How Microsoft.com Makes IT Happen

Are you curious how they do IT?

The Microsoft corporate Web site, Microsoft.com, is one of the largest and most heavily visited sites on the Internet, yet it maintains consistently high availability ratings. The team that operates the site meets these demands through a combination of carefully planned infrastructure; collaboration with other teams; and use of technology for maintenance, monitoring, and change management.

During the past eight years, Microsoft.com has achieved one of the highest rankings on the Internet in terms of site availability as measured by Keynote Systems Inc., an independent third party. According to the Keynote reports, Microsoft.com has been available more than 99.8 percent of the time for the past five consecutive years, and more than 99.9 percent of the time for the past two years. The site generates more than 1.2 billion hits per day from more than 57 million unique Internet Protocol (IP) addresses. This traffic generates 200 million daily page views, averages 30,000 Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) requests per second, and results in an average of 750,000 concurrent client connections.

Well Microsoft has published a white paper on their infrastructure and provide some insight into how they keep one of the most visited sites on the Internet up and running.

Overview of MSCOM Ops Infrastructure Design

Maintaining High Availability for Microsoft.com

The intended audience for this white paper is IT Managers, Website Managers, IT Pros, business decisions makers for Web strategy, and CIO’s.

I think most anyone in the field would enjoy reading this.

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Richard Hay  (3358 Posts)

Richard is the Owner of WindowsObserver.com and has been involved in tech for over 25 years. His first website – AnotherWin95.com – came online in 1995. Back then he used GeoCities Web Hosting for it and what you see here today is the result of the work he has continued on the site since 1995. In January 2010 his community contributions were recognized by Microsoft when he was awarded the Most Valuable Professional (MVP) Award for Windows Desktop Experience. In January 2011 he was renewed as a Microsoft MVP but in a new category called Windows Expert - Consumer and in January 2012 he received the award for the third time.