Category: Startup

Before helming services and infrastructure at Caffeine, Peter Sankauskas was the CEO at CloudNative, founder of Answers for AWS, and a 2013 winner of a NetflixOSS Cloud Prize. Now an AWS Community Hero, Sankauskas recently spoke to a full house at the AWS Loft space in San Francisco.

At last count, Smallpdf, the PDF conversion startup I work for, had roughly 13 million monthly users. As for the number of employees currently running our website? That would be 10—with only two employees focused on the backend and infrastructure. You might be curious to learn how we run such a processing intensive website with such a small DevOps team. Our little secret stands in automation and delegation.

Whether just starting a company or migrating your existing storage or applications, issues of cybersecurity, speed and scalability are high on every company’s checklist. Now, privacy and “data protection” (as this area is called in Europe) can join that list.

“I’m actually an unusual tech co-founder,” Polina Montano says. And it’s true: while Montano’s isn’t exactly a rags-to-riches story, it is a gas-stations-to-striking-tech-gold story. Coming from a retail background, Montano was a small business owner for most of her life—starting with a fashion store and moving up to a chain of gas stations—before the inspiration for Job Today struck. In fact, Montano says, she started pondering the concept of Job Today in earnest thanks her hands-on gas station experience

Whether it’s via phones, cars, speakers, or even watches, brands have an ever-increasing number of places to reach consumers. The catch, however, is that consumers are getting savvier—and more demanding—about how brands are engaging with them. “Customers have high expectations… that brands are going to deliver relevant, personalized, and important messages to them that add a lot of value,” says Braze co-founder and chief technology officer Jon Hyman. For the most part, consumers don’t understand—nor care—whether they are getting a discount or new product notice from a brand’s email or app team. “All they care about is: is it delivering a great product experience, is it valuable to me, is it adding value, and is it relevant to me,” he says.

You’ve certainly heard about the volatile ride cryptocurrency investors have been on of late. But all of the focus on the wealth being created and/or lost tends to drown out the underlying technology that is enabling these forays into not just new kinds of digital currencies, but also new ways of thinking about transferring wealth, ownership, access, all kinds of data, and more. AWS Solutions Architects Santanu Dutt and Anand Iyer explain the potential for Blockchain technology to up-end industries.

You know the story. Plucky band of adventurers make off with the dragon’s loot, only to suffer some tragic ending because they neglected to take seriously some key bit of information. Usually it falls along the lines of said-dragon treasure being cursed, or so heavy it sinks the boat, or originally belonged to a foul-tempered Orc king now out for blood. The point is, things end badly. There was no way Pouch cofounder Vikram Simha was letting any of that happen.

While most people know Rent the Runway as the country’s leading lender of LBDs and workwear, the nine-year old startup also happens to be the country’s largest dry-cleaning business. As Rent The Runway CTO Josh Builder notes, the company turns around, on average, 50,000 to 55,000 items on a daily basis—over 65,000 during peak seasons and holidays—and 100% of that inventory comes back to them.

As veritable stylists and dry-cleaning experts, Rent the Runway must keep track of not only the latest fashion trends, but also a wide variety of inventory and chemical mixes to keep their clothes in red-carpet shape. To do this, RTR is shifting many of their operations to the cloud. Watch to see how they pulled it off.

The AWS Startup Kit is a set of resources designed to accelerate startups’ product development on AWS. A core component of the Startup Kit is a set of well-architected sample workloads that can be launched within minutes. These workloads, which reflect best practices for reliability, networking, and security, are supported by AWS CloudFormation templates and code published on GitHub. They easily can be extended to create a wide variety of applications.

The AWS Startup Kit provides resources to help startups begin building applications on AWS. Included with the Startup Kit is a set of AWS CloudFormation templates that create fundamental cloud infrastructure building blocks. For purposes of this post, we’ll look at the building blocks that relate to an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), a bastion host, and an (optional) relational database.