Bing Social Built on Windows Azure

We all know about Bing.com/Social, a website that provides social insights of the people. It allows us to search for a topic and it also shows top 10 shared items. I recently came across in the msdn blog that Bing social was built on Windows Azure. That’s a great example for the power of cloud computing.

Bing Social was implemented using Windows Azure. There is code there that harvests the world’s Twitter and Facebook status updates, counts the hits and serves up the “Hottest Social Topics”. It was something that was created by a Microsoft developer in a matter of a couple months after he wrote the prototype. He was able to go from idea to launch of one of the world’s largest cloud services (it updates 500 Mil+ status posts per day) in about 12 weeks. And, as the posts from Twitter and Facebook grow, Azure scales with it automatically. Go ahead, play with it. It’s pretty cool.

I’m floored by that app, mostly by the way in which it was created. When people talk about “the power of the cloud” it now has real meaning to me. It means whatever worldwide internet-scale app I can think of can become a reality in a matter of weeks, not months or years.

Source: MSDN Blog