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 networking software components required to have 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 from multiple vendors and ASICs. 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, 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 available on GitHub.