In this community member profile we highlight Ankur Upadhyaya, a Cloud Software Engineer at Intel, based in Bangalore, India. He has been an active contributor in the SD-Core community since early 2021.
“I enjoy working with ONF and the Aether community; it provides me with the opportunity to interact and learn from other community members. It also offers first hand feedback from SD-Core users who guide the direction of new features working with the community,” said Ankur. “I look forward to more community members contributing to open source 5G SD-Core so that it is easy to adopt by both small and large operators and researchers.”
Ankur holds a Bachelor of Technology degree in Computer Science from Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam Technical University and is a Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD). He began his professional career at Wipro Technologies working on Avaya VoIP telephones, bringing up boards and network stack configuration. Next, he moved on to Cisco Systems as a Software Engineer to work on 3G/4G core gateway products, GGSN and PGW. He later worked with the customer facing team on core deployments. He was part of the war room team that led to the successful launch of Cisco’s VoLTE on Verizon and KDDI (Japan) networks. He also worked on enhancing the design for a centralized configuration manager for distributed network-functions at Cisco. Ankur then rejoined Affirmed Networks (now part of Microsoft) and was responsible for the co-development of the NB-IoT product eSCEF to cater NIDD (Non IP Data Delivery) and UE monitoring solutions.
In February 2021, Ankur joined the ONF to focus working on SD-Core. His major contribution to SD-Core features has been related to SMF, specifically:
- Transaction Framework for high throughput
- 5G Qos provisioning for SMF
- Introduction of UPF Adaptor function to support CN SMF.
- High Availability and Stateless feature support for CN SMF along with community member Jingqi Huang.
In addition, he has worked closely with community members on successful SD-Core deployment.
At Intel, Ankur is continuing SD-Core development along with Oguz Sunay, Ajay Thakur, Badhrinath Padmanabhan and Vijaya Rani. The team is focused on development of 5G network functions and making SD-Core fully cloud native. Ankur is currently working on the development of Metrics Function and 5G Statistics Dashboard. This feature will provide 5G SD-Core users with a rich metrics experience using Grafana Dashboard and Metric API Server to fetch raw subscriber/NFs statistics via API call. More details can be found in the Aether Documentation.
In his spare time, Ankur is a sports enthusiast and enjoys playing lawn tennis, swimming, skating and running. He is also an amateur photographer and has won contests from Sony and Canon India. Check out his portfolio of photos here.
