Virta Powers EV Charging with Confluent’s Real-Time Data Streaming Platform

Virta provides smart EV charging services for over a thousand companies across many industries, including retail, hospitality, real estate, and more. As one of the fastest growing companies in Europe, Virta’s network is in a near-constant state of expansion, as the team adds new features, infrastructure, and charge stations.

But Virta realized its monolithic data architecture presented scaling challenges as data volumes increased, which could result in delays, outages, and inconsistent user experiences. To provide customers with a great in-app experience and give its team real-time visibility over the status of its charging stations, Virta needed to stream information in seconds rather than hours. 

To get ahead of the risks, Virta looked for a scalable, resilient, and cost-effective streaming solution that could handle millions of messages simultaneously. 

Now, Virta uses Confluent Cloud’s real-time data streaming platform to reduce time to market for new charging stations, app features, and more. As a result, the company is expanding faster, minimizing operational bottlenecks, and providing a responsive user experience.

“We knew we needed to rethink how we processed our data. With Confluent, we’ve got a usage-based data streaming platform where we can develop features, expand into new markets, and create seamless customer experiences based on real-time data,” says Mostafa Aghajani, Enterprise Architect at Virta.

Rapid growth, slow data processing

Expanding to over 350,000 EV charging points in such a short span of time generated massive volumes of data for Virta’s systems to process and analyze in real time.

“Our systems process millions of messages every hour, so our databases are hit pretty hard,” says Aghanjani. “We recognized that our current system of sequential authorization was contributing to blockages as we increased the volume of data.”

Delayed data meant Virta couldn’t update customers or its team on charging performance or potential outages, which could cause service disruptions and leave customers in the dark. And when you’re processing millions of messages every hour, even small delays can quickly snowball into massive headaches for both technical teams and end users.

Virta first attempted to solve its data streaming challenge with open-source Apache Kafka®, but soon realized managing complex data sets at a high volume was time-consuming for its development team.

“As soon as we got to scale, we knew we needed enterprise support,” explains Aghanjani. “Confluent’s data streaming platform was a natural fit for us, as it removed the operational burden, so we could focus on the exciting stuff.”

A system purpose-built for scaling 

Confluent took over as the data streaming backbone of Virta’s new, cloud-based platform.

As a fully managed data streaming platform, Confluent eliminated the operational burden of self-managing Kafka clusters. This meant Virta’s technical team could focus on building new app features and creating new charge points, instead of maintaining systems or putting out fires.

Additionally, Confluent’s elastic scaling feature means workloads automatically scale up to meet demand, all while eliminating the manual burden. “We’re reliably processing 45 million messages per hour in real time,” says Aghanjani. “With Confluent, the throughput increases seamlessly as our usage grows, without needing to manually scale up clusters.”

From the start, Virta wanted to make it easy for developers to use Kafka to create new applications and services based on real-time data streams. With Confluent, teams are equipped with tools and capabilities like Schema Registry and pre-built APIs that serve as a secure middle layer between developers and Confluent's infrastructure. 

As a result, Virta has created strict guidelines and samples for developers to follow, to standardize the process and speed up the development time of new services.

Faster deployment, real-time updates, and cost savings

With a fully scalable data streaming platform, Virta has achieved fantastic results, including:

Accelerated time to market

With Confluent as the foundation of its data architecture, Virta’s team is deploying app features, charge points, and new event-driven services faster. “Thanks to Confluent, we’ve regained the speed of a start-up!” says Aghanjani. “Now, our technical teams can focus on adding new functionality and features, instead of putting out fires.”

Updates in seconds, not hours

Since adopting Confluent, Virta is surfacing up-to-the-second charging station data and delivering updates to customers in record time. “We can reflect station configuration changes in less than a second,” says Tolga Tunçbilek, Director of Technology at Virta. “It gives our customers peace of mind, and real-time data eliminates any guesswork.”

Huge savings through usage-based pricing

After shifting to a usage-based pricing model, Virta has cut down on its monthly spend by only paying for the resources it’s actually using. 

“We don’t have to buy additional clusters,” says Aghanjani. “The billing is based on our usage/throughput. If we reach these limits, we can just switch to a different cluster plan, so we only pay for what we use.” 

What’s next for Virta and Confluent?

Through its partnership with Confluent, Virta has overcome the challenges of growth, scalability, and real-time data processing. But that’s not the end of Virta’s story. In the near future, Virta plans to integrate Confluent with Snowflake’s AI data cloud to unlock powerful real-time analytics. 

“We’re already looking into new use cases, such as real-time billing, predictive maintenance, and advanced analytics on charging station data,” says Aghajani. “We’re looking forward to exploring new possibilities and really pushing the boundaries of what's possible in the EV charging space."

Learn more about Virta