Case Study: Affinio achieves scalable social‑data analysis and faster innovation with Microsoft Azure DocumentDB

Affinio switches from AWS to Azure DocumentDB to harness social data at scale

Affinio, a Canadian marketing-intelligence company (50–999 employees) that analyzes social-media behavior for clients, was struggling to manage and query massive JSON datasets—about 50 million tweets per day and more than 2.7 TB of active data. Initial deployments on Elasticsearch and Amazon DynamoDB on AWS created heavy operational overhead (node failures, index maintenance, manual partitioning) and limited query flexibility, slowing development and diverting engineering resources to infrastructure problems.

Affinio migrated its document store to Microsoft Azure DocumentDB (Azure Cosmos DB) and adopted other Azure services, gaining automatic indexing, data partitioning, and managed operations. The move (migration of Elasticsearch data completed in under three weeks) eliminated the CTO’s infrastructure bottlenecks, sped up prototyping (apps built in a weekend), enabled integrations with Azure Cognitive Services and Machine Learning, and let the company move its stack to Azure—reducing management burden and accelerating time-to-market.

Affinio

Stephen Hankinson

CTO