Nearly all of Microsoft’s services are now powered by Azure

Seems no better way to sell you cloud services and products than to use them yourself. Mary Jo Foley over a ZDNet is reporting Microsoft’s chief technology of Azure Mark Russinovich recently spoke about how the company has followed through on its decade long journey to host its own cloud services on its Azure cloud platform.

“Most of Microsoft 365 services, including Teams, SharePoint Online and Office online, as well as Xbox Live services run primarily on Azure infrastructure today. Mailbox storage for Exchange Online and Outlook.com is also in the process of moving to standard Azure infrastructure.”

Russinovich’s statement comes after some digging on Foley’s part to clarify what of Microsoft’s services were precisely running on Azure after a handful of Microsoft ran blogs claimed “all” of its services were running on the cloud platform back in the summer of 2020.

Aside from invoking confidence in its own product, Microsoft’s move to standardize its Office 365, Xbox Live, and Bing Services onto Azure also serves as both a cost-cutting measure and a way to closely monitor outages, inconsistencies, standards compliance, and bugs.

With that being said, there are still significant outliers that Microsoft needs to migrate over to Azure that include Exchange Online and SharePoint which currently run-on Autopilot.  Much of the day-to-day management of these holdouts can be done via virtual machines or other custom instances of Azure, but the underlying databases and mailboxes servers still need to be ported over.

In the grander picture, however, Microsoft is closer than it’s been in almost ten years to actualizing one of its broader sweeping goals, and the feat is impressive, to say the least. Now we’ll just have to check in on CEO Satya Nadella’s goal of having people “love Windows” is going.