Nominee’s bio (or LinkedIn profile link)

Over 15 years in networking & communications, Saurav has worked on systems as diverse as network virtualization at Big Switch Networks, datacenter switches at Arista, and WDM optics at Enablence. He currently serves as Director of Engineering at the Open Networking Foundation, where he leads open-source projects like CORD and Trellis.

He was also part of the original team at Stanford that made SDN popular. His pioneering research on SDN in WANs proposed, demonstrated and analyzed a converged IP/MPLS/Optical WAN architecturally based on SDN. He holds an MS from the University of Arizona and a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University.

http://www.linkedin.com/in/saurav-das

How long have you been working in the CORD community?

Since inception in 2015.

What contributions have you made in the past to the CORD community?

I designed the original CORD networking infrastructure - both the underlay leaf-spine fabric using bare-metal hardware, and the overlay virtual networking using OvS. Over time the underlay fabric grew into its own project (Trellis) that implemented several new features that were not used in CORD, but required by network operators in a CORD-like (inspired) setting. Trellis is now in production with several hundred live, paying customers at a Tier 1 network operator. I led the team at ONF that helped put Trellis into production.

Over the last year I have also taken on the responsibility of managing two other projects at ONF - VOLTHA and R-CORD. Under my guidance and leadership, the VOLTHA project, whose community used to be fractured and did things mostly privately, became a true open source project following the best practices of open source - public architecture discussions, releases, sprint planning, weekly scrums, TST, and more. I was also instrumental in the creation of open source software support for the industry's first whitebox OLT for XGS-PON (EdgeCore), a critical reference hardware for VOLTHA. More recently, I designed and led the transition of the old-R-CORD to what I used to call the new-R-CORD, which eventually came  to be known as SEBA. The old-R-CORD, while innovative, failed to meet operator's real-world needs. Conversely, SEBA enjoys wide operator support.

What are you actively working on in CORD?

I lead the ONF engineering team working on SEBA.

Why do you feel you would be a good candidate for this position?

The ONF works on many different projects with many different communities. It can be chaotic at times, but I help ensure that ONF engineers and community contributors are rowing in the same direction, making forward progress  towards our deliverables.

Are there any changes you would like to bring to the community if elected into this position?

We are already starting to see greater community involvement in the SEBA and VOLTHA projects - we hope to continue growing as we bring in more features into SEBA.

There are two other things I have been involved with. One is the greater use of P4 and Stratum interfaces in Trellis and CORD. The other is the integration of M-CORD into the work that has been done in the new CORD platform and SEBA. Both are already in motion, and over the next year will be the focus of ONF work, as we gear up towards building a multi-access edge cloud that meets operator needs.