SIG 1

Chair 

@Sana Tariq 

Sana is a principal technology architect leading the architecture and long-term roadmap of E2E Service Orchestration for supporting 5G/edge services over a hybrid telco cloud. She has been leading initiatives to improve cloud-native adoption through DevOps, open source solutions, and implementing organization-wide automation principles, and an API program. She has been involved in leading industry initiatives on making telco automation agile and cloud-native, founding partner of TELUS OSPO, project Nephio, and leading industry efforts around cloud-native automation.  She is actively working and leading various efforts with the Linux Foundation, and NGMN and supporting research across North American universities. 

Sana Tariq is a Ph.D. in Computer Science majoring in optical communications, cloud computing, and software-defined networking (Fulbright scholarship and CREOL fellowship awards)

Sana has given many presentations on service orchestration, cloud-native transformation, open source adoption and telco transformation at the edge of 5G.  Some of recent blogs published at Nephio website: https://nephio.org/on-the-road-to-public-cloud-5g-networks/

https://nephio.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2023/07/Nephio-Telus-CaseStudy-v4.pdf?hsCtaTracking=9dfabe15-a71f-43ed-a47a-4973f8489356%7C4d50251e-b3d3-416a-b9cc-538357f59c7d

https://www.ngmn.org/wp-content/uploads/NGMN_Cloud_Native_Manifesto.pdf

TELUS, Canada 

Served as Nephio Sig Arch Chair in the 2022/23 term. Having worked with many orchestration platforms across the industry (ONAP, OSM, and most vendors' solutions) over the last six years, I want Nephio's roadmap to drive simplicity, agility, and vendor-neutral automation that can deliver the promise of cloudification. The Nephio community has to influence ecosystem standards, open source projects, and network function vendors to this cloud-native vision. We need to build a strong foundation for faster, easier network functions onboarding and runtime management to accelerate service delivery timelines, a need to support the 5G vision. 

We need to approach automation as bottom-up and solve the immediate challenges and complexities first. To ensure this open-source project is successful, we must focus on smaller targets, run in DevOps cycles and be pragmatic. 

1. Identify the use cases that apply to the largest number of service providers' requirements in 2024+ (targeting greenfield 5G/IoT/ and O-RAN that requires massive roll-outs)

2. Drive Roadmap through Working group to drive community efforts realizing through future releases that includes O-RAN WG, Assurance and Closed Loop WG, Modeling WG, Architecture WG 

3. Ensure Nephio can evolve to serve its role in O-RAN SMO and Edge orchestration 

4. Ensure Nephio's adoption across all NFs vendors, Public Cloud providers through service provider's joint collaboration

5. Ensure community members participation and joint voice is reflected in requirements and roadmap through effective delegation and inclusiveness

SIG 1

V-Chair

@Sudhi Chada 

Sudhi is a Senior Product Manager at Google building automation products.

Prior to Google, Sudhi was a Director of Product Management, Dynamic Orchestration at Ericsson where he spent considerable amount of time building and influencing the Ericsson OSS (Operational Support System) portfolio. During his time at Ericsson, Sudhi was instrumental in onboarding Ericsson to Nephio and represented Ericsson in the inaugural Nephio TSC.

Sudhi holds an MBA and an MS IS from Boston University and Bachelor of technology in Electronics and Communication engineering from JNTU India

Work with the telco, enterprise and vendor community to identify the key priorities to build a Nephio roadmap for the next year. There are several low hanging fruits to work together and define an approach for:

• Simplifying onboarding to Nephio

• Supporting brownfield scenarios with existing standards and paradigms such as Helm, ETSI

• Aligning with key emerging ecosystems such as ORAN

• Articulate Nephio ambition for non-5GC and RAN workloads such as Transport, SD-WAN, Security and other enterprise applications

Foster an inclusive voice for vendors and users of all sizes to ensure Nephio can grow to its full potential and serve the broadest user base in adopting the automation

SIG 1

Vice-Chair

@Alexis de Talhouët 

As a Telco Solutions Architect at Red Hat, Alexis strives to increase cloud-native network function adoption by defining and promoting best/common practices through to Open Source Networking communities.

Given his developer background, he can define solution architecture, roadmap toward its implementation, along with pipeline strategy fostering agile delivery, with a strong emphasis on support and operations.

He also has experience with hybrid multi-cloud architecture and governance, and a strong passion for network automation and orchestration, where he spent the last 8 years working on.  

Alexis has a proven track record in the Open Source Networking communities as previous TSC member and daily contributor to OpenDaylight and ONAP. He understands the Open Source dynamics, and focuses on converging ideas towards meaningful deliverables.

Red Hat

In the past 8 years I have been involved as contributor, committer, and TSC member in different projects within the LFN and I believe I can bring Open Source best practices and guidance. As a SIG 1 representative, I want to help driving the adoption of Nephio through meaningful use cases by making them community-driven, agile, and aligned to operator’s needs.

In contrast to previous Open Source initiatives, Nephio has well defined areas of focus, and clear guiding principles. My goal will be to keep this focus to drive incremental value by proving the benefit of a cloud-native network automation platform for network related use cases.

Concretely, as part of the SIG1, I will:

• Contribute to identifying meaningful use cases in the domain of 5G, Transport and Cable

• Act as a liaison to the O-RAN Alliance, where I'm an active participant and contributor to the specification

• Drive Nephio's adoption by fostering an inclusive community, where NEP, Cloud Providers and Telcos can share their view and align and priorities

• Provide Open Source best practices and methods of engagement

• Contribute to a high level roadmap defining Nephio's direction

• Ensure we don't take too much and priorities deliverables. Keep the community focused by avoiding too many requirements.

SIG 2

Either seat

@Wim Henderickx 

Wim is head of technology and architecture in Nokia’s IP division, where he works with partners and customers to provide consultancy advise in IP technology, Cloud and Automation. He has over 25 years of experience in the telco and enterprise communication and networking industry and is a regular speaker at technical conferences.

He is driving the automation strategy within Nokia for the IP division where he developed a prototype that is aligned with the Nephio vision. A reference open source project he initiated is [containerlab](https://containerlab.dev) where multiple vendors have been integrated and collaborated, Wim received Nephio R1 Contribution Award for various contributions to the project.

Wim holds a Bachelor’s degree in Industrial Engineering, Data Communication and a Masters degree in Economy and is a Bellabs Fellow

Nokia

I am a big believer in the cloud native operation and the goals the Nephio project is aiming for. 

I want to do this on one hand by leveraging my knowledge of the Telco world, but also from the knowledge I gained when building a prototype that leverage CRDs to automate various parts of the telco’s infrastructure.

On top I intend to help organize the project and build an open community. I have experience in operating large multi-national and multi-cultural teams that operate on common goals, set milestones and drive towards success.

I am known to be open and approachable to get the best way forward for the community and the project

SIG 2

Chair only

@Tal Liron 

Tal is an engineer in Google Cloud's telco team. Specifically he works on TNA, which is a Nephio downstream product (currently the only one, but we expect this to expand), together with @Stephen Wong, @Sudhi Chada, @Kandan Kathirvel, Kaushik Bhandankar, and others who you will see more and more in the project. As such he represents real world commercial considerations for Nephio.

He has exclusively worked on telco orchestration for the past 7 years, starting at Cloudify and then at Red Hat before joining Google. Throughout he has become a converted believer in declarative orchestration and decentralized yet tightly integrated architectures, principles which are at the heart of Nephio. He is a member of the OASIS TOSCA TC where he's working on developing a more cloud native TOSCA 2.0, is an Apache Software Foundation committer, has been heavily involved in OPEN-O (where he received a contributor award), then ONAP, and has participated in several CNCF workgroups. Also, he has functioned as Nephio SIG#1 vice chair for a short time in the past, having won your vote in the previous election while he was working for Red Hat.

A coder first and foremost, he has initiated a long list of open source projects and PoCs. For those relevant to Nephio, see: TKO, Knap, Candice, Planter, CNCK, Reposure, Puccini, Turandot, and Khutulun.

Google

After proving that we can deliver network functions in R1, Nephio has greatly expanded its list of topics, integrations, use cases, and sub-projects. My goal as chair would be to work with others to rally our diverse contributors towards a unifying, useful, and implementable vision. This means delegating responsibilities to sub-project leads, coordinating efforts between sub-projects as well as with other SIGs and the TSC, while also functioning as leader and facilitator to keep us on track.

I will take an active role in our sub-projects, especially focusing on these topics:

• Workload cluster operations: Day 2 agency for NF operators (as part of Nephio SDK), Multus networking, NETCONF support

• North-south-east-west integrations with O-RAN, TOSCA, and cluster management (cloud providers)

• Exploring decoupling mechanisms for data and functionality

I intend to help turn PoCs from myself and others into concrete proposals we can evaluate, discuss, and implement. I'm passionate about code quality, which means best practices for coherence, consistency, and maintainability.

Finally, I intend to lead on shaping our work culture. We can be more welcoming, more open, and less intimidating to both newcomers and established contributors. This involves conversational habits in meetings and Slack, clarity on work processes, as well as outwardly communicating and evangelizing our vision not only as a technology, but also as a community of real people backed by real companies.

SIG 2

Vice-Chair

@Vishwanath Jayaraman 

- Software engineer with a career spanning twenty+ years of professional experience in Server/Storage/Converged infrastructure/SDN/NFV, Public cloud(cloud networking, NFV) and Telco solutions domain.

- Held multiple technical/project leadership role leading teams spread across geographies.

- Past Employers: Dell (Storage, Servers, Converged Infrastructure), Brocade (OpenStack, SDN)

- Current Employer: Red Hat (Telco Solutions group)

- OpenSource Project experience

  - Past contributor and reviewer in the OpenStack community, worked on ground breaking projects such as Open Stack NFV Tacker.

  - Past contributor to the ovn-kubernetes project.

LinkedIn Profile →  https://www.linkedin.com/in/vishwanathjayaraman

Red Hat

Help build and grow the community by putting a structure that allows for

- Cross collaboration across 

    - time zones

    - companies

    - domain experience

    - years of experience

    when authoring/proposing design documents and Pull Requests 

- asynchronous communication/collaboration via slack and GitHub discussions

- approach planning and execution that always meets production level quality by having wider community member participation in scope/design/code reviews.

- mentoring and shadowing opportunities for existing and new members joining the project

SIG 3

Chair

@balaji varadaraju 

I have over 20 years of experience in the industry developing software products for both enterprises and Telcos.  Currently at Red Hat working as a Manager/Engineer. 
I have been a committer to OpenDayLight ( under LFN) and also been a member of its TSC. Also contributed to OVN-K.

Software engineer at heart , I have performed different functional roles as lead, architect and manager.

Red Hat

I am very involved in various aspects of Nephio including being the release lead. I would continue my contributions to Nephio's roadmap, design and architecture and release processes. If elected as the chair, I would like to collaborate with vice chair to:

• Continue to engage and work with the community to augment development and release processes

• Work with the leads, other SIGs and TSC to continue to make our community more welcoming.

• Work with Sig-1 and Sig-2 to define priorities, scope and milestones while adhering to core Nephio principles

• Intersections with other open source efforts such as O-RAN

• Releases with good quality and documentation

• Actively soliciting contributions, spreading knowledge and community growth.

SIG 3

v-chair

@Radoslaw Chmiel 

Radoslaw 'Rado' Chmiel has over 20 years of professional experience, large portion of it related to continuous integration/delivery and software release process. Worked for Cisco, Oracle, Dell and others.

Samsung

Continue to improve CI/CD infrastructure and release processes and tooling. Increase engagement and number of test-infra contributors.

SIG 4

Either

@Rahul 

Cofounder of AccuKnox, Engg, Dev Lead (k8s, kernel, cloud-native, C/golang coder)
* maintainer of KubeArmor - Runtime security (CNCF Project)
* open source contributor (kubearmor, cilium, scapy, lsquic, RIOT-OS, and others)
* IETF ROLL/6lo WG member (RFC 9009)
* CNCF Ambassador 2023
* TSC member of Open Horizon (LF project)
* 25+ patents, many publications
* 10+ projects mentored as part of LFX/GSoC mentorship

AccuKnox

* prepared sig-security charter
* Overall vision for Nephio from the security point of view

SIG 4

Either

@Phil Porras

phillip.porras@sri.com

Program Director and SRI Fellow in the Computer Science Laboratory.  I am an active 5G Security researcher, leading the SE-RAN Project (5GSec.com),

Provided the introduction presentation of the Nephio Security Working Group at the most recent R2 Nephio Summit. 

An established computer security researcher with more than 90 academic publications, 33 INFOSEC patents and participated on numerous program committees and editorial boards, and on multiple commercial company technical advisory boards.

Very actively involved in all things Federal, DoD, and the relationship between LF, LFN, and Federal agencies.

Stanford Research Institute (SRI) International

* Official LFN/Whitepaper: P.A. Porras, " 5G Security-Enhanced Open
     Radio Access Networks," Technical whitepaper LFN/Nephio, May 2023.
   * Introduction presentation of the Security Working Group at the October 2023  R1 Nephio Summit

Technology Demonstrations:  developed two technical summary demonstration videos:
o Live-RF Demonstration of 5G-Spector: https://www.5gsec.com/post/5g-spector-demo
o R1 Nephio Demonstration of 5G-KubeArmor: Integration with Free5GC
https://youtu.be/hE9kMlLNl_s?si=Cv4Ul4FXr7xX72jQ

Nephio Summit at Google. https://events.linuxfoundation.org/nephio-r2-technical-summit/. (Our
session presentations are posted at this site).

   * InfoSec expertise, active 5G Security community building, and overall alignment and vision for Nephio Security SIG.

SIG 4

Vice Chair only

@Tom Kivlin 

Nearly 20 years of experience in building, operating, and securing infrastructure and software within the Telco industry.

Founder and initial PTL of Anuket (CNTT-as-was) Kubernetes Reference Architecture in LFN.

Led the setup of the LF project Sylva, which looked to create a fully open source Kubernetes solution for Telco needs.

Co-chair of the CNF Working Group in the CNCF, which documents best practices for implementation in the CNF Test Suite (including security best practices).

Cyber champion in Vodafone's Network Cloud & Automation division, working on 5G SBA PKI, Federated Identity, Privilieged Access Paths, and general CaaS security topics.

Vodafone

• Build / develop / continue links and relationships with other Nephio SIGs to ensure we're covering functional security features in Nephio, and the non-functional security of Nephio itself

• Build/develop / continue links and relationships with groups outside of Nephio to ensure broader alignment with e.g. LFN Security WG, CNCF Tag Security, Kubernetes SIG Security, 3GPP SA3, etc.