Deepak Bansal: Vice President and Technical Fellow in Azure Core Engineering organization at Microsoft

Title: Evolving inter-connect fabric and SDN in the cloud to meet the needs of AI workloads

Abstract: AI applications are demanding much higher scale, performance and security from the datacenter network. These applications are bandwidth hungry, needing to read/write large amounts of data from storage. They rely on GPUs that may be geographically distributed, including 3rd party GPUs in remote datacenters. The connectivity must be secured so that there is no risk of data leakage. In this talk, I will share how we are evolving the interconnect fabric and SDN stack in the cloud to meet these needs of AI workloads.

Biography: As Corporate Vice President and Technical Fellow in Azure Core Engineering organization at Microsoft, Deepak Bansal leads the engineering and operations for the Azure Software Defined Network (SDN) platform serving global customer base spanning across varied industries. In his role, Deepak focuses on building and operating planet scale services spanning across compute, network and AI infrastructure such as Network Controller, Virtual Networks, Load Balancer, DDoS protection, Private Link and making Azure the most secure, reliable, scalable, rich and cost-efficient platform for customers to run their workloads whether be lift and shift or cloud native workloads. Deepak is also the pillar leader for “Secure Networks” pillar in the Microsoft’s Secure Futures Initiative (SFI). Deepak is an expert in distributed systems and cloud and AI infrastructure. He is a thought leader in industry having bootstrapped multiple open source projects such as DASH (disaggregated APIs for SONIC hosts, open API interface to Data Processing Units or DPUs) as part of SONIC OSS project and ReTiNA (real time network analytics) – leading open source network observability platform for cloud native workloads.

Deepak previously served as Vice President and Distinguished Engineer of Azure Networking. Deepak has also served on the boards for Open Networking Foundation (ONF). He founded and spearheaded ONF configuration management working group which later evolved into OpenConfig. Deepak was one of the founding members of Azure having joined Azure in 2008. Prior to that, he led rewrite of the network stack in Windows. He started his career with stints at Iospan Wireless and Motorola after completing his Masters at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA and Bachelors in Computer Science at Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, India.

Deepak has authored over 50 patents. He has published papers in leading conferences. His areas of interest lie in datacenter architectures, building scalable and reliable systems and services, networking and security.