Piping our way through the Azure Cloud

To make our amazing service Tubi work, a lot of cloud is needed. We aim to make the plumber’s job easier by recommending the best layout for where the pipes should go, and for that, we need AI. We have trained a model in Custom Vision to recognize all components in a bathroom that need water. So, when the plumber uploads a floor plan to our Static Web App, the image is sent to our Azure Function App backend in C# Asp.net through our own API. But both the image and the equipment list must be stored somewhere. Therefore, we have also connected to Azure Blob Storage. Then last but not at all least. The people working in the back office have instant interactive reports available to help them with filing and billing through Power BI and alerting the using an automated flow (Badges: Feature Bombing)

Sometimes it works, and that’s plenty

Databases are good, but sometimes it’s easier to just dump everything in one place until you need it again. Yes, it might not be very scalable or very normalized. SQL became too heavy, and we already needed a Blob storage to store the images, so we also dump the order data in the same blob storage as JSON files. It’s old fashioned way of serverstorage, and a bit dirty, but it works! (Badges: Nasty hacker, Retro badge)

Power the backoffice

As the final list of components are decided, they still have to be approved from the accounting team in the office. To make sure they have all the information they require, we have developed a Power BI dashboard to crawl through our registered data and make sure the orders are handled properly (Badges: Crawler, Dash it Out, Dataminer). And to make sure the orders are handled easy and fast, the dashboard is embedded into teams and an alert is automated by using a logic app to make sure the workers can receive and cooperate in realtime (Badges: Embedding Numbnuts, Go with the flow, Pug N’ Play, Power user love, Right Now, Stairway to heaven).