Case Study: MSN achieves global-scale scalability and faster innovation with Microsoft Azure

MSN Rolls Out Exciting New Services Built on Global-Scale Cloud Infrastructure

MSN, a two-decade-old web portal serving roughly 450 million monthly visitors and billions of page views, needed to rearchitect its 10-year-old platform for a mobile-first, more personalized, and globally scalable experience. The challenge was to rebuild infrastructure to support huge traffic spikes, provide regional editorial collaboration, and enable richer personalized services without ballooning maintenance overhead.

MSN rebuilt and migrated the entire site to Microsoft Azure in six months, moving 200 million documents (~100 TB) and running on a globally replicated architecture (30,000+ cores across multiple datacenters) with DocumentDB, Redis caching, Elasticsearch, and Service Bus for synchronization. The result: support for billions of daily page views, faster feature delivery (from monthly to daily), lower support costs, and the ability to deliver extensive personalization and new social features while redirecting staff from operations to product development.

MSN

Eric Passmore

Partner Development Manager, Interactive Content Experiences