Shaofeng Wu, The Chinese University of Hong Kong and Microsoft Research Asia; Zhixiong Niu, Microsoft Research Asia; Riff Jiang, Lawrence Lee, Junhua Zhai, Ze Gan, Vasundhara Volam, Prabhat Aravind, Prince Sunny, Prince George, Qi Luo, Evan Langlais, Soumya Tiwari, Venkat Satish Katta, Weixi Chen, Rishiraj Hazarika, Sachin Jain, Deven Jagasia, Michal Zygmunt, Avijit Gupta, Neeraj Motwani, and Pranjal Shrivastava, Microsoft; Qiang Su, The Chinese University of Hong Kong; Anil Reddy Pannala, Kristina Moore, James Grantham, Anupam Pandey, Xin Liu, Guohan Lu, Gerald De Grace, Rishabh Tewari, Lihua Yuan, Erica Lan, Deepak Bansal, and Dave Maltz, Microsoft; Yongqiang Xiong, Microsoft Research Asia; Hong Xu, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Community Award Winner!
To support stateful cloud network services, Microsoft Azure has operated several generations of offloading solutions over the past decade. While these systems improved performance, operating them at hyperscale revealed three persistent lessons: (i) overly flexible programming models hinder hardware acceleration, (ii) appliance-style DPU pools inflate physical footprint and complicate deployment, and (iii) vendor-specific SDKs slow down service iteration.
We present SONiC DASH SmartSwitch that addresses these lessons with three key designs: (1) the DASH pipeline as an immutable and hardware-friendly programming model; (2) the uni-box SmartSwitch that converges NPU and DPU resources within a single T1 switch; and (3) a community-driven development model with P4 behavior specifications. SONiC DASH SmartSwitch has been deployed in Microsoft Azure at scale. It achieves 1.53Tbps throughput, 19.2M CPS, and 256M concurrent connections for network services, while improving power efficiency by ~1.8× and space efficiency by ~2.7× compared to the previous generation.
NSDI '26 Open Access Sponsored by
King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST)
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author = {Shaofeng Wu and Zhixiong Niu and Riff Jiang and Lawrence Lee and Junhua Zhai and Ze Gan and Vasundhara Volam and Prabhat Aravind and Prince Sunny and Prince George and Qi Luo and Evan Langlais and Soumya Tiwari and Venkat Satish Katta and Weixi Chen and Rishiraj Hazarika and Sachin Jain and Deven Jagasia and Michal Zygmunt and Avijit Gupta and Neeraj Motwani and Pranjal Shrivastava and Qiang Su and Anil Reddy Pannala and Kristina Moore and James Grantham and Anupam Pandey and Xin Liu and Guohan Lu and Gerald De Grace and Rishabh Tewari and Lihua Yuan and Erica Lan and Deepak Bansal and Dave Maltz and Yongqiang Xiong and Hong Xu},
title = {Offloading Cloud Network Services at Production Scale with {SONiC} {DASH} {SmartSwitch}},
booktitle = {23rd USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI 26)},
year = {2026},
isbn = {978-1-939133-54-0},
address = {Renton, WA},
pages = {2569--2586},
url = {https://www.usenix.org/conference/nsdi26/presentation/wu-shaofeng},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = may
}
