Maintaining a pension analytics product for Sciurus Analytics across multiple AWS accounts

Who are Sciurus Analytics?

Sciurus Analytics is an established pensions and actuarial software provider. Their innovative and powerful solution enables pension providers, fund managers, and life insurers to efficiently build and share complex financial modelling and analytics. 

The company has a unique blend of industry, mathematical, and software development expertise. Their software consists of Financial Canvas, a desktop application, which links to Financial Canvas Studio, a SaaS offering. Their products are used by hundreds of finance professionals at large pension schemes and multinational companies with over 800 schemes and £100bn of assets under analysis.

Why Lambert Labs?

Lambert Labs were chosen because of our proficiency in cloud computing, specifically our expertise in deploying end-to-end production workloads to Amazon Web Services (AWS) according to industry best practices, e.g. the AWS Well-Architected Framework. Our AWS consulting expertise is backed up by our status as AWS Select Partners.

Sciurus Analytics also enlisted our services because of our skills and experience developing web applications in Python and ReactJS.

What we did – technical implementation

  • Production deployment of a React app with rich interactive visualisations over HTTPS using CloudFront and S3 that has successfully scaled across multiple clients
  • Production deployment of a backend Flask API over HTTPS using a load-balanced Elastic Beanstalk application, connected to a MongoDB database (AWS Marketplace; Bitnami).
  • Security hardening of the API deployment via network and firewall configurations to pass external penetration testing
  • Production deployment of file servers on Windows Server EC2 instances and using AWS FSx
  • Production deployment of CPU-intensive MATLAB workloads on Windows Server EC2 instances triggered via Systems Manager
  • Configuration of Directory Service to add Windows Server EC2 instances to Active Directory domains
  • Setup and configuration of SFTP server (Win32 OpenSSH) on Windows Server EC2 instance
  • Development of new features and bug fixes using Python (Flask; PyMongo; custom MongoDB ORM), React (Redux; D3; Bootstrap)
  • Provided technical support to onboard new clients and troubleshoot existing deployments

What we did – non-technical implementation

  • Project management
    • Turned business requirements and initiatives into technical specifications
    • Liaised with appropriate stakeholders (Sciurus Analytics and their clients) to turn end user feedback into product roadmaps
    • Provided technical input to new business pitches
    • Designed and architected solutions taking into account time and budget constraints giving due consideration to alternatives and relevant trade-offs
    • Wrote new and improved existing documentation across the system using Dropbox
  • Code quality
    • Manual QA testing in staging environment
    • Pair programming