Mission critical hybrid cloud brings Eneco one step closer to being climate neutral by 2035

One of the effects of the energy transition is the shift from traditional power plants to a variety of energy assets (solar farms, wind farms, batteries) and less predictable customer behaviour (electric cars, feed-in of energy). In order to guarantee a reliable supply of energy to the Netherlands, Eneco must be able to manage all these different assets. This places significant demands on its existing IT landscape, which needs to be updated to incorporate greater flexibility and stronger security.

Part of the updated IT landscape is a mission critical hybrid cloud that enables Eneco to take advantage of the benefits of the Microsoft Azure environment in a reliable manner. Thanks to its updated IT environment, Eneco can shorten the time-to-market for new assets and respond in real time to the fluctuating demand for energy.

At Eneco’s request, the updated mission critical IT environment consists of an Azure cloud platform, supplemented by a container platform and integration platform. This environment is suitable for receiving mission critical workloads and is an important prerequisite in enabling Eneco to operate in a climate-neutral manner by 2035.

After determining the requirements for the Azure landing zone, this was fully realized by using infrastructure as code (IaC) to ensure that new landing zones can be rolled out quickly and efficiently in future. By embedding the platform in code, the platform is reusable, changes can be implemented in a controlled manner, and human error is reduced significantly as the acceptance and production environments are identical.

To save Eneco time, the decision was made to build the environment in parallel and deliver it in part products. As a result, Eneco was able to land its workload on the Azure cloud platform as quickly as possible and carry on with its transition.

Once the Azure cloud platform had been delivered, a container platform was built in collaboration with Red Hat based on Red Hat OpenShift. This platform makes it possible for modern software architecture to be supported, with work conducted in containers instead of Virtual Machines (VM). An on-premise container platform built earlier has now been installed both on the premises and in the cloud, enabling critical and non-critical applications to be developed, tested, produced, hosted, and scaled in a cloud environment quickly and efficiently.

Lastly, an integration platform was installed on the container platform in collaboration with Axual. As the business critical integration platform we built in 2020 for Event Streaming does not meet the higher requirements for a mission critical platform, it was decided to design and build a completely new platform from scratch. In doing so, we took into consideration the much higher demands in terms of availability and resilience. Eneco will replace the old integration platform with this new platform in the near future.

The delivered Azure hybrid cloud environment contributes significantly to the objectives of the ‘Lighthouse’ programme – such as quicker landing of new assets and a real-time response to demand for energy – and therefore fulfils an important prerequisite in enabling Eneco to become climate neutral by 2035.