Case Study: Fotoable achieves rapid global expansion and scalable PaaS operations with Microsoft Azure

Top mobile app developer pictures worldwide expansion on an elastic cloud platform

Fotoable is a China‑based mobile app developer (FotoRus, PIP Camera, InstaMag) founded in 2011 that serves about 600 million users and ranked 13th worldwide for downloads. As it expanded globally, the company struggled with complex, heterogeneous cloud setups (AWS, Aliyun, etc.), data synchronization across regions, and the need for a PHP/MySQL‑friendly PaaS to simplify management and control costs.

Fotoable migrated to Microsoft Azure, adopting Azure Database for MySQL (PaaS) plus App Service, CDN, Redis Cache, Load Balancer, and Media Services across nine datacenters on five continents. The move enabled minutes‑to‑deploy global rollouts, simplified maintenance, lower costs, improved regional performance and scalability, and supported rapid growth (about 1 million new users per day and continued market expansion).

Fotoable

Jiawei Li

IT Architect