Case Study: eBay achieves scalable, cost‑effective cloud hosting on Windows Azure with Avanade

eBay Microsoft Windows Azure Platform Migration

eBay, the world’s largest online marketplace with roughly $60 billion in goods sold in 2009 and millions of active users, needed ways to drive IT efficiency and scale its highly customized, Java-based applications more quickly and cost-effectively. In 2010 it explored Microsoft’s Windows Azure Platform to determine whether cloud infrastructure could support its marketplace needs, using the iPad landing site as a low-risk, high-demand pilot to validate the approach.

Accenture and Avanade, alongside Microsoft, used their Windows Azure Factory to port the iPad site to Azure in three phases—manual porting, automated deployment/provisioning, and performance monitoring—leveraging tools like Visual Studio, Azure Tomcat Solution Accelerator and an Eclipse plug‑in. The pilot proved eBay could provision and host marketplace applications on the public cloud, demonstrated Azure’s flexibility, scalability, cost advantages and ease-of-use, automated deployment and monitoring, and yielded insights for a long-term cloud infrastructure strategy.

eBay