Groendus Charging and ihomer Build Hosting Platform for EV Chargers, Migrate 1,500 Units in 5 Months

Dutch clean-energy company Groendus Charging—formerly Powerd, which was acquired by Groendus in 2023—needed to migrate support for 1,500 electric vehicle (EV) chargers in just 5 months to ensure continued scalability and reliability, as the previous hosting partner no longer met its evolving requirements. It also wanted to build a smart, scalable charging platform for its EV charging service to offer a better customer experience and to carry out more installations. Groendus Charging was already working with AWS Partner ihomer because of its industry expertise, so it was a natural choice to help develop the solution. Working together, they created and implemented a solution within 5 months that enabled Groendus Charging to migrate support for its 1,500 EV chargers. The solution can scale up to accommodate new charger installations, and the company is expecting a 1000% increase over the next 3 years. 

Groendus Charging is on a mission to support its customers’ sustainability goals by helping them with their solar energy and electric charging needs. It also provides users with an energy management system that gives guidance on the best times to charge EVs and batteries. It offers services to employers who provide employees with EVs to manage the monitoring and reimbursement of energy costs.

Groendus Charging needed to migrate support and control of 1,500 chargers to a cloud-based hosting environment to meet a hard deadline of December 31, 2021, because its hosting partner could no longer support the company. As its customer base grew, it also needed to develop a scalable platform to support the growing pool of users. This would enable it to install more electric chargers without slowing down the system or causing downtime.

Groendus Charging also faced problems with its Internet of Things (IoT) system that connects chargers with the charge point management system. The charging points were resource intensive, and if there was system downtime, the chargers would all try to reconnect at the same time. This would overwhelm the system, causing further downtime and reconnection difficulties. While it was a foreseen issue, and part of its scaling ambitions, Groendus Charging needed to find a way to optimize the IoT connection to prevent this from happening in cases of any unplanned, widespread downtime across the customer charge points. 

Groendus Charging was already working with ihomer to develop solutions, so it was a natural choice for support with migrating the chargers and creating the scalable infrastructure. “Partnering with ihomer was a win-win situation,” says Charlotte Wegewijs, product manager at Groendus Charging. “ihomer has a lot of market knowledge about chargers and clean energy protocols like OCPP and OCPI and they’ve helped us to translate that to something that our users would actually be able to use.”

To tackle the migration, the need for scalability, and the IoT system connection issues, Groendus Charging and ihomer worked in sprints. First, they collaborated on defining a vision for each sprint and then on working to find a solution. “We work very closely with the team, and they feel like colleagues—it doesn’t feel like a customer-client relationship,” says Wegewijs. “We’re finding goals and discovering new things together. It’s a real partnership.”

The depth of technical knowledge that ihomer has around the EV market has been beneficial for Groendus Charging. “It’s great that they have a lot of domain knowledge,” says Lucien Joppe, chief technology officer of charging at Groendus Charging. “We can just express our ideas instead of defining them in high detail because we have that communication with each other.” Each sprint begins with a whiteboard session where the two teams work on defining the objectives, and then ihomer uses these collaborative, goal-setting meetings to drive its development work. After this, the teams review and test the work. They can then move to production.

ihomer worked to develop solutions to host the chargers in the cloud using AWS Lambda, a serverless compute service that handles the compute resources for Groendus Charging. This means that the team doesn’t have to manually scale the environment up and down based on demand, enabling it to focus on innovation, customer experience, and other high-value activities. ihomer also used AWS IoT Core to solve the connection issues between the charging points and the charging management system. This improves scalability and optimizes costs. Using AWS IoT Core also means that if there are connection issues, it doesn’t take the entire fleet offline.

Additionally, ihomer used Amazon EventBridge, which lets users build event-driven applications at scale. This solution allows Groendus Charging to connect critical business processes such as invoicing, customer onboarding, and charge point onboarding, as well as dynamically routing new events including new customer registrations and charge point activations. And using AWS Step Functions, Groendus Charging can orchestrate workflows efficiently and automate tasks, including validating customer details and generating accurate invoices. 

Working with ihomer, Groendus Charging successfully migrated the 1,500 charging points that needed to be hosted on AWS in less than 5 months, before the deadline. Using its new AWS infrastructure, Groendus Charging is now hosting 15,000 chargers in total, after starting with just 1,000. This 15-times’ increase in charger installed base hasn’t required a comparable increase in team size. The company started with three members and now has seven. “There is significant growth within our platform, our users, and the number of chargers, but the team didn’t have to exponentially grow to manage it,” says Wegewijs.

With the automatic scaling provided by AWS Lambda, along with the support from ihomer, Groendus Charging can focus on innovation and looking after its customers, rather than on managing the technical side of the business. This has led to a 100% year-over-year increase in customer install base, with the ability to scale up as more customers join. 

The ability to spend time on its customers has been beneficial for Groendus Charging, helping it achieve an 85 percent customer satisfaction rate. The scalability also brought cost benefits, because Groendus Charging now pays only for the compute resources it needs as usage fluctuates.