For the storage service, we employed the use of Microsoft Azure Cloud with its virtual machine network. For this, the contractual obligation was a standard three year commitment, with a possible extension of up to ten years. Employing 20 virtual machines, with a total storage capacity of 1TB, meant MelRok was going to get charged USD 20,000 per month. This was based off of a pricing per subscription model for its SDK where every single message was going to get billed individually.

With this solution, we employed the use of WebSocket API from the HTTP stack of the TCP/IP suite. Using this was extremely economical, eliminating any communication costs since all of this was being handled over the cloud, each device initiating its own connection, without any interfacing provided by third party in between. Hence, no cost for the communication mechanism meant a very economical solution. However, due to this, the WebSocket API needs to be implemented in a certain manner.

Due to the usage of WebSockets, the API needed to be heavily configured with custom settings. This included communication protocol synchronization but still left packets getting lost or dropped during transmission, the network would easily get blocked again and again due to protocol mismatch or barriers set by Microsoft’s Azure service and at times, the service would not be able to process the bulk of messages as is.

Every single device sold to clients, was returned after the three year contractual term ended and neither did the clients give MelRok another chance, nor did MelRok ever try the Microsoft Azure service again. The entire device portfolio was handed back without any extension to either of the contracts.