Hi everyone,

I’m happy to share a key milestone for SCOMB: we have successfully completed the migration to an internal image registry pipeline for SONiC builds.

SONiC image builds has been moved to internal repositories and a local registry. This change provides:

• Reduced dependency on external Microsoft repositories
• Elimination of redundant base image rebuilds across pipelines
• Lower load and fewer duplicate requests to upstream services during parallel builds
• Faster and more predictable build and retrieval times through local infrastructure

All image artifacts are now served through our internal registry pipeline.

Performance improvements:

A significant reduction in build time was observed after adding prefetching of slave images.

• Previous build time: ~5 hours
• Current build time: ~2.5–3 hours

This improvement comes primarily from eliminating redundant slave image builds.

However, additional gains are possible by enabling and tuning caching layers (e.g., build cache, registry cache, and layer reuse), which are not fully optimized yet.

Test access:

You can access and test the latest built images here:

https://scomb.demo.alasca.cloud/local-build/

Please verify:

• Compatibility with your current workflows
• Image stability
• Any issues during boot, or deployment

What’s next? sonic-cli revival:

We are restarting development on the sonic-cli project and looking for contributors.

Initial analysis shows that the current SONiC management framework provides only a minimal baseline implementation. The majority of the existing codebase is in Go and Python.

Roadmap focus

We will focus on:

• Fixing existing bugs and stability issues
• Adding missing management features
• Expanding coverage across SONiC system components
• Improving usability and consistency of CLI workflows

How you can help

We need community input to guide development.

If you have identified:

• Missing CLI features
• UX gaps or workflow issues
• Bugs or inconsistencies in current behavior

please create work items in SCOMB.

All feedback, including code contributions, feature requests, and bug reports, will directly help shape the roadmap and accelerate development.

We will progressively define and publish detailed work items as we finalize the feature set.

Looking forward to your feedback and contributions.

Best regards,

Rankan