Burgenland Energie Empowers Households to Adopt Renewable Solar Power Using Cloud-Native Platform Built on AWS

Greenhouse gases are the leading cause of temperature rises around the world. The United Nations has called on governments and businesses to cut carbon emissions to as close to zero as possible to limit further increases. Energy producers like Burgenland Energie in Austria are fully aware of their responsibilities. It is committed to meeting energy needs for current residents and future generations using renewable sources whenever possible to minimize the environmental impact.

Based on these goals, Burgenland Energie entered a joint venture with Krone Zeitung, Austria’s largest newspaper, to launch renewable energy provider Krone Sonne. The company supplies turnkey “solar power plants” to generate electricity using solar panels fitted to customers’ homes. Residents can also install batteries to store the electricity and use a smartphone app to manage their entire Krone Sonne system with maximum convenience.

Burgenland Energie wanted Krone Sonne’s IT to be as eco-friendly as possible. “Our strategy is to use cloud-native services for highly efficient and agile modern data architectures across all our new businesses,” says Robert Roller, head of development at Burgenland Energie. The company engaged ByteSource Technology Consulting, an AWS Partner that had supported Burgenland Energie on multiple cloud deployment and migration projects in the past. ByteSource Technology Consulting recommended AWS for the scalability, flexibility, and energy efficiency of running applications on AWS rather than on-premises enterprise data centers in Europe.

ByteSource built a serverless, microservices infrastructure using AWS to support business processes and customer-facing services. Martin Karner, sales director at Krone Sonne, says, “Our AWS solution needed to support multiple processes, including the online planner for customers to design their power plants, our Zoho enterprise resource planning system, and our Atlassian software development environment.”

In just two weeks, ByteSource created the necessary environments for Krone Sonne using AWS cloud services. These environments featured AWS Lambda serverless services, with Lambda@Edge functions to redirect static content and maximize the performance of Amazon CloudFront, a content delivery network. For rapid scaling, they also included Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) to run tools such as Atlantis, which instructs Terraform to plan and apply infrastructure changes as workloads rise and fall. Karner says, “We were impressed with how quickly ByteSource launched our infrastructure-as-code architecture for us to go live.”

Within 12 months of Krone Sonne launching in 2022, the company had installed over 2,500 solar systems on residential homes across Austria. Customers were able to use planning tools reliably to design their solar panel installations, gain customer support, and place orders. Thanks to the AWS infrastructure, these customer-facing services integrated smoothly with Krone Sonne’s backend systems to ensure orders were fulfilled, installations successfully fitted, and records updated. “No matter if there were sudden peaks in orders on Monday after a weekend campaign, our systems scaled easily to handle the workloads,” says Karner.

To date, Krone Sonne has calculated that its solar panels have generated around 20 gigawatt hours of energy from renewable solar sources. Its findings show generating this energy with non-renewable sources would have pumped significant amounts of greenhouse gas into the atmosphere. Karner states, “We’ve helped make a CO2 saving of approximately 2.8 tons—equivalent to the amount of carbon dioxide captured by approximately 315,000 trees—to better protect the planet.”