Principal Financial Group of Des Moines, Iowa is a leading global investment manager. Their financial services include retirement planning, insurance, and investment. They are a Fortune 500 company and manage over $735.3 billion in assets.

The Data Science team at Principal Global Investors (PGI) is responsible for building systems, models, and frameworks to analyze large data sets and produce forward-looking insights. To this end, the Data Science team builds and deploys many web applications.

As these applications are built, user management and authentication adds a significant amount of overhead to the development process. Our Analytics Research Intelligence Network (ARIN) Application Launcher eliminates this overhead by providing a single point of access for employees to manage, request access to, and launch applications.

After logging in, users see a dashboard showing all of the applications to which they have access. They can either launch an application or browse through a list of applications. A user can click on an application to view a description, image, and list of all approved roles. They can request access to the application, which is either approved or denied by an administrator based on the role of the requestor.

When a user launches an application, they are redirected and receive context-sensitive information provided by our ARIN Application Launcher.

The ARIN Application Launcher is built with a serverless architecture, using the React JavaScript framework and a suite of Amazon Web Services for storage (S3, DynamoDB), routing (CloudFront), authentication (Cognito), and the hosting of our functions (Lambda).