APIs and Cloud Help Power Innovative Business


“We would also classify ourselves as a disruptive know-how company”
James Eddison is Octopus Vitality CTO. He co-started the business in 2015 with Greg Jackson, the company’s CEO.
Octopus has produced a novel cloud-based purchaser provider system, Kraken, which it uses to meet the requirements of its one,five hundred,000 shoppers, and licenses to other strength suppliers.
An engineer by track record, James tells us how cloud know-how has been central to the growth of Octopus and why he thinks in putting the electricity of the firm’s novel know-how again into the arms of its shoppers by way of APIs.
Hello James. Give us the low-down on Octopus Vitality and what you do…

On the encounter of it we’re a new entrant strength supplier, with two essential motorists supplying good purchaser provider to a sector which has been not notably successful in undertaking that, and a need to make a environmentally friendly dent in the universe.
We would also classify ourselves as a disruptive know-how firm.
Greg and I appear from a track record of utilizing know-how to remedy other people’s issues, and now we’re undertaking that in the strength sector, or the “Entech” house if you want to place an acronym on it.
We started out out aiming to create the expertise of shoppers and the expertise of our assistance workers around know-how. For the reason that we have built Kraken with individuals objectives in head it offers us a a great deal reduced cost to serve and a great deal larger purchaser pleasure degrees than having an SAP or Oracle-sort procedure which has its strengths but is not built for that objective.
Ok… So are you an strength supplier or a know-how firm initially?
That is a bit like inquiring which of your kids you like better. We’re a family members with both, and if we weren’t an strength supplier we wouldn’t have the sensible arms-on expertise to know what’s genuinely essential, and if we weren’t creating our possess know-how we wouldn’t be ready to do the strength supplying element as properly.
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We’ve invested 20 a long time constructing massive programs, so we have acquired and I do not consider it is conceited to say we have acquired a few suggestions of how it really should be performed. There’s a McKinsey report we like to quotation on why most IT transformation initiatives are unsuccessful, and it states it is because the IT division is however acting as buy takers fairly than conclusion makers.
In our firm the IT division are the conclusion makers: I’m a director, Greg is the CEO and is pretty technically astute – he was composing online video video games when he was a child. And the wider board and management staff have been incredibly supportive about the possibility and the problems of constructing your possess system, so we have been ready to produce it progressively.
Convey to us why the cloud has generally been central to your business. Are there any distinct resources which have been beneficial?
Applying the cloud has enabled us to produce our system in a very agile and innovative way. You listen to about CICD – continual integration, continual deployment – a ton, but this is anything we have performed considering that working day one particular each individual transform in the code foundation can be tracked again and replayed
We utilized Terraform and deployed to the cloud considering that working day one particular, so each individual transform in our infrastructure is also tracked in code and auditable again to Working day One who did what, when and how. And when we deploy, we’re rebuilding infrastructure because it is all element of the identical deployment pipeline. We’re at present undertaking that involving 40 and 50 occasions for every working day.
We use load balances and also scaling groups so that the availability of means flexes to to meet what we require. The ordinary everyday living of a server is possibly it is likely to be calculated in minutes, it is very transitory in real conditions.
How does this differentiate you from your competitors?
We were being once asked how lengthy it usually takes us to do a run of ten,000 bills on our system as opposed to the industry’s classic tactic. Usually strength suppliers are constrained by their components, or by their program even if they selected to run that in the cloud, and you get these lengthy procedures [to make bills].
If we’re undertaking a run of ten,000 bills, it will become ten,000 duties, and the issue then is how swiftly do we require to do it? We could spin up ten,000 servers to method one particular every single, or we could have ten servers every single undertaking one,000. We want the run to be performed in an hour so we assign the proper selection of servers.
Now a large invoice run can comprise one hundred,000 bills, but it however just usually takes an hour because that is the time we want it to acquire. We’re ready to use the identical code and infrastructure and perform the process at a different scale.
You just lately turned an AWS spouse – why did you plump for this system about many others?
We’ve generally utilized AWS and I consider the most up-to-date evolution is that we have acquired off the fence a minimal bit. Theoretically we could acquire our application and port it to Google Cloud or Azure, but when you’ve acquired a massive quantity of info set up and you start out to use the benefit-introducing resources around issues like stability that AWS presents, there is a important upside in investing as a spouse fairly than just dipping your toe in the h2o. We also know they’ve acquired world wide info centres and can assistance us lengthen our reach internationally.
You have manufactured a ton of APIs readily available – how do these assistance your business?
There was in no way a discussion around no matter whether we would give APIs to assistance shoppers accessibility their info. At the time we imagined folks may possibly want to do issues like composing a Windows Cellular application we did not make an application ourselves because it was not a industry we noticed a great deal upcoming in, but we figured if you give folks the info they could do it by themselves.
Quickly ahead 6 a long time and APIs are helping us with our goals of supplying clear pricing and sustainable strength. When we introduced Agile [a solution which tracks strength source each individual half an hour to let shoppers to reduced their bills by syncing their occasions of higher consumption to occasions of higher network capacity] we manufactured an API readily available promptly, and within a pair of weeks of the solution hitting the industry we held a hack working day the place about thirty providers turned up with suggestions, quite a few of which are now in the industry.
The APIs deliver an eco-procedure the place other providers can assistance remedy the problem of earning our info simple to accessibility for shoppers. We have the geeks who will publish code on a Raspberry Pi and do awesome initiatives, but we also have guys constructing applications for telephones and watches so that info is readily available to shoppers all the time.
This is an business which is [if not] however utilizing technologies and procedures which were being devised in the eighties at the time of the industry deregulation. The present speed of transform usually means even a rather compact alteration gets created up into a lengthy multi-million pound venture, but we require to be earning a substance impact on local climate transform this decade. So know-how requirements to allow transform, and APIs will be an interface that will be a large element of that.
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