LinkedIn has decided to abandon its endeavor to shift its datacentre infrastructure to Microsoft Azure, a move initially disclosed four years ago. According to sources familiar with the situation, CNBC has reported that the project, known internally as “Blueshift,” encountered numerous challenges since Microsoft’s acquisition of the professional networking site in 2016 for $27 billion.
Confirming this decision, LinkedIn released a statement to The Register, outlining its intention to invest in its own datacenters while selectively utilizing Azure services. The statement emphasizes the continued use of Azure for running 100 employee-facing applications, employing Azure FrontDoor, and ongoing efforts to consolidate datacenter locations under a single roof. The spokesperson stated, “Azure has been crucial to support and scale collaboration and productivity for our teams to deliver value to our members.”
This strategic shift marks a departure from LinkedIn’s 2019 announcement, where the company expressed plans to migrate its workloads to a public cloud, specifically Azure. At that time, LinkedIn’s SVP of engineering, Mohak Shroff, highlighted the move as an opportunity to better accommodate the platform’s expanding membership.
Despite deploying some services in Azure in recent years, reports indicate that by mid-2022, LinkedIn began facing challenges with its migration strategy. A memo from LinkedIn CTO Raghu Hiremagalur last summer reportedly informed employees about a transition to a hybrid-cloud model, with certain services operating in the cloud and others in the company’s dedicated datacenters.
Sources revealed that the difficulties arose when LinkedIn attempted to migrate its existing software tools to Azure without adapting them to run seamlessly on the cloud provider’s pre-built tools. This departure signifies a shift from the initial optimism about Azure’s potential scale, as LinkedIn struggled to leverage the cloud provider’s software effectively.
