Daniel Firestone

About Daniel Firestone

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:Azure CTO Mark Russinovich\'s ONS\'15 keynote at Greenberg\'s keynote at ONS\'14 https://aka.ms/ons-hyperscale-sdn-blogPress: https://arstechnica.com/?post_type=post & p=964715Research papers: https://aka.ms/vfpPrior to Azure, I studied at MIT with a focus on systems.

Experience

1. Vice President and Distinguished Engineer, Azure Host Networking and Hardware Acceleration

   Microsoft

   Aug 2025 — Present · Redmond, WA, US

   I\'m the tech lead and manager of the Azure Host Networking and Hardware Acceleration Team as part of Azure Compute.I\'m responsible for HW and SW development of the dataplane for Azure Boost, our networking and storage hardware acceleration platform; the MANA NIC; Boost storage offloads; and the Azure Virtual Filtering Platform, Microsoft\'s cloud virtual switch.VFP runs the SDN stack on every server in our cloud, and since I started our first FPGA-based programmable SmartNIC program, our 40G, 50G, 100G, 200G, and 400G SmartNICs have powered all our new servers in compute and AI for over a decade. Azure Boost powers Azure Accelerated Networking, the default VM networking stack for Azure customers, and RDMA-based acceleration for Azure\'s Block Storage offerings. Boost Storage offloads power our storage-optimized VMs with industry-leading IOPS and throughput to remote reliable storage on a virtual NVMe device. Our instances with MANA NICs enable high performance guest RDMA for AI and data-intensive network workloads, CPS offloads, and subsecond/impactless NIC servicing. Our frontend RDMA infrastructure has powered multiple generations of our AI supercomputers.I lead a combined team of over 300 software and hardware (RTL and DV) engineers, spanning the US, Israel, India, Serbia, and Canada. I am responsible for the quality, performance, cost, feature set, and technical strategy / hardware roadmap of Azure\'s host dataplane at scale.We\'re hiring software and hardware engineers worldwide - if this sounds exciting to you, send me a note!

Education

• Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  Computer Science and Engineering

Skills

• Security
• C#
• Multithreading
• Kernel
• Perl
• Software Defined Networking
• Java
• High Performance Computing
• Virtualization
• Software Development
• Python
• Debugging
• System Architecture
• Data Structures
• Object Oriented Design
• C++
• Software Design
• Network Security
• Storage
• Device Drivers
• Tcp/Ip
• C
• Win32 Api
• Microsoft Azure
• Algorithms
• Distributed Systems
• Operating Systems
• Sql
• Linux
• Computer Science
• Mobile Devices
• Windows Azure
• Scalability
• Software Engineering
• Networking
• Cloud Computing
• Data Center Networks
• Internet Protocol Suite (Tcp/Ip)
• Unix
• Artificial Intelligence