Could SONiC become mainstream?

Fancy Wang 1308 2021

Some of the following content comes from the Internet and Guy Matthews

The data network was once an IT resource to which few business leaders paid attention. Most people simply considered the network to be the “plumbing” of a company and little else. That opinion has been changing, because the network has rapidly increased in importance as digital transformation has taken hold in the business world.

The building blocks of digital are cloud computing, mobility, internet of things and artificial intelligence, all of which are network-centric. This means as business becomes more digital, the network increases in strategic value. At the same time, we have seen the rise of new and emerging applications and technologies, from data analytics to virtual and augmented reality, automated vehicles and edge computing.

The growing demand for faster speeds, more bandwidth and lower latency has put the network front-and-center in the IT world. Data and applications are no longer confined to central data centers, and they need to move quickly between those data centers, the edge and multiple clouds.

The network also has undergone significant change. Networks are now increasingly virtualized, with software-defined networking (SDN), network-function virtualization (NFV) and software-defined WAN (SD-WAN). They’ve also become more intelligent—look at intent-based networking—and the decoupling of the data plane and network functions from the underlying proprietary hardware has given rise to open switches that can run third-party operating systems and software. 

Could SONiC become mainstream?

As 2020 dawned, SONiC's challenge was how to mature from a well-regarded but somewhat fringe OS to something more mainstream where it could disrupt the vested interests of the proprietary world.

Independent analyst firm IDC sees a big future for SONiC in the sphere of corporate connectivity, saying it has the potential to become the Linux of networking. IDC's research vice president of data center networks Brad Casemore said SONiC has already achieved the status of leading open source standard bearer for network disaggregation, as well as the modular decoupling and composability of individual software functions.

Right now, he said, SONiC's natural habitat is in Ethernet switches in hyperscale data centers, but it could extend to data center leaf-spine networks, converged networks and WANs. In the coming years, he added, SONiC could be featured in 5G and telco-cloud edge environments.

"SONiC is not a commercial product per se, because it's open," Casemore said. "But, if you're a vendor, you can build a lot of value around it."

But why did openness take so long to get to networking?

"Sometimes the WAN looks like the last mainframe, with its own interfaces and its own hardware," Casemore said. "Now, networking is driven by the hyperscalers and the realization is dawning that there's another world out there and it makes a lot of sense. It's long overdue -- but it's happening."

SONiC at the network edge

Dave Maltz leads Microsoft Azure's physical network team and its SONiC developments. He said he's excited by what he sees coming next.

"The pandemic put a crimp in everybody's plans," he said. "But we are continuing to see good adoption across the large cloud companies. In the enterprise space, we are still a bit more in a holding pattern than I would have hoped, but we're making good progress."

Critical mass adoption of SONiC is already evident among hyperscalers, he added, while many enterprises are continuing their pilot programs. Over the next year, Maltz said he expects to see more enterprise interest and action, especially in areas like SONiC at the network edge where Microsoft has started to see some early deployments.

Maltz also said he is seeing SONiC make progress in the world of Kubernetes and expects to see wide usage there soon. Microsoft has encouraged people to join the SONiC working groups to track future developments. People can contribute as advocates or join the testing effort.

Who are we ? We are built with SONiC/SAI as its kernel is characterized by fully open structure, completely decoupled hardware and software, loosely unionized software modules, high reliability architecture, and easy functional expansion.Fully open and programmable SDN architecture