LinkedIn nixes plans to move its data to Microsoft Azure
LinkedIn has scrapped plans to move its data to Microsoft’s Azure cloud storage for the time being. This news has been confirmed by “people familiar with the matter,” as reported by CNBC and others.
It comes four years after LinkedIn first announced Project “Blueshift.” In that announcement post, LinkedIn’s vice president of engineering wrote,
Moving to Azure will give us access to a wide array of hardware and software innovations, and unprecedented global scale. This will position us to focus on areas where we can deliver unique value to our members and customers. The cloud holds the future for us and we are confident that Azure is the right platform to build on for years to come.
For the moment it seems those lofty plans will be put on hold, as LinkedIn will stick to its physical data centers for the foreseeable future. Sources have suggested that the eventual migration has been merely postponed rather than canceled outright, however.
Reasons for the delay weren’t specifically stated, though LinkedIn Chief Technology Officer Raghu Hiremagalur wrote in an internal memo: “We’ve decided to pause our planned migration of LinkedIn toto allocate resources to external Azure customers.”
LinkedIn still leverages the power of Azure in other respects, such as with dynamic translation. The migration LinkedIn’s data systems to Azure seems an inevitability as other Microsoft properties have made the move to the cloud, such as Github.
A popular business-oriented social media platform, LinkedIn was acquired by Microsoft in 2016. Only last month LinkedIn announced that it had reached a staggering 1 billion members.
