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This Guidance demonstrates how to build and modernize your electric vehicle (EV) charging station using AWS IoT Core. It highlights a modern Charging Station Management System (CSMS) built with serverless technologies, offering improved performance, lower costs, enhanced security, and compliance with the Open Charge Point Protocol (OCPP) for charger-to-cloud interoperability. The Guidance helps establish a reliable, secure, highly available EV charging platform with 99.9% uptime, as required by law in certain countries. Designed for reduced operating expenses and supporting OCPP, the serverless CSMS helps ensure a seamless charging experience while meeting regulatory requirements.
Please note: [Disclaimer]
Architecture Diagram
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[Architecture diagram description]
Step 1
The EV arrives and connects to the charge point. The customer authenticates to initiate charging.
Get Started
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Well-Architected Pillars
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The AWS Well-Architected Framework helps you understand the pros and cons of the decisions you make when building systems in the cloud. The six pillars of the Framework allow you to learn architectural best practices for designing and operating reliable, secure, efficient, cost-effective, and sustainable systems. Using the AWS Well-Architected Tool, available at no charge in the AWS Management Console, you can review your workloads against these best practices by answering a set of questions for each pillar.
The architecture diagram above is an example of a Solution created with Well-Architected best practices in mind. To be fully Well-Architected, you should follow as many Well-Architected best practices as possible.
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Operational Excellence
The architecture leverages NLB to efficiently distribute incoming connections from charge points to OCPP Handler instances running on Fargate. This offloads load balancing and high availability responsibilities, allowing you to focus on the core charging application. Fargate hosts the containerized OCPP Handler, enabling automatic scaling based on traffic and simplifying deployment and management.
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Security
AWS IoT Core establishes secure, encrypted communication channels between charge points and backend systems to handle authentication, authorization, and message encryption. AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) enforces fine-grained access controls, restricting access to authorized users and services only. Security groups and network ACLs act as virtual firewalls, controlling inbound and outbound traffic, protecting the system from potential network-based attacks.
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Reliability
The stateless architecture allows the NLB to route traffic to any available OCPP Handler instance on Fargate. AWS Auto Scaling groups help ensure system scalability to handle increased load without downtime. AWS IoT Core provides reliable message handling, automatically rerouting traffic during failover or scaling events. Amazon SQS buffers and stores payloads, enhancing overall system resilience.
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Performance Efficiency
AWS IoT Core, Amazon SQS, and Lambda leverage scalability and high-throughput capabilities to efficiently handle potentially large volumes of OCPP messages from charging stations. Their serverless nature supports automatic scaling based on demand, adapting infrastructure to workload fluctuations. Managed services reduce operational overhead, re-directing focus to application-level concerns.
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Cost Optimization
Serverless and pay-as-you-go pricing models (meaning you pay only for what you use) of AWS IoT Core, Amazon SQS, Lambda, and Step Functions allow you to scale the charging network up and down as needed, without incurring fixed costs. The event-driven architecture, facilitated by these services, consumes resources only when specific events or messages invoke actions, improving resource utilization and reducing waste.
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Sustainability
The event-driven architecture and serverless services like AWS IoT Core, Amazon SQS, Lambda, and Step Functions minimize the environmental impact by consuming resources only when invoked, reducing the overall operational footprint and the need for always-on computing power.
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Disclaimer
The sample code; software libraries; command line tools; proofs of concept; templates; or other related technology (including any of the foregoing that are provided by our personnel) is provided to you as AWS Content under the AWS Customer Agreement, or the relevant written agreement between you and AWS (whichever applies). You should not use this AWS Content in your production accounts, or on production or other critical data. You are responsible for testing, securing, and optimizing the AWS Content, such as sample code, as appropriate for production grade use based on your specific quality control practices and standards. Deploying AWS Content may incur AWS charges for creating or using AWS chargeable resources, such as running Amazon EC2 instances or using Amazon S3 storage.
References to third-party services or organizations in this Guidance do not imply an endorsement, sponsorship, or affiliation between Amazon or AWS and the third party. Guidance from AWS is a technical starting point, and you can customize your integration with third-party services when you deploy the architecture.