The Weather Company's Platform Story: Lessons from Handling Up to 26 Billion Transactions Per Day

Mon, 24-Oct 11:00 AM - 11:45 AM

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10/27/16World of Watson 2016 2

Your speakers

Derek BaronProgram Director

Platform as a Service

Landon WilliamsSVP Technology Products

& Architecture

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Data from connected cars are an important factor in the determination of insurance

premium pricing

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The problem:25 GB / hour / connected car

By 2026 that’s one billion GB / year

Source: http://ww2.cfo.com/big-data-technology/2016/04/my-car-my-data-connected-car/

62 miles separate us from space

The Weather Company collects and connects

the dots…

… powering Billions of personalized forecasts a day

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Hundreds of different types of data, terabytes a day coming in

162 forecast models serve as inputs to our

forecast

> 200,000 personal weather stations

Atmospheric data from

50,000 flightsper day

15 Million pressure reading devices providing

readings

20 Milliondevices provide

Location data

The SUN Platform is supporting data for IoT, Analytics, and Cognitive computing

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2012: The big reboot to embrace cloud and transform culture

#2

#5

The InformationWeek Elite 100 tracks the IT practices of the nation's most innovative IT

organizations

Before After• 13 maxed-out data centers• Aging apps running on one-of-everything

infrastructure

• Cloud-based, Cloud-agnostic• Data-driven infrastructure• API-based delivery of data

• 2.2 Million weather data points 4 times per hour (2012)

• 2.2 Billion weather data points 15 times per hour (2014)

• 60-70% of tech effort in maintenance/ops • 20-25% of tech effort in maintenance/ops

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Transferred 1.6 PB forecast, map, and digital content141 Billion API calls

4 PB of video in a single day

SUN throughput during hurricane Matthew

Yet only 15% of organizations have the capability to leverage data and advanced analytics across their organization.

HBR Insight Economy Study

The advent ofcognitive

computing

The re-invention of the world

in code

A world awash with data

What’s changed in the world today

Source: The Battle Is For The Customer Interface, Tom Goodwin, Havas Media

World’s largest transportationcompany…

owns no vehicles

World’s biggest media company…

creates no content

World’s most valuableretailer…

has no inventory

World’s largest accommodation provider…

owns no real estate

World’s largest video conference company…

has no telcoinfrastructure

New business models disrupt legacy players

New business models create entirely new value streams

12Source: IBM and http://www.slideshare.net/andreasc/vision-mobile-iot-megatrends-iot-accelerate-berlin-v003

Nest harnesses the power of exogenous data

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Source: http://www.slideshare.net/andreasc/vision-mobile-iot-megatrends-iot-accelerate-berlin-v003

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Lessons / cultural change

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• lessons learned over the last few years (eg cache strategies to lower latency)

• technical choices and evolution (eg hadoop to spark)• team structure and cultural changes - squads / agile etc...• Scalability and efficiency lessons

#ibminsight

The SUN Platform logical architecture

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Imperatives of the SUN Platform

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Powers a multi-billion dollar business

Serving all data on a global basis

ProvenScales to the precise load without human interaction

Scaling regularly between 15 and 26 Billion transactions a day

EfficientService oriented and API first methodologies

Ability to “compose your own data flow"

Flexible

Including: Spark, Cassandra, and Parquet

Supports structured, semi-structured, unstructured datasets

Latest Tech

Platform has never had an outage

Able to sustain failures at any level with no operational impact

Fault Tolerant

Example Use Case: Forecast on Demand (FoD)

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FoD delivers Billions of personalized forecasts a day for 2.2 Billion locations for The Weather Company

Why do so many great companies struggle putting their data to work?

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Challenge RiskHigh cost to get started Maintaining the health, scale and performance of a platform is expensive

• Skilled resources are expensive and hard to find, also different mix of skills are required for each step of implementation

• Technology changes fast, it’s expensive to stay up to date

It’s easy to fail, especially in the first few years

Modernization involves a lot of failure before you succeed• Projects often reset at least 2x before getting it right

The data will never be perfect

Business data requires significant cost and time to cleanse and combine with external data sources through partnerships to mine for insight.

Fast changing market needs Making the investment to build your own platform is a distraction from your core business

Step 1: buy, setup and manage cloud infrastructure

Data centers close to (global) users

Automatic failover between data centers

Automatically adapt to workload changes – increasing or decreasing resources and performance

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IaaS Type Monthly 3-yearTotal

Compute 10k $360k

Storage 0.5k $18k

Database 5k $180k

Networking 0.5k $18k

Analytics 2k $72k

Management .5k $18k

Security / Identity .2k $7.2k

App Services .3k $10.8k

Example over 3 years

Labor Cost 3- year Total

Setup 100k $100k

Manage 1 FTE ==12.5K /mo

$450k

Step 1 Costs:IaaS: $684k Labor: $550k Total: $1.23M

* Assume 1 TOC FTE is 100k/year, 1 DevOps is 150k/year

Step 2: design and build your initial and ongoing solution

Services Architecture to:– Ingest / Transform / Persist / Analyze / Distribution

– Self management / logging / monitoring

Cloud agnostic

API driven

Automatically elastic, scalable

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Example over 3 years:Step 2 costs:• 12 Months to get to Production• Labor: $3.6M

Labor Costs # Months FTE Count TotalInitial Dev and Setup 12 8 $1.2MOngoing DevOps (after initial dev) 24 8 $2.4M

* Assume 1 TOC FTE is 100k/year, 1 DevOps is 150k/year

Step 3: Run and manage your system, 24/7

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Labor Costs # Months FTE Count TotalTOC Operations 36 5 $1.5M

* Assume 1 TOC FTE is 100k/year, 1 DevOps is 150k/year

TOC Facility Monthly 3-yearTotal

Software 5k $180k

Hardware 5k $180k

Space 2k $72k

Networking 0.5k $18k

Example over 3 years:Step 3 costs:

Facility: $450k Labor: $1.5M Total: $1.95M

3 year costs to build FoD from scratch

Step1: Buy, setup and manage cloud infrastructure

Step 2: Design and build your initial and ongoing solution

Step 3: Run and manage your system, 24/7

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Step 118%

Step 253%

Step 329%

3 Year Cost ($6.8M)

Step 1: $1.23M, 18% of 3 year total costStep 2: $3.60M, 53% of 3 year total costStep 3: $1.95M, 29% of 3 year total cost

Cost is roughly $6.8M over 3 years

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Profile for our foundational customers/partnersVisionaries who share our belief and are driven by achieving an "order of magnitude" improvement in their business

ü willing to invest in an initial use caseü see implementation as a project

Datasets: non-regulated

Interested?mailto: derek.baron@weather.com

Notices and disclaimers

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Notices and disclaimers continued

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Thank You

8:00-8:45 Weather: the Most Pervasive Force in Business Breakers H

8:30-11:00 Into the Storm: Extracting Weather Data and Putting It to Use for Your Business – Hands on Lab Breakers A

9:00-9:45 IBM Watson IoT Plus The Weather Company Equals a Game-Changer for Energy and Utilities Breakers A

9:00-9:45 Actionable Insights without Dealing with Data Sources, Analytics Software or Data Scientists Islander E

11:00-11:45 The Weather Company's Platform Story: Lessons from Handling Up to 26 Billion Transactions Per Day Islander E

1:00-1:45 Spotlight Session: Weather and Climate Science: Benefits to Business and Society to Date and Future Trends

Theater Level 3

2:00-2:45 How Visibility into Foot Traffic Can Transform Retail: Demos and Real Client Use Cases Jasmine B

3:00-3:20 How Watson Powers Content Personalization at The Weather Company Redefining Development

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1:00-1:20 Adventures of a Storm ChaserMonetizing Data Community

Theater, Booth #465

1:00-1:45 Fighting Crime with SPSS and Weather Data South Pacific D

1:20-1:50 How Many Forecast Models Does it Take to Predict the Weather Monetizing Data Community Theater Booth #465

2:00-2:45 Putting Cities at the Center of a Growth Strategy with IBM Metro Pulse Powered by Watson Breakers H

3:30-3:50 Let’s Talk About the Weather: Predictive Analytics Uncover the Impact of Climate Events Transforming Industries

Theater, Booth #726

4:00-4:45 How American Airlines Uses Weather Data and Aviation Analytics Islander E

4:00-4:45 Energy and Utilities Outage Prediction, Demand Forecasting and Field Worker Safety through Weather Jasmine B

11:00-11:45 Increase Customer Loyalty through Proactive Alerting Islander E 9:00-9:45 Think You Really Know Your Customers? With Micro-segmentation, You Can Islander E

11:00-11:45 Weather and Location Should Be the Core of Your Business Strategy Breakers A

12:00-12:45 How Weather Data and the IoT Improve Nutrition and Food Safety throughout the Supply Chain Breakers J

1:00-3:30 Weathering the Storm: A Technical Deep-Dive into How to Get (and Use!) Weather Data Hands on Lab Bayside F-09

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