A few years ago, I put together a fun little app that used node.js, service bus, cloud services, and the Instagram realtime API to build a realtime visualization of images posted to Instagram. In 2 years time, a lot has changed on the Azure platform. I decided to go back into that code, and retool it to take advantage of some new technology and platform features. And for fun.
So - I haven't been doing much blogging or speaking on WebMatrix or node recently. For the last year and a half, I've been part of the team that's building the new Azure portal - and it's been quite an experience. A lot has been said about the end to end experience, the integration of Visual Studio Online, and even some of the new services that have been released lately. All of that's awesome, but it's not what I want to talk about today. As much as those things are great (and I mean, who doesn't like the design), the real interesting piece is the underlying architecture. Let's take a look under the hood of the new Azure portal.