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LinkedIn announced its plans to move to Microsoft’s Azure cloud service in 2019 when the tech giant acquired the job-searching company for $27 billion. Now, after three years, the company has reportedly decided not to proceed with the plan. According to a report by CNBC that cited people familiar with the matter, LinkedIn has shelved its plans to relocate its data centre technology out of its physical facilities.
LinkedIn’s decision to not proceed with the project which is code-named “Blueshift,” marks a major reversal for the company. However, the job portal had been using Azure for specific tasks. This reversal represents a setback for Microsoft, which is chasing Amazon Web Services in the cloud infrastructure market.
Why LinkedIn has reversed its decision
In a 2019 blog post, Mohak Shroff, LinkedIn’s vice president of engineering wrote announcing Blueshift that “moving to Azure will give us access to a wide array of hardware and software innovations, and unprecedented global scale.
The report claims that the company’s employees started to learn about the decision not to follow through with the Azure migration in 2022. As per the report, executives emphasised that the project was not being cancelled altogether, but rather being put on hold.
In a memo to research and development employees in June 2022, LinkedIn Chief Technology Officer Raghu Hiremagalur said that the company would continue to use some Azure services and would “focus our efforts on scaling and innovating our on-prem infrastructure.”
Hiremagalur wrote 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,”
A different internal document, says LinkedIn and Microsoft together agreed to hold off on trying to get LinkedIn’s website running on Azure.
Another LinkedIn spokesperson confirmed that the Microsoft subsidiary changed direction on Blueshift. However, the spokesperson reaffirmed that LinkedIn continues to use Azure.
In an email, the spokesperson said: “We are using both Azure to complement our infrastructure needs and further investing in our data centres. This includes our running 100 employee-facing applications on Azure, leveraging Azure FrontDoor and ongoing work to consolidate our datacenter locations that are currently spread across multiple buildings under a single roof. Azure has been crucial to support and scale collaboration and productivity for our teams and to deliver value to our members.”
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