Case Study: Bing Maps IPS achieves rapid global scale and lower storage costs with Microsoft Azure

Bing Maps Cuts Costs While Globally Expanding Its Innovative Geospatial Search Services

Bing Maps, Microsoft’s global mapping service, faced rapid data and usage growth—ingesting about 20 TB per day (peaking at 100 TB) and handling roughly 40,000 tile requests per second—while stored imagery grew from 2.5 PB toward 6 PB. Its on-premises setup relied on ~2,000 back-end tile servers and could take up to 12 months to add capacity, creating scalability, cost, and management bottlenecks.

Bing migrated its image-publishing platform to Microsoft Azure Blob Storage, adding 8 PB across 32 storage accounts with geographically redundant storage, cutting capacity add time from months to about one week and enabling quick expansions (for example, 500 TB with minimal setup and moving 500 servers in one day). The cloud solution improved reliability and scalability, preserved sub-25 ms tile delivery while tripling ingest capacity, reduced TCO by eliminating on‑prem “gold” copies, and freed engineering teams to focus on product enhancements.

Bing Maps IPS

Igor Vodov

Senior Program Manager