Microsoft have launched Azure Location Based Services,a new public cloud offering for enterprise customers, providing location capabilities built & integrated directly into Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform. The new location capabilities will provide cloud developers critical geographical data to power smart cities and Internet of Things [IoT] solutions across industries including manufacturing, automotive, logistics, urban planning and retail, among others.
Microsoft is making efforts to solve mobility challenges and bring government bodies, private companies and automotive OEMs together, using Microsoft’s intelligent cloud platform.
TomTom Telematics, will be the first official partner for the service, supplying critical location and real-time traffice data, providing Microsoft customers with advanced location and mapping capabilities. Microsoft also announced that Azure LBS will be launched in calendar year 2018 and will be available globally in more than 30 languages. The company will also enter in a cloud with ICONIQ, a Chinese Electric Vehicle company. In the year 2018 Microsoft is expected to be joined in by several partners who will be showcasing various location, connected car and smart city-relevant technologies they are building on top of the Azure cloud.
Microsoft’s Azure Location Based Services will offer enterprise customers location capabilities integrated in the cloud to help any industry from manufacturing to healthcare to automotive track assets or improve traffic flow.
Microsoft is providing an enterprise-ready location service for customers to build location of things applications and easily access location insights through one dashboard, one subscription, and one bill.
Microsoft customers will benefit from TomTom’s hyper-accurate location data enabled by hundreds of millions of connected devices, providing the most up to date maps.
Marico Limited, India’s leading consumer products company in the wellness and beauty space, has recently adopted Microsoft Azure SQL Data Warehouse to improve their business productivity. The adoption of the fully-managed, highly-elastic, petabyte-scale, warehouse-as-a-service cloud-based relational database has helped Marico increase their data processing speed by over 150%.
In the FMCG space, the volume of data being generated fluctuates greatly during certain periods, especially the month beginning and ends or during season and festival time. This puts unforeseen burden on the existing IT infrastructure in managing the data flux. The window for extraction, transformation and loading of huge amount of data is limited to a few hours.
This deployment has freed Marico from regular hardware refresh owing to data volume variability, and provided the flexibility of scale-up or scale-down on demand. They now have an end-to-end data solution [database, data warehouse, big data, visualization, advanced analytics] that unlocks insights from any data. This has given Marico complete control of data management and more agility for business decision-making during critical times. They have also overcome the need for creating disaster recovery or backup infrastructure.
Mukesh Kripalani, Chief – Business Process Transformation & IT, Marico said
With the growing surge of data, and the burden that used to come along with it, Microsoft has helped us in eliminating the need for over-provisioning. We wanted to gain control over the churn and speed of data, and Azure SQL Data Warehouse has not only helped achieve this but also helped us gain business insights from big data and advanced analytics.
Peter Gartenberg, General Manager, Enterprise Commercial, Microsoft India, said
The deployment at Marico addresses the current FMCG market need for an integrated, intelligent cloud-based database management system. The solution will help Marico stay ahead of the market with faster and more accurate decisions. We have always aimed to reduce complexity and redundancy, and ensure data privacy and security through the Microsoft Cloud. We are excited to be associated with the growth of Marico.
In India, numerous FMCG customers are leveraging Microsoft Azure as their cloud platform to develop cutting edge digital and data analytics capabilities. Microsoft’s commitment to deliver enterprise-grade cloud platform that is open, flexible, affordable and secure has resonated strongly with Indian companies.
IBM and Pace Automation Ltd, a leading ‘Solution as a Service Company’ announced a strategic partnership to offer ‘RetailSmart‘, an end-to-end fully integrated solution that will enable local ‘Kirana’ [unorganized] stores to become ecommerce ready. Powered by IBM Cloud, the solution allows Kirana stores to deliver a convenient online shopping experience to consumers and pay safely using a convenient payment mode [irrespective of the size of the purchase].
According to industry reports, the current number of Kirana stores in India is pegged to be at 15 million. These stores have been facing tremendous headwinds from the organized retail & ecommerce companies. Attractive product presentations, discounts and cash back offers have led consumers to shop online while saving both time and money through these ecommerce portals. In addition, with the government’s demonetisation campaign, it is imperative for Kirana stores to go digital.
To bridge the gap, Pace Automation Ltd. has developed a unique solution, ‘RetailSmart’ on IBM cloud to digitally enable Kirana stores across the country. By implementing the solution, a Kirana store automatically becomes a part of the SmartKirana Network, hosted on IBM Cloud from Chennai data-center. The network digitally interconnects all Kirana stores in the country. Customers can easily access the network of Kirana stores in the neighborhood via smartphone app on Android available on Google Play Store or the SmartKirana web portal. Initially, the service will be available in Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Kerala and National Capital Region and will be gradually expanded to other states and rural areas via network of distributors.
The solution will also give these stores an immediate access to ecosystem partners in banking, communication, insurance, payment processing and National product data repository. It enables the Kirana stores to:
Automate business processes like billing, stock management and accounting with increased efficiency and profitability
Receive online orders from customers through a web portal or smartphone app
Accept all credit / debit cards, mobile wallets, Aadhar enabled payments or UPI, irrespective of the value of the transaction thus making the transactions Cashless.
Put all transactions through the system creating transaction transparency, an integral aspect of GST compliance
Provide micro banking and value added services to customers generating additional revenue streams
SG Chandru, Chairman & Mentor, Pace Automation Ltd said
The objective of this project is to digitally empower Kirana stores and help them scale business by adding new revenue streams. For this we have tied up with series of partners to create a successful business ecosystem for Kirana merchants. Our target is to bring 1,50,000 local grocery stores to the network in the next three years & allow customers to order their groceries online from the nearest Kirana shop.
IBM is our technology partner that enabled us to develop and seamlessly deploy the solution on the Cloud. RetailSmart connects all the Kirana Stores across the country in its network digitally through the communication Ecosystem partner. This project is a win-win for all the stakeholders involved – Kirana stores, Manufacturers and Suppliers of goods and the end use customers.
Mukul Mathur, VP, Global Business partners and CSI, IBM India/South Asia said
We are excited about partnering with PACE in their efforts to digitize the unorganised Kirana stores and transform them into organized retail, leveraging the IBM Cloud and Cognitive solutions. IBM cloud is open by design, offering a set of tools, flexibility and agility that helps organizations of all size and developers to easily translate their innovative ideas into technical solutions and business models. This tie-up is an extension of IBM’s commitment to the ecosystem and a great example of how our joint solutions reach deep into the SME segment making the vision of Digital India real.
Powered by IBM Cloud, the solution is fully integrated end-to-end consisting of a custom -built hardware, an intuitive application software, backend / payment processing engines. A physically separated disaster recovery system ensures business continuity.
PACE has also developed and implemented several solutions on IBM cloud across verticals for retail sector. ServeSmart is the flagship solution of PACE to automate the operations of restaurant retail business and has automated Cafe Coffee Day (CCD) operations in 2004 when they had just 90 outlets which has grown to 1800 plus outlets today.
PACE now provides ‘ServeSmart’ services to more than thirty five hundred restaurant outlets of various leading restaurants in India. PACE hosts all its solutions on an IBM-IaaS Facility at Chennai and at Singapore to provide disaster recovery and business process continuation.
Megasoft Limited, a leading technology company, have announced the award of cloud-enabled solution & services contract by the Bihar State Electronics Development Corporation Ltd. [BELTRON]. The state Government of Bihar, through BELTRON, plans to establish state-of-the-art cloud computing facility for use by its various e-Governance programs and other IT-driven initiatives.
The cloud-enabled State Data Centre [SDC] named ‘Bihar Cloud’ is one of the important elements for supporting initiatives of National e-Governance Plan [NeGP]. The primary purpose of the cloud computing solution is to establish a viable ‘Private’ cloud environment for use by the various e-Governance applications of Bihar.
Megasoft, acclaimed for its sophisticated cloud deployments, will provide state-of-the-art infrastructure and technology solution and services to address various needs of multiple line departments within the state that come under the purview of Bihar Cloud. While the solution is focused primarily on Infrastructure-as-a-Service [IaaS], other services such as Platform-as-a-Service [PaaS], Data-as-a-Service [DaaS] & Software-as-a-Service [SaaS] will complement and be deployed on top of the basic IaaS services.
In the past, applications and websites of state departments were hosted on different servers. In such a scenario, introduction of a new application or website required all other applications and websites to be brought down. With ‘Bihar Cloud’, sufficient space will be allocated to various state Government departments based on their requirements.
The unique feature of this project is that the cloud-based implementation will also further strengthen the security aspect of all the applications. The inauguration of the solution is planned shortly.
G V Kumar, CEO & Managing Director of Megasoft said
Virtualization and the cloud mean much more than mere consolidation. Our Infrastructure-as-a-Service [IaaS] solution will not only ease BELTRON’s infrastructure management efforts but also provide them the ability to automatically scale-up or scale-down services hosted in the cloud, based on user demand.
By addressing the systems and information technology needs from a holistic perspective, our delivery model will ensure that BELTRON implements ‘Bihar Cloud’ in the most effective manner.
Megasoft cloud-enabled solution is agnostic to the underlying hardware, storage, network and operating system. Besides enabling end customers to automatically provision services via a web portal it provides service assurance for maintenance & operations activities performed by the users.
About BELTRON
Bihar State Electronics Development Corporation Ltd. [BELTRON] is the nodal agency of the Bihar state working towards promotion & implementation of IT and e-Governance. It is the single-point of access to any IT business opportunity in Bihar and encourages various players in the field of IT to come forward and invest in the state.
BELTRON is committed to generate IT business for the public / private sector with a mandate from the Government to develop IT in the state. For more information, please visit BELTRON
DigitalOcean, the cloud for developers, have released LoadBalancers, one of the most requested products from customers. LoadBalancers is a highly available product that enables developers and small businesses to distribute traffic across their infrastructure to achieve100% uptime for their productionworkloads.
DigitalOcean is approaching one million registered users with more than 40,000 active teams since releasing its cloud five years ago. With workloads becoming more complex, DigitalOcean is focused on delivering the tools and performance that are required to seamlessly deploy, scale and manage any sized application.
We are quickly expanding the capabilities of our cloud to support larger scale-out applications. With Load Balancers, we are providing developers and businesses with a simple service for maximizing the availability and reliability of applications without disrupting the end user experience. Load Balancers is the first major new product DigitalOcean has released this year. Over the coming year, you’ll see us continue to release a number of important products and features to meet our customers’ high availability, data storage, security, and networking needs.
Load Balancers on DigitalOcean can be created effortlessly from the control panel or API-no additional installation or configuration needed. Using Load Balancers to distribute connections enables developers and small businesses to scale their applications horizontally by sending traffic only to healthy Droplets, ensuring no single point of failure and increasing availability across their infrastructure.
With Load Balancers, developers have access to the following:
Support for multiple protocols including HTTP, HTTPS, and TCP
There was an era of MS-DOS [Microsoft Disk Operating System] in the 80’s & 90’s when our computer systems used to have around 512 MB of RAM. In fact, this was considered as a very high end configuration during those times! However, with the advent of time the OS was replaced with operating systems that offered rich GUI’s with support of CLI [Command Line Interface]. Fast forward now, we have so many operating systems for PC’s i.e. Windows, Linux [with various distributions], MAC, etc. Not only has the demand of an average user changed but there has been a gradual shift in the expectations of the developers.
Important applications like Word, Excel, Powerpoint, etc. that are used by millions of users are now accessible without local installation of those softwares. This is all possible due to the advent of Cloud Computing that has been a buzzword for quite a few years! Thanks to cloud computing, companies can now focus on core business instead of spending time & effort on costly server infrastructure.
In a nutshell, there has been a gradual shift to ‘Pay Per Use‘ or ‘What You Use Is What You Pay‘ economy. Cloud computing eliminates the expense required for buying quality hardware, reduces overall cost, guarantees better reliability and performance [depending on the maximum up-time mentioned by the cloud service provider].
According to the latest data by Synergy Research Group, Amazon Web Services [AWS] continues to remain the market leader followed by the likes of Microsoft, IBM, Google, etc. [Source]. Though AWS from Amazon is considered the ‘Big Daddy’ of the game, smaller [and rising] players like DigitalOcean are upping their game by following a very different strategy [that does not directly confront with Amazon].
DigitalOcean : Overview
DigitalOcean is a cloud infrastructure provider founded in 2011 and headquartered in New York with data centers worldwide. The company is founded by Ben and Moisey Uretsky who earlier founded ServerStack, a managed hosting business and while surveying the cloud hosting market, they realized that most of the hosting companies were serving the enterprise market leaving a void that needed to be filled!
Unlike AWS that targets variety of customers, products from DigitalOcean cater to solving developer needs. DigitalOcean became one of the fastest growing cloud-hosting companies offering SSD virtual machines [Source]
They have data centers located in 12 countries around the world with one server located in Bangalore which is a huge boon to the growing startup [and developer] community in the city!
DigitalOcean – Data Center locations
DigitalOcean : Droplets, Pricing and more
The Virtual Private Servers [VPS] are termed as Droplets and each droplet that you create is considered as a new VPS. For the review, we created a VPS/droplet with 20 GB space, 512 MB RAM and running Ubuntu 16.04. The installation process was very simple and it took us couple of minutes to setup the droplet.
Droplet Installation – To create a droplet, you need to login to the Digital Control Panel. On successful login you need to click on the ‘Create Droplet’ button. You would be prompted with the available linux distros that you can use to create your first droplet.
Once you have zeroed in on the distro, you need to select the right storage option that suits your requirements. There are variety of options available as shown below:
The plans are very flexible and you can change the Droplet’s plan based on your future requirements. If you are a newbie who is testing the waters of cloud computing, then you can opt for the least expensive plan that offers 512MB of RAM with single core & 20GB of SSD storage. As seen above DigitalOcean offers a very different pricing model, something that even looks very lucrative to developers!
The next step in setting up the droplet is very crucial as it can have a major impact on the performance (and reduce latency). In this step, you select your nearest data-center region. For our test, we selected Bangalore as the preferred location 🙂 Amazon that offers AWS has a server in Mumbai that offers Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) [Source] but they do not have a server in Bangalore!
Once the Droplet region is selected, you would be prompted with additional options like setting up backups, IPV6 enabling, etc. You can name your droplet for easy identification purpose and also set up an SSH key. You can now breath a sigh of relief for completing the ‘simple’ task of setting up your droplet.
We could setup the droplet in a couple of minutes, thanks to the awesome UX of DigitalOcean that made the task look very simple.
Pricing – As stated earlier, pricing offered by DigitalOcean caters to a range of customers (particularly developers). Pricing starts at USD 5 per month and goes all the way upto USD 640 per month where you get 640 GB SSD storage! On Amazon’s EC2 platform, the closest equivalent [of the most popular droplet that offers 30GB SSD disk, 2TB transfer] is a t2.small instance which starts at USD 0.026 per hour, almost double the cost of a DigitalOcean droplet [Source].
Effective Pricing, high performance machines, simplicity and developer focused approach are the pillars of strength for DigitalOcean.
DigitalOcean – Vibrant Community
DigitalOcean has a very vibrant Community where you can find a host of tutorials that cater to a range of topics centered around DigitalOcean. They also have an active YouTube channeland a very active topic on Quora (Moisey Uretsky, Cofounder at DigitalOcean being one of the active contributors of that topic! You can follow their official blog here
DigitalOcean – Backups, Performance and more
Backups can be enabled for the droplets with just 1 USD per month. As per this particular thread on Quora
Backups on DigitalOcean are strangely infrequent-which could worry you depending on how your backup plan is. Right now they do it once every 3 days, which is fine for my personal blog, but not for any applications I work on. Amazon requires a laborious setup to do backups that isn’t as straight forward as “click here to buy backups”.
In this case I have been using both. A DigitalOcean Droplet with daily backups to S3 and Glacier. This in my circumstances has been offering the best combination of offerings for small-midscale projects.
From a performance/value perspective, DigitalOcean follows a bulk pricing model. For customers who need higher RAM, they don’t necessarily have to upgrade to a larger sized Droplet. They could merely choose from DigitalOcean’s High memory plans which provide larger amounts of RAM and which would be relevant for use cases such as running databases, in-memory caches, etc. For more information on the plans, please visit High memory Droplet pricing. For customers who need more storage than what is available by default in a Droplet, they could use DigitalOcean’s Block Storage offering which provides highly available SSD based storage without having to scale the number of cores. The block storage volumes can be attached to their existing Droplets, and the pricing starts at just $0.10/GB per month. For more information on the plans, please visit SSD Block Storage pricing.
From a developer’s point of view, debugging [apart from development] is a very crucial phase in the life cycle of a product 🙂 DigitalOcean has an exhaustive Developers Sectionwhere you can find the API documentation and insights into how to use those Tools. A sample snapshot of the CPU load on the droplet that we installed is below:
DigitalOcean – Offerings for Indian Startups
In India, DigitalOcean has partnered with several top-tier accelerators, incubators and VCs based in India to support the startups from their portfolio with infrastructure credit.
DigitalOcean – Conclusion
DigitalOcean is not a direct competitor to the behemoths e.g. Amazon, Azure, Salesforce, etc. of the Cloud Computing since it addresses the needs of a very specific market – The Developer Community. With One click app support, developer can even skip the installation as well as configuration and get started with the deployment of code using any one of the pre-built images supporting various languages. A snapshot of their 2016 achievements below
If you are a developer looking for affordable linux servers that support only a few well-known tools, than DigitalOcean could be an ideal match. Unlike AWS, Azure, etc. that provide Infrastructure-as-a-service [IaaS], Platform as a service [PaaS] & Software as a service [SaaS]; DigitalOcean provides reliable as well as affordable IaaS platform for developers!
If you are an existing customer of DigitalOcean, please leave your feedback in the comments section…
DigitalOcean, the cloud for developers released High Memory Droplets (cloud servers) to continue to support more advanced workloads and applications at scale. While DigitalOcean’s standard Droplets make it easy for developers to deploy a healthy balance of RAM, CPU and local SSD-based storage, High Memory Droplets enable developers and businesses with specific use cases, typically running large-scale databases or distributed in-memory caches that require more RAM such as MongoDB, Cassandra and Redis.
This is another example of the company’s focus on ensuring developers and businesses can seamlessly launch, scale, and manage any size production application.
The next generation of applications need high memory to be intensely high performance, predictive and provide an exceptional user experience. In-memory, data structure platforms such as Redis can then take advantage of the available DRAM to meet a diverse set of processing and analytical needs, with the simplest possible developer experience.
We are constantly evaluating the service options we provide our customers to ensure they are getting the most value from DigitalOcean. By offering High Memory Droplets, developers now have an optimal solution for larger, high-performance databases that demand aggressive memory caching for data file management. High Memory Droplets also allow for scaling up vertically versus horizontally.
DigitalOcean is launching five new High Memory Droplets plans that start at $120 per month or $0.18 per hour and scale from 16GB to 224GB of RAM while maintaining an appropriate amount of local storage and CPU. The per-gigabyte cost of RAM is 25% less than DigitalOcean’s standard Droplet plans. High Memory Droplets are the first optimized Droplet type that DigitalOcean has released.
To learn more about DigitalOcean’s High Memory Droplet plans, please go here
About DigitalOcean
DigitalOcean is a cloud infrastructure provider focused on simplifying web infrastructure for software developers. The company is headquartered in New York City with data-centers throughout the world. For more information, please visit DigitalOcean
The best cloud storage providers simplify our digital lives. They make it easy to share files and photos and provide a secure place to back up our most important memories. We love the cloud and made it our mission to find the best cloud storage provider.
Note* : This article was previously featured on Reviews.com and content is reproduced here with author’s consent.
After exploring over 45 different options, interviewing power users across the nation, and personally testing 26 different apps, we are confident that DropBox, Google Drive, OneDrive, and Box are the best, most reliable cloud storage providers on the market today.
All four of our top picks will provide you with roughly the same lineu of features and each has a freemium version, letting you take advantage of the cloud without paying a dime. So, picking your favorite cloud storage option will be a matter of how much space you need, how much you’re ready to pay, and which one is the easiest for you to use.
How We Found the Best Cloud Storage
We started by compiling a list of 45 different cloud-based software solutions and then we hit the books (well, the internet, that is). We read reviews from the top technology blogs, dissected user guides, toyed with a bunch of settings, and narrowed our list down to our top four recommendations using these five criteria:
1. We removed services that are focused primarily on media- and OS-level backups.
Of the active users we surveyed, 53 percent primarily use cloud storage for media and file sharing, so our best picks had to be well-rounded, and not focused on automated, system-level backups.
2. We removed services that are just for business and have no personal option.
Enterprise cloud solutions are technical, and include a plethora of features that most people either don’t need, or would find confusing, such as task management and user comments.
3. We cut all services without extensive support for OS X, Windows, Android, and iOS.
A huge benefit of cloud storage is that it bridges the gap between operating systems. We only passed services that support all of the most common desktop and mobile operating systems.
4. We cut any cloud storage services that did not offer a freemium version.
Offering a freemium version is obviously a great way for companies to win new users, but it’s also part of being the best cloud storage service. Not everyone is a power user, after all. And why pay when you don’t have to?
5. We cut any contenders that didn’t have an average of 3.5 stars or higher from the App Store, Google Play Store, and Windows Store.
If there’s one thing that should be indicative of cloud storage, it’s mobility. Filtering out low-rated mobile apps was a great way to find out which companies really catered to their users. Of course, app scores change with every update and release, but as of our latest update all of our top contenders had high marks.
Cloud Storage Reviews and Testing
After narrowing down the cloud storage contenders to our top recommendations, we spent a week testing them all on four different operating systems (OS X Yosemite, Windows 10, iOS 9.1, Android Lollipop 5.1.1) and on seven different devices. We updated files, shared a ton of pictures (maybe one or two selfies), and installed a bunch of apps. We even used Google Drive to write and edit this review.
We also tested the transfer speeds for each contender by uploading a leisurely afternoon’s worth of iPhone photos (about 30) from three different locations. As you can see below, Microsoft OneDrive consistently logged the fastest times, while Box and Dropbox duked it out for last place.
Speed Test : Save a Few Seconds on Every Upload
Packet Size: 393.6Mb (Note: Lower score is better)
