SkyElectric uses Scylla to power its smart energy platform. Scylla provides better performance, scalability, and lower latency than their previous MySQL database. With Scylla, SkyElectric has seen average write latency of 1.4ms and read latency of under 1ms, which is 10x faster throughput than MySQL. While Scylla has been easy to operate and support responsive upgrades and repairs, SkyElectric hopes to see improvements in data changelog, faster node joining, and backup/restore processes.

1. How SkyElectric Uses Scylla
to Power Its Smart Energy
Platform
Jehannaz Khan, Director Engineering and Meraj Rasool, DevOps Lead

2. Presenters
Jehannaz Khan, Director of Engineering
Jehannaz is an electrical engineer with a Masters in Sustainable Energy from Imperial
College London.
Meraj Rasool, DevOps Lead
Meraj is a Software/DevOps Engineer. He started his career as a software engineer and
then 5 years ago switched primary role to DevOps engineer. Big fan of open source
software.

3. SkyElectric-Who We are
and What We Do

4. Great Energy Challenge-Powering the World
in the 21st Century
❏ Gap in energy usage between developed and developing nations
❏ Climate Change
❏ Poor Quality Grid in Developing Nations

5. To make clean energy
universally available by
building a distributed and
intelligent solar and energy
storage grid, managed via
the Internet, across the
world.
Our Vision & Mission

6. Our Product
❏ SkyElectric Smart Energy System
❏ Cloud connected, remotely monitored solar energy system with A.I.
algorithms running and constantly learning

8. SkyElectric - Legacy V1
To support all our desired functionality, we had our V1 SkyElectric Cloud:
■ SkyElectric’s V1 was developed in Java and MySQL as backend.

9. SkyElectric - Legacy V1 Problems
■ Scalability
■ Performance
■ Database write latency (~2 seconds)
■ Database read latency (<1 second or a few minutes in some cases)
■ Had to regularly do maintenance and cleanup of data to keep up
with growing data.

10. SkyElectric - v2
■ Team attempted a v2 with MongoDB + Node
■ Both MongoDB + Node didn’t prove to be right candidates for our
solution
■ Stopped working on it at very initial stages.
■ Moved to Elixir + Scylla + PostgreSQL. This is SkyElectric v3.

11. SkyElectric Upgrade

12. SkyElectric - V3
■ Infrastructure - AWS
■ Backend - Elixir
■ RDBMS - PostgreSQL
■ Scylla
■ ElasticSearch

13. Why Scylla?
■ Time Series Data
■ Comparison with Apache Cassandra and Riak TS
■ Ease of Operation
■ No worries about performance or scalability

14. Scylla Numbers
■ One 5 node cluster
■ Running on AWS EC2
■ Single DC
■ Overall 1+ TB data across all nodes
■ Average Write Latency 1.4 ms
■ Average Read Latency <1 ms
■ Request Volume 10x MysQL throughput

15. Scylla Maintenance
■ Adding / replacing nodes
■ Upgrading software
■ Repairs
■ Backups and restoration

16. Scylla at SkyElectric so far
■ Operational Ease
■ Hassle free upgrades to software
■ Better performance
■ Responsive Scylla support team

17. Wishlist for Scylla
■ Data changelog
■ Wish nodes can join the cluster faster
■ Support forum along with Slack channel
■ Backup / restore process improvements.

18. Thank you Stay in touch
Any questions?
Jehannaz Khan
jehannazkhan@skyelectric.com
Meraj Rasool
meraj.rasool@skyelectric.com
naqoosh