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At the Open Networking Summit conference in Santa Clara, California, today, Microsoft and Alibaba are announcing that Alibabas public cloud is starting to use Software for Open Networking in the Cloud, or SONiC, which Microsoft introduced last year.

SONiC, originally known as Azure Cloud Switch, is Linux-based open source software that runs on networking switches. Its designed to let public cloud providers do more on their hardware at great scale. Microsoft contributed it to the Facebook-led Open Compute Project (OCP) last year.

Now Chinas largest cloud provider is adopting SONiC, following Microsoft Azure itself, Yousef Khalidi, corporate vice president for Azure networking, told VentureBeat in an interview. In addition to using SONiC, Alibaba will also contribute to the softwares development.

With SONiC, Microsoft has targeted public cloud environments, but thats not to say that companies cant experiment with the core open source software, which is available on GitHub. Applications that depend on SONiC-based infrastructure could well recover more quickly following downtime, Khalidi said.

Microsoft sought to build SONiC atop Linux primarily because of the community effect, Khalidi said. Thats significant considering Microsofts legacy of commercializing Windows, but Linux is widely used on public cloud servers particularly, and even in Azure, more than one-third of virtual machines (VMs) run Linux, Khalidi said.

Other systems for building on top of data center switches include startup Cumulus Linux distribution. There is also the HP-backed OpenSwitch.

Other public cloud infrastructure providers include Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud Platform. Khalidi was not sure if they have used SONiC.

Khalidis blog post has more detail.

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Alibaba cloud adopts Microsoft's open-source networking software - VentureBeat