Microsoft unveils Linux-based Azure Cloud Switch OS and people are losing

In addition to debugging their in-house built software, Microsoft uses the Azure Cloud Switch Linux-based operating system to share software stacks across different hardware from various switch vendors, simply by using the Switch Abstraction Interface (SAI) specification, which can be used for programming network switching application-specific integrated circuits.

This also is similar to Cumulus Linux, which is devised to run switches as simply another piece of software (and hardware) to be managed with conventional enterprise tools.

Azure Cloud Switch is meant to be an open source platform for running different kinds of networking devices. ACS is the showcase for Microsoft’s approach toward disaggregating switch software from switch hardware. But Microsoft has revealed that its new Azure Cloud Switch software for networking devices is built on a Linux foundation. The company’s presence at Apple’s iPhone 6s event earlier this month was a big testament too.

Microsoft’s recent love affair with open source programming is getting into high gear these days. Microsoft will still commission reports that cast open-source rivals in a negative light compared to its own products, as seen recently in Munich in Germany and Pesaro in Italy. As Kamala Subramaniam, Principal Architect, Azure Networking explains on the company blog, “It is a cross-platform modular operating system for data center networking built on Linux”. “It also allows us the flexibility to scale down the software and develop features that are required for our datacentre and our networking needs”. Still, every cloud has to keep innovating; in time, Microsoft may offer ACS freely, but probably only after the advantage it provides Azure has been superseded by other, more ambitious features.

Microsoft dabbled with InfiniBand for some HPC use cases and behind Bing Maps, but Laing told The Platform back in March that the company was embracing Ethernet for the majority of its networking because the RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) protocol had significantly closed the gap between InfiniBand and Ethernet and that it was easier to have one protocol rather than two in the Azure network. The operating system under development aims to alleviate this issue and deliver a more unified, cloud-centric platform that works across diverse hardware solutions.

Again, this isn’t a product up for sale from Microsoft or even being widely distributed.