Aviatrix Blog 
As the cloud networking experts, Aviatrix wants to elevate the work of cloud networking heroes who labor to keep networks secure, effective, and performant. We’re proud to highlight people who have taught themselves the necessary skills, designed and managed successful networks, and have the expertise to share, including several who joined Aviatrix in New York at the NASDAQ tower.
Our next hero spotlight is on Li Yan, Sr. Principal Engineer TL/M – Software Development at Aviatrix and one of our first employees in 2014. Aviatrix celebrates our 10-Year Anniversary this week thanks to our revolutionary vision for cloud networking and great team members like Li Yan.
From Cisco to Aviatrix: Revolutionizing Networking Technology
Li Yan cares deeply about technology, her fellow engineers, and the customers who benefit from her work. Her journey in tech began at an early age, following in her father’s footsteps. He was an Electrical Engineering professor at a top engineering university.
Li Yan began in networking working on networking management software and moved from startups to Cisco, which gave her a diversity of experiences in hubs, switches, and routers. In 2014, she joined as one of Aviatrix’s first employees when we were a new startup, seeing our potential to revolutionize networking technology.
“Transitioning from Cisco to Aviatrix was a pivotal moment in my career,” she said. “The work was challenging, but the opportunity to be a founding engineer, drive innovation, and bring a product from concept to completion was incredibly rewarding.”
As one of the leading engineers, Li Yan helped Aviatrix refine a customer-centric product that helps networking teams manage, troubleshoot, secure, and optimize complex networks. We launched our first product in 2014, which helped customers extend their data centers to the oldest major cloud platform, Amazon Web Services (AWS). In 2015, Aviatrix joined the multicloud space by showcasing stateful firewall features at Microsoft’s Ignite event. In 2017, the company had a significant turning point when we introduced AWS Transit VPC/Transit Gateway architecture, allowing us to deliver a unified, secured and optimized network infrastructure across all cloud service providers (CSPs). Between 2016 and 2018, Aviatrix Gateways were the only Transit Gateways in the industry.
“Witnessing Aviatrix’s transformation from a small customer base to over 500 enterprise customers, including recognizable brand names, has been an extraordinary journey,” Li Yan said.
The Network is the Cloud
When asked what “the network is the cloud” means to her, Li Yan responded that the idea is that in modern computing, the network and cloud are inseparable.
“The cloud relies on scalable, manageable, and secure networking infrastructure to function efficiently and often now network is defined by cloud principles.”
Li Yan used this concept to explain how Aviatrix adds value: “Aviatrix has simplified multicloud networks into what we call ‘The Network.’ Our unified platform empowers enterprise customers to build scalable, flexible, and secure multicloud networks with simplicity, visibility and high performance.”
Career Milestones
Li Yan’s favorite aspects of her career are the people and projects she’s worked on at Aviatrix:
- The team – “I enjoy the opportunity to lead and empower a talented team of engineers. One of the aspects I like most about my role is driving innovative projects from conception to completion, which allows me to make a significant impact on our product for our customers. My great satisfaction is solving challenges for customers and continuously improving our solution.”
- Leading the development and launch of Aviatrix’s multicloud private mode – “This project involved coordinating cross-functional teams, implementing private link in multicloud platforms, and ensuring high performance and security. Seeing our platform get adopted by a large multinational payment card services customer has been incredibly rewarding.”
- Integration – “Driving continuous integration of cloud native network orchestration including Distributed Cloud Firewall SG orchestration into our platform has significantly enhanced our customers’ ability to manage and scale their cloud with enhanced security and ease.”
Greatest Challenges
Li Yan describes one of her greatest career challenges as balancing the need to stay ahead of rapidly evolving technologies while making sure Aviatrix solutions stay robust and secure. This tension means pursuing feature velocity while maintaining excellent service for customers by prioritizing stability, scalability, and reliability.
“In the early days, we focused heavily on feature velocity to meet customer needs. However, now that our platform is used by a much larger enterprise customer base in production, stability and reliability have become equally critical factors in our development process,” she said.
Outside of Work
Outside of work, Li Yan enjoys traveling around the world, walking, cooking, and baking to have fun and unwind. “I find walking to be incredibly relaxing, and, on the flip side, many ideas have emerged during these walks,” she explained.
If she did not work in tech, Li Yan described a deep interest in the medical field. “I would love to help improve people’s quality of life and overall health and well-being.”
Curious about other cloud networking heroes like Li Yan?
- We’ll keep highlighting networking professionals on this blog.
- Learn more about the Cloud Networking Heroes program and apply on The Cloud Network Community.