The CTO of LinkedIn explains how and why it's making the massive shift to Microsoft's cloud, three years after the $26.2 billion acquisition
- Three years after Microsoft bought it for $26.2 billion, LinkedIn is making the move to the Microsoft Azure cloud.
- The move was first announced in July 2019, but the company pegs the project's completion date within the next three and a half years, LinkedIn CTO and VP of Engineering Raghu Hiremagalur estimated to Business Insider.
- Hiremagalur says the idea to move from its own data centers to Azure came from LinkedIn itself, and not Microsoft.
- The appeal of Azure is the opportunity to take advantage of Microsoft's global footprint, storage and compute power, and security infrastructure to open new doors for LinkedIn.
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Last July, professional social network LinkedIn announced that it will move completely to the Microsoft Azure cloud.
This may seem overdue. LinkedIn has already been under Microsoft's umbrella for about three years, following a blockbuster $26.2 billion acquisition.
However, LinkedIn has from the very beginning hosted itself from its own private data centers: Microsoft gave LinkedIn an unusual amount of control over its fate after the deal closed, and made no apparent move to force any changes to its technology infrastructure.
But now, LinkedIn will move to Azure because of the "opportunity, not need," Raghu Hiremagalur, LinkedIn CTO and vice president of engineering, tells Business Insider. This move will take about three and a half years, Hiremagalur estimates.
However, he says it's worth the time and hassle: LinkedIn works just fine as it runs today, but moving to the cloud gives it more opportunities to take advantage of future technologies, he said. He also highlights Azure's major presence in data centers all over the globe, which he says will help LinkedIn better serve customers around the world.
"We made this decision primarily to significantly increase our agility in our infrastructure," Hiremagalur told Business Insider. "From what we see, the way innovation has happened in public cloud, specifically in Azure, we would like access to such technologies moving forward."
"Overall at the high level, we are doing this because we see this as an opportunity for us right now, not because we have a need to do this," Hiremagalur said. "There's a very deep sense of commitment from the Azure leadership team and Linkedin to make this a success," he later added.
'Obviously, they were happy we were interested'
Although Microsoft owns LinkedIn, it didn't ask the networking site to move to its cloud, Hiremagalur says. Instead, LinkedIn initiated the conversation. That said, he says, they didn't even think about moving to rival clouds like Google Cloud or Amazon Web Services.
"We reached out to folks at Microsoft and said we believe this is the right next step in the long term for us," Hiremagalur said. "Obviously, they were happy we were interested."
The cloud is attractive to LinkedIn because it can help manage its computing and storage needs more efficiently - public cloud platforms like Azure allow customers to grow or shrink their infrastructure depending on the capacity needed in the moment.
Hiremagalur also praises Azure's security, which uses advanced AI and other cutting-edge techniques, reducing LinkedIn's reliance on more traditional firewalls.
Slow and steady
LinkedIn plans to move onto Azure one region at a time. Hiremagalur estimates that in 2021, LinkedIn will be ready to start moving customer-facing traffic to Azure in at least one such region. They're taking it slow and steady, he said, as he doesn't want there to be any kind of disruption for users between now and the completion of the project.
The ultimate goal is that by the time the project is finished, LinkedIn will be completely off its data centers and entirely in the cloud. The company did explore the possibility of using hybrid cloud technology to connect, rather than replace, its data centers with Azure, but the team decided against it because it "creates more complexity."
"Homogeneity in software stack overall is a big plus," Hiremagalur said. "That's why hybrid is not something we want."
The team isn't exactly starting from scratch, though. LinkedIn already has a tight collaboration with the Azure team, Hiremagalur says, and already uses Azure's capabilities for spam detection. It's starting to explore the possibility of building Azure-powered machine learning features, too. This is just the start, though, he says.
"I would like to over time, figure out ways to embrace more native Azure capabilities," Hiremagalur said. "I want us to start leaning on Azure for things they are very good at so we can start focusing on things we're good at."
By that same token, though, Hiremagalur said that it'll take some planning to get there.
"We want to leverage Azure for what we see as an opportunity - the kinds of networking backbone that Azure has, the investments they're making, and storage innovations," Hiremagalur said. "Evolutions of these things will become a reality. Those are things we want access to."
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