About Me — Sunku Ranganath

Principal Product Manager | Solution Architect | Travel Lover

Sunku R
6 min readDec 27, 2021

To the reader: Its nice of you to stop by to learn more about me. If you are here reading this, give me a holler through LinkedIn!

Sometimes one of the hardest thing to do is to express oneself in writing about what they are/were/would be! Its always the case that we go through multiple iterations of putting everything in text.

While keeping things brief, this goes in to 2 sections, personal side and professional life!

Personal Side:

We all are human beings before we are defined by our title or by our work. So here are few things I am:

  • Believes in core set of values that help guide and define one’s self
  • Traveled 16 countries and looking for the next opportunity to travel again
  • Love being a Dad!
  • Always strive to be good at what I do, no matter the time it takes
  • There are enough complicated things in the world, our life need not be one!
2019 was one of my best years of travel! Would love to do that again!

Professional Life:

Brief Highlights

  • Principal Product Manager & Product solution leader in Edge Infrastructure, Edge AI, Private 5G & IoT SaaS & PaaS services with open-source software
  • Product managed Machine Vision AI aaS, Edge AI based Contextual Ads aaS, Multi-Cloud Network Security aaS & O-RAN based Private 5G aaS for B2B customer adoption at scale
  • Expertise in pre-launch product planning, competitive positioning, defining technical product requirements, cross functional requirements, Go-To & Get-To Market solutions with inhouse SaaS & public cloud-based offerings
  • Expertise in architecting, design, integration & performance analysis of Industrial IoT, Smart City based Edge services & infrastructure, O-RAN & Private 5G infrastructure, SASE, NFV & microservices
  • Avid innovator with 12 patent filings, presented at multiple industry & IEEE conferences, authored multiple ETSI standards, industry publications, white papers & solution briefs

IEEE Senior Member — Awarded

“ Senior Member is the highest professional grade of IEEE for which a member may apply. It requires extensive experience, and reflects professional accomplishment and maturity. Only 10% of our more than 400,000 members have achieved this level ”

Patents — Filed

Awards

  • Top 15 in Patent Filings for 2022 in a group of >1000 people
  • Divisional Recognition Award (DRA) — Delivered 1st Live SASE POP in a Box solution with Zscaler & Supermicro
  • DRA — Smart Edge 6–11 collaboration & delivery
  • Recipient of 2019 OPNFV Community Leadership Award
  • DRA — IceLake server Power/Application Telemetry Upstream 3Qs ahead of Launch
  • DRA — Advancing SDN/NFV with Unified Infrastructure for Cloud Customers
  • DRA — For Scaling Enterprise, Telco & Cloud deployments of IA-optimized NFV
  • Spontaneous Recognition Award — From VP of OTC for integration KVM4NFV into Intel Open Network Platform
  • IEEE Student Leader Award — From IEEE Phoenix section

Conferences

  • Geekly Worldwide Software Architecture Summit ’22 — Workshop on Edge Computing Architectural Patterns & Innovation Opportunities
  • IEEE Edge Conference 2021 — “Challenges and Opportunities in Performance Benchmarking of Service Mesh for the Edge”
  • IEEE NFV-SDN Conference 2021 — Partnership with IEEE INGR Edge Services Platform — “Convergence of Edge Services & Edge Infrastructure”
  • IEEE 5G World Forum 2021— Partnership with IEEE INGR Edge Services Platform —Presentation on “A Survey of AI Enabled Edge Compute for Future Networks”
  • Service Mesh Con 2021 — Partnership with Red Hat — “Are You Sure About Your Mesh Performance — Details Matter”
  • Intel Software Professionals Conference 2021 — “It’s a mess in the Service Mesh!”
  • Open Source Summit 2020 — Partnership with Google — “Collectd transition into the modern observability universe”
  • Open Networking & Edge Summit 2020 — Partnership with Red Hat — “Streaming Analytics & Observability for Latency Sensitive Kubernetes Workloads”
  • PromCon 2020 —“Lessons from Closing the Cloud Native Infrastructure Loops
  • OPNFV Technical Event 2020 — “Telemetry Reports”
  • IEEE International Conference on Communications 2020 — “Closing the Loop with Infrastructure & Automation”
  • Kubecon & Cloud Native Con 2019 Keynote Representation — Contributor to Open Virtual Central Office keynote demo
  • Open Network & Edge Summit 2019 — Partnership with Nokia — Demo’ed two solutions at Linux Foundation for Networking demo booth — 1) Self-healing & rolling maintenance in OpenStack 2) Resiliency & self-healing using streaming telemetry in Kubernetes
  • Open Network & Edge Summit 2019 — Partnership with Nokia — Resiliency Closed Loop: Telco Self-healing and Maintenance
  • Open Infrastructure Summit 2019 — Demo on “Resource Management Daemon”
  • IEEE 5G World Forum 2019 — Panel talk on “The Edge Computing Paradigm for the Industry”
  • IEEE 5G World Forum 2019 — Demo on “Adaptive Frequency Control based Energy Savings & Memory Resiliency with Closed Loop”
  • IEEE NetSoft 2019 — Tutorial on “Packet Processing & Service Assurance Constructs for Network Transformation
  • IEEE Traffic Measurement & Analysis 2019 — “Energy Savings & Resiliency with Closed Loop Platform Automation”
  • IEEE Globecom 2019 — Tutorial on “Service Assurance”
  • FOSDEM 2019 — Presentation on “Are You Insured Against Noisy Neighbor
  • Open Networking & Edge Summit 2019 — “Are You Insured Against Noisy Neighbor”
  • ONES 2019 Unconference Session — organizer
  • IEEE Conference on NFV-SDN 2018 — Partnership with Spirent — Demo on “Noisy Neighbor Detection”
  • OpenStack Summit 2018 — Presentation on “Painless Cache Allocation in Cloud
  • Open Source Summit 2018 — Presentation on “Are You Insured Against Noisy Neighbor
  • Intel Oregon Leadership Conference 2018 — Presentation on “Navigating Across Managers & Reorgs”
  • OpenStack China Days 2018 — Demo highlighting Intel RDT with OpenStack
  • OPNFV Plugfest 2017 — Partnership with Spirent — “Are You Insured Against Your Noisy Neighbor”
  • Intel Design Test Technology Conference 2017 Best Of Selected paper on “NFV Reference Architectures And Platform Considerations”
  • Intel Software Professionals Conference 2016 — Presentation on “Programming for NFV in Cloud And Telco Deployments”
  • Intel Software Professionals Conference 2015– Presentation on “Accelerating SDN-NFV with Intel Open Network Platform”

Invited Talks

Industry Standards

Industry Publications

  • Featured & published articles on Fast Stack, International Society of America, Medium publications, etc.
  • IEEE International Next Generation Roadmap Edge Service Platform roadmap specification for 2021 — co-author
  • Intel Network Builders White Paper on “Closed Loop Automation Telemetry Aware Scheduler and Self-healing & platform resiliency” — co-author
  • Intel Network Builders User Guide on “Enhanced Service Assurance — Intel Platform with OPNFV Barometer Project”
  • Intel Network Builders White Paper on “Deterministic Network Functions Virtualization with Intel® Resource Director Technology”
  • Over 8 Intel Network Builders White Papers on Closed Loop Platform Automation — Co-author
  • Reference architecture & benchmarking guides for Intel Open Network Platform — Co-author
  • User Guides — Monitoring telemetry from Intel Resource Director Technology & Run Sure Technology
  • Collectd 6.0 architecture document — contributor
  • Collectd Plugin documents on design, test & usage on Barometer wiki — author
  • OpenStack Blueprint on leveraging Resource Director Technology — author
  • Intel IT publication “Intel’s Working Hard to Enable Your Data Center Transformation” — contributor
  • Open Network Platform Reference Architecture & Benchmarking Guides — author

Industry Committees Representation:

· Co-founded CNCF Service Mesh Performance Sandbox project

· OPNFV Technical Steering Committee (TSC) Member (elected role)

· OPNFV Closed Loop Automation Working Group Chair

· OPNFV Barometer project contributor

· OPNFV & CNTT meld technical committee member

· Maintainer of open source Collectd community

· Intel representative at CNCF Observability SIG

· Open Infrastructure — PDX Meetup Organizer

Collectd meetup 2019 & 2018 — co-organizer with Red Hat & Google

Open Source Projects — Maintainer

Collectd: https://github.com/collectd/collectd

CNCF Service Mesh Performance: https://smp-spec.io/

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