Kushagra Vaid is the General Manager for Hardware Infrastructure in Microsoft Azure, and is accountable for the architecture and design of Compute & Storage platforms which are the foundation for Azure’s global cloud scale services. Kushagra has been instrumental in driving Microsoft’s success as a leading Hyperscale cloud operator and is a recognized industry leader on Open Source hardware. Kushagra and team have successfully delivered 3 generations of Hyperscale cloud hardware which has been deployed at massive scale across a global fleet of datacenters hosting a diverse set of workloads such as Public Cloud (Azure), Internet search (Bing), Big Data Analytics, Cloud gaming (Xbox Live), Online productivity (Office 365). These Hyperscale system designs have been fully open sourced and contributed to the OpenCompute Project (OCP).

Kushagra is a member of the OCP Incubation committee representing the Networking group, and in that role has influenced several aspects of OCP policy and is a key stakeholder in approving system specifications submitted to OCP.

Prior to Microsoft, Kushagra was a Principal Engineer at Intel where his responsibilities included driving the technology direction for Intel’s Xeon microprocessors and platforms. He started his career as a CPU design engineer and architected several enterprise class CPUs and platforms for over a decade at Intel.

Kushagra has published several papers in international research conferences, and is also the holder of over 30 patents in the field of computer architecture and datacenter design.