How Dapr enabled lightning speed development at Watts Water Technologies

Watts Water Technologies is dedicated to providing cloud connectivity for smart and connected devices, including boilers, water heaters, and mixing valves. With a team of 40 engineers, they built two new cloud-native products that leverage Dapr: Nexa and Watts Vision+.

Challenge

Watts Water Technologies sought to build Nexa, an observability platform for commercial buildings' water systems with real-time monitoring, leak detection, and digital twin capabilities. The team faced a critical question: "How will this distributed architecture grow over time and what can we do to streamline the development of an event-driven system?"

The company needed to select technologies from the CNCF landscape that could support real-time event-driven architecture, scalable telemetry processing, and rapid development within tight timeframes.

Solution

Dapr provided the abstraction layer needed for distributed application development. Key capabilities deployed included:

Pub/Sub — The pub/sub API enabled the system to ingest telemetry and publish to a single topic with subscribers reacting accordingly—accomplished in less than 50 lines of application code. The platform now processes over 115 million telemetry events per month. The approach remained vendor-agnostic, supporting both Azure IoT Hub + Event Hubs and Azure Service Bus without requiring code changes.

Service Invocation — Dapr enabled secure, decoupled service-to-service communication with mTLS and built-in retry policies, eliminating the need for separate resiliency libraries.

CRON Bindings — Rather than deploying custom infrastructure like Azure Functions, developers implemented simple APIs invoked on scheduled intervals—reducing operational complexity.

State Management — Dapr's state store APIs provided vendor-agnostic access to shared state across services, removing SDK dependencies.

Output Bindings — Alert generation leveraged Dapr's output bindings with Twilio and SendGrid.

Impact

Development Speed: A team of 40 engineers built two SaaS products (Nexa and Watts Vision+) in parallel within two years.

Infrastructure Migration: The platform migrated from Azure Container Apps to Azure Kubernetes Service with zero downtime, quadrupling telemetry processing capacity without application code changes.

Simplified Configuration Changes: Switching message brokers (e.g., Azure Service Bus to Event Hubs) required only configuration modifications—no refactoring of business logic.

Developer Experience: Teams eliminated context-switching associated with multiple SDKs, focusing on business logic rather than infrastructure concerns.

"Dapr's capabilities are an instant value-add that significantly reduces time-to-market for both application developers and platform teams."