SUCCESS CASE #BigData #ML #Cloud

Landing zone and data environment for analytics and Business applications

Imagina Energía, the first 100% solar company on the Spanish energy market, was launched with the goal of bringing solar power to all Spanish homes and companies in a simple, innovative way, with either self-consumption or grid power customized solutions. 

Imagina Energía combines renewable energy with a clear focus on digitalization, with the aspiration of being the power company with the market’s best customer experience with an innovative technological offer thanks to technology like AI, Big Data and Cloud.

A new sustainable energy that is more accessible and adapted to the needs of each person, with the support of Hanwha Energy, one of the world’s largest solar investors and an international leader in innovation and sustainability. Hanwha Energy is a comprehensive energy solutions provider that operates power plants in Korea and around the world with a focus on sustainability. Its diverse portfolio includes cogeneration plants, solar power plants, as well as the world’s largest hydrogen fuel cell power plant, located in Korea’s Daesan Industrial Complex. Hanwha Energy seeks to become a global Solar Developer, having active entities in Spain, the US, Japan, Australia and Vietnam. As of now it has a global Solar pipeline of 12GW in development. Hanwha Energy also acts as an independent power producer, offers operation and maintenance services, and is developing new energy storage systems and smart energy management solutions.

The energy sector is currently facing three challenges: Decarbonization, decentralization and digitalization.

Decarbonization, which opens up the market to new companies that base their business model on renewable energy, the decentralization of the generation of energy leaning towards self-consumption distributed models, and digitalization which affects the whole value chain. From the improvement in the communications networks in the generation and distribution to marketing through the attracting and retaining of digital customers. In this scenario of growing competition, the capacity to accelerate time-to-market and scale-up quickly becomes a determining factor in achieving a market quota.

Imagina Energía is beginning its operations in Spain with a clear Public Cloud First and Data-Driven digital strategy. Its business plan is based on growing whilst consolidating its technological structure and constantly accelerating its marketing times and adjustment of technological investment in accordance with its business needs. To achieve this, Imagina Energía’s approach is to create a solid technological base that will allow it to scale-up quickly and profitably.

At the same time, the energy sector is highly regulated which is why privacy and security are the company’s main priorities. It is essential to apply solid principles of security, governance and practical improvements.

Solution in Amazon Web Services

The solution must serve a dual purpose. First of all, it must offer a landing zone that allows the governance of the cloud infrastructure and simple accounts organization in which the various business applications will be deployed and it must facilitate the management of the roles, permissions, and identities of the users who will have access to the cloud resources. Secondly, the provision of a centralized data environment or data lake which will be the source of the data of the business applications and, in turn, the destination of the new data generated by the business operations, which can be used to generate new use cases for descriptive or predictive analytics.

For this reason, Keepler has deployed the AWS Control Tower service that implements the landing zone pattern in an immediate and highly scalable manner. This service suggests ways of centralizing accounts management in the form of delegated roles and compliance with own policies or those proposed by AWS in all associated accounts. These controls are activated preventively or for information with protective barriers that apply to all accounts.

For the creation of the data lake, Keepler relies on the support of the AWS Lake Formation service as a deployment accelerator. This service is aimed at centralizing the design of data lakes in AWS. It is based on normal serverless technologies like Amazon S3, AWS Glue and AWS DMS, offering an additional layer of fine-grained permissions on AWS IAM between the service use roles and the data.

Once the deployment project was complete, Keepler began to operate the client infrastructure through the DataOps service.

The main Amazon Web Services used are:

  • AWS Control Tower to securely configure and control a multiple account AWS environment.
  • AWS Organizations to create new AWS accounts through a program and assign resources and apply policies to accounts or groups for control.
  • AWS Single Sign-On to administer access centrally using single sign-on (SSO) to different AWS applications and accounts.
  • AWS IAM to safely administrate access to AWS’s resources and services.
  • AWS Lake Formation to facilitate the configuration of a safe data lake in a matter of days.
  • Amazon S3 as the main storage repository.
  • AWS Glue as an ETL tool and Data Catalog.
  • Amazon Cloudwatch to monitor any faults in the models and send an email if faults are found.
  • Amazon Security Hub to centralize high priority security alert management and the results of services like GuardDuty or Inspector. It also allows the constant measurement of the degree of compliance of all the AWS accounts with security standards like CIS.
Benefits
  • Imagina Energía’s main goal was to have a secure environment in the cloud that could be scaled up in a short space of time. The solution implemented by Keepler has made it possible to have a landing zone and a data lake available within days. This has been possible thanks to the services used for deployment in AWS and Keepler’s experience through its application in other clients.

  • The infrastructure cost generated during the deployment and subsequently reduces the TCO of the solution by 50% compared to implementations not based on native services like Control Tower and Lake Formation.

  • The use of managed services reduces the complexity of infrastructure operation, allowing operations teams to dedicate their efforts to tasks that provide the customer with greater added value.

  • The data environment created will allow the necessary short-term information to be collected to build use cases focused on prescriptive or predictive analytics with Machine Learning techniques.

Keepler is a boutique company of professional technology services specialized in design, construction, deployment and software solutions operations of Big Data and Machine Learning for big clients. They use Agile and Devops methodologies and native services of the public cloud to build sophisticated business applications focused in data and integrated with different sources in batch mode and real time. They have Advanced Consulting Partner level and have a technical workforce with 90% of their professionals certified in AWS. Keepler is currently working for big clients in different markets, such as financing services, industry, energy, telecommunications and media.

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If you want to know more or if you want us to develop a proposal for your specific use, contact us and we’ll talk.