The pursuit of our mission to connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful is deeply dependent on the technology and infrastructure we build and maintain. Ten years ago, we had 50 million members. Fast forward five years and that number jumped to 300 million. Today, we have more than 645 million members, 20 million jobs and someone is hired using LinkedIn every eight seconds. Our focus on building a platform that created opportunities for people and businesses has remained steadfast, and our capabilities have evolved to match that.
As we’ve grown, our engineering team created a world class infrastructure and a set of tools and products to make it all possible. We’ve built a data infrastructure that operates at a scale very few companies have achieved. We’ve never shied away from challenges, which includes rebuilding our entire software development infrastructure with Project Inversion, and we’ve developed and open sourced world-class technologies, including Kafka that fields 4.5 trillion messages a day for LinkedIn.
Today’s technology landscape makes the need for constant reinvention paramount, especially as we look to scale our infrastructure to drive the next stage of LinkedIn’s growth. With the incredible member and business growth we’re seeing, we’ve decided to begin a multi-year migration of all LinkedIn workloads to the public cloud.
In recent years we’ve leveraged a number of Azure technologies in ways that have had a notable impact on our business. The agility, capacity and elasticity that Azure provides has allowed us to accelerate video post-delivery, improve machine translation in the Feed and keep inappropriate content off our site. That success, coupled with the opportunity to leverage the relationship we’ve built with Microsoft, made Azure the obvious choice. Moving to Azure will give us access to a wide array of hardware and software innovations, and unprecedented global scale. This will position us to focus on areas where we can deliver unique value to our members and customers. The cloud holds the future for us and we are confident that Azure is the right platform to build on for years to come.