Case Study: Morningstar achieves rapid launch of an online investment marketplace with Amazon Web Services

Morningstar Uses AWS to Rapidly Create Online Investment Marketplace

Morningstar, a global provider of investment research and services (4,300 employees), faced a 2016 regulatory shift when the U.S. Department of Labor’s fiduciary rule tightened requirements for retirement-plan investments. To help employers and investment providers comply, Morningstar’s Workplace team needed to rapidly launch Morningstar Plan Advantage, an online marketplace that explains the rule, lets users search and filter compliant investments, and accepts provider data via APIs.

Morningstar built the marketplace on AWS—using Amazon VPC for secure connectivity, Elastic Beanstalk for .NET APIs, Amazon RDS (PostgreSQL), Amazon API Gateway, ECS, S3, and EC2—allowing fast provisioning, scalable APIs, and containerized services. The cloud deployment preserved security and links to corporate data centers, enabled quick co-branded testing, and saved an estimated four to six weeks of engineering time while allowing the team to iterate and scale rapidly.

Morningstar

Stephen Rylander

Head of Engineering