LinkedIn moves onto Microsoft Azure

Photo courtesy of Microsoft

LinkedIn has embarked on a multi-year migration of all workloads to the public cloud amid massive growth of its membership and business, turning to Azure after about three years since Microsoft acquired the professional networking service.

“Today’s technology landscape makes the need for constant reinvention paramount, especially as we look to scale our infrastructure to drive the next stage of LinkedIn’s growth,” said Mohak Shroff, SVP of engineering at LinkedIn.

Shroff said in a blog post the employment-oriented social networking service now has more than 650 million members, having ballooned from 300 million five years ago and 50 million 10 years ago.

With someone getting hired using LinkedIn every eight seconds, Shroff said LinkedIn has in recent years leveraged a number of Azure technologies in ways that have had a notable impact on their business.

“The agility, capacity and elasticity that Azure provides has allowed us to accelerate video post-delivery, improve machine translation in the Feed and keep inappropriate content off our site,” Shroff said.

“Moving to Azure will give us access to a wide array of hardware and software innovations, and unprecedented global scale,” he said. “This will position us to focus on areas where we can deliver unique value to our members and customers.”