LinkedIn is abandoning its cloud migration. Although the social network is owned by Microsoft and plans have been on the table for more than four years, it has not been possible to migrate LinkedIn’s infrastructure to Microsoft Azure.

Cloud providers like to tell a story in which the cloud is the future for most, if not all, enterprise workloads. This story is based more on marketing than reality, as Microsoft itself has now proven. Four years ago, LinkedIn enthusiastically announced that it wanted to migrate everything to the Azure cloud. Today it’s throwing in the towel, CNBC knows.

Fail

This is surprising since both LinkedIn and Azure are owned by Microsoft. A period of four years was not enough to develop a future-proof migration project and the entire project that bears the name Blue shift received, ends up in the trash.

In retrospect, the failure was not unexpected. Anyone migrating to the cloud should not simply move their workloads to another data center. A cloud migration only makes sense if you adapt processes and tools to make the most of the cloud environment. LinkedIn didn’t do that: the organization opted for a so-called Lift and moveand insisted on continuing to use its own tools instead of switching to the alternatives offered by Azure.

Hybrid cloud

LinkedIn will therefore continue to invest in its own data centers, but is aiming for consolidation there. In addition, the business social network uses Azure for certain applications and services. The CDN service, for example, is Azure FrontDoor, which ensures the rapid global availability of LinkedIn. In practice, LinkedIn, like many other organizations, is now moving towards a hybrid model.

The failure of the Blueshift project is a little painful for Microsoft, as the company bought LinkedIn in 2016 and hasn’t been able to make a good case for a full cloud migration since then. The LinkedIn story is indicative of the rest of the world: hybrid cloud is gradually becoming the norm and Microsoft and LinkedIn also exemplify this.