Kishore C Rao

• Part of the Software Development team of Cisco ACI, which is a comprehensive SDN architecture aimed at automating and accelerating Data Center deployments.
• Designed and developed Virtual Control Plane for Cisco ACI Virtual Pod (vPOD), which helps customers extend their existing ACI workloads from physical data centers to their new cloud infrastructure while retaining existing policies and providing seamless Layer 2 and Layer 3 extensions to the cloud. Hence vPOD saves several hundred millions per year in overall costs for customers.
• Designed and developed the entire WAN control plane in ACI Virtual Spine, Leaf, and Virtual Edge Switch VMs to aid data path forwarding. Was involved in the entire QA cycle for end to end testing of the project.
• ACI fabric uses proprietary distributed control plane (COOP) for storing and distributing EndPoint information across the spine nodes in the fabric. Designed and implemented major features in the protocol including support for WAN routes storage and distribution across all the virtual spines in the vPOD control plane.
• Undertook major scale feature to improve ACI spine control plane connectivity to Remote Leafs across the WAN. Spines use open source Mosquitto message broker (MQTT) for exchanging Endpoint and Route information with the Remote leafs. Led a team of 3 to enhance MQTT to multicast data to the leafs and thereby increased scale from 8 leafs to 128 leafs.
• Networks Insights (NI) Telemetry Application: Designed and Architected End Point Analytics for monitoring availability, location and health of Endpoints/Route information from the ACI fabric, provides visibility of any impact to these Endpoints due to any events or changes in infrastructure and generates anomalies based on collected data to help customers understand, analyze and forecast current and future allocation of network resources in the ACI fabric.
• NI application helps network admins troubleshoot, plan, monitor, audit Data Center networks. It has various analytics for endpoints, event, flow, resource and environment data. Its distributed data pipeline designed to accept concurrent records from over 500+ ACI leaf nodes at 1 million events per sec. The stack was architected using Elasticsearch and Kibana for data store and visualization, Kafka for streaming data from the ACI fabric and Kubernetes to manage the application pods.
• ACI switch team develops infrastructure for the ACI Network fabric, consisting of Nexus 9K series of switches in Spine-Leaf architecture. As part of the Layer 3 forwarding group in the ACI switch team, I was involved in the design and development of a new SDK for hardware programming of Cisco’s in-house Asics. This SDK enables seamless integration of Cisco's NexusOS with multiple next generation scalable and powerful ASICs for the ACI switches.

Member of the packet-forwarding group for the Data Center focused Nexus 5000 switching platform:

• Contributed to development of the Next-Gen Fabric Interconnect switch for the UCS platform, based on Broadcom’s Trident-2 ASIC.
• Contributed to developing distributed forwarding software for the modular switching chassis based on the Nexus OS, targeted toward the next-gen Data Center as part of the Leaf/Spine layer switch connectivity.

Contributed actively as a member of MPLS and L3 packet forwarding group for the CRS platform. CRS is a high availability service provider core router, based on the IOS-XR operating system.

• Designed, implement and support Point-To-Multipoint TE tunnels on CRS platform. P2MP-TE is a flavor of the Label Switched Multicast (LSM) architecture, allowing global/VRF IPv4/IPv6 multicast traffic to be carried over MPLS core in service provider networks and is mainly used for video applications.
• Design, architecture and implementation for mLDP platform support on CRS which is yet another flavor of LSM.
• Feature improvements, customer and Test support and maintenance of P2P TE tunnels for CRS.
• As part of IP/MPLS layer3 forwarding team, designed, implemented and supported QA cycles for several features for the CRS platform including development of the Hardware Abstraction layer (HAL) to support multiple forwarding ASICS and provide a uniform API layer to the control plane components in the system.

Xylan Inc / Alcatel’s Birds of prey series of Enterprise class IP routers are known for their feature set and stability. Responsibilities included:

• Integrate, Enhance and maintain Layer 3 routing software, including OSPF, RIP and BGP
• Designed and implemented Router Discovery Protocol.
• Designed and implemented RIPng for IPV6 networks with support for Equal-Cost-Multi-Path.
• Implement and support MPLS-LDP for Alcatel’s Omni routers.