Microsoft Corporation operates a content delivery network for its Internet-based services. Bing Maps took advantage of the Windows Azure Content Delivery Network, to cache and deliver content at strategically placed, global nodes. By bringing content closer to customers, Bing Maps improved performance by 80 percent, attracted new customers, and gained the ability to cost-effectively scale.  

Business Needs
Microsoft Corporation operates in more than 100 countries, offering technology solutions to consumers and organizations. Bing Maps is no exception and delivers high-resolution aerial photography and maps to customers around the world. Bing Maps offers both consumer and business-to-business products and has gained more traction among the geographic information system industry competitors, including Google Maps and MapQuest, due in part to its excellent map coverage and high-quality images.

Though Bing Maps serves a global audience, it originally did so through just one Microsoft data center in Virginia, with a failover data center in California. However, Bing Maps is client-driven—that is, when a customer pulls up a map using Bing Maps, the data request is sent from wherever the client computer is located over the Internet to the data center in Virginia. With only one data center in the United States to process requests from around the world, customers who used Bing Maps sometimes experienced latency issues. “You can imagine the amount of time it takes to send data over the Internet from half-way around the world,” says Chris Pendleton, Bing Maps Technology Evangelist, Microsoft Corporation. “The bottom line was that we needed to improve the performance for our customers.”

Beyond performance issues, and despite the recognized quality of Bing Maps content, the latency resulted in lost business for Bing Maps, especially for its business-to-business offering. Performance, and the resulting loss of business, was such a concern that the Bing Maps team even considered building its own global data centers, but the cost was exorbitant.

The Bing Maps team wanted to bring mapping data closer to customers—no matter where they are located—to reduce latency and improve application performance. “Ideally, we wanted a data center with a global presence to which we could replicate content to and spread out across multiple nodes that are geographically dispersed—just like our customers,” explains Pendleton.

Solution
In 2009, the Bing Maps team started using the Windows Azure Content Delivery Network. The network, which initially started as a service for internal teams at Microsoft to use, enables customers to cache and deliver content at strategically placed locations around the globe. The Content Delivery Network, which also hosts content for microsoft.com, MSN, and other Microsoft services, is now available to the public as part of the Windows Azure platform.

By using the Windows Azure Content Delivery Network, we proved that our service was reliable. We retained our current customers, won back customers who had previously left, and gained new customers. Chris Pendelton Bing Maps Technology Evangelist, Microsoft Corporation

The Bing Maps team uses the Content Delivery Network to deliver its image tiles—more than 2 petabytes of aerial images that are each 256 pixels wide and 256 pixels high. Each of the image tiles are cached across the Content Delivery Network so that at run time, when a customer requests a map, that request is sent to the nearest Content Delivery Network node and the tiles are compiled and sent back for quick map-rendering.

Bing Maps also stores its licensed application programming interface (API) on the Content Delivery Network. The JavaScript API control, which is 242 kilobytes, enables developers to embed maps in web-based applications. Each time a customer visits a webpage that uses the API control, the large file is pulled from a Content Delivery Network node and executed at run time as close as possible to the client computer.

While the Content Delivery Network already delivers 2 petabytes of data for Bing Maps, the team plans to scale out and cache even more data at similar levels as it continues to expand its map coverage.

Benefits
As a result of using the Windows Azure Content Delivery Network, Bing Maps resolved its latency and performance issues; and by doing so, it also reversed customer attrition and attracted new customers. At the same time, Bing Maps gained cost-effective scalability.

Improved Application Performance
After implementing the Content Delivery Network, the Bing Maps team saw a significant improvement in application performance. Bing Maps also reduced the latency issues by caching image tiles and its API control at strategically placed geographic locations. “With the Content Delivery Network, we have an 80 percent increase in performance in some locations,” says Pendleton. “We are constantly testing our performance, and in most cases, Bing Maps is faster than other online mapping services in terms of how long it takes to process data requests.”

Reversed Attrition and Attracted New Customers
The considerable improvements in application performance ultimately translate to an improved customer experience; where Bing Maps had the high-quality images that customers expect, it is now also able to offer the performance that customers expect. “By using the Content Delivery Network, we proved that our service was reliable. We retained our current customers, won back customers who had previously left, and gained new customers,” says Pendleton.

Gained Cost-Effective Scalability
The Bing Maps team knew that it would be unrealistic and expensive to build out its own data centers. By using the Content Delivery Network, however, Bing Maps can scale as needed and cache global content while avoiding the expense and hassle of building additional infrastructure. “We don’t have to add servers if we bring on a new enterprise customer; we don’t have to add servers if we need to add petabytes of data; we just take advantage of a system that distributes content to additional nodes and lets us grow elastically and lets us regulate our costs,” explains Pendleton.

Additional Resources:
Bing Maps Official Website
Bing Maps
Bing Maps Blog

For more information about other Microsoft customer successes, please visit:
www.microsoft.com/casestudies