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.
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.
Challenges
- 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.
What we did
To overcome these challenges, Lambert Labs developed a dashboard for Caribou Digital using Grow. The dashboard was designed to provide insights into the progress of the Strive Community project and to allow stakeholders to easily visualise the impact of the project on the targeted small businesses.
The backend of the dashboard was built using Lambda and Fargate for the project’s computational requirements, and an Amazon Redshift data warehouse for data storage. The use of these technologies allowed for seamless integration of the disparate data sources and ensured that the data was secure.
Data visualisation was a critical component of the dashboard, and Grow’s intuitive interface made it easy to create custom visualisations that effectively communicated the data. The ability to create interactive dashboards, custom metrics and data filters helped Caribou Digital’s stakeholders to quickly identify trends and take action when necessary.
To ensure the code we produced was of a high quality, we wrote an automated testing suite using the pytest framework. We then used CircleCI to automate the testing and deployment of our solution. AWS CloudFormation was also used to encode elements of the infrastructure as templates that could be automatically deployed.
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