Case Study: Zooniverse achieves enhanced performance and faster deployments with Microsoft Azure

Zooniverse’s move to Azure enhances citizen science

Zooniverse, the world’s largest people-powered research platform, needed a more reliable, scalable, and cost-effective infrastructure to handle traffic spikes, complex volunteer-driven data workflows, and tight grant-based budgets. After running on AWS, the team chose Microsoft Azure and products such as Azure Front Door, Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), and Azure Database for PostgreSQL to modernize its platform and improve collaboration with Microsoft.

Microsoft Azure helped Zooniverse migrate gradually with minimal disruption, moving traffic through Azure DNS and Azure Front Door, shifting applications to AKS, and transferring data to Azure databases and Azure Blob Storage. The result was a more cohesive platform with better performance and less downtime, deployments cut from about an hour to 3–10 minutes, roughly 10–20% lower monthly bills, and just 17 hours of total downtime during the migration year.

Zooniverse

Zach Wolfenbarger

Software Developer