Hey peeps, just a quick technical update to let you know the Scratch Audio collaborative platform is now running entirely on Microsoft Azure. For the techies out there who like to hear about the internals of our operation, this means our service is now backed by one of the largest computing clouds available and you benefit from the scalability, reliability, awesomeosity afforded by running on it.

From an implementation standpoint the migration from a traditional hosted environment turned out to be easier than anticipated. There were some minor code changes required mostly around how disk access works (and I don’t want to downplay the work involved since Eric did it all and it’s still rocket science from my perspective) but apparently it was a fairly smooth transition. Eric had the foresight to architect the app so all disk access occurred via a single class so it apparently involved changing the way things worked in one place.

The good news is absolutely nothing changes from your perspective as a user of the service but performance should be snappier on a daily basis. Plus if Oprah decides to make a joint audio recording with The View using our platform, service to you will continue uninterrupted whereas before such a traffic spike would have likely vaporized our server. One thing to note for the other young startups out there running a windows stack in a traditional hosted environment: you can take advantage of the BizSpark program and get a bunch of free Azure hosting in your first year. Find more details about that deal here. Have fun on the new souped up system!