1. Incubation: Looking glass -
Progression to Windows Azure
Patrice Pelland
Principal Dev Manager, Microsoft Corp.

2. Social Monitoring – Incubation
• Social Monitoring incubation project codename Looking Glass
• Silverlight 4 application, Windows Phone 7 application and iPhone/iPad
application – Code Reuse.
• Progression of the back end from
• Windows Server 2008 R2 with WCF Services, SQL 2008 R2
• Windows Azure (Web Roles and Worker Roles), SQL Azure
• Windows Azure (Web Roles and Worker Roles), SQL Azure, Azure
Storage (Table Store, Blob storage)

5. WP 7 Application

6. Code Re-Use Explorations
• Since Silverlight is X-Platform and X-Browsers we
were able to have our project run (with the SL
download) across browsers and cross OS.
• Worked on PCs, Mac OSx and Linux (via Moonlight)
• Worked on iPhone/iPad via Monotouch
• Kept 85% of the code to have the code run on
iPhone/iPad and Linux.

7. Back End Progression – Phase 1

8. Why it did not scale?
• Regular Social APIs with limitations on # of
calls
• Generic Data Acquisition Service
• No partitioning

9. Back-End Progression – Phase 2

10. Scalability issues still there for the back end…
• Crawling became more scalable with worker
queues
• Still not the complete data corpus and not fast
enough to query – Full text index and tag
indexes

11. Web Roles Web Roles WCF CDN (xaps, jpg, png, css, …)
Azure Blob
LG Worker Role Media Storage –
LG SQL Azure
Posting Backup Index
LG
Sentiment Bing Indexers Sentiment Visualization Services
Indexers Processing
Processing
LG Bing + LG LG – LMI
Bing Data Agg.
Internet Data Aggregators Data Aggregators Agg.
Data
LG Azure
Bing Azure
Incubation v2.0 Phase 3

12. Conclusion…
• Moving to Azure was cost effective
• Reliable, scalable and available
• Changing the approach to using indexers gave
us a more interesting and complex query and
filtering capability.