How Kraken Scales Serverless to Balance the National Grid

Explore how serverless architecture powers critical energy infrastructure in this 49-minute conference talk that examines Kraken's approach to managing the UK's national power grid using AWS Lambda, EventBridge, and IoT technologies. Discover the physics challenges behind AC frequency and grid stability as renewable energy sources like wind and solar create unpredictable power generation patterns. Learn how Kraken developed an "autopilot" system for gigawatt-scale batteries and inverters to maintain grid stability, and understand the complexities of energy markets and settlement windows that drive real-time decision making. Examine a real-world incident analysis of the January 30th grid trip to see how these systems respond to actual emergencies. Dive deep into the technical architecture including the Trigger/Action Lambda pattern, event-driven microservices design, and the use of SAT solvers for 24-hour energy optimization planning. Understand the data handling challenges of processing thousands of telemetry data points using Redis and InfluxDB, and explore the edge computing infrastructure with industrial PCs and IoT hardware that enables 24-hour autonomous operation even during cloud outages. Investigate how this architecture scales to manage 500,000 electric vehicles as virtual power plants, and learn about reliability considerations, incident management, and strategies for avoiding vendor lock-in when building mission-critical energy infrastructure.