Case Study: COVVE achieves rapid scalability and massive signup growth with Microsoft Azure

Innovative Cypriot business development software uses Microsoft cloud and Open Source synergy

COVVE Visual Networks is a 10‑person startup in Nicosia that built a cloud‑native web and mobile app to help professionals exploit their social networks for business development, managing 2.7 million contacts across 320,000 companies. The founders needed a platform that would let them combine best‑of‑breed open source tools with commercial cloud services, pick the right architecture from many options, and guarantee rapid, reliable scalability for sudden traffic surges.

Using Microsoft BizSpark Plus and Azure (VMs, PaaS, SQL, storage and queues) together with an OSS stack (OrientDB, Elasticsearch, Node.js, AngularJS, Cassandra, Redis, Ubuntu) COVVE implemented a microservices architecture that balanced IaaS and PaaS. The result: the system scaled from typical 50 VMs to 350 when needed, absorbed a Product Hunt spike (6,000% traffic increase, 4,000% rise in signups) and added several hundred thousand contacts in ten hours for only a modest monthly cost increase, delivering a scalable, cost‑effective platform backed by ongoing Microsoft support.

Covve

Alex Protogerellis

Founder and Chief Technology Officer