the History of disaggregating Operating Systems from Hardware
summary
SONiC is presented as a Debian‑based, containerized network OS that Microsoft open sources in 2016 and hands to the Linux Foundation in 2022, running production at Azure and on 22 vendors 160+ switching platforms with BGP/FRR, RDMA support and a Redis in‑memory DB for state. The main failure mode is the ASIC glue: vendor switch drivers and transceiver support often live in enterprise forks that don’t upstream, causing unpredictable breakages. Simulation options include GNS3, ContainerLab and QEMU.
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chapters (7)
- 0:00Introduction to OS disaggregation
- 2:16Open vs closed source evolution
- 5:12Early DOS and Unix systems
- 7:49Hardware disaggregation beginnings
- 10:02Microsoft's Sonic network OS
- 13:15Scale as the main driver
- 16:30Current trends and future outlook
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