I’d be curious to know more about Microsoft’s always-tortuous product planning here.
Their o365 data location page says that Germany is still a thing, with two locations; but their little press piece says that they started a cloud-something for Germany in 2015; but are currently not accepting new customers for it, and doing security updates only; with the shiny new o365 Germany becoming an option in Q4 2019 and 2020.
Does anyone know what happened to the 2015-era offering that makes putting it on life support, before the replacement is ready, and prodding existing customers to try to get them to move, attractive? It suggests that divergence between the Germany special case and their mainline code became too great; but it’s not obvious why “HDDs will live in Germany and for legal purposes some German company will operate the place” would require any changes beyond localization.
Seems like there’s probably a story, whether of haste, hubris, or spite; of how it came to this, and presumably a weird mutant stepchild of azure-stuff that they want to dispose of as quickly as possible; rather than just doing the seemingly-obvious thing and keeping the German operation a more or less identical copy of their other locations. This awkward transition from their original offering, whatever exactly it was, to the shiny, new, not-actually-fully-built-yet one is unlikely to be pleasing anyone(see TFA) so they aren’t doing it for their amusement; and there has to be a good backstory if things got weird enough that they can’t just quietly nudge operations there back toward uniformity.
It’s especially odd when they have a second arms-length foreign outpost (Office 365 operated by 21Vianet in China); and that one has no analogous reports of a discontinuity of operations; despite presumably having at least the same difficulties of 3rd party operation, jurisdictional differences; and localization.
