Flavio Castro

Automation & Security Researcher | Network Engineer | Open-Source Advocate

For over 15 years, I’ve been at the intersection of traditional networking and software engineering, specializing in software-defined networking, network automation, infrastructure-as-code, and secure system design. My career spans research institutions and Fortune 500 companies including Argonne National Laboratory, Open Networking Lab, PayPal, Cargill, and Hudson River Trading, where I’ve championed approaches that bring software development practices to network operations.

I’ve built automated network provisioning systems for data centers, developed test-driven deployment frameworks, developed automated tests for OpenFlow switches, and implemented white-box switching solutions with open source operating systems such as Cumulus and others.

Open Source Contributions

Argonne National Laboratory: Lead developer for SciStream, focused on secure data streaming between scientific instruments and HPCs. Projects include scistream/scistream-proto (open reference implementation for secure streaming framework) and scistream/benchmarks (benchmarking performance tools).

Open Networking Lab: Contributed to SDN projects including OpenNetworkingLab/OnosSystemTest (ONOS controller testing) and castroflavio/oftest (OpenFlow protocol testing).

My Approach

I apply software engineering principles to infrastructure through these key tenets:

• Infrastructure as Code: Representing infrastructure configurations as versioned, testable code
• Open Source Solutions: Leveraging and contributing to community-driven tools that promote transparency
• Observability and Telemetry: Designing systems with comprehensive monitoring and insight capabilities
• NetDevOps: Applying DevOps principles and practices to network engineering

Explore my technical blog for in-depth discussions and tutorials on network automation, SDN, and infrastructure as code.