The Business
HomeServe launched Leakbot, an innovation created by HomeServe labs, to monitor consumer water pipes 24/7. Leakbot deploys custom-built IoT devices to identify hidden leaks and bursts within households. The IoT devices send data to the Leakbot platform which applies machine learning to detect unseen water leaks and protect against the damage this causes in homes.
Leakbot contains patented Thermi-Q technology, which means a single unit can detect a mains water leak anywhere around the home. Once a leak has been detected, Leakbot alerts the customer via the mobile app and can automatically schedule a plumber to visit at a time that suits the customer.
The Challenge
The Leakbot IoT device fastens onto the customer’s main inlet water pipe in order to detect a leak in the home, such as under the floor, that would normally go unseen. Created by Homeserve, one of the UK’s leading home assistance providers, they began building Leakbot on Microsoft Azure. However, the Leakbot team needed help in scaling and were searching for tools that would help them build a scalable and highly available platform that included a data analytics solution. Leakbot quickly came to the decision to explore the capabilities of Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
LeakBot’s unique wireless communication technology has the capacity to connect millions of homes to an intelligent system, moving Connected Home out of the early adopter stage, and making it a reality for customers. Leakbot is committed to making their customers’ lives easier and ensuring they deliver the best solution possible. Leakbot needed to ensure they were choosing the right cloud platform for their technology.
Throughout their research, the team at Leakbot were in contact with CTS, as they are already a customer through Homeserve who CTS helped migrate over to Google Workspace, and therefore decided to work with CTS based on their already great partnership and trust in their cloud experts. Krystian Pasich, Senior Backend Developer at LeakBot explains: “the project went so well between HomeServe and CTS, that it was a no brainer to work with them again on this project. They’re one of the best Google experts out there.”
After looking at the many benefits GCP has to offer, Leakbot decided they wanted to move to GCP. On behalf of Leakbot, the CTS team were able to leverage best infrastructure for auto-scaling, auto-recovery, data warehousing and machine learning. Krystian said “BigQuery for data warehousing and machine learning with TensorFlow are some of the best tools in the industry. We also chose GCP for its flexibility, scalability, and ease of use. We have peace of mind knowing that Google Cloud takes security very seriously.”
The Solution
CTS were asked to build a consistent, scalable and repeatable environment on GCP for the backend LeakBot services to ensure they have the best technology to provide for their customers.
The team at CTS used Terraform to provision a consistent, scalable and repeatable platform of GCP services. Where virtual machines are required Puppet is used for configuration management providing auto-scaling capabilities along with automated recovery from failure.
During delivery, CTS added a full observability stack which collates infrastructure and application logs & metrics along with executing service testing to ensure the entire platform is functioning as expected. Krystian added: “What they have done, the technology used – has been so smart. We really trust that CTS has provided us with a great infrastructure and monitoring to ensure we can provide the best quality service to our customers.”
CTS helped Leakbot migrate to GCP as smoothly and as fast as possible, supporting them through the whole process and building the system they need to take their technology to the next level and continue developing the Leakbot product into the future.
Krystian explains: “The CTS team have been great to work with – they’ve really gone above and beyond to ensure the project was delivered on time and communication has been great. It became a partnership.”
“It was a difficult timeline, but the team were still able to deliver on time, support and backfilled the test environment in order for us to go live.”
With already seeing great benefits such as up time and scaling, Homeserve Labs believe that they made the right decision to go with Google Cloud Platform. Working with CTS, the Leakbot platform has been successfully deployed onto GCP. Third party and renowned security specialists complete penetration tests against the environment to ensure Leakbot continues to be a safe and seamless technology for their customers.
Ensuring long-term success with MSP
CTS provides the Leakbot platform with a suite of managed services to ensure the services continue to operate smoothly. The Leakbot software developers have access to CTS GCP experts via the CTS Cloud Engineering service. Engineers are available to work with the Leakbot developers during feature planning and to implement the necessary platform changes in GCP. Around the clock observability and incident response is provided by the CTS GCP Standard service giving the Leakbot team the peace of mind they need should something go wrong outside of business hours.
Krystian said “I’m really happy I am working with CTS. They’re a great team and we managed a first great milestone in our partnership. Now we can focus on scaling, growing and building new functionality in our project to serve our customers as best as possible.”