Daniel Firestone

About

I lead the Azure Host Networking and Hardware Acceleration Group, as part of Microsoft’s Azure Compute Team. We are an integrated hardware-software codesign team building Azure’s host networking and offloads stack. We’re responsible for the dataplane of Azure Boost – a high performance, SmartNIC-based virtualized infrastructure for datacenter networking and storage at 100/200/400Gbps and beyond. Our HW-SW codesigns blend FPGA, ASIC, and SW-programmable accelerators to deliver high speed network virtualization, load balancing, RDMA for storage and AI, accelerated block storage, and hybrid connectivity scenarios, all delivered at cloud scale with rock solid reliability.

I started as the lead vswitch dev in Azure’s early years, and built the team from the ground up. Today, we are a group of 300+ engineers with thriving sites in Redmond, WA; Hyderabad and Bangalore, India; Haifa and Tel Aviv, Israel; Vancouver, Canada; and Belgrade, Serbia.

I am hiring software and hardware engineers to build the next generation of Azure Boost, SmartNICs, storage acceleration, and host SDN in the US, India, Israel, Serbia, and Canada! Send me a note if interested.

For a descipriton of VFP and SmartNIC:
Some of my talks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJJaN5wDUrs , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhTfZnYbWyI, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHSan8xf3ao , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1xoAD_VomU
Azure CTO Mark Russinovich’s ONS’15 keynote at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RffHFIhg5Sc
Albert Greenberg’s keynote at ONS’14 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Kyoj3bKepY
Blog: https://aka.ms/ons-hyperscale-sdn-blog
Press: https://arstechnica.com/?post_type=post&p=964715
Research papers: https://new-cm-edgedigital.pages.dev/en-us/research/people/fstone/

Prior to Azure, I studied at MIT with a focus on systems.