Dealing with Azure Retirements

• Retirements of Azure support for APIs, languages and framework versions, features, and services have recently been announced in larger than usual batches.
• The retirement dates are mostly one to three years from now, but some will arrive much sooner.
• Customers must track these retirements and take actions ranging from tweaking administrative processes to re-architecting solutions.

Dozens of Azure retirements have been announced in recent months. The retirements do not indicate a reduction in Azure’s capabilities but rather reflect housecleaning of the platform. Customers get sufficient advance notice in most cases, but they cannot opt out of the changes, reflecting an inherent risk of relying on cloud services.

Causes of Azure Retirements

Azure has been commercially available for more than 12 years, during which changes to technology priorities, strategies, and capabilities have steered and course-corrected the offering. For example, container virtualization technology was not popular when Azure debuted, but it is now an innate element of many services.