LinkedIn details adoption of SONiC

Zaid Kahn describes how LinkedIn moved from proprietary switches to SONiC, detailing technical steps and cultural shifts that enabled improved visibility, operational control, and scalability—issues that matter to enterprise IT and security leaders.

Research overview

The episode features a conversation between Ilona Gabinsky and Zaid Kahn, who is identified as CEO of Neuron Factory and a former vice president at Microsoft with infrastructure and Artificial Intelligence (AI) experience at LinkedIn and Microsoft.

The discussion focused on LinkedIn’s motivations for evaluating SONiC and the production problems that prompted the move from vendor-owned networking software to an open networking stack.

Key findings

Proprietary switches reduced visibility and complicated debugging of production issues such as microbursts, and vendor software defects affected reliability even when unused features were involved.

Adopting SONiC provided teams control over telemetry and debugging, allowed incremental scaling from small deployments, and produced recurring operational and financial gains as the platform matured.

Technical breakdown

The guests cited limited telemetry and vendor lock-in as technical drivers for change, noting that open networking enabled direct access to instrumentation and faster Root Cause Analysis (RCA).

SONiC’s model separated network operating software from underlying hardware, which the speakers linked to more predictable operational outcomes in production environments.

Operational impact

Speakers described a phased rollout approach where leadership approval followed demonstrable stability from initial deployments, enabling broader adoption over time.

They reported that cost advantages accrued progressively and that a community-oriented support model contributed to ongoing maintenance and feature development.

Leadership perspective

Achieving leadership buy-in involved starting with controlled pilots and demonstrating reliability, while organizational adoption required training engineers and structuring incentives to accept experimentation.

The conversation emphasized that cultural change and ownership by engineering teams were factors in moving from pilot projects to production-scale deployments.

The overall takeaway is that LinkedIn’s move to SONiC addressed visibility, telemetry, and operational control through a phased technical and cultural program, and this “Blog Signals brief” is a fact-based summary of the vendor blog.