Cisco 8000 Series routers now support the open source SONiC operating system.

The networking vendor announced the new routing platforms late last year as part of its boldly named “Internet for the Future” strategy targeting service providers. At the time, Cisco teased future SONiC support.

Microsoft originally developed the open source Software for Open Networking in the Cloud (SONiC) along with Arista, Broadcom, Dell, and Mellanox before contributing it to Open Compute Project (OCP) in 2016. It’s Linux-based and built on the Switch Abstraction Interface (SAI) specification, which Microsoft open sourced to OCP in 2016.

And since then, the network operating system has become increasingly popular among service providers and hyperscale clouds. SONiC allows these cloud-scale network operators more flexibility to switch out silicon and optics in the data center, thus taking advantage of new hardware innovations, while benefiting from new features and capabilities that developers add to the open source operating system.

In a blog post, Cisco Engineering Fellow Praveen Bhagwatula detailed how SONiC is implemented on fixed and modular Cisco 8000 Series routers focusing on the modular platform support. “While the support for SONiC on fixed, single NPU [network processor] systems is an incremental step, bringing in another Cisco ASIC and platform under SONiC/SAI, support for SONiC on a modular platform marks a significant milestone in adapting modular routing systems to support SONiC in a fully distributed way,” he wrote.

The implementation uses Cisco Silicon One ASIC, and it enables SONiC-based standard leaf-spine network topology within a modular system. This benefits services providers because it provides a “way to achieve the flexibility of a disaggregated network design at the optimal cost and power envelope of a modular system,” Bhagwatula explained.

Cisco’s Nexus platforms already supported SONiC. In a 2018 blog post, Cisco touted “Microsoft and other web-scale customers” running SONiC on Nexus 9200/9300 platforms.

Juniper Networks last month announced SONiC support on its QFX5210 single ASIC platform, including support for leaf and spine deployments in data centers.