Meet the 2025 NAF Advisory Board
We’re pleased to introduce the 2025 class of the NAF Advisory Board (AB)!
The AB is critical for reviewing presentation and workshop proposals for AutoCon events, serving as a sounding board for ideas and questions regarding NAF activities and direction, and leading by example in the NAF community. We’re so excited to have this next group of people for 2025. Without further ado, here they are…
Naveen Achyuta
Naveen is a Senior Network Reliability Engineer at Roblox where he’s part of the network software team building network systems for Roblox infrastructure like network observability, network modeling systems, network event driven systems, and device lifecycle management. He’s also an advisory board member of Supertrace AI, helping them with his network and software expertise to build the world's first AI network engineer that can help companies to improve their efficiency and reduce downtime. Naveen likes to hike and travel the world. He’s a returning AB member.
Shannon Byrnes
Shannon is a Senior NetDevOps Engineer for Network Automation at Internet2. She’s involved in the analysis, design, code, test, and maintenance of systems and software in support of Network Services, in the primary domains of network modeling, automation, and orchestration; network performance testing and monitoring; and network telemetry collection and analysis. Shannon joined the inaugural AB (“AB0”) late in our first term, and is returning to the AB for 2025.
Eric Chou
Eric is a Network Automation Advocate at Network to Code, the author of network automation books and classes, and the host of the Network Automation Nerds (NAN) Podcast. In his work at NTC and through his NAN podcast, Eric helps help businesses around the world reduce operational inefficiencies, increase reliability, and become more agile with network automation, and helps network engineers innovate, elevate, and automate networks with podcast and training content and through building community (NAF and more). Some might describe Eric as a gym rat, where he exhausts the body in order to tame the mind. He’s new to the AB for 2025.
Anna Claiborne
Anna is the SVP of Network Tools and Automation at Zayo, and is the Co-Founder and previous CTO and CPO of PacketFabric. Anna began her adventure into network automation in 2003 at her first startup, Prolexic Technologies, which was also the first DDoS mitigation provider. Her broad industry experience is invaluable to the AB and the NAF community, as evidenced in her AC2 opening keynote. Anna is a returning AB member for 2025.
Mark Coleman
Mark is Co-Founder and Chief Evangelist at NetBox Labs. He joined the NetBox journey in 2022 and launched NetBox Cloud out of NS1, and now focuses on product and education for the NetBox community. Mark has served as a contributor, organizer, and founder in various tech communities, including: Software Circus, an infrastructure as code meetup in Amsterdam which grew into an international meetup and conference series; the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), where he served as Marketing Chairperson and helped take Kubernetes from a handful of founding member companies to being everywhere; and starting NetDevOps Days, which brought him into contact with NAF, eventually merging NetDevOps Days into AutoCon in January 2023. He likes learning new languages, snowboarding, video games, and coding. He’s new to the AB for 2025.
Ivana Duvnjak
Ivana is a Senior Director for IP/Optical and Data Center Network Automation Business Development at Nokia. Ivana has over 15 years of experience in network automation, starting in R&D, then moving into presales, with various roles from consulting engineering to Head of North America regional PLM and BD automation team. Her career highlight so far has been leading the NAM rPLM and BD network automation team. She enjoys traveling and exploring the outdoors. She has been actively engaged in organizing BoF topics and meetings for AC1 and AC2, and we welcome her as a new AB member for 2025.
Claudia De Luna
Claudia is Advanced Technical Consultant - Networking and Automation at Enterprise Infrastructure Acceleration (EIA). Claudia has several memorable career highlights, including: completing a network refresh at a major airport/port with planned zero downtime, and when calling the Operations Manager to let him know they were done, getting the response "Oh… you are done already?"; and watching someone's face when they realize what a piece of network automation can do for them and how it changes the way they think about their network and the role of network automation in it. She enjoys travel, scuba diving, photography, and harvesting mangos at her mother’s ranch in Mexico (which apparently is a great workout). She is new to the AB for 2025.
Joan Garcia
Joan is Director of Network Platforms and Solutions Architecture at Colt Technology Services. Joan has contributed to more than 20 international projects in Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Automation/Orchestration technology solutions. He also delivered a smart city platform in Bristol (UK) based on a custom, converged network combining private 5G, FWA, and a programmable packet core. Joan has a passion for old cars and motorcycles, especially those from the pre-electronics era, even the steam era machines. He enjoys playing Legos with his kids (Technic if possible!), and travelling is a family hobby. He is new to the AB for 2025.
Phil Gervasi
Phil is Director of Technical Evangelism at Kentik, where he hosts the Telemetry Now podcast. Most of Phil’s career has been with VARs, giving him the opportunity to go both deep and broad in networking, getting into the weeds of many technology areas, including traditional route/switch, data center, wireless, network security, and systems integration. For the last few years he’s been very focused on observability and the application of data analytics to network telemetry. Phil and his wife have three children. He enjoys watching sci-fi with his oldest daughter, reading, camping and canoeing, and lifting weights in his basement gym. He is new to the AB for 2025.
Hari Gollapalli
Hari is the Head of PayPal Infra Platforms Software Services. He joined PayPal in 2019, leading efforts to enable Platform Engineering for PayPal Infrastructure. He’s responsible for driving automation across PayPal's AI, Network, Compute, and Storage infrastructure. With over 20 years of experience as a seasoned software developer, Hari specializes in creating network protocols, devices, and orchestrators for startups and large enterprises. He formerly served as a Technical Steering Committee member for OpenSwitch, and on the Technical Advisory Board for Arrcus Inc. Outside of work, Hari finds fulfillment in running marathons and ultramarathons, embracing both the challenge and the serenity they bring. He is new to the AB for 2025.
Peter Sprygada
Peter is the Chief Architect at Itential. Peter has made notable contributions to automation and networking: he launched Ansible Networking in 2016; he was part of the original draft authors that produced G.8031 and G.8032 for ethernet ring protection monitoring; and he was co-developer of netdev_stdlib, bringing network abstractions to Puppet, Chef, CFEngine and more. He’s an avid cyclist, he loves to scuba dive and is working toward his master diver certification, and he is a lover and trainer of Dobermans. He is new to the AB for 2025.
Mircea Ulinic
Mircea is Senior Network Developer / Architect / Team Lead at DigitalOcean. Mircea has spent nearly 6 years at DigitalOcean, where he holds multiple roles as a Senior Network Developer, Architect, and Team Lead. Before DigitalOcean, he worked in various positions at Cloudflare, iBrowse, EPFL, and more, with a strong focus on network automation for over 10 years. In 2017, he was honoured with the SaltStack Contributor of the Year award, and is the maintainer of several open-source tools. He is also new to the AB for 2025.
Your Turn…
Now you know a little more about the people helping to guide NAF. What can you do with this info? Here are a few ideas:
Engage them. If you see something in their background that interests you, reach out and talk. If you have ideas to share, do the same. This isn’t reserved to AB members - you can do this with anyone that’s part of the NAF community (including Chris and Scott). This is a big part of what NAF is all about.
Realize they can’t do it alone. As NAF grows as a community, there is room for more people in the community to help with informal and formal projects and tasks. You’ll hear more from us on this throughout 2025. Join the Slack and the Mailing list to stay updated.
Get ready for AutoCon 3! The calls for presentations and workshops will open soon. What would you like to present as a conference topic? Is there a workshop idea that you can bring unique value to? Get your ideas together and don’t hesitate to submit them when we open the call.
