SONiC NOS faces challenges fitting in with mainstream
Seven years of development by the open source community have failed to carry Microsoft-created SONiC significantly closer to becoming an alternative to the proprietary network operating systems found in mainstream data centers.
Instead, SONiC, or Software for Open Networking in the Cloud, remains an NOS for cloud providers and enterprises running massive data centers. Companies using SONiC include China-based Alibaba and Tencent, Microsoft Azure, Comcast, eBay and Target.
For those companies, SONiC significantly reduces the cost of data center operations by delivering network automation at scale. It does so by rolling infrastructure management into cloud-native software on top of switches and routers.
For most enterprises, that architecture is too much of a departure from what they have from traditional suppliers.
Gartner clients bring up SONiC in roughly 10% …