The GeoPoint location-based services platform uses the Service Bus in Windows Azure to transmit alerts to search-and-rescue applications. This allows the platform to scale massively to support hundreds of thousands or millions of vessels without any capital expenses. By migrating to Windows Azure, the developer avoided expensive infrastructure expansion and gained new capabilities like cross-firewall access and deep diagnostics tools.

1. Windows Azure
Customer Solution Case Study
Developer Scales Search-and-
Rescue Application to Help Save
More Lives at Sea
Overview “Our original architecture supported
Country or Region: United Kingdom
Industry: Professional services— 10,000 vessels, but the Windows Azure
Software engineering
platform enables us to support hundreds
Customer Profile of thousands or even millions of vessels,
Active Web Solutions (AWS),
based in Ipswich, United without any capital expenses.”
Kingdom, is a Microsoft® Gold Responding to high numbers of deaths at sea in
Certified Partner that
specializes in Web application
the fishing industry, the Royal National Lifeboat
and custom software Institution contracted Active Web Solutions (AWS)
development. It has 35
employees.
to create an automated sea-safety application.
AWS developed a location-based service
Business Situation
AWS needed a way to scale its
infrastructure, code-named GeoPoint, which
successful sea-safety transmits position data to a centralized tracking
application so that more lives
could be saved, but wanted to
and alerting system. AWS used GeoPoint to build
avoid an expensive MOB Guardian, a search-and-rescue application
development effort and costly
infrastructure expansion.
for fishing vessels. To extend GeoPoint to more
scenarios, AWS migrated it to the Windows Azure™
Solution
AWS migrated its application to
platform. By hosting GeoPoint in the “cloud,” in
the Windows Azure™ platform Microsoft® data centers, AWS attained massive
and used the Service Bus and
Access Control Service to
scalability, richer functionality, and lower
provide global communications infrastructure costs. AWS was able to quickly
scalability.
convert its application to a hosted service and
Benefits avoid the expense of building and managing a
• Massive scalability
• New market opportunities
data center. AWS also has the flexibility and
• Lower infrastructure, scalability to offer GeoPoint to many more
management costs
• Faster time-to-market
markets.

3. “Our original Situation Here’s how MOB Guardian
Fishing is a dangerous business. works: Individual crew members
infrastructure could Authorities estimate that every are outfitted with wearable
year 24,000 crew members personal safety devices that stay
handle drown, worldwide. In the waters in constant radio contact with a
approximately surrounding the United Kingdom, base unit fitted to the vessel.
an estimated 350 fishing crew Falling overboard breaks radio
10,000 boats, but lost their lives at sea between contact and automatically
1996 and 2007, according to the triggers an onboard alarm
we wanted to offer Royal National Lifeboat Institution simultaneous to sending a signal,
MOB Guardian to (RNLI). These figures do not via satellite, to the search-and-
include drowning related to rescue service. The onshore
the 500,000 leisure leisure and other non-fishing alarm includes the position and
craft. details of the casualty, typically
craft in the U.K. within two minutes of the incident,
and the millions of The RNLI wanted to improve so the emergency services can
these sobering statistics by immediately initiate the rescue.
marine users creating an automated alerting
system that would keep fishing In its first 18 months of operation,
boats and individual crew MOB Guardian has helped to
members in continuous contact save nine lives. AWS signed a 10-
with its search and rescue year contract with the RNLI to
services. So, in 2006, the RNLI host the back-end infrastructure
engaged Active Web Solutions for MOB Guardian—approximately
(AWS), a Microsoft® Gold Certified 15 servers, originally distributed
Partner and software developer, across two U.K. data centers for
to build the automated system. resilience. As more people adopt
AWS created a location-based MOB Guardian, however, AWS
service infrastructure, code- saw that it would approach the
named GeoPoint, which transmits physical limits on the number of
position data to a centralized vessels that it could monitor
tracking system and combined it using its hosting infrastructure.
with a variety of decision-support
and other systems to enable “Our original infrastructure could
location-aware scenarios. Using handle approximately 10,000
GeoPoint as the foundation, AWS boats, but we wanted to offer
then built MOB Guardian, a MOB Guardian to the 500,000
search-and-rescue application for leisure craft in the U.K. and the
fishing vessels, in 2008 (MOB millions of marine users
stands for “man overboard”). worldwide,” explains Richard
U.K. fishing crews gradually Anscombe, Commercial Director
began to adopt it. for Active Web Solutions. “Even
smaller boats that cannot afford
the MOB Guardian unit that sits

4. on the boat could use a mobile user interface, back-end
phone as a transmitter. The services, or databases. Whatever
scalability limitation lay in the we did to scale the solution
back-end infrastructure. We are a needed to support these original
small company with only 35 investments.”
employees, and we would find it
hard to accommodate the Last, but certainly not least, the
massive infrastructure that would RNLI needed to keep prices low
be required to offer MOB to encourage more fishing crews
Guardian more broadly.” to adopt MOB Guardian, and to
extend the service to the leisure
As AWS began to consider ways marine market.
to scale MOB Guardian, it
realized that it needed to Solution
preserve its investment in AWS had worked closely with
existing code, and users’ Microsoft during the original
investment in existing MOB development of MOB Guardian,
Guardian hardware. “We could and the application’s major
not reinstall MOB Guardian units components are based on
The GeoPoint location-based
services platform uses the already in the field or modify the Microsoft software—the Windows
Service Bus in Windows messaging protocol between the Server® 2003 operating system
Azure to transmit alerts to vessels and their services,” says and Microsoft SQL Server® 2005
search-and-rescue Richard Prodger, Technical database software—and built in
applications. Director for Active Web Solutions. the Microsoft Visual Studio®
“We also did not have the time or development system. In early
budget to rewrite the desktop 2008, Microsoft told AWS about
the Windows Azure™ platform,
adding that, when it was
available, it would be perfect for
MOB Guardian and other
GeoPoint applications.
The Windows Azure platform is a
cloud-computing services
platform hosted in Microsoft data
centers that provides computing,
storage, communications, and
authentication services for
creating scalable, pay-as-you-go
Internet services. It includes
Windows Azure, a cloud services
operating system; Microsoft SQL
Azure™ cloud database services;
the Service Bus and Access

5. Azure platform in Microsoft data
centers. Accordingly, emergency
alerts are no longer passed by
satellite to physical servers at
AWS, but rather are received by
satellite using the Simple Mail
Transfer Protocol (SMTP) and
delivered to a number of
message queues. Multiple
service instances read from the
queues, process the messages,
and store the data in Windows
Azure table storage. Emergency
alarms are then relayed through
the Service Bus to the end-user
monitoring application in the
search and rescue operations
center.
AWS administrators also use the
Service Bus to manage Windows
Azure services from a central
Control Service components; and network management system
online table and blob storage. (NMS), where they can easily see
which services are running,
Cloud-Based System current service performance, and
In August 2008, when Microsoft how many instances of each
released an early version of the service are running.
Windows Azure platform, AWS Troubleshooting a performance
built a prototype of its location- issue is usually as easy as
based infrastructure running on provisioning additional Windows
Windows Azure. In late 2009, Azure computing capacity within
AWS completed the production the NMS and watching service
version of its Windows Azure– levels improve as a result.
hosted version of GeoPoint,
identifying it as a location-based AWS uses another Windows
service that could be used in any Azure platform developer service,
type of search-and-rescue the Access Control Service, to
environment. enable highly secure
communications between
Instead of running on Windows GeoPoint and a number of on-
Server–based servers at AWS premises applications for
like its previous iteration, debugging and monitoring. The
GeoPoint runs on the Windows Access Control Service provides

6. an easy way to manage move to the Windows Azure
authentication and authorization platform, AWS wanted to instead
of applications and services push messages to a smart client,
through standards-based identity but this would have required
providers. Authorization decisions reengineering the application and
can be pulled out of the much development work.
application and placed in a set of “Instead,” Prodger explains,
rules that can translate incoming “with the Service Bus, we were
security claims into claims that able to route messages from the
applications understand. Windows Azure platform directly
to the client applications and
Rapid Migration to Cloud circumvent the technical
For AWS, implementing GeoPoint challenge of pushing messages
was primarily an exercise in through a firewall.”
migration. Developers had to
write very little new code and Cross-Firewall Connection to On-Premises
were able to transfer their Databases
existing skills with service- A second and related win from
oriented architecture to the using the Service Bus was the
Windows Azure platform. “By ability to connect cloud-based
Search-and-rescue teams use following a few simple guidelines GeoPoint to on-premises
a graphical user interface and using Microsoft development databases without exposing the
created by AWS to see tools, we moved the majority of data to the public Internet. For
precisely where troubled the application from our data example, identification
boats and crew members center to the Windows Azure information about individual
are. platform in a matter of weeks,” fishing crew members resides in
Prodger says. “The switchover a highly secure and confidential
from the original architecture to database that only needs to be
the Windows Azure platform accessed in the event of a
involved only network search-and-rescue operation. To
configuration changes to route make this data securely available
messages to the Service Bus.” to GeoPoint, AWS developed an
add-in called SocketShifter, which
No Changes to Front-End Application automatically bridges arbitrary
One key advantage of using the Transmission Control
Service Bus is that it eliminated Protocol/Internet Protocol
the need to modify the desktop (TCP/IP) endpoints and handles
application that the RNLI search- any intermediate firewall
and-rescue operation team uses traversal. This mechanism allows
to interact with GeoPoint. In the an on-premises SQL Server
original scheme, the client database to be accessed from
applications polled the back-end the cloud.
servers to see if there were any
alarms waiting for it. With the In-Depth Diagnostics

7. “I can sit at my The third big win for AWS from monitor and manage its Windows
using the Service Bus was the Azure–based application. “I can
desk and use ability to build sophisticated sit at my desk and use existing
diagnostics tools for its new network management tools to
existing network hosted application. “Once your see what’s going on inside the
management tools application is running in a cloud and control our
Microsoft data center rather than application,” Prodger says. “It
to see what’s your own, it’s difficult to would have been a lot harder and
troubleshoot issues at a granular a lot more expensive to do this
going on inside the level,” Prodger says. “We without the Service Bus, which
cloud and control needed to come up with a provides a means for routing
mechanism for giving us that level those messages and traversing
our application. It of control.” firewalls coming and going.
Because this agent is based on
would have been a In the Microsoft .NET Framework, the SNMP standard, we can use
lot harder … to do Microsoft has created any network management tool to
established techniques for doing monitor our application.”
this without the this using the .NET TraceListener
features. Tracing is a form of Soon, AWS plans to create a
debugging that allows developers custom Microsoft System Center
to track the health of applications. Operations Manager 2007
A trace listener collects, stores, management pack for GeoPoint
and routes tracing messages. so that it can use the familiar
AWS used the Service Bus and System Center Operations
Access Control Service to build a Manager as its central monitoring
TraceListener in the cloud, for console.
monitoring and diagnosing issues
with the GeoPoint infrastructure. Benefits
If something goes wrong with a By moving its sea-safety
GeoPoint server at the Microsoft application from an on-premises
data center, AWS can see infrastructure bound by physical
precisely what the problem is. server scalability constraints to
an Internet service, AWS has
To then fix that problem, which removed limitations for market
requires taking control of the growth—and provided several
GeoPoint application that is new capabilities. AWS avoided a
running in the Microsoft data million-dollar data center
center, AWS built a custom investment to scale the
Simple Network Management application and, using the Service
Protocol (SNMP) agent. This Bus, eliminated three to six
agent connects through the months of development effort.
Service Bus to an AWS With a highly scalable computing
management interface through platform, AWS can provide
which AWS administrators can excellent performance, no matter

8. “We can have a how many people and vessels the of requests and message
system is monitoring. volumes.”
much bigger server
Massive Scalability New Market Opportunities
infrastructure The most valuable benefit to AWS can even move beyond
without worrying AWS, and the RNLI, of moving search-and-rescue to address
GeoPoint to the Windows Azure the leisure boating and other
about buying, platform is the ease with which it markets. For example, AWS plans
can now scale the application. to build a Web application that
managing, or “Our original architecture enables boaters to interact with
patching servers. supported 10,000 vessels, but the the GeoPoint application during
Windows Azure platform enables their vacation—for trip tracking as
We would have had us to support hundreds of well as safety. Pleasure sailors or
thousands or even millions of yachters might access GeoPoint
to invest up to a vessels, without any capital from Facebook, for example, to
million dollars to ... expenses,” Prodger says. “To see a map of where they’ve
scale the application, we will been or to log their trip once they
make our solution a simply provision more computing get home. Of course, if they fell in
capacity and add more message the water, GeoPoint would also
global offering.” queues from the Windows Azure generate a rescue message, but
platform Web portal.” AWS could offer other services as
a bonus. “With Access Control
In fact, by using the Windows Service, we wouldn’t have to
Azure platform and developer force users to create another set
services, AWS has been able to of authentication credentials for
transform the original fishing such a scenario,” Prodger says.
vessel–focused MOB Guardian “We could let them use their
application into a broader Facebook credentials as their
geolocation services platform GeoPoint ID.”
that has more extensive
capabilities and can be marketed Lower Infrastructure, Management Costs
to many more customers. With Windows Azure, AWS has
avoided the huge capital expense
“If a guy falls off a boat in the of scaling out a physical on-
North Pacific, or a climber in the premises infrastructure. “We can
Colorado Rockies gets buried by have a much bigger server
snow, GeoPoint could infrastructure without worrying
immediately route the alarm about buying, managing, or
messages to the appropriate patching servers,” Prodger says.
search-and-rescue organization “We would have had to invest up
anywhere in the world,” Prodger to a million dollars to scale out
says. “With the Service Bus, we the physical infrastructure to
will be able to handle those kinds make our solution a global
offering.”

9. The company avoids high IT The company will continue to
staffing costs, as well, since it realize development and time-to-
shifts server management tasks market savings as it enhances
to Microsoft. “Microsoft handles GeoPoint. “Having a consistent
all operating system updates and and flexible communications and
upgrades, which occur without authentication framework
downtime,” Prodger adds. eliminates the need to build a
number of point-to-point solutions
AWS also sees reduced Internet for each usage scenario,”
service provider fees as it pays Prodger adds.
only for the Windows Azure
platform resources that it uses. In Improved Performance
this respect, AWS can make the With the Windows Azure platform,
infrastructure a variable cost and AWS has vast processing
thereby improve profitability. “We scalability for GeoPoint. “Not a
have been able to convert our single point in the application is
fixed monthly hosting fees to a throttled by performance,”
variable cost that grows based Prodger says. “If the message
on volume,” Anscombe says. load goes up, we create new
“We now pay only for the CPU, instances of our application, and
storage, and networking the Windows Azure platform
resources that we use.” dynamically copes with the
Correspondingly, by lowering scaling. That would have been
internal costs, AWS is able to very hard to do with another
keep costs low for its price- platform.”
sensitive customers while
maintaining profitability.
Faster Time-to-Market
AWS also slashed development
costs by using Windows Azure
platform developer services.
“Using the Service Bus and
Access Control Service saved us
three to six months of
development effort,” Prodger
says. “More importantly, without
these services, we would have
come up with a solution that was
far less flexible—if we would have
been able to create something at
all.”

10. For More Information Windows Azure Platform
For more information about The Windows Azure platform To learn more about the Windows
Microsoft products and provides an excellent foundation Azure platform, visit:
services, call the Microsoft for expanding online product and www.windowsazure.com
Sales Information Center at service offerings. The main
(800) 426-9400. In Canada, call components include:
the Microsoft Canada • Windows Azure. Windows Azure
Information Centre at (877) is the development, service
568-2495. Customers in the hosting, and service
United States and Canada who management environment for
are deaf or hard-of-hearing can the Windows Azure platform.
reach Microsoft text telephone Windows Azure provides
(TTY/TDD) services at (800) developers with on-demand
892-5234. Outside the 50 compute and storage to host,
United States and Canada, scale, and manage Web
please contact your local applications on the Internet
Microsoft subsidiary. To access through Microsoft data
information using the World centers. In addition, Windows
Wide Web, go to: Azure serves developers’
www.microsoft.com connectivity needs through
the following services.
For more information about 〉 The Service Bus connects
Active Web Solutions products services and applications
and services, call (44) 1473 across network boundaries
834560 or visit the Web site at to help developers build
www.aws.net distributed applications.
〉 The Access Control Service
provides federated, claims-
based access control for
REST Web services.
• Microsoft SQL Azure. Microsoft
SQL Azure offers the first
cloud-based relational and
self-managed database
service built on Microsoft SQL
Server 2008 technologies.
Software and Services • Microsoft Visual Studio
• Windows Azure Platform • Microsoft Visual Studio 2008
• Windows Azure
• Access Control Service
• Microsoft SQL Azure
• Service Bus
This case study is for informational
purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO
WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN
THIS SUMMARY.
Document published November 2009