Case Study : Achieving Open Charge Alliance (OCA) and British Compliance with SRE

Revolutionising Infrastructure and Security for an Electric Vehicle Chargers Company

Introduction

Our client, a leading company in the electric vehicle (EV) charging industry, sought to enhance their platform to be security compliant with OCA and British standards. This included implementing charge point authentication via TLS and mTLS to the central system.

Objective

The primary objectives of this initiative were to:

Seamlessly integrate the existing Google Cloud Platform (GCP) infrastructure with the compliance standards.
Enable charge points (CP) to communicate with the central system at all three levels of authentication.
Enhance the reliability and security of both the platform and the central system.
Provide a CI/CD pipeline for releases to ensure continuous improvement and deployment.

Approach

Infrastructure Assessments

We conducted a comprehensive infrastructure assessment to identify the current state, pinpoint single points of failure, and determine areas for improvement.

This included:

Scalability and Availability: Ensuring the infrastructure can handle increased load and maintain high uptime.
Data Durability: Confirming data is reliably stored and protected against loss.
Automating Testing and CI/CD: Identifying opportunities to automate testing and streamline CI/CD processes for enhanced efficiency and reliability.
Monitoring Systems: Ensuring comprehensive coverage of essential metrics for proactive incident detection and response.

Applying SRE Principles to Address Industry-Critical Challenges

To enhance reliability and ensure seamless operation, our Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) collaborated with the our Engineers and Data Scientists.

Our SRE team strategically leveraged the company’s existing Google Cloud infrastructure, addressing its limitations and integrating seamlessly with containerised environments.

By applying SRE principles and adhering to industry standards, they designed and implemented a scalable, robust, and efficient solution that fully utilises Google Cloud native services, ensuring a smooth and compliant product release.

The key components included:

- Cloud Run: Deploys scalable, containerised applications for high availability and performance.
- Cloud Logging, Prometheus, and Grafana: Provides log management and monitoring with detailed metrics and dashboards.
- Certificate Authority Service: Manages secure certificate issuance, renewal, and revocation.
- Artifact Registry: Handles version control and management of application artifacts, supporting CI/CD pipelines.
- Kubernetes: Orchestrates containerised workloads with automated deployment, scaling, and management.
- MongoDB and Redis: Offers data caching and secure storage, enhancing performance and responsiveness.
- Pub/Sub: Ensures reliable message delivery and supports real-time data processing and event-driven architectures.

Our SRE contributions: 

The implementation of SRE processes yielded significant benefits:

Achievement of uptime > 99.95% : We ensured platform’s high availability and reliability, meeting stringent uptime requirements through strategic infrastructure enhancements and proactive monitoring
Enhanced Security: By implementing robust security measures such as TLS and mTLS for charge point authentication, we significantly reduced the attack surface and ensured compliance with OCA and British standards.
Reduction in Toil Operations: We automated repetitive tasks and processes using CI/CD pipelines and comprehensive monitoring systems, reducing manual intervention and improving operational efficiency
Implemented an Efficient Disaster Recovery Strategy: Leveraged stateless infrastructure to simplify scaling and recovery processes, minimising downtime and complexity, while implementing robust database backup and restore strategies to ensure data integrity and availability, enabling quick restoration in case of data loss or corruption

Conclusion

Our collaboration with the electric vehicle chargers company led to transformative enhancements in their infrastructure and security. By leveraging SRE practices and Google Cloud native services, we delivered a scalable, robust, and secure solution that not only meets their current needs but is also poised to tackle future challenges with confidence.

This case study underscores the critical importance of strategic infrastructure development and the immense value of adopting advanced security measures in the rapidly evolving EV charging industry. Our efforts have set a new benchmark for reliability and security, paving the way for a more resilient and efficient future.

For more information on how our SRE services can benefit your organisation, contact us today at enquires@bigspark.dev.