From an article at The Register regarding Microsoft’s SONiC network operating systems:

Microsoft coordinated a bunch of announcements at the Open Compute Project summit this week, centred around its SONiC open switch software platform.

SONiC, as you may recall, is Microsoft’s Debian based network operating system which it has donated to the Open Compute Project. Worth noting SONiC has now attracted Barefoot Networks:

Barefoot’s another fan, folding SONiC into a variety of its Tofino-based bare metal switches. The company said SONiC will bring advanced capabilities like data plane telemetry.

It looks like Barefoot has contributed support into SAI for their Tofino-based switching platforms from Wistron and Edgecore. This is an interesting development, as it helps embolden Barefoot as they look to expand their Tofino-based platforms, and give’s Microsoft’s SONiC platform something interesting to use for network telemetry.

It’s worth noting that SONiC is different than Open Network Linux, which itself is also hosted in the Open Compute Project, and is backed by operators such as Google and Facebook, and vendors including Big Switch. The two are different network operating systems, my assumption is OCP is simply a home for both. Choice is good, until it isn’t.