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Kobi Bohbot

Kobi Bohbot

Understanding Azure Time Series Insights

Understanding Azure Time Series Insights
azure

What is Azure Time Series Insights?

Azure Time Series Gen2 is an end-to-end Internet of Things (IoT) analytics service designed for industrial IoT deployments. It provides powerful APIs you can use to integrate it with current workflows and applications. 

Azure Time Series Insights collects, processes, stores, queries, and visualizes IoT data at scale, adding context and optimizing it for time series analysis. It is designed to explore data ad hoc and analyze operations, helping you discover hidden trends, spot anomalies, and perform root-cause analysis.

In this article, you will learn:

  • What is an Azure Time Series Model?
    • Time Series Model Components
  • Azure Time Series Data Storage
    • Storage Tiers and Data Availability
    • Warm Store
    • Cold Store
  • Azure Time Series Best Practices
    • Using Warm Store and Cold Store
    • Configure Time Series IDs and Timestamp Properties
    • Optimize Your Events
    • High Availability

Kobi Bohbot

Real Time Analytics and Stream Processing: An Introduction

Real Time Analytics and Stream Processing: An Introduction
real time analytics

What is Real Time Analytics?

Real-time analytics makes it possible for organizations to capture live streams of data, process them very quickly, and extract insights or perform operations on the data in real time or near-real-time. It is based on stream processing technology that can handle a very high throughput of event data. 

There are two types of real time analytics:

  • On-demand analytics—providing data or computation results to users or applications in real time. For example, displaying the current product price to a user on an eCommerce site.
  • Continuous analytics—processing events on a continuous basis and streaming the results to end users, applications, or a data store. For example, showing live stock market data on a dashboard in a financial institution. 

Real-time analytics has many uses in the digital economy. For example, it can help businesses track customer data and respond with personalized offers, improving customer engagement. It  can enable rapid, automated response to shifts in the market, enabling dynamic pricing on eCommerce sites. Another common use is to process massive volumes of log or sensor data, from IT systems or internet of things (IoT) devices, and using them to drive business decisions.

In this article, you will learn:

  • What are Stream Processing Frameworks?
  • Top Stream Processing Frameworks
    • Amazon Kinesis
    • Azure Stream Analytics
    • Apache Spark
  • Best Practices for Real Time Analytics

Kobi Bohbot

Google Firebase Pricing for Dummies

Google Firebase Pricing for Dummies

How Much Does Google Firebase Cost?

Firebase is a platform for building web and mobile applications. It was originally developed by Firebase Inc., and purchased by Google in 2018.

Firebase has two main pricing plans. The Firebase pricing plans are:

  • Spark Plan (Firebase free tier) is a basic plan offering 1 GB total storage, 20K writes/day, 50K reads/day, and 20K deleted/day
  • Blaze Plan (paid) is a pay as you go plan charging $0.18/GB for database storage, $0.026/GB for application storage, and additional charges for database operations, data transfer, etc.

In this article, you will learn:

  • How Much Does Google Firebase Cost?
  • Firebase Always-Free Services
  • Firebase Pricing for Paid Services
  • Cloud Firestore Database
  • Real-Time Databases
  • Hosting
  • Authentication
  • Cloud Functions
  • Firebase ML
  • Test Lab
  • Firebase: Estimating Your Costs

Kobi Bohbot

Firebase Database: Should You Choose Realtime DB or Cloud Firestore?

Firebase is a NoSQL cloud service, offered as part of the Google Cloud Platform database offerings. It is based on a document-model and can be used to store and sync data in real-time with horizontal scaling. You can use Firebase for multi-user applications, such as mobile apps, serverless applications, and offline applications. 

Beyond standard NoSQL functionality, Firebase includes features for authentication, crash reporting, messaging, performance monitoring, and analytics. Firebase is accessible through SDK and API, with support for both Unity and C++. You can integrate it with a wide variety of services and utilities, including Kubernetes deployments, BigQuery, Google Marketing Platform, Data Studio, JIRA, and Slack. 

This article will explain the differences between Firestore vs Real Time Database.


Kobi Bohbot

Firebase Storage: What It Is and How It Works

Firebase is a web and mobile application development platform powered by Google. Cloud Storage is incorporated natively into the Firebase architecture.

When creating Firebase projects, you’re also creating Google Cloud projects, because this is where Firebase stores data. This integration enables you to leverage Google Cloud security features for Firebase apps, as well as manage media directly through your storage account. 

This article explains how Firebase architecture works, and walks you through the process of  accessing and uploading files, setting up monitoring, and configuring user-based security rules.

In this article, you will learn:

  • What is Firebase storage?
  • Firebase architecture in the cloud
  • Firebase storage methods

Kobi Bohbot

5 Ways to Reduce Lambda Cold Starts

AWS Lambda is a serverless service that you can use to run functions on the AWS cloud. Lambda functions can be triggered automatically based on pre-configured events, or manually. Whichever way you choose to run your functions, you need to carefully monitor performance, to ensure that you are not billed for cold starts. Lambda cold starts typically occur when the system cannot meet the demands needed to deploy your function. This article explains the main factors that contribute to cold start times, and offers three techniques you can use to reduce the impact of Lambda cold starts.


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