This Aether community member profile features Scott Baker. Scott is a Principal Engineer, Cloud Software Architecture at Intel and is based in Oregon.
Scott was a leader in operating the production Open Networking Foundation (ONF) Aether network which hosted edge sites at multiple universities, commercial organizations, test clusters, etc. He also contributed to the development of the Runtime Operational Controller (ROC), a component for managing Aether connectivity services. He even had an active “Aether At Home” edge site with an eNodeB bolted to the ceiling of his home office where he deployed a couple of test edge nodes using raspberry pi devices together with cellular USB dongles. These “Aether At Home” installations were deployed by several team members during the Covid pandemic, when the ONF office was not available, and it was still useful to gain experience with network operation.
His experience gained with Aether and the technological approaches developed for Aether influenced Scott’s next project, the Edge Manageability Framework. For example, Aether contributed useful open source libraries related to logging, support for Kubernetes operators, etc. Aether exemplifies a strong philosophy of data model drive design that emphasizes getting the data model right, followed by implementation. The configuration systems used in the ROC, including µONOS, are novel and excellent examples of how to develop a data model and push that configuration via adapters to multiple southbound technologies.
“My involvement as a member of the Aether community has been a wonderful learning and personal growth experience. It was amazing to see the project successfully transition from internal development to something supported and utilized by an active community.” – Scott Baker
Scott holds a PhD from the University of Arizona. He was an independent consultant for many years before joining the Open Network Laboratory which eventually evolved into the ONF. While at ONF he had the opportunity to work on many of the organization’s projects including the XOS operating system Central Office Rearchitected as Datacenter (CORD), Software Enabled Broadband Access (SEBA), and Virtual OLT Hardware Abstraction (VOLTHA). He was recognized by the community with a SEBA/VOLTHA Contributor Award in 2020.
During his tenure at ONF, he co-authored a book, “Edge Cloud Operations: A Systems Approach”. In addition he was c-authored several conference publications including:
Scott was born in the midwest United States. He moved to Tucson, Arizona at an early age where he spent many years, including his attendance at the University of Arizona. Eventually he moved out of the desert to the pacific northwest for a chance of scenary..In his free time, he enjoys walking an hour each day before work, enjoying the beautiful outdoors in Oregon – rain or shine.
