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OPNFV Developer Spotlight: Peter Lee

By October 28, 2015January 18th, 2017Blog

The OPNFV community is comprised of a diverse set of active developers who are passionate about transforming the industry through open source NFV. This new blog series highlights the people who are collaborating in the trenches to build a de facto standard open source platform for NFV.

About Peter Lee

Peter LeePeter Lee leads R&D at ClearPath Networks where he is responsible for driving technology innovation and strategic vision across the company’s products and services. He is also serving as project lead for OPNFV Promise project dealing with Resource Management for the Virtualized Infrastructure. He is the primary developer for YangForge model-driven open-source framework and serving as project lead on YANG enablement for ON.LAB XOS/ONOS projects. He is an avid practitioner of pragmatic programming principles and a strong advocate of open source development and open standards-based initiatives. Peter holds B.S. degrees in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, and Computer Engineering from Duke University.

What projects in OPNFV are you working on? Any new developments to share?

I’m currently leading the OPNFV Promise project and committer to IPv6, MOVIE, and Doctor. The Promise project was initiated just after OPNFV was introduced and addresses the ETSI NFV use case requirements around Resource Reservation for Future Usage. We’ve worked closely with the ETSI NFV IFA working group (many of our project members active in both organizations) and received strong collaboration from NTT-DOCOMO, NEC, Ericsson, and AT&T – just to name a few participating organizations.

During the upcoming OPNFV Summit, the OPNFV Promise project team will be demonstrating our first implementation, which will showcase live integration with multiple OpenStack environments for providing active capacity awareness, planning future capacity increase/decrease, reserving resources for future utilization, and allocating resources based on reservations.

During the Summit, we will also provide an in-depth overview of the underlying YANG Model-Driven framework (YangForge) which ClearPath open-sourced back in July.  The YangForge framework powers the Promise implementation and provides a rich abstraction for YANG-driven NB interface generation for CLI, REST/JSON, as well as web sockets.

Where do you see OPNFV in five years?

Within five years, I believe that OPNFV will successfully deliver a NFV platform that will be deployed by many communications service providers around the globe.  We will be actively working on a number of new use cases including service federation across clouds, along with the next generation real-time resource and service exchange systems.  With the emergence of Personal Clouds, OPNFV will be focusing on enhancing per-subscriber networking experience for the users, while addressing geo-political concerns around data privacy, lawful intercepts and other transport related challenges as the network boundaries become blurred into a series of dynamically created service paths across carriers.

What is the biggest challenge facing networking today and how do you see NFV helping to resolve it?

The networking industry today faces a significant challenge in recruiting and growing software development talent. With so much competition from the mobile, social, and other web-centric industries, our industry needs to focus on highly targeted developer outreach programs (into external development ecosystems) to spread awareness of recent developments within the networking industry while specifically highlighting the new monetization opportunities. I believe that the NFV movement captures the key ingredients for opening up the software development ecosystem as we usher in the next generation of marketplace-driven networking apps to become the new currency for delivering services to end users running directly on the carrier networks.

What is the best piece of developer advice you’ve ever received?

“There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult. It demands the same skill, devotion, insight, and even inspiration as the discovery of the simple physical laws which underlie the complex phenomena of nature.”–C.A.R. Hoare

The above observation has provided foundational guidance throughout my software development career. I always strive to identify the primitive logical constructs that succinctly expresses the desired solution, give it a whirl, attack the underlying implicit assumptions, then try again until further decomposition is no longer practical.

Unfortunately, the emphasis on design over implementation is often at odds with many recent trends in software development methodologies where quantitative progress is being championed over qualitative progress (which is inherently much more difficult to measure). Open Reference Platforms such as OPNFV provide the testing grounds for newly emerging paradigms in model-driven and functional software construction that serve to shift the focus back on design along with a new trajectory for collaborative innovation.