Microsoft has announced that it’s working on a Linux-based operating system called Azure Cloud Switch (ACS) and people are losing their minds. The company has clearly taken on a new identity under CEO Satya Nadella, and the tech world still can’t contain its surprise. ACS is a cross platform OS for running network devices such as data center switches. It’s not a consumer-grade system and will hence not be coming to your desktop PC or laptop in the near future.
Azure Cloud Switch is intended to be an open source platform for running different kinds of networking devices. It is designed for cloud-based and enterprise services. The main idea behind it is to ensure that network hardware manufacturers can build optimized hardware architectures while keeping the programming interface consistent across devices. ACS uses the Switch Abstraction Interface (SAI) specification which has been accepted by the Open Compute Project (OCP) as a standardized C Application Program Interface (API).
SAI is essentially a cheaper, simpler, more reliable and flexible solution to programming network switch ASICs, or application-specific integrated circuits. Microsoft describes ACS as an internal tool it employs to debug, fix and test software bugs quickly. The company will be contributing the code for this Linux-based OS to the OCP. The members of said non-profit organization include Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, Rackspace, Cisco and Juniper Networks among others. Following its debut at the OCP summit in March this year, the second demonstration of ACS was held at SIGCOMM in August.
Barefoot, Broadcom, Cavium, Dell, Mellanox and Metaswitch also contributed to the SAI specification approved by the OCP. In a recent blog post, Microsoft revealed that it wanted to elaborate on its Linux-based Azure Cloud Switch OS because it feels separating switch software from switch hardware is the direction towards which the networking industry is heading.