Noodoe leverages MongoDB Atlas on AWS & GCP as core database to crack the global market of EV charging station management

INTRODUCTION

Noodoe Continues to Lead the Global Market of EV Charging Station Management

Noodoe helps companies around the world deliver EV charging. Fuelled by research and development of charging software and hardware, Noodoe’s vision is to introduce the best EV charging experience to parking lots across the world. Beyond its own charging stations, Noodoe supports other charger manufacturers, including ABB, BTC Power, Delta, EVBOX, Tritium, Joint Tech and ZEROVA (a subsidiary of PHIHONG), and is growing rapidly around the globe. Founded in 2013, Noodoe is well established in Taiwan, the U.S. and Canada. The company is expanding into the UK, Australia, Singapore, Thailand, Philippines, Indonesia and the Middle East. Noodoe is also active in the Charge Point Operator market, helping new providers deliver EV charging services that are compliant with Open Charge Point Protocol (OCPP).

According to Yan-Ming CHEN, Software Development Manager at Noodoe, all major auto manufacturers have moved to electric vehicle production in recent years, decreasing the price of EVs and in turn driving up consumer demand across the world. With more and more charging stations springing up, management of these stations is becoming a major focus.

"The U.S. has experienced the fastest growth in electric vehicles with the largest market size. That’s why we chose the U.S. market as the starting point for our journey to expand internationally into charging station management. This is a highly competitive market. We need to balance needs from charging station owners, EV owners and more, a database that can handle a large amount of unstructured data is needed, to ensure faster innovation than competitors. The stable and reliable technology infrastructure that’s powered by MongoDB Atlas, empowers us to seize the global business opportunity," said Yan-Ming CHEN.

THE CHALLENGE

Enforced Stability of Application Service Becomes our Ace in the Hole to Enter the Energy Management Market

As people around the world are becoming more concerned and conscious about saving energy and reducing carbon emissions, governments are releasing policies to encourage manufacturers to invest more in electric vehicles. As a result, more and more EV charging stations are entering the market. Sensing that most charging station manufacturers are not experts in software development, Noodoe decided to tap into the charging station management market, establishing a U.S branch office in 2018. With the business growing at an unpredictable speed, Noodoe chose to host application services on the cloud platform, so that they could focus on the development of core business and marketing.

In the early stages of the project in 2018, Noodoe’s R&D team adopted a Firebase software bundle to shorten development lead time and to launch an App on Android and iOS platforms, along with tools including Firestore and Elasticsearch. This combination onboarded the charging station management services quickly. However, management and storage of large amounts of data were not prioritized. As a result, the database would crash once a month soon after the service was available, and data on the charging stations failed to be transferred to the back end.

According to Yan-Ming CHEN, when the database crashes, the charging station fails to deliver any service. This leads to significant negative impacts from two perspectives. First, EV owners cannot use a charging station when the App stops responding. Second, charging station owners fail to understand the status of charging stations across various regions from the back-end system.

“At first, we restarted the system to recover from the crash. However, incidents like these kept happening for several months which greatly impacted our corporate image as well as business functioning. So, in 2019, we decided to look for suitable products on the market from the perspectives of reliability and scalability, and finally chose MongoDB Atlas on AWS,” he said.

THE SOLUTION

International Charging Market Penetration with MongoDB Atlas as the Unsung Hero

Noodoe set up branch offices in the U.S. and Australia respectively in 2018 and 2021. With extensive experience in serving clients internationally, Noodoe adapts to the need for development and integration of charging software/hardware in many different countries. Recent product developments include the release of multi-purpose charging applications which cover load balancing, Automated Demand Response (ADR), smart scheduling, eRoaming, a charging plan for EV owners/members, cloud subscription service, fleet management, and energy storage device integration.

"When we were looking for a NoSQL solution, we gave full consideration to our small team and sought out a fully managed service with a Web interface. We also required processors and analytical features, like memory usage and indexing to reduce the operational burden on our databases. Given we have sites all over the world, we needed a global solution with the same services that are accessible to all consumers in different regions,” Yan Ming CHEN said “Considering the rapid growth of the company's business and the continuous growth of operational requirements, MongoDB Atlas is a good fit to provide excellent flexibility and scalability to meet future business needs, so we finally chose MongoDB Atlas on AWS to replace the previous database" he said

Noodoe introduced MongoDB Atlas on AWS in 2018 after carrying out a proof of concept comparison against other services and MongoDB’s overall stability left the expert team quite satisfied. When the charging station management service went down and couldn't be fixed in time, the R&D team turned to MongoDB Atlas because stability and reliability was assured. They then commenced data migration in 2019.

For Noodoe’s R&D team, the introduction of MongoDB Atlas brought many benefits, including speeding up the development of projects when NoSQL is used with Node.js, and back-end engineers can meet all needs with a single database. Also, when it comes to data processing speeds, a large amount of data generated by the charging station can be gathered automatically with a time series collection mechanism. Zstd compression transfer can be enabled with read only replica, which shortens the time it takes to transfer data and saves bandwidth when gathering data and analysis.

According to Yan-Ming CHEN, the most important benefit is that the overall stability of the service improved significantly.

“There are no more database crashes and no further disruption to charging station management services. This is freeing up our R&D team to focus on developing new features, system architecture optimization and so on. We are now firing on all cylinders to assist in seizing the international market opportunity for charging station management,” he said.

In addition,to make it easy for EV owners globally to locate charging stations, Noodoe added a map in its APP after introducing MongoDB Atlas. With the help of MongoDB Atlas Search, fuzzy search is now available to all. Simply by typing in the probable route or name of the charging station in the APP, owners can access location information about various charging stations, dramatically reducing the time it takes to locate a charging station.

Jia-Wei HU, APP development manager with Noodoe, explained that MongoDB Search was previously used in APP to help locate the charging stations. But they noticed a decrease in database performance when there were many simultaneous users.

“To integrate a map service in the APP that provides full-text search, fuzzy search and more, we needed to equip other tools as well. MongoDB Atlas Search saved us the trouble of complex data migration whilst maintaining database performance. So it's definitely the best choice for us and helped our R&D team roll out this service in record time,” Jia-Wei HU said.

LOOKING TO THE FUTURE

Make the Most of MongoDB's Features and Continue Business Expansion

Extensive experience in charging station management and positive feedback from customers continue to win Noodoe more business opportunities. For example, Fubon Insurance approached Noodoe to co-develop the Fubon Noodoe CAR service. Owners can enjoy many services after installing a dedicated smart sensor on their vehicles. The sensor automates recording of parking locations, personal driving logs, detection of major accidents, automatic contact with emergency contacts, and GPS positioning transmission, as well as paperless claim processing and road rescue services. Considering the requirements of Taiwan's financial regulations, data must be stored in Taiwan, so Noodoe chose MongoDB Atlas on GCP to start the first step for the company to develop a multi-cloud strategy.

Noodoe recently became a bidder for charging station management projects by the U.S. Department of Energy. With MongoDB Atlas accredited by the U.S federal government gives Noodoe confidence they have a competitive edge to secure this work.

With a widespread adoption of EVs globally, it's anticipated that revenue for charging software services will experience exponential growth. Noodoe is currently working with 10 fast-growing CPO partners, and this number is projected to exceed 20 by 2026. Noodoe EV OS cloud charging technology is set to reach 100+ countries, making it easier for all providers to shift to electrification and zero carbon emissions.

"The Taiwanese authorities have allowed related parties to host data from finance, health care and other industries on cloud platforms, provided that such data centers are based in Taiwan. So we believe that the GCP platform will be preferred by Taiwanese clients. Our partnership with Fubon is just the starting point. It's anticipated that more services will adopt GCP and MongoDB Atlas service is available on multi-cloud, making it a cornerstone for companies to innovate in business and expand their operations," Yan-Ming CHEN concludes.