Microsoft SQL AzureCustomer Solution Case Study

Online Ad Firm Cuts Costs, Scales to Handle Peak Holiday Demand, with Cloud Solution

OverviewCountry or Region: United StatesIndustry: Internet advertising

Customer ProfileLinkShare, a division of Rakuten, provides full-service online marketing solutions for e-commerce businesses. The company is headquartered in New York City, with more than 200 employees worldwide.

Business SituationTo power its LinkShare Lightning e-commerce application, LinkShare sought cost-effective cloud platform and database technologies that would easily scale to meet peak-season Internet traffic.

SolutionLinkShare chose the Windows Azure platform, including Microsoft SQL Azure, which makes it possible to scale LinkShare Lightning on demand and pay only for the compute resources it uses.

Benefits High scalability and performance Lower IT costs Rapid development Efficient database architecture,

simplified IT management

“The rough estimate is that we’ll be saving $10 million to $15 million dollars a year on hardware, software, and development with the Windows Azure platform when our global system is fully deployed.”

James Chen, Chief Technology Officer, LinkShare Labs

LinkShare, a provider of online advertising solutions, sought a cloud platform to power its next-generation, cost-per-action–based application, LinkShare Lightning. The company examined other leading cloud platforms but chose the Windows Azure platform, including Microsoft SQL Azure, for its high scalability, pay-as-you-go pricing, and support for easy development. LinkShare completed primary programming for its application in just three months using only three developers. Relying on SQL Azure, the LinkShare Lightning application has demonstrated it can easily scale to handle billions of online ad impressions during peak holiday traffic, without requiring expensive infrastructure. When the company finishes implementing its global system of cloud-based applications, it expects to save up to U.S.$15 million a year in hardware, software, and development costs.

SituationFounded in 1996, LinkShare Corporation is the performance marketing network for Rakuten, the eighth largest Internet company in the world. LinkShare provides e-commerce businesses with wide-ranging, online marketing services, including search engine marketing, lead generation, and affiliate marketing. LinkShare connects online advertisers with appropriate Internet sites that have available advertising space (publishers), helping both parties to acquire and retain new customers and increase business performance. LinkShare clients include Fortune 500 and other prominent and emerging companies doing business online, such as J.C. Penney, 1-800-Flowers.com, American Express, and Avon Products.

“Unlike a generic ad network, LinkShare gets paid based on conversions—actual completed sales—not just the number of ad impressions or users’ clicks,” explains James Chen, Chief Technology Officer at LinkShare Labs. “What differentiates us from competitors is that we focus on big, name-brand advertisers, and we offer expert consultative services along with our advanced patented technologies.”

In 2009, LinkShare developed a vision to quickly and cost-effectively deploy its advertising solutions worldwide. Chen says, “We wanted to provide a truly global system so that we could develop advertising applications that can be used anywhere. Behind this goal were two drivers: performance and cost.”

As a first step in realizing this vision, LinkShare created specifications for an advanced e-commerce application called

LinkShare Lightning. Initially serving the North American market, this application would support cost-per-action (CPA) advertising that complements affiliate marketing by filling open ad space inventory with ads optimized for the publisher. LinkShare Lightning would also track ad performance to pay the publisher’s commission based on the ad’s success, and would be easy to use for both advertisers and publishers.

The company sought a technology platform on which to build and run LinkShare Lightning that would require minimal development effort, support global deployment, and easily scale to track billions of daily ad impressions during peak holiday periods. With these criteria in mind, LinkShare determined that only a cloud-based platform would offer the combination of flexibility and cost-effectiveness the company needed.

SolutionIn October 2009, LinkShare began testing the Windows Azure platform from Microsoft, which includes the Windows Azure development, service hosting, and service management environment, as well as Microsoft SQL Azure—the first cloud-based relational and self-managed database service built on Microsoft SQL Server 2008 technologies.

Before choosing the Windows Azure platform, the company considered and rejected two other well-known cloud platform solutions. “The first one would have required too much investment to make it productive for our developers, so it soon became a choice between the second one and Microsoft,” says Chen. “What made

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“With Windows Azure, in just three months, with three developers, we built our first application—LinkShare Lightning—that moves us in the direction of our global cloud-based vision.”

James Chen, Chief Technology Officer, LinkShare Labs

Windows Azure the clear winner over the second option is that Microsoft is a world-class provider of ‘platform as a service.’ Additionally, cloud innovation and feature development is proceeding at a much faster pace at Microsoft than at the competitors we looked at. Every quarter, new Windows Azure tools come out to support easy development, versus other platforms, where you have to do a lot of the work yourself by piecing together open source components to complete your development stack.”

The LinkShare Lightning application is fully designed and architected for the cloud from the ground up. It takes advantage of two Windows Azure role capabilities. The web role (a role customized for web application programming as supported by Internet Information Services 7 and ASP.NET) powers the LinkShare Lightning publisher and advertiser websites, as well as transaction tracking, through standard Representational State Transfer (REST) and Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) interfaces. The worker role (a role that is useful for generalized development, and which may perform background processing for a web role) is used for ad optimization algorithms and for transferring Windows Azure Table data to SQL Azure.

Additionally, LinkShare Lightning is a highly data-intensive application, so it uses multiple data management technologies, resulting in a hybrid deployment of both cloud-based and on-premises Microsoft SQL Server 2008 databases that are used in the following ways:

Windows Azure storage services provide persistent, durable storage in the cloud.

The most important of these services for LinkShare Lightning are Queue service for reliable, persistent messaging between services, and Table service, for structured storage that can be queried. Specifically, the application uses Windows Azure storage for information that is important but does not require real-time action, such as the referral URL, IP address information, and any click-through data.

SQL Azure stores vast amounts of real-time LinkShare Lightning transaction information that requires immediate processing across the application’s multiple subsystems.

SQL Server 2008 verifies database integrity across all data sources. Specifically, LinkShare Lightning transfers data from Windows Azure storage and from multiple, separate SQL Azure databases into SQL Server. From there, SQL Server analyzes the information to check it for accuracy, and pushes a summary version of the information back to a reporting database in SQL Azure.

Development planning of LinkShare Lightning began in February 2010, with coding starting in April. It was created using the Microsoft .NET Framework and the Microsoft C# programming language. The application went into production in July, and the global version will also use a front end based on the PHP scripting language. The company plans to move additional applications to the Windows Azure platform in the coming months. Chen says, “In order for us to scale our business globally and also profitably, we need a solution like the Windows Azure platform.”

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BenefitsBy deploying LinkShare Lightning on the Windows Azure platform and taking full advantage of SQL Azure technology, LinkShare benefits from high scalability—which is especially important during peak holiday advertising times—without expensive investment in traditional IT infrastructure. The company is also able to produce applications like LinkShare Lightning faster and with fewer developers than before, and the efficient database architecture of the Windows Azure platform offers high performance while simplifying IT management.High Scalability and PerformanceFor LinkShare, scalability is critical because the nature of its business is seasonal, with peak North American traffic that’s about 10 times higher than normal during the holiday shopping season. Says Chen, “We don’t want to add hardware for extra seasonal capacity, or to change our software to handle the load for a short period of time; and with SQL Azure, we don’t have to.”

On how the capacity is evaluated and measured, Chen adds, “We’ve done extensive testing to make sure we can adjust the number of instances of worker roles and web roles to handle traffic as the load goes up and down.” Initially, his team simulated 1.5 million ad impressions per day for two weeks, and then increased the number to 100 million. “We just kept on cranking up the number of instances to see how our application performed,” he continues. “We’re confident that we can scale LinkShare Lightning to easily handle over one billion impressions per day in North America without further code changes. Eventually, that won’t be a peak

load but a normal one, as we roll the system out to different countries.”

Chen goes on to explain how rapid database provisioning contributes to this scalability: “SQL Azure is flexible in supporting different architecture patterns. We can create new databases—new instances of SQL Azure—and the process is both completely on-demand and inexpensive. The best part of using SQL Azure is that we know our application is going to work no matter how big we scale it out.”

Lower IT CostsAccording to Chen, cost-effectiveness was a primary driver in selecting the Windows Azure platform, and SQL Azure in particular. “Historically, companies in our business would have to buy two fully redundant systems to be able to handle the peak load between November and early January. That’s very expensive,” he says. “SQL Azure is a great value—really inexpensive in the grand scheme of things—only a few hundred dollars a month in usage fees for us right now. This monthly pricing scheme model is ideal because we don’t have to go through procurement and pay upfront licensing costs.”

When the company implements its solutions worldwide, the total annual savings realized from the platform stand to be quite significant. Says Chen, “The rough estimate is that we’ll be saving [U.S.]$10 million to $15 million dollars a year on hardware, software, and development with the Windows Azure platform when our global system is fully deployed.”

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“The best part of using SQL Azure is that we know our application is going to work no matter how big we scale it out.”

James Chen, Chief Technology Officer, LinkShare

Chen also notes that the flexible pricing model contributes to innovation within LinkShare. “Anytime we want to try out something that requires an additional database, it’s easy to create a new one, change one, or shut one down,” he says. “SQL Azure is really flexible in terms of letting us pursue new product ideas without a big investment, and then rolling them out quickly.”

Rapid DevelopmentThe speed of development, testing, and deployment that the Windows Azure platform facilitates is a marvel, according to Chen. “There was an initial learning curve because our systems are fairly complex, but now it’s pretty simple for us to package our production code and push it out to Windows Azure,” he says. “With Windows Azure, in just three months, with three developers, we built our first application—LinkShare Lightning—that moves us in the direction of our global cloud-based vision. Going forward, we should be able to push out feature enhancements with one development team faster than we could with four teams in the past.”

About SQL Azure specifically, Chen adds, “Anybody with a SQL Server skill set can use SQL Azure. That makes development a seamless process if you’re already using Microsoft technologies and have enterprise applications that you need to connect to SQL Azure databases.”

Efficient Database Architecture, Simplified IT ManagementUsing multiple Microsoft data management technologies, LinkShare has designed its database architecture to maximize the performance of LinkShare Lightning. “The

complementary relationship between Windows Azure storage and SQL Azure is very important,” says Chen. “High-performance SQL Azure databases are ideal for our real-time processing, and inexpensive Windows Azure storage is ideal for all our other data. Additionally, we have a lot of SQL Azure databases, and we’re able to offload the complex task of data integrity checks to SQL Server, resulting in even better performance. Plus, the transfer of data among these database technologies is very smooth.”

Chen is also pleased with the system availability and simplified IT management of SQL Azure. “SQL Azure offers administration, patching, data backup, and so on, all provided by Microsoft. We really don’t have to manage Windows Azure or SQL Azure in the traditional way that on-premises software and data centers require.”

An added benefit is that support for the Open Data Protocol (OData) in SQL Azure helps make data available for internal analysis tools, such as PowerPivot for Excel 2010. “Another great reason for using SQL Azure is OData, which makes it easy to turn information into a consumable service,” says Chen. “For example, if our account management team needs to move data from a SQL Azure database into PowerPivot workbooks for Microsoft Excel, there’s no extra work for our technical team to expose that data in a neatly consumable form.”

He concludes, “I think almost all of the software development shops in the world will move in the direction we’re going—we'll handle development full time, and everything else will be taken care of for us

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in the cloud. When it comes to providing the best ‘platform as a service’ to developers, I think Microsoft is the visionary leader by far.”

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Windows Azure PlatformThe Windows Azure platform provides an excellent foundation for expanding online product and service offerings. The main components include: Microsoft SQL Azure. Microsoft SQL

Azure offers the first cloud-based relational and self-managed database service built on Microsoft SQL Server technologies.

Windows Azure. Windows Azure is the development, service hosting, and service management environment for the Windows Azure platform. Windows Azure provides developers with on-demand compute, storage, and bandwidth, and a content distribution network to host, scale, and manage web applications on the Internet through Microsoft data centers.

Windows Azure AppFabric. With Windows Azure AppFabric, developers can build and manage applications more easily both on-premises and in the cloud.– AppFabric Service Bus connects services and applications across network boundaries to help developers build distributed applications.– AppFabric Access Control provides federated, claims-based access control for REST web services.

Windows Azure Marketplace DataMarket. Developers and information workers can use the new service DataMarket to easily discover,

purchase, and manage premium data subscriptions in the Windows Azure platform.

To learn more, visit: www.sqlazure.com

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For More InformationFor more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers in the United States and Canada who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to:www.microsoft.com

For more information about LinkShare products and services, call (646) 943-8200 or visit the website at: www.linkshare.com

This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.

Document published January 2011

Software and Services Windows Azure Platform− Microsoft SQL Azure− Windows Azure

Microsoft Server Product Portfolio−Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Enterprise

Technologies− Microsoft .NET Framework− Microsoft C#− Microsoft PowerPivot for Excel 2010