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Comment by liotier | Hacker News Reader

Linux-based. How is SONiC positioned vs. Cumulus ?

Cumulus requires a license to run on whitebox hardware. Sonic doesn't.

Does the Nvidia acquisition of Cumulus make that even worse going forward?

Cumulus was a pure software company; now that they are part of Mellanox there are more business models available such as subsidizing software with hardware.

It's also interesting that Nvidia (via Mellanox) announced on their blog their support for SONiC [0] a week after they acquired Cumulus.

[0] https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2020/05/12/mellanox-integrated...

SONIC has a very similar vibe to OpenStack and k8s. It's too big to fail, it has what plants crave, and you're dead if you're not on the bandwagon. Whether the code works doesn't matter.

Besides being cheaper and supporting more hardware, SONIC is more like a traditional NOS that runs on Linux but doesn't integrate with it. I would expect SONIC to be more familiar to Cisco CLI jockeys and Cumulus to be more familiar to Debian/Ubuntu sysadmins.

You are correct that sonic does a poor job of integrating switch management features, but it's nothing like other CLI platforms.

All configurations go in a single JSON file, which is used to configure the docker containers that manage the switching hardware.

Incorrect. In Cumulus you have NCLU which is the Cumulus cli that just takes the commands from the bash prompt. If you know traditional Cisco you can sort it pretty quickly. They start with “net” so to show something “net show interfaces”.

Here is a cheatsheet:

https://cumulusnetworks.com/learn/resources/cheatsheets/nclu

Also Cumulus runs FRR (as does sonic) but on Cumulus you can do sudo vtysh and pretty much be at a CLI for routing like you are at an IOS prompt.

Sonic sticks all configuration in different docker containers in Json files and can be a real pain. Also not all commands are hitless, ie some will restart forwarding. That is being worked on. SONiC is pretty much “what MS wanted for large scale ops” and still is rough around the edges for enterprise IT.

There are a number of companies that support Sonic in production enterprise such as Dell and Apstra.

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