Vidhart Bhatia

Platform engineer at Microsoft, Seattle.

I'm at Microsoft Defender now, moving security services onto Kubernetes. Before that, six years on the platform behind Xbox services: seven of us owning ingress, CI/CD, telemetry and autoscaling for 116 services across ~45 clusters.

Elsewhere

Work

Microsoft · Seattle

2020 — present

Microsoft Defender 2026 —

Security services, and moving them onto Kubernetes. Malware detection and game streaming turn out to want a lot of the same things from a platform: low latency, traffic that spikes without asking, and real unhappiness when a cluster fills up. Ask me again in a few months.

Xbox Platform Services 2020 — 2026

  • Chose how ingress worked for the shared platform behind 116 Xbox services, and carried the pager for it.
  • Moved the platform to KEDA-backed autoscaling through one shared Helm chart and its CI/CD pipelines.
  • Re-architected fleet logging from fluentd to FluentBit, cutting each pod's CPU request from 300m to 50m across roughly 880 pods — about 220 cores back.
  • Built defence in depth at the edge: DDoS protection, WAF with bot management, and custom rate limits that held through a known L7 attack.
  • Designed the Gateway API and Istio migration, and reversed the chosen approach when the design review showed edge mTLS terminates upstream.
  • Migrated a 547-dashboard Grafana estate into a hardened tenant.
  • Moved 30+ secrets and service connections to managed and federated identity with no downtime.
  • Cut ~30 of ~94 recurring alerts in one on-call cycle by fixing what triggered them.
  • Earlier: built C#/.NET session-management services for console streaming and shipped Remote Play to GA.

Built

Open source