Alibaba Cloud Presents SRv6 Deployments and AONOS Optical Network OS at ONE‑SONiC Conference

On November 15, the ONE (Open Networking & Edge) – SONiC conference was held in Seattle, attracting SONiC users worldwide. This was the first SONiC event after its migration from OCP to the Linux Foundation, featuring theme talks selected by the SONiC TSC committee and a hackathon.

Alibaba Cloud’s infrastructure network team focused on sharing the application of SRv6 in Alibaba Cloud’s data‑center interconnect (DCI) network and demonstrated the industry’s first SONiC‑based optical network operating system, AONOS (Another Optical Network Operating System), along with the integrated white‑box optical transport device OEX.

Senior technical experts Shang Shuai and Yuan Yifei detailed the topology of Alibaba Cloud’s data‑center DCN and DCI networks, the use cases and deployment methods of SRv6 within the DCI network, and the extensive enhancements made to SONiC’s SRv6 capabilities, such as FRR, SBFD hardware offload, and SRv6 VPN routing support. As the first internet company to apply SRv6 in SONiC, Alibaba Cloud has contributed many of these enhancements back to the SONiC community and plans to establish a working group to further promote SRv6 adoption globally.

During the hackathon, senior expert Zheng Weitang demonstrated AONOS, marking the first time SONiC technology has been applied to a data‑center optical interconnect device system.

The hackathon attracted nearly 25 teams from major cloud providers and equipment vendors. Alibaba Cloud introduced its self‑developed white‑box optical transport device OEX and showcased key AONOS functions. It also presented the first unified optical line‑card abstraction interface (LAI) and the LAI‑based optical line‑card management module OLSS, which can manage both electrical and various optical line‑cards such as amplifiers, protection switches, and WDM components.

AONOS achieves further decoupling of hardware and software for SONiC‑based optical transport devices, accelerating the transition from gray‑box to white‑box optical network equipment. Alibaba Cloud will continue to collaborate with the open‑source community and industry partners to advance open, innovative optical networking.