With one of the largest market shares for providing power to UK businesses, EDF supplies energy to more than 3.5 million companies and homes in the UK. In 2019, it was expecting to see continued growth within the retail market and needed strong IT foundations in place to maintain the performance, scalability, and reliability of its core operations. EDF’s on-premises infrastructure was at capacity and nearing the end of its support lifetime. Because it already chose AWS as its preferred cloud provider, EDF wanted to migrate its business solutions to the AWS Cloud.

EDF used Meter Data Management and Customer Care and Billing from Oracle Utilities to manage user account services. It wanted to upgrade these functionally rich solutions to Oracle Customer to Meter (C2M) to help it differentiate itself in the UK business-to-business market. However, EDF had also begun migrating data services to AWS and needed its core operational systems to reside as close as possible to its data assets to keep latency low. EDF ran a proof of concept to prove it could run its existing Oracle Exadata–based workloads on AWS. After successfully showing it could do so with better performance than in its on-premises environment, EDF prepared for the migration using AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS), which helps users migrate databases to AWS quickly and securely. “When we began using AWS DMS, we didn’t have internal knowledge and skills,” says Teuton. “AWS provided experts in AWS DMS and specialist solutions architects to help, which we benefited from significantly.” EDF also received support from Navisite, an AWS Partner and expert in Oracle migrations. Meanwhile, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), also an AWS Partner, led the development activity. After three rehearsals, EDF migrated its customer management solution to Amazon RDS for Oracle.

In November 2021, EDF migrated its business applications to AWS in a single weekend. The migration involved over 200,000 business customers and 400 internal EDF users in three global locations. EDF migrated 15 billion rows of data totaling 15 TB with no functional or operational impact. As part of the design of its Amazon RDS for Oracle instance, EDF implemented archive and delete capabilities to manage the life cycle of its data, and it compressed 15 TB to 8 TB of data with these new archiving features. EDF completed the migration with minimal downtime and impact for customers. “The service we were offering our customers as a result of this transformation was the same to them the day before the migration as the day after,” says Teuton. “We made this step so that we can start investing in the digital modernization that’s coming next.”

Following the migration to AWS, EDF has achieved greater cost transparency and has begun optimizing costs. It uses Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)—which provides secure and resizable compute capacity for virtually any workload. It also started using Savings Plans, a flexible pricing model offering lower prices compared to Amazon EC2 On-Demand Pricing, for its Amazon EC2 instances and Amazon RDS Reserved Instances, which give users the option to reserve a database instance for a 1- or 3-year term and, in turn, receive a significant discount compared with On-Demand Pricing. EDF can optimize its costs by scaling to match its regular consumption patterns, using the AWS model of paying for only the resources it uses. As a result, EDF has saved 52 percent compared with what it was previously spending on provisioning. It has also virtually eliminated the maintenance costs for its on-premises infrastructure. Because Amazon RDS is fully managed, EDF not only saves personnel costs for maintaining the database but also reduces its operational risk by avoiding single points of failure. Additionally, EDF continues to receive support from Oracle for its C2M application and its databases on Amazon RDS for Oracle.

The migration to AWS sets the foundation for EDF to continue building on the cloud, which will support its sustainability goals. “By migrating to AWS, we are able to stand up our compute for such tasks as big billing runs and then dial back the use of electricity when we don’t need it,” says Teuton. “From a carbon footprint and cost perspective, that was a big driver for us to not be on premises. We’re not finished yet, but this migration has certainly set the pattern for us to confidently commit to reducing the carbon impact of our IT.” EDF has already been working with its industrial and business customers to add their own electricity generation capabilities through batteries. Using AWS, EDF is also implementing additional impactful services to help customers manage energy demand, make informed choices about their power consumption patterns, and support the drive toward net-zero carbon emissions.

EDF is building solutions on AWS to reenter the business gas market in the United Kingdom, which will add an estimated 10,000 new customers over the next 4 years. The company is also migrating more data capabilities to AWS and will be able to create several new value streams in other business areas.

“Because we are backed by AWS, we can make bold choices with the confidence that we will be able to provide our customers with excellent service,” says Mark Askew, head of solutions and architecture at EDF. “This flawless migration has created a springboard for new services to our customers as well as an acceleration of our AWS adoption.”

“Our business use case is quite varied,” Teuton says. “Using AWS gives us flexibility, not just technologically but also in access to the marketplace. The maturity of its compute, the native-build capability that it provides, and the degree of different solutions on AWS made it really appetizing for us as an energy retailer.”