A project thought up by Nigel Tyrell, head of Environment at Lewisham, named LoveCleanStreets, came about in 2004. The project allowed anyone that spotted trash or graffiti around the area to report it by taking a picture and uploading it the LoveCleanStreets website. After putting the new project into place, they were able to respond to problem areas 87% faster and cut case work time down by 21%.
Mayor Boris Johnson was so impressed with the project and its results, that he wanted to bring it to all of London and call it LoveCleanLondon. Bringing on all of London meant that Tyrell would have to beef up his server capacity and staff since the project was hosted internally. Mr Tyrell told the Telegraph,
We had a vision for taking our project to the rest of London, but we didn’t have the capacity, Lewisham handles some 300-400 clean-up jobs each week through the website.” This could be multiplied by 30 as the service is now being extended to London as a whole.
To solve the capacity problem, they moved the project to the cloud using Microsoft"s Azure platform. Azure allows web services to scale up and down as needed and also allows the service to be replicated. This allows the web service to take on as many councils and organizations as they want without having to worry about running out of server capacity.