AWS Startups Blog

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.

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.

To demonstrate monitoring with AWS services, I’ll use the AWS Startup Kit, which is a set of resources designed to accelerate a startup’s product development on AWS.

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.