I'm Pete Baxter, a Principal Cloud Solution Architect at Microsoft. I've been here since 1998, and I've spent the last several years focused on financial services and banking, helping some of the largest regulated enterprises design and run secure workloads on Azure.

My current focus is enterprise Network Architecture on Azure: Virtual WAN and ExpressRoute, Hub-and-Spoke Topologies, and Secure Connectivity at scale. Close behind are the regulated-cloud workloads I've spent years on: Azure Government and FedRAMP High, AKS and Container Platforms, Capacity and Resiliency, and the Security and Governance controls that have to hold up under audit. Much of that is operational work: disaster recovery, capacity planning, platform migrations, and finding the root cause of the incident at 2 a.m.

Alongside the customer work, I lead a worldwide train-the-trainer program for Microsoft's cloud architects and have owned new-hire and trainer-development content for over 15 years. I'm also deep in AI tooling for engineers, working hands-on with GitHub Copilot, the Copilot CLI, and Microsoft Scout, and serving as an early adopter and design partner for Microsoft's internal AI tools.

Outside work, I've been married for 31 years and I'm a father of five, based in Charlotte, North Carolina. When I'm not in front of a terminal you'll find me hiking, swimming, building things in Minecraft with my kids, or automating some new corner of my smart home.