Microsoft Cloud Computing: interviewing technical manager Adrian Gonzalez of the San Diego public Security team

As part of the real World Windows Azure interview series, I interviewed Adrian Gonzalez, technical manager of the San Diego public Security team, to learn more about how Santiago uses Windows Azure to ensure that its emergency information Web site is ready for disaster. Read the success stories of the San Diego public security team here. Here is the interview content.

Himanshu Kumar Singh: Please give a brief introduction to the Santiago emergency website.

Adrian Gonzalez: San Diego, California, provides emergency, judicial, health and social services to its 30,000 inhabitants, providing municipal services to its unincorporated areas. The Santiago Emergency web site is used by Santiago to provide information before, during and after the disaster, and it is the source of official information in a massive emergency, providing a variety of recovery information about the impact of a major disaster.

HKS: How does the website work in the event of a massive emergency?

Ag:2007 October, a fire storm ravaged Southern California, sweeping 370,000 acres of Santiago and 515,000 of residents were forced to evacuate. The storm has forced the government to publicize urgent information more quickly and widely than ever before. With three universities and famous sites in Santiago, San Diego attracts students and holidaymakers from around the world, and all friends and relatives go home to search the Internet for their benefits during the fire.

Many of them visit government websites. There are many more links from CNN.com to there. Page visits per hour rose to 12,000 and led to a crash, and it took days to re-establish the site, which was a time of time!

HKS: What kind of Web site do you need to build these questions about how to shape your plans?

AG: We are determined to solve this limitation problem completely. We need an online business that can handle 12,000 or more page visits, because we don't know what the next visit will be, and there may be more. 2007 mobile phones are not very popular, but their share will be more and more big. We have to be ready for the future.

We also want to address other constraints, such as lack of visual features and time-consuming update processes that are not allowed in an Emergency services Web site.

HKS: What solution did you evaluate?

AG: To eliminate these differences, we're thinking of building two service sites that support 120,000 of page traffic per hour, 10 times times the limit of the original site. But the cost is high: building a data center costs about 350,000 dollars a year, and it takes 80,000 to maintain it.

We have considered the cloud computing platform hosted by the data center on the Internet to ease capital expenditure and scalability issues, we have considered the Amazon elastic Computing cloud, but realize that if we choose this service we still need to maintain our responsibility.

Then we saw the Dade County 311 Information System, which is hosted in Windows Azure. They have solved the same workflow and traffic spikes that we use Microsoft's cloud computing services, and have dramatically reduced operating costs.

HKS: How do you continue to use Windows Azure?

AG: We test Windows Azure's ability to support government scalability goals on a mock web site with a number of gold-capable Microsoft Partner Network member Adxstudio, and even access the site from Third-party resources around the world. Windows Azure passed the test easily, and the government commissioned Adxstudio to build its new emergency services Web site on the Microsoft Cloud computing platform.

HKS: Please describe the solution Adxstudio built.

Ag:adxstudio builds an extensible Content Management Web site using its flagship product, built on the Microsoft. NET Framework, Adxstudio portals for Microsoft Dynamics CRM. The new Emergency Services Web site supports live, streaming video, Twitter and RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds, navigation resources and threats to Bing Maps, location-based information, such as the nearest asylum site.

HKS: Migrating to Windows Azure What benefits do you see?

AG: Using Windows Azure, we've got the scalability and something else we're looking for. This is achieved with the goal of supporting 120,000 page hits per hour and using only three Windows Azure instances. When we see Windows Azure 162 times times more than our scalability goals, we think that's enough. Windows Azure's ability to meet demand is satisfying, regardless of how quickly the demand grows.

In addition, the portal site delivers more information than the original site, while making it easier for government personnel to update the information and make it easier for users to find it. Because portals are hosted in cloud computing, you can use Internet connections to update it from anywhere without having to connect to a virtual private network connection to a government network.

Online maps and data such as shelter status can be automatically updated and in real time, and these original manual processes take several minutes to a few hours to complete.

HKS: How about cost saving?

AG: We need Windows Azure to be extensible and cost-effective, and indeed it is. We use Windows Azure to avoid capital investment when we need to spend 350,000 dollars to build a non-cloud solution, we only pay by use. Non-emergency costs about 18,000 dollars a year, compared to maintaining a non-cloud solution cost 80,000 dollars a year: about 78% savings. I estimate that there will only be a 7,000-dollar increase in the month of emergency in a particular moon.

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