DEV Community: Optisol Business

CaseStudy – Contactless Food Delivery: Mobile Companion App for Food Dispenser

Optisol Business — Mon, 27 Jul 2020 06:25:19 +0000

With the whole world swinging in full throttle, balancing between work and life, we wanted to give something that money can’t buy, which is “Time”. Whether we realize it or not, we are constantly faced with the decision to either spend hours cooking our own meals for the week, or to surrender and pick up a random sandwich from the cafeteria. To ease the process, we have designed a system that will allow our customers to pick up their food, fresh & flavorful, without human interaction.

To achieve that, we have developed a user friendly mobile application, which allows a user to place a food order on a nearby Vending machine / Kiosk and then pick it up. Also, a profile for the vendor can be created to manage their products and kiosk details

Tech Stack:

We have used the following technology stack to achieve the same.
Hosting – AWS: Amazon Web Services (AWS) plays a very vital role in offering reliable, scalable, and inexpensive cloud computing services.

JAVA: With Java as backend, we were able to effectively communicate between the application, Kiosk and the Database, so that we will can keep an update on the product availability & order status.

React Native : Using React Native as mobile platform that offers Single framework and works in multiple platforms, we are able to achieve the proposed solution more strategically with less effort & time.

BrainTree for PayPal: PayPal / Braintree provides us global use of payments with multiple payment options with credit card, wallet that makes our payment easy without having any security concerns for our customers.

Key Features

Our team at Optisol has developed a simple, yet extensive application with features that assist in dispensing the products from Kiosk.

Search and Locate the nearby Kiosk and the also ones in specific locations.
View the products available at the specific kiosks.
Buy products based on their availability.
Make payment is made seamless through PayPal gateway.
Generate barcode on each successful order.
Track the order until it gets delivered or expired.
Track the order expiry time taken for the users to pick up products.
Scan the barcode in the Kiosk machine and dispense the products.
Refund the amount on partial dispense or if the order time expires.
Allow user to mark their favourite products, so that user can keep their favourite food on their tips to re-order.

Conclusion:

The implementation of food delivery using Kiosks has the potential of eliminating human interaction of picking up and delivery from restaurants.

With administrative portal in place, the vendors will be able to understand the customer of their locality by the data points they get from the mobile application. With that the vendors will be able to form a strategic plan for different regions to attract their customers, making it as Customer Centric.

5 Ways Machine Learning Can Transform Supply Chain Management

Optisol Business — Mon, 20 Jul 2020 05:22:33 +0000

Machine learning is changing the future of supply chain management. According to a recent study by Mckinsey Global Institute, advanced AI technologies have the potential to unlock a global economic impact of $10-15T across all industry segments. Gartner recently projected that by 2020, 95% of supply chain planning vendors will rely on supervised and unsupervised machine learning for their solutions.

Increasing costs, Revenue losses, Bad customer service, and reducing profits are all By-product of operational inefficiencies. For the Supply chain business to survive in today’s competitive and complex market, Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are considered as the most promising technologies available.

The ability for the system to analyze the data, learn, and improve automatically from experience, without any programming is done through Machine learning. The future of supply chain technologies will be highly automated and highly responsive. Machine learning is used to identify missing, rogue, or duplicate data points and uses history and historical actions to correct the data.

Why and How does Machine Learning is ideally suited to transform supply chain management? The answer is such that Machine Learning algorithms can be best used to effect for detecting patterns and predictive insights. By doing so, the supply chain companies can forecast error rates, reduce costs, improve demand planning productivity, and increase on-time shipments.

Here are 5 ways that a Supply Chain Management can be transformed by Machine Learning Technology:

Predictive Analytics
Reducing Cost and Response Time
Improve Customer Experience
Scheduling Maintenance
Fraud Prevention
Predictive Analytics

Predictive analytics techniques allow organizations to identify patterns and trends hidden in their data to understand market trends, identify demand, and establish appropriate pricing strategies. A study by the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals revealed that 93% of shippers and 98% of third-party logistics firms feel like data-driven decision-making is crucial to supply chain activities, and 71% of them believe that big data improves quality and performance. The predictive Analytics technique has the advantage of enabling real-time decisions based on statistical estimates of future outcomes. It has the potential to enhance strategic thinking and overall performance.

Reducing Cost and Response Time

An increasing number of B2C companies are leveraging machine learning techniques to trigger automated responses and handle demand-to-supply imbalances, thus minimizing the costs and improving customer experience. The ability of machine learning algorithms to analyze and learn from real-time data and historic delivery records helps supply chain managers to optimize the route for their fleet of vehicles leading to reduced driving time, cost-saving and enhanced productivity. Further, by improving connectivity with various logistics service providers and integrating freight and warehousing processes, administrative and operational costs in the supply chain can be reduced.

Improve Customer Experience

Machine learning techniques can be used to enhance the customer experience by improving supply chain visibility and achieve faster delivery commitments. The historical data from various sources are analyzed by Machine learning models along the supply value chain. Machine learning techniques, including a combination of deep analytics, IoT, and real-time monitoring, can be used to improve supply chain visibility substantially, thus helping businesses transform customer experience and achieve faster delivery commitments.

Scheduling Maintenance

One of the most exciting applications of this technology is proactive machine maintenance scheduling. Advanced ML algorithms study the signs of machine failure and predict in advance the breakdown or malfunction in the machines in the near future. By making this prediction, the ML algorithm lets the planners schedule downtime in advance before a breakdown occurs. Logistics and various other elements of the supply chain can also benefit from this technique

Fraud Prevention

Machine learning can reduce the potential for fraud in the supply chain in addition to reducing risk and improving product and process quality. Machine Learning algorithm provides insights that instantaneously reduce the risk of fraud.

Gartner predicted that at least 50% of global companies would be using Artificial Intelligence (AI) -related transformational technologies in supply chain operations by 2023. According to a Statistic survey, visibility is a significant organizational challenge for 21% of supply chain professionals. If you have had questions about machine learning within supply chain management (or) need to create a process for supply chain using ML technology, please reach us at info@optisolbusiness.com

Building Modern Applications on Microservices using Microsoft Technology Stack – Part 1

Optisol Business — Sat, 27 Jun 2020 11:37:06 +0000

Pros and Cons of Microservices – The Trending Business Architecture

What is Microservices?

A microservices architecture is a suite of small, autonomous services which are independently self-contained and implemented to a single business capability.

• Services can be deployed independently. A team can update an existing service without rebuilding and redeploying the entire application.

• Services are responsible for persisting their own data or external state. This differs from the traditional model, where a separate data layer handles data persistence.

• Services communicate with each other by using well-defined APIs. Internal implementation details of each service are hidden from other services.

• Services don’t need to share the same technology stack, libraries, or frameworks.

What’s special about Microservices?

• Agility: These independently deployable services can be easily managed mainly during bug fixes and feature releases. Unlike traditional application, the service can be updated without redeploying the entire application.

• Small, focused teams: The microservices have short development cycles, which can be managed by a small development team eliminating dependency between teams that helps in promoting greater agility and increase productivity.

• Small code base: Each service is a separate code-base, that in turn minimizes dependencies, and that makes it easier to add new features.

• Mix of technologies: Teams can pick the technology that best fits their service, using a mix of technology stacks as appropriate.

• Scalability: Services can be scaled independently, letting you scale out subsystems that require more resources, without scaling out the entire application. Using an orchestrator such as Kubernetes or Service Fabric, you can pack a higher density of services onto a single host, which allows for more efficient utilization of resources.

• Data isolation: Contrast to monolithic applications, the schema updates can be easily updated without affecting the other parts of the application.

What are the Stumbling blocks in Microservices Architecture Integration?

The benefits of microservices don’t come for free. Here are some of the challenges to consider before embarking on a micro services architecture.

• Complexity: A microservices application has more moving parts than the equivalent monolithic application. Each service is simpler, but the entire system as a whole is more complex.

• Development and testing: Due to different runtime environment, each service requires individualized testing and monitoring, which means organizations have to consider automation tools.

• Lack of governance: The decentralized approach leads to the inclusion of different languages and frameworks, which in turn makes the maintenance difficult.

What is an API gateway?

The API gateway is the entry point for clients. Instead of calling services directly, clients call the API gateway, which forwards the call to the appropriate services on the back end.

Pros and Cons of using an API gateway include:

• It decouples clients from services. Services can be version-ed or re-factored without needing to update all of the clients.

• Services can use messaging protocols that are not web friendly, such as AMQP.

• The API Gateway can perform other cross-cutting functions such as authentication, logging, SSL termination, and load balancing.

• Complexity in client code as the track of multiple endpoints, and handle failures in a resilient way is difficult.

• A single operation might require calls to multiple services. That can result in multiple network round trips between the client and the server, adding significant latency.

• Each public-facing service must handle concerns such as authentication, SSL, and client rate limiting.

• Services must expose a client-friendly protocol such as HTTP or Web Socket.

• Services with public endpoints are a potential attack surface, and must be hardened.

To get further insights, talk to our experts at +1(415) 233-4737 or reach us at info@optisolbusiness.com for a free consulting.

Azure Push Notification Hub- Push Notification service of Azure

Optisol Business — Sat, 20 Jun 2020 07:08:38 +0000

Introduction to Azure Push Notification Hub

Push notifications deliver information from a back end system to a mobile application. Apple, Google, and other platforms each have their own Push Notification Service (PNS). Azure Notification Hubs enable you to centralize notifications across platforms so your back end application can communicate with a single hub, which takes care of distributing the notifications to each platform-specific PNS.

What is Azure Notification Hubs?

Azure Notification Hubs scaled-out push engine that enables you to send notifications to any platform (iOS, Android, Windows, etc.) from any back-end (cloud or on-premises). Here are a few example scenarios:

• Send breaking news notifications to millions with low latency.
• Send location-based coupons to interested user segments.
• Send event-related notifications to users or groups for media/sports/finance/gaming applications.
• Push promotional contents to applications to engage and market to customers.
• Notify users of enterprise events such as new messages and work items.
• Send codes for multi-factor authentication.

What is Push Notification?

Push notifications are a form of app-to-user communication where users of mobile apps are notified of certain desired information, usually in a pop-up or dialog box on a mobile device. It’s the best app-to-user communication because it is energy-efficient for mobile devices, flexible for the notifications senders, and available when corresponding applications are not active.

How does Push notifications work?

Push notifications are delivered through platform-specific infrastructures called Platform Notification Systems (PNSes). They offer basic push functionalities to deliver a message to a device with a provided handle, and have no common interface. To send a notification to all customers across the Android, iOS, and Windows versions of an app, the developer must work separately with Apple Push Notification Service (APNS), Fire base Cloud Messaging (FCM), and Windows Notification Service (WNS).

At a high level, here is how push works:

An application wants to receive a notification, so it contacts the PNS for the target platform on which the app is running and requests a unique and temporary push handle. The handle type depends on the system (for example, WNS uses URIs while APNS uses tokens).
The client app stores this handle in the app backend or provider.
To send a push notification, the app backend contacts the PNS using the handle to target a specific client app. 4 The PNS forwards the notification to the device specified by the handle.

Challenges of Push Notification

Sending push notifications requires complex infrastructure that is unrelated to the application's main business logic. Some of the infrastructure challenges are:

1.Platform dependency

• The backend requires complex and hard-to-maintain platform-dependent logic to send notifications to devices on various platforms, as PNSes are not unified.

2.Scale

• As per PNS guidelines, device tokens must be refreshed on every app launch. The backend deals with a large amount of traffic and database access just to keep the tokens up-to-date. When the number of devices grows to hundreds, thousands, or millions, the cost of creating and maintaining this infrastructure is massive.
• Most PNSes do not support broadcast to multiple devices. A simple broadcast to a million devices results in a million calls to the PNSes. Scaling this amount of traffic with minimal latency is nontrivial.

3.Routing

· Though PNSes provide a way to send messages to devices, most app notifications are targeted at users. The backend must maintain a registry to associate devices with users, etc.

Why use Azure Notification Hubs?

Notification Hubs eliminates all complexities associated with sending push notifications on your own from your app back end. With Notification Hubs, the back end sends messages to users or interest groups, as shown in the following figure:
Notification Hubs is your ready-to-use push engine with the following advantages:

1.Cross platforms

• Support for all major push platforms.
• A common interface to push to all platforms in platform-specific or platform-independent formats with no platform-specific work.
• Device handle management in one place.

2.Cross backends

• Cloud or on-premises.
• .NET, Node.js, Java, Python, etc.

3.Rich set of delivery patterns

• Push to segment with dynamic tags: The tags feature helps you segment devices and push to them according to your needs, whether you are sending to one segment or an expression of segments (For example, active AND lives in Seattle NOT new user). Instead of being restricted to publish-subscribe, you can update device tags anywhere and anytime.
• Localized push: The templates feature helps achieve localization without affecting back end code.
• Silent push: You can enable the push-to-pull pattern by sending silent notifications to devices and triggering them to complete certain pulls or actions.
• Scheduled push: You can schedule notifications to be sent anytime.
• Direct push: You can skip registering devices with the Notification Hubs service and directly batch push to a list of device handles.
• Personalized push: Device push variables help you send device-specific personalized push notifications with customized key-value pairs.

4.Scalability

• Send fast messages to millions of devices without re-architecting or device sharing.

5.Security

• Shared Access Secret (SAS) or federated authentication.

Notification

A notification is a message that Android displays outside your app's UI to provide the user with reminders, communication from other people, or other timely information from your app.

Status Bar and Notification Drawer

When you issue a notification, it first appears as an icon in the status bar.

Users can swipe down on the status bar to open the notification drawer, where they can view more details and take actions with the notification.

Users can drag down on a notification in the drawer to reveal the expanded view, which shows additional content and action buttons, if provided.

A notification remains visible in the notification drawer until dismissed by the app or the user.

Head-up Notification

Beginning with Android 5.0, notifications can briefly appear in a floating window called a heads-up notification. It appears only if the device is unlocked.

The heads-up notification appears the moment your app issues the notification and it disappears after a moment, but remains visible in the notification drawer as usual.

How to send Push Notification to android devices using firebase?

This Article shows you how to use Azure Notification Hubs and Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM) to push notifications to an Android application. You must create Android app that receives push notifications by using Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM).

Android-Prerequisites

• The latest version of Android Studio
• Android 2.3 or higher for Fire base Cloud Messaging
• Google Repository revision 27 or higher for Fire base Cloud Messaging
• Google Play Services 9.0.2 or higher for Fire base Cloud Messaging

Setup Push Notification Services for Android

Step1: Define an Android package name.

Step2: Download google-services.json from the Firebase console.

Step3: Create an Azure Notification Hub instance and give it a name.

Step4: Copy the FCM Server Key and save it as the API Key under Google (GCM/FCM) in your Azure Notification Hub.

How to send Push Notification to iOS apps using Azure Notification Hubs?

In this Article, you use Azure Notification Hubs to send push notifications to an iOS application. You must create a blank iOS app that receives push notifications by using the Apple Push Notification service (APNs).

iOS-Prerequisites

• An active Azure account.
• Windows Azure Messaging Framework
• Latest version of Xcode
• An iOS version 10 (or later)-capable device
• Apple Developer Program membership.

Steps to setup Push Notification Services for iOS

Step 1: Define an IOS bundle identifier.

Step 2: Create a Certificate Signing Request (CSR) file and use it to generate a push notification certificate.

Step 3: Upload the push notification certificate under Apple (APNS) in your Azure Notification Hub.

Quick Overview of .NET Core and ASP .NET Core

Optisol Business — Thu, 18 Jun 2020 12:56:50 +0000

What is .NET Core and Why use it?

.NET Core, a new version of .NET Framework, is known to be a free, open-source, general-purpose development platform maintained by Microsoft.

.NET Core Framework can be used to build different types of applications such as mobile, desktop, web, cloud, IoT, machine learning, microservices, game, etc. It includes the core features that are required to run a basic .NET Core application. Other features are provided as NuGet packages, which can be added in the application as needed. In this way, the .NET Core application speed up the performance, reduce the memory footprint and becomes easy to maintain.

What can .NET Core do?
1.Cross-platform& Container support

ASP.NET Applications runs on Windows, macOS and multiple distributions of Linux. It also supports different CPU architectures. Containers are eating the clouds these days. Docker, Kuberenetes and other technologies are all the rage. ASP.NET Core allows developers to utilize all of these new technologies.

2.High performance& Asynchronous via Async/Await

Performance is one of the important requirements in the application features. All I/O in ASP.NET Core is asynchronous. Servers implement the Stream interface, which has both synchronous and asynchronous overloads. The asynchronous ones should be preferred to avoid blocking thread pool threads. Blocking threads can lead to thread pool starvation.

Most modern applications spend most of their time and CPU cycles waiting for database queries, web service calls, and other I/O operations to complete. One of the reasons ASP.NET Core is faster is its extensive use of asynchronous patterns within the new MVC and Kestrel frameworks.

3.Multiple environments and development mode

ASP.NET Core introduces improved support for controlling application behavior across multiple environments, such as development, staging, and production. Environment variables are used to indicate which environment the application is running in, allowing the app to be configured appropriately.

4.Dependency Injection

ASP.NET Core is designed from scratch to support Dependency Injection. ASP.NET Core injects objects of dependency classes through constructor or method by using built-in IoC container.

5.Swagger OpenAPI

Swagger is a set of open-source tools built around the OpenAPI Specification that can help you design, build, document and consume REST APIs. Swagger has become the most popular technology for designing and describing RESTful APIs. Its use allows developers to document and develop APIs while maintaining synchronization with the code.

What is ASP .NET Core?

ASP.NET Core is an open source and cloud-optimized web framework from Microsoft.
ASP.NET Core is a cross-platform, high-performance, open-source framework for building modern, cloud-enabled, Internet-connected apps. It includes the MVC framework, which now combines the features of MVC and Web API into a single web programming framework.

Why use ASP .NET Core?

The features of ASP .Net Core are listed below:

Supports Multiple Platform:ASP.NET Core applications can run on Windows, Linux, and Mac. So there is no need to build different apps for different platforms using different frameworks.
Fast: ASP.NET Core no longer depends on System.Web.dll for browser-server communication. ASP.NET Core allows us to include packages that we need for our application. This reduces the request pipeline and improves performance and scalability.
IoC Container: It includes the built-in IoC container for automatic dependency injection which makes it maintainable and testable.
Integration with Modern UI Frameworks: It allows you to use and manage modern UI frameworks such as AngularJS, ReactJS, Umber, Bootstrap, etc. using Bower (a package manager for the web).
Hosting: ASP.NET Core web application can be hosted on multiple platforms with any web server such as IIS, Apache etc. It is not dependent only on IIS as a standard .NET Framework.
Code Sharing: It allows you to build a class library that can be used with other .NET frameworks such as .NET Framework 4.x or Mono. Thus a single code base can be shared across frameworks.
Side-by-Side App Versioning: ASP.NET Core runs on .NET Core, which supports the simultaneous running of multiple versions of applications.
Smaller Deployment Footprint: ASP.NET Core application runs on .NET Core, which is smaller than the full .NET Framework. So, the application which uses only a part of .NET CoreFX will have a smaller deployment size. This reduces the deployment footprint.

Want to know about ASP.NET Core Security?

Security is obviously one of the most important things to build into your web service. ASP.NET Core enables developers to easily configure and manage security for their apps. ASP.NET Core contains features for managing authentication, authorization, data protection, HTTPS enforcement, app secrets, anti-request forgery protection, and CORS management.

Overview of ASP.NET Core MVC

ASP.NET Core MVC is a lightweight, open source, highly testable presentation framework that is used for building web apps and APIs using the Model-View-Controller design pattern.

ASP.NET Core MVC provides a patterns-based way to build dynamic websites that enables a clean separation of concerns. It gives you full control over markup, supports TDD-friendly development and uses the latest web standards.

A web application can be built on top of the ASP.NET Core, and more specifically, the ASP.NET Core MVC framework. Technically, an entire application can be built using only middleware, but ASP.NET Core MVC gives the features that can be used for easily creating HTML pages and HTTP-based APIs.

Components of ASP.NET Core MVC Framework

The ASP .NET Core MVC design pattern has the following design components which are listed below:
• Controllers - define the end points / routes for the web API. Controllers are the entry point into the web API from client applications via http requests.
• Models - represent request and response models for controller methods, request models define the parameters for incoming requests, and response models can be used to define what data is returned.
• Services - contain business logic, validation and data access code.
• Entities - represent the application data.
• Helpers - anything that doesn't fit into the above folders.

Features of ASP.NET Core MVC

Routing

ASP.NET Core MVC is built on top of ASP.NET Core's routing, a powerful URL-mapping component that lets you build applications that have comprehensible and searchable URLs. Routing is responsible for matching incoming HTTP requests and dispatching those requests to the app's executable endpoints. Endpoints are the app's units of executable request-handling code.

Model Binding

ASP.NET Core MVC model binding converts client request data (form values, route data, query string parameters, HTTP headers) into objects that the controller can handle. As a result, your controller logic doesn't have to do the work of figuring out the incoming request data; it simply has the data as parameters to its action methods.

Model Validation

ASP.NET Core MVC supports validation by decorating the model object with data annotation validation attributes. The validation attributes are checked on the client side before values are posted to the server, as well as on the server before the controller action is called.

Action Filters

Filters in ASP.NET Core allow code to be run before or after specific stages in the request processing pipeline.
Built-in filters handle tasks such as:

• Authorization (preventing access to resources a user isn't authorized for).
• Response caching (short-circuiting the request pipeline to return a cached response).

Razor view engine

ASP.NET Core MVC uses the Razor view engine to render views. Razor is a compact, expressive and fluid template markup language for defining views using embedded C# code. Razor is used to dynamically generate web content on the server. You can cleanly mix server code with client side content and code.

Supporting Web APIs

ASP.NET Core supports creating RESTful services, also known as web APIs, using C#. To handle requests, a web API uses controllers. Controllers in a web API are classes that derive from Controller Base.

A RESTful API is an application program interface (API) that uses HTTP requests to GET, PUT, POST and DELETE data. And also referred to as a RESTful web service or REST API .

ASP.NET Core is a high-performance, open-source multiplatform framework for creating modern cloud applications that are connected to the Internet. Before embarking on the development of an application with ASP.NET Core, it is recommended to validate that the new framework covers your needs regarding APIs.

As an ASP.NET web development company, our certified developers will provide custom solutions to match all your business requirements.

Effective Project Management - Casestudy

Optisol Business — Tue, 09 Jun 2020 05:12:24 +0000

Overview

Practically, most construction companies would want their projects to be completed and delivered on time without any delay. It is the duty of a project manager to take proactive steps in order to avoid any hold ups.

But how can the manager get a hold of what is happening without getting an in-depth knowledge on the progress of work?

With the help of the project management tool, one can monitor the physical progress, manpower, labor productivity engineering, design status and direct cost. It assists the project team to monitor the
physical progress through Daily Progress Reports and financial progress through Cost Register Reports.

The tool identifies and assesses critical areas of each project and based on its inbuilt alert system, slippages are monitored and hierarchically escalated to various stakeholders for effective decision making and taking necessary actions.

User can download the jobs that are related to them and update their progress both online and offline.

With the help of Machine Learning, attendance can be marked by the facial recognition of employees.

The facial feature matching technology helps the application user to match the faces of the employee with the database and provide exact match.

While marking attendance, with the help of facial recognition using Machine Learning, the system will be able identify and recognize any new faces and prompts the user to create a profile for them and add it to the existing labor list.

With the assistance of AI&ML, the system will be able to identify the faces of individual laborers and match it with the database, even if it has to run a facial recognition on a group picture.

Approvals

Superiors can approve a work progress entry in a particular location by just tapping on the pin location and the list of jobs that needs approval will be listed.

Tech Stack

Xamarin Forms: Xamarin.Forms is an open source cross-platform framework from Microsoft, that extends the .NET developer platform with tools and libraries for building mobile apps.

Zetetic-SQLITE: SQLCipher is a security extension to the SQLite database platform that facilitates the creation of encrypted databases.

OpenCV: OpenCV (Open Source Computer Vision) is a library of programming function mainly aimed at real-time computer vision. It is a library that is mainly used to do all the operation related to Image processing and Video analysis, as in the case of facial recognition and detection.

Cosine Similarity: Cosine similarity is a Similarity Function that is often used in Information Retrieval. It measures the angle between two vectors and in this case, used for facial feature matching.

TensorFlow: It is a framework developed and written in Python, C++ and Cuda. TensorFlow provides multiple API’s in Python, C++, Java etc. CNN architecture with TensorFlow backend has been used to extract vector facial features, which is the architecture behind computer vision applications.

Conclusion:

With the help of this management tool, delivering a project on time can be achieved by identifying and highlighting activities that are likely to cause delay and address the issues on time.

This tool also facilitates forecasting the manpower requirement based on quantum of works planned with respect to actual productivity reflected in Productivity Register Report.

6 things you should know about Azure Data Lake

Optisol Business — Mon, 01 Jun 2020 07:54:26 +0000

1) What is Azure Data Lake storage?

It’s the enterprise wise repository for big data analytics workloads. Data stored can be of any type and any size.
• A single store for all data
• All ranges of data can be stored such as raw data to the highly transformed data

Data Lake Store is a no-limit cloud Data Lake built so enterprises can unlock value from unstructured, semi-structured, and structured data.
Data Lake Analytics is a cloud analytics service for developing and running massively parallel data transformation and processing programs in U-SQL, R, Python, and .NET over petabytes of data

Azure HDInsight is a cloud service that allows cost-effective data processing using open-source frameworks such as Hadoop, Spark, Hive, Storm, and Kafka, among others.

2) How Azure Data Lake works?

• Ingest all data regardless of requirement
• Store all data in native format without any schema definition
• Later, the analysis part can be done with Hadoop, Spark, R & Azure Data Lake Analytics (ADLA)

3) How the data is stored in Azure Data Lake?

A data lake is a storage repository that holds a large amount of data in its own raw format. Advantages of a data lake: Data is never thrown away, because the data is
stored in its raw format.

4) What Azure Data Lake does?

• Storage in form of petabyte size files and trillions of unlimited data.
• Develop massively parallel programs.
• Pay per job
• Can debug and optimize big data problems.
• It can start the job within seconds as there are no virtual machines or cluster loading like stuff to wait for.
• U-SQL is used to parallelize the scaled job massively

5) What is Data Lake architecture?

A Data Lake is a storage repository that can store large amount of structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data.
Unlike a hierarchical Data warehouse where data is stored in Files and Folder, Data Lake has a flat architecture

6) How Azure Data Factory, Azure Data Lake and Power BI works together?

U-SQL
The “U” in U-SQL stands for “Unified”; which is aptly named whereas it is designed to execute parallel queries across distributed relational or unstructured data sources using the SQL syntax.

U-SQL in Azure
U-SQL is a language that combines declarative SQL with imperative C# to let you process data at any scale. Through the scalable, distributed-query capability of U-SQL, you can efficiently analyse data across relational stores such as Azure SQL Database.

Power BI
Power BI is a powerful business intelligence platform. It is known for the abilities to connect to various data sources, tools for aggregating and analyzing data, and for the rich library of visualizations with many styling options.
We can connect Power BI with Azure Data Lake Store (ADLS) which is one of the most popular storage products for massive datasets.

Why Power BI
Microsoft Power BI is used to find insights within an organization’s data. Power BI can help connect disparate data sets, transform and clean the data into a data model and create charts or graphs to provide visuals of the data.

Author Bio:

B. Anitha Letchumi, BI Lead at OptiSol Business Solutions, having 10 years of experience in Business Intelligence and working with OptiSol for the last 7 years. The area of expertise are Microsoft BI, Power BI & SQL programming and worked on a couple of projects with Azure Data Lake Storage & Azure Data Factory

How to get your hospital online with a web and mobile app platform?

Optisol Business — Mon, 18 May 2020 05:51:22 +0000

The impact of Covid is here to stay on a long terms and it is also getting obvious that the impact of the epidemic on healthcare systems goes beyond the current turbulence and there will be new norms. Necessity is the mother of invention and disruptions create many necessities. One of the major necessity for healthcare vertical is safer collaboration amongst various stakeholders, patients, doctors and other professionals.

Healthcare providers are operating with a conviction that services had to be exchanged in physical tangible terms and that made the adoption of digital technology a huge challenge. The current turmoil could trigger a change in the course of this direction and adoption to digital solutions can be a reality soon.

“Globally, there has been drop by 60% in the visits to hospitals and ER as people avoid due to the fear of getting infected”

One of the vital steps towards easing patient experience is providing virtual care via digital tools. Recent reports states that there is increase of hospitals and health systems which aims in providing virtual care as part of their transformation strategy. This will improve the hospital operation with easy access and cost-effective models by leveraging Telemedicine technology.
“Telemedicine – a Virtual Integrated Care, enables the health care to grow and establish capacity to widen the access and improve outcome”

Digital health – the transformation of healthcare from one-on-one consulting to virtual consulting through video conferencing, online health monitoring, online prescription, etc. This ensures safety of all stakeholders and in the long run, there might be increasing needs for quarantine of healthcare professionals and uninterrupted services can be provided with this service offering. Telemedicine – acts as the bridge between patients, physicians and health systems enabling virtual channels to reduce safety threats to both people and frontline medical staffs.

Building blocks of a Tele Health Platform

Booking Engine: Patient/Members can explore the list of all registered Doctors (available) nearby their location. They can select any specified doctor to view details and book appointment. The Doctors can manage their appointments and availability timeslots. Both Doctors and Patients get alerted on appointment confirmation and upcoming appointments.
Digitized Doctor - Patient Portal: Doctors can access the portal using their mobile or tablet devices to view patient details, make virtual consultation and recommend medication. Similarly, the patients can use the mobile application to make booking, take virtual consultation and get online prescription. Both these users can access the application anywhere, anytime seamlessly
Secured Payments: Support secured payment for the appointments using credit/debit card as well as net banking
Video Consulting: Acts as the key feature to enable real-time interaction between doctor and patient. Doctors can attend their patients through this feature and communicate on the health issues.
Online Prescription: Doctors can make prescriptions to patients online based on the communication and interact in future on need basis. Patients can use this prescription and get medicines in the pharmacy and intake medication as guided

OptiSol eHealth Offering:

https://www.optisolbusiness.com/platform-online-doctor-consultation
Our mobility Solution will act as the entry point for patients to connect with licensed doctors and get consultation and medication prescriptions. With listing of doctors across multiple specialties, the patients can schedule on-demand visits virtually based on their needs along with service range from therapists, psychologists and counselors to get support and guidance.

The patients with complex medical assistance, can get medical service and confident decisions from experts. These medical experts can review the case history, medical records and test results to provide accurate diagnosis and treatment plans.

Our Solution assists the healthcare members to collaborate with the patients to deliver industry-leading virtual care. We have a team of experts who can provide business consulting and ideas to develop tailored solutions for modernizing user experience and high-quality care.

Are you interested with our solution, feel free to call us or email us at info@optisolbusiness.com

Why should Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) tap into Cloud Computing?

Optisol Business — Tue, 12 May 2020 13:54:01 +0000

If this is your question, in the prevailing pandemic situation, companies irrespective of their sizes are forced to work on a remote basis evolving varying operational models. Thanks to the adoption of cloud, today the IT infrastructure cost for the companies have become a variable cost instead of being a fixed cost. The bigger companies have so far managed to adopt cloud at various levels.

However, for smaller businesses, the adoption till date has been very cautious, largely influenced by necessity. In the current pandemic scenario, the SMEs need to take a fresh look at the varying cloud services right from Infrastructure-as-a – Service ( IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service ( PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service ( SaaS) so they don’t have to commit on fixed IT Capex expenditures instead manage their IT spending at Opex level.

Simply put

Cloud computing enables data to be stored, managed and processed via internet. Data here could simply vary from a simple 1-page word document to enterprise data measured in GBs. However, this still fits to the need of SMEs by allowing them to take advantage in terms of

· Infra cost as it reduces the cost to set up and maintain on premise servers

· Accessibility to data stored in internet as internet can be accessed from anywhere and many more explained below

You can jump start with cloud computing by consuming services offered by various enterprises.

Suit your need

Business needs can be suited within 3 cloud models available namely, Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).

PaaS allows companies to customize the licensed application that they own to suit their needs. In same way, if a service is owned to suit delivery model while it still is hosted centrally it is known as SaaS. Mostly SaaS is consumed on-demand. The applications and services when hosted and managed on cloud by accessing service providers’ infra is said to be IaaS. Servers, networks and storage facilities fall under IaaS.

KNOW THE BENEFITS BEFORE YOU JUMP START CLOUD COMPUTING

Access via wide network:

Working remotely is the new norm in today’s world. Work spaces can be planned at minimal cost as cloud services can be accessed via internet on any device, not just desktop but also via laptop, mobile, iPad and tablet.

On demand and pay as you go

The best offer from cloud computing model is that any business can consume any service that best fits their need on subscription basis. Thus business get to pay only for the consumption and best manage the operational costs.

A reasonable cost would be incurred for cloud space setup. This can be considered a good investment as moving forward the entire maintenance cost will be minimal and the spending towards hardware environment will reduce drastically.

Instant recovery

In fast changing world, both naturally and digitally, companies should ideally prep themselves for robust disaster recovery. Situations like this demand involvement in terms of cost and experts. Cloud services can be very handy at these times as data is available round the clock and stored in a place where tampering is least possible.

Reliable and secure

The Cloud computing services enables continuity of business from anywhere in world. Most of co-workers these days operate at different time zones and getting hands on to latest version of any work is no challenge as it’s readily available on cloud.

In terms of security, cloud services are offered at compliance of very stringent rules and regulations to protect users’ data. Continuous surveillance and proactive disaster prevention systems are in place ensuring high level of secure environment for data.

Future Enabled

Digital Transformation is another word buzzing around lately. Technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Big data rely on cloud rather than traditional methods. Processing and training abundant data, AI making inference with data fed and applying what it has learned into real life scenarios are possible with highly powered processors supporting via cloud.

Adaptable

With limited capital and manpower adapting to changes in business environment is a huge challenge for SME’s. A considerable investment is needed both in terms of time and money to see a long run in any business. The current Corona situation has altogether posed a very new challenge of survival on the financial and business front. The world is moving in a direction of PRE and POST COVID-19

Adapting to cloud is comparatively as working with service provider is all you need to do for the initial set up. There are various certifications available to make yourself eligible to handle the cloud services and involve in maintenance. This can be achieved with existing IT team in place while need to hire expertise can be totally avoided.

Conclusion

Any Business users who have the flair to grow their Business on a short investment, then Cloud Computing could be the best solution for them to add real value and can take their small business to the enterprise level.

How Technology can lend a helping hand during challenging times?

Optisol Business — Wed, 06 May 2020 12:39:58 +0000

Robin Cook novels and Contagion movie were just fillers to pass our time. Whenever we watch Hollywood movies where aliens attack and try to capture the earth, we were sure that someone like Bruce Willis or Will Smith would save us for sure. With the advent of Covid19, we are made to look at scientists and research scholars and medical professionals for their opinions and celebrity chart has changed its course.

A similar change is happening in the world of technology where increasing organizations are forced to adopt digital technologies and amend their business processes to the new norm of the world order. Science and technology has always offered helping hands in the time of distress and there are many options for enterprises to leverage technology to overcome this challenging time. Following are three major focus areas that enterprises can leverage:

⦁ Reach-out and smoothen customer experience
⦁ Empathize and collaborate with workforce
⦁ Reengineer & Venture ahead

Reach-out and smoothen customer experience:

The only thing available without limits during lockdown is internet and data. During lock down or post lockdown, your customers would be looking forward to consume your services in safe manner. It would be the appropriate time to make your services and information around that available for easy access.

User centric web portals and mobile applications
On demand applications to sell products or services
Location based services to meet specific needs
Mobile platform with video chat and collaboration tools for hospitals, personal tutoring and fitness centers
Digital tools that ensure customers of your availability when they need you

Empathize and collaborate with workforce

⦁ Provide digital tools and collaboration platforms
⦁ Provide virtual tools to manage communication
⦁ Onboard vendors on your core applications and integrate them as part of your
core business process
⦁ Remote workforce management with reoriented HR practices
⦁ Periodic communication via different channels

Reengineer & Venture ahead

⦁ Leverage analytics and artificial intelligence
⦁ Leverage your historic data to manage cash flow and operations
⦁ Sales/marketing tools to reengineer sales process
⦁ Enhance process efficiency using vision/text analytics tools
⦁ Identify automation opportunities and tools to accelerate the digital journey

Top 6 Advantages of Using Laravel Framework

Optisol Business — Wed, 06 May 2020 06:20:12 +0000

A PHP framework is a platform that allows developers to develop web applications. The PHP frameworks allow developers to rapidly develop the web apps. That is the reason why every web application development company choose PHP frameworks for their web projects due to increasing demand for speedy time-to-market.

There are various PHP frameworks available in the industry- Laravel, Symfony, CodeIgniter, CakePHP, Zend, Yii etc. But, among all of the PHP frameworks, only Laravel is considered to be the best one for web application development for enterprises. Let’s discuss what is Laravel and how it is beneficial for web app development.

Laravel is a free, open-source PHP web framework, created by Taylor Otwell and intended for the development of web applications following the model–view–controller architectural pattern and based on Symfony. Laravel is a framework for creating web applications with an easy to use syntax. The idea behind Laravel is that it makes common development tasks easy such as routing, authentication, sessions, and caching.

Laravel 6.0 - the updated version was released on September 3, 2019, with new functionalities such as shift blueprint code generation, introducing semantic versioning, compatibility with Laravel Vapor, improved authorization responses, improved job middleware, lazy collections, and sub-query improvements. The frontend scaffolding was removed from the main package and moved into the laravel/ui package.

We have listed the top 6 advantages of Using Laravel Framework. Let's read on.

Highly Secured: In the world of hacking chaos and cyber-attacks, there is a general expectation to have a platform/framework that is totally reliable and safe to use. There is a need for framework that safeguards the application. This being the expectation across globe, Laravel framework exactly fits into this criteria and expectations. Laravel provides high-class security.Laravel itself is a secured framework which does not allow any malware activities or security threats to enter within the web app. That means your web app development code is safe and secure. If you choose Laravel, your web app is risk-free from any unintended and hidden SQL injections.
Authorization and Authentication systems creation: Laravel makes authentication implementation very straightforward. Nearly everything is configured out-of-the-box. The framework also provides a simple way of organizing authorization logic as well as control resources access. Laravel makes easy for the developers to create a logic behind providing access to the authorized users.
Integration with Mail Services: Laravel provides a clean, simple API over the popular SwiftMailer library. Laravel also provides drivers for SMTP, Mailgun, Mandrill, SparkPost, Amazon SES, PHP's “mail” function, and “sendmail”, allowing an application to quickly get started sending mail through a local or cloud-based service. In addition to support for sending email, Laravel provides support for sending notifications across a variety of delivery channels, including SMS (via Nexmo) and Slack.
Reduce Manual Effort & Cost: With the help of Artisan, a built-in tool of Laravel, manual efforts such as doing repetitive programming tasks are reduced for developers. If you want to start a Laravel project or enable caching mechanism, then this command line tool will help you to perform those tiresome programming tasks efficiently. This feature not only reduced development time for developers but also, from the standpoint of a business, this directly reduces the costs the business has to bear for the PHP development solutions they may be looking for.
Tools Integration for Agile Development: Laravel supports robust caching engines like Redis and Memcached. PHP Framework in a good way to make effective use of the driver file cache, which stores dynamically configured cache parts of that file system. Moreover, the development of institutions in this context can effectively configure multiple cache configurations.
Fixing Technical Vulnerabilities: Laravel helps to secure the web application by protecting it against the most serious security risks: SQL injection, cross-site request forgery, and cross-site scripting. Laravel itself is secure. We can tell you first hand that the codebase is fanatically guarded, and that the code has been vetted by several people. Laravel can really be a useful PHP framework for your project owing to its growing popularity. If you are looking to harness Laravel’s capabilities to build a cost-effective app, you can think of hiring a Laravel developer who is familiar with all its features and capabilities. By getting in touch with an experienced Laravel development company, you can build a scalable and intuitive solution that meets your dynamic business growth needs. So, what are you waiting for? Connect with our Laravel experts now.

Technology Dilemma: Why JavaScript and how it fits in digitization?

Optisol Business — Fri, 01 May 2020 13:51:16 +0000

Increasing organizations are getting Chief Digital Officers or someone at CXO level to focus purely on digitization. The digital officers primarily focus on adoption of digital technologies and transformation from legacy ecosystem. The transformation involves two different aspect, one via behavioral/mindset and the other one on the technology ecosystem of the organization.

“At least 40% of all businesses will die in the next 10 years… If they don’t figure out how to change their entire company to accommodate new technologies.” — JOHN CHAMBERS, EXECUTIVE CHAIRMAN, CISCO SYSTEM

The tech modernization via CX modernization, tech upgrade and automation would accelerate the transformation from technology perspective and it is high on the checklist for the digital officers. The major dilemma with tech modernization is about:

Rebuild from monolithic to micro services architecture or
Build API services on need basis within existing eco system and build portals/mobile apps or
Reorient the frontend alone for CX and integrate with existing backend via API services The answer to the above dilemma varies based on the context and current status of the enterprise technology stacks. The one common factor for the above three choice events is to pick a technology stack that will address the current challenges and also scale up to long term needs from digitization perspective.

“In Today’s era of volatility, there is no other way but to re-invent. The only sustainable advantage you can have over others is agility, that’s it. Because nothing else is sustainable, everything else you create, somebody else will replicate.” — JEFF BEZOS, AMAZON FOUNDER

Amongst multiple tech stacks, Full Stack JavaScript (JS) has been the pick of flavor for many but again it is subject to the context. BTW, what is a full stack JavaScript? Below is a quick illustration of JS architecture:
Major rationale behind choosing JavaScript frameworks like NodeJS and Angular or React or VueJS.

Option to split the load between client and server side that ensures high performance applications
Reduced lines of code due to enhanced reusability (libraries, templates and models) with Don’t Repeat Yourself (DRY) paradigm
With patronage from Google/Facebook and others, the frameworks have excellent community backup and contribution and are growing aggressively
Wide availability of resource pools with excellent knowledge base
Enhanced User Experience as it overcome many technical limitations and restrictions with legacy platforms. How full stack framework helps in building web platforms for digital transformation:

Serving millennials and leveraging technology is major driving force behind digital transformation and full stack JS development has become organization standard in many large enterprise.

1) Full stack JS development allows development of frontend and backend using JS tech stack with enhanced performance. PayPal has seen 2X increase in their application performance when they adopted JS tech stack.

"Historically, our engineering teams have been segmented into those who code for the browser (using HTML, CSS and JavaScript) and those who code for the application layer (using Java). Imagine an HTML developer who has to ask a Java developer to link together page “A” and “B”. That’s where we were. This model has fallen behind with the introduction of full-stack engineers, those capable of creating an awesome user interface and then building the application backing it. Call them unicorns, but that’s what we want and the primary blocker at PayPal has always been the artificial boundary we established between the browser and server. Node.js helps us solve this by enabling both the browser and server applications to be written in JavaScript. It unifies our engineering specialties into one team which allows us to understand and react to our users’ needs at any level in the technology stack."

Jeff Harrell, Head of UI Engineering Architecture at Paypal

2) Build rich applications with excellent Customer Xperience

“We’ve been fascinated for a long time by end-to-end JavaScript, we wanted to create “a website that would be rich and dynamic… on devices that weren’t too powerful

Ben Galbraith, and Dion Almaer, Walmart’s vice president for mobile architecture

3) Full stack JS enables API based interactions that will help in building mobility solutions and accelerate seamless interactions within the technology eco system of the organization.

4) JS frameworks and micro services have become like Siamese twins and with inbuilt components that facilitate micro service architecture, NodeJS and Angular/ReactJS has been pick of tech for many large enterprises like Uber, PayPal, eBay, Trello etc.

The Uber technical team has written a two part article about their tech stack.

5) Automation and developer friendly with rich pool resources available. JS frameworks can be deployed in any cloud infrastructure like AWS or Azure or GCP and the CI & CD can be automated with DevOps process.

To summarize, no technology is inferior to the other but a stack is technically superior for a specific context and assumptions. With volatile and agile environment, the CDO’s and digital heads are always in dilemma to choose a right tech stack with a long term orientation. Though micro services makes any services technically agnostic, the fundamental choice still revolves around standardization and full stack JS development can be good fit for your digital transformation journey.