Author: AWS Editorial Team

Hackathons challenge us to question our norms and assumptions, as well encourage us to break boundaries and change the status quo. That is why DBS Bank, a Singapore-based multinational bank, has been running and sponsoring over 50 hackathons across Asia over the past five years, bringing together the brightest minds to brainstorm new banking solutions for modern-day problems.

At Aledade, we perform ETL on the healthcare data of millions of patients from thousands of different sources, and the primary tool we leverage is the workflow management tool Airflow. Because the amount of data we process is growing exponentially, we have quickly outgrown the ability to scale our dockerized Airflow deploy horizontally. We decided to move Airflow into Kubernetes to take advantage of their native support for scaling pods up and down, as needed, to handle tasks. With zero experience running a Kubernetes cluster, EKS allowed us to get up and running rapidly. Here is how we did it.

Cory Watson, Technical Director at SignalFx, will take a tour of observability’s origins and discuss the practical benefits you can expect from investment, including a better-informed capacity planning process and debuggability. He’ll share the steps to take when building your infrastructure and how having an observable system can provide the real-time data you need to make better engineering decisions.

As blockchain steadily advances and reaches mainstream acceptance, what can startups do to prepare for this financial revolution?

Joshua Builder, Rent the Runway CTO, shares insights into the technology system and tools that organizes and dispatches more than 100k items every day.

Learn how Houtan Fanisalek, Chief Technology Officer of Felix Gray, an e-commerce startup, scaled their infrastructure and planned for massive traffic spikes using Amazon Aurora and Elasticache. He discusses best practices on how to scale your database with minimal downtime, find performance bottlenecks in your database driven application, and how to handle service failures gracefully. Houtan also provides real world examples of the challenges his team faced while scaling Felix Gray, and speaks to the common growing pains any tech startup will face as they scale in the cloud.

Benn Stancil, Chief Analyst and co-founder of Mode, gives a crash course in the practical analysis startups need to raise money.

No matter the industry or stage of a startup, there are common challenges and goals. While speaking with founders and technology leaders every day, I noticed common topics such as fundraising, profitability, hiring, regional expansion, and cloud architecture. In this post I’d like to share three technology-driven trends I’m seeing in consumer startups, which address new types of challenges.

On Wednesday, May 15th, Startup Central—with speakers from Capital Float, Clevertap and Moonfrog labs, and more—will be on showcase for all attendees of AWS Summit: Mumbai.

Jeremy Johnson, Co-founder & CEO of Andela, a startup that builds and trains high-performing distributed engineering teams, joins us at the AWS Loft NYC to share how startups can build a solid recruitment strategy that attracts top players.