azure

List of discontinued services in Microsoft Azure

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Introduction

This article provides a list of discontinued services in Microsoft Azure, as per the Azure service lifecycle. This includes services and features which have been discontinued, retired or deprecated. The below list shall be continuously be updated with latest updates from the Azure side. Many of these services involve migration of Azure ASM-type (Azure Service Management) classic resource migration to the equivalent Azure ARM-type (Azure Resource Management) resources. The article also contains a separate list will all deprecated protocols in Azure, for instance discontinued support for TLS v1.0 or v1.1.

Please note that it would be good to periodically check the Azure updates channel for any posts which include the “Action Required” phrase, in order not to miss any Azure service retirement which could result in downtime or operational issues for your infrastructure, apps and data: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/?query=Action%20required.

You are advised to consult the Microsoft Lifecycle Policy and periodically check the “Product End of Support & Retirements” page. For example, for year 2023 the following Azure and Microsoft 365 services will be deprecated: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/end-of-support/end-of-support-2023. For a comprehensive list of Microsoft products and their lifecycle policy timelines, including migration options, please visit the Microsoft Product Lifecycle Search page.

Bear in mind that Microsoft usually allows a minimum of 1 year ahead of the imminent retirement/deprecation until announcing the deprecation of an Azure service.

List of discontinued services in Microsoft Azure

Update March 2023

Azure AD legacy MFA and SSPR policies

On 30 September 2024, the ability to manage authentication methods in the legacy multifactor authentication (MFA) and self-service password reset (SSPR) policies will be retired. Before that date, you’ll need to migrate to the Authentication methods policy in Azure AD, which provides all the same capabilities, plus it enables you to:

  • Centrally manage MFA, SSPR, and passwordless authentication methods.
  • More granularly target authentication methods to groups of users instead of all users.
  • Access more secure authentication methods that will be part of future updates of this policy.

To avoid any disruptions in service, migrate your authentication methods from the MFA and SSPR policies to the Authentication methods policy before 30 September 2024.

Azure App Service disaster recovery mode

Beginning 31 March 2025, Microsoft will no longer place Azure App Service web applications in disaster recovery mode in the event of a disaster in an Azure region. Microsoft strongly encourage you to implement commonly used disaster recovery techniques (https://aka.ms/AppserviceBCDR) to prevent loss of functionality or data for your web apps if there’s a regional disaster. Backup and restore capabilities are included in Basic and higher pricing tiers. The Free and Shared pricing tiers of App Service are not recommended for production scenarios and are not backed by any SLAs. If you have web applications deployed to the Free or Shared tier and you want to implement a disaster recovery strategy for them, scale up to Basic tier or higher. To avoid data or functionality loss in the event of a regional disaster, implement common disaster recovery techniques (https://aka.ms/AppserviceBCDR) for your App Service web apps by 31 March 2025.

Azure Multi-Factor Authentication Server

Beginning September 30, 2024, Azure Multi-Factor Authentication Server deployments will no longer service multi-factor authentication (MFA) requests, which could cause authentications to fail for your organisation. To ensure uninterrupted authentication services and to remain in a supported state, organisations should migrate their users’ authentication data to the cloud-based Azure MFA service using the latest Migration Utility included in the most recent Azure MFA Server update. Learn more at Azure MFA Server Migration.  

Classic alerts for Recovery Services vaults in Azure Backup

On 31 March 2026, classic alerts for Recovery Services vaults in Azure Backup will be retired and no longer supported. Before that date, you’ll need to transition to a new alerting solution. Microsoft recommend using built-in Azure Monitor alerts because they include the same capabilities as classic alerts, plus:

  • Support for multiple notification channels.
  • Alert monitoring at scale.
  • Programmatic management of alerts and notifications.

To ensure you continue to receive alerts for Recovery Services vaults in Azure Backup, review pricing and transition to built-in Azure Monitor alerts or another supported alerting solution by 31 March 2026.

Azure Batch Low Priority VMs

Azure Batch offers Low Priority and Spot Virtual Machines (VMs). Low Priority VMs are a deprecated feature and will be retired on 30 September 2025. Please transition to using Spot VMs, the official generally available (GA) preemptible offering from the Compute platform. Follow these steps to transition using Spot VMs before 30 September 2025. After that, we’ll stop supporting Low priority VMs. The existing Low priority pools may no longer work or be provisioned. They may be forced to be scaled down after the target date. 

Azure unmanaged disks

In 2017, Microsoft launched Azure Managed Disks. Microsoft will begin deprecating unmanaged disks on September 30, 2022, because Azure Managed Disks now have full capabilities of unmanaged disks and other advancements. This functionality will be completely retired on September 30, 2025. To avoid service disruptions, review pricing and follow the steps to migrate/convert your Windows or Linux virtual machines to managed disks before 30 September 2025.

NC-series Azure Virtual Machines

NC-series was previously announced to be retired on 31 August 2022. Microsoft have extended the retirement date to 31 August 2023. See updated post here. All NC VMs will need to be de-allocated by that date.  For recommendations on which VMs to migrate your NC workloads to, or for help with the creation of new VMs, please see the GPU compute migration guide. Visit the Azure Virtual Machine pricing page for additional information. 

Azure Cognitive Search skills

Because version 3 of Cognitive Search sentiment analysis and entity recognition skills improve accuracy and model performance, we are retiring version 2 of sentiment analysis and entity recognition skills on 31 August 2024. Microsoft encourage you to make the switch early to benefit from the improved models. Transition to version 3 of the Cognitive Search sentiment analysis and entity recognition skills before 31 August 2024. After 31 August 2024, the older versions of sentiment analysis and entity recognition skills will no longer be supported, and any invocation of these skills will result in errors.  When adding sentiment analysis or entity recognition skills, please use the latest version. 

Azure MySQL single server

On 16 September 2024, Azure Database for MySQL Single Server will be retired, and you’ll need to migrate to Flexible Server by that date. Use Azure Data Migration Service to migrate to Azure Database for MySQL Flexible Server by 16 September 2024 (read the FAQ to learn more). More details can be found in the following article: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/mysql/single-server/whats-happening-to-mysql-single-server.

Azure classic networking services

In August 2021, Microsoft announced that Azure Cloud Services (classic) will be retired on 31 August 2024. Because classic Azure Virtual Network, reserved IP addresses, Azure ExpressRoute gateway, Azure Application Gateway, and Azure VPN Gateway are dependent on Azure Cloud Services (classic), they’ll be retired on the same date. Before that date, you’ll need to migrate any resources that use these classic networking services to the Azure Resource Manager deployment model. To avoid service disruptions, follow the guidance to migrate your resources that use these classic networking services to Azure Resource Manager by 31 August 2024: 

Azure Classic Cloud Services

Cloud Services (classic) is now deprecated for new customers and will be retired on August 31st, 2024 for all customers. New deployments should use the new Azure Resource Manager based deployment model Azure Cloud Services (extended support).

Azure Application Gateway v1

Microsoft will be disabling creation of new gateways on the V1 SKU at some point in the future, advance notification will be provided so customers have sufficient time to migrate. Migrating your gateways to the V2 SKU sooner rather than later will allow us to allocate more of our engineering and support resources to the V2 SKU sooner. No specific date is established yet for Azure Application Gateway V1 depreciation. The Application Gateway team from Microsoft also mentioned that advanced notifications would be sent out before V1 support is stopped. This would follow the general Azure 3-year deprecation cycle post announcement.

App Service Environment version 1 and version 2

In August 2021, Microsoft announced Azure Cloud Services (classic) will be retiring on 31 August 2024. As App Service Environment version 1 and version 2 run on Azure Cloud Services (classic), Microsoft will retire App Service Environment version 1 and version 2 on the same date. Before that date, please migrate to App Service Environment version 3. After 31 August 2024, App Service Environment version 1 and version 2 will no longer be supported and these App Service Environments and the applications running on them will be deleted and any application data associated with them will be lost. To avoid service disruption, please follow the steps to migrate to App Service Environment version 3 by 31 August 2024.       

Classic IaaS VMs

Because Azure Resource Manager now has all the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) capabilities of Azure Service Management and new advancements, we’ll retire classic IaaS VMs on March 1, 2023. If you use IaaS resources from ASM, please complete your migration by March 1, 2023. To avoid service disruption, migrate your IaaS resources from classic IaaS VMs to Resource Manager by March 1, 2023. We recommend migrating sooner to start using the feature enhancements in Resource Manager.

Power Platform

Various Power Platform feature deprecations are providid in the following article: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform/important-changes-coming.

Archive of years 2017-2018-2019-2020-2021-2022

Azure Container services

In 2017, Microsoft introduced Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) for simplifying Kubernetes management, deployment and operations. Because it fully replaces Azure Container Service (ACS) capabilities for Kubernetes, ACS will be retired as a standalone service on 31st January 2020.

If you use the Kubernetes orchestrator, please migrate to AKS by 31st January 2020.

If you use ACS with Docker or DC/OS, migrate to one of the following options no later than 31st January 2020:

Azure API Management REST API

The following versions of the Azure API Management REST API are being deprecated and will be retired on 1st October 2019: 

  • 14-02-2014-preview
  • 14-02-2014
  • 15-09-2015
  • 07-07-2016
  • 10-10-2016
  • 01-03-2017

Azure Site Recovery REST API

The following versions of the Azure Site Recovery REST API will be deprecated on 31st July 2018: 

  • 27-10-2014
  • 10-02-2015
  • 10-04-2015
  • 10-06-2015
  • 10-08-2015

Log Search API for Azure Log Analytics

In November 2017, Azure Log Analytics customers learned that the Log Search API will be deprecated. This API is used with the old Log Analytics query language. The Log Search API has been replaced with the Azure Log Analytics REST API. The REST API supports the new query language, as well as higher query limits in terms of the number of returned rows and payload size. The Log Search API will be deprecated during the week of 30th April 2018.

Azure Functions

With Azure Functions recently becoming generally available and making the 1.0 Azure Functions host available, preview versions of the Azure Functions host (0.x) are deprecated. Microsoft will begin removal of these versions on February 1, 2017.

Azure Analysis Services web designer

The Azure Analysis Services web designer in the Azure portal has been in public preview since it was introduced in July 2017. It was later deprecated in October 2018, meaning that it would be discontinued at some point in the future. Microsoft have tried to avoid discontinuing it entirely, but due to certain compliance requirements, it will be removed from the portal as early as 1st March 2019. Instead of the web designer, Microsoft recommend that you use SQL Server Data Tools and SQL Server Management Studio for authoring and managing your Azure Analysis Services models.

Azure Monitor classic alerts

The classic alerts retirement date which was originally announced to be on 30th June 2019 will now be 31st August 2019.  After 31st August 2019, Microsoft will start the automatic migration process for any customers who have not voluntarily migrated. Please note that certain classic alerts which cannot be migrated using the tool, will continue to work as classic alerts till June 2020 and will need to be migrated manually.  

Azure log integration tool

The Azure log integration (AzLog) tool will be deprecated on 15th June 2019.  The deprecation timeline had been announced a year earlier in June 2018. The AzLog tool had enabled customers to collect logs from Azure Resource Manager and other Azure resources into their Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) products for security analysis. AzLog is being replaced with an approach of using Azure Monitor and Azure Event Hubs to export logs coupled with Azure connectors from SIEM vendors that enable collecting these into the SIEM product.

Azure Datacentre IP ranges (XML files)

Weekly publication of Azure datacentre IP ranges (also known as XML files) for Azure Public, China and Germany will be deprecated by 30 June 2020. Instead, you can now download the updated weekly publications (also known as JSON files) or programmatically retrieve this information using the Service Tag Discovery API to integrate with an on-premises firewall. 

Azure HDInsight G-series VMs

Azure HDInsight will deprecate G-series virtual machines (VMs) on 31st October 2019. After this date, you will not be able to create any new clusters using G-series VMs or to scale up clusters having G-series nodes. Please migrate your current workloads from G-series nodes to other VM types like Ev3-series and Dv2-series before 31st October 2019.

Azure Storage – Restoration of NSG flow logs retention

The Retention feature on NSG flow logs was disabled in November 2019, the functionality has been restored for general purpose v2 (GPv2) accounts and Blob storage accounts.  It will not be restored for general purpose v1 (GPv1) storage accounts.

Azure Active Directory B2C login.microsoftonline.com

The endpoint retirement has been delayed until 31 August 2022.  See updated information with the new publication on 24 August 2021. 

Azure DNS private zones preview API

During public preview release, private DNS zones were created using dnszones  ARM resource with zoneType property set to Private.  Support for zones created using the preview API will be removed on 30th June 2020 and you must immediately migrate these private DNS zones to the GA resource model. The GA resource model makes use of privateDnsZones resource type instead of dnszones. Post 15th April 2020 you will not be able to create new private DNS zones using preview dnszones resource API. Existing zones created using this API will stop working after 30th June 2020 and must be migrated to GA resource model. This does not affect public DNS zones created using dnszones resource. These zones will continue to work normally.

Azure Communication Services Calling JavaScript SDK

On 24 August 2021, WebRTC APIs – specifically Plan B Session Description Protocol (SDP) API – will be retired in popular web browsers. To avoid browser compatibility risk and service disruption to your customers, please upgrade to Azure Communication Services’ Calling SDK 1.1.0 for JavaScript by 31 July 2021. While Microsoft still support earlier versions of JavaScript SDK 1.1.0, they will be marked as deprecated in NPM and other repositories.

Google webview sign-in support

Google recently announced that starting on 04 January 2021, embedded webview sign-in support will be deprecated. Customers using Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) B2B collaboration with Google accounts or self-service sign-up using Google may be affected and should test line of business native applications for compatibility. 

Azure Time Series Insights Gen2 Preview APIs

A new API version of Azure Time Series Insights Gen2 (2020-07-31) was made generally available on July 16, 2020, and uses an updated Time Series Expression Syntax (TSX). The preview API version (2018-11-01-preview) was deprecated on October 31, 2020. Please migrate your environment’s Time Series Model variables, saved queries, and Power BI queries, along with any custom tools making calls to the API endpoints, to the new API version, if you have not already. 

Deprecation of protocol support in Microsoft Azure

TLS v.1.0 and v.1.1

For more details about TLS v.1.0 and TLS v.1.1 retirement/support in Azure, consult the following article: https://cloudcomputing.help/blog/tls-1-0-and-1-1-deprecation-in-azure-services/. Also review Microsoft Azure articles on TLS 1.2 preparation at:

The following list contains all TLS protocol support Microsoft announcements:

  • On 4th December 2018, the Azure Bot Service will require all connections to be secured using transport layer security (TLS) 1.2.
  • Microsoft has announced in 2021 that they are deprecating TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1 support from Office 365 and Microsoft 365 products and services. More details can be found at: https://cloudcomputing.help/kb/how-to-allow-legacy-tls-smtp-clients-in-exchange-online/.
  • The deadline for IoT Hub deprecation of support for transport layer security (TLS) 1.0/1.1 is postponed indefinitely. IoT Hub will continue to support TLS 1.0/1.1 until further notice to ensure compatibility with existing applications and devices. It was previously announced that IoT Hub would deprecate support for TLS 1.0/1.1 on 1st July 2020. After reviewing customer feedback, we are postponing the deadline for migration indefinitely. However, all customers should migrate to TLS 1.2 as soon as possible.
  • To ensure that Azure can provide the best level of security for our customers’ data, Azure Resource Manager will be deprecating support for incoming requests coming over TLS 1.1 and other older security protocols by Autumn 2023. As such, to avoid any interruptions in your connections with Azure, we highly recommend that you migrate to TLS 1.2 and remove any dependencies on older protocols in your operating systems and work environments. Azure Resource Manager already supports TLS 1.2; customers currently using this version will be unaffected by this move. However, we will require HTTPS connections coming from all customers to use TLS 1.2, and we will no longer provide backwards compatibility to older security protocols. To maintain your connections to Azure Resource Manager, please update your operating systems, development libraries, frameworks, and all other solutions to their latest versions to support TLS 1.2. 
  • Azure App Service still supports TLS v.1.0 and v.1.1 as per: https://azure.github.io/AppService/2018/06/13/TLS-Configuration-now-fixed-to-block-1.0.html.
  • Azure Batch TLS 1.0/1.1 will be retired on 31 March 2023. To avoid disruptions to your workflow, follow these steps to transition using Batch TLS 1.0/1.1 before 31 March 2023. After that, Microsoft will stop supporting Batch TLS 1.0/1.1. TLS 1.0/1.1 workflows will break, and our client application won’t work until you upgrade.

References

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-in/updates/?query=discontinued

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-in/updates/?query=deprecated

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-in/updates/?query=retired

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/?query=Action%20required

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/overview/product-end-of-support-overview

https://azurecharts.com