What is the Strive Community Programme?
Strive Community is an initiative of the Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth to empower small businesses across the world to build resilience and thrive. Lambert Labs was approached by Caribou Digital on behalf of Mastercard to build a dashboard to track the performance of the programme in reaching individuals and small businesses.
Customer Challenge
The main challenge faced in the Strive Community project was to consolidate and analyze data from various sources, such as learning management systems, chatbots, and social media interactions, into a unified platform. This platform needed to be scalable and secure while effectively integrating diverse data and creating meaningful visualizations to facilitate easy monitoring of the program’s impact on small businesses.
If this challenge were not addressed, the Strive Community project stakeholders would struggle to measure the progress and impact of the initiative, leading to potential inefficiencies and missed opportunities. An effective and visually appealing dashboard was crucial to ensure that decision-makers had access to the relevant data needed to make informed choices and optimize the program’s reach and effectiveness.
Why Lambert Labs?
Lambert Labs was chosen for our knowledge of the AWS ecosystem as well as our experience with AWS services to deploy secure and scalable solutions. Our work on previous projects with ETL tasks using Lambda and Fargate gave us valuable experience that we were able to draw on to design a robust solution for Caribou Digital.
Customer Challenges
A number of challenges were faced in the Strive Community project. The primary objectives of the dashboard were to provide insights into the progress of the project and to allow stakeholders to easily visualize the impact of the project on targeted small businesses. However, several obstacles needed to be overcome in order to achieve this:
- Data Integration: The data for the Strive Community project was collected from multiple sources, such as learning management systems, chatbots, and social media interactions. Integrating these disparate data sources into a single platform was a major challenge.
- Data Visualization: The data collected for the Strive Community project was large and complex. Presenting this data in a meaningful and easy-to-understand format was essential to ensuring that key stakeholders could effectively monitor the impact of the project.
- Data Security: The data collected for the Strive Community project was sensitive and required proper security measures to ensure that it was anonymised and free from identifiable information.
Partner Solution
Lambert Labs designed a robust solution for Caribou Digital, addressing the challenges faced in the Strive Community project. We utilized AWS services to create a secure and scalable infrastructure, which allowed for seamless integration of data from various sources. Our experience with ETL tasks using AWS Lambda and Fargate was invaluable in crafting an efficient solution to meet the project’s requirements.
To create a comprehensive and visually appealing dashboard, we chose Grow as our data visualization tool. Grow’s intuitive interface enabled the creation of custom visualizations that effectively communicated the data and provided insights into the project’s progress. Interactive dashboards, custom metrics, and data filters further enhanced the stakeholders’ ability to quickly identify trends and take action as needed.
To guarantee the high quality of our code, we wrote an automated testing suite using the pytest framework. CircleCI was employed to automate the testing and deployment of our solution, while AWS CloudFormation was utilized to encode elements of the infrastructure as templates for automatic deployment. This combination of technologies ensured that the Strive Community project dashboard was reliable, secure, and efficient in meeting the needs of Caribou Digital and their stakeholders.
Results and Benefits
The solution delivered by Lambert Labs provided significant benefits for Caribou Digital and the Strive Community project. The use of serverless technologies like AWS Lambda and Fargate not only reduced operational costs but also enhanced the overall performance and reliability of the dashboard. This allowed stakeholders to access real-time insights and make data-driven decisions, thereby positively impacting the project’s outcomes.
Additionally, the automated testing and deployment process ensured the solution was consistently updated and maintained, reducing the risk of potential issues and minimizing downtime. This, in turn, increased the confidence of stakeholders in the data presented by the dashboard and facilitated the monitoring of the project’s impact on targeted small businesses. The Strive Community project has been successful in empowering small businesses and fostering growth, thanks in part to the efficient and reliable dashboard solution provided by Lambert Labs.
Measurably, the benefits that Lambert Labs delivered include:
- 100% uptime of the solution
- Improved logging and monitoring reduced development team time spent debugging application bugs by 50% compared to comparable projects.
About Lambert Labs
Lambert Labs, an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner, is a Python and cloud development company based in London. We specialize in providing Python development services, AWS consulting services, and AWS Well-Architected Framework Review services.
We participate in various APN programs, including:
- AWS Well-Architected Partner Program
- AWS Reseller
- AWS CloudFormation Service Validation holder
- AWS RDS Service Validation holder
- AWS Public Sector Program
- AWS Immersion Day Program
Our expertise in AWS technologies and commitment to delivering high-quality solutions have made us a trusted partner for clients seeking reliable and efficient solutions to meet their business objectives.
If you would like to find out a little bit more about Lambert Labs then please feel free to read about our Python development services, AWS consulting services or AWS Well-Architected Framework Review services.