Draft:Alexander Saroyan

Alex Saroyan

Alex Saroyan is a tech entrepreneur with extensive background in data center network engineering of Armenian descent based in the United States. He is known for his work in the telecommunications and cloud-computing domains, particularly his development of a conceptually new approach to managing data center network infrastructures through an innovative network abstraction model. This unique approach, which has been adopted by a number of tier-2 and tier-3 cloud services providers and has been supported by cloud infrastructure technology vendors like Nvidia, EdgeCore, Dell and Equinix, enables organizations of any size to create their own cloud infrastructures, using their own hardware. This approach is particularly critical for GPU-based parallel computing for training AI models, building alternative and sovereign cloud environments and creating private cloud networks that host large scale Software as a service (SaaS) offerings.

Early life and education

Saroyan was born August 10, 1983, in Yerevan, Armenia. He is a grandson of Alexander Sahinian, a Soviet-era Armenian architectural historian and social scientist, and he is a distant relative of writer William Saroyan. Saroyan became interested in technology at an early age and gained experience as an ethical hacker. Later, he was majoring in computer science and math. As a first-year student he launched a local Internet service provider (ISP) business, which grew rapidly. Ultimately, Saroyan dropped out of the university to work full-time on the ISP that he founded.

Network engineering career

After exiting the ISP, Saroyan took a job with Electroapparat, an elevator components manufacturer, where he was the leading architect for a software-controlled elevator, an innovative concept at the time. Alex Saroyan’s father Armen Saroyan was the CTO. He hired Alex to help develop a microcontroller-based system, which was innovative at the time. As part of this project, Saroyan created a custom network protocol designed for software-controlled elevator systems. Saroyan later took roles in networking and communications at Lycos, where he helped design large-scale data centers, and Orange, where he led design and implementation of data center networking for a new national mobile operator that France Telecom was launching.

Declarative abstraction concept in network management

Saroyan gained prominence in the networking industry following a 2016 conference presentation titled "How We Create SDN Platform of the Future," in which he promoted the concept of declarative abstraction as the foundation for network management. Under this approach, which builds on the practice of Infrastructure as code, engineers write configuration files to describe how networks should operate. Then, network management tools automatically implement the desired configuration. This was a disruptive concept at the time, when most networks were managed manually applying an imperative approach. The core concept of Saroyan's philosophy was that major cloud providers, like Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform, had implemented proprietary network automation, abstraction and multi-tenancy software to configure their networks. Saroyan's goal was to build software that provides the same functionality for everyone. He founded a company, Netris, to pursue this goal.

By demonstrating the viability of this approach, Saroyan helped to popularize the practice of declarative abstraction in networking, which grew increasingly prominent following the widespread adoption of cloud-native computing strategies (which generally emphasize declarative management and automation) starting in the later 2010s.

Today, the technology Saroyan helped to create is in use within various tier-2 and tier-3 public cloud providers, online entertainment providers, SaaS companies, automotive and financial organizations. Apparently the software is the only one that is compatible with NVIDIA’s Spectrum-X network architecture for GPU-based AI cloud service providers.

Internet measurement volunteer work

In addition to his work in the networking and telecommunications industry, Saroyan has served as a volunteer ambassador for RIPE Atlas, a distributed Internet measurement platform.

See also

• Software-defined networking.
• Infrastructure as code.