AWS Startups Blog

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.

Monitoring involves processing app logs and metrics to provide insights into your app’s performance and health so that you can keep your app running smoothly. It’s a best practice and key aspect of operational excellence, which focuses on how to optimally run systems. Operational excellence is one of the pillars of the AWS Well-Architected framework. […]

For a deeper dive into the world of design startups, we are featuring Canva, Figma, and InVision as our hot startups of the month.

Initially released on February 19, 1990, Adobe’s Photoshop has long been the doyen of design. However, after nearly 30 years, Photoshop’s licensing model is being challenged by several startups looking to democratize the design industry and make it easier for all people, and not just professionals, to create. One such startup is San Francisco-based Figma. Founded in 2012 by Dylan Field and Evan Wallace, the open design platform—which just raised a $25 million Series B—features a cloud-based screen design tool, which helps teams achieve a shared understanding around design without worrying about syncing, exporting or installing software. We recently caught up with Field to talk about how the cloud has made life easier for designers.

Looking to democratize design for everyone, Melanie Perkins co-founded Canva in 2014 to reimagine design for the Internet age. “We’ve had a very strong focus on ensuring it’s accessible to everyone—regardless of your level of design experience, the language you speak, your income or the device you use,” she says. “So whether you’re a teacher, a student, an entrepreneur, a nonprofit organization or a Fortune 500 company, Canva gives everyone the ability to create beautiful designs and publish them anywhere. Just recently we heard from one of our users who created an animated design for a digital billboard—without any graphic design experience!” We recently caught up with Perkins to talk design.

Andiamo aims to bring 3-D scanned and printed orthotics to families and children in the UK—and soon, the world. What the London-based startup, through 3-D scanning and printing, has the potential to solve for is what every great new technology brings to the party: a better, faster, and cheaper approach. For children, that crucially means brace fittings that aren’t miserable and a resulting orthotic that not only fits, but also functions better.

Every day here at GIPHY, we have GIFs on GIFs on GIFs uploaded to our platform. In fact, we serve over three billion GIFs a day (that’s a lot of dancing cats!) to over 300 million daily active users. Every upload, however, brings new information and an increasingly large amount of data—this can become a lot to manage. Using database services like MySQL and DynamoDB, we’re able to organize this heavy amount of data in a high-performing way.

Want to build a database-backed website, or the backend to a mobile app? Set up a WordPress or Drupal site, or just use an Amazon S3 bucket to store files? You can do all this and much more on AWS, but first you’ll need to create an account and set it up. Let’s walk through how to do that from scratch—while following best practices and making sure your account is securely configured to take full advantage of all that AWS offers.

After selling his first startup to Salesforce when he was 21, Howie Liu could have focused his efforts on any number of subjects. Instead, he decided start Airtable, a collaboration platform that essentially modernizes one of the least sexy products around: spreadsheets.

What’s more fun than an all-night hackathon in Vegas? Why, a Vegas hackathon involving self-driving cars, of course. During AWS’s 2017 re:Invent conference, 25 teams were given kits to build an autonomous car that could learn how to drive around a track on its own. In this video, we explain what deep learning has to do with autonomous driving and how even a light-hearted Robocar Rally can have deeper implications for learning and the cloud.