Safefood 360 choose Windows Azure as their PaaS solution
Philip Gillen, Chief Operating Officer with Safefood 360 talks about his approach to choosing a Platform as a Service (PaaS) provider.
Safefood 360 is a niche compliance software solution which is built using the ASP.Net MVC framework and leverages the Microsoft Windows Azure platform. Although just launched in early 2011 it is being used by companies in over 50 countries around the world. It helps food manufacturing businesses comply with ever increasing food safety legislation which aims to improve the safety and quality of the world’s food supply.
When we embarked on the project to build Safefood 360 in 2009 we looked closely at several hosting platforms including; traditional data centre hosting, Amazon Web Services, Windows Azure, Google App Engine and even Force.com. We were keen to find a low maintenance hosting solution as we had spent enough years with our heads stuck in Servers and DB’s and felt that it was time to jump on the PaaS bandwagon. Both Force.com and the Google App engine would have required developing our solution in an unfamiliar codebase so they were ruled out relatively quickly. This left us with AWS, private hosting or Azure. After careful research, and even though it was new at the time, we decided upon Windows Azure because it allowed us to develop our application in a familiar environment, with minimal configuration and commissioning of servers/databases and with the ability to scale the application quickly in line with increasing demand.
Safefood 360 is now live and takes advantage of an elastic web/worker role configuration across multiple datacentres utilising Azure Tables for logging & audit data and Blob storage for documents and other static objects. SQL Azure serves the relational database and we are currently in the process of building out our reporting on top of SQL Azure Reporting Services. Looking back we are happy with the decision we made and bar a very slight hiccup in April there has been no downtime whatsoever and performance is consistently very good. The monthly cost is predictable and can be easily scrutinised with granular itemised billing. Over other options at the time we are confident that we have saved money on both the operational costs associated with the Azure platform and the reduced human costs associated with quick deployments and minimal configuration.