Engineering case study

Energy Exemplar

Cloud capacity for demanding simulation work.

Cloud ArchitectureAWS Cloud SecurityManaged Services

The challenge

Simulation workloads needed elastic capacity and a repeatable disaster-recovery process.

The engineering

A phased AWS migration with solver orchestration, scaling, Multi-AZ metadata and operations dashboards.

The result

A validated migration and automated failover with an ongoing testing process.

Read the full project story ↓

Client: Energy Exemplar
Industry: Energy Software
Location: Adelaide, Australia

About project

Cloud Architecture

AWS Cloud Security

Managed Services

AWS

Energy Exemplar builds PLEXOS, the leading energy simulation platform used by utilities, regulators and market operators in 100+ countries. tMinus1 led the AWS migration of their SaaS delivery infrastructure, moving solver workloads from co-located data centres to managed cloud.

The situation

PLEXOS solver jobs are computationally intensive and latency-sensitive. The existing co-lo environment could not provide the elastic compute capacity customers needed during peak simulation periods, and disaster recovery was a manual process with an untested runbook.

What we built

tMinus1 designed a phased migration: CloudFront and S3 for model file distribution, ECS on EC2 for solver orchestration with Auto Scaling Groups sized for peak demand, RDS Multi-AZ for job metadata, and CloudWatch dashboards giving the operations team real-time visibility. A parallel-run period of four weeks validated parity before the cutover.

How we delivered it

Architecture design and Terraform build (weeks 1–4), parallel run and validation (weeks 5–8), cutover and hypercare (weeks 9–12).

The result

Zero production incidents during the 90-day migration window. Solver throughput increased 40% versus co-lo. Disaster recovery reduced from a multi-day manual process to automated failover tested quarterly.