Daniel Firestone is the tech lead and manager for the Azure Host Networking team at Microsoft. His team builds the Azure virtual switch, which serves as the datapath for Azure virtual networks, load balancers, security groups, QoS, and more, as well as SmartNIC, the Azure platform for offloading host network functions to reconfigurable FPGA hardware. As a developer, he built many of the technologies Microsoft's host SDN platform is now based on, and worked on projects such as network virtualization offloads and RDMA. Before Azure, Daniel did his undergraduate studies at MIT.