Customer Success
Futurepump: IoT Telemetry
From Google Cloud to Stable Bare Metal
"Our latencies halved when we moved to Lithus, and our costs haven't changed in two years. We don't think about infrastructure anymore."
~ Toby Hammond, CEO, Futurepump
The Situation
Futurepump builds solar-powered water pumps for farmers in developing countries. Tens of thousands of pumps in the field, each sending telemetry data back to a central pipeline for monitoring and diagnostics.
Their data processing system was running on Google Cloud. Costs were growing at roughly 20% per year with frequent spikes, and nobody on the team had the infrastructure expertise to understand why or optimise the setup. The system worked, but it was expensive, opaque, and fragile.
What We Built
We migrated the entire data pipeline to a bare-metal cluster running our managed Kubernetes stack. The new stack receives IoT telemetry via an MQTT broker, processes it through the pipeline, and persists it into PostgreSQL with TimescaleDB for time-series data.
We deployed a full observability stack (Prometheus, Loki, and Grafana) so Futurepump's team has visibility into the pipeline that they never had on Google Cloud. When something goes wrong, they can see what is happening and why.
Moving from shared cloud instances to dedicated bare-metal hardware cut request latency by 50%. That improvement landed as soon as traffic hit the new cluster. Dedicated hardware means no noisy neighbours, no shared storage contention, and consistent performance.
The Results
- 50% reduction in request latency from moving to dedicated hardware
- Costs stable for over two years after growing ~20%/year on Google Cloud
- Pipeline visibility through Prometheus, Loki, and Grafana
Futurepump has been a client since before Lithus was formally established. They no longer spend time managing their data pipeline, and we continue to support their infrastructure as it grows. See our pricing to understand what this kind of engagement costs.