AWS Case Study: EDP Renewables

Hi José, briefly tell us about the business of EDP Renewables and your partnership with Espiral MS:

EDP Renewables is a world leader in renewable energy. Currently, we are the world’s third largest wind energy company. We are also the Iberian Peninsula’s third largest energy operator, holding business interests in the generation, distribution, and supply of electricity and gas in Portugal and in Spain.

We recently partnered with AWS solution provider, Espiral MS, a software manufacturer headquartered in Gijón, Spain, which serves organizations across fifteen countries. Espiral MS specializes in information systems administration applications and is the creator of prosafety®, a complete safety management software system that helps organizations implement a ZERO ACCIDENTS philosophy. The tools provided by Espiral MS incorporate the best safety practices available, including shared safety, work group safety, and behavior-based safety. prosafety® also helps organizations become certified by OHSAS 18000.

Mack, how have you incorporated Amazon Web Services as part of your architecture? What services are you using and how?

We're currently using Amazon Web Services (AWS) to bring some of the EDP business applications to the cloud. The prosafety® health and safety at work application is the first application we transitioned to AWS, with the goal of achieving high availability. We're specifically using the following:

• Amazon EC2 instances with SQL Server and IIS roles to service the application
• Amazon S3 for the main backup system of the EDP AWS app, with automated snapshots and file uploads to our bucket
• Amazon EC2 API tools to automate our snapshots
• Amazon Route 53 for DNS of the Internet domains

The following diagram illustrates our prosafety® architecture:

Why did you decide to use AWS for your prosafety® software and how has it helped your business?

Our key reasons for choosing AWS are the reliability it offers, a faster time to market, and the flexibility to deploy our business applications. AWS is very simple and fast. The reliability for creating, modifying, and deploying business applications are unmatched.

José, how has AWS helped business at EDP Renewables?

The AWS cloud, together with the prosafety® software, gives us the guarantee we need to fulfill our needs on time and with great flexibility. Now, we are much more efficient in our business, we are not concerned about managing backups or implementing patches, and we have more time to dedicate to the real business.

Have you learned any valuable lessons during this development process that you’d like to pass on to other developers?

The development process was very simple and easy to use. We highly recommend the use of AWS and prosafety® to other developers, not only for the ease of use, but also for the transparency in all processes. From the beginning, our IT department did not have to be involved in the process because the prosafety® team managed everything by themselves with Amazon Web Services and achieved great results.

Do you have any future plans to incorporate other AWS solutions?

Yes, we are currently working on boosting the flexibility and security of our systems. Specifically, we are adding Amazon VPC to connect instances to some of our client’s offices, providing redundancy of applications on two different Availability Zones.

To learn more, visit http://edprenovaveis.com/ .

Added June 5, 2012