rescendent
Reduce node_modules and long paths for ASP.NET 5 by 60%
Serving 6.8M rps at 9 Gbps from C# on a single Azure VM
Adventures in High Speed Networking on Azure
Not really, with 1.5 million hexagons, http://www.illyriad.co.uk/ is over 5 times larger at 8.6 million squares.
Illyriad CEO James Niesewand discusses ultra-massive MMO gaming and tech behind it
Age of Ascent – A space game on Microsoft Azure
However, in this answer, I can see why the CEO of a 120k employee company is not going to say "get pushy with your salary" else he's have a pay rise revolt with people's justification being "your boss', boss', boss' boss told me to"
Age of Ascent to beat EVE's battle concurrency record?
And that's not being able to afford your licences that you are using beyond the program: "BizSpark Alumni can keep, at no charge, all the software they downloaded during their three years in the program, including a standard configuration of Windows Server and Microsoft SQL Server."
It would suggest you are doing something wrong if you can't afford what ever extra licences, you need to use passed this and 5 years on...
If you build on Azure tech; you aren't locked into MS being the host of the services; you can run an Azure cloud entirely in your own datacenter; you can use Azure as overflow in a Hybrid model http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/solutions/hybrid... or if you have legal or compliance needs to not host with a US company you can use one of their many partners: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/press/2013/dec13/12-12co... as the "Cloud OS" provider.
They even providing server and datacenter blueprints as part of the Open Compute Project http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_blog/archive/2014/01/27... with datacenter rack management software, if you want to build your own datacenter.
All their client libraries are even on GitHub https://github.com/WindowsAzure