Microsoft posts a batch of Azure retirements — IoT Central shuts down, HPC Pack ends, Functions v1-on-Container-Apps goes away

Microsoft pushed a batch of official Azure retirement notices on 29 September, and three of them end things people build on — so they get permanent pages tonight. All three were verified against Microsoft’s server-rendered release-communications API, because the human-facing Azure Updates pages are JavaScript-rendered and don’t fetch cleanly. Layer 1 also surfaced the usual endoflife.date version churn (Temurin, future Windows 11 builds), which isn’t news; discovery was quiet.

New: Azure IoT Central is being retired — 20 September 2029

The biggest of the three, because it’s a whole product going away, not a version bump. Azure IoT Central — Microsoft’s turnkey IoT application platform (device templates, provisioning, dashboards, rules, exports, all bundled) — will be retired on 20 September 2029, with no drop-in successor. Microsoft’s recommended path unbundles it into platform services you assemble yourself: Azure IoT Hub + Device Provisioning Service for connectivity, Azure Device Registry for identity, and Microsoft Fabric for the dashboards and analytics you got for free. There’s no automated migration and no promise of feature parity, so for anyone running production fleets this is an architecture project measured in quarters — which is exactly why the notice says to start planning now, three years out.

New: Microsoft HPC Pack — all versions retired, End of Support 27 August 2027

Microsoft HPC Pack, the cluster manager and job scheduler for high-performance and parallel compute, is being retired in every version, with End of Support on 27 August 2027. It enters a one-year, retirement-only support window now — security fixes and documented-config guidance stay in scope, but non-security fixes, new-OS/hardware validation, and migration consulting are already out of scope. After the date: no updates, fixes, or support; clusters keep running but permanently unpatched. Microsoft points HPC scheduling to Azure Batch (or another Azure service), with the blunt caveat that nothing guarantees one-to-one feature parity — so scope the move early, because Microsoft won’t help plan it.

New: Azure Functions v1 hosting model on Container Apps retires — 29 September 2027

The developer-facing one. If you run Azure Functions on Azure Container Apps under the v1 hosting model, that model retires on 29 September 2027, after which those apps stop running and stop processing triggers. Important distinction: this is the hosting model, not the Functions programming model your code targets — so the fix is a deployment change, not a rewrite. The replacement is the v2 hosting model (a native Container App with kind=functionapp), you can reuse your existing image, and there’s a migration assistant. Manual path: record the v1 app’s config, recreate it as v2, test triggers, shift traffic, decommission v1.

Departing today — the busiest board of the autumn

Four entries reach their date today, 30 September 2026 (all re-verified against their primary sources before this went out):

• Amazon Mechanical Turk shuts down.
• The Azure Automation Python 2.7 / 3.8 and PowerShell 7.1 / 7.2 runtimes retire.
• Cloudflare Service Key authentication ends.
• The JetBrains teacher-pack bootcamp benefit sunsets.

Also coming due

Re-verified tonight, all dates unchanged:

• 1 October: gpt-5.4-cyber is removed from the OpenAI API; Exchange Web Services in Exchange Online starts being blocked (Microsoft’s Exchange blog, hand-checked tonight: “on October 1, 2026, we will start blocking EWS requests”); Microsoft Publisher reaches end of life.
• 2 October: Gemini 2.5 Flash Image and the GitHub Copilot model deprecations.
• Then: Windows 11 24H2 end of servicing (13 Oct), Cloudflare Workers KV legacy API (15 Oct), OpenAI GPT-4 / GPT-3.5 / o1 / o3 (23 Oct), Consul 1.22 (31 Oct).

Full board with live countdowns on the calendar.