08“LLM From Scratch” Workshop on Azure Platforms
Role: Instructor / Author
Executive summary
Designed and delivered a hands-on workshop on building and fine-tuning LLMs/SLMs on Azure (Databricks + Fabric)—enabling colleagues and partners to start their own domain-specific LLM proofs-of-concept.
- Azure Databricks
- Microsoft Fabric
- Hugging Face Transformers
- PyTorch Lightning
- OneLake
- Microsoft Foundry
Colleagues and technical communities wanted to learn how to build LLMs/SLMs from scratch on Azure. Given my expertise, I was asked to host a workshop showing how Azure data platforms (Fabric and Databricks) can create or fine-tune LLMs, as part of an AI enablement initiative.
- Cover LLM architecture and the training/fine-tuning pipeline.
- Use Azure Databricks (distributed clusters) for preprocessing and training with Hugging Face Transformers / PyTorch Lightning.
- Use Microsoft Fabric for data management (OneLake) and experiments.
- Demonstrate training a small custom model or fine-tuning a known model on a dataset.
- Emphasize integration across Azure tools end to end.
I built slides and a live demo: data prep in Databricks on a sample text dataset, cluster setup with the right libraries, a simplified training loop for a GPT-2-scale model, and transferring the final artifact to a Fabric Lakehouse for serving. I shared a Git repo with code and instructions, delivered the session both in person and via live online meeting, and ran Q&A on performance tuning and managing models with Foundry.
The workshop was well received; participants gained a clear understanding of LLM architecture and practical training on Azure, and several started their own fine-tuning PoCs afterward. It positioned the team as AI thought leaders and produced reusable internal documentation adopted in other regions.
Teaching reinforced my own knowledge and sharpened my ability to distill key takeaways. Balancing depth and approachability kept the session valuable for varied audiences. It also revealed strong demand for AI literacy among engineers, which I continue to address through coaching.