Microsoft-Owned Minecraft Will Stop Using Amazon's Cloud (cnbc.com) 22
Microsoft will stop relying on Amazon to help it run the popular Minecraft video game. CNBC reports: The shift represents an obvious way for Microsoft to cut back on payments to one of its toughest competitors and promote its own product. Amazon Web Services rules the market for public cloud infrastructure for running software from afar through vast data centers, and Microsoft has been working to take share with its Azure cloud. Azure is growing faster than many other parts of Microsoft, helping it lean less on longstanding properties like Windows and Office. Moving more of its own software to Azure can help Microsoft make the case to customers that it doesn't look anywhere else for computing, storage and networking resources to deliver its online services. That's an important consideration, because Amazon can tell customers that its sprawling e-commerce business consumes resources from AWS.
The use of AWS for Minecraft for a version called Realms -- virtual places for small groups to gather and play the open-world game together -- dates to 2014. Months after AWS published a blog post about how Mojang, the game developer behind Minecraft, had chosen to tap AWS for Realms, Microsoft announced that it would acquire Mojang for $2.5 billion. It would not have been right to make Mojang get off AWS immediately after the acquisition, Matt Booty, the head of studios at Microsoft, suggested in a recent interview. Now there is an end in sight for the dependence on a rival. "We'll be fully transitioned to Azure by the end of the year," the Microsoft spokesperson wrote.
The use of AWS for Minecraft for a version called Realms -- virtual places for small groups to gather and play the open-world game together -- dates to 2014. Months after AWS published a blog post about how Mojang, the game developer behind Minecraft, had chosen to tap AWS for Realms, Microsoft announced that it would acquire Mojang for $2.5 billion. It would not have been right to make Mojang get off AWS immediately after the acquisition, Matt Booty, the head of studios at Microsoft, suggested in a recent interview. Now there is an end in sight for the dependence on a rival. "We'll be fully transitioned to Azure by the end of the year," the Microsoft spokesperson wrote.
Anyone else remember when MS bought hotmail (Score:4, Interesting)
Difference (Score:4, Interesting)
The difference is that Microsoft can still use the Linux backend server images, as Azure can run those. Also, Microsoft already uses Azure for Xbox multiplayer game hosting, so they theoretically know what they are doing.
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And the absolute clustermug that was their move from BSD? to Windows for hosting it?
That was under a different leadership. Under Satya Nadella services come before Windows in many ways. For this reason I don't see Microsoft trying to move the Minecraft server to Windows, unless there is a good reason.
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Guess it's time for a renaissance (Score:1)
A renaissance of the self-hosted Minecraft server, that is.
Is this why they shut down Beam/Mixer? (Score:1)
To free up as many servers as they can for Minecraft?
Let me get this straight... (Score:5, Insightful)
It took a MegaCorp with vast resoursed and in-depth knowledge of Azure like Microsoft to move a workload from AWS to Azure about 7 years, yet they claim they can move my/your workload in mere hours?!?!?!
https://azure.microsoft.com/en... [microsoft.com]
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-... [microsoft.com]
Granted, my/your workloads may be less complex than minecraft, but I/you lack the resources and in-depth Azure knowledge of Microsoft....
So.....
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Microsoft didn't even own Mojang 7 years ago - it was bought in September 2014 [theguardian.com] which is a little less than 6 years ago. The article also explains the obvious - that they obviously they didn't start the migration the day buyout was announced.
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Lol, hardly. It likely just wasn't a huge priority for the Mojang team. You seriously believe this was the #1 item on their development wishlist? That they've been working on this since they day they've been acquired? No other more plausible explanation you can think of here?
Or more realistically: They probably just eventually got some prodding a few months ago from some higher ups that Microsoft thinks dogfooding is a good idea, and they can probably save some money paying themselves instead of Amazon
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My co-worker's previous job was network support for Azure. When I forwarded him the story about Azure getting the Pentagon contract his first words were, "They're going to regret that."
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Who was going to regret it, though: Microsoft for realizing how much they don't know about networking, or the Pentagon for realizing how much Microsoft don't know about networking?
In terms of networking few things shit me more than Microsoft servers just dropping incoming TLS connections because they can't be fucked sending back a "protocol_version" alert message when the clients ask for an incompatible version. What a huge fucking waste of investigation time that is when SSL/TLS have had a built-in error r
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You're exactly right, he meant both parties.
Re: This new MS no longer force feeds its culture (Score:3, Informative)
If you RTFA, under Satya Nadella, Microsoft has been making it a point not to infect, with its own culture, the culture of the companies that it acquires.
“It would be easy for a large organization to come in and say: ‘Hey, we’re going to show you how it’s done. We’re going to get you off this Java code. We’re going to get things moved over to C. We’re going to get you off Amazon Web Services and over to Azure,’” Booty told GamesIndustry.biz. “But it’s important to realize that the conditions that created Minecraft, how it came to be, are likely to be things that are difficult to recreate within a more corporate structure.”
Mojang was the first acquisition of Satya Nadella and his decision not to touch its culture, to not mess with the magic of what made Minecraft great, proved to be very successful and it served as a template for other acquisitions such as Linkedin, Nadella's second acquisition, and six game studios that were later acquired by Xbox Game Studios under Phil Sp
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Not just the obvious discount, but that would mean Minecraft gets more servers for the buck. Likely they're working on a budget and while AWS works, it also means having to pay full price. I wouldn't be
Company Eats Own Dog Food, News at 11. (Score:2)
Azure growth (Score:2)
So it seems the only way Microsoft can get Azure to grow is by doing it themselves. First Office 365, then during the pandemic the Teams uptick, and now Minecraft. When's github moving? Surely can't be long now, can it? What else have they bought recently? They'll all be moving to Azure soon - gotta fill up those empty datacentres somehow.
This sort of move is inevitable - even if Azure was a run-away success and they couldn't build the datacentres fast enough, they'd still be moving their own assets into th
Sharing games suck (Score:2)