SIG Election

Tal is a senior principal software engineer in Red Hat’s Telco Solutions team, where he works with partners and customers to integrate network function workloads into the cloud native stack. In other words: the Nephio scope. He was the liaison to the ONAP project, where he focused on service orchestration and Kubernetes, and is in the core group at OASIS drafting the TOSCA 2.0 specification. In his Telco Solutions role he has initiated several projects and PoCs that align with Nephio's goals, including multusctl, Candice, Knap, Puccini, Turandot, Khutulun, Reposure, and CNCK.

Before Red Hat he worked at Cloudify, specifically on OPEN-O (subsumed into ONAP) and the now-retired AriaTosca project.

He has given many public presentations on the topic of cloud native, declarative, intent-driven, policy-oriented orchestration in telco. Evangelist? Prophet? Broken record? Time will tell!

I intend to steer us towards the “Unix philosophy”: Nephio as a collection of focused tools (operators) that solve one problem well. The advantage of the operator pattern in declarative orchestration, on which I have worked and written extensively, is that operators can be chained together to form comprehensive solutions, which we know will differ between vendors. Our reference implementation should reflect this differentiation and encourage innovation at its integration points rather than locking us down with too much opinion.

CRDs will be tricky, requiring a careful balance between abstraction and actual features, all within the confines of Kubernetes’s extensible ecosystem. I’ve seen many modeling efforts in telco fail due to designed-by-committee bloat, shortsightedness, and/or irrelevancy. I hope to lead from experience and help us keep our eyes on the ball: delivering CNFs on Kubernetes, rather than defining them.

In particular we need to solve the “bifurcation” problem of vertically integrated CNFs. Which operators will run on the management cluster and which on the workload cluster? How will our packaging, CRD design, and tooling reflect and connect the two paths? Presentation on this topic is forthcoming. Another topic I want to focus on is networking orchestration, what I call "Multus, part 2". How do we manage Multus at scale without requiring CNFs to package complete CNI configs?

Some words I live by: The best technology is often the most familiar, not the suddenly popular. User experience is a starting point, not an afterthought. Documentation is as important as code.

I’ll do my best to foster a welcoming, open, and diverse development community where everyone feels safe and valued.

Tina Tsou is an innovator and a visionary with far-reaching accomplishments within the technical engineering realm. As Arm’s Enterprise Architect, Tina serves in the highly visible Technical Lead role for the Enterprise Open Source Enablement team, where she analyzes, designs, and implements robust strategies to establish first tier status for Arm’s architecture within open source communities and projects. Tina also serves as Arm’s Edge Computing Team Lead. As the company’s open source thought leader, she builds powerful partnerships with and influences open source communities in support of multiple architectures.

Tina previously served as the Digital Domain Expert (Connectivity) for Philips Lighting, where she implemented NB-IoT in an outdoor carrier project with China Mobile and Huawei. She released Bluetooth + ZigBee combo chip architecture and delivered a connectivity hardware/software platform (ZigBee 3.0, Wi-Fi). The China and United States Patent and Trademark Offices have granted Tina 100+ patents. 

She earned her Bachelor of Computer Science degree from Xi’an University of Architecture and Technologies, and currently studies in Stanford University Graduate Business School. Tina was the first woman to chair an Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) working group from a Chinese business enterprise and was the youngest Asian rapporteur in ITU Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T) history. She currently serves as Board Chair of LF Edge, and previously served as Chair of the Akraino Technical Steering Committee. 

People: bring in developers and interested people to contribute on the release work.

Architecture: leverage LF experience, to build CI/CD, Test Grids, and Builds.

Routine: build roadmap, milestones, requirements, for Release Machinery.

Culture: provide project administration for release planning.