SONiC in 2026: What I’m Excited About
It’s a brand new year, and at CES this past week they showed us what the future looks like. If you’ve been following the news, we can expect robotic floor cleaners, robotic dogs, and robotic floor cleaning dogs. Every single product now offers a new feature called “AI” which I don’t yet fully understand.
But I’m a network engineer at heart, so what can I look forward to this year? I’m not talking about those super exciting new IETF drafts or new brands of SFPs, no, I mean the stuff we all drool over, NOS features that will make our lives easier and more operationally mature.
TL/DR: If you run SONiC in production, 2026 is shaping up to be less about “ok it works well” and more about “how far can we push it across every place Ethernet shows up”, from AI fabrics, to Neoclouds, to edge closets and DPU offload.
This is how I’d frame the 2026 outlook as a network architect who has to balance roadmap optimism with operational truth.
1. Core SONiC NOS: the big buckets to watch in 2026
A. Routing and overlay maturity keeps moving up the stack
SONiC’s routing and overlay backlog is no longer just “add protocol X”, it is increasingly about scale, correctness, and multi-feature coexistence. The design-spec pipeline continues to emphasize things like BFD improvements, EVPN/VXLAN, management VRFs, IPv6 operational features, and better route scalability and next-hop handling.
What this means for my fellow network engineers in 2026:
- More enterprise grade behavior at the edges: faster failure detection, more deterministic convergence, fewer weird interactions when you combine overlays with underlay routing.
- More consistent patterns for how SONiC integrates with FRR and how routing state gets pushed into the forwarding plane (you can see this theme across multiple routing-related design specs). This is really important because we don’t want to completely invalidate the FIB when we make slight changes to the routing configuration. We want graceful changes, not “sudo service frr restart” madness. At BE we’re working on a pre-tested automated SONiC upgrade path that minimizes network impact and gives you a single button to click to upgrade SONiC across all your devices.
B. Data center features keep broadening beyond classic ToR
A lot of the design-spec momentum continues around distributed architectures and scale primitives: VOQ-related designs, distributed forwarding, and other chassis and multi-ASIC oriented work. If you are building large fabrics in 2026, the practical win is straightforward: fewer reasons to treat SONiC as “ToR only”. In fact, at BE we’re working on a simple reference design selector to specify East-West, North-South, or traditional Clos designs for your data center builds.
C. QoS and “AI-fabric reality” (RoCE behavior, lossless tuning) stays front-and-center
The QoS section of the design specs remains packed: PFC variants, headroom and buffer behavior, shaping, IFA, ECN/WRED stats, hashing enhancements, and other knobs that matter when you are running lossless(ish) Ethernet under load.
Translation: engineers can expect continued refinement in the exact area where most NOSes earn (or lose) trust in AI and storage fabrics: predictable congestion behavior and observable lossless performance. In Verity 6.5 we added RoCE tuning knobs as well as automated telemetry for lossless performance.
D. Telemetry and operational ergonomics get awesome
In 2026, the SONiC story continues to trend toward “instrumentation you can actually automate against”: gRPC/dial-out telemetry, process and container stats, structured streaming messages with protocol buffers such as telegraf and OpenTelemetry, as well as more system-level lifecycle features like warm reboot/warm restart.
This matters because the difference between a lab NOS and a production NOS is not the routing protocol list. It is day-2 operations: you need reliable signals, consistent counters, and debuggability. No one wants to drive a car with a dirty windshield.
E. Security is expanding in both DC and campus-adjacent directions
The design-spec list includes items like 802.1X/MAB authentication support, and there is also an active SAI IPsec subgroup now working toward hardware-accelerated encryption.
Even if you do not plan to use every security feature, 2026 is about SONiC closing common “enterprise expectations” gaps while still serving hyperscale needs.
2. SONiC DASH: Services via DPU offload enters the arena
DASH (Disaggregated APIs for SONiC Hosts) is one of the most important “next-adjacent” SONiC efforts because it targets a hard problem: how to standardize and operationalize offloaded network services on smart NICs and DPUs while staying aligned with the SONiC ecosystem.
When I look at a typical network design, my eyes always water when I see all those L4-7 devices which cost 10x everything else and can only be purchased from one or two vendors, while a common linux server can do the same function at a fraction of the price. This is where DASH makes sense, inexpensive service nodes for L4-7 services at respectable speeds (think 100-400Gb).
From the project itself, DASH’s stated goal is to extend functionality to stateful workloads and enable smart programmable technologies to optimize performance, explicitly targeting large performance gains for stateful connections.
What I’m expecting in 2026:
- More standardization pressure: APIs, schemas, and counter definitions will keep converging because without that, “DASH-ready” means something different on every platform. You can already see work tracking around counter identification/standardization which is going to help us all.
- Better HA and lifecycle integration: there is dedicated work in the ecosystem around more HA related services (a strong signal that operators are pushing for predictable behavior during failures and upgrades).
- Testing maturity becomes a gating factor: DASH testing is focusing on conformance and additional validation for the entire community, because no one is going to bet their network on unproven code.
- Clearer architecture narratives: DASH is explicitly positioned as an extension of SONiC that enables disaggregation of networking functions for flexible and scalable management, which sets expectations for how engineers will deploy and troubleshoot it.
The real 2026 shift: DASH should feel less like “a cool offload idea” and more like an ecosystem with repeatable integration points, conformance expectations, and operational patterns. To prepare for this initiative, BE is simplifying ACL and security policy operations in Verity 6.6 so traffic identification patterns are as easy as can be.
3. SONiC PENS: SONiC pushes to the edge and PoE use cases
PENS (PoE Edge Network SONiC) is a clear indicator that the SONiC community is serious about edge and retail-class deployments, not just data centers.
The SONiC workgroup is focused on edge and retail use cases, PoE driver work, L2/L3 protocol enablement for edge, advanced security like 802.1x, dedicated builds, interop/performance requirements, and test planning.
What I’m looking forward to in 2026:
- More coherent PoE integration: not just “PoE works”, but PoE exposed in ways your operations team can standardize (state, alarms, policy, platform driver behavior).
- L2 being treated as first-class (STP and friends) because edge closets issues can be unforgiving to campus network engineers.
- Enterprise access security patterns (802.1x) becoming more normal in SONiC conversations, not a niche request.
More “edge-ready” packaging: builds, test plans, and scaling/interop requirements are explicitly part of the charter, which is the right sequence if the goal is broad adoption outside hyperscale. Think of a “shrink-wrapped” SONiC device from major vendors preconfigured for edge/host port access without having to do anything. You can already see some of these on the product pages of major switch vendors.
4. How I’d advise engineers to prepare for SONiC in 2026
Track design specs, not marketing: the SONiC Design Specs index is still the most practical “what is being engineered” view, across routing, QoS, telemetry, platform, and security.- Decide where you want “Linux-like flexibility” vs “appliance-like guardrails”: SONiC keeps adding guardrails (telemetry, warmboot behaviors, management improvements), but it will always reward teams who can handle the openness responsibly.
- If you are betting on DPUs for L4-7 services, start mapping your operational model now: DASH’s value is huge, but the real work is how you observe it, test it, and recover from failures. The project is clearly moving in that direction.
If you are eyeing edge, treat PENS as your signal: it is the clearest sign the community is organizing around PoE + access/security + L2/L3 expectations for edge deployments.
In summary, I am super excited about what is happening in the open networking community this year. There is REAL momentum, great partnerships, and the necessary dollars and mindshare to ensure that SONiC speeds rapidly into the future.
Thanks!
Josh Saul
VP Produktmarketing
Josh Saul has pioneered open source network solutions for more than 25 years. As an architect, he built core networks for GE, Pfizer and NBC Universal. As an engineer at Cisco, Josh advised customers in the Fortune 100 financial sector and evangelized new technologies to customers. More recently, Josh led marketing and product teams at VMware (acquired by Broadcom), Cumulus Networks (acquired by NVIDIA), and Apstra (acquired by Juniper).
