How to choose a SONiC release for production

SONiC community releases are named by year and month, such as 202411 or 202505, and a new one lands roughly every six months. Picking one for production is less about the newest features and more about how well your exact hardware is tested on it.

What we check first

• Platform coverage. Is your ASIC and switch SKU in the release’s test matrix, and does the vendor ship a SAI version that matches?
• Features you actually use. EVPN, MC-LAG and PFC watchdog behave differently across branches. We test the ones in your configuration, not the release notes.
• Backport activity. A release that is still receiving fixes is worth more than one with a bigger feature list.

A simple rule of thumb

Run the release that is one behind the latest, on a maintenance branch, unless a feature you need only exists in the newest one.

admin@leaf01:~$ show version | grep "SONiC Software Version"
SONiC Software Version: SONiC.202505.0-maint

Planning the next upgrade

We keep a lab image of the next candidate release running your configuration, so when it’s time to upgrade, the regression results already exist.