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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.

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 all over the world.

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

Given I developed a similar vision as Nephio, my motivation to apply for this role is to make the Nephio project successful. 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.