GreenSpark Analytics

GreenSpark Analytics specialises in data-driven energy trading across foreign markets with growing operations in Ireland, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands. As trading volumes continue to increase, automation and algorithmic trading have become essential to ensure faster decision-making and remove emotional influences from the trading process. The GreenSpark Analytics platform is central to this data-driven business, supported by a skilled engineering team who had already migrated much of their workloads to AWS.

GreenSpark presented their primary technology challenges to fourTheorem, with a clear prioritisation of data engineering, business, and platform activities. fourTheorem identified a key set of infrastructure challenges that could be executed quickly in collaboration with the GreenSpark team. These included:

• Complex data integration across multiple systems
• Performance bottlenecks in their existing infrastructure
• Manual operations consume valuable engineering time
• Outdated security practices
• Limited monitoring capabilities
• Scaling constraints as data volumes grew
• Inconsistent deployment processes

fourTheorem undertook a short, high-impact engagement with GreenSpark, transforming their approach to infrastructure. The team was brought on the journey through a mixture of co-development, training, and collaborative workshops. A high demo cadence ensured they were always on the right track.

Infrastructure as Code:

• Terraform Cloud with GitHub integration for robust GitOps workflows
• Integration with GitHub Actions for CI/CD pipelines
• Container images built and pushed to a shared account

Landing Zone and Security:

• Multi-account AWS Organisation with SCP guardrails
• IAM Identity Centre integrated with their IdP
• Permission sets mapped to teams and job roles
• Centralised monitoring with CloudTrail and Config
• Security account as delegated admin with detective controls
• AWS Client VPN replacing legacy self-hosted OpenVPN

Containerization:

• Migration from EC2 to ECS Fargate with automated deployment pipelines
• Ephemeral containerized tasks using ECS Fargate and EventBridge Scheduled Rules
• Pattern for hosting Streamlit apps in ECS Fargate with ALB and authentication

Analytics:

• Read replicas for separation between production and analytics workloads
• DocumentDB (MongoDB) integration with existing tools

“The stuff we tried already took most of last year.”

• Accelerated Maturity: In just weeks, GreenSpark achieved a level of maturity in software development, infrastructure, and platform operations that typically takes 12–18 months to build internally.
• Time to Market: Engineers can create the infrastructure and automation for new services or features using battle-tested, proven patterns in minutes or hours.

“I can already think of so many use cases for this.”

• Operational Excellence: GreenSpark’s infrastructure is treated as cattle, not pets – automated, scalable, and hands-off. With Terraform Cloud managing the full lifecycle, manual processes and human intervention are minimised. Deployments are robust and highly available, while changes are made through small, peer-approved Pull Requests, ensuring efficiency and reliability at scale.
• Scalability: Migrating to ECS Fargate eliminated the complexities of EC2 right-sizing and disk management, enabling seamless scaling as data volumes grow.

“We didn’t think anything impactful could be done in that timeframe.”

• Landing Zone: Accelerated set up of a mature, secure AWS Landing Zone using best-practices blueprints, saving time, effort, and money that would otherwise be required to set up each account manually.
• Developer Productivity: Onboarding new team members is streamlined with SSO access to AWS. Infrastructure is well-documented, and new development resources are just a Pull Request away.

In just 10 billable days deployed across a month, GreenSpark was propelled 12-18 months into the future from a Software Development Lifecycle, Infrastructure, and Capability perspective, allowing their team to focus on activities that generated real business value.

fourTheorem brought two key assets to the engagement:

1. Our People: Experienced practitioners who brought extensive knowledge and had already implemented these solutions multiple times, ensuring the right approach was taken.
2. Our Code: A collection of battle-tested Infrastructure as Code modules, libraries, and patterns, making the implementation fast, efficient, and effective.