This Aether community member profile features Andy Bavier who is based in Tucson, Arizona.

Andy has been involved with Aether since its inception in 2020 and served for several years on the Aether Technical Steering Committee as a member of the Open Networking Foundation (ONF) technical team. He contributed to the Monitoring and Alert infrastructure that is an integral part of the Aether Management Plane (AMP). He created multiple dashboards to simplify monitoring of various attributes of Aether, including resource health and subscriber activity.
Andy created “Aether-in-a-Box” (AiaB), a software tool that enabled developers and researchers to easily setup and deploy Aether’s SD-Core and Runtime Operational Components (ROC) for testing, validation and experimentation on a local machine. It offered a self-contained, simplified way to set up a private 4G/5G network with tools to manage and validate the network, enabling users to test network slices, application integration, and other core Aether features without requiring large-scale infrastructure. AiaB was also leveraged to build the Aether CI pipeline to run E2E integration tests and ensure the quality of Aether releases. AiaB inspired Aether OnRamp, which is the currently recommended method for deploying Aether.
Andy collaborated on the Pronto Project, a DARPA-funded project focused on building and testing new types of programmable and flexible 4G/5G networks to improve security and performance. The project was led by the ONF and included researchers at Stanford, Cornell, and Princeton universities. As part of this effort, he maintained a centrally-managed Aether at several of the universities for use in project research. He also supported researchers’ experiments to demonstrate and evaluate novel applications using Aether.
With other members of the Aether community (Larry Peterson, Scott Baker, Zack Williams), he co-authored a book based on hands-on experiences operating Aether and Pronto networks: Edge Cloud Operations: A Systems Approach. Andy was a key contributor to Intel’s open-source Edge Manageability Framework, a secure platform for delivering scalable edge solutions that aligns with the principles described in the Edge Cloud Operations book.
“Being a member of the Aether community has been a very rewarding experience. My contributions have centered around “operationalizing” Aether so that it was easy to deploy, configure, and monitor. As a result I have been fortunate to collaborate with many remarkable colleagues, including engineers managing their own Aether deployments, and researchers working to extend Aether with new capabilities. I am proud of the project that we have built together and excited to see it being adopted by companies around the world.” – Andy Bavier
Andy received a B.A. in Philosophy from the College of William and Mary in 1990, a M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Arizona in 1995, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Princeton University in 2004.
He worked as a Research Scientist at the University of Arizona from 1996 – 1998, contributing to the Scout OS, a research OS for network appliances. From 2004 – 2017, he was a Research Scholar at Princeton University, where he built and operated distributed testbeds (PlanetLab, VINI, VICCI, GENI) supporting research in distributed systems and networking. From 2015 – 2022 Andy served as a member of the technical staff at ON.Lab / ONF, where he worked on integrating edge clouds with telecommunication technologies in the CORD, SEBA, VOLTHA, and Aether projects. He joined the Ananki ONF spin out that was formed to commercialize Aether. After Intel acquired Ananki in 2022, he worked as a Cloud Software Development Engineer at Intel on the Edge Management Framework project. Andy left Intel earlier this year and is taking time off to plan his next chapter.
Some of the publications to which Andy has contributed include:
- SIGCOMM Test of Time Award paper: PlanetLab: An Overlay Testbed for Broad-coverage Services
- USENIX Test of Time Award paper: Operating System Support for Planetary-scale Network Services
- In VINI Veritas: Realistic and Controlled Network Experimentation
- Container-based Operating System Virtualization: A Scalable, High-performance Alternative to Hypervisors
- XoS: An Extensible Cloud Operating System
Andy was born in Providence, Rhode Island. In his free time he enjoys hikes in the Arizona desert, playing guitar with friends, cooking, reading, and drinking good quality coffee and craft beer.