Schréder Hyperion scales smart-city lighting with Dapr Actors

Schréder Hyperion, the innovation hub of the century-old lighting specialist Schréder, delivers a global 'lighting-as-a-service' platform that controls ~800,000 street- and area-lights in more than 70 countries and ingests 20–30 million telemetry messages every day.

To keep pace with an exploding device fleet that reached over 1 million luminaires in 2024, and is projected to reach over 5 million by 2026, the Hyperion team chose to use Dapr and particularly the virtual-actor pattern. By modelling every device as a Dapr Actor and persisting state in Azure CosmosDB, the team shipped a production-grade, cloud-agnostic IoT system while meeting demanding reliability and scalability requirements.

About Schréder Hyperion

Founded in 1907, Schréder is the world's largest independent provider of outdoor lighting solutions. Hyperion, its Lisbon-based R&D centre, focuses on 'connected lighting' and broader smart-city services.

The challenge: Scaling smart lighting for millions of devices

Hyperion's platform began modestly, coordinating a few thousand lights through nightly dimming schedules. But urban customers quickly discovered that connected lighting is the backbone of broader smart-city ambitions—traffic, air-quality sensors, and even 5G micro-cells all piggyback on the lamppost. By 2023, telemetry volume had exploded to tens of millions of messages daily.

Hyperion needed an architecture that would allow each lighting device to have its own custom configuration with the ability to spin devices up or down by the hundreds of thousands without intervention.

The solution: Dapr Actors

The team ultimately decided to use Dapr's virtual-actor model. In their system, every physical device is modeled as an Actor with different device families modeled as Actor types.