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In this whiteboard design session, you will work with a group to design an IoT solution using data emitted from RFID tags attached to airline passengers' checked luggage, and mobile applications to allow employees and customers to track those bags from any device.
Contoso Air, founded in 1932, is a leader in the air travel industry, with service to more than 70 different countries/regions around the globe. Contoso is currently modernizing their entire ticketing and operations platform. With a global workforce in over 70 countries/regions, there is a need to access data with extremely low latency thus requiring replication across geographical regions. Furthermore, employees are becoming increasingly mobile and digital savvy. They expect to be able to have access to their data in real time from any type of the common mobile platforms: be it UWP, iOS, or Android. Contoso's competitors are smaller and nimbler, as such they have been able to transform digitally much faster and provide employees and customers with a better experience.
Over time, Contoso hopes to be able to shift to a 100% cloud infrastructure, but they have an extensive number of on-premises legacy systems which are extremely costly to upgrade. They are interested in using Azure to help securely expose specific information housed in those legacy systems accessible to other applications. This will also enable their global workforce to tailor their own application experiences in order to perform their jobs accurately and effectively. For this, they will require both a broadly available, highly scalable cloud that also offers hybrid capabilities to bridge to their on-premises infrastructure.
Contoso has already recently migrated email, file sharing, collaboration, chat, and VoIP systems into the cloud by taking advantage of the services provided in Office 365. As such, they have already set up federated AD, as well as other Microsoft 365 services (including the Microsoft Graph) which are all available for integration. They have various resources spread across three Azure regions.
To remain competitive and improve their customer satisfaction ratings, Contoso Air wishes to modernize their baggage handling and tracking process. This includes the introduction of RFID luggage tags, equipping baggage handlers with mobile devices to perform luggage scans, a customer luggage tracking mobile application, and adding IoT enabled RFID antennas and scanners throughout the baggage handling process. Employees and customers alike will be able to track the exact position of a piece of luggage from the time that it leaves its owner's hands to the time that it returns to them at the baggage claim.
At any given time, Contoso has an average of 120 active flights on the ground (processing baggage) at 60 locations worldwide. Each flight has an estimated 180 customers with an average of 360 checked bags, so it is beneficial that the handling and tracking of these bags is improved.
By implementing this system, Contoso will be able to improve their metrics as it relates to lost luggage. At the same time, they will improve their satisfaction ratings by providing their customers with piece of mind by giving them visibility into exactly where their luggage is at all times. Even if luggage is lost, Contoso Air can start the search at the last known scan location, thus saving time and money.
1. Without getting into the details (the following sections will address the particular details), diagram your initial vision for handling the top-level requirements for data security, ingestion, processing, and exposure to the mobile applications. You will refine this diagram as you proceed.
*Data Security*
1. Given their existing services, how would you ensure that all communication to and from the system is secured?
- How would you authenticate and authorize an RFID scanner client?
- How would you authenticate and authorize an employee using a client application?
- How would you authenticate and authorize a customer using a mobile application?
2. How would you ensure that in-transit data is secured?
*Data Ingestion*
1. What format would you choose for the messages being ingested by the system?
3. What is the anticipated volume in messages expected from the RFID IoT solution that Contoso Air will need to support given their employee and customer base?
4. How would you propose they ingest that quantity of messages? What Azure service would you recommend and why? At what initial scale?
5. What protocol would they use in sending data to the service(s) used for message ingestion?
1. What Azure service would you use to guarantee ingested data is processed reliably?
2. How would you ensure that the data is processed with low-latency?
3. Which Azure service would you use to persist the current state of the RFID luggage tag?
4. How will you ensure that persisted data is available at low-latency around the globe?
*Data Exposure*
1. What Azure service would you recommend that will provide read-only luggage information to the Customer mobile application. Why did you make this choice?
2. What protocol is used when the Customer mobile application initiates communication with the service you decided upon in \#1?
*Client Applications*
1. Which Azure service do you recommend using for housing application source code?
2. What Azure services do you recommend for automated builds, testing, and deployment?
3. Which Azure service would you use to store application secrets, such as certificates or connection strings so that they aren't readily available in client application source control?
4. How would you bridge data between on-premises systems and Microsoft Azure?
5. What Azure service would you recommend for Contoso Air business users to be able to self-service a CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) application that can be made available on both web and mobile?
