We Asked, Matt Answered – WordPress and Windows Azure Explained

Filed as Features on November 21, 2009 8:19 am

Update: Here’s the  link to Matt’s post at the WordPress Publishers Blog explaining his appearance on stage at the PDC.

When I asked a couple of days ago why Matt Mullenweg was in Microsoft’s PDC, I was never really expecting Matt to read my post and answer the question. Back then, it was just reported that he was called onstage by Microsoft’s Ray Oozie but what he talked about was not reported yet then.

A good fellow that he is, Matt was kind enough to leave a comment on my post and posted the link to the transcript of what transpired during the PDC, particularly on what he talked about.

The transcript is very long so, lazy that I am I just scanned through the document until I found Matt’s part of the show.

Matt demonstrated an example of a WordPress blog running on Azure on the background. The point of the demonstration was to show how multiple blogs can handle traffic surges whenever a blog post gets an unprecedented spike.

And the implication? – WordPress  can be adopted by businesses as part of their Azure applications. Come to think of it, WordPress being an open-source CMS doesn’t get that much acceptance in the corporate environment. Putting it as part of Azure’s computing products can pave the way for application of WordPress in corporate intranets.

Anyway, before I misinterpret Matt’s reason for showing up at the PDC, here’s the full transcript of what he talked about.

MATT MULLENWEG: Good morning, everybody!

Do we have any WordPress users here in the audience? Nice! Thank you, thank you.

I’m very excited to be here. Just to give you a little bit about my timeline, about six years ago, as a 19-year old poly-sci student, I started working on an Open Source GPL, PHP and MySQL project named WordPress. About four years ago, I founded a company called Automattic to bring WordPress to the masses, which was done to about 200 million people with WordPress.com.

Then about a month ago, I get a phone call from a guy named Jeff Sandquist, and he says, Matt, remember that thing I told you would never happen, and I said, what’s that? And he said, we’re going to have MySQL, PHP, and Apache support on Windows Azure.

So, I looked outside, peaked out the window, made sure there were no pigs, and I said, well, get me out there, I’d love to show this. So, that’s what we’re going to be showing you right now.

As you can see, right here on the Azure back-end, and we have a production WordPress blog here. So, I can click on it, and you will see the beautiful big blue header, everything that you’ve come to know and love about WordPress blogs.

But as you know, blogs are no more longer about just personal publishing, they’re being used for big news sites, they’re being used to cover everything. And so sometimes you get varied traffic.

So, as you can see, we have a MySQL and an Apache instance here. Let’s say my blog gets on Slashdot or Channel 9 or Digg or something like that, and we need to scale it up. We go right here in this beautiful XML file and change it from one instance in Apache to — how many should I go to, a hundred, a thousand? I don’t know a thousand to do that.

So, you can put it however you like, though. You just click the button, and that will take you all the way back, it will reload, it will deploy the instances, bring up all the machines, deploy the virtual machines, everything like that, and instantly add it to the load balancer and you have a fully scaled WordPress.

Now, what’s interesting a few months ago, because we had the election cycle in the United States, and we hosted about 10 million blogs at the time. So, we were seeing all range of really some of the biggest traffic we’d ever seen to blogs.

There were two blogs that were at the very top. One was CNN Political Ticker. It had deep, insightful analysis, really talking about the future of the free world was in the hands, hung in the balance in this election. And then on the other side we had a blog with pictures of cats and funny captions, battling every day for top traffic. I’m not joking.

So, to show you one of the engineers behind the other biggest blog, WordPress blog in the world, I wanted to invite out Martin Cron, who is one of the engineers behind I Can Has Cheezburger. Hey, Martin.

This post was written by
Arnold Zafra

You can visit the Author Archive for a short bio, more posts, and other information about the author.

Submissions & Subscriptions

Submit the post to Reddit, StumbleUpon, Digg, Del.icio.us or Blogosphere News.

Did you like it? Then subscribe to our RSS feed!



  1. By Robert@PNG posted on November 21, 2009 at 11:05 am
    Want an avatar? Get a gravatar! • You can link to this comment

    Hi,

    Matt and the core team, Automattic, the loyal community (especially plugin authors) all deserve a mighty pat on the back. With the recent CMS award and now the interaction between MS and WP I feel a deep sense of honour and kudos to be associated with and be a part of this vibrant, dynamic and at times almost zen-ish phenomenon called Wordpress.

    Wordpress has literally changed my life. Apart from giving me the means to “share” about my interaction with a tribal people and culture (Highlands of Papua New Guinea) , it has without a doubt rekindled my passion for getting under the “hood” for some good old fashioned tinkering. Each time I learn something new I realise that I have only just scratched the surface. The true limits and potential of Wordpress remain yet to be developed and discovered.

    Yesterday I read the story on “Is Automattic Evil” and I was amused. If Matt or Automattic or anyone else is making a bucket of cash then good luck to the lot of them! Anyone out ther making making a good living out of Wordpress? Half your luck… I wish I could! The “free” part of the Open Source culture gets misunderstood at times. The software license and the code itself is free – the services and value add that accompanies OSS must remain (or become) profitable. Free everything is utopia at this point in human history – at the end of the day a man (or woman) cannot survive on thin air alone. I would even go so far as to say that a healthy profit is vital in order to ensure the evolution and ultimate survival of products such as Wordpress.

    The “Software for Profit” model is slowly (and surely) being replaced with an “Open Source” model. The coming together of Wordpress and Microsoft is proof of the fall and rise of the old and the new. The old model aims for financial profit whilst the new one strives relentlessly and selflessly towards quality – a living process of never ending improvement. The paradigm shift away from a “Software for Profit” model has certainly come of age but is yet to mature and “rock” the foundations of the software industry and large corporates. I suspect strongly that Winblow$ version 8 will have a very different licensing arrangement to the recently released V7. The announcement by Microsoft to “open up” .Net is surely a sign of more to come.

    This comment started out as a two line congrats to the “Team” (recent award) but has ended up a short essay. I get envious at times when I read about Wordcamps and other similar gatherings. It kind of gets a little “lonely” in Papua New Guinea at times and I yearn for an opportunity one day to be able to share the Wordpress passion with others – face to face and over a couple of cold ones. Who knows? One day we might even have a Papua New Guinea Wordcamp!!

    Enough raving… it’s a bloody comment not a post!!

    R

  2. By Zmicer posted on November 21, 2009 at 2:02 pm
    Want an avatar? Get a gravatar! • You can link to this comment

    Wonderful post!
    Early I create design of my sites by html (for example 3ds max, Corel Draw, ), but the following project design I will necessarily create by wordpress! (ask to forgive my bad English:)

  3. By Arnold posted on November 21, 2009 at 2:47 pm
    Want an avatar? Get a gravatar! • You can link to this comment

    @ R – Whew! That was a long comment indeed but well worth it. Looks like you’re having fun in PNG. Maybe you should start organizing a WordPress user’s group there. Yeah, WordCamp in PNG sounds great. Thanks for the comment!

    @Zmicer – No apologies needed. It’s a free world. :-)

  4. By Belajar Bahasa Inggeris posted on November 23, 2009 at 3:06 pm
    Want an avatar? Get a gravatar! • You can link to this comment

    Hello friends,
    Great post, very well written.
    You should blog more about this.
    I’ll definitely be subscribing.
    Have a good day..

  5. By m65 posted on January 30, 2010 at 8:31 am
    Want an avatar? Get a gravatar! • You can link to this comment

    good read thanks a lot for the share and very nice website

  6. Trackback

    Your words are your own, so be nice and helpful if you can. If this is the first time you're posting a comment, it might go into moderation. Don't worry, it's not lost, so there's no need to repost it! We accept clean XHTML in comments, but don't overdo it please.