2010 is proving an amazing year for Freestyle Interactive. Not least, our latest opportunity to directly influence the road-map of the Microsoft Azure platform.
Alongside 5 key influential UK digital agencies, Freestyle contributed to an informal roundtable designed to encourage discussion, feedback, and planning for future features and functionality of the platform with Microsoft Azure platform engineers in the US.
Azure went live on January 4th 2010, after more than a year in beta, with much of its feature set based on feedback from early adopters. Its ability to provide “elastic computing”, to scale up and down on demand, and a financial “pay as you go” model, along with its rich development toolset, makes it a very attractive offering for many web developers and architects. There are a number of published reports discussing the applicability of cloud to the digital marketing space, be it the capability to cope with ad-serving fluctuation or the potential integration of Facebook Connect with cloud services. Other recent examples include Domino’s Pizza using Azure to deal with the 50% traffic spike experienced during Super Bowl Weekend.
The Azure team are still in the processes of planning and prioritizing new features and are actively looking for feedback from the digital community. We contributed our ideas around the use of Azure for large scale digital asset management, advising Microsoft to consider a scalable cost model to make the platform feasible for true enterprise use.