Architecture & stack

StrataBI is assembled from well-understood open-source and managed AWS components rather than bespoke infrastructure. This page explains what those pieces are and how the runtime stays mostly stateless.

The application

The dashboard application is a Plotly Dash app — Dash is Plotly's Python framework for building data applications. Within it:

Plotly renders interactive charts (the plotly and plotly_resampler blocks).
AG Grid powers the data tables (the table block).
Dash Bootstrap Components provides the layout grid, cards, and theming — every tile is a Bootstrap card, and themes swap without touching dashboards.
Monaco — the editor that powers VS Code — provides in-app editing of dashboard JSON, with the same schema that validates dashboards driving its assistance.

Dash itself runs on Flask, so the app is a standard WSGI application — nothing exotic to host.

The runtime

In the Enterprise Edition, the application runs as a container on Amazon ECS Fargate behind an Application Load Balancer — no servers to manage, and it scales by task count. (The Developer Edition runs the same application as a plain local Python process instead of on Fargate/ALB; everything below the app — Lambda, Athena, S3, DynamoDB — is identical across editions.)

Compute that shouldn't block the UI runs on AWS Lambda as discrete contracts:

an async Athena runner executes queries and writes results to S3, built on the AWS SDK for pandas (awswrangler);
a status writer records tile status;
module Lambdas are your own functions, invoked through the same contract.

Data and state

Amazon Athena executes SQL over your data, using the AWS Glue Data Catalog for table metadata. Results are handled as pandas dataframes and stored as Parquet via PyArrow.
Amazon S3 holds dashboards, themes, and result artifacts.
Amazon DynamoDB tracks async tile status and the module and source registries.

Mostly stateless by design

The Fargate application holds no durable state. Dashboards, artifacts, status, and registries all live in S3, DynamoDB, and Athena/Glue — not in the running container. User sessions are ephemeral.

This has practical consequences you benefit from:

Horizontal scaling. Any task can serve any request; add tasks to add capacity.
Clean ownership. Everything durable is a resource in your account that you can inspect, back up, or tear down. Nothing important is trapped inside a process.
Disposable compute. Containers and Lambdas can be replaced or redeployed without data migration.

Note

"Mostly" stateless: short-lived runtime coordination (for example, the async status a tile polls while a query runs) is recorded in DynamoDB with a TTL, not held in the app. There is no session database to manage.

Licensing

These are third-party components under their own licenses; StrataBI uses them as intended and does not redistribute them. The bundled UI themes are Bootswatch themes (MIT, © Thomas Park), included with their attribution preserved.