SONiC (operating system)
SONiC (Software for Open Networking in the Cloud) is a free and open source network operating system based on Linux and developed by Microsoft and the Open Compute Project. SONiC includes the networking software components necessary for a fully functional L3 device and was designed to meet the requirements of a cloud data center. It allows cloud operators to share the same software stack across hardware from different switch vendors.

Overview
SONiC was developed and open sourced by Microsoft in 2017.
The software decouples network software from the underlying hardware and is built on the SAI switch-programming API. It runs on network switches and ASICs from multiple vendors. Notable supported network features include Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), remote direct memory access (RDMA), QoS, and various other Ethernet/IP technologies.

The SONiC community includes cloud providers, service providers, and silicon and component suppliers, as well as networking hardware OEMs and ODMs. It has more than 850 members. Companies using and/or contributing to SONiC include Alibaba Group, Arista Networks, Broadcom, Dell, Cisco Systems, Comcast, Juniper, Nokia, Nvidia-Mellanox and VMware. SONiC is used in Microsoft’s Azure networking services.

The SONiC network operating system was presented at the ACM SIGCOMM 2nd Asia-Pacific Workshop on Networking 2018 (APNET 2018) in Beijing, China.

The source code is licensed under a mix of open source licenses including the GNU General Public License and the Apache License, and is available on GitHub.

See also

Open Compute Project

References

Further reading
 SONiC: Software for Open Networking in the Cloud

External links
 
  – Documentation
  – Scripts which perform an installable binary image build for SONiC

Computing platforms
Free and open-source software
Linux
Microsoft free software
Microsoft operating systems
Network operating systems
Software using the Apache license
Software using the GPL license
2017 software