Ritesh Modi

I'm currently Head of AI at MarketOnce, and previously a Principal Forward Deployed Engineer at Microsoft. Most of my time is spent between the system-design tradeoffs of production AI platforms and the practical questions engineers actually run into when they try to ship one.

Why these books

Databricks has quietly become the dominant operating system for production data and AI work. The documentation is solid. The marketing is busy. What's missing is the practitioner's viewpoint, the architecture-level decisions, the operational realities, the tradeoffs that only become obvious when you're on call for a system that suddenly costs 3× what it did last week.

These two volumes are the synthesis of what works. Volume 3 (The Production Lakehouse Playbook) is the platform foundation, Unity Catalog, Lakeflow, governance, orchestration, CI/CD. Volume 4 (The AI Lakehouse Playbook) is the AI build-out, Mosaic AI, Agent Bricks, MLflow 3, the Multi-Agent Supervisor, Lakebase. Written for engineers, ML practitioners, and architects who are done with surface-level tutorials.

Track record

• 18 published technology books across cloud, blockchain, ML, and GenAI, including the Azure for Architects series, Solidity Programming Essentials, Deep Dive Terraform on Azure, and the Inside Language Models series.
• Books adopted by 20+ universities through AICTE for blockchain coursework.
• 100,000+ enterprise users received Azure for Architects through Microsoft's free distribution.
• Speaker at Microsoft BUILD 2024 (200,000+ registrants), .NET Conference 2025 (900+ attendees), Global Azure 2025, and the UK Securitisation Summit.
• Creator of Microsoft's open-source RAG Experiment Accelerator and LLMOps PromptFlow Template.
• Contributor to HashiCorp's Terraform AzureRM Provider, used at 115M+ downloads per year.
• Microsoft Regional Director (honorary, 2018–2020).
• DeepTech mentor at T-Hub through the Kickstart-Blitz program.

Where to find me

Best places: riteshmodi.com, LinkedIn, GitHub, HackerNoon. For book inquiries and speaking, email riteshmodi1310@gmail.com.