This impacts exclusively online and sovereign deployments of the Discovery Service. The on-premises Discovery Service remains untouched and is still fully supported.
Microsoft is announcing the deprecation and shut down of all regional endpoints for the Discovery Service and the Discovery APIs in the Organization Service (SOAP endpoint). They are replaced by a single global discovery service accessed through the existing ‘discovery’ OData V4 RESTful endpoint. Please ensure your administrators and IT professionals have the information they need to prepare for these changes.
How does this affect me?
Deprecation will take place on March 2nd, 2020 and will be followed by a shutdown of the regional services a year later on March 1st, 2021. All instances with versions pointing to the regional Discovery endpoints and the Discovery APIs in the Organization Service must upgrade.
What is deprecation?
Deprecation means that Microsoft will continue to provide support, security, and other critical updates to the legacy endpoints until March 1st, 2021 but will not release any additional functionality beyond what has already been announced. After March 1st, 2021, the regional Discovery Service will not be available.
Features of the new global Discovery Service
- Get all the organization instances given a tenant Id
- Get all the organizations for a user
- Get all the apps a user has access to
- Force synchronization of all the organizations in a tenant to the global Discovery Service
- Re-synchronize all the organizations to the global Discovery Service
Why change the experience?
The regional Discovery Service is outdated. It relies on old technology (authentication, SOAP, etc.) and has a heavy dependency on global database tables which are central for processing. For that reason, Microsoft has developed a new global Discovery Service that caters to the same discovery scenarios, but in an improved fashion thanks to its modern software architecture. More specifically, it offers the following:
- Improved performance by adding caching for app modules
- Enabled user filtering for instances and apps by syncing users and roles from all regions
- Improved performance and resiliency by replicating/syncing data across storage accounts
- And more…
How to migrate to the global Discovery Service?
- Learn how to migrate to the new global Discovery Service endpoint here.
- Learn how to leverage the full capabilities of the global Discovery Service here.
Thank you for being a valued Microsoft customer.
Thank you,
Microsoft