Microsoft releases case study on move to host its own services on Azure
Microsoft has published a case study revealing how it will complete its goal of moving all of its Microsoft 365 services to run on Azure.
The company has a 10-year-plus goal of moving its services over to Azure and, according to a recent report from ZDNET, the majority of Microsoft 365 services, including Teams, SharePoint Online and Office Online, in addition to Xbox Live, were "primarily", but not totally, hosted on Azure by early 2021. Other services, including mailbox storage for Outlook.com and Exchange Online are said to be in the process of moving to Azure.
Microsoft’s recent case study has now provided the latest update on the company's efforts to bringing Microsoft 365 to Azure. The case study says: “Thanks to Windows containers on AKS, now Microsoft 365 has the infrastructure consistency it needs to accelerate development, along with the cost savings that shared computing capacity brings.”
The case study adds that Microsoft's goals in moving more of its own services to Azure include better resiliency, scalability, automation, security, cost reduction and alignment of code bases. The company also hopes that the shift from a proprietary, bare-metal underlying infrastructure to a Kubernetes-based system may also help with hiring and talent retention.
ZDNET reports that Microsoft officials have declined to comment publicly on the "CloudOptimal" work, while the Microsoft CloudOptimal team has been working within the company to move Microsoft's own services over to Azure.
Marc Power, a Microsoft Partner Software architect, is quoted in the case study, saying: "We're going to see substantial business savings—not just from packing applications together in AKS clusters or using containers instead of VMs, but by creating one platform for all our application developers."
The case study adds that moving Microsoft 365 to Azure is a "multiyear effort that's still underway", with Power concluding: "The underlying architecture before was missing the benefits of Azure—the flexibility, the new hosting models, and the specialised hardware,”
