WordPress on Azure: The Awesome Choice Saves Microsoft 75 Percent of Hosting Costs

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1 Customer Solution Case Study Enable application innovation WordPress on Azure: The Awesome Choice Saves Microsoft 75 Percent of Hosting Costs It turns out that Azure Websites is an awesome platform for WordPress. We ve used it to solve our hosting problems and get back to creating great content. Brian Costea, Site Manager, Microsoft Office blogs Blogging is more important than ever at Microsoft, where the company s blogs are now used to make major product announcements and disseminate other news. So when Microsoft sought a new blogging environment, it wanted the best option whether that option was one of its own products or not. Ultimately, it chose the highly popular, opensource WordPress. For the hosting platform to support it, Microsoft again sought the best option, no matter who offered it. It didn t have far to look Microsoft Azure Websites. A blog manager calls Azure Websites an awesome choice for WordPress, and the numbers bear him out. Blog sites see uptime as high as five nines ( percent), surpassing the service-level agreement. Managers regain the 30 percent of their time that they formerly spent on site administration, and use it to generate more content and enhanced site features. And Microsoft saves up to 75 percent of the fees it formerly paid to external hosters.

2 If a blog isn t up when the media tries to get to it, it can cost us millions of dollars in the loss of earned exposure. Ted Roduner Senior Product Manager Microsof You might think that Microsoft uses only its own software to run its business. You d be wrong. We re a multibillion dollar company, but our business units run lean and mean, says Mark Brown, a Senior Product Marketing Manager at the company. They can t afford to use anything but the best tool for any given job. Most of the time, that s our own software. But even when it s not, we go with what s best. That no-nonsense philosophy was behind a major change in 2014 in how blogs are produced and hosted. Over the past few years, blogging at Microsoft has evolved from an informal and not terribly important marketing tool into a primary means of communicating major news. When Microsoft announced Microsoft Office for ipad, for example, it did so on its Office blog and quickly saw the news attract more than two million page views. Page views into the hundreds of thousands aren t unusual for announcements ranging from new versions of Windows Phone, Bing, and Microsoft Surface. These can represent spikes of 500 percent or more from routine traffic. Reliability Is the New Crucial As blogs become more important to the Microsoft marketing machine, the demands on those blogs grow, too. Reliability is absolutely crucial, says Ted Roduner, a Microsoft Senior Product Manager who oversees five blogs for the Bing service. If a blog isn t up when the media tries to get to it, it can cost us millions of dollars in the loss of earned exposure. And reliability had become a problem. Most of the big Microsoft blogs were hosted at third-party datacenters. When a major Internet backbone to one of those datacenters went down and stayed down for days, it took the Office blog down with it. Scheduled downtime for maintenance resulted in brief outages that were no longer acceptable, given the increased importance of the blogs. Even without an outage, managing the servers was a strain on marketing managers who were supposed to be focusing on creating content. Roduner spent about 30 percent of his time and US$250,000 annually in contracted services to manage the Bing blogs. I m a marketer, not a tech person, he says with a hint of exasperation. I spent my mornings on the phone to the offshore maintenance team and had to field calls in the middle of the night as well. An Inflexible and Expensive Process Managing the blogs was an inflexible process, too. Senior PR Manager Dan Laycock, who oversees the Surface blog, couldn t access his site remotely unless he had his corporate PC with him, making it difficult to quickly post timely content when he was away from the office. For Chris DeMaria, Senior Content Publishing Manager for the company s News Center site and related blogs, the pain was being dependent on outside support personnel for any site changes. I was completely locked out at the server level, he says. For any change to the sites, I could only place a phone call and hope for the best. Some of the blogs were incurring sixfigure annual hosting fees. That might not make them major expenses on the Microsoft balance sheet, but they were major expenses within the budgets of their business units. Clearly, it was time if not past time for a change.

3 An Unsurprising, Awesome Choice The time came when Microsoft needed to upgrade not only its hosting platform, but its blogging software as well. That software, like the underlying hosting platforms, was deemed an expensive drag on productivity and agility. A search for an alternative ended up with an unsurprising choice: WordPress. The open-source software isn t a Microsoft product, but Microsoft, like much of the market, decided it was the best one, given its flexibility, ease of use, and robustness. That left Microsoft with the task of selecting the best hosting platform for WordPress, one that would address its litany of concerns with external hosters. Again, it looked for the best choice regardless of its origin. This time, it chose an in-house solution: Microsoft Azure Websites. It turns out that Azure Websites is an awesome platform for WordPress, says Brian Costea, Site Manager for the Microsoft Office blogs, which kicked off the mass migration to Azure Websites in January We ve used it to solve our hosting proble ms and get back to creating great content. On-Demand Reliability One of the problems that Costea solved with Azure Websites was unreliability. He hosts the Office blogs in a pair of Azure datacenters on the US East Coast and West Coast that serve as primary and failover sites. The automated traffic manager capability in Azure Websites mediates between them. Nine months later, he hasn t seen any downtime nor have the millions of visitors to the Office blogs. That performance has led Costea and his colleagues to consider expanding their use of Azure Websites. Roduner, who oversees some of the more heavily trafficked blogs, uses those same two datacenters as live, primary hosts and the traffic manager as a load balancer between them. When he anticipates traffic spikes in response to major news, he uses the Azure Management Console to add capacity. When the spikes are unanticipated, Azure autoscaling capability ensures that the extra capacity is available. Because our blogs are on the Bing site, we re held to the same uptime standard as the rest of Bing: five nines, says Roduner. We didn t always meet that standard before. On Azure Websites, we do. Costea expected that the move to Azure Websites would boost reliability. What he didn t anticipate was that he would gain a disaster recovery solution for his blogs, too. In the event of a catastrophic incident at the primary datacenter, the blog can continue to run from the secondary site. We always knew we needed disaster recovery capability, but it was an enormous expense, he says. After we moved to Azure Websites, we realized that we had our disaster recovery solution at no extra expense. No More Babysitting Costea and his counterparts at the other Microsoft blogs used to spend up to 30 percent of their time on site maintenance, or speaking with the vendors responsible for site maintenance. They don t any more. For example, for DeMaria, who formerly had no visibility into maintenance for the News Center site and blogs, the difference is like coming from the darkness into the noonday sun. I don t have to babysit or troubleshoot my servers any more, he says. Azure Websites creates its own alerts; it even has self-healing properties. I can see the status of all my sites from a single dashboard. This has given me back several With the move to Azure Websites, administration has become a far smaller part of my week, so I can focus on content creation. Brandon LeBanc, Senior Marcom Manager, Microsoft

4 Azure offers both command line and UI, and pretty sophisticated options. That s unusual; you don t get that with Amazon, for example. We re now recommending Azure to our other clients. Brad Williams, CEO, WebDevStudios hours per week, which I use to add new features to the sites and to work with other teams to enhance their web presence. Over at the Windows blog, Brandon LeBanc had a similar experience. The Senior Marcom Manager administers the blog and is its chief contributor. With the move to Azure Websites, administration has become a far smaller part of my week, so I can focus on content creation, he says. Our visitors see a lot more content from me. And not having to respond to administrative problems has made a huge difference in my not having to work nights and weekends. Saving up to75 Percent on Fees Giving up third-party hosters has also lightened the load on the business units budgets. The amount they save by moving to Azure Websites varies based on their previous hosting agreements and the size of their workloads, but most see savings of at least 50 percent and some see as much as 75 percent. They ve moved to a Microsoft platform, of course, but the blog managers say that the fees they pay are comparable to what external customers pay and so are the savings. For example, DeMaria says the savings for the News Center site and blogs is 62 percent for Azure use tha t autoscales from three to eight large (quad-core) Azure instances in each of two datacenters. The Windows blog saves more than 50 percent which adds up to more than $100,000 per year. The Office blog, which scales from 6 to 20 instances in each of two datacenters, has reduced costs by 75 percent. More Work More Quickly Yet another benefit of the move to Azure Websites is the increase in agility: it s simply easier to do much of the work of enhancing, improving, and expanding the blogs. As a result, that work gets done more quickly and more frequently. For example, the Microsoft teams gave staff members at their external design agency New Jersey based WebDevStudios access to the Azure sites without undergoing the credentialing and other related hassles of giving them access to the Microsoft internal network. It wouldn t have been practical to host our site internally, says Filip Lazar, Senior Program Manager, who manages the company s OneDrive blog. With Azure Websites, we avoided onboarding our vendors with corpnet accounts and managing VPN access. Lazar, like many of his counterparts at Microsoft, also takes advantage of Azure Websites to develop and test new functionality such as support for new browsers and devices without having to maintain a separate development and test environment. With Azure Websites, development and test are faster and cheaper, so we can get innovations out to our users more quickly, he says. The View from Outside One of the few people involved in the move to Azure Websites who s not on the Microsoft payroll is Brad Williams, CEO of vendor WebDevStudios, which handles many WordPress projects. His company managed the migrations and redesigns for most of the blog sites. He had experimented with Azure when it was first released back in 2010, but hadn t used it for a client until this project. When he took a new look at Azure, he was surprised by what he saw.

5 Azure is pretty impressive, Williams says. I m not a systems administrator, but I could configure sites with failover capabilities through a few clicks in the UI and feel comfortable doing it. For people who are systems administrators, Azure offers both command line and UI, and pretty sophisticated options. That s unusual; you don t get that with Amazon, for example. We re now recommending Azure to our other clients. For more information about enabling modern business applications, go to: cloud-os/modern-business-apps.aspx For More Information About Microsoft Products and Services Call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) Customers in the United States and Canada who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to: This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY. Document published October 2014