enersis Paves the Way for Greener Cities with gaia, a Climate Solution Built on AWS

Founded in 2011, enersis provides gaia to over 1,800 municipalities in Germany and Switzerland, impacting over 13.1 million inhabitants. enersis combines its own curated data from public governmental sources with customer data to create a digital twin of a city, which can include years of utility measurements.

To manage this confidential data and help comply with the General Data Protection Regulation, enersis needed a secure, scalable infrastructure that was cost effective and offered advanced visualization capabilities. In 2018, it started building gaia on AWS. “We chose AWS because we thought it was the most technologically advanced solution,” says Thomas Koller, founder and CEO at enersis.

With tecRacer, an AWS Partner, enersis completed the cloud hosting for its SaaS solution in March 2023. Multiple times throughout the project, enersis validated its architecture against AWS Well-Architected best practices through an AWS Foundational Technical Review (AWS FTR), which can be used to identify and remediate risks specific to software. This provides customers with greater confidence in the gaia solution.

For resilience and scalability, enersis runs gaia on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS)— a managed service for starting, running, and scaling Kubernetes in the cloud—and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), secure and resizable compute capacity for virtually any workload. Using Amazon EKS, enersis doesn’t need to manage infrastructure, saving time for its staff to focus on gaia development. For new tenants, gaia’s cloud deployment and application setup takes only 5 days, compared to the 1–2 months required to deploy and set up the application with on-premises hardware.

Using AWS helps enersis feel confident in managing data security and maintaining compliance. For data storage, enersis uses Amazon Aurora, a MySQL- and PostgreSQL-compatible relational database management system designed for high performance and availability on a global scale.

enersis supports sustainability by using the cloud, which is five times more energy efficient than a typical on-premises data center. Also, by paying for only the resources that it uses, enersis can pass cost savings on to customers.  

With a SaaS solution on AWS, enersis is positioned for global expansion. “Using AWS, we have cost transparency and scaling possibilities. We don’t have to worry about basic infrastructure and can expand to other regions,” says Andreas Jaus, chief information officer at enersis. “AWS has all the services and tools so we can profit from the benefits of a cloud infrastructure.”