Original reporting: Data Center Dynamics. Original publication date: July 2019.
Background: Microsoft Acquires LinkedIn
Microsoft acquired LinkedIn for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016 — one of the largest technology acquisitions in history at the time. In the years that followed, LinkedIn continued to operate with a significant degree of independence, maintaining its own engineering culture, data center infrastructure, and open-source initiatives. That arrangement eventually gave way to a major strategic shift: a full migration of LinkedIn’s workloads to Microsoft Azure.
The Decision to Move to Azure
LinkedIn’s senior VP of engineering, Mohak Shroff, announced the migration in a blog post, framing it as a response to the platform’s continued growth rather than a directive from Microsoft’s parent organization.
“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. With the incredible member and business growth we’re seeing, we’ve decided to begin a multi-year migration of all LinkedIn workloads to the public cloud.”
Mohak Shroff, Senior VP of Engineering, LinkedIn
That public cloud is Azure. Shroff noted that LinkedIn had already been selectively using Azure before the full migration announcement, applying it to specific use cases such as accelerating video post-delivery, improving machine translation in the Feed, and detecting and removing inappropriate content.
On why Azure was the right choice, Shroff said: “Moving to Azure will give us access to a wide array of hardware and software innovations, and unprecedented global scale. This will position us to focus on areas where we can deliver unique value to our members and customers.”
What Happens to LinkedIn’s Data Centers?
At the time of the announcement, LinkedIn operated a corporate-owned data center in California and four leased colocation facilities in Texas, Virginia, Oregon, and Singapore. Shroff acknowledged in an interview with VentureBeat that the fate of those facilities was not yet determined:
“The exact end state for those data centers is unclear. In some cases, we will vacate them. In some cases, we may find new uses for those data centers. All of our activities that currently happen in our own native data centers will migrate into the Azure public cloud.”
Mohak Shroff, VentureBeat interview
Shroff also pushed back on the notion that the Azure migration was predetermined by the Microsoft acquisition, stating that LinkedIn’s engineering teams retained decision-making independence throughout the integration period and that the move to Azure was ultimately their own choice.
However, it is worth noting that Microsoft’s original investor slides from the 2016 acquisition did explicitly highlight that LinkedIn would benefit from “access to Microsoft’s scaled cloud infrastructure and technology stack” — suggesting the Azure migration was at least anticipated, even if not formally mandated.
LinkedIn’s Open Hardware Legacy: The Open19 Foundation
One of the more significant open questions raised by the Azure migration concerns LinkedIn’s long-standing investment in open hardware standards — particularly through the Open19 Foundation, which LinkedIn co-founded in 2016.
Open19 was created to accelerate innovation and standardization around the 19-inch server rack form factor, a specification that is ubiquitous in enterprise and colocation environments. LinkedIn was consistently the Foundation’s most active contributor and advocate.
Open19 vs. Open Compute Project (OCP)
Open19 is distinct from the Open Compute Project (OCP), which was originally backed by Facebook and initially focused on a less common 21-inch rack specification. Over time, the two groups moved closer together:
- In 2018, LinkedIn became a Platinum member of OCP.
- In 2019, LinkedIn announced that its Open19 technology specifications would be contributed to OCP.
- Despite the closer relationship, the Open19 Foundation remained legally and operationally independent from OCP.
LinkedIn’s head of infrastructure engineering, Zaid Ali Kahn, described the OCP contribution as an opportunity to share engineering learnings and find convergence opportunities between the two communities.
Open19’s Edge Push and Broader Adoption
Around the same time as the Azure migration announcement, Open19 was actively expanding its scope to include edge computing deployments. Yuval Bachar, Open19 Foundation president and LinkedIn’s principal engineer of global data center infrastructure architecture, indicated at the Foundation’s May 2019 summit that two major data center operators were evaluating Open19 technology — a significant milestone for the initiative.
Whether Azure would adopt Open19 hardware at scale remained an open question. Microsoft is not a member of the Open19 Foundation, though it has been a Platinum member of OCP since 2014.
Microsoft’s Own Open Hardware Contributions: Project Olympus
Microsoft has a substantial history with open hardware through OCP. In 2016, the company disclosed that approximately 90 percent of servers it procured were based on OCP-contributed specifications. That same year, at a Data Center Dynamics event in London, Microsoft unveiled Project Olympus — a hyperscale server hardware blueprint developed in collaboration with the OCP community.
Project Olympus was notable for being released at an earlier-than-usual design stage, allowing the open source community to participate in shaping the hardware before it was finalized. The project was later contributed to the Open19 initiative as well, with LinkedIn’s Kahn noting: “The combination of Open19 and Project Olympus allows data centers of any scale to enjoy high efficiency and advanced open standards with their existing EIA19 racks.”
Key Takeaways for DevOps and Infrastructure Engineers
- Large-scale migrations take years: Even a well-resourced organization like LinkedIn committed to a multi-year timeline, reflecting the complexity of migrating custom-built, on-premises infrastructure to public cloud.
- Hybrid use before full migration: LinkedIn used Azure selectively for specific high-value workloads before committing to a full migration — a practical pattern for de-risking large cloud transitions.
- Open hardware contributions don’t automatically follow ownership: LinkedIn’s significant investment in Open19 does not guarantee that Azure will adopt those same hardware standards at scale, highlighting the risk of tying organizational open-source contributions to infrastructure decisions.
- Acquisition goals and operational independence can coexist — up to a point: LinkedIn maintained engineering autonomy for several years post-acquisition, but eventually aligned its infrastructure strategy with its parent company’s cloud platform.