Microsoft Announces Today That They’re Phasing Out Azure RemoteApp, and Transitioning Customers Over to a Citrix Solution Instead

Gabe Knuth first blogged on this possibility August 3rd, and now it has been confirmed.

From the Microsoft Enterprise Mobility Blog:

Today we are announcing the next step in our broad partnership with Citrix in the remote desktop and applications space, which we recently expanded to address new scenarios for our joint customers on the Azure cloud.

Customers have provided us consistent feedback that they want a comprehensive, end-to-end, cloud-based solution for delivering Windows apps. The best way for us to deliver this is with Citrix through XenApp “express”, currently under development. XenApp “express” combines the simplicity of application remoting and the scalability of Azure with the security, management, and performance benefits of XenApp, to deliver Windows applications to any employee on any device. We will have much more to share on this offering through the coming months.

Key takeaways:

• New purchases of Azure RemoteApp will end October 1st, 2016.
• End of life date for existing Azure RemoteApp deployments will be August 31st, 2017. Migration of some sort will be required before then.

My thoughts – this is a smart move. As Gabe mentioned, Azure RemoteApp had issues with rapid scaling during logon storms and other load balancing issues. Also, there’s the practical aspect that most organizations, if they move their apps to the Cloud, also need to move the supporting infrastructure (e.g. database servers, CRM/ERP servers, Active Directory, etc). In that sense, it makes better sense to either leverage this new Citrix solution OR simply stand up a full Remote Desktop Services IaaS deployment in Azure. This will only be easier to do with the upcoming release of Microsoft Windows Server 2016.