While Microsoft can sometimes trip over its on branding laces with seemingly duplicate names or products such as Outlook.com, Outlook Mail and Calendar app for Windows 10, or Outlook Exchange for work all being the same relative service, the company does try its best to pare down those occurrences.
For customers using its cloud service Azure, Microsoft is once again attempting to simply a would-be branding issue by announcing its transition of Azure Mobile Services to Azure App Service.
Adrian Hall, Sr. program manager of Azure App Service discusses the details of the transition as such:
- If you have created a free mobile service for testing or learning and the mobile site gets no traffic after testing is complete. You can assist us by deleting your mobile service if you are no longer using it. If you are still using the Mobile Service for testing, then please migrate the Mobile Service to Azure App Service at your convenience.
- We realize that service changes are of particular concern to production sites. You should know that migrating to Azure App Services does not change the domain name nor the underlying code or database of your mobile site. There is a minimal amount of downtime associated with the migration (generally less than a few seconds). If you are running a production site, read about the migration process.
- Use a test site (potentially a clone of your existing site in an alternative region) to test the migration.
- Migrate your site at a time that is convenient for you.
- We will start migrating sites that have not already done so on September 1, 2016. If you wish to control when your migration happens, you should plan to complete your migration by September 1, 2016.
For a clearer picture of the timeline in which the transition will occur, Hall layouts a relatively simple path. May 2016 marks the beginning of the deprecation process that accompanies a notice to all current customers. New customers signing up no longer be allowed to create Azure Mobile Services.
August 2016 marks the first month that creation of new Azure Mobile Services will cease to be available, so customers should ready themselves between now and the end of July to start using Azure’s App Services.
In September 2016, the Azure team will begin its backend migration of Mobile Services for customers automatically, starting with free sites.
By December 2016, the Azure team hopes to have Azure Mobile Services completely shut down.
There it is, Azure Mobile Service customers have the next two months to prepare for the automatic transition to Azure App Services. According to Hall, the move was spurred by years of Azure Mobile Services customer feedback and A/B testing that saw a demand for features already provided by App Services.
For more information, the Azure team is encouraging customers to reach out via the Azure Community Forums or other means which include Stack Overflow and Twitter.
