Video Showcase Web site converted to Azure using SXP
I can’t tell you how many times people at Silicon Valley companies have told me they eat their own dog food, meaning they use their own technology to run their business. One exception was the classy guy who said, “We drink our own Champagne.” I trust that the only company where they don’t eat their own dog food is Purina. Microsoft recently posted about how its Azure dog food tastes.
Microsoft just published a case study on how the people at Microsoft Information Technology (MSIT) deployed the company’s Social eXperience Platform (SXP) on Azure, the cloud-based version of its Windows Server OS, to power the Video Showcase Web site on Microsoft.com.
While the report, as you would expect, lauds the performance of SXP in making a site that looks slick, is reliable and is inexpensive to build, the writers do share “lessons learned” from the experience.
Video Showcase is a site for viewing about 8,000 Microsoft videos offering information on product lines such as Windows 7 and Office 2010, insight into what it’s like to work at Microsoft or replays of TV ads like the Bing reimagining of the Thunderbird over the cliff scene from “Thelma and Louise.” As the onetime owner of two T-Birds, I found that deeply disturbing.
SXP is a multi-tenant Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering that enables social media capabilities across Microsoft.com and Video Showcase is its first tenant, the company says. The showcase’s social media capabilities allow visitors to rate videos and submit comments while the operators of the site can monitor comments, tasks that had previously been performed by a third party on-premise solution. SXP runs on Windows Azure and the SQL Azure Database, the blog post explains, although the Video Showcase Web servers themselves are standard Microsoft servers running in the company’s internal data center. In short, SXP manages the comments and ratings while physical servers play the videos.
The SXP service began serving the Video Showcase site in April and after 120 days in use, the MSIT team documented these comparisons to the third party on-premise solution: site availability was 99.98 percent, versus 99.1 percent before SXP; IT support costs were $1,050 per month versus $15,000; planned downtime was zero, versus two to four hours; and the hardware provisioning time shrank to 30 minutes from two to three weeks for virtual servers or five to six weeks for physical servers. The site also recorded increases in unique visitors, page views, the number of videos rated and the number of comments made.
“The SXP team used familiar development tools to quickly create a solution based on Windows Azure that has extremely high availability, scalability, and performance,” the report states. And, of course, they saved a bunch of money.
While you would expect the case study to show a positive result, it does come with some caveats. “Writing code for Windows Azure is very familiar for developers … but there are also some important differences to keep in mind.”
First off, success depends on using the right application, the report states. While Azure is suited to building a Web application or a compute-intensive application, it is not yet a general-purpose application development platform. It’s also important to bring the operations team on-board for such a project because a cloud-based app will have an impact on operations. And it’s important to integrate security into the cloud application, especially if an exchange of data inside and outside the firewall is involved.
The MSIT team also stressed the importance of performance testing on the Wide Area Network (WAN) before going live. Running performance tests in Visual Studio and Azure “can be challenging,” the report states; if there is a problem with the WAN link between the client and server, “the network can quickly become a bottleneck.”
Lastly, the report warns of a possible loss of connection when a database running in SQL Azure is moved for load balancing purposes.
It’s encouraging to see that Microsoft isn’t just pitching us a “just flip this switch and it all works like magic” whitewash but provides some real honest insight into these new technologies that customers are still trying to figure out.
