Facebook accelerator meets the Cloud!

+ = Windows Azure Toolkit for Facebook

One of the exciting announcements last week at sxsw was the release of the Facebook Azure Toolkit (https://bit.ly/azurfb) for download at codeplex by Jim Zimmerman (Thuzi) and Gunther Lenz (Microsoft). 

The Facebook Azure toolkit provides the ability to rapidly develop Facebook applications that leverage Windows Azure to profit from all the benefits of the cloud with a solid framework based on best practices. Facebook applications hosted in Azure provide a flexible and scalable cloud computing platform for the smallest and largest of Facebook applications. Whether you have millions of users or just a few thousand, the Facebook Azure Toolkit helps you to build your app correctly so that if your app is virally successful, you won't have to architect it again. You will just need to increase the number of instances you are using, and then you are done scaling. :). Jim Zimmerman demonstrated these capabilities in his session at the Mix10 conference, where he showed live Facebook applications, such as the Outback Facebook application and CloudPoll. Both are based on the Facebook Azure Toolkit. Furthermore CloudPoll will be made available for free to all Facebook users to create, manage, and evaluate polls for their pages, all using blob storage, SQL Azure, and compute hosted in Windows Azure. Try it for yourself, download the Facebook Azure Toolkit from codeplex and create you polls in Facebook with CloudPool, powered by Azure.