LinkedIn is set to migrate its computing workloads to its parent company’s Azure public cloud, some three years after being acquired by Microsoft.

The professional social network will shift all workloads from its own data centres to Microsoft’s cloud, with the project taking will ‘multiple years’ to complete, according to LinkedIn’s senior VP of engineering, Mohak Shroff.

Although Microsoft has largely left LinkedIn to its own management since it bought the platform in 2016, it has used a number of Azure technologies for improvements to content delivery, updates to its news feed and also to keep inappropriate content off the site.

The success of these improvements made Azure the right choice and one of the reasons for the decision to now move from its own datacentres, according to Shroff.

«Moving to Azure will give us access to a wide array of hardware and software innovations and unprecedented global scale,» he wrote in a blog post. «This will position us to focus on areas where we can deliver unique value to our members and customers. The cloud holds the future for us and we are confident that Azure is the right platform to build on for years to come.»

In October, Microsoft published details of how it had moved LinkedIn’s 14,000 employees off Google services and onto Office 365,  which took a couple of years. The move to Azure, however, may take much longer.

There are a number of Microsoft services that still don’t run on Azure, such as Office 365 and Xbox Live. Similarly, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has been trying to take its workloads off Oracle databases – most of which are Amazon systems set up prior to AWS.