[jiggawatts]

Active Directory comes free with Windows Server, it was never a "cash cow", that would be the Office suite.

Microsoft is actively killing of Active Directory and they're replacing it with Entra ID, which is "just" OAuth and hence is relatively easily replaced by a competing product.

[p_ing]

Windows Server 2025 included many AD changes that were non-cloud related. They're not actively killing it.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/get-started...

[jiggawatts]

Most of those are scalability / security improvements that are only relevant to fortune 500 sized megacorps.

These are the kind of release notes you'd expect to see for a dying product on life support, used only by those few remaining customers that are too big and too invested in it to migrate away.

Also, the Server 2025 release is the first one to change anything in Active Directory, the 2022 and 2019 versions had essentially nothing in the release notes for AD.

A few performance tweaks and a long-overdue security catch-up or two in a decade is not a vibrant, living and breathing product. It's a shambling zombie.

[p_ing]

That's a weird take but you're entitled to it, of course; normally we see products die with zero improvements for many years. I'm well aware of the rel history of AD, but thanks for the re-education.

[9dev]

Well to be fair, Entra is still backed by AD behind the scenes as the database. But yeah, I’m also not sure a directory server is still required to store domain objects; tree structures are pretty much solved in all kinds of databases and don’t warrant LDAP anymore anyway.