I summarize two years of practical experience developing campus-wide business applications on Microsoft's Azure platform. Our results are more rapid application development, better uptime and disaster recovery, and infrastructure costs two orders of magnitude lower than traditional on-premises solutions.

1. CLOUD APPLICATIONS
Adam Getchell (acgetchell@ucdavis.edu)
as architected by Scott Kirkland (srkirkland@ucdavis.edu)
College of Agricultural & Environmental Sciences

2. PROGRAMMING STARTED 9/1/2011
• AT PEAK 4 PROGRAMMERS, 2 DESIGNERS
• MANY CONTRIBUTIONS FROM OTHERS
!
PROJECT BETA 4/1/2012
• MAINTENANCE AND UPDATES CONTINUE
• MOST RECENT UPDATE 9/5/2014
• REPLACING SERVICENOW! IN SHARED SERVICES CENTER
• SPECIFIC UPDATES FOR PROCURE-TO-PAY
!

3. • $300 MILLION INTRANSACTIONS, $136M COMPLETED
• 60,000 ORDERS
• 3689 ACTIVE USERS IN 1092 WORKGROUPS
• 300,000 APPROVAL/EDIT ACTIONS
• 79,000 FILES
• 250-500MB OF FILES UPLOADED DAILY
• 97GB OF STORAGE

5. First code commit 1/23/13
•At peak 3 programmers, 1 designer
!
Beta test Summer Session II, 2013
•Updates and maintenance continues
•Most recent update 8/4/2014

6. Used by more than 2,000 instructors across 60 academic departments
!
Fall 2013
•1452 courses, 26066 responses
Winter 2014
•2170 courses, 43197 responses
Spring 2014
•2338 courses, 44214 responses, 23689 students
!
Overall 70% response rate. Hundreds of thousands of questions and answers are
collated automatically and immediately available upon final grade submission

8. HOW MUCH DOES IT COST?

9. AZURE MONTHLY COSTS
Month Charge
June 2013 $
26.81
July 2013 $
78.60
August 2013 $
28.20
September 2013 $
58.89
October 2013 $
68.35
November 2013 $
70.15
December 2013 $
86.93
January 2014 $
88.53
February 2014 $
88.91
March 2014 $
216.42
April 2014 $
101.36
May 2014 $
189.91
June 2014 $
158.34
Total $
1,261.40
Average Monthly Cost $
97.03

10. CHALLENGES

11. INEFFICIENT WEB SERVICE CALLS

12. LOCAL INFRASTRUCTURE
Infrastructure = required system components, the absence of which causes system failure (e.g.
firewall, filesystem services)
Service = required system data, the absence of which causes system failure for those clients
that don't have cached copies of the data (e.g. DNS records, email, authentication cookies)
Azure Infrastructure Outages: 0 minutes 100.00%
Azure Service Outages: 0 minutes 100.00%
Azure app outages due to local failures 8 hours 48 minutes 99.90%
Azure app degradation due to local degradation 2 days 18 hours 37 minutes 99.24%
Total Azure app downtime due to local issues 3 days 3 hours 35 minutes 99.14%
January 2013-December 2013 uptime

13. ONTHE HORIZON
Giving! (With PCI 3.0 compliance)

14. CLOUD APPLICATIONS
Adam Getchell (acgetchell@ucdavis.edu)
as architected by Scott Kirkland (srkirkland@ucdavis.edu)
College of Agricultural & Environmental Sciences