Are you one of those people who want to make something special during the holiday season for your near and dear ones? Well, in that case, you’re sure to have browsed recipes from AllRecipes.com – one of the most popular and comprehensive database of food recipes for any season. This holiday season got even better as AllRecipes.com has turned to Microsoft Azure, a popular cloud platform, for sharing its recipes with millions of visitors like you.

AllRecipes.com is a food site owned by Meredith Corp, and has been in operation since 1997. Over these two decades, it has transformed the way people search for recipes, and in fact, has helped billions of people around the world to make any kind of dish. If you translate this to numbers, it services more than 1.5 billion people every year, and these visitors view about 95 recipes per second. Over the last few years, 66 percent of its visitors connect to it through their mobile device. These numbers are growing as more people around the world are exploring food beyond their comfort zone.

Typically, traffic to AllRecipes.com is cyclical. For example, the number of visitors on a Sunday afternoon is almost 60 percent more when compared to Monday morning. Likewise, traffic peaks during Thanksgiving and Christmas season as more people look for recipes to serve their family. A detailed study of its traffic pattern shows that eight weeks in November and December, especially during the holidays and the day before the Super Bowl generate the maximum traffic.

Since it’s traffic is cyclical and predictable, it makes sense for AllRecipes.com to move to the cloud. This way, it can choose a scalable plan that will handle its traffic during the peak season, and will expand during the off-seasons to help the company save some money. Without the cloud, this company would have to invest in large infrastructure, which would have not just cost not just a ton more money, but would also be underused during the off season. With cloud, AllRecipes.com has the option to expand or scale back, according to its needs.

Another important reason to move to the cloud is the expected responsiveness. Most chefs who visit the site are looking for ideas while dropping their kids at soccer practice or while shopping at the grocery stores. Sometimes, they may be at a place where the network is not great, and yet they may want to have an idea of what to make for dinner once they’re back. To cater to these customers, who incidentally form the largest customer base, it’s important that the site is fast, responsive, and takes as little data as possible. Again, this can be best achieved on a cloud platform like Microsoft Azure rather than on a data center that could be located miles away from the visitor’s location.

So, why did the company choose Azure, and not anything else? The simple answer is this site is built on C#, so Azure was the natural choice!

All this means is you’re sure going to spend a lot less time waiting for the site to load, and a lot more time cooking and having fun with your family and friends.

Merry Christmas!

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