Geofencing using azure maps

There are plenty of cloud providers help you to implement geofencing once you know your customer and your market you want to target. 

Getting Ready

• Know your Customer - Study currently available customer data, survey result and other hard data (browsing history, call center history, etc.)

• Identify your Market - Define your market, you may want to chose top 5 segments

• Configure Infrastructure - Setup your infrastructure, we need (1) A mobile app to publish current location using GPS or RFID, in this example POC, we will use GPS coordinates and (2) A server to capture the event and log, in future we can enhance it send push notification to customers.

We are almost ready to implement our first geofencing project. 

Implementation

I find it easier to understand this in reverse, ultimately a REST API will get called as soon as a device enters into or exit from a predefined geofence, & that's our events, and we get device id, geofence name, & coordinates as parameters. Once the event is captured, we can do whatever we want, log it, find the best offer, send a push notification to end user's device, etc. etc.  

1. Logic app - Capture the HTTP request and then send the message to a service bus

2. Azure map - Subscribe the event and set the endpoint to the logic app

3. Event hubs - Optionally configure scalable Event Hubs to stream massive events

4. Define geofences

5. Mobile App - A mobile app (or IOT) which will register devices to your events.

6. Invoke Geofence API - The same mobile app will use Azure Map API to report current location every x interval

Here is the complete flow...

Runtime

At run time the device will send the coordinates using Azure Map API, which will publish events by call a rest API of the logic app, which ultimately drop the package to a service bus.