Nike's Jordan Brand gives a lift to Microsoft's new Windows Azure |
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Nike's Jordan Brand gives a lift to Microsoft's new Windows Azure
It's not exactly an endorsement from The Man himself, but Nike's Jordan brand is using a collection of Microsoft technologies -- including the new Windows Azure cloud-computing platform -- for a new site that marks its 25th anniversary by letting fans upload photos of themselves and their Air Jordan shoes and clothes.
The site uses those images to make a mosaic that recreates a famous poster of No. 23 flying through the air on his way for a dunk. Built on Azure, the site Microsoft's Silverlight DeepZoom technology for zooming in and around the page. Microsoft is promoting the new Jordan site in a bid to bring more attention to Azure, which started billing customers this week as part of its formal rollout.
Microsoft's Windows Azure team has more on the underlying technology in this post. Here's an excerpt:
The Web application was built on the Windows Azure platform to implement the mosaic because Windows Azure is able to easily calibrate the number of Web Role instances needed to support unpredictable traffic bursts, and it can also separately scale out back-end Worker Role instances to support a rapid regeneration of the mosaic based on new photo uploads from consumers. By employing up to 40 backend (and parallel) Worker Role instances, a new mosaic can be regenerated in approximately 10 minutes to include new photos that were uploaded since the last mosaic was constructed. Considering that a typical mosaic is more than 5 gigapixels and, if just a single instance were used it would take approximately 5 hours to generate, this speed underscores the benefit to scaling out processing in a linear fashion.
In case you were wondering, that's the technology geek's equivalent of playground trash talk. "Yeah, that's right, I can scale up exponentially to support unpredictable traffic bursts. Whatcha gonna do about that, huh? Boom!"
For its own sake, the Azure team had better hope the site holds up under the traffic.
In any event, the mosaic is pretty cool. I have to admit, I got a little nostalgic looking at all those Jordans. Kinda makes me want to find a hoop at lunch.
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