I think most of us in the industry knew this was going to happen at some point, in some scale.

LinkedIn truly is a pioneer in the open-source distributed systems space. A number of successful technologies have come out of the LinkedIn stable, specifically their Systems and Infrastructure division, that have been widely adopted. Kafka is obviously the most famous of them all. Followed by others such as Samza, Pinot, Voldemort, etc. Given that most of these technologies have been open-sourced, they will of course continue to thrive. It will however be interesting to see how LinkedIn leverages Azure to replace their usage of these technologies, if that is what they intend to do. It is possible that Azure will provide their equivalents for these technologies. So, the underlying systems may remain the same or similar, except that they will be managed by Azure. So what does this mean for the Systems and Infrastructure group at LinkedIn? I guess we will find out in due course.