Back in June, we first learned that Skype’s future involved Microsoft’s Windows Azure service, bringing on the power of the cloud. Microsoft has announced that Skype is up and operating on Azure.
The news was confirmed mere hours ago by Scott Guthrie, Microsoft’s vice president for Windows Azure: “Skype, a lot of which is built here in our London developer centre, is also now running on Azure.” Other Microsoft products beyond Skype will take advantage of the more flexible Azure setup in the future as well, including SkyDrive and yes, even Xbox One.
The move to the Windows Azure platform is a natural move for Skype.
Moving the Skype service to Windows Azure is a good test case for the auto scaling capability offered by the service. By moving to Windows Azure, Skype can scale to the capacity it requires as fluctuations in usage change. Because of Skype’s ever-fluctuating capacity requirements, the move to the Windows Azure platform seems all the more natural for the application, especially as more and more services move to the cloud as time goes on.