Since its introduction by Microsoft and OCP in 2016, SONiC has gained momentum as the open-source operating system of choice for cloud-scale data center networks. The Switch Abstraction Interface (SAI) has been instrumental in adapting SONiC to a variety of underlying hardware. SAI provides a consistent interface to ASIC, allowing networking vendors to rapidly enable SONiC on their platforms while innovating in the areas of silicon and optics via vendor-specific extensions. This enables cloud-scale providers to have a common operational model while benefiting from innovations in the hardware. The following figure illustrates a high-level overview of the platform components that map SONIC to a switch.

SONiC has traditionally been supported on a single NPU system with one instance of BGP, SwSS (Switch State Service), and Synced container. It has been recently extended to support multiple NPUs in a system. This is accomplished by running multiple instances of BGP, Syncd, and other relevant containers, one per NPU instance.

SONiC on Cisco 8000

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