DEV Community: Akash A Benki

“Insanely Good” by Swiggy Uses Amazon Web Services

Akash A Benki — Sat, 02 Sep 2023 10:14:23 +0000

Whenever we encounter any instance where a food item is sensed by our senses we instantly feel the urge to eat and try out that food item. I know you imagined yourself eating that Crisp Delicious Dosa in your mind when you saw that image or felt like eating it out sooner or later, or remembered the last time you ate such Delicious Dosa. Well, that’s the normal human tendency to do so it’s not your fault.

But why am I talking about food now? Well, let me explain.

Food being an essential part of our lives plays an important role in our growth as well as being health. We all are addicted to some kind of food which is our favorite pick among some. In this 21st Century, the Food Industry has grown tremendously huge and is playing a crucial role.

Nowadays people are more likely to order food items online. A Majority of people are hugely dependent on Food Delivery Services offered by various companies like Zomato, Swiggy, Uber Eats, etc.

Today I attended the highly anticipated AWS Innovate Online Conference which took place on 30th August and 1st September 2023. Today in one of the sessions that took place among many I came across Swiggy’s Supr Daily Grocery service which fascinated me to know more about how this company uses AWS services to improve its services constantly.

In this blog, we will explore Swiggy’s “Insanely Good” pilot program, an exploratory case study of how the company is delivering exceptional quality to its customers (As they say).

Swiggy is an Indian online food delivery platform that has become a household name for many people in India. Through the use of innovative technology and a focus on customer feedback, Swiggy was able to improve its delivery service and set itself apart in a competitive market.

Swiggy’s “Supr Daily” Story

Based in Bangalore, Supr Daily is a grocery ordering and delivery service that makes it convenient for customers to order fresh groceries to their homes. More than 200,000 customers use Supr Daily to order milk, eggs, fresh fruits and vegetables, and other groceries for delivery by 7:00 a.m. each day.

But to support its network of thousands of delivery partners across six cities and manage its inventory of thousands of products, Supr Daily needed to scale its order delivery verification and inventory planning systems.
At the same time, the company’s growth accelerated as restrictions due to the COVID-19 pandemic limited in-person shopping, contributing to a 70 percent surge in new users.

Due to some reasons, the founders decided to scale down the operations in five cities namely Delhi, Mumbai, Pune, Hyderabad and Chennai in 2021. But they continued to operate and experiment in one city which was Bangalore.

Recently in March 2023, Swiggy rebranded its morning grocery delivery service SuprDaily to “InsanelyGood”, continuing the service in pilot mode and offering the next-day delivery of locally sourced groceries in Bangalore.

InsanelyGood by Swiggy has promised to offer customers fresh, authentic, and delicious groceries delivered to their doorstep the next morning.
InsanelyGood will offer more than 3,000 locally sourced and organic food items, including fruits and vegetables, grains, snacks, beverages, baby food, and kitchen essentials, according to a company executive in the know.
Orders placed before 11 pm will be fulfilled by 7 am the following day. It is not known if the firm’s membership program Swiggy One will apply to orders on InsanelyGood immediately.

Now let us understand how Swiggy uses AWS Services

1. Amazon Rekognition

Amazon Rekognition is a service offered by AWS that offers pre-trained and customizable computer vision (CV) capabilities to extract information and insights from your images and videos.

Using this Organizations Automate and lower the cost of your image recognition and video analysis with machine learning.
Supr Daily wanted to automate the photo verification process so that it could provide instant feedback about whether a delivery partner needed to take a better photo.
The company decided to use ML to reduce manual work and increase the speed and accuracy of the system. After realizing that building the technology in-house would be too costly and complex, the company began working on multiple proofs of concept using Amazon Rekognition in 2020.
Each time a delivery partner submits a photo of the delivered goods, Supr Daily automatically sends that photo to Amazon Rekognition, which uses ML to check the photo quality and verify that it is valid as proof of delivery. This system facilitates verification in near real-time that deliveries have been fulfilled and that confirmation images are high-quality.

2. Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)

Supr Daily uses the images it stores on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), an object storage service that offers industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance, to build custom Amazon Rekognition models that can recognize items in the images with 95 percent accuracy.

3. Amazon Forecast

Since 2020, Supr Daily has also used Amazon Forecast, which can forecast business outcomes easily and accurately using ML, to analyze customer behavior data and to make sure it had the right inventory to meet demand. The demand forecasting workflow used to be manual, but Supr Daily has automated it on AWS, performing the forecasting on data stored in Amazon S3 and receiving results rapidly.

4. Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS)

The company uses Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), which provides fully managed message queuing for microservices, distributed systems, and server-less applications, to send a notification containing the results to the procurement teams, who can place orders and make sure that items are in stock.

5. Amazon Elastic Beanstalk

Because AWS manages the infrastructure, Supr Daily can iterate more quickly and accelerate time to market for new features. Meanwhile, the app’s backend is hosted on AWS Elastic Beanstalk, a simple-to-use service for deploying and scaling web applications and services, making the solution scalable enough to support millions of customers in multiple cities. Implementing these services was simple.

6. Amazon Personalize

The Company Developers also used Amazon Personalize allows developers to quickly build and deploy curated recommendations and intelligent user segmentation at scale using machine learning (ML). Because Amazon Personalize can be tailored to your individual needs, you can deliver the right customer experience at the right time and in the right place.

Thank you for reading my blog so far. Give it a Like if you loved it and stay tuned for more blogs.

Also, I saw a video of Danish Sait advertising InsanelyGood Products on YouTube while exploring this study if you want to check it out.

You can also check out these References which I used for this Blog

Swiggy official Email for scale-down operations
AWS Case Study on SuprDaily by Swiggy
A Story by Soumya Ramasubramanian on YourStory
InsanelyGood current website

Cloud for Beginners | AWS Cloud Practitioner Essentials Course | Part-4

Akash A Benki — Thu, 31 Aug 2023 18:09:08 +0000

I am on my journey to explore and deep dive into this fascinating cloud technology. I started to explore and understand the basic terms of cloud technology and came across the AWS Cloud Practitioner Essentials Course. The instructors in this course are Blaine Sundrud a Senior Instructional Designer, Morgan Willis a Senior Cloud Technologist and Rudy Chetty a Solutions Architect.

In the previous blog we understood some of the fundamentals of Amazon EC2. In this blog which is the Part-4 of my Cloud for Beginners Blog Series, we will understand more about Amazon EC2 Instance Types.

Do you remember the Coffee Shop analogy we used earlier to describe different roles and responsibilities when we started our journey? The Barista’s played different roles at the Coffee shop, Similarly, the EC2 instances also serve different kinds of Clients in the client-server model.

If we want to have a cafe that can serve a lot of customers, then we’re probably going to need multiple employees, right? And they can’t just be cashiers. We also need someone to make the drinks, someone to handle the orders, and maybe someone to do that cool latte art that our customers love so much. Like any business, there are a variety of tasks that need to be done, and they often require different skill sets.

If we want businesses to operate as efficiently as possible, it’s important to make sure that an employee’s skillset suits their role. In the same way that our coffee shop has different kinds of employees, AWS has different types of EC2 instances that you can spin up and deploy into your AWS environment.

Each instance type is grouped under an instance family and is optimized for certain types of tasks. Instance types offer varying combinations of CPU, memory, storage, and networking capacity, and give you the flexibility to choose the appropriate mix of resources for your applications.

The different instance families in EC2 are general-purpose, compute-optimized, memory-optimized, accelerated computing, and storage-optimized.

Let’s look into each of them more specifically,

1. General-Purpose Instances

General purpose instances provide a balance of computing, memory, and networking resources. You can use them for a variety of workloads, such as application servers, gaming servers, backend servers for enterprise applications and small and medium databases.
Suppose that you have an application in which the resource needs for computing, memory, and networking are roughly equivalent. You might consider running it on a general-purpose instance because the application does not require optimization in any single resource area.

2. Compute-optimized Instances

Compute-optimized instances are ideal for compute-bound applications that benefit from high-performance processors.
Like general-purpose instances, you can use compute-optimized instances for workloads such as web, application, and gaming servers.
However, the difference is compute optimized applications are ideal for high-performance web servers, compute-intensive applications servers, and dedicated gaming servers.
You can also use compute-optimized instances for batch-processing workloads that require processing many transactions in a single group.

3. Memory-optimized Instances

Memory-optimized instances are designed to deliver fast performance for workloads that process large datasets in memory.
In computing, memory is a temporary storage area. It holds all the data and instructions that a central processing unit (CPU) needs to be able to complete actions. Before a computer program or application can run, it is loaded from storage into memory. This preloading process gives the CPU direct access to the computer program.
Suppose that you have a workload that requires large amounts of data to be preloaded before running an application. This scenario might be a high-performance database or a workload that involves performing real-time processing of a large amount of unstructured data. In these types of use cases, consider using a memory-optimized instance.
Memory-optimized instances enable you to run workloads with high memory needs and receive great performance.

4. Accelerated computing Instances

Accelerated computing instances use hardware accelerators, or coprocessors, to perform some functions more efficiently than is possible in software running on CPUs. Examples of these functions include floating-point number calculations, graphics processing, and data pattern matching.
In computing, a hardware accelerator is a component that can accomplish data processing sooner. Accelerated computing instances are ideal for workloads such as graphics applications, game streaming, and application streaming.

5. Storage-optimized Instances

Storage-optimized instances are designed for workloads that require high, sequential read and write access to large datasets on local storage.
Examples of workloads suitable for storage-optimized instances include distributed file systems, data warehousing applications, and high-frequency online transaction processing (OLTP) systems.
In computing, the term input/output operations per second (IOPS) is a metric that measures the performance of a storage device. It indicates how many different input or output operations a device can perform in one second. Storage-optimized instances are designed to deliver tens of thousands of low-latency, random IOPS to applications.
You can think of input operations as data put into a system, such as records entered into a database. An output operation is data generated by a server. An example of output might be the analytics performed on the records in a database. If you have an application that has a high IOPS requirement, a storage-optimized instance can provide better performance over other instance types not optimized for this kind of use case.

Now, if we map this back to our coffee shop, our cashier becomes a memory-optimized EC2 instance, baristas become compute-optimized instances, and our latte art employee is an accelerated computing instance type. And there you have it, EC2 instance types.

Thank you for reading my blog so far. Give it a Like if you loved it and stay tuned for more blogs.

Also if you don’t know Coffee shop analogy we used in this blog you can refer to my First blog post.

To learn more about Types of EC2 Instances check-out the below link:

Amazon EC2 Instance Types Documentation

Cloud for Beginners | AWS Cloud Practitioner Essentials Course | Part-3

Akash A Benki — Mon, 28 Aug 2023 15:58:32 +0000

I am on my journey to explore and deep dive into this fascinating cloud technology. I started to explore and understand the basic terms of cloud technology and came across the AWS Cloud Practitioner Essentials Course. The instructors in this course are Blaine Sundrud a Senior Instructional Designer, Morgan Willis a Senior Cloud Technologist and Rudy Chetty a Solutions Architect.

In this blog which is the Part-3 of my Cloud for Beginners Blog Series, we will understand and dive deep into the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), exploring its key features, benefits, and use cases. By the end, you’ll have a comprehensive understanding of how EC2 can revolutionize your computing infrastructure.

Let’s get started,

Introduction
Overview of Amazon Web Services
Understanding EC2 — Elastic Compute Cloud
Key Features and Benefits of EC2
Use Cases and Examples of EC2 in Action

Introduction

In today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape, businesses are increasingly relying on cloud computing to power their operations. Amazon Web Services (AWS), a leading cloud service provider, offers a wide range of services to help organizations scale their infrastructure and meet demanding computational needs. One such service is EC2, or Elastic Compute Cloud, which allows businesses to access virtual servers in the cloud.

Overview of Amazon Web Services

Before delving into EC2, let’s take a moment to understand Amazon Web Services as a whole. AWS is a comprehensive suite of cloud-based services offered by Amazon, designed to provide businesses with scalable and cost-effective solutions for their computing needs. It includes services for computing, storage, databases, analytics, networking, machine learning, and more.

Understanding EC2 — Elastic Compute Cloud

EC2, which stands for Elastic Compute Cloud, is a central component of AWS and serves as a scalable virtual computing environment. It enables businesses to rent virtual servers, known as instances, in the cloud and run their applications on them. EC2 instances are highly configurable, allowing businesses to choose the desired operating system, hardware specifications, and storage options.

The elasticity of EC2 allows businesses to scale their computing resources up or down based on demand. This eliminates the need for costly upfront hardware investments and provides the flexibility to handle fluctuating workloads. Additionally, EC2 offers a variety of instance types optimized for specific use cases, such as compute-intensive, memory-intensive, or storage-intensive workloads.

Key Features and Benefits of EC2

1. Scalability and Elasticity

One of the key benefits of EC2 is its ability to scale compute resources based on demand. Whether you need to handle sudden spikes in traffic or accommodate steady growth, EC2 allows you to easily add or remove instances as needed.
This helps businesses optimize their resource utilization and ensure smooth operations without the worry of over-provisioning or underutilization.

2. Security and Reliability

Security is a top priority for AWS, and EC2 benefits from the same high level of security measures. EC2 instances are protected by advanced firewalls, network isolation, and encryption mechanisms to safeguard your data.
Additionally, AWS ensures high availability by offering multiple availability zones within regions, reducing the risk of downtime and ensuring reliable performance.

3. Flexible Configuration Options

EC2 provides businesses with a wide range of configuration options to match their specific requirements. From choosing the appropriate instance type, operating system, and storage options to adjusting networking settings, EC2 allows for extensive customization.
This flexibility enables businesses to build and deploy applications that fully align with their needs.

4. Integration with Other AWS Services

As part of the AWS ecosystem, EC2 seamlessly integrates with other services offered by AWS. This allows businesses to leverage additional capabilities such as storage (Amazon S3), databases (Amazon RDS), content delivery (Amazon CloudFront), and more.
The tight integration leads to efficient workflows and easy management of complex architectures.

5. Cost-effectiveness

EC2’s pricing model is based on pay-as-you-go, meaning you only pay for the compute resources you consume. With no upfront costs or long-term commitments, this pricing model enables businesses to optimize their IT budgets and avoid unnecessary expenses.
Additionally, AWS offers cost-monitoring and optimization tools to help businesses keep track of their usage and identify opportunities for cost savings.

Use Cases and Examples of EC2 in Action

EC2 is widely used across various industries and has proven its value in numerous use cases. Here are a few examples:

Web Applications: EC2 is ideal for hosting web applications. Businesses can easily deploy web servers, load balancers, and databases on EC2 instances, ensuring high availability and scalability.
Big Data Processing: EC2 offers powerful instances optimized for handling big data processing and analytics. Businesses can quickly spin up instances to process large datasets, reducing processing time and costs.
DevOps and Continuous Integration: EC2 allows for easy creation of development and testing environments. The flexibility of EC2 instances enables developers to quickly provision resources for code compilation, testing, and continuous integration processes.
High-Performance Computing: EC2’s high-performance instances are designed to handle computationally intensive workloads. Industries like financial services, scientific research, and engineering can utilize EC2 to perform complex simulations, data modeling, and rendering.
Disaster Recovery: EC2 provides an excellent solution for disaster recovery by replicating critical systems across different regions. In the event of an outage, businesses can quickly switch to replicated instances, ensuring minimal downtime and data loss.

These are just a few examples of how EC2 can be leveraged to meet specific business needs. The versatility and scalability of EC2 make it a valuable asset for organizations across industries.

In the next part will shall look into Amazon EC2 Instance Types, Amazon EC2 Pricing and much more. Stay tuned.

Thank you for reading my blog so far. Give it a like if you loved it and stay tuned for more blogs.

Cloud for Beginners | AWS Cloud Practitioner Essentials Course | Part-2

Akash A Benki — Fri, 25 Aug 2023 18:55:47 +0000

We have all seen a Library with huge collections of books, newspapers, magazines, maps, etc. Well some of us still remember how that librarian used to shout at us and used to warn us for our mischief.
Wait a second, why am I telling you about Library now? — — — don’t worry you will understand.

In this blog which is the Part-2 of my Cloud for Beginners Blog Series, we will understand different types of Deployment Models in cloud computing and also a few of the major benefits of Cloud Computing.

Businesses or Organizations when selecting a cloud strategy must consider factors such as required cloud application components, preferred resource management tools, and any legacy IT infrastructure requirements. Selecting a good cloud strategy by analyzing and planning plays a crucial role for Businesses (Organizations) to level up their game in this fast-paced Tech world.

When we visit libraries we stumble upon so many interesting books, magazines, audiobooks, etc. We use those resources and sometimes even take them home for rental (On-Premises). Some of the resources are not allowed for the rental because of some reasons and that’s fine still we can use them while being in the library itself (In Cloud). Sometimes we take the keynotes from those resources in the library and later use them at home (Hybrid).

According to Amazon Web Services (AWS), there are 3 cloud deployment models. They are:
1. Cloud-Based Deployment Model
2. On-Premises Deployment Model and
3. Hybrid Deployment Model

Let us understand the above-mentioned deployment models one by one.

1. Cloud-Based Deployment Model — In this model, you can migrate existing applications to the cloud, or you can design and build new applications in the cloud. You can build those applications on low-level infrastructure that requires your IT staff to manage them. Alternatively, you can build them using higher-level services that reduce the management, architecting, and scaling requirements of the core infrastructure.

For example, a company might create an application consisting of virtual servers (Amazon EC2 instances), databases (Amazon DynamoDB), and networking components that are fully based in the cloud.

2. On-Premises Deployment Model — Also known as the private-cloud deployment. In this model, resources are deployed on-premises by using virtualization and resource management tools. Increase resource utilization by using application management and virtualization technologies.

For example, you might have applications that run on technology that is fully kept in your on-premises data center. Though this model is much like legacy IT infrastructure, its incorporation of application management and virtualization technologies helps to increase resource utilization.

3. Hybrid Deployment Model — In this model, cloud-based resources are connected to on-premises infrastructure. You might want to use this approach in several situations.

For example, suppose that a company wants to use cloud services that can automate batch data processing and analytics. However, the company has several legacy applications that are more suitable on-premises and will not be migrated to the cloud. With a hybrid deployment, the company would be able to keep the legacy applications on-premises while benefiting from the data and analytics services that run in the cloud.

Therefore the Businesses (Organizations) will have to carefully look into their requirements and then choose a suitable deployment model which will serve them well.

Let us concisely revisit the above concepts:

1. Cloud-Based Deployment Model

Run all parts of the application in the cloud.
Migrate existing applications to the cloud.
Design and build new applications in the cloud.

2. On-Premises Deployment Model

Deploy resources by using virtualization and resource management tools.
Increase resource utilization by using application management and virtualization technologies.

3. Hybrid Deployment Model

Connect cloud-based resources to on-premises infrastructure.
Integrate cloud-based resources with legacy IT applications.

Now let us look into and understand a few major benefits of cloud computing:

1. Trade upfront expense for variable expense

Upfront expense refers to data centers, physical servers, and other resources that you would need to invest in before using them.
Variable expense means you only pay for computing resources you consume instead of investing heavily in data centers and servers before you know how you’re going to use them. By this companies can implement innovative solutions while saving on costs.

2. Benefit from massive economies of scale

By using cloud computing, you can achieve a lower variable cost than you can get on your own.
Because usage from hundreds of thousands of customers can aggregate in the cloud, providers, such as AWS, can achieve higher economies of scale. The economy of scale translates into lower pay-as-you-go prices.

3. Increase speed and agility

The flexibility of cloud computing makes it easier for you to develop and deploy applications with more time to experiment and innovate.
When computing in data centers, it may take weeks to obtain new resources that you need. By comparison, cloud computing enables you to access new resources within minutes.

4. Stop Spending money to run and maintain data centers

Computing in data centers often requires you to spend more money and time managing infrastructure and servers.
A benefit of cloud computing is the ability to focus less on these tasks and more on your applications and customers.

5. Stop guessing capacity

With cloud computing, you don’t have to predict how much infrastructure capacity you will need before deploying an application.
For example, you can launch Amazon EC2 instances when needed, and pay only for the compute time you use. Instead of paying for unused resources or having to deal with limited capacity, you can access only the capacity that you need. You can also scale in or scale out in response to demand.

6. Go global in minutes

The global footprint of the AWS Cloud enables you to deploy applications to customers around the world quickly while providing them with low latency.
This means that even if you are located in a different part of the world than your customers, customers can access your applications with minimal delays.

Thank you for reading my blog so far. Give it a like if you loved it and stay tuned for more blogs.

You can also check out these additional resources to explore more about AWS:

Cloud for Beginners | AWS Cloud Practitioner Essentials Course | Part-1

Akash A Benki — Thu, 24 Aug 2023 07:19:28 +0000

On this beautiful Earth who doesn’t love the fascinating and amazing clouds in the sky? The person who loves clouds is called Nephophilia. But in the Technical world, the people who are in love with these cloud technologies and their power are the cloud architects, cloud engineers, cloud data scientists, cloud automation engineers, cloud administrators and many others.

I am on my journey to explore and deep dive into this fascinating cloud technology. I started to explore and understand the basic terms of cloud technology and came across the AWS Cloud Practitioner Essentials Course. This course gave me a very strong basic understanding of what cloud is and how Amazon with its Amazon Web Services (AWS) is dominating and serving so many purposes in this world.

In this blog, I will just give the Introduction about the course which was the module-1 of the course and how it explained some of the cloud concepts with a beautiful example of a Coffee Shop. The instructors in this course are Blaine Sundrud a Senior Instructional Designer, Morgan Willis a Senior Cloud Technologist and Rudy Chetty a Solutions Architect.

Firstly let us understand How AWS defines what is Cloud Technology ?
Cloud computing in basic terms is the on-demand delivery of IT resources over the Internet with pay-as-you-go pricing. Instead of buying, owning, and maintaining physical data centers and servers, you can access technology services, such as computing power, storage, and databases, on an as-needed basis from a cloud provider like Amazon Web Services (AWS).

AWS offers a wide range and variety of services to its Customers (Clients).
In this Modern technological world, everything is based on Client-Server Model. In computing, a client can be a web browser or desktop application that a person interacts with to make requests to computer servers. A server can be serviced, such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) — a type of virtual server. Now let us understand this using an example of a Coffee shop.

Suppose I own a Coffee shop where I have appointed two Baristas to work there. One of them let’s say Barista A is responsible for taking customer orders and payments. While Barista B is responsible for taking orders from Barista A, Making and Serving the choice of Coffee requests of the respective Customers.

Now a Customer comes in and orders an Espresso. Barista A takes the order from the Customer and gives it to Barista B for its fulfillment. Barista B makes the Espresso and gives it back to Barista A who further gives it to the respective Customer.
Here we can refer to Customer as the Client and Barista A and B as the Server. In the same way, Clients can use various AWS Web Services and request various resources from the server (AWS Cloud Server).
Now Suppose I decide to Launch a new variety of Coffee, Something like let us name it Monster Coffee. My Coffee Shop at certain times of the day of the Launch is too much crowded and Customers are excited to order this newly launched Coffee. Now my crew Barista A and Barista B are helpless with so many orders to fulfill at the same time.
As an Owner of this Coffee Shop, I decided to appoint some more baristas, in this case, to help the customers fulfill their requests as early as possible. As time passes the Customers begin to reduce at the end of the day. Now I don’t need too many Barista’s working at my Coffee shop. So I decide to pay them for the hours they served at my Coffee shop and remove them.
Similarly in the case of AWS Cloud the client (customer) can request resources on demand and pay only for the duration for which they were used.

As mentioned earlier pay-as-you-go pricing policy works in this way. The Clients only need to pay for the resources for which they have used without needing to worry about the most of the things as in the case of On-premises Data Center. We will talk more about the Deployments models and advantages of using AWS Cloud Services in the next blog. Stay tuned.

Those who wondered what is meant by Barista if you did not google it then let me tell you. Barista in simple terms is the person who serves in a Coffee shop. A Barista is a professional who makes and serves beverages such as coffee, tea and specialty beverages. They are responsible for taking customer orders and payments. They also clean and sanitize their work areas, seating areas and equipment/tools.

Thank you for reading my blog so far. Give it a Like if you loved it and stay tuned for more blogs. This is a Cloud for Beginners Series with a subtitle Nephophilia Dairy.