The move. After nearly six years of relying on AWS to operate, Minecraft is finally making the switch to the Azure cloud platform. The process has actually been going on for a few years now.
Minecraft has been using Amazon Web Services since 2014 to offer a subscription service called Realms that allowed users to quickly set up private spaces to play with friends. In fact, a few months after this partnership with AWS was announced, Microsoft acquired Mojang.
For a sweet sum of $2.5 billion.
Since then, the software titan has been working to transition Minecraft to its own cloud platform, which should come as no surprise considering the huge investment the company made on the game.
After years of preparation the big moment is finally here.
And Matty Booty, Head of Microsoft Studios took time out to explain why it took the company that long to end this reliance on AWS after its acquisition.
“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. 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.”
Colossal.
But makes perfect sense for a game that has sold more than 200 million copies.
Despite all these preparations, the migration itself will require months. The software titan confirmed that the transition will be completed by the end of 2020.
