AWS for Industries
How AMPECO is using AWS Globally to provide a reliable EV charging experience at scale
Introduction
As the global shift toward electric vehicles (EVs) accelerates, the demand for a scalable, and secure EV charging infrastructure is becoming increasingly urgent. Governments are strengthening their support for charging infrastructure, and a healthy mix of private and public chargers is emerging.
AMPECO, a global EV charging management solution provider, is on a mission to empower large-scale charge point operators (CPOs) to deliver a seamless and efficient charging experience to drivers worldwide.
Through its platform, AMPECO enables automotive OEMs, energy utilities, parking operators, and other infrastructure operators in managing and optimizing their EV charging networks. The platform covers all business cases for CPOs and EMSPs (E-Mobility Service Providers), public, private, and home charging. Core capabilities include partner and tariff management, advanced energy management, and diverse payment, billing, and subscriptions modules. With security and scalability at its core, the AMPECO platform allows for a go-to-market in a few months with a ready-made platform offering extensibility through APIs and out-of-the-box integrations.
As of January 2025, AMPECO supports more than 160 charging network operators and well over 130,000 charging points (and over 900,000 through roaming) in 66 countries. In the next 6 to 12 months, the company is set to migrate another 100,000 charging points from other platforms.
An FT1000 fastest-growing company, AMPECO is an AWS trusted Partners and has seen accelerated growth using AWS-managed services to maintain, optimize, and scale its data operations in EV charging.
What are the main challenges for EV charging network operators?
Network operators face a range of challenges that make providing a reliable EV charging experience difficult. These challenges fall primarily into three categories: reliability, security, and scalability. Here’s a closer look at each:
Charging reliability:
Charging operators must make sure that their stations are working at all times. Even brief downtimes can lead to significant revenue loss and customer dissatisfaction. Making sure of consistent uptime across thousands of chargers necessitates continuous monitoring to preemptively identify and resolve issues. This usually happens over a wide array of charging stations from different manufacturers, each with its own quirks.
Charging security:
Charging stations handle sensitive customer data, including payment information and usage patterns. Protecting this data from breaches is crucial, especially as regulations around data privacy become more stringent. As charging networks grow, they become more attractive targets for cyberattacks.
Charging scalability:
The demand for EV charging is growing rapidly and necessitates quick network expansion. This rapid pace puts pressure on existing infrastructure and can lead to operational bottlenecks if the underlying technology can’t scale effectively. As networks grow, so does the complexity of managing resources such as energy consumption, billing, and customer service.
The combination of these three factors creates a challenging environment for CPOs. Being a cloud-based platform, AMPECO builds on the power of the cloud to offer the flexibility needed to address these challenges. By enabling dynamic resource management, seamless integration, and real-time scalability, AMPECO’s platform supports the rapid and continued expansion of EV charging networks worldwide.
How AMPECO is using AWS to solve challenges for CPOs
a. High-level architecture of the AMPECO platform
Since its start, AMPECO has relied on the AWS cloud infrastructure to streamline the deployment of new charging points, allowing CPOs to rapidly expand their networks across different geographies. Using the AWS scalable architecture allows AMPECO to quickly set up new charging infrastructure in various locations, meeting the growing demand for EV charging services.
AMPECO strategically chose robust software architecture in its early stages, enabling the simultaneous operation of multiple tenants on the same software without interference or data leaks. This approach significantly reduces the resources needed to support each client. Furthermore, AMPECO introduced custom autoscaling, container placement, monitoring, and deployment methods on top of the AWS offerings. These enhancements not only grant excellent insight into the current service performance but also provide early warnings of potential future issues.
The AMPECO system is built with redundancy and failover mechanisms, making sure of high availability to keep services operational even in the face of hardware, software, or network failures. The platform dynamically adjusts resources based on the size and needs of each charging network to meet demand levels across locations and time. Integrability is facilitated through a robust suite of public APIs, Webhooks, and Kafka event streaming, enabling seamless interaction with third-party applications and real-time data exchange. Data storage is optimized for different types of information, making sure that each dataset, from transaction logs to user profiles, is stored and managed in a way that maximizes performance and efficiency, and is tailored to the specific requirements of the data.
b. Addressing the reliability of EV chargers
With the increasing adoption of electric vehicles, drivers can be confronted with issues around charging reliability. Many of these are addressed by software solutions that improve network connectivity and system stability.
AMPECO’s disaster recovery strategy is rigorously designed and audited under ISO 27001 standards. High availability is maintained through AWS best practices, with infrastructure currently hosted across eight AWS Regions. AMPECO closely aligns recovery objectives with the AWS Foundational Technical Review, enhancing resilience. Furthermore, real-time backups, daily snapshots, and a seven-day recovery window further bolster the system’s reliability. AMPECO also provides continuous 24/7 support through a robust monitoring and reporting system, using tools such as Amazon CloudWatch and Amazon Managed Grafana for Availability Monitoring.
This integrated approach enables real-time monitoring, prompt incident response, and seamless communication, making sure of the reliability and performance of the EV charging network.
c. How AWS helps Ampeco to solve the CPO cybersecurity challenges
One of the biggest challenges with large CPO businesses is security. Cyber threats, such as data breaches, payment process compromises, and even threats to grid stability, pose significant risks. This is why a secure architecture is essential for making sure of the high reliability of the charging networks.
AMPECO addresses these challenges by using the AWS advanced cloud security features, such as AWS GuardDuty and AWS WAF, which offer proactive threat detection, DDoS protection, and continuous monitoring. Moreover, AMPECO’s platform implements comprehensive security measures, such as certificate management for secure device authentication and encrypted communication between charging stations and the central system.
AMPECO also employs AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) to enforce compliance controls on its infrastructure and applications. These measures align with certifications such as ISO 27017 and ISO 27018.
Following AWS best practices helped AMPECO offer a better service to CPOs
AMPECO’s commitment to delivering a scalable and high-performing EV charging management platform is underscored by its adherence to AWS best practices, such as items covered during the rigorous AWS Foundational Technical Review.
AMPECO has achieved operational efficiencies through its optimized use of AWS services. These are reflected in several key performance metrics:
- Cost efficiencies: Migrating all of its Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances to ARM and Graviton-based instances allows AMPECO to reduce operational costs by up to 20% without compromising on performance. This transition has allowed the company to allocate resources more effectively, reinvesting savings into further innovation and platform enhancements.
- Resource usage: AMPECO’s custom auto scaling solutions, built on Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), enable the platform to dynamically allocate resources based on real-time demand. This approach to improve resource usage is complemented with the use of spot instances, making sure that compute and storage resources are only used when necessary. This helped to keep a competitive price with CPOs.
- Platform uptime: Using the AWS global infrastructure, AMPECO has implemented a distributed back office system across multiple AWS Regions, resulting in a platform uptime of 99.95% or better on an annual basis across individual tenants. This enhanced redundancy makes sure that AMPECO’s platform remains available and responsive for all customers, even in the event of regional failures or outages.
- Deployment efficiency: AMPECO achieves zero downtime on new releases through canary (rolling) deployments, which allow for a progressive switch of service containers and makes sure of seamless updates without interrupting service. This approach is complemented by a multi-stage release process that limits potential errors, thereby enhancing the reliability of each deployment. Furthermore, a delayed deployment option provides valuable safeguard by allowing for thorough testing of custom-built solutions before they are introduced to the production environment.
What’s next
AMPECO’s platform is designed to adapt to the evolving requirements in the EV charging space by enabling operators to build their own unique selling propositions (USPs) on top of the platform and develop in their own environments, all hosted on AWS. This flexibility allows for more tailored offerings, increasing market share and unlocking new revenue streams.
AMPECO’s partnership with AWS has been instrumental in enabling the growth and success of its EV charging management platform. AMPECO is a member of the AWS Partner Network and has been active in implementing best practices, including the robust requirements in the AWS Foundational Technical Review. Using the AWS scalable cloud infrastructure allowed AMPECO to build a platform that meets and exceeds the complex needs of pure play CPOs, automotive OEMs, energy utilities, parking operators, and other charging network providers.
Looking ahead, AMPECO plans to further enhance its platform with new features and integrations, all while continuing to use the powerful cloud services of AWS. This collaboration will not only drive AMPECO’s growth but also support the broader adoption of electric mobility worldwide.