Offloading Cloud Network Services at Production Scale with SONiC DASH SmartSwitch#

Shaofeng Wu (CUHK and Microsoft Research Asia), Zhixiong Niu (MSRA), Riff Jiang, et al. (Microsoft), Hong Xu (CUHK) — Community Award Winner

• Why: A decade of Azure offload lessons distilled into an open, community-governed architecture — and a concrete datapoint that the DPU pool is collapsing back into the T1 switch itself. Directly relevant to where cloud-network offload roadmaps are heading.
• What: SONiC DASH SmartSwitch, deployed at Azure production scale for stateful network services: 1.53 Tbps throughput, 19.2M CPS, 256M concurrent connections, ~1.8x power efficiency and ~2.7x space efficiency over the prior generation.
• How: Three design lessons encoded: an immutable, hardware-friendly DASH pipeline programming model (vs. overly flexible models that block acceleration); a "uni-box" SmartSwitch converging NPU and DPU resources inside a single T1 switch (vs. appliance-style DPU pools); and community-driven P4 behavior specifications (vs. vendor SDKs).
• Where applicable: Built on the open SONiC/DASH ecosystem rather than a proprietary fork, so this is the rare Microsoft-scale result a non-hyperscaler can actually build on. Requires SmartSwitch-class hardware (integrated NPU+DPU in the T1).