2

Chair Only

Liam Fallon

Liam Fallon is a practitioner working on delivering Network Automation in open source. He is helping to build the software frameworks that we need to realize the promise of real automation in modern telecommunication systems.

Liam has architected, designed, and implemented a variety of systems, one of which was the first packet analyzer for the Ericsson AXE switch. From there he moved to work on management of Ericsson's ATM switches (a connection tracing system), and onto mobile network management (a number of systems including a batch job management system, a session tracing system, and a complex event processing system). He believes that system architects and designers should follow their designs, and should be involved in the implementation and deployment of their designs so he has led the implementation teams for most of the systems he has designed.

In his time in Applied Research,he led the development of the APEX adaptive policy engine, which Ericsson contributed to the Linux Foundation ONAP (Open Network Automation Platform) project.

He followed APEX into the ONAP project and into the Open Source world. He worked on the design and implementation of the TOSCA driven Policy Framework architecture in ONAP. He also designed and and led the implementation of Automation Composition Management, which is the core of the rApp Manager in OSC.

Ericsson

The value that Nephio brings has been recognized by its community of users. The fourth release of Nephio is under development and will be released in the next months. As such, there is an expectation that Nephio will bring enhanced functionality with each release but also will mature as a system with each release.

The charter of SIG Automation stats that “this SIG group focuses on design and standardization of schemas, CRDs, and operators; development of CRDs, Operators, related tooling & reference Implementation; and packaging and testing of functional components of Nephio.”

In the spirit of the charter, for R4 and R5 I will

• Work with the other SIGs (particularly SIG-1) to drive the implementation and delivery of the functionality for Releases 4 and 5

• Focus on maturity and robustness the existing Nephio platform and its operators, specifically the operators in Nephio and Porch

• Engage with the community to augment and streamline the software engineering processes used in Nephio

Having delivered on this contribution plan, a mature Nephio will be well positioned to deliver on its promise of Cloud Native Intent automation.