The open-sourced Software for Open Networking in the Cloud (SONiC) NOS is rapidly growing a community of developers and users that could change the way many networks are run by large enterprises, hyperscalers and service providers.
The Linux-based NOS, developed and open sourced by Microsoft in 2017, decouples network software from the underlying hardware and lets it run on switches and ASICs from multiple vendors while supporting a full suite of network features such as Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), remote direct memory access (RDMA), QoS, and other Ethernet/IP technologies.
One of the keys to SONiC is its the switch-abstraction Interface, which defines an API to provide a vendor-independent way of controlling forwarding elements such as a switching ASIC, an NPU or a software switch in a uniform manner, according to the SONiC GitHub community site.
