Case Study: Yaqut achieves rapid growth to over 1 million downloads with Microsoft Azure

World’s No. 1 Arabic e-book publisher builds for further growth with Microsoft

Yaqut is an Amman-based start-up that built a popular Arabic e‑book app to address a market lacking fast, well‑presented digital Arabic literature. Faced with rapid user growth and the need to serve many concurrent requests with minimal downtime and very fast response times, the company needed a scalable, highly available backend to deliver a superior on‑screen reading and search experience.

Yaqut moved its back end to Microsoft Azure (with BizSpark support) while using an open‑source stack (Linux, NGINX, PHP, MySQL), server‑side preprocessing, load balancing and a RESTful API to optimize performance. The solution delivered ultra‑fast book loading, smooth Arabic search, high availability and near‑zero downtime, helping the service surpass 1 million downloads in 18 months, reach 440,000 registered users and 180,000 monthly unique users, with plans to grow to 1 million registered users.

Yaqut

Ashraf Amayreh

Chief Technology Officer