Hardware Design for Cloud Scale Datacenters

Cloud computing is growing at an exponential pace with ever more applications being hosted in mega-scale public clouds such as Microsoft Azure. Designing and operating such large infrastructures requires not only significant investments in datacenters, servers, networking and operating systems, but also new paradigms for seamlessly integrating technologies and supply chains to drive higher efficiency and lower overall TCO. In this talk, we will present learnings from Microsoft’s vast experience in operating large scale cloud services on an installed base of 1M+ servers and how those learnings translate into architecture and operational principles for designing hardware infrastructure.

Kushagra Vaid is the General Manager for Server Engineering in Microsoft’s Cloud & Enterprise division. He is responsible for driving hardware R&D, engineering designs, deployments and support for Microsoft’s cloud scale services (such as Bing, Azure, Office 365, and others) across a global datacenter footprint.

Kushagra has published several papers in international research conferences, and is also the holder of over 25 patents in the field of computer architecture and datacenter design. He is a featured speaker in industry conferences on cloud services, hardware engineering and datacenter architecture.