Once again, and as you know it, Lifecycle is always looking for new ways to innovate and encourage our teams to do it, that way we stay competitive in the market. Our most recent innovation challenge was with Microsoft Hackathon.
Are you excited as we are to know what we have been doing?
- THE CHALLENGE -
Running from the 11th of October until the 13th of October, a dedicated team of developers with part-time support from others attended the Microsoft "Solution Accelerator Hackathon". The idea behind the event is that companies propose a hack entry that they would like to try out using the Azure architecture, and within the 3 days they are given the time to create a proof-of-concept application. This was a virtual event where we were assigned a hack buddy at the start who helped resolve any blockers while using the Azure cloud functions. We also had access to 30-minute "Lightning Talks", where Microsoft experts would give a short and insightful explanation of some of the useful features of Azure, including demonstrations about the solutions.
- LIFECYCLE SKILLS ON - THE SOLUTION -
Our hack entry was based around our current BI platform (ODR). We store large amounts of call records in this database (9 Terabytes+) along with aggregations of that data. This not only increases the cost of storage but also is not necessarily the most efficient way to query and aggregate the data in large volumes. The proposal put forward was to move this data into the Azure Data Lake and store it in efficient file formats allowing partitioning, compression and indexing of the data. We can then proceed to run aggregations on this data efficiently, utilizing cloud serverless processes. This also opens to door to further investigation around machine learning across the data set, hopefully allowing us to detect trends in customer usage more easily.
We finished the hackathon with data pipeline which consumed call records from a database, converting them into Parquet files for storage in the Azure Data Lake. From here a data aggregation pipeline further processed the data into a layer that could be used within reports.
Another fun day at Lifecycle with a lot of new insights to bring up to the market the most efficient and automated products for the Telecom industry.
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