AgroStar: Small farms in India getting big help from the cloud
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AgroStar has launched a cloud-based mobile app that is helping to boost crop yields and encourage best practices for small farmers in India. Launched as an on-premises ecommerce platform selling farm tools in 2008, the firm turned to Google Cloud Platform (GCP) to expand its offering. It now uses cloud-based analytics and is deploying ML models to provide timely advice in five languages on everything from seed optimization, crop rotation, and soil nutrition to pest control.
A 2018 survey underscored the demand for agricultural planning for Indian farmers. While farming remains a dominant sector in India, employing half of its labor force, 70 percent of small farmers – those cultivating fewer than three acres – said their crops are damaged by unforeseen weather and pests. An even higher number – 74 percent – say they lack access to farming-related information.
Widening that gap is the relative lack of access to new, higher yield seeds and improved soil analyses for small farmers, who must otherwise rely on traditional methods. “It could take a few years for innovative information to trickle down from universities to small, grassroots farmers,” says Pritesh Gudge, AgroStar Software Engineer. “Today, just by clicking through our Android application, farmers learn about new, effective farming practices and receive advice customized to their crop and soil.”
Connecting a million farmers in the cloud
Operating in the Indian states of Gujarat, Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Orissa, Bihar, and Karnataka, AgroStar is closing the knowledge gap with a full-service, cloud-based SaaS solution – the only one of its kind in India. It combines agronomy, data science, and analytics to help farmers by providing a variety of resources.
AgroStar has reached over a million farmers through its Android app, the AgroStar Agri-Doctor. The mobile client is available as a web-based or full-featured native app. Both provide access to the firm’s knowledge base hosted on GCP, a Q&A forum that connects farmers to each other to help understand and better solve problems and to learn about innovative practices and products. Farmers can also click through to follow local and national market trends that help forecast crop prices.
In addition to the self-service knowledge base, AgroStar provides access to agronomy experts who use cloud-based analytics tools and historical data to provide season-and locale-specific advice to each farmer. “We are now tracking thousands of calls in 5 languages each day,” says Pritesh.
The AgroStar app also provides links to purchase and then track the delivery of farm tools and supplies such as cultivators and fertilizers. An in-house platform manages fulfillment centers and a doorstep delivery network simplifies the supply chain while giving farmers what they need, when they need it. By procuring directly from the manufacturers and primary distributors of farm supplies, Agrostar is achieving cost savings, which it passes on to farmers.
Build fast, pivot faster
From the start, the human and environmental variables of farming in India, not to mention the volume of AgroStar’s few hundred thousand monthly active users, made a highly scalable cloud-based solution inevitable. Farmers rely on the firm’s Agri-Doctor app to provide advice in multiple languages on topics that range widely throughout three growing seasons, each with distinct crop nutrition and rotation cycles and farm implementation requirements.
“For farmers, the focus keeps changing every month, and every season,” says Pritesh. “To serve our growing community, we needed a platform that could process images at high volume, fulfill tools and seed orders across thousands of miles, and respond to multilingual queries. We quickly moved away from spreadsheets and server-based solutions – we needed to build fast and pivot faster.”
Ending late-night deployments
The firm’s first cloud experience was with an AWS solution. At the time, AWS was the only cloud provider in India, but AgroStar wanted to find a solution that was easier to use and offered better integration with Android devices. “Deployment and processing costs were very high, and the developer tools and documentation were not as intuitive as we needed,” says Pritesh.
When GCP service arrived in India in October 2017, AgroStar embarked on a platform re-implementation that made possible dramatic changes in the way it developed and deployed its solution. Using Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) for crop advice management and Compute Engine for its production application services, the firm built the backend for the Agri-Doctor discussion forum in only three weeks. The platform’s microservice architecture is implemented in Python and Golang and deployed on GCP.
AgroStar began to realize significant efficiencies in its build, deploy, and test cycles. “We previously needed to work overnight to deploy to production,” says Pritesh. “Now using Google for Kubernetes containers and a rolling update strategy, we can deploy during the day without any problems or interruptions to service.”
The move to GCP streamlined AgroStar’s stack. “We were running 12 independent instances on AWS,” says Pritesh. “With Google Kubernetes Engine, we are deployed on a single cluster at a cost savings of $1,300 per month and growing.”
Improving customer response times by 85 percent
With a managed deployment capability, AgroStar can devote more time and resources to executing on its platform and Agri-Doctor app development plan. A strategic goal was managing customer response times as the firm grew its base. GCP has helped the firm meet that goal, achieving an 85 percent improvement in customer response times even as traffic grew significantly.
“With our on-premises solution, we could handle around 100 customers daily, which took 30 to 50 minutes for each customer,” says Pritesh. “We now handle thousands of customers daily, taking only 4 to 5 minutes for each one.”
AgroStar used Firebase to implement its Agri-Doctor app. A real-time cloud database, Firebase provides an API that enables the Agri-Doctor advice forum to be synchronized across all its far-flung mobile clients, effectively sharing knowledge base updates with one million users in near real time.
Using cloud tools to manage and monitor
Cloud Pub/Sub, Kafka, and Cloud Dataflow manage data ingestion and queueing of event and transaction data to the analytics layer. BigQuery fetches and persists data to Cloud Storage. Cloud SQL and dashboards powered by Tableau deliver farmer crop and soil profiles within minutes.
Cloud IAM helps AgroStar control access to all its cloud resources. And Stackdriver, the integrated logging aggregation capability for GCP, helps monitor and speed debugging on every tier of the AgroStar solution.
Machine learning to enhance yields
AgroStar is developing a variety of ML components to improve responsiveness and extend its platform offerings.
To speed up the diagnosis of and treatment for crop blight, AgroStar is building a deep learning pipeline using TensorFlow. The pipeline relies on GoogLeNet models that use multi-layered convolutional visual pattern recognition. It will assess uploaded images to support a disease-detection capability on the mobile app. Based on the commercially successful AI algorithms that automated postal code processing, GoogLeNet offers improved performance and computational efficiencies by using a creative layering technique that distinguishes them from older, sequential recognition engines.
To improve its customer search experience, AgroStar is developing an ML pipeline that shrinks fetch times by suggesting tags mapped to stored data. Processed using TPUs, Cloud Natural Language and Video AI, the tags provide a metadata layer that supports queries in any of the ten natural languages that AgroStar farmers can use.
The AgroStar search pipeline consists of Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) models of Recurrent Neural Networks. Recurrent networks exhibit “memory” through iterative processing and are distinguished from feedforward networks by a feedback loop connected to their past decisions, ingesting their own outputs moment after moment as input.
Implementing a recommendation engine
The firm is also adapting the Random Forests TensorFlow AI model to develop a crop and product recommendation engine. The model is trained by consuming numerical (rainfall, humidity, water availability per acre) and categorical (soil type, water sources) parameters to suggest appropriate products by season, region, and locale.
To simplify the product suggestion experience, AgroStar developers are testing Cloud Dialogflow, the Google Cloud conversational interface, to build a chatbot capability into its mobile app. The bot will track a farmer’s crop schedules and answer simple questions by linking to the recommendation engine.
AgroStar is also extending its analytics platform with AI-powered sales planning and forecasting. Using linear regression models implemented in TensorFlow and powered by Cloud ML Engine, the capability will enhance supply chain logistics as the company scales its operations across India.
To provide a credit on-demand offering for a range of seed-to-harvest cycle products, AgroStar is attempting to use Vision API to create an AI model that will convert uploaded photos of customer application records into standard data formats. The firm’s credit policy features a grace period in which farmers begin paying back loans after harvested crops go to market.
A versatile and friendly development ecosystem
AgroStar credits the convivial tools and documentation that GCP offers and its incremental, pay-as-you-go pricing model for both the firm’s success and its ability to manage growth.
“What Google Cloud offers is extremely good documentation and extremely simple-to-use tools and interfaces across all services,” says Pritesh. “It helped us initially deploy our platform and at every scale that we have required since then, and its cost effectiveness enabled us to staff up to meet new feature milestones.”
Picsart’s Apigee-powered Pivot: From B2C to B2B, Bringing Graphic Design Capabilities to Businesses
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With 150 million users and counting, Picsart was originally founded as a photo and video editing app we use to enhance our everyday life before uploading them to various social media platforms. As its user numbers continue growing, the company began exploring options for incorporating its easy-to-use editing tools into other applications and services. Now, businesses looking for a low-lift solution to enhance their product offerings with Picsart’s award-winning software suite can do so. Thanks to Apigee, organizations from assorted markets, such as printers, t-shirt makers, and phone case designers, are benefiting from Picsart’s custom design APIs.
Picsart helps companies reach a new audience of customers by offering them graphic design capabilities at an affordable cost, avoiding the resource and time-intensive process of hiring developers and building these functions from scratch. The benefits of APIs are energizing Picsart’s business partners, too; with the addition of photo editing, keeping customers engaged, and returning to their apps.
“Eighty percent of our users are Generation Z and Millennials,” says Jinny Jung, vice-president of Picsart’s API program. “They’re the future of creators all over the globe. They want creative control.”
“Many of the businesses we serve are looking to tap into that audience. They really need solutions like this to take their business to the next level,” Jung adds. Having an API service also takes Picsart to the next level — thanks in part to Apigee.
How to turn a quick pivot
Moving from strictly business-to-consumer (B2C) services to a business-to-business (B2B) offering wasn’t easy for Picsart. The company had to adopt an entirely new business model and develop a new suite of API products — and they did so quickly.
When a prominent social media site contacted Picsart about offering its editing tools to their users via APIs, Picsart knew it couldn’t miss this opportunity. However, none of their developers knew how to manage APIs for external use, an endeavor involving multiple processes and fraught with logistical complications. Failing to configure APIs correctly allows malicious actors to effortlessly bypass cybersecurity protections, exposing network data.
The company quickly assembled an API business unit to plan and coordinate the creation of a secure API development process. This process would support marketing, sales, distribution, and other facets of the business, all while still delivering great functionality to the company’s original B2C customers. And voila! Picsart was reborn.
The API BU works as “a scrappy startup within a larger company,” as Jung puts it. Its budget is scrappy too. Among the unit’s first tasks: finding an API management platform that could simplify and streamline all the tasks the team faced at an affordable price. Jung says that Apigee was a clear choice.
“Apigee’s offerings gave us the flexibility to get off the ground without a huge budget and grow our business over time. It’s super easy to use, the dashboard is very intuitive, and the price came in well for us.”
The company had already used APIs internally, but had never provided them to customers or partners.
“We needed to lean on gateways and management platforms that already knew how to set everything up,” Jung says. “We really needed the shortcut.”
Her team did consider other API platforms, but being part of Google Cloud gave Apigee a natural edge.
“We were already Google Cloud clients. We were already part of the Google Cloud ecosystem. We really liked Apigee’s ease of use and the power of Google behind it.”
Apigee works seamlessly in tandem with its other Google Cloud services, including the Google Cloud Content Delivery Network (CDN) and BigQuery, Google Cloud’s fully-managed data warehouse.
“Apigee’s integration with the whole Google ecosystem makes our lives easier, and makes it quite natural for us to use,” says Tiberiu Stanescu, director of engineering for the Picsart API business unit. “It allows us to also meet our technical needs, including scalability and even improved performance with queries and, when we’re integrating the data, dashboards.”
Using Apigee for total API control
Picsart uses Apigee to manage all its external APIs, which include those that enable users to remove or change photo backgrounds, apply filters, and add text. Apigee also manages the API features for Picsart’s Editor SDK package.
Key ways in which Picsart uses Apigee include:
- API management. Apigee runs test/stage and production environments, can customize pre-and post-flows, and automatically authorize for services with different methods including API Keys and oAuth.
Apigee’s pre-built integrated portal has helped Picsart “greatly” in the time the company has been using it, Stanescu says. He praised its flexibility and its rate-limiting function, “which allows us to properly define and secure our products.”
- Developer support. With Apigee, Picsart now takes an “API-first” approach to developing new features by using microservice architectures. They’re exposing APIs via their developer portal, which allows them to describe precisely how developers can use each API.
- Apigee helps Picsart’s own developers use APIs to simplify the development process and save the company time and money. In conjunction with other Google products, Apigee is providing Picsart with the data and analytics it needs to view and monitor API-related productivity improvements.
- Security. Apigee’s out-of-the-box security requires no specialized knowledge or skill to implement. Picsart relies on Apigee security features such as including headers to set up security parameters, and custom rate-limiting policies and quotas, allowing the company to avoid stack overflow from API calls.
As a result, the company has experienced zero API-related security incidents, Stanescu notes. “We’re definitely grateful to Apigee for this,” he adds. Recently, Stanescu says, a company performed penetration testing on Picsart’s APIs, looking for vulnerabilities, but failed to discover any security flaws or threats. Apigee’s easy-to-use, but powerful security features are helping Picsart keep its clients and customers safe and secure.
From scrappy startup to business core
In the three years since implementing Google Apigee, Picsart’s API business unit has gone from a seemingly simple request to a critical product offering enabling new and recurring revenue.
“It’s part of the foundation of our business,” says Jinny Jung. “It powers our entire API external-facing business. We wouldn’t be able to sell APIs to developers and partners without the Apigee API gateway. We wouldn’t have gotten off the ground without Apigee.”
Apigee is helping Picsart in another key way, too: its integration with products like BigQuery, Google’s data analytics platform that lets it stay on top of which APIs are most used. That information guides every aspect of the business and helps the company develop and release new generative AI-powered products.
“The data absolutely informs what we choose to develop and where we put our resources,” Jung says. “Apigee makes it super easy for us to track API use and see the trends.”
With Apigee, Picsart is opening up a new world of creative design to audiences across all markets and demographics, while avoiding the stress that comes with a costly development process. Today, generative AI apps continue capturing imaginations, unlocking the ability to create awe-inspiring art with only a few natural language prompts. Picsart and Apigee will continue working together to provide a canvas through APIs no matter where an artist may be.
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Modern web APIs allow businesses to build compelling experiences that generate, consume, and combine digital assets. They’ve become the foundation upon which digital business is built.
But the path to success can be unclear, rough, and challenging. The game has changed, after all, and this requires tossing out many of the rules by which you run your business.
You’re not alone. Other businesses have struggled down the path toward increased competitiveness, agility, and opportunity—and we, at Google Cloud, are privileged to partner with hundreds of customers across myriad industries as they gear up to go digital.
We’ve seen the successful decisions and strategies that have enabled companies to adapt to new digital realities. But we’ve also seen businesses make decisions that slowed, stymied, or, in some cases, reversed progress toward becoming an agile digital business.
There’s no one path to travel. There are many ways to make your business digital, but there are also many pitfalls. This is the survival guide to help navigate a smarter digital journey.
There’s one bit of advice we can offer above all else: GET STARTED. If you don’t take steps to adapt to the new competitive landscape and to your customers’ expectations, the very survival of your business is at risk.
Download the E-book to know more about the best and worst practices of how a business leads, measures, invests in, and executes an API initiative.
MerPay Platform Scales its Reach to Millions of Users using Cloud Spanner
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Editor’s note: To launch a new mobile payment platform, Mercari needed a database solution strong on scalability, availability, and performance. Here’s how Cloud Spanner delivered those results.
E-commerce companies need to connect customers to their services securely, reliably, with zero downtime. When Mercari, Inc. launched a new mobile payment platform, we chose Cloud Spanner as part of our data portfolio, which provided us with easy scalability to handle millions of new users, a fully managed service that minimized overhead costs, and deep integration with other Google Cloud services.
Mercari, Inc., Japan’s largest C2C marketplace, launched its app in 2013, which allows 18.2million monthly users to easily and securely buy new and used items. Mercari expanded into the United States and in 2014 and launched Merpay, a mobile payment service that can be used through Mercari in Japan in 2017. With more than 85 million users, Merpay is now accepted at 1.8 million merchants and e-commerce sites in Japan, supporting payments via the DOCOMO ID contactless system and QR code.
Prioritizing availability and scalability
When we started building Merpay, we were looking for a new database. In the past, Mercari had used MySQL with bare metal hardware. Because of the amount of data, we required additional expertise to manage and maintain the hardware, software and MySQL implementation. Having built much of the microservices architecture for our Mercari app using Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), it was natural to look at Google Cloud’s managed services when deciding upon our new database infrastructure for Merpay.
For the database, we were focusing especially on requirements around availability, scalability, and performance. To do a single payment transaction, there were multiple steps each with writes, requiring high-write-throughput and low-latency from the database. Needing a solution that would support reliable payment processing 24/7/365, we chose Spanner, which offers up to 99.999% availability with zero downtime for planned maintenance and schema changes.
We worked closely with Google Cloud’s Premium Support, Technical Account Management (TAM), and Strategic Cloud Engineer and Cloud Consultant teams to implement Spanner, including separating the payment processing— originally one of the functions in Mercari—as a microservice.
A nod to easier nodes and better scale
After launch, the number of Merpay users reached 2 million in only a few months. We had 45 Spanner nodes at the time of launch of Merpay and about 50 nodes four months later. Because we’d optimized the application side during those four months, we didn’t have to add many nodes to keep up with the growing traffic.
Whenever we needed to scale up the serving and storage resources in our instances, Spanner made it easy to increase nodes as needed in the Cloud Console. To optimize costs, it’s easy to add nodes during a marketing campaign and remove them afterward. Even if the traffic count is different from expected, we can change the number of nodes immediately. That’s one incredible convenience of Cloud Spanner.
Building powerful pipelines
Our data pipelines are used for KPI analytics, fraud detection, credit scoring, and customer support use cases. Because Cloud Spanner integrates so easily with other Google Cloud data services, the data in Spanner is easily accessible for analytics. From the Spanner database for each microservice, we create both batch and streaming data pipelines using Pub/Sub and Dataflow, as well as Apache Flink, and load the data into BigQuery and Google Cloud Storage. We’re able to quickly aggregate the data required for data platforms such as BigQuery and Cloud Storage. The original data is stored in Spanner and managed by microservices, but analysis through BigQuery is centrally managed by the Data Platform team. This team determines the confidentiality level of data and centrally manages BigQuery permissions using Terraform. By centrally managing data access permissions on the data platform rather than on individual microservices, we’re able to set appropriate security for individual users.
Our full data portfolio also includes Looker, which we use for product analysis, accounting analysis, test performance visualization, operation monitoring, development efficiency analysis, and HR analysis. We also use Dataproc, Cloud Composer, Data Catalog, and Data Studio. The Dataflow template created for the pipeline is also published as OSS.
With Spanner and other Google Cloud services, our Merpay platform is flexible, secure, scalable and highly available. As Spanner eliminates overhead, we can devote engineering resources to developing new tools and solutions for our customers. We’re looking ahead at providing cryptocurrency service, for example, and are now working on a project to migrate Mercari’s monolithic system that is still on premises entirely over to Google Cloud.
Read more about Mercari and Merpay. Or check out our recent blog: three reasons to consider Cloud Spanner for your next project.
Google Maps Platform Helps BungkusIT Fulfil its Promise of Deliveries in One Hour!
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Editor’s note: Today’s post is written by Hatim M, Chief Commercial Officer at BungkusIT. The on-demand delivery service delivers packages within the hour for one million customers across Malaysia and uses Google Maps Platform to create a seamless end-to-end delivery experience for its customers.
Imagine it’s the end of a long day at work, and you’re heading home for dinner as you look forward to a restful evening. Then just as you arrive at the doorstep, your phone buzzes with a message from a family member, asking if you could grab a carton of milk from the supermarket.
With moments like these in mind, we founded BungkusIT to alleviate the stress of everyday chores and give people a break from having to run seemingly mundane errands that can often be time-consuming. With so much to do and so few hours in a day, we want to make life simpler by providing our customers with an on-demand delivery service.
As a social enterprise, our mission is to create jobs and increase earning potential for BungkusIT roadies (those who run deliveries), while also increasing online visibility for local small and medium enterprises through an e-commerce platform. As such, we don’t charge merchants a fee for being featured on our app.
Our roadies help connect users with products and services that they need. Whether it’s picking up the keys you forgot, or buying a birthday cake for a loved one, our on-demand roadies can help accomplish your task quickly and efficiently. In fact, we’ve helped many seniors—a large and often underserved population—to run errands and provide last mile support.
Providing reliable service, 24/7
From the day we launched, our promise has always been to complete every task given to us within one hour. Google Maps Platform empowers us to fulfil this promise. We understand the importance of selecting a reliable mapping service from the get-go. After exploring different map products, we made the decision to go with Google Maps Platform due to its detailed and accurate location mapping system. With the support of our partner Searce, we’ve been able to quickly integrate all the relevant products on our platform and optimize our API calls.
On a day-to-day basis, our roadies rely on the Places API to navigate their journeys. It pinpoints the exact location set by customers so that our roadies can be sure they arrive at the correct destination. With so many small roads and alleys in Malaysia, it can be challenging to find the exact place based on an address. Dropping a pin on a specific location removes any confusion.
Because we price our services based on distance, it’s business critical to determine the exact distance of a location and the most efficient route to reach it. By automating that process with the Distance Matrix API, we can guarantee that customers don’t get overcharged, while making sure that we’re adequately compensated for our services.
Improving the user experience
At the end of the day, we want to make people’s lives easier. That’s why having an app that is intuitive is key. More than that, we want customers to be able to create a request as quickly as possible. By automatically completing the location a customer is typing after they’ve keyed in the first few characters, Place Autocomplete does that job for us.
As a fairly young company, we’ve got a long way to go. I believe that we’ll continue evolving alongside Google Maps Platform and exploring the new features it has to offer. We’re already talking to global brands to expand our services and I’m confident that with Google Maps Platform as our maps partner, we will go a long way.
For more information on Google Maps Platform, visit our website.
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Choosing ROI criteria that drive smart decisions about digital investments is necessary to win in the app economy. But according to an Apigee Institute survey of IT and Marketing executives, there is a wide gap between what corporate leaders believe are the best ROI metrics and what are actually used in most enterprises today. Those who move first to bridge the gap will be able to move further and faster towards digital transformation and market leadership.
This special report drills down on patterns and practices for digital ROI that drive more confident decision making and stronger results based on empirical analysis of 200 large companies. Read the report to understand how you can drive decisions about digital investments to the next level of actionability and strengthen digital capabilities by building stronger organizational alignment. The report explores how top performing digital businesses evaluate and make decisions about digital investments using data analytics, by deploying apps, and operating APIs.
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