Requirements for a Green Energy IoT Software

Serverless Architecture Challenge #4

Welcome to the new subscribers who joined last week!

Now, onto the next challenge…

Business Details

Smart Tech and IoT aren’t just about automating your home lights and sprinklers. Industry has started to use it for some compelling functionality.

One industry that is changing is Green Energy. Being able to monitor and analyse both the energy generation and storage of systems can be incredibly valuable. Whether that is for a notification system for equipment issues or being able to control your system to store electricity during the day and sell it at night at a higher price.

You’ve been approached by a company that builds devices that connect to green energy systems to add IoT functionality. They have written the code for analysing the data but need a scalable way to ingest and process the data.

They will be selling this as a service to green energy projects.

Requirements

Functionality

• Ingest energy production events from IoT devices installed on any green energy device (solar panels, wind turbines, hydro turbines, energy storage devices eg. battery banks)

  • Devices can be set to send one event every 10s in real-time or batch 10s events and send that data once per minute.

• Detect anomalies in the outputs

  • Issues with the equipment

  • Weather anomalies

• Store data for long-term analysis and future prediction

  • Solar panel degradation

  • Battery cycle degradation

  • Predicting future energy generation capacities

  • Estimating real-world production for new projects

• Users can add devices to their account which starts the data ingestion process.

  • This involves selecting the device type, device ID and confirming a data connection

• View real-time data

  • See all of the generated power and storage capacity

  • See any anomalies

  • See future energy predictions for you system

  • View the live sell price for the energy with your respective provider

• Control devices

  • Send commands to devices

    • Store or sell electricity

    • Turn on / off turbine

  • Schedule commands

    • Charge the battery bank until 5pm then change to sell to the grid

• There can be multiple members of a project

  • owners - all permissions

  • admins - all permissions except billing

  • analyst - view only

  • engineer - view only anomalies

Non Functional Requirements

• Events need to show up in the dashboard within 10s of receiving them.

• Ingest data from 2,000 real-time devices and 10,000 devices sending batches of events.

What Happens Next?

Once you’ve designed your architecture, you want to be able to critique it. The best way is to have another architect review it. The next best thing is to have a set of questions to go through and see how your architecture answers those questions. You might find areas where your architecture could be improved and better meet the requirements.

But you’re not getting those questions just yet. I want to give you a chance to design your architecture without being influenced by the questions. You’ll get these questions in 7 days, so get architecting!

If you’re doing this challenge with a friend or colleague, that’s amazing. Peer feedback and having someone else’s viewpoints can be incredibly valuable. If you can, try and complete your architecture before reviewing and comparing it. This will help you understand the topics you know well and the ones you can work on.

Submit Your Architecture

Self review is really good, but having your architecture reviewed by others is always the gold standard. To enable this I’ve created a Github repo where you can upload your designs to get community feedback. You can also check out other people’s designs for further learning (after you’ve done your design).

To submit, follow these steps:

• Fork the main repo (https://github.com/SamWSoftware/ServerlessArchitectureChallenge)

• Clone your repo locally

• Add a folder to /{Challenge Number}/submissions/{Your Name}

• Put whatever you want into that folder. Ideally an architecture diagram (png would be great) and some notes on how the architecture works and your process to get there

• Push your changes

• Create a PR into the main repo

If you want to view and discuss other people’s submissions then check out the open PRs.

If you have anything you would want to see in a future Serverless Community, let me know!

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If you like the idea of this Serverless Architecture Challenge then please share it with your friends and colleagues.

If you have any feedback, please email me at sam@completecoding.io

Good luck!

Sam