The open source Dent network operating system is continuing to move forward, adding capabilities that will help to make edge and enterprise deployments more efficient.

In a session at the Open Source Summit North America this week, Michael Lane, principal technical program manager at Amazon, outlined the progress and direction that the Dent project is headed in. Amazon is one of the leading contributors to Dent and helped to get the project started back in 2019 at the Linux Foundation. Dent is largely targeted at edge deployments which is where Amazon and other large organizations are using the technology.

Lane said that Dent is deployed in Amazon's physical stores today, which include the Amazon Go, fresh and style brands. Dent is also starting to find a home inside Amazon's fulfillment centers as well.

"Dent is not just an operating system, but it's a whole ecosystem, that includes software, it includes hardware, we have a number of manufacturers, we also have to have some silicon providers," Lane said. "The testing methodology that we're leveraging is also part of the dent ecosystem."

Lane commented that from a hardware perspective, not only is Dent concerned with routers and switches, but it also could have usefulness for edge devices like cameras and sensors.

"In our use case in the physical stores, we also have Dent running in some of our pedestals and our entry and exit gates," Lane said.

Dent is built on top of the open source Linux operating system.

"From a user's perspective, it looks and feels like a Linux device and it is free to access the source code," Lane said. "There are no barriers, you know, in terms of pulling things down, or installing the binaries directly from the website."

While Linux is the foundation, it's only one component of Dent. Lane recounted that when Dent was first released, from his perspective a primary target was to help support the networking needs of Amazon's retail business.

With the release of Dent 2.0 in 2022, the project expanded significantly to meet Amazon's needs as well as that of a growing community of users. A core part of the Dent 2.0 update was the introduction of extensive Power over Ethernet (PoE) capabilities.

"Power over Ethernet is pivotal in the enterprise space," Lane said. "Our entry/exit gates are all powered over Ethernet. "

Enabling PoE support in a hardware agnostic approach was a challenge, but it is one that Lane feels satisfied that Dent was able to achieve.

Dent 2.0 also benefited from the inclusion of networking port isolation capabilities, which came as the result of requirements from the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD), which wanted to use Dent for parts of its network.

The newest release of Dent is version 3.0 which became generally available on April 20.

Among the key improvements is the introduction of support for the IEEE 802.1x protocol, for access control and authentication. Lane said that Amazon's own fulfillment centers were using 802.1x and needed that capability in Dent.

Dent 3.0 also benefits from new Quality of Service (QoS) controls which are increasingly important for edge deployment. Lane said that in Amazon's case, QoS is necessary because it has some costly WAN links to each of its stores.  Amazon has all kinds of cameras and in-store assets that are making extensive use of artificial intelligence (AI) and most of the inference work is actually done in the cloud. As such, Amazon needs to be able to optimize bandwidth appropriately to be able to get the data from the edge up into its cloud.

Perhaps the biggest change in Dent 3.0 is support for the switch abstraction interface (SAI). The goal with SAI is to more easily enable an operating system to run on different types of hardware. SAI is an open source effort originally created at the Open Compute Project (OCP), with extensive participation from the Microsoft-led open source Sonic network operating system.

Both Dent and Sonic are open source network operating systems that are projects at the Linux Foundation and now both rely on SAI as well.

Lane doesn't see Sonic as a competitor, rather he sees the two technologies as serving different needs for different audiences. From his perspective, Sonic is more focussed on the data center and then works its way back down to the enterprise. In contrast, Dent is focused on the edge and then comes to the enterprise, which is where there might be some overlap.

"This is where we give the opportunity for customers a choice, if they want to run a Dent or a Sonic operating system," Lane said. "I don't necessarily see them as competing. I think this is an opportunity for the two organizations to collaborate and now that we're both in the Linux Foundation, we actually have the means to collaborate in a neutral space."