Welcome to another edition of 'This is My Architecture'. Today I'm joined by Ken from STAX.
Welcome Ken. - Thanks Elvis good to be here. - Tell me about STAX, what does STAX do?
Yeah, so STAX is a software as a service platform and it's designed for resource constrained
companies to enable them to do best practice and well architected landing zones and solutions in AWS.
Okay and we're going to talk about one of the tools that you built for your internal use today right?
Yeah so we're talking about a data analytics platform that we're actually
leveraging an AWS Solutions Library solution called ADA or AWS Automated Data Analytics
and that's helping us solve some business use cases for our product and sales and marketing
teams in terms of understanding effectiveness of marketing and sales campaigns. Translated
right through to product usage. - Okay so you've got product usage data, marketing campaign data that's
coming probably from different sources and you need to be able to build
insights and usage models across all of that. - Yeah exactly.
What kind of data sources are we talking about? - Yeah so we've got sales data from Salesforce,
we're using HubSpot for our marketing system, and then we've got a bunch of different product
metrics and product analytics solutions that are all flowing into S3. ADA has a native
integration into S3, so that's like our common platform where we first pump that data in.
And we're processing around three terabytes a day from all those systems. - Okay so you get a whole bunch of
data that's from crazy different sources and then once it crosses this dotted line it's coming
into the ADA architecture. - Yeah that's right. - You're going to pull that into Glue, I'm guessing?
Yeah so first protocol is Glue and we've got five services here but ADA is actually over 25
AWS services. So this is just a little snippet of what is in the pipeline. But in the ingestion
pipeline we're definitely using services like Glue to clean up that data, extract it out, and document
and catalog that data. So it makes it easier to query later. - Right on, yeah and then it looks
like we've got Comprehend next. What's going on with Comprehend? - Yeah so STAX just got SOC 2 Type 2
compliant. So thank you so removing PII and having compliance around that data is super
critical to us. And Comprehend is the service in the platform that is stripping away that PII data
to meet our compliance requirements. - All right, so there's a lot of power in Comprehend to do that.
Tell me about your users, what kind of users are looking at this information? Is this your product managers?
Yes so we've got non-technical people, so the great thing about ADA
is it has a web front end. So we actually have our business users authenticate and
as you said we've got people from products, we've got people from marketing, got people from sales,
and they're basically hitting a static website which served out through CloudFront.
And we don't want to give them access to the Amazon environment, so critical to the ADA solution
as well is they're actually authenticating into Cognito. So they're using our enterprise identity
to access the web page we don't have to give them access to our AWS environments. And then
beyond that we're hitting services like Athena and others that are processing and transforming
those queries for them. - Right so they're they're storing the data back here but you've got
a performant way to access that without giving them the keys to the kingdom. - Exactly and the best
thing about the ADA solution for us it's all on demand. So we're not really processing..
we only pay for the data that we process and the queries that we run so it's all on demand
pricing, which is great. - And then with ADA since that comes out of the Solutions Library this has
already been vetted by Amazon so you're getting all of the compliance and governance and all of
that along with that solution. How long did it take you to implement this?
We had one of our tech leads implemented in days to productionize but we had it going in hours
in terms of proof concept. Which is really great, because we don't have a dedicated data analytics
team and without having the ADA solution in the Solutions Library we simply wouldn't have had it.
If we did have the capability, it probably would have taken us six to 12 months to
architect a similar quality solution that meets all the compliance and security requirements.
Well that's a pretty powerful endorsement. I'm glad that's working for you. Thanks for sharing
your architecture with us today, and thank you for watching 'This is My Architecture'.