Building a scalable streaming data platform that enables real-time and batch analytics of electric vehicles on AWS

The automobile industry has undergone a remarkable transformation because of the increasing adoption of electric vehicles (EVs). EVs, known for their sustainability and eco-friendliness, are paving the way for a new era in transportation. As environmental concerns and the push for greener technologies have gained momentum, the adoption of EVs has surged, promising to reshape our mobility landscape.

The surge in EVs brings with it a profound need for data acquisition and analysis to optimize their performance, reliability, and efficiency. In the rapidly evolving EV industry, the ability to harness, process, and derive insights from the massive volume of data generated by EVs has become essential for manufacturers, service providers, and researchers alike.

As the EV market is expanding with many new and incumbent players trying to capture the market, the major differentiating factor will be the performance of the vehicles.

Modern EVs are equipped with an array of sensors and systems that continuously monitor various aspects of their operation including parameters such as voltage, temperature, vibration, speed, and so on. From battery management to motor performance, these data-rich machines provide a wealth of information that, when effectively captured and analyzed, can revolutionize vehicle design, enhance safety, and optimize energy consumption. The data can be used to do predictive maintenance, device anomaly detection, real-time customer alerts, remote device management, and monitoring.

However, managing this deluge of data isn’t without its challenges. As the adoption of EVs accelerates, the need for robust data pipelines capable of collecting, storing, and processing data from an exponentially growing number of vehicles becomes more pronounced. Moreover, the granularity of data generated by each vehicle has increased significantly, making it essential to efficiently handle the ever-increasing number of data points. The challenges include not only the technical intricacies of data management but also concerns related to data security, privacy, and compliance with evolving regulations.

In this blog post, we delve into the intricacies of building a reliable data analytics pipeline that can scale to accommodate millions of vehicles, each generating hundreds of metrics every second using Amazon OpenSearch Ingestion. We also provide guidelines and sample configurations to help you implement a solution.

Of the prerequisites that follow, the IOT topic rule and the Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) cluster can be set up by following How to integrate AWS IoT Core with Amazon MSK. The steps to create an Amazon OpenSearch Service cluster are available in Creating and managing Amazon OpenSearch Service domains.

Prerequisites

Before you begin the implementing the solution, you need the following:

IOT topic rule
Amazon MSK Simple Authentication and Security Layer/Salted Challenge Response Mechanism (SASL/SCRAM) cluster
Amazon OpenSearch Service domain

Solution overview

The following architecture diagram provides a scalable and fully managed modern data streaming platform. The architecture uses Amazon OpenSearch Ingestion to stream data into OpenSearch Service and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to store the data. The data in OpenSearch powers real-time dashboards. The data can also be used to notify customers of any failures occurring on the vehicle (see Configuring alerts in Amazon OpenSearch Service). The data in Amazon S3 is used for business intelligence and long-term storage.

Architecture diagram

In the following sections, we focus on the following three critical pieces of the architecture in depth:

1. Amazon MSK to OpenSearch ingestion pipeline

2. Amazon OpenSearch Ingestion pipeline to OpenSearch Service

3. Amazon OpenSearch Ingestion to Amazon S3

Solution Walkthrough

Step 1: MSK to Amazon OpenSearch Ingestion pipeline

Because each electric vehicle streams massive volumes of data to Amazon MSK clusters through AWS IoT Core, making sense of this data avalanche is critical. OpenSearch Ingestion provides a fully managed serverless integration to tap into these data streams.

The Amazon MSK source in OpenSearch Ingestion uses Kafka’s Consumer API to read records from one or more MSK topics. The MSK source in OpenSearch Ingestion seamlessly connects to MSK to ingest the streaming data into OpenSearch Ingestion’s processing pipeline.

The following snippet illustrates the pipeline configuration for an OpenSearch Ingestion pipeline used to ingest data from an MSK cluster.

While creating an OpenSearch Ingestion pipeline, add the following snippet in the Pipeline configuration section.

version: "2"
msk-pipeline: 
  source: 
    kafka: 
      acknowledgments: true                  
      topics: 
         - name: "ev-device-topic " 
           group_id: "opensearch-consumer" 
           serde_format: json                 
      aws: 
        # Provide the Role ARN with access to MSK. This role should have a trust relationship with osis-pipelines.amazonaws.com 
        sts_role_arn: "arn:aws:iam:: ::<<account-id>>:role/opensearch-pipeline-Role"
        # Provide the region of the domain. 
        region: "<<region>>" 
        msk: 
          # Provide the MSK ARN.  
          arn: "arn:aws:kafka:<<region>>:<<account-id>>:cluster/<<name>>/<<id>>"

When configuring Amazon MSK and OpenSearch Ingestion, it’s essential to establish an optimal relationship between the number of partitions in your Kafka topics and the number of OpenSearch Compute Units (OCUs) allocated to your ingestion pipelines. This optimal configuration ensures efficient data processing and maximizes throughput. You can read more about it in Configure recommended compute units (OCUs) for the Amazon MSK pipeline.

Step 2: OpenSearch Ingestion pipeline to OpenSearch Service

OpenSearch Ingestion offers a direct method for streaming EV data into OpenSearch. The OpenSearch sink plugin channels data from multiple sources directly into the OpenSearch domain. Instead of manually provisioning the pipeline, you define the capacity for your pipeline using OCUs. Each OCU provides 6 GB of memory and two virtual CPUs. To use OpenSearch Ingestion auto-scaling optimally, it’s essential to configure the maximum number of OCUs for a pipeline based on the number of partitions in the topics being ingested. If a topic has a large number of partitions (for example, more than 96, which is the maximum OCUs per pipeline), it’s recommended to configure the pipeline with a maximum of 1–96 OCUs. This way, the pipeline can automatically scale up or down within this range as needed. However, if a topic has a low number of partitions (for example, fewer than 96), it’s advisable to set the maximum number of OCUs to be equal to the number of partitions. This approach ensures that each partition is processed by a dedicated OCU enabling parallel processing and optimal performance. In scenarios where a pipeline ingests data from multiple topics, the topic with the highest number of partitions should be used as a reference to configure the maximum OCUs. Additionally, if higher throughput is required, you can create another pipeline with a new set of OCUs for the same topic and consumer group, enabling near-linear scalability.

OpenSearch Ingestion provides several pre-defined configuration blueprints that can help you quickly build your ingestion pipeline on AWS

The following snippet illustrates pipeline configuration for an OpenSearch Ingestion pipeline using OpenSearch as a SINK with a dead letter queue (DLQ) to Amazon S3. When a pipeline encounters write errors, it creates DLQ objects in the configured S3 bucket. DLQ objects exist within a JSON file as an array of failed events.

sink: 
      - opensearch: 
          # Provide an AWS OpenSearch Service domain endpoint 
          hosts: [ "https://<<domain-name>>.<<region>>.es.amazonaws.com" ] 
          aws: 
          # Provide a Role ARN with access to the domain. This role should have a trust relationship with osis-pipelines.amazonaws.com 
            sts_role_arn: "arn:aws:iam::<<account-id>>:role/<<role-name>>" 
          # Provide the region of the domain. 
            region: "<<region>>" 
          # Enable the 'serverless' flag if the sink is an Amazon OpenSearch Serverless collection 
          # serverless: true 
          # index name can be auto-generated from topic name 
          index: "index_ev_pipe-%{yyyy.MM.dd}" 
          # Enable 'distribution_version' setting if the AWS OpenSearch Service domain is of version Elasticsearch 6.x 
          #distribution_version: "es6" 
          # Enable the S3 DLQ to capture any failed requests in Ohan S3 bucket 
          dlq: 
            s3: 
            # Provide an S3 bucket 
              bucket: "<<bucket-name>>"
            # Provide a key path prefix for the failed requests
              key_path_prefix: "oss-pipeline-errors/dlq"
            # Provide the region of the bucket.
              region: "<<region>>"
            # Provide a Role ARN with access to the bucket. This role should have a trust relationship with osis-pipelines.amazonaws.com
              sts_role_arn: "arn:aws:iam:: <<account-id>>:role/<<role-name>>"

Step 3: OpenSearch Ingestion to Amazon S3

OpenSearch Ingestion offers a built-in sink for loading streaming data directly into S3. The service can compress, partition, and optimize the data for cost-effective storage and analytics in Amazon S3. Data loaded into S3 can be partitioned for easier query isolation and lifecycle management. Partitions can be based on vehicle ID, date, geographic region, or other dimensions as needed for your queries.

The following snippet illustrates how we’ve partitioned and stored EV data in Amazon S3.

- s3:
            aws:
              # Provide a Role ARN with access to the bucket. This role should have a trust relationship with osis-pipelines.amazonaws.com
                sts_role_arn: "arn:aws:iam::<<account-id>>:role/<<role-name>>"
              # Provide the region of the domain.
                region: "<<region>>"
            # Replace with the bucket to send the logs to
            bucket: "evbucket"
            object_key:
              # Optional path_prefix for your s3 objects
              path_prefix: "index_ev_pipe/year=%{yyyy}/month=%{MM}/day=%{dd}/hour=%{HH}"
            threshold:
              event_collect_timeout: 60s
            codec:
              parquet:
                auto_schema: true

The pipeline can be created following the steps in Creating Amazon OpenSearch Ingestion pipelines.

The following is the complete pipeline configuration, combining the configuration of all three steps. Update the Amazon Resource Names (ARNs), AWS Region, Open Search Service domain endpoint, and S3 names as needed.

The entire OpenSearch Ingestion pipeline configuration can be directly copied into the ‘Pipeline configuration’ field in the AWS Management Console while creating the OpenSearch Ingestion pipeline

version: "2"
msk-pipeline: 
  source: 
    kafka: 
      acknowledgments: true           # Default is false  
      topics: 
         - name: "<<msk-topic-name>>" 
           group_id: "opensearch-consumer" 
           serde_format: json        
      aws: 
        # Provide the Role ARN with access to MSK. This role should have a trust relationship with osis-pipelines.amazonaws.com 
        sts_role_arn: "arn:aws:iam::<<account-id>>:role/<<role-name>>"
        # Provide the region of the domain. 
        region: "<<region>>" 
        msk: 
          # Provide the MSK ARN.  
          arn: "arn:aws:kafka:us-east-1:<<account-id>>:cluster/<<cluster-name>>/<<cluster-id>>" 
  processor:
      - parse_json:
  sink: 
      - opensearch: 
          # Provide an AWS OpenSearch Service domain endpoint 
          hosts: [ "https://<<opensearch-service-domain-endpoint>>.us-east-1.es.amazonaws.com" ] 
          aws: 
          # Provide a Role ARN with access to the domain. This role should have a trust relationship with osis-pipelines.amazonaws.com 
            sts_role_arn: "arn:aws:iam::<<account-id>>:role/<<role-name>>" 
          # Provide the region of the domain. 
            region: "<<region>>" 
          # Enable the 'serverless' flag if the sink is an Amazon OpenSearch Serverless collection 
          # index name can be auto-generated from topic name 
          index: "index_ev_pipe-%{yyyy.MM.dd}" 
          # Enable 'distribution_version' setting if the AWS OpenSearch Service domain is of version Elasticsearch 6.x 
          #distribution_version: "es6" 
          # Enable the S3 DLQ to capture any failed requests in Ohan S3 bucket 
          dlq: 
            s3: 
            # Provide an S3 bucket 
              bucket: "<<bucket-name>>"
            # Provide a key path prefix for the failed requests
              key_path_prefix: "oss-pipeline-errors/dlq"
            # Provide the region of the bucket.
              region: "<<region>>"
            # Provide a Role ARN with access to the bucket. This role should have a trust relationship with osis-pipelines.amazonaws.com
              sts_role_arn: "arn:aws:iam::<<account-id>>:role/<<role-name>>"
      - s3:
            aws:
              # Provide a Role ARN with access to the bucket. This role should have a trust relationship with osis-pipelines.amazonaws.com
                sts_role_arn: "arn:aws:iam::<<account-id>>:role/<<role-name>>"
              # Provide the region of the domain.
                region: "<<region>>"
            # Replace with the bucket to send the logs to
            bucket: "<<bucket-name>>"
            object_key:
              # Optional path_prefix for your s3 objects
              path_prefix: "index_ev_pipe/year=%{yyyy}/month=%{MM}/day=%{dd}/hour=%{HH}"
            threshold:
              event_collect_timeout: 60s
            codec:
              parquet:
                auto_schema: true

Real-time analytics

After the data is available in OpenSearch Service, you can build real-time monitoring and notifications. OpenSearch Service has robust support for multiple notification channels, allowing you to receive alerts through services like Slack, Chime, custom webhooks, Microsoft Teams, email, and Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS).

The following screenshot illustrates supported notification channels in OpenSearch Service.

The notification feature in OpenSearch Service allows you to create monitors that will watch for certain conditions or changes in your data and launch alerts, such as monitoring vehicle telemetry data and launching alerts for issues like battery degradation or abnormal energy consumption. For example, you can create a monitor that analyzes battery capacity over time and notifies the on-call team using Slack if capacity drops below expected degradation curves in a significant number of vehicles. This could indicate a potential manufacturing defect requiring investigation.

In addition to notifications, OpenSearch Service makes it easy to build real-time dashboards to visually track metrics across your fleet of vehicles. You can ingest vehicle telemetry data like location, speed, fuel consumption, and so on, and visualize it on maps, charts, and gauges. Dashboards can provide real-time visibility into vehicle health and performance.

The following screenshot illustrates creating a sample dashboard on OpenSearch Service

Opensearch Dashboard

A key benefit of OpenSearch Service is its ability to handle high sustained ingestion and query rates with millisecond latencies. It distributes incoming vehicle data across data nodes in a cluster for parallel processing. This allows OpenSearch to scale out to handle very large fleets while still delivering the real-time performance needed for operational visibility and alerting.

Batch analytics

After the data is available in Amazon S3, you can build a secure data lake to power a variety of analytics use cases deriving powerful insights. As an immutable store, new data is continually stored in S3 while existing data remains unaltered. This serves as a single source of truth for downstream analytics.

For business intelligence and reporting, you can analyze trends, identify insights, and create rich visualizations powered by the data lake. You can use Amazon QuickSight to build and share dashboards without needing to set up servers or infrastructure. Here’s an example of a Quicksight dashboard for IoT device data. For example, you can use a dashboard to gain insights from historical data that can help with better vehicle and battery design.

The Amazon Quicksight public gallery shows examples of dashboards across different domains.

You should consider Amazon OpenSearch dashboards for your operational day-to-day use cases to identify issues and alert in near real time whereas Amazon Quicksight should be used to analyze big data stored in a lake house and generate actionable insights from them.

Clean up

Delete the OpenSearch pipeline and Amazon MSK cluster to stop incurring costs on these services.

Conclusion

In this post, you learned how Amazon MSK, OpenSearch Ingestion, OpenSearch Services, and Amazon S3 can be integrated to ingest, process, store, analyze, and act on endless streams of EV data efficiently.

With OpenSearch Ingestion as the integration layer between streams and storage, the entire pipeline scales up and down automatically based on demand. No more complex cluster management or lost data from bursts in streams.

See Amazon OpenSearch Ingestion to learn more.

About the authors

Ayush Agrawal is a Startups Solutions Architect from Gurugram, India with 11 years of experience in Cloud Computing. With a keen interest in AI, ML, and Cloud Security, Ayush is dedicated to helping startups navigate and solve complex architectural challenges. His passion for technology drives him to constantly explore new tools and innovations. When he’s not architecting solutions, you’ll find Ayush diving into the latest tech trends, always eager to push the boundaries of what’s possible.

Fraser Sequeira is a Solutions Architect with AWS based in Mumbai, India. In his role at AWS, Fraser works closely with startups to design and build cloud-native solutions on AWS, with a focus on analytics and streaming workloads. With over 10 years of experience in cloud computing, Fraser has deep expertise in big data, real-time analytics, and building event-driven architecture on AWS.