Azure Lessons Learned: Outback Steakhouse Facebook Application

Check out this Channel 9 Azure-focused episode with Jim Zimmerman, CTO of Thuzi where he talks about building their Facebook application for Outback Steakhouse that was hosted in Windows Azure. 

https://channel9.msdn.com/posts/benriga/Azure-Lessons-Learned-Outback-Steakhouse-Facebook-App/

At the time this video was filmed, Thuzi had yet to go into production with the Outback Facebook application. 

They launched in early November, 2009 and by the time of the PDC (under 2 weeks), they had over 450k fans.  Their forecast models had predicted viral geometric growth rates and due to the popularity of the offer - they were right!     

The solution leveraged the following components:

• Microsoft ASP.NET MVC Framework - to render a custom View for Facebook FBML
• Facebook Developer toolkit: http://facebooktoolkit.codeplex.com
• Windows Azure: Web/Worker Roles, Table Storage, Message Queues.
• SQL Azure: For relational data storage and reporting.
• Visual Studio Team System / Team Foundation Server

Be sure to also check out the PDC09 session SVC32 - where Thuzi was a featured in a session about real-world Azure scalability:  http://microsoftpdc.com/Sessions/SVC32

And while your at it - feel free to sign-up for a free Bloomin’ Onion at any of the thousands of Outback Steakhouse restaurants across the country...

http://www.facebook.com/outback

 

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