LinkedIn is moving to Azure in multi-year migration

B2B social media giant finally makes the jump to Azure

LinkedIn has announced it is finally migrating workloads from its own data centres to Microsoft Azure, three years after Microsoft acquired the company for $27bn.

Since the acquisition, the B2B social media platform has made limited use of Azure services, preferring to operate its own portfolio of global data centres.

Azure’s weight in the cloud market has steadily increased in recent years, although market leader AWS still remains a dot on the horizon.

As Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure and services continue to mature, the company is being rewarded with big customer contracts, including a deal signed with AT&T last week, rumoured to be worth $2bn.

Now LinkedIn, a platform that boasts 610 million users in more than 200 countries, has decided to entrust its parent company with the entirety of its data and workloads.

In a blog post, Mohak Shroff, senior vice president of engineering at LinkedIn, said the company chose Azure after being impressed with the business impact of its cloud services.

“The agility, capacity and elasticity that Azure provides has allowed us to accelerate video post-delivery, improve machine translation in the Feed and keep inappropriate content off our site,” he said.

“That success, coupled with the opportunity to leverage the relationship we’ve built with Microsoft, made Azure the obvious choice. Moving to Azure will give us access to a wide array of hardware and software innovations, and unprecedented global scale.”

The migration to Azure will take place over several years, Shroff added.