Written by | Yun Zhao
出品 | 51CTO技术栈（微信号：blog51cto）
According to people familiar with the matter, LinkedIn has decided to shelve plans to migrate its data center from physical facilities to Microsoft's Azure cloud, which has been in place for 4 years.
The decision not to proceed with the project, code-named "Blueshift," marks a major technological reversal for LinkedIn.
1. The subsidiary abandons migrating the infrastructure to the parent company's cloud
In 2016, Nadella's Microsoft invested $27 billion to acquire LinkedIn. Three years later, LinkedIn is also looking forward to a new round of scale growth and innovation from Microsoft Azure, and announced plans to enter Azure in 2019, and has been using the Azure cloud platform to support tasks such as machine translation and video transmission.
Mohak Shroff, VP of Engineering at LinkedIn, wrote in a blog post announcing Blueshift in 2019, "Migrating to Azure will give us access to a wide range of hardware and software innovations, as well as unprecedented global scale." ”
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At the time, Mohak Shroff, senior vice president of engineering at LinkedIn, touted the move as an opportunity to better support the site's growing membership.
However, things are not as simple and smooth as imagined, according to sources, employees have been informed of the decision to "not carry out the Azure migration" last year, but it is only for confidentiality reasons, and it is not made public. "Executives stressed that the project was put on hold, not canceled entirely. ”
This information was confirmed in a memo sent to R&D employees in June 2022.
LinkedIn CTO Raghu Hiremagalur wrote in the memo: "With the huge demand for Azure and the growth of our own platform, we have decided to pause LinkedIn's data center migration plan and allocate resources to external Azure customers. ”
In addition, he said that LinkedIn will continue to use some Azure services and will "focus on scaling and innovating our front-end infrastructure." ”
Meanwhile, both LinkedIn and Microsoft have agreed to postpone attempts to run a LinkedIn website on Azure, according to another internal document disclosed by CNBC.
Recently, a spokesperson for LinkedIn confirmed that Linkedin, a subsidiary of Microsoft, has indeed changed the direction of the Blueshift program and said that LinkedIn will continue to use Azure.
2. Microsoft was stabbed in the back, what is the reason?
There is no doubt that LinkedIn's decision is a big blow to Microsoft Azure. As we all know, the trend of Azure has soared this year, and the share of the global public cloud field has been growing, although it is still far from the market leader Amazon's AWS.
It is worth noting that the growth momentum of Microsoft cloud was very strong at that time, according to data released by Microsoft, Azure cloud revenue increased by 46% in the third quarter of fiscal 2022, and the data and services of other companies acquired by Microsoft such as Mojang and GitHub have been transferred to the platform.
So why didn't Microsoft get LinkedIn to finally believe and choose Azure?
The problem, according to another person familiar with the matter, is that LinkedIn prefers to use its own software tools rather than off-the-shelf software tools on Azure. LinkedIn is building an additional data center to meet its computing needs, the person said.
In a memo last summer, LinkedIn CTO Raghu Hiremagalur told employees that LinkedIn is moving to a hybrid cloud model, with some services running in the cloud and others in the company's dedicated data centers.
Then the problem is clear, the Lift & Shift strategy is challenging for any company. Sources told CNBC that when LinkedIn certainly wanted to be able to lift and move its existing software tools to Azure, however, when those tools were refactored and run on top of the cloud provider's ready-made tools, a bunch of problems arose.
3. Why cloud migration has been questioned repeatedly
The fact that LinkedIn's plan to migrate to Azure four years ago is now stalled, illustrating that cloud transformation is not all easy. Coincidentally, Jay Thoden, CSO strategic consultant of global software vendor giant SAP, recently mentioned in a blog that SAP encountered very difficult security issues when migrating to the public cloud in the past five years.
"Traditional security tools that are divested and transferred from data centers are still likely to provide more value. However, without cloud-aware monitoring and detection, it's vulnerable to common cloud threats that legacy tools can't see. ”
He also gave a figurative analogy: traditional security tools that rely on data centers are like running an office building that is secure on a higher floor, but everyone has access to the ground floor, and the security guard doesn't care who gets on the elevator. ”
Previously, David Heinemeier Hansson, CTO of 37Signals (representative product: project management platform Basecamp), also posted a huge bill for the adoption of cloud computing, and decisively retreated from building its own data center to save expenses.
4. Linkedin's follow-up plan
A Linkedin spokesperson said in an email that Linkedin is currently using Azure to refine its infrastructure needs and will further invest in its own data centers.
"This includes us running 100 employee-facing applications on Azure, leveraging Azure FrontDoor and being
Work is being carried out to consolidate our data center locations, which are currently spread across multiple buildings under one roof. Azure is critical to supporting and expanding the collaboration and productivity of our teams, as well as providing value to our members. ”
It is reported that Azure Front Door is a content delivery network that stores information around the world for quick delivery to devices.
5. Write at the end
Whether infrastructure needs to be moved to the cloud is not an easy question to answer these days.
In recent years, the cost, security, business adaptability, and stability problems exposed by public cloud have become increasingly apparent, and many companies have adopted a similar approach to LinkedIn: hybrid cloud. From this perspective, hybrid cloud is not like a transition to cloud transformation, but rather a stable form.
Of course, for Microsoft Azure, this move is a little embarrassing, but it can almost certainly not have much impact, because maybe not all infrastructure needs to be moved to the cloud, but it is almost certain that there is hardly a business that does not need the power of ChatGPT-like products.
After all, the numbers are out there, with Microsoft saying in October that revenue from Azure and other cloud services was up 29% in the third quarter, while LinkedIn revenue was up 8%. LinkedIn said in November that it had reached 1 billion members.
After being acquired by Microsoft, LinkedIn may have chosen the right path of transformation.
Reference Links:
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/12/14/linkedin-shelved-plan-to-migrate-to-microsoft-azure-cloud.html
https://www.theregister.com/2023/12/14/linkedin_abandons_migration_to_microsoft/
https://blogs.sap.com/2023/12/13/dont-lift-shift-legacy-securing-public-cloud-requires-cloud-friendly-security-tooling/
Source: 51CTO Technology Stack