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ADR-005 Use AWS QuickSight-for-data-visualisation

Status

✅ Accepted

Context

We do not offer a managed data visualisation and reporting tool. Users need to build and run these applications themselves using R or Python.

PowerBI comes part of our Microsoft 365 subscription, but connecting to data on our platform requires additional infrastructure.

If we offered AWS QuickSight, we can reduce our current support burden from new RShiny deployments, and give new and existing users simpler visualisation and reporting capabilities.

Decision

We will offer AWS QuickSight to our users. QuickSight is fully managed and can be integrated into our identity management system.

Consequences

General consequences

  • Users can build and share dashboards from data stored on our platform
  • Operates on a pay-as-you-go pricing model, which means we are billed based on actual usage
  • QuickSight is designed to be user-friendly (no coding required), but users might face issues when dealing with more advanced or complex use cases
  • We will need to start a QuickSight community for users to help and share their experiences and knowledge
  • There is already a public QuickSight community

Advantages

  • Serverless BI service, meaning we do not need to patch or maintain and security and compliance is maintained by AWS
  • User friendly interface and extensive online training materials, we won’t need to produce extensive documentation to support, AWS provides many resources for building and sharing dashboards
  • Reduced operational cost and complexity for users to create reports and visualisations
  • AWS provided immersion days and free training for our users
  • Cost transparency, the total cost of ownership and management of RShiny and other hosted solutions is hard to calculate

Disadvantages

This page was last reviewed on 19 December 2024. It needs to be reviewed again on 19 June 2025 by the page owner #analytical-platform-notifications .