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Lessons learned from three years in cloud supercomputing

blog.glennklockwood.com · 6,547 words · saved by 1 readers

I recently decided to leave Microsoft after having spent just over three years there, first as a storage product manager, then as a compute engineer. Although I touched many parts of Azure's infrastructure during that time, everything I did was at the intersection of large-scale supercomputing and hyperscale cloud. There was no shortage of interesting systems to figure out and problems to solve, but as I began to wrap my arms around the totality of hyperscale AI training in the cloud, I also began to see the grand challenges that lay ahead. Although many of those challenges would probably be fun and exciting to tackle, the more I learned, the more I found myself asking the same two questions: what did I want to do with the rest of my career, and was the path I was following going in the right direction? I spent a lot of time thinking about this, and my decision to leave Microsoft ultimately reflects the answer at which I arrived. But rather than indulge myself by recounting my introspe

Lessons learned from three years in cloud supercomputing Skip to main content Labels cloud hpc opinion personal July 10, 2025 Lessons learned from three years in cloud supercomputing I recently decided to leave Microsoft after having spent just over three years there, first as a storage product manager, then as a compute engineer. Although I touched many parts of Azure's infrastructure during that time, everything I did was at the intersection of large-scale supercomputing and hyperscale cloud. There was no shortage of interesting systems to figure out and problems to solve, but as I began to

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