About

Chief Data Officer (CDO) for Federal Civilian LLS ATU at Microsoft. Over 23 years in technology. Writing about Azure, AI, data engineering, and home lab infrastructure.

About

I'm Frank Garofalo — a Cloud Solutions Architect and Data Engineering leader at Microsoft. By day, I design enterprise-scale Azure platforms. By night, I run a home lab that would make some small businesses jealous.

What I Do

I build production systems across the full stack — from bare-metal Proxmox clusters with Ceph distributed storage to Azure AI pipelines processing thousands of documents. My work spans:

  • Cloud Architecture — Azure infrastructure, Container Apps, serverless, IaC with Bicep
  • AI & Machine Learning — LLM orchestration, RAG pipelines, document intelligence, AI agents
  • Data Engineering — ETL pipelines, real-time processing, data platform design
  • Home Lab Infrastructure — 95+ Docker containers, 3-node Proxmox cluster, enterprise-grade monitoring and security

The Home Lab

My lab runs on a 3-node Proxmox cluster with Ceph storage (22 TiB raw), 95+ Docker containers, 34 Grafana dashboards, Wazuh SIEM with agents on every node, Suricata IDS, and an AI stack powered by an RTX 5090 running 34 local LLMs through Ollama.

It's where I prototype ideas before they become production systems — and where most of the content on this blog comes from.

Why "Build Without Bounds"

I believe the best way to learn is to build. Not tutorials. Not certifications. Actual systems that do real work. This blog documents that journey — the wins, the failures, the 3 AM debugging sessions, and the architecture decisions that come from running production-grade infrastructure at home.

Find Me

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