After almost half a year of downtime, Transport for London's (TfL's) real time data feeds are back online with a little help from Microsoft's Windows Azure platform.
Public access to the servers was cut-off in July - after only a month of uptime - due to the massive number of calls that developers were making to the databases, which hit several million per day. This far outstripped TfL's expectations - and the servers's capacities - forcing it to seek out a more robust alternative.
With the help of Microsoft, the company developed a scalable platform based on Windows Azure that would be able to handle the huge number of daily requests. Although several datasets have been migrated in the past few weeks - including information on the cycle-hire stations and real-time traffic data - the Tube network information, called Trackernet, has only just been transferred.
Microsoft's Mark Taylor commented that "TfL asked for a system able to handle in excess of seven million requests per day, as well as being able to scale to handle unpredictable events like snow days. Microsoft's cloud computing platform, Windows Azure is ideal for this kind of task and provides a great basis for the programme of innovations that TfL has planned over the coming years".
The data, and the accompanying APIs, allow developers to create unique programs and apps that make use of the data, such as Matthew Somerville's live train map. Furthermore, TfL is increasingly seen as a pioneer in allowing access to its data, blazing a trail that other public bodies will hopefully follow in the future.
More details on the APIs and how they can be accessed are available on the TFL Developers' Area website.
