“Network programmability has been a goal for years within the networking community,” said Jim Frey, principal analyst for networking at Enterprise Strategy Group. “There is even a term of art for it, NetDevOps, as well as a growing community, the Network Automation Forum, that is focused on making it a reality.”
“But achieving that goal has been fiendishly difficult due to a lack of standard interfaces and closed, proprietary equipment architectures,” Frey said. “The arrival of AI is changing the rules of the game. Network infrastructure teams, and the equipment providers that supply them, are having to fall back and regroup for this new world, and find a path to programmability that aligns with rest of infrastructure domains.”
Given this new reality, the idea that a future control plane will give AI developers declarative access to bandwidth, latency profiles, or even Layer 7 behavior is not far-fetched, according to Cisco. “We’re building for AI not as a workload, but as the platform,” said Patrick LeMaistre, technical solutions architect at Cisco. “That changes everything.”
