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Top 14 Azure Consultants for Hire

azure consultants - Top 14 Azure Consultants for Hire

Cloud computing is driven by visionary engineers, architects, and leaders who shape technologies across Azure, AWS, GCP and beyond.

Below is a curated list of 14 globally recognized cloud computing experts – spanning renowned open-source creators, influential tech communicators, startup founders who still code, key figures at major cloud providers (especially Microsoft Azure), and even champions of programming competitions – all selected for their impactful contributions:

  1. Janakiram MSV
  2. Solomon Hykes
  3. David Linthicum
  4. Neha Narkhede
  5. Charity Majors
  6. Forrest Brazeal
  7. Troy Hunt
  8. Lydia Leong
  9. Urs Hölzle
  10. Scott Guthrie
  11. Donovan Brown
  12. Jeffrey Snover
  13. Tomasz Czajka
  14. Jez Humble

Now, let’s delve into their remarkable journeys and contributions:

Janakiram MSV

YouTube Video

Nationality: Indian

Janakiram MSV (Manne Sathyanarayana Venkata) is an internationally recognized cloud analyst, advisor, and architect from India. A former engineer and technology evangelist at both AWS and Microsoft, Janakiram has deep multi-cloud expertise – he holds professional certifications from AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, and was one of the first Kubernetes Certified Administrators and CNCF Ambassadors.

Today, he runs an independent analyst firm (Janakiram & Associates) and contributes as a Senior Contributor to Forbes on cloud computing. Janakiram is known for his in-depth articles, reports, and workshops covering cloud-native technologies (containers, IoT, edge) and guiding enterprises in their cloud adoption journey. He frequently appears as a speaker and panelist at cloud events across Asia and globally. With two decades in the industry (including product roles at Microsoft and Bell Labs), he combines hands-on technical knowledge with strategic insight. His efforts in educating the community via blogs, webinars, and courses have made him a go-to expert on Kubernetes and cloud architecture trends in the Asia-Pacific region and beyond.

Solomon Hykes

Nationality: French

Solomon is the founder of Docker, the technology that ushered in the containerization revolution in cloud computing. He started Docker (originally as a project within his PaaS startup “dotCloud”) in 2013, and it quickly became one of the fastest-adopted enterprise computing technologies ever.

As CTO of Docker, Hykes was the driving force who took container isolation – once an obscure Linux feature – and made it accessible to developers everywhere. Docker’s lightweight containers enabled applications to be “build once, run anywhere,” profoundly changing how software is built, shipped, and deployed across cloud and on-prem environments. The rise of Docker also catalyzed an ecosystem of orchestration (Kubernetes), tooling, and the broader DevOps movement. Solomon’s leadership in open sourcing Docker and fostering its community demonstrated his deep understanding of open-source development models. In 2018, after Docker had grown to an industry standard, Hykes stepped down to make way for enterprise-focused leadership.

He later founded Dagger, a DevOps startup. Solomon Hykes thoroughly understands how developers work, and his contributions have left an indelible mark on cloud infrastructure. By “containerizing” computing, he changed the industry’s trajectory and paved the way for modern cloud-native architecture.

David Linthicum

David Linthicum - Top 14 Azure Consultants for Hire

Nationality: American

David is a highly respected cloud computing strategist, author, and educator with over 35 years in IT. He has served as CTO of five companies and CEO of two, spanning both startups and large enterprises.

Named one of the top 9 Cloud Computing Pioneers by InformationWeek, Linthicum is often cited in lists of influential cloud thought leaders. He is currently the Chief Cloud Strategy Officer at Deloitte Consulting, where he helps Fortune 500 companies shape and navigate their cloud transformations. David has published countless articles and books on enterprise integration, SOA, and cloud – covering many foundational concepts of today’s cloud architectures. He also shares insights as a contributor to Forbes and IEEE Cloud Computing. As a prolific speaker and advisor, Linthicum is known for translating complex cloud trends into practical guidance for businesses. His long track record of thought leadership and his role in guiding enterprise cloud adoption strategies firmly establish him as a top cloud computing expert.

Neha Narkhede

Nationality: Indian

Neha co-created Apache Kafka, the open-source distributed streaming platform that has become a fundamental layer in modern cloud data architectures. While at LinkedIn in 2011, Neha and her colleagues developed Kafka to handle the company’s growing data pipeline needs, then open-sourced it for the world.

In 2014, she co-founded Confluent to provide a managed Kafka platform and enterprise stream-processing tools, serving as Confluent’s CTO and helping to grow it into a multibillion-dollar company. Narkhede’s technical leadership made Kafka the go-to solution for high-throughput, real-time data feeds used across banks, tech firms, and telecommunications in the cloud. She has since moved into advisory roles and entrepreneurship – she sits on Confluent’s board and in 2021 co-founded a new risk detection startup – while continuing to champion “data-in-motion” technology. Frequently recognized in “top women in tech” lists, Neha Narkhede is a trailblazing cloud software engineer whose work on Kafka enabled streaming data as a service on every major cloud.

Charity Majors

Nationality: American

Charity is the co-founder and CTO of Honeycomb.io and a pioneer of modern observability for cloud applications. With a background in running infrastructure at scale (she previously built out storage systems at Parse/Facebook and database infrastructure at Linden Lab), Charity saw firsthand the need for better tooling to debug distributed systems. She helped define and popularize the concept of “observability” – going beyond traditional monitoring by giving engineers deep insights into live systems.

At Honeycomb, she built a cutting-edge observability platform (even developing a custom high-performance datastore) to make complex cloud environments more transparent. Charity is also co-author of Observability Engineering and Database Reliability Engineering, sharing her expertise in running reliable services. An outspoken writer and Twitter personality (known by handle “@mipsytipsy”), she has been a leading voice in the DevOps/SRE community, often emphasizing cultural aspects of high-performing teams. From advocating “testing in production” to hiring juniors and fostering inclusive engineering cultures, Majors challenges conventional wisdom in service of better software.

Her influence can be seen in how companies approach operations and embrace the dev-and-ops collaboration model. By marrying her years of gritty operational experience with thought leadership, Charity Majors has reshaped how we think about keeping cloud systems dependable and observable.

Forrest Brazeal

Forrest Brazeal - Top 14 Azure Consultants for Hire

Nationality: American

Forrest is a cloud architect turned content creator who has become a leading voice in cloud education and community engagement. An AWS Serverless Hero and former head of content at Google Cloud, Brazeal is known for making cloud computing fun and accessible through creative media – he draws cartoons (the “Cloud Irregular” comic series), writes catchy cloud parody songs, and authors insightful articles.

Forrest gained prominence at A Cloud Guru (a cloud training startup) where he built popular learning content and community programs, and later at Google Cloud, where he led developer media until 2024. He also authored The Read-Aloud Cloud, an illustrated book explaining cloud concepts for all ages. Brazeal’s specialty is demystifying complex cloud architectures (especially serverless computing) with clarity and wit. By engaging developers’ imagination and creativity, he has inspired many to learn cloud technologies, earning him recognition as an influential cloud expert-educator.

Troy Hunt

Nationality: Australian

Troy is an Australian web security expert and Microsoft Regional Director/MVP who created Have I Been Pwned (HIBP) – one of the most widely used breach notification services on the web. He built HIBP as a cloud-first service on Microsoft Azure, taking advantage of modern cloud paradigms (like Azure Table Storage) to achieve massive scale and performance at low cost.

HIBP’s success (it’s queried billions of times to check breached passwords and emails) showcases Troy’s ability to leverage cloud architecture for global-scale solutions. He has blogged extensively about “doing big things for small dollars” on Azure, and speaks around the world about cloud scalability and security. Beyond HIBP, Troy is a Pluralsight author and has taught thousands about Azure security and DevOps. He often demonstrates how serverless functions, CDN edge caching, and cloud databases enable HIBP to handle sudden traffic spikes (for example, after news of a big breach) with ease.

By openly sharing HIBP’s architecture and even open-sourcing parts of it, Troy Hunt has become a role model for building secure and scalable services on Azure. His passionate advocacy for cloud security best practices and his community work (workshops, blogs, podcasts) solidify his place among the top Azure experts.

Lydia Leong

Lydia Leong - Top 14 Azure Consultants for Hire

Nationality: American

Lydia is a Vice President and Distinguished Analyst at Gartner Research, and one of the most influential analysts in cloud computing. She was among the first industry analysts to cover the rise of cloud in the mid-2000s, and her research has guided countless enterprises through the shift to cloud services.

At Gartner, Lydia is the lead author of the famous Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure and a subject-matter expert on IaaS, data center outsourcing, content delivery networks, and related topics. Her reports and blog posts (often published on the Gartner Blog Network) are known for candid assessments of cloud providers’ strengths and weaknesses. Leong is frequently quoted in tech media for her insights on cloud trends and vendor strategies. Because she maintains an independent, vendor-neutral perspective, her analysis carries significant weight – cloud product teams pay close attention to her critiques. Few people have had as much impact on how organizations plan their cloud strategy as Lydia Leong, through her research and advice.

Urs Hölzle

Nationality: Swiss

Urs was Google’s first VP of Engineering and is the technical genius behind much of Google’s cloud infrastructure. As employee #8 at Google, Urs designed the company’s ultra-scalable data center architecture and network, which later evolved into the backbone of Google Cloud Platform.

He led the development of seminal technologies like Google’s Borg cluster manager (a precursor to Kubernetes) and energy-efficient “warehouse-scale” computing farms. Until 2023, Hölzle served as Google’s Senior VP for Technical Infrastructure, overseeing everything from Google’s private global fiber network to its planetary-scale storage systems. Now a Google Fellow, he continues to advise on big-picture cloud strategy and infrastructure for GCP. Urs Hölzle is often cited as a cloud computing pioneer – he figured out how to operate at “Google scale,” proving out concepts like containerization, load balancing, and distributed file systems that are now industry standards. His work directly enabled the cloud revolution by turning Google’s internal innovations into services available to the world via Google Cloud.

Scott Guthrie

Scott Guthrie - Top 14 Azure Consultants for Hire

Nationality: American

Scott is Microsoft’s Executive Vice President of the Cloud + AI Group, responsible for the entire Azure cloud platform and related developer tools. As one of the highest-ranking executives on this list, Guthrie brings a unique blend of technical and business leadership.

He’s a developer at heart – in the early 2000s, Scott co-invented ASP.NET and led the teams building .NET and Visual Studio. Now he spearheads Azure’s strategy, overseeing services across infrastructure, databases, AI, and enterprise applications. Under his guidance, Azure has aggressively expanded and innovated to close the gap with AWS, with Scott often appearing in his signature red polo shirt to announce new Azure features. He is also known for pushing Microsoft toward open source and cross-platform support (such as open-sourcing .NET and embracing Linux on Azure). Scott Guthrie’s two decades of steering Microsoft’s most important developer and cloud technologies make him a pillar of the cloud industry, trusted by developers and CIOs alike.

Donovan Brown

Nationality: American

Donovan is a Partner Program Manager in Azure’s Office of the CTO Incubations team at Microsoft, widely known as “the man in the black shirt” who brought DevOps to the masses at Azure. A former process consultant and Scrum Master, Donovan traveled the globe helping companies adopt agile and DevOps practices with Microsoft tools.

At Microsoft, he became the face of Azure DevOps (formerly VSTS), famously demonstrating how to “rub some DevOps on it” to streamline software delivery. He has shown developers and IT pros how to integrate everything from GitHub and Jenkins to hybrid cloud deployments into a single automated pipeline. Donovan’s energetic keynotes and live demos have inspired countless teams to embrace CI/CD and Infrastructure as Code on Azure. After years of advocating DevOps best practices and even open-sourcing parts of Azure’s tooling, he’s now driving new cutting-edge projects in Azure’s incubation group. Brown’s impact on the Azure community – making DevOps approachable and fun – has solidified his status as a cloud DevOps guru.

Jeffrey Snover

Nationality: American

Jeffrey is a Technical Fellow and celebrated engineer at Microsoft (now at Google), best known as the inventor of Windows PowerShell. Often dubbed the “father of PowerShell,” Snover created the object-based automation shell that revolutionized how IT administrators manage servers at scale.

This innovation laid groundwork for modern DevOps on Windows and Azure. During his Microsoft tenure, Jeffrey served as Chief Architect for Windows Server and the Azure Storage & Edge Cloud group, focusing on products like Azure Stack (the on-premises extension of Azure). He helped design hybrid cloud solutions that bring Azure’s services into customers’ data centers. Snover also drove infrastructure-as-code practices at Microsoft – for example, he was a key proponent of Desired State Configuration (DSC) and other automation in Windows/Azure. After over two decades at Microsoft (holding over 30 patents), in 2022 he moved to Google as a Distinguished Engineer, but his legacy at Azure is immense.

By empowering automation (via PowerShell) and hybrid cloud capabilities (via Azure Stack), Snover has enabled countless organizations to adopt cloud practices. He frequently speaks about the “renaissance of the command line” and continues to influence cloud ops and SRE disciplines across the industry.

Tomasz Czajka

Tomasz Czajka - Top 14 Azure Consultants for Hire

Nationality: Polish

Tomasz (known as “Tomek”) is a legendary competitive programmer turned software engineer who bridged the world of coding contests and real-world cloud engineering. A Polish national, he helped the University of Warsaw win Poland’s first ACM ICPC World Championship in 2003 and also won the TopCoder Open tournament soon after. Tomek then spent 6 years at Google in California as a software engineer, honing his skills on large-scale systems.

In 2014, he joined SpaceX, where for another 6 years he wrote flight software for the Crew Dragon spacecraft’s navigation and control. In fact, Czajka literally coded systems that send astronauts to the International Space Station – a testament to his ability to apply algorithmic brilliance to mission-critical engineering. His work contributed to the successful manned flights of SpaceX, blending cloud-like principles (reliability, automation) into rocket software. After a storied stint at SpaceX, he has returned to Poland and reportedly works on advanced software at a satellite company, while remaining a revered figure in programming circles.

Tomasz Czajka’s journey illustrates how top-tier problem-solving skills can translate into building and operating some of the most complex systems imaginable. He is an inspiration in Eastern Europe and beyond, proving that competitive programming excellence can lead to groundbreaking contributions in tech and cloud (even “above the cloud,” in space!).

Jez Humble

Nationality: British

Jez is a DevOps luminary best known as co-author of the landmark book “Continuous Delivery” (Jolt Award winner) and the Accelerate book (which won the Shingo Publication Award). A software engineer by background, Jez became a thought leader by promoting practices like continuous integration, automated testing, and rapid release cycles long before they were mainstream.

He was a principal at ThoughtWorks and co-developed the GoCD tool, then co-founded DevOps Research & Assessment (DORA), whose research on high-performing IT teams provided hard data to back DevOps practices. Google acquired DORA in 2018, and Jez joined Google Cloud as a Site Reliability Engineer and DevOps Advocate. He has also lectured on software engineering at UC Berkeley. Humble’s contributions go beyond theory: he helped numerous large organizations around the world actually implement DevOps and Lean engineering transformations. He also co-authored The DevOps Handbook and Lean Enterprise, further spreading modern software delivery ideas.

Through countless talks, workshops, and writings, Jez Humble has been instrumental in moving the industry toward fast, reliable software delivery on the cloud. His work has empowered companies to deploy Azure/AWS/GCP services in minutes rather than months, fundamentally changing expectations for IT. In the pantheon of cloud experts, Jez represents the critical human/process side of achieving cloud success.

Wrap Up

These legends represent exceptional talent, making them extremely challenging to headhunt. However, there are thousands of other highly skilled IT professionals available to hire with our help. Contact us, and we will be happy to discuss your hiring needs.

Note: We’ve dedicated significant time and effort to creating and verifying this curated list of top talent. However, if you believe a correction or addition is needed, feel free to reach out. We’ll gladly review and update the page.

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