AWS SaaS Applications

Metal Toad has been building applications for some of the most well-known global brands for over 15 years and we can help you with yours. AWS, with its 200+ products and services, provides the most cost effective building blocks available for building applications today.

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Why build SaaS applications on AWS?

Building AWS native applications or retrofitting existing applications to leverage AWS technology can provide some big benefits over time:

    1. Cost savings - average of 31% infrastructure cost savings vs applications hosted on premise
    2. Less downtime - 69% reduction in unplanned downtime of applications
    3. Scalable growth - properly architected cloud application have close to infinite scalability

Application building blocks

Now we get to the fun stuff: the building blocks which can be used to create cloud-native applications. In almost all cases, these application building blocks can support multiple front-end frameworks: VUE, Angular, ReactJS (our personal favorite) and have nice shortcuts that can help you build robust extensible apps. Here are some valuable components:

  1. Amazon Cognito - turnkey scalable, authentication and identity management
  2. AWS AppSync - consolidates multiple data sources into a single API powered by GraphQL
  3. AWS Amplify - facilitates building full-stack web and mobile apps
  4. Amazon SQS & Amazon SNS - if your application needs to queue and send email or text messages
  5. Amazon QuickSight - build out beautiful dashboards quickly using a variety of data sources

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Example AWS Cloud Application

You can read all about the buildout of an example AWS application built out using the following stack:

  • AWS Amplify
  • AWS Auth (a wrapper for Cognito)
  • AWS AppSync
  • ReactJS

But that's not all. AWS provides services that can be used to build everything from media service platforms to robotics and IoT fleet management. Here's a visual to help you understand the breadth of options available

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Other AWS Services

All AWS services are by definition "managed services", meaning that AWS makes sure the services are up and running. AWS services can be broken down into a few major categories. Knowing what belongs 

  1. Infrastructure
  2. Helper services

  • Other AWS Services

Infrastructure

AWS infrastructure services include many of the services that people first think of when they think of AWS: cloud-based computing and storage. If you'd like to learn more about these services I'd recommend our articles on AWS cloud computing and Amazon S3 - the most common file storage. There are literally dozens of services that can be summarized as:

  • Compute (EC2, Lambda, etc.)
  • File Storage (S3, Glacier, etc.)
  • Databases (RDS, Athena, etc.)

Helper services

After infrastructure, there are the helper services. These services don't underpin applications (like infrastructure) and they aren't building blocks. Instead they provide services that surround the applications. Here are some examples:

  • Migration services (Migration Hub, Datasync, etc)
  • Security (Firewall, etc.)
  • Application health monitoring (Control Tower,  etc)
  • Optimization (Elastic Inference, etc.)
  • Developer Tools (CodeGuru, etc.)
rpgmatch
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BUSINESS PROBLEM

As players answered the questions and engineers looked at the data, It became clear that there were too many data points to program an algorithm that is accurate and robust. 

 
TECHNOLOGY SOLUTION

With the matching algorithm ready to go. Metal Toad integrated it into the data pipeline to make the whole process seamless. 

 
IMPACT

With a complete data pipeline with integrated ML, users can now be matched in seconds. 

Bent-Ericksen-Associates-Logo-01
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BUSINESS PROBLEM

Aging software had become painfully slow Bent Ericksen & Associates (BEA) is a leading provider of employment compliance and human resources.

 
TECHNOLOGY SOLUTION

Refactoring—the process of rewriting functional code, without adding new features, to improve performance, maintainability, and scalability—is the best solution to technical debt. 

 
IMPACT

 Massively improved software performance—and happy users. The measure of really great software is an experience that works so seamlessly that the user doesn’t even notice the functionality. 

sony rewards
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BUSINESS PROBLEM

Sony Rewards was hosted on old physical IBM servers. There was no way to scale up capacity when needed, and the clunky legacy infrastructure led to unreliability.

 
TECHNOLOGY SOLUTION
Metal Toad’s first order of business was to get the site’s capacity up to snuff with an elastic cloud solution using Amazon Web Services (AWS). Now their server capacity can stretch to meet traffic demands.
 
IMPACT
Eliminating the capital investment in physical servers frees up over $150,000 a year, and reducing server space saves around $200,000 a year on infrastructure operations.
unfi_logo
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OBJECTIVE

To help a digital media team build a flexible and cost-efficient internal tool to manage assets and information for thousands of products.

 
TECHNOLOGY SOLUTION
Metal Toad implemented internal software to manage digital assets and content in a custom environment.
 
IMPACT
A scalable home for a growing repository of product and marketing data, as well as a long-term data management partner in Metal Toad.
 
claviate
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BUSINESS PROBLEM

With such an enormous amount of information to organize and deliver, including video, sensor data, and maintenance logs, Claviate’s platform was not aging well. 

 
TECHNOLOGY SOLUTION
Metal Toad’s UX design team created new, visually appealing, intuitive, and easy-to-use interfaces to improve user experience and navigation.
 
IMPACT
With Metal Toad’s expertise in AWS machine learning, application development, architecture, migration, and DevOps, the team created a modern, aesthetic, performant, and helpful dashboard for Claviate. 
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SaaS Case Studies

We've helped hundreds of companies over the two decades we have been in the software business; from new software product development to managed services, see how we've helped some of the biggest brands out there succeed.
 
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