Minecraft Realms has completed its migration to Microsoft Azure

Back in July of this year, we reported that Mojang Studios was seeking to migrate from Amazon Web Services (AWS) to Microsoft Azure, a massive undertaking that would bring Minecraft‘s private servers, known as Realms, firmly in-house with Microsoft. While this caught many players by surprise, since Microsoft bought Mojang Studios all the way back in 2014, this kind of migration is daunting in its scale, so it is in part understandable why it took the Swedish game studio so long to make the transition.

Today, Mojang Studios confirmed with us that it has officially completed the migration to Microsoft Azure, with minimal disruption of play time for Minecraft gamers, which should make the game’s future development considerably easier and simpler for the development team. With this move, Mojang Studios believes it’ll be able to focus resources in other areas that would otherwise be tied up handling AWS and the management of Minecraft Realms.

If these kinds of things interest you, Mojang Studios has published the first of a series of posts on the Microsoft Game Stack blog, which details the benefit of Azure’s game-dev tools, and how, while this move was a big one, means great things for Minecraft’s future. This is also a big win for Microsoft, as it means considerably more data and usage for Microsoft Azure, and reduced maintenance and development costs.

A tidbit of information snuck into the announcement is how Minecraft has officially crossed 132 million monthly active users, an ever-impressive milestone that indicates there should be a lot of people tuning into Minecraft Live, where we should learn more about Minecraft, Minecraft Dungeons, and even vote on what the next mob in Minecraft should be.