Microsoft Announces Open Sourced SONiC for Running Network Devices

This week at the Open Compute Project (OCP) Summit in San Jose, Microsoft announced an open sourced “Software for Open Networking in the Cloud (SONiC)” for running network devices like switches. Mellanox, Dell, Arista, and Broadcom collaborated the company on the project.

You can see the keynote remarks from Microsoft’s Mark Russinovich here:

He discusses SONiC more here.

“Software for Open Networking in the Cloud (SONiC) is not hardware, but a collection of software networking components required to build network devices like switches with rich functionality,” says Azure Networking Principal Architect Kamala Subramaniam. “It can run on various switching platforms via the Switch Abstraction Interface (SAI) specification, which we announced during last year’s OCP Summit and which was officially accepted by the OCP in July. It is based on a modular architecture with a lean stack built for data center networking needs. SONiC will enable cloud operators to take advantage of hardware innovation while giving them a framework to build upon an open source code for apps on the network switch and the ability to integrate with multiple platforms. SONiC is not just prototyped software but deployed today and planned to run at scale in the future.”

“Most importantly, all the components of Software for Open Networking in the Cloud (SONiC) are available as open source, enabling community driven innovation in open networking,” she adds.

She gets much more into the whys and hows here. Arista, Big Switch Networks, Broadcom, Cavium, Centec Networks, Dell, Mellanox, and Facebook all offer comments on the news as well.

Image via YouTube