This week is Microsoft Ignite! A ton of great new technology has been announced, such as Azure Communication Service, or the ability to run Azure Logic Apps anywhere!

Building systems in the cloud is not always a walk in the park! Services, features and even data centers get deprecated because of a variety of reasons such as lack of traction, a better alternative, …

With the rapid expansion of Azure services this will only happen more and more. We need to prepare ourselves to learn what the impact is, how much time we have, and what the alternative is!

Unfortunately this is not as straightforward as it should be, because there is no standard across all Azure services which allows customers to follow just that. While you can subscribe to Azure Updates (💘 good old RSS) and filter on “Retirements”, not all of the deprecations will show up because they are reported in blog posts, documentation, GitHub, etc.

I’m happy to announce Azure Deprecation Notices, a suite of tools to stay up to date on all Azure deprecations, and provide a single-pane of glass for all Azure services.

Since there is no central place, I’m gathering all the deprecations I notice. In the future you will be able to contribute them back through Google Forms! If you see any that are missing, feel free to let me know on kerkhove.tom@gmail.com for now.

Get an overview with our dashboard

Our Azure Deprecation Dashboard is a public GitHub repo that lists all open deprecation notices, and categorizes them with the impact, area and service to which they apply.

Every new deprecation notice provides you with all the related information from the official deprecation and optionally more context, links and information from the community or Microsoft PMs.

By using labels, you can easily filter notices based on these different categories, for example for deprecation of service runtimes:

Last but not least, we provide milestones which group all deprecation notices per year so you can get an idea of what notices are more urgent than the others:

In case you want to discuss a deprecation, we recommend people to create a new GitHub Discussion and help each other migrate to the new approach.

Get notified about new deprecations

A dashboard is a great way to check what is open, but you have to remind yourself to do so. And we all forget.

An easy way to get notified is to watch the GitHub repo, and they will automatically show up in your notifications!

For more advanced scenarios we provide automated deprecation notifications, so you are aware of potential migrations.

A first option is to follow @AzureEndOfLife on Twitter that tweets every new notice (automated), and reminds you about remaining time for open notices (manual, for now).

Do you prefer event-driven workflows? We’ve got your back! You can now onboard to receive CloudEvent notifications and trigger internal automation to take actions, such as creating tickets in JIRA, notifying somebody or build your own internal Azure Deprecation bot!

💡 All endpoints should be compliant with the validation process of Azure Event Grid (docs)

What’s next?

In the future, we’ll add more notification channels, such as weekly email notifications to which you can sign up! Want a different notification channel? Feel free to let us know!

Next to that, we will provide APIs to query all the deprecation notices and offer self-service for receiving CloudEvent notifications instead of our current onboarding flow.

Last but not least, we are planning to provide automated reminders so that you are being reminded how much time is left before it shuts down. Our current plans are to send them 1 year, 6 months, 3 months, 2 months, and 1 month before it gets deprecated through the same notification channels. This allows you to not only be aware of new deprecations but help you with planning and keeping the awareness up.

What would you like to see or are you struggling with? Feel free to let us know in the comments!

If this is super helpful, feel free to support this initiative 💘 to cover the Azure & development cost; but that’s not why I’m doing this!

Thanks for reading,

Tom.