Tag: AWS Lofts

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.

On April 13, 2019 the New York Urban League Young Professionals (NYULYP) hosted its annual STEAM Conference for over 120 middle and high school students at the AWS Loft in New York as part of its National Day of Service initiative. The NYULYP organized a full day of mentorship, hands-on learning, career discovery, and entertainment.

From unanticipated service failures to load-related performance degradations, infrastructure event readiness planning is critical for handling seasonal traffic spikes gracefully and dynamically. Without proper preparation, your best sales day could become your last. Gain insights into how Elaine Arbaugh, Senior Software Engineer and SRE tech lead, at fintech startup Affirm managed the massive influx of activity during the 2018 Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday shopping weekend by building a scale-up, fault tolerant, database system that was able to handle 5x a normal day’s scale.

Ilya Volodarsky, Co-founder at Segment—a customer data infrastructure startup—shares how startups can leverage analytics to answer the tough questions and enable growth. From uncovering hidden opportunities to identifying trends, patterns, and problems areas, Volodarsky will discuss the advantages and ROI of collecting user behavior data. Volodarsky also shares insights on how top startups have built their technology and growth stack as well as guidance on how to build your own.

When creating your startup’s online presence, it’s essential to understand the vital role that content marketing plays. From blog and social media posts, to videos, and press releases – good content lasts forever and can do wonders for your SEO. Director of Marketing at HubSpot for Startups, Amanda Sibley, shares the benefits of creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content. She discusses how this cost-effective alternative to traditional marketing can differentiate a startup’s brand and build authority, reputation, and a voice of influence.

When Branch Metrics grew from zero to billions of daily transactions their engineering team had a major storage challenge that was far beyond their expectations. They quickly needed a cost effective, horizontally scalable, and low operational maintenance way to solve these massive database challenges—without compromising quality of service and availability to their customers. Engineering Director Ian Chan and Platform Engineer Ryan Churaman of Branch Metrics share how they leveraged DynamoDB and DAX to achieve massive scalability on a tight budget and with a very lean engineering team.

With competition at an all time high, it’s critical that startups deliver technical features quickly without compromising quality or security. CLEAR, a biometric security startup popular at U.S. airports, has been successful at both quality and security for their customers while running on AWS and leveraging Terraform and GitOps practices. Victor Cuascut, Director of IT at CLEAR, talks about how your startup can deploy multiple AWS infrastructures while maintaining compliance, speed, and predictability at the push of a button. 

Whether you have 1 or 1,000,000 users, building a scalable web application that can handle peaks and dips in traffic is vital to the long-term success of your startup. And, one that should be planned in advanced so that, as you grow, the correct scaling architecture is in place. But, as a new startup, how do you plan for high loads while also juggling a growing business? Eric Yip, Co-founder and CTO of adtech startup Track Revenue, recently joined us at the AWS Loft in San Francisco to share the mistakes and lessons learned along their journey to a scalable architecture. He unpacked the principles of developing high-performance applications as well as provided the audience with considerations and tips on building a well-designed application that’s both resilient and scalable. 

Still trying to catch up on all of the launch announcements from re:Invent 2018? With over 75 launch announcements, this may seem like an overwhelming task. Throughout the course of the week of January 21st, the AWS Loft in San Francisco recapped some of re:Invent 2018’s highlights.

If you haven’t heard about the AWS Lofts in New York and San Francisco, they are an outstanding resource for startups and developers. One of the key resources that the lofts provide for customers are AWS Architecture Weeks.