AWS Startups Blog

European startup culture is evolving rapidly, both in terms of priorities and investment. The technology sector has seen especially significant growth over the last decade, with $23 billion in investments in 2018, up from $5.2 billion just five years prior. The European Union has adopted a brighter attitude toward startups as venture capital funds in the region have matured and investments have soared. Perhaps unsurprisingly, entrepreneurial enthusiasm isn’t hard to come by in Europe, and neither are up-and-coming folks with promising ideas.

Whether it’s a day trip snorkeling in Palawan or a visit to an elephant sanctuary in Phuket, it’s tough for activity operators to make sure that travelers around the world can snag a spot for their activity. Dawid Makowski, CTO of BeMyGuest, is changing that.

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.

“Public transit is not reliable enough,” says Eitan Yanovsky, CTO of Optibus, an Israeli software startup. “People are suffering from delays and a lot of these are happening because of improper planning.” To help cities run their bus fleets more efficiently, flexibly, and economically, Optibus offers proprietary cloud-based software driven by AI machine learning that analyzes historical and real-time passenger data to optimize service. The ultimate goal is to cut cost and improve service, making happier municipalities and happier riders.

“Death by PowerPoint, yeah? A phenomenon known to all of us,” jokes Sven Hoffmann, Chief Technology Officer and Co-founder of Powtoon, a cloud-based service that allows users to create their own professional-looking videos. But what other option do you have, if you want to present information in a visual way? According to Hoffmann, video is the way to go. Specifically, animated video. “[It’s] better to grab people’s attention and get your point across than a long, boring presentation.”