The Open Networking Foundation (ONF) announced the upstream contribution of its collaboratively developed P4 Integrated Network Stack (PINS) into Software for Open Networking in the Cloud (SONiC), the leading open source network operating system for data centers. PINS extends SONiC with an Software-Defined Networking (SDN) interface and P4 programmable pipeline, providing network developers with a standardized and fully documented interface that simplifies and accelerates network programming, validation, testing, and analysis.
Also Read: 4 Important Digital Transformation Strategies to Overcome Digital Transformation Challenges
SONiC, a switch operating system for data center scenarios, uses embedded control plane protocols (e.g. BGP and OSPF) to build disaggregated networking fabrics. SDN, on the other hand, espouses building centrally controlled fabrics with a common controller that has end-to-end visibility of the entire topology. Until now, operators have had to choose one over the other, either a disaggregated solution or an SDN architecture. Integrating PINS into SONiC now makes it possible to have the best of both worlds.
The ONF, along with community leads Microsoft, Google and Intel, created PINS to marry SDN intelligence into SONiC. The broader community, including Alibaba, Arista, Broadcom, Cisco, Innovium, and NVIDIA are working with ONF to incubate the project and extend PINS with additional features and capabilities.
PINS Highlights:
Supports Hybrid Control Planes: PINS gives network operators a choice of network control planes, and which parts run locally or remotely, and even allows the control planes to be mixed with certain functions running locally (like traditional routing protocols such as BGP) and other control operations (like traffic engineering) being centrally orchestrated.
Opt-In Path Towards SDN: P4Runtime and SONiC have been combined such that SONiC will continue to work the way it does today, while enabling users to migrate towards an SDN solution without initially requiring an SDN controller. Using P4Runtime, users can control essential networking features, including L3 routing, Weighted-Cost Multipath (WCMP) routing, and ACLs (with more capabilities planned for future releases).
Familiar Interfaces: PINS uses P4 to model the SAI pipeline used by SONiC to model the data plane pipeline. PINS also provides a P4Runtime interface that exposes this pipeline to local and remote control planes over a fast and secure gRPC connection.
About the Open Networking Foundation:
The Open Networking Foundation (ONF) is an operator-led consortium spearheading disruptive network transformation. Now the recognized leader for open source solutions for operators, the ONF first launched in 2011 as the standard bearer for Software Defined Networking (SDN).