Case Study: Affinio accelerates social data analysis with Microsoft Azure DocumentDB

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

Affinio, a medium-sized Canadian company in the media and telecommunications sector, faced a significant challenge in managing and analyzing its massive volume of social data, which included 50 million tweets per day and over 2.7 TB of active JSON data. Their initial solutions, Elasticsearch and Amazon DynamoDB on AWS, created substantial management overhead and featured restrictive indexing rules that hampered development, pulling crucial resources away from innovation.

Microsoft provided a solution by implementing Azure Cosmos DB (then called DocumentDB). The switch to Azure Cosmos DB delivered automatic indexing, rich query capabilities, and effortless scalability, which eliminated management headaches and database bottlenecks. This allowed Affinio's developers to focus on innovation, drastically reducing their time-to-market for new applications—some were built in a single weekend. Impressed by these results, Affinio migrated its entire infrastructure from AWS to the Microsoft Azure platform, gaining access to additional intelligent services like Azure Cognitive Services and Azure Machine Learning to further enhance its offerings.

Affinio

Stephen Hankinson

CTO