Why BYoNOS, Why Now
Bring Your Own Network Operating System (BYoNOS) has been one of Nexthop AI’s software offerings and it has been gaining industry traction with some of our key customer base. Network operators are facing the challenge of ever-increasing scale of deployments and sustaining work, with the need to iterate faster on new product development. BYoNOS offers them a way to choose an operating system that fits their automation and workflows while still relying on well-engineered hardware. With BYoNOS, operators are able to choose from a variety of equipment suppliers, and customize the software based on their operational needs. The promise is practical: faster integration, more consistent operations, and a clearer path to scale.
When operators choose BYoNOS, foundations range from SDK and driver integration, installer and provisioning support, northbound interfaces, and with this comes a long list of validation. When those pieces come together, teams can reuse existing operational expertise instead of rebuilding everything for each platform.
The Foundations Beneath the NOS
SONiC® and FBOSS both provide such foundations that the world’s hyperscalers have decided to adopt. Microsoft, Meta and Google are examples of companies that have led this industry transformation to use community driven open-source projects, enabling a diverse vendor ecosystem and faster innovation. You can see their efforts through their years of leadership in SONiC and FBOSS along with related community efforts such as OCP Networking, SAI, FRR, and other active software working groups.
Thanks to these heavyweights driving consistent abstractions and of course, providing the right financial incentives, switch vendors like Nexthop and the open source ecosystem have ensured that BYoNOS is ready at the same time as when bleeding edge hardware reaches mass production. Whether you are considering traditional pluggable switches, moving from 51 Tbps to 102 Tbps, or planning your co-packed optics (CPO) / near-packaged optics (NPO) deployments, there is a BYoNOS solution available for you.
A Different Model for Switch Vendors
This model is disrupting the status quo vendor ecosystem. Traditionally, proprietary NOS software has been a meaningful way to differentiate and provide value, but the rise of BYoNOS has diminished the value of proprietary NOS at these operators. So in each step of this movement, incumbent switch vendors have had to decide whether to preserve their original differentiator (their own NOS) or to do what their largest customers want (BYoNOS).
Nexthop surfaced two years ago as a group of veterans in this industry that is approaching this disruption differently. We think that making BYoNOS work requires more than just meeting a platform compatibility check box while secretly crossing their fingers that you’ll crawl back to their proprietary OS when things break. Instead, we fundamentally believe that our success lies in successfully operationalizing the operator NOS.
With BYoNOS as table stakes to our success, our incentive is to make our equipment the best integrated hardware with BYoNOS – we are a product company after all. But in addition, we are motivated to make their chosen BYoNOS truly the best option compared to the alternative.
Making BYoNOS Solutions Better in the Open
How have we gone about enabling BYoNOS? Last week, we showcased a number of examples shared at the Open Compute Project Global Summit and the SONiC Workshops, which we hope you will watch:
- SONiC BMC for Unified Management and Next-Generation Liquid-Cooled Networks by Roger Liao (Nexthop AI) & Judy Joseph (Microsoft)
- Config-Driven FBOSS: From Board Bring-up to Qualified Platform by Benoit Sigoure (Nexthop AI) & Srikrishna Gopu (Meta)
- SONiC Resiliency and Hardening: Bounding SAI Notification Storms by Senthil Krishnamurthy (Nexthop AI) & Prince Sunny (Microsoft)
In August 2026, Nexthop AI and Meta presented improvements to FBOSS that the two companies collaborated on.
In addition, we are pleased to support the Open Switch Platform Architecture (OSPA) work led by Microsoft, Meta and Alibaba. We have been in active discussions with the OSPA authors to ensure consistent software interfaces for switch hardware used by hyperscalers, and to make BYONOS easier to integrate across platforms. In line with these efforts, Nexthop hardware supports FBOSS, SONiC and other BYoNOS software.
We are also excited to share that Nexthop is now the #1 contributor by PR to FBOSS outside of Meta itself, with the broadest and most varied set of contributions. Additionally, we are among the top 5 contributors to SONiC despite being a relative newcomer company.*
When switch vendors and operators share a unified goal, which is to ensure the chosen BYoNOS thrives, the traditional friction of proprietary vendor lock-in disappears. By aligning our success directly with the operator’s choice of operating system, open networking moves past mere compatibility to a model where everyone’s incentives point in the exact same direction: building the best possible network infrastructure together.
*based on publicly available data as of original publication ( fboss / sonic sii score )
SONiC and the SONiC logo are registered trademarks of the Linux Foundation. See sonicfoundation.dev
