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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, automation CoE, 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 Linux Foundation, ATIS, and supporting research across North American universities. 

Sana Tariq is 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. One of recent blogs published at Nephio website: https://nephio.org/on-the-road-to-public-cloud-5g-networks/

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, vendor-neutral automation that can deliver the promise of cloudification. 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 services 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 projects gets 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 services providers' requirements in 2023+ (targeting greenfield 5G/IoT/.. that requires massive roll-outs)
2. Define a functional roadmap for Nephio that helps deliver production-ready increments of the project for faster adoption across major service providers
3. Aim to simplify the use/adoption of Nephio and development of Operators, CRDs (template sharing, GUI improvements, partial parsers, etc.)
4. Ensure Nephio can support automation of network functions, and services and is capable of integrating over standards based interfaces to ecosystem components following ETSI, 3GPP and ORAN interfaces. 
5. Ensure Nephio's adoption across all NFs vendors, Public Cloud providers through service provider's joint collaboration
6. Ensure community members participation and joint voice is reflected in requirements and roadmap.

Padma Sudarsan is a Bell Labs Fellow and has 25+ years of experience in telecommunication industry with roles that have spanned various domains including customer and industry strategy, open and inner source projects, research, product management and architecture. As part of Nokia Bell Labs, more recently, Padma led topics related to end-to-end 5G architecture and technology insertion supporting the CTO and head of business groups by analyzing the selection and evolution of architecture and future proof solution enabling brownfield and greenfield deployments. Led architecture transformation towards building a Cloud-Native RAN.  She has played an active role in shaping and driving several topics in International Wireless Standards (3GPP, ETSI, TMF, SCF, BBF, O-RAN).

Currently, in VMware, Padma is setting architectural direction and telco transformation towards cloud-based deployment by understanding customer requirements, key market and technology trends and to providing the best and most cost-effective end-to-end solution. She is active in O-RAN WGs topics for cloud Orchestration, Management, LCM, SMO architecture and RAN intelligence aligning with industry and internal VMware strategy.

For the telco applications (especially the RAN) a move toward cloud-based deployments requires an architecture transformation and careful analysis of the latency sensitive requirements necessary to deliver performance. In addition, the vertical and horizontal disaggregation of the network functions introduces complexity and requires an automated, programmable, intelligent orchestration and lifecycle management architecture framework to realize the advantages of cloud-based deployments. 

Over the years, having worked on e2e solutions, openness with programmability and automation are key to enable multi-vendor, multi-cloud orchestration. Instead of being just yet another open source, Nephio architecture and requirements should leverage existing industry standards/fora/open source (ETSI, O-RAN, 3GPP, ONAP, Anuket etc.) and enable synergetic implementation for a simple, fast, easier onboarding and life cycle management that can be adopted by the industry.

Pure cloud based/cloud native networks will take time to realize, this means that there will be a significant amount of time where hybrid networks (a mix of physical, virtual, cloud and cloud native networks) will be prevalent in most operators.

While cloud “container” based deployments are rapidly evolving, brownfield deployments with a mix of classical, VM based, container on bare metal, container on VM combinations will continue to exist for many years to come.

The mains goals for SIG 1 would be to:

• Define e2e scenarios and associated workflows for LCM of telco applications leveraging work in other standards, fora. This should include sunny day and rainy-day scenarios and information model.
• RAN application deployment at the edge and far edge which are resource constrained and latency sensitive need careful architecture considerations and identify/recommend choice of design.
• Define requirements and architecture to enable multi-cloud deployments supporting public, private and hybrid mix
• Enable “container” based deployments and brownfield deployments with a mix of classical, VM based, container on bare metal, container on VM combinations
• Clear definition of packaging for ease of multi-vendor application deployment. Leverage work in other standards bodies as applicable.
• Recommendation for choice of leveraging other open-source modules.
• Automation of LCM of infra, platform assets, services, applications.
• Selection and evolution of key architectural direction and helping identify future proof solution while leveraging synergies with existing mechanisms.
• Foster and encourage open discussions/technical debates.
• Ensure collaboration within the Nephio community and across external/relevant standards/for a/open source to avoid fragmentation.