According to sources familiar with the matter, LinkedIn has made the decision to halt its project, known as “Blueshift,” which aimed to migrate its data center technology from its physical facilities to Microsoft’s Azure cloud. This decision marks a significant reversal for LinkedIn, as it had announced its plan to shift to Azure in 2019, three years after being acquired by Microsoft for $27 billion. Prior to this, LinkedIn had been utilizing Azure for specific tasks.
This U-turn represents a setback for Microsoft, which is striving to catch up with Amazon Web Services in the competitive cloud infrastructure market. Microsoft has heavily relied on cloud technology and services to drive much of its growth. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella had previously overseen the cloud business before taking up his current role in 2014.
In a blog post from 2019, Mohak Shroff, LinkedIn’s vice president of engineering, had emphasized that the move to Azure would provide access to a wide range of hardware and software innovations, as well as an unprecedented global scale.
Sources have revealed that LinkedIn employees became aware of the decision to abandon the Azure migration last year. Executives clarified that the project was being put on hold rather than completely canceled.
In a memo to research and development employees in June 2022, LinkedIn’s Chief Technology Officer Raghu Hiremagalur stated that the company would continue to use certain Azure services and would focus efforts on scaling and innovating its on-premises infrastructure. An internal document seen by CNBC outlined that LinkedIn and Microsoft had mutually agreed to postpone the migration of LinkedIn’s website to Azure.
Hiremagalur explained in his memo, “With the incredible demand Azure is seeing and the growth of our platform, we’ve decided to pause our planned migration of LinkedIn to allocate resources to external Azure customers.”
Source (CNBC)
