Microsoft has released an open product based on GNU / Linux

Microsoft really did it. Yesterday, at the Open Compute Project (OCP) conference in San Jose, a completely open product was introduced, which was called SONiC or Software for Open Networking in the Cloud . The product was created with the participation of manufacturers such as Arista, Broadcom, Dell and Mellanox. SONiC is a set of software and utilities designed to control network devices of L2 / L3 levels from different manufacturers. At the moment, the basis is the Debian distribution with the Linux 3.16 kernel, but as Microsoft claims, any other distribution with a kernel version starting with 3.16 can be used.

SONiC can work on various devices thanks to the specificationSAI (Switch Abstraction Interface) , adopted in the summer of 2015. OCP project. The initiator of the SAI project was also Microsoft itself. SAI is a standardized C API for programming ASIC circuits for network equipment. The SAI project is also open source and available on Github .

SONiC is the foundation of another Microsoft GNU / Linux-based product - Azure Cloud Switch (ACS) . ACS was developed by the company for internal use and contains an additional set of Azure cloud management software.

Microsoft says that SONiC v1 is used in production and is already present in existing switches of Microsoft data centers. They also promise to post it on Github Sonic v2 in the coming weeks.which will contain many improvements.


SONiC project page on Github: http://azure.github.io/SONiC/
SONiC project sources on Github: https://github.com/Azure/SONiC
SONiC project FAQ: https://github.com/Azure/SONiC /blob/gh-pages/FAQ.md

UPD: Project released under Apache 2.0 license

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Sources:

1. https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/ocp-2016-building-on-community-driven-innovation/
2. https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/microsoft-showcases-%E2%80%9Csoftware-for-open-networking-in-the-cloud-sonic-%E2%80%9D/