Title: Designing a cost-effective model leveraging serverless computing to provide weather forecasts to farmers in rural India

Authors: Ravi Prakash Varshney; Dilip Kumar Sharma

Addresses: GLA University, Mathura-281406, India ' GLA University, Mathura-281406, India

Abstract: Serverless computing has been widely adopted as a platform for the deployment of various event-driven applications and services. The features like autoscaling, no resource management, pay-as-you-go, less expensive are some of the key reasons for its wide adoption in software development. It allows the developers to define applications as a sequence of event-triggered functions. Weather forecast plays a vital role in Indian agriculture, but rural Indian farmers are devoid of any form of weather forecast information. The dearth of weather information accounts for the reduction in crop productivity and hence, financial loss. In this paper, we propose a cost-effective and scalable architecture and a prototype of a serverless application that provides the weather forecast to the farmers in the form of a mobile push notification or short message service (SMS). With an operating cost of around $25 per month, the proposed model caters effectively to around 100,000 users'. We demonstrate how serverless computing, along with the other services offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS), can be glued to build a scalable and cost-effective solution and assist farmers in mitigating the losses incurred.

Keywords: serverless computing; function as a service; FaaS; weather forecast; cloud computing; AWS Lambda; Amazon Web Services; AWS; India.

DOI: 10.1504/IJICT.2022.123157

International Journal of Information and Communication Technology, 2022 Vol.20 No.4, pp.367 - 390

Received: 11 May 2020
Accepted: 21 Sep 2020
Published online: 01 Jun 2022 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article