Preparing to Move from Product Demo to Full-Featured Commercial Offering
Founded in 2020 and headquartered in London, Climate X provides an analytics platform called Spectra that helps organizations assess location-specific risks and financial impacts related to climate change. Because the first version of its platform was more of a demo than a complete product, the company knew that it needed to update its cloud architecture before officially launching its commercial offering. It had started making some improvements but wanted additional support.

With its foundation already built on AWS, Climate X asked AWS for help and was referred to AWS Partner DoiT International, a global technology company with multicloud expertise for digital-native businesses. Climate X decided to work with DoiT to conduct an AWS Well-Architected review of its existing infrastructure, which would help it to learn, measure, and build using architectural best practices. It then planned to make improvements suggested by the review and grow its existing in-house IT knowledge and skills.

By working with a AWS Partner, Climate X also hoped to gain access to additional AWS financial incentives to help build its business. The two companies began working together in late 2021 and by the spring of 2022 had completed the AWS Well-Architected review. At that point, the early version of Climate X’s platform was being used by only a limited number of investors and some of those investors’ prospective partners. “We were still working toward a minimum viable product at the time, and we realized that if we were going to rearchitect, it needed to be before a flood of clients reached our platform,” says Aatish Thakerar, head of data engineering at Climate X.

Rebuilding for Improved File Handling and Future Microservices Support
Thanks to the work of its global team of AWS experts, DoiT’s review identified a number of areas where Climate X’s architecture could be improved to deliver a high-performing and scalable infrastructure to support the organization’s growth ambitions. One issue was related to Climate X’s use of comma-separated values (CSV) files, which store data records in plain text, for processing data inputs from users and returning outputs back to users. This limited the company’s choices around other file types and also restricted the architectural options available to it. “It was very easy to set up with that file type, but it was fairly limiting later on because it just took longer to process,” says Thakerar. Climate X had also been working to convert its geospatial data to a format that would be easier for its science team to use, but those efforts also had knock-on effects on other parts of the company’s architecture.

Those issues helped determine how to best redesign Climate X’s platform based on the recommendations of the AWS Well-Architected review. “It was more of a revolution than an evolution at that stage,” says Thakerar. “We actually built the new architecture around the change in file type.” The redesign wasn’t a full microservices-based architecture, he says, but it could support microservices in the future. And it involved building different services for different kinds of data processing, with separate modules for handling client authentication, processing customer requests, load-balancing traffic, and reading geospatial data.

Climate X also moved from a single large database instance to Amazon Aurora, which provides built-in security, continuous backups, and serverless compute. That change provides a smoother scaling process for Climate X, Thakerar says.