AWS Startups Blog

By Noam Kaiser, VC Business Development, AWS

• Population: 8.06 million people[1]
• Hi-tech exports account for 45% of GDP[2]
• Technology companies: 5,720[3]
• 1 in 12 startups globally is Israeli, making it the country with the highest number of startups per capita[4] (the same applies for lawyers, and I hope the two aren’t related)
• R&D centers of multinational companies: 281[5]
• Companies listed on NASDAQ: 76, ranked 3rd after the US and China[6]
• Ranked 2nd following Switzerland in intellectual property (IP) innovation[7]
• Exits amounting to $9.8B in 2014 and $9.2B in 2015[8]. Considering the IPO crunch, these records will not be broken this year.
• Capital raising amounting to $3.4B in 2014 and $3.6B in 2015[9]. Considering the VC response to the same crunch, these records probably WILL be broken this year.

Pretty impressive stuff, and if you’re wondering how it happened I’ll get to that soon. But first let’s look at a fascinating change that’s been going on in the ecosystem in recent years. The best way to do that is to compare the startup environment five years ago with today’s environment.

Since 2011, there’s been a clear trend of a rising number of VC-backed companies, postponing a quick exit and advancing towards higher valuations and annual sales[10].

• Over 30 Israeli IT companies crossed the $400M valuation threshold, compared with only three in 2011
• Over 20 Israeli IT companies crossed the $100M annual sales threshold, compared with only six in 2011
• 100 Israeli IT companies crossed the $10M annual sales threshold, compared with 50 in 2011
• 8  Israeli IT companies performed NASDAQ/LSE IPOs and There were 16 IPOs in 2014, with an average valuation of $1.75B, compared with none in 2011

Yep, the numbers tell the story: The “startup nation” is changing into the “scale-up nation.”

In addition to the numbers, here is what we see happening on the ground:

• VCs/LPs are more patient with turnover timing, aiming higher.
• The local scene boasts seasoned entrepreneurs, engaging in their 2nd, 3rd, and even 4th run.
• Funding is growing. Local firms, global firms, and corporate VCs are investing more, giving Israeli startups the greatest accessibility ever to growth-stage funding, the biggest cut of VC funding for eight quarters now. (IVC)
• Foreign management is demonstrating an increasing willingness to join the leadership teams of Israeli companies, helping them grow.
• More Israeli companies than ever are employing hundreds of employees, and some will grow to four digits soon. More and more foreign employees are coming in. These are signs of growth.
• More Israeli startups are acquiring other startups globally. For example, IronSource, Jfrog, SimilarWeb, and Taboola have all acquired startups. They’re growing their businesses with new talent, features, and technologies. Some startups are even gaining additional market share.
• The state of mind is there. You’ve come to expect young Israeli startups to disrupt certain industries. It is now completely conceivable to expect some to lead certain industries. For example, the following companies are leaders in these sectors:
  Big data: IronSource, SimilarWeb, SiSense, Panoply.io, Logz.io, Windward, Dynamic Yield
  Ad tech, content, and discovery: OutBrain, Taboola, MinuteMedia, Kaltura, PlayBuzz, YotPo, EyeView, SundaySky
  DevOps and infrastructure: Jfrog, Redis Labs, Cloudinary, SpotInst, Velostrata, Stratoscale
  Enterprise software: WalkMe, Capriza, Gong, SAmanage
  GIS and automotive: Moovit, Gett, Nexar, Innoviz, Via (and, of course, success stories like Waze and MobileEye)
  Cyber security and fraud prevention: BioCatch, Forter, Riskified, Cybereason, Argus, Coronet, Guardicore, Morphisec, Dome 9, EnSilo, Minerva Labs

So how did Israel get there?

 
How did Israel turn into a startup hub in the first place? I believe it’s due to a unique combination of factors:

1. Israel is an immigrant country. The community of Israelis include individuals from all cultures and schools of thoughts. This diversity generates creative perspectives and new approaches.
2. Necessity is the mother of invention. Unique security, agriculture, energy, and other needs brought about innovation across a range of fields including military, communications, medicine, irrigation, and solar energy. With limited trade with neighbors, nor significant natural resources, innovation was Israel’s only choice.
3. Academic education. From its inception, Israel has emphasized the importance of academic education. Despite its small size, Israel has five of the top 500 leading academic institutions globally.
4. Investment in innovation. 5% of Israel’s budget is invested in high-tech companies of all stages, through various plans and grants of the Office of the Chief Scientist in the Ministry of Economy, in order to increase the amount of Israeli IP and successes.Israeli also enjoys a vibrant and experienced VC ecosystem, now in its third decade, made up of local veteran VC firms, a promising wave of young local VCs, and a vast local presence of top corporates that are increasingly active.n addition, 281 multinational tech companies have R&D centers in Israel, including Amazon, Apple, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Qualcomm, Samsung, and Facebook. In fact, only the US hosts more multinational companies R&D centers than Israel. Usually it begins with a startup acquisition.This creates a cycle: Israelis gain experience with multinational acquiring companies, they launch new startups, global leaders acquire them and set up shop in Israel, and so on.
5. The IDF technologies. Military tech developments find their way into private market applications, giving companies a unique global edge. A great example is Given Imaging, a medical devices company.
6. Unique intelligence and data tech capabilities combined with the Military Service effect. Military intel and cybersecurity units like 8100 and 8200, along with other intelligence agencies, incubate some of the best Israel human resources. Young Israelis undergo unparalleled training and engage in sci-fi like activities. Through the military service, young Israelis learn what responsibility, true challenges, and mature proportions are. This molds many Israelis into natural problem solvers, potential entrepreneurs, and leaders. After they complete their service, they often complement their skills with business education. Guess what happens next. Yep, startups.
7. Local market too small. From day one, Israeli startups think globally; there’s no point in aiming locally. They never use a “co.il” domain, it’s all “.com” (Well, recently it’s “.io”). Incidentally, that’s partly why many Israeli solutions aim at giving the little guy a chance to play in the big league, for example, Fiverr, EatWith, DubaMobile, Wix, and ProoV.
8. Chutzpa (also known as chutzpah). It’s a Hebrew word that describes a bold attitude, something like “Of course our underfunded, three people strong, Middle East-based startup will beat up Fortune 500 companies! What other option is there?“
9. Efficiency over protocol and hierarchy. By the time a non-Israeli company finishes outlining its company structure, product road map, and work plan, an Israeli startup will have its beta product ready for installation. It’s partly because everyone does everything in an Israeli startup: The VP of Product gets involved in sales, the R&D team joins marketing sessions, and so on.It all seems like an effective mess that somehow works…until it doesn’t. Israeli startups dash through the seed and early stages because everyone does everything. However, startups need more structure when they hit the growth stage with 100+ employees, and when there’s a risk that senior management might relocate. Local and global investors can help these startups add more structure during the growth stage. But the main point is that the Israeli casual approach works well as an early-stage method.
10. Tolerance towards failure. Israeli investors are very “forgiving” compared with other global counterparts, with regards to past failures of a startup founder. The fact you failed COULD mean that you’ve learned, so past failure don’t necessarily get you shunned.

And then?

 
This unique combination of factors has made Israel an exciting, thriving hub for startups. Looking ahead, Israel will need to keep the momentum going by striving for new heights. It will present both a challenge and an opportunity for the Israeli VC and startup community.

In a sense, that’s the same challenge—and opportunity—that we at Amazon Web Services aim to help each and every startup with.

Noam is the VC Business Development Manager for Israel, Portugal, and Spain. He has been active in the Israeli VC and startup arena for over a decade now, working as a principal for two VCs (Gemini and Ofer Hi Tech) and CEO/VP of two startups (VentureApp and BAlink).

References:

[1] Worldbank (http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.TOTL)
[2] Ministry of Treasury (http://www.financeisrael.mof.gov.il/FinanceIsrael/Pages/En/Home.aspx)
[3] IVC (http://www.ivc-online.com)
[4] StartupBlink (http://www.startupblink.com)
[5] Ministry of Economy (http://economy.gov.il/english)
[6] NASDAQ (http://www.nasdaq.com/screening/companies-by-region.aspx?region=Middle+East&country=Israel)
[7] IMD World Competitiveness Center (https://worldcompetitiveness.imd.org)
[8] KPMG IVC Survey (https://home.kpmg.com/il/en/home/industries/technology/kpmg-ivc-survey.html)
[9] Ibid
[10] IVC (http://www.ivc-online.com)

By Rodrigo Prudencio, The Alexa Fund

Just over 18 months ago, we set out to build Amazon’s first dedicated corporate venture capital fund with the same mindset of any new Amazon experiment: Work Hard, Have Fun, Make History. And we’re doing just that. The Alexa Fund, with an initial $100MM investment commitment, has already made 23 investments in companies committed to building delightful experiences using voice as a primary interface.

The Alexa Fund is named after the voice technology that powers Amazon products like the Echo, Amazon Tap, and Echo Dot, as well as Amazon Fire TV and Fire tablets. Alexa’s voice capabilities are purposefully built so developers can use the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) to create new voice experiences for Amazon’s devices, or Alexa Voice Service (AVS) when they want to embed Alexa into a third-party device.

In building the portfolio, we’ve applied investment criteria that reflect best practices from the venture capital community. We favor great teams with a passion for building world-class products and companies that are differentiated against their competitors. We work with VCs, angels, and other forms of institutional capital as co-investors, leveraging their network and company-building expertise.

The stage of company is also a consideration, but we’ve shown interest in backing small and early-stage companies as well as more mature companies. Defined Crowd, for example, is an investment in a small team using crowdsourcing to build voice services such as transcription, annotation, and lexicons on behalf of large enterprises around the world. Ecobee, on the other hand, is a well-established builder of advanced thermostats capable of networking together to provide system-wide energy savings. Regardless of stage, we back up our dollars with support from the Alexa organization to help portfolio companies solve technical challenges and develop effective go-to-market strategies.

It’s an honor to work alongside promising entrepreneurs who are innovating in ways Amazon may never have imagined. But as we say at Amazon, it’s still Day 1 and we have much more to do to expand Alexa’s presence and capabilities.

That’s why we created our latest initiative, the Alexa Accelerator, powered by Techstars. The Alexa Accelerator will accept about 10 companies to participate in a 13-week startup course running from July to September 2017. We will seek out companies tackling hard problems in a variety of domains—consumer, productivity, enterprise, entertainment, health and wellness, travel—that are interested in making an Alexa integration a priority. We’ll also look for companies that are building enabling technology such as natural language understanding (NLU) and better hardware designs that can extend or add to Alexa’s capabilities.

The Alexa Accelerator is just one more way in which Amazon is working closely with startups and investors. We hope we’ll see many of our existing VC friends and meet new ones when we reveal a group of new companies at the Alexa Accelerator demo day in October.

Rodrigo is a member of the Alexa Fund, the Amazon team investing in startups to support the Alexa environment. Prior to Amazon, Rodrigo founded Shuddle and led energy-related IT investments for Nth Power.

The Insider’s View series is a collaboration between different teams at Amazon. It shares our company’s unique insights, products we’re developing, reasons for our business focus, and most importantly, how our peculiar culture enables us to lead by always placing our customers first.

Guest post by Philip West, Founder, Vidora

Data ingestion

 
Vidora’s A.I. starts with data ingestion. Sharing data with others can be a pain due to the infinite number of ways it can be structured and organized. Fortunately, AWS already provides numerous ways to share data, making the process easier. A user’s behavioral events are sent to us via a variety of methods: Vidora’s API, Amazon Kinesis, Amazon Redshift, and custom pull-based systems that pull from Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). This data includes an anonymous but unique ID for the user, and also some information on what that user just “did,” such as read an article, clicked a link, watched a video, liked a post, etc. We translate each of these to a dataframe friendly format that gets stored in S3 every few minutes for Spark processing. As this data comes in, other various analytics get stored in both Redis and Cassandra as well.
 

Modeling & profile generation

 
Once we have the data, the next step is building our A.I. models. This lies at the heart of what Vidora does. Each of our customers has different scales of the amount of data we need to process, and varying intervals for how often the underlying A.I. models need to be updated. They also have different business goals, each with unique needs and constraints. For example, one customer might need to send weekly personalized emails, while another might need to optimize push notifications in near real-time.
 
Given the large amounts of data and the variations in the output required, Vidora needs a tool that provides the ability to run fast map-reduce jobs as well as a simple solution for investigatory data science. Vidora has found Spark on Amazon EMR to be a great fit. Spark interfaces nicely with Python and enables us to execute Panda’s dataframe operations at scale without having to do much around code optimization or pre-defining queries. Amazon EMR provides us a simple solution to spin up Spot clusters with Spark on various schedules and with custom parameters, and then spin them down once the jobs are finished, ultimately saving us money. By using Spot clusters, we typically see savings of 80% when compared with the on-demand price.
 
Once the machine learning models are generated, our queue-based processing system spins up Spot instance worker machines in Amazon EC2 that build and constantly update profiles for the most recently active users. This means we can update a user’s profile minutes after their last activity. These profiles contain information such as each user’s likelihood of returning to our customers’ products and services, what marketing channel is the most effective to reach them, when a message should be sent, and what specific content the user is most likely to engage with. Vidora has written its own machine learning algorithms to identify these characteristics of the profiles. Included in that process is a layer of information-theoretic techniques that assess the importance of each feature’s influence on user retention or any other high-level goal the customer has. This allows us to predict beforehand whether a specific action or set of content will have a positive or negative impact on the user’s loyalty, and by how much.
 
To manage the worker cluster that builds the profiles, we recently began using Spot fleet configurations. With Spot fleets, we now can get the best-priced computing power across a variety of instance types and Availability Zones, with no effort on our end other than the initial setup. It’s also trivial to adjust the size of our fleets using the aws-cli tool and its modify-spot-fleet-request command, which allows us to auto-scale the fleet size based on how large our processing queue is.
 

Multi-region Cassandra configuration

 
User profiles can take up a bit of space. Especially when you’re working with customers of Walmart’s or News Corp’s scale. These customers also require global coverage because many of them own multiple properties in various locations. To meet these requirements, we store our user profiles in Cassandra running in a multi-region replicated configuration, so that every user’s profile is available from a multitude of geographical locations. This allows us to do the high-cost processing in only one region.
 
All writes happen in the U.S. East (N. Virginia) Region, but then are seamlessly sent to the other regions via DataStax’s Ec2MultiRegionSnitch for Cassandra. To ensure our reads are as low-latency as possible, we use Cassandra’s LOCAL_ONE consistency for reads, meaning we return the first result we find from the local region without double-checking any other replicas for consistency. Using this strategy, we risk the data becoming gradually inconsistent, so we run full repairs daily to correct them in the background. We ensure the clusters have enough CPU and I/O capacity to always have a repair running without impacting latency.
 

Low-latency APIs

 
After we build and store user profiles, customers need to access them via APIs on a per-user basis, whether it’s for emails, push, or web experiences. These APIs often lie in the critical path of each user’s experience, thus demanding extremely low latency and high reliability across the world.
 
As mentioned earlier, we store user profiles in Cassandra across several regions, which improves the lookup times for user profiles to meet these low latency conditions. Similarly, our API servers are also deployed in the same regions, helping to decrease the time customers spend waiting for a response. We also aggressively cache much of our data with Redis to ensure even lower latency for most of our results.
 
Finally, we use Amazon Route 53 for DNS, specifically Route 53 latency-based routing and health checks to ensure each region is healthy. This satisfies both low latency and high availability: When everything is up, the customer talks to the nearest region for the fastest response, but if we lose a region, our Route 53 DNS failover configuration reroutes to a healthy region, providing reliability.
 

What’s next

 
While building an A.I. is difficult, AWS services dramatically simplify the architectural decisions you need to make as well as the tactical steps you need to take to manage the system. You can store massive amounts of data at very affordable rates, spin processing clusters up and down with the latest and greatest map-reduce frameworks, and address a global audience quite easily with a suite of cloud-computing services. At Vidora, we hope that our learnings from building an A.I. in the cloud can benefit others, and we look forward to hearing more about the innovative ways others decide to use AWS as we enter 2017, the year of A.I.
 
Please reach out to us at info@vidora.com to learn more!

As an investor you’ve developed an exceptional ability to invest in the right startups. These companies combine proven business models with a solid technical foundation to build some of the most exciting products around the world. But how do you ensure your investments are investing in the right technology?
 
Making the wrong technical choices early on can bring on technical debt that can easily bring a 10x return on your growing pains. Ask any big enterprise how they decide on technology, and they’ll run you through their technical evaluation process. This process includes reviewing software capability matrices, reading case studies, talking to other customers, and running multiple proofs of concept on development workloads. Startups don’t have the resources or time to conduct such extensive evaluations. Startups need to make quick decisions about their technical stack, but as a result the risk of getting it wrong is much higher.
 
Let’s talk about some ways to help you and your thriving companies avoid common pitfalls that early stage companies make:

1. Small teams benefit from well-adopted technologies
   There is a high cost of adopting early technologies, especially ones that have not been battle-tested in large production environments. Everyone wants to build with the latest hip language, but rarely does the new language provide enough of a benefit that it outweighs the learning curve or risk of early adoption. Never underestimate the track record of a well-established and utilized language or service. Well-adopted languages and services have more technical resources that are available online, and troubleshooting issues will be less time consuming. Also, it will be easier to hire engineers who are familiar with the technology. More time can be focused on what matters: building a better product.

 

2. The Do-It-Yourself mentality is great, but not when it comes to critical services
   Startups all have their domain experts: The MySQL seasoned “big data” expert, the Elasticsearch guru, and so on. These engineers are valuable assets for a company to have in the early days but can be costly if this expertise lures a company away from the reliability and operational advantages of managed services. It’s easy for a small company to manage a small cluster, but as usage grows so does the operational overhead. Managed services such as Amazon RDS, Amazon Elasticsearch Service, Amazon Redshift, Amazon Kinesis, and Amazon Aurora mean that clusters can be managed, updated, and backed up by AWS. Remember that every company needs a database, a server, and more. Any time spent managing these common infrastructure components is time that could be better spent on developing new products and services.

 

3. Build mentorship programs early on
   If you have a less experienced technical lead at a company, help provide them with a mentor. Mentors fill the void where previously these engineers had the ability to bounce ideas off of a trusted colleague. Mentors can help your teams make the right technical decisions by understanding the familiar challenges their engineering team is facing. Great mentors likely already exist among other companies in your portfolio. Ask around about who is a strong leader in specific areas of focus such as infrastructure, security, front end, data, AI, marketing, etc. This exposure to a variety of challenges will also help your mentors bring new perspectives and solutions back to their own projects. In summary, having an experienced individual that companies can engage about regarding architectural decisions, data design, security, and more will help keep your early-stage company feeling confident about their decisions.

 
There are many more best practices and recommendations that we will cover in upcoming articles. These three pillars are a good start for helping you and your companies figure out what technology makes sense for you today. Providing these companies with access to the right resources, with the right guidance, will help set up these teams for long-term success.

Take a look through our list of the top ten most read blog posts from 2016! Get caught up on ones you may have missed or share your favorite. If you are an AWS startup solving unique challenges, building innovative technology or approaching conventional problems in unconventional ways – we want to hear from you! We welcome ideas, suggestions, and feedback to help improve the AWS Startups Blog experience.

• Did Someone Say Beer? 
• Why Your Minimum Viable Product Must Scale
• Scaling to Billions of Requests a Day with AWS
• What Startups Should Know Before Choosing a CDN
• Triggering Lambda Functions via Text Messages
• Hiring a Cloud Engineer? Questions to Ask and What You Should Hear
• Greenhouse of the future with AWS IoT and Intel Edison
• Serverless Architecture with Java 7, AWS Lambda, and Amazon DynamoDB – Part 2
• Serverless Architectures with Java 8, AWS Lambda, and Amazon DynamoDB — Part 1
• Introducing the ‘Startup Kit Serverless Workload’

Don’t forget that you can subscribe to our blog’s RSS feed to stay up to date on our latest posts. Share your story, check out what’s new at the AWS Pop-up Lofts, sign-up for AWS Activate, and read up on AWS Hot Startups!

“What’s the easiest way to get started on AWS?” is a common question. Although there are many well established paths to getting started, including using AWS Elastic Beanstalk, serverless computing is a rapidly growing alternative.

Serverless computing allows you to build and run applications and services without thinking about servers. On AWS, the AWS Lambda service is the central building block for serverless computing. AWS also provides several other services to support serverless architectures. These include Amazon API Gateway, which you can use with Lambda to create a RESTful API, and Amazon DynamoDB, a NoSQL cloud database service that frees you from the burden of setting up a database cluster.

A completely serverless architecture is shown in the following diagram.

The bottom group of services in the diagram implement a RESTful API service. API Gateway processes API requests and responses, mapping them to Lambda functions that implement business logic. DynamoDB is the persistence layer. The group of services at the top of the diagram form the frontend. Amazon S3 hosts static website assets, such as an AngularJS or React app, and is a fully managed service that eliminates the need to run a fleet of frontend servers. In front of S3 is Amazon CloudFront, a content delivery network (CDN) for efficient delivery of website content from edge locations close to users all around the world.

Until recently, one of the concerns with implementing serverless applications was how to deploy them efficiently. However, there is now an AWS native solution: AWS Serverless Application Model (AWS SAM). Using AWS SAM, you can easily manage your serverless deployment using a simple YAML-based description language and just two AWS CLI commands. Going serverless might now be the easiest way to get started on AWS, especially for those unfamiliar with managing infrastructure.

In this post, I introduce the first component of a larger initiative: the AWS Startup Kit. The Startup Kit provides prescriptive guidance about how to get started on AWS, and includes several example workloads that use technologies commonly employed by startups. A “workload” is one or more related applications running on AWS that provide business or operational value, such as a RESTful API exposed to your customers, a batch processing job for analytics, and so on.

The Startup Kit component discussed in this post is the Startup Kit Serverless Workload:  a sample RESTful API for a TODO app built using the Lambda Node.js 4.3 runtime and deployed with SAM. You can check out the code itself on GitHub in the startup-kit-serverless-workload repository. If you haven’t already done so, you’ll need to set up an AWS account and install the AWS CLI (details here).

Serverless architecture benefits

By using a serverless architecture, you’ve gained many of the benefits of the AWS Well-Architected framework. Although a complete, in-depth Well-Architected review is beyond the scope of this post, it’s worthwhile to briefly look at how the five pillars of the framework apply to this architecture.

In the following summary chart, “HA” means high availability, “OS” is operating system, and “IAM” refers to the AWS Identity and Access Management service, which enables you to securely control access to AWS services and resources.

The preceding analysis just scratches the surface of the Well-Architected framework. As you move forward with building your serverless architecture on AWS, be sure to consult the Well-Architected framework’s whitepaper for additional considerations and ways to improve your architecture.

Using SAM to deploy the workload

SAM is a model for defining serverless applications. To use SAM, describe your serverless resources using YAML (or JSON) syntax in a template file, then package and deploy your code using a pair of AWS CLI commands. SAM itself is an open-source project, and is available on GitHub.

Three basic kinds of serverless resources are supported by SAM: “Function” (via Lambda), “Api” (via API Gateway), and “SimpleTable” (via DynamoDB). SAM also allows specification of event sources for Functions (such as an Api), and properties such as environment variables for Functions. To further simplify your SAM template, specify an Api as an event source for a Function. If you do so, there is no need to explicitly declare an Api resource because SAM will set it up for you.

The SAM template below shows how simple it is to specify a Function resource. The first Function, CreateFunction, implements an API call to create a new TODO item in the TODO app’s DynamoDB table. CreateFunction’s relationship to the rest of the serverless application is fully specified in the SAM template. For example, to specify how CreateFunction interacts with the DynamoDB table, the template associates with CreateFunction an IAM policy that includes DynamoDB write permissions, and also specifies an environment variable that references the DynamoDB table. An Api event is specified for invoking CreateFunction. This event is described by the path and HTTP method, in this case POST. The other Functions in the SAM template all follow the same basic pattern.

AWSTemplateFormatVersion: '2010-09-09'
Transform: AWS::Serverless-2016-10-31
Description: RESTful API for a TODO app, backed by a SimpleTable (DynamoDB) resource.

Resources:
  
  CreateFunction:
    Type: AWS::Serverless::Function
    Properties:
      Handler: index.create
      Runtime: nodejs4.3
      Policies: AmazonDynamoDBFullAccess
      Environment:
        Variables:
          TABLE_NAME: !Ref Table
      Events:
        PostResource:
          Type: Api
          Properties:
            Path: /todo/new
            Method: post

  GetAllFunction:
    Type: AWS::Serverless::Function
    Properties:
      Handler: index.getAll
      Runtime: nodejs4.3
      Policies: AmazonDynamoDBReadOnlyAccess
      Environment:
        Variables:
          TABLE_NAME: !Ref Table
      Events:
        GetResource:
          Type: Api
          Properties:
            Path: /todo/all
            Method: get

  # API functions related to active TODO items
  
  GetActiveFunction:
    Type: AWS::Serverless::Function
    Properties:
      Handler: index.getActive
      Runtime: nodejs4.3
      Policies: AmazonDynamoDBReadOnlyAccess
      Environment:
        Variables:
          TABLE_NAME: !Ref Table
      Events:
        GetResource:
          Type: Api
          Properties:
            Path: /todo/active
            Method: get

  UpdateActiveFunction:
    Type: AWS::Serverless::Function
    Properties:
      Handler: index.updateActive
      Runtime: nodejs4.3
      Policies: AmazonDynamoDBFullAccess
      Environment:
        Variables:
          TABLE_NAME: !Ref Table
      Events:
        PutResource:
          Type: Api
          Properties:
            Path: /todo/active
            Method: put

  # API functions related to completed TODO items
  
  GetCompleteFunction:
    Type: AWS::Serverless::Function
    Properties:
      Handler: index.getComplete
      Runtime: nodejs4.3
      Policies: AmazonDynamoDBReadOnlyAccess
      Environment:
        Variables:
          TABLE_NAME: !Ref Table
      Events:
        GetResource:
          Type: Api
          Properties:
            Path: /todo/complete
            Method: get

  MarkCompleteFunction:
    Type: AWS::Serverless::Function
    Properties:
      Handler: index.markComplete
      Runtime: nodejs4.3
      Policies: AmazonDynamoDBFullAccess
      Environment:
        Variables:
          TABLE_NAME: !Ref Table
      Events:
        PutResource:
          Type: Api
          Properties:
            Path: /todo/complete
            Method: put

  DeleteCompleteFunction:
    Type: AWS::Serverless::Function
    Properties:
      Handler: index.deleteComplete
      Runtime: nodejs4.3
      Policies: AmazonDynamoDBFullAccess
      Environment:
        Variables:
          TABLE_NAME: !Ref Table
      Events:
        DeleteResource:
          Type: Api
          Properties:
            Path: /todo/complete
            Method: delete

  Table:
    Type: AWS::Serverless::SimpleTable
    Properties:
      PrimaryKey:
         Name: todo_id
         Type: String
      ProvisionedThroughput:
         ReadCapacityUnits: 5
         WriteCapacityUnits: 5

Before you start, make sure to either install the AWS CLI, or update the version you have installed previously:  some commands used in this post may not exist in older versions of the AWS CLI. The IAM user you associate with the AWS CLI should have admin permissions, including the ability to create IAM roles.

To begin your deployment of the Startup Kit Serverless Workload, either download a zip file of the code from GitHub or clone the GitHub repository with this command:

git clone https://github.com/awslabs/startup-kit-serverless-workload.git

In the AWS Region where you plan to do your deployment, be sure you have an existing Amazon S3 bucket in which SAM can put the deployment artifacts, or create a new bucket using the following AWS CLI command:

aws s3 mb s3://<your-bucket-name>

Next, simply run the following two AWS CLI commands. For the first command, package, replace the s3-bucket argument with the name of your S3 bucket. For the second command, deploy, replace the template-file argument with the full path to your output template file:

aws cloudformation package \
--template-file serverless.cfn.yml \
--output-template-file serverless-xfm.cfn.yml \
--s3-bucket <your-bucket-name>

aws cloudformation deploy 
--template-file <path-to-file/serverless-xfm.cfn.yml> \
--stack-name StartupKitServerless \
--capabilities CAPABILITY_IAM

After the deploy command indicates it has finished, your workload is up and running! These two commands are the core of the deployment workflow when working with SAM.

For example, if you modify the code and want to deploy the changes, simply execute the package and deploy the commands again.

Next, to test your workload, get the invoke URL of your API. To do this, execute the following Bash code by copying and pasting it into your terminal, replacing the AWS region code “us-west-2” with your current region if different (e.g. us-east-1), then hitting return:

x=`aws cloudformation list-stack-resources --stack-name StartupKitServerless | grep -A2 'AWS::ApiGateway::RestApi' | grep 'PhysicalResourceId' | awk '{print $2}' | tr -d '"' | tr -d ","`; echo "https://$x.execute-api.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/Stage/"

(An alternative way to get the invoke URL:  go to the API Gateway console, choose StartupKitServerless, choose Stages in the left navigation pane, and then choose Stage in the list of stages. The API’s invoke URL should now appear in the upper-right pane; copy the entire URL, including the “/Stage” at the end.)

Begin testing by adding some TODO items using the create API. This may be accomplished using the following command:

curl -X POST -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -d '{"todo_id": "1001", "active": true, "description": "What TODO next?"}' https://<invoke-URL-for-your-API>/todo/new

To fetch the active TODO items you created, execute the following command:

curl https://<invoke-URL-for-your-API>/todo/active

Similar commands can be used to test all of the other API calls.

Stay tuned . . .

Using AWS SAM and serverless architectures is one of the easiest ways to get started on AWS. If you have any suggestions, comments, or corrections regarding the Startup Kit Serverless Workload, please submit a pull request on GitHub. This is just the beginning of the Startup Kit story – more content is on the way!

Special thanks to Itzik Paz for providing the Bash code to retrieve the invoke URL

By Amanda Mackay, Loft Manager, AWS Startups

I haven’t been on a vacation in the past six months where I didn’t see a drone. Just last weekend I was at the top of Donner Summit taking in the beauty of the Sierra Mountains, only to have one zoom past me to get the perfect photo…one that would make me jealous on Instagram later. Drones are everywhere lately, and it’s for good reason. Drones have the capability of taking photos we’ve never dreamed of, providing entertainment to the masses and, soon, assisting in tasks that will make our lives easier.

To learn more about drones and where they are headed, I sat down with Natalie Cheung, Drone Product Manager at Intel. You might know her as one of the Intel gurus behind Drone 100, which lit up the night sky in Indio, California last March.

Amanda: Can you share your story about how you got into the world of drones?

Natalie: Getting into the world of drones was definitely a pleasant surprise. In my previous role, I had an opportunity to lead several special projects, and a few of them were about drones. One of the projects was called Drone 100. It stemmed from a hallway conversation I had about having 100 drones light up the night sky and forming the Intel logo above our campus. It was such a farfetched idea, but at the same time doing something like that was fascinating from both a technology perspective and a creative perspective. Before I knew it, my full-time job mostly focused on drones, so I made a switch out of my role to specialize in drones. I’ve never looked back!

Amanda: As an expert in drones, what best tips in purchasing the right drone can you recommend?

Natalie: It depends. There’s a lot of different drones out there for various use cases—you’ll have to choose the one that fits your needs. If you want something more compact because you’ll use the drone when you travel, there are some great drones out there that have collapsible props and are lightweight. If you are more into professional photography and film, you’ll want a drone that has a mechanical gimbal and high-quality camera so that the footage captured is high resolution and smooth. If you are looking for a smarter drone, you’ll want to look for one that has collision avoidance enabled and has some automatic modes for filming.

Amanda: We’re seeing faster, better quality, more portable drones coming out at an increasing pace. With this rapid iteration of innovation, where do you see or hope to see drone technology in 3-5 years?

Natalie: In 3-5 years, I see drones everywhere (in a managed fashion) in the sky. Drones will be used to help inspect cell towers or bridges, deliver packages in neighborhoods, and provide entertainment[MB2] . Not only will we see better quality and more portable drones, but we’ll also see drones that are smarter—like ones that are able to analyze data or ones that have 4G or 5G integrated in—that will automatically send that favorite photo. We’ll even see drones that communicate with one another to safely fly as a community.

Amanda: There are around 500+ drone startups currently working around the world. Can you share 2-3 of your favorites and why they have such a big impact?

Natalie: I loved Legos when I was a kid, so I have to say Flybrix. They have Lego-based drones that anyone can build. From a safety perspective, AirMap is a great startup that focuses on air space safety for flying a drone.

Amanda: Drones generally don’t have high computational power on-board but are able to augment their capabilities in the cloud. Can you share how this has opened the door for exciting new technologies that are impacting industries?

Natalie: Drones today are getting smarter. Manufacturers are integrating Intel Atom processors, vision processors, FPGAs, etc. This allows drones to do analysis on board versus up in the cloud, allowing the user to have a smoother experience.

Amanda: What are the current laws/FAA regulations still on-going regarding drone hobbyists that we should all be aware of?

Natalie: I’d recommend the B4UFLY Smartphone App or checking the FAA website for the latest regulations. Make sure that you are in the right environment to fly safely!

Amanda: Earlier this year you and your team conducted a 100-drone synchronized light display to Beethoven’s 5th Symphony. Can you share some of the challenges in such a massive project of orchestration?

Natalie: Drone 100 had lots of challenges that we had to solve. First, from a technical perspective, building software that allows 100 drones to be controlled by one pilot is quite a feat! We saw challenges with finding an open area that had enough space to fly Drone 100 and showcase different animations and scenes. We had to receive regulatory approvals where we flew: USA, Germany, Australia, Austria, and more. However, we were able to engineer a way to meet all those challenges, and Drone 100 has been one of the most unique projects. We’ve been able to change the definition of nighttime entertainment, change the perception of what drones can be used for, and showcase multiple drone-per-pilot technology that can be implemented in other drone segments in the future. This also helped us grow our fleet to more than 500. We used the Intel® Shooting Star Drone, which is purposely built for drone light shows, and we were able to put 500 drones simultaneously up in the sky. This new drone led to a holiday collaboration with Disney: We’ve been flying 300 drones at Disney Springs nightly and will do so for eight weeks to bring this technology to the public. What was Drone 100 over a year ago has blossomed into new fleets that can redefine nighttime entertainment.

Amanda: Enterprises and startups are both heavily investing in drones. Who do you feel has the competitive advantage? Is it the capital investment of the enterprise or the nimble ingenuity of the startup?

Natalie: Both have different advantages. I believe that both are needed in order to allow the drone ecosystem to flourish and grow.

Amanda: How many drones do you own, which is your favorite, and how do you pick a good name for your drone?

Natalie: Technically the drones from Drone 100 are registered in my name, so I have more than 100 drones. My favorite drone that I own is the Yuneec Typhoon H with Intel RealSense Technology. I’m slightly biased as I was part of this project with Yuneec. It’s a smart drone that has an Intel RealSense Camera, a depth camera that allows the drone to have eyes and see it’s environment so the drone can actually see an obstacle when it flies and fly around the obstacle. This drone also has a great 360 degree 4K camera and six props to help ensure a stable flight.

Amanda: The world of mapping has been heavily evolving with the introduction of drones. Can you share how startups like Mapbox have been leveraging drones to improve maps of the Earth?

Natalie: Mapping and drones go hand in hand. With the right sensors and cameras, drones allow users to capture the X, Y, Z components of any structure. I believe it’s using data fusion with the right sensors and cameras, and a robust and precise drone to map out environments to centimeter accuracy. With this, you’ve digitized your data and can do any analysis far easier than before.

See the Intel Drone

If you would like to take a look at an Intel Drone, stop by the AWS Pop-up Loft’s new location in early 2017 where you can see one on display. For our events schedule, visit our website.

A big shout out to Natalie Cheung for taking the time to speak with me and to AWS Startup Evangelist, Mackenzie Kosut, for writing our rad questions. This blog post was brought to you by Intel and AWS.

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If you are an AWS startup solving unique challenges, building innovative technology or approaching conventional problems in unconventional ways – we want to hear from you! Send us an email with your name, title, company’s name, and a brief description of what products or services you offer. Be sure to include a one-paragraph description of the type of blog post you’d like to submit. Whether it’s a how-to guide or sharing your team’s best practices consider including which AWS products or services you’ll be writing about, and what month you’d like to post in. Our team will include all submissions in our content review and reach out to any potential startups that have been vetted and approved. Due to the expected volume of requests, we will be unable to respond to every potential inquiry.

If you have an idea for a topic, but don’t want to write the post yourself, that’s great too! We welcome ideas, suggestions, and feedback to help improve the AWS Startups Blog experience. Don’t forget that you can subscribe to our blog’s RSS feed to stay up to date on our latest posts. Share your story, check out what’s new at the AWS Pop-up Lofts, sign-up for AWS Activate, and read up on AWS Hot Startups!

Guest post by Mikhail Ledvich, Head of Marketing, Shippo

Shippo is a shipping API that helps developers connect to a global network of carriers like USPS, FedEx, DHL, UPS and others to print shipping labels, track packages, and more. We work with a wide range of developers to help them send packages around the world.

With more software being built than ever before, more businesses are being created that provide easily consumable APIs and tooling for developers to use. It’s common knowledge that marketing and selling to developers can be difficult. Developers tend to be one of the most challenging audiences to sell a software product to because they ask tough questions that  range from “Why should we pay for this?” to “Why can’t I build this over the weekend?”

Even though marketing to developers is challenging and requires unique approaches, you shouldn’t discard proven marketing strategies. For example, you should clearly define your developer segments, and you should identify the tactics that will best capture the attention of those segments. Are they mobile or web developers? What programming language do they use? Are they simply looking to tinker or are they building a business?

When startups that focus on developers fail, they typically fail for common reasons: lack of product-market fit and lack of paying customers. A lack of product-market fit is a failure to properly segment and focus on a specific target market. Positioning your product and drilling down to exactly who you’re selling to are important parts of finding product-market fit. Product-market fit clarifies your offerings, establishes how you will compete with similar businesses, and helps you solidify a message that resonates with the right people.

What’s preventing developers from finding and using your product? Before you promote your product to developers, you should define exactly who your targeted developers are and remove obstacles that are preventing them from adopting your product.

Five important areas to invest in

1. Don’t assume all developers are the same

Too often, marketers make the mistake of lumping all developers into one bucket when planning their developer marketing campaigns. Just like sales and marketing professionals, developers can vary drastically across team, function, and industry. There are vast differences between web, mobile, and desktop developers. The needs of development teams at startups are very different than the needs of teams at larger, enterprise companies. They differ by workflow, size, budget, and the specific frameworks and languages they build in. Some developers are specialists, while others are generalists. The list of different types of developer demographics is endless. This is why it’s crucial to first identify which types of developers would benefit the most from your product or API when building your marketing plan.

2. Highlight features over benefits

Developers will want to know the details of your API features and how they work. They can figure out the benefits for themselves. This is contrary to the instinct of most marketers and sales professionals, who typically want to share all of the amazing benefits of their API before diving into details about features. But engineers are trained in deductive reasoning. They’re also tinkerers. They want to know how a watch works before hearing you sing its praises. For this reason, you’ll reach more developers by showing them rather than telling them why your solution is exactly what they need.

3. Provide thorough documentation

Documentation, such as tutorials and sample projects for your API or product, speak to developers in the same way that a sophisticated website or a polished marketing presentation speaks to business leaders. Documentation is the most important marketing component you can provide for developers. They might skip reading your product one-pager, but they’ll pour over every last detail in your sample project. In your documentation, developers are looking for a step-by-step preview of how they could build with your API. For example, for the Shippo API, we aimed to answer the four top questions that developers ask:

1. How do I ship a package?
2. How do I track a package?
3. How do I insure a package?
4. How do I create a refund label?

We broke down each one of these steps and created documentation tutorials that developers can use when getting started with our API. We laid out the documentation in an article format and included code snippets from the five most popular programming languages. That way, any developer can read the information and understand how they could build off of the API.  Our goal was to give developers the fastest path to an “ah-ha” moment, when they are able to generate their first label. Identify what your products “ah-ha” moment is, and focus all your efforts to get the developers to experience it.

4. Be transparent

Transparency is very important to the developer community. Developers want to be clear on metrics such as uptime, response time, and stability before they recommend that their company uses your product. No one wants to recommend a software package that will not be maintained. One of the first questions that developers often ask is “How well can you support my business?” Many companies have done this by embracing transparency and by making a status page publicly available. By doing this, they show how reliable their platform is and how confident they are in their product. At Shippo, we not only publish our uptime and status, but also the speed of our services.

5. Design your pricing model around experimentation

One fast way to lose developer prospects is to have a pricing model that limits their ability to experiment with and test your API. For example, MailChimp, an email marketing company, offers a pretty flexible free tier for their API. This gives freelancers and small businesses the ability to try their product out and see their business grow. Once they start growing and their email marketing needs expand, customers are motivated to upgrade and pay more for the services.

For enterprise developers, who typically have a discretionary fund they can use, having a free tier isn’t as important as being able to show that your API can scale. Stripe, an online payment API, does this really well. Stripe doesn’t ask for monthly fees; instead, they simply charge per transaction. Once transactions begin to increase to a certain amount, they work with customers to roll them over to their volume billing plan to handle the higher volume. This way, enterprise developers can experiment with the Stripe API and build on it without any fear of commitment. Designing your pricing model to leave room for developer experimentation is key to engagement.

Next Steps For You

Figuring out your pricing model, providing documentation, and segmenting developers correctly are all vital for marketing to developers. However, these strategies are just the beginning. Once you have a clear target and developer-friendly assets, reaching developers becomes simple. From launching a developer forum for your community to hosting hack-a-thons, there are a number of ways that you can build developer engagement for your product that not only will grow your business, but also will improve your products and organization as a whole.

There’s no silver bullet when it comes to marketing to developers. For inspiration, you can check out our documentation, API reference, and client libraries. If you’re doing something that’s working well or if you have a fantastic developer experience that you’d like to share, we’d love to learn about it! Let us know on Twitter.

Mikhail is head of marketing for Shippo.

Day 3 of AWS re:Invent got started with Amazon.com CTO, Dr. Werner Vogels, bringing out some awesome startups on stage during his keynote! We heard from Jeff Lawson, CEO and Founder of the Unicorn startup Twilio, Chris Turvil, ‎Head of Cloud and Platform Agility at thetrainline.com, and Eric Gunderson, CEO at Mapbox. Werner also announced that Martin Garrix would be performing at the AWS re:Play party! Vote on your favorite announcement from yesterday’s keynote here.

The re:Source Mini Con yesterday was all about containers. Here were some other great startup sessions:

• How Amazon S3 Storage Management Helps Optimize Storage at Scale, with Special Guest, Pinterest
• Driving AWS Cost Efficiency at Your Company
• Wild Rydes Takes Off – The Dawn of a New Unicorn
• From Startups to Enterprise, Performance for a Low Cost

We also had a TON of awesome interviews with startups, all including demos of their products and services. Be sure to check them out:

1. Amiram Shachar, Founder and CEO at Spotinst
2. JP La Torre & Stefan Thorpe, CEO and CTO at Caylent
3. Toby Olshanetsky & Alexey Sapozhnikov, CEO and CTO of prooV – watch the interview to see some of the coolest SWAG at the conference!
4. Max Zuckerman, Director of Sales at Alooma
5. AWS Community Hero Shimon Tolts, GM of Data Solutions at ironSource
6. Amanda Chan from Nucleus at the Alexa booth
7. Sudarshan Srinivasan from Dome9
8. Yaniv Leven & Ze’evi Gideon of Panoply.io

On top of the startup interviews, we were even lucky enough to get a quick tour of some of the cool new Alexa integrated products from Amit Jotwani on the Amazon Alexa team.

If you were in the Expo Hall or watching @AWSreInvent on Twitter, you might have gotten a glimpse of Amelia Wietting defying gravity with her Giant Jenga tower at the ‘Club Dev’ Lounge in the Expo Hall. Be sure to check out the time lapse!

Before the re:Play party, there was an AWS Certification Appreciation reception at LAVO for attendees who are AWS Certified. Congrats to everyone who got certified this week!

The AWS re:Play party included dodge ball, a rock climbing wall, bubble soccer, a ball pit, and loads of food and drinks everywhere you looked. Martin Garrix came on around 10:15 p.m., and kept the party going strong until midnight.

If you’re sticking around on Friday, there’s still lots to do! AWS Certification Exams will continue, along with Hands-on Labs and a bunch of breakout sessions.  See the full Friday session schedule here. If you’re headed home, safe travels, it’s been great having you here in Las Vegas at AWS re:Invent. We look forward to staying in touch with you here and on Twitter @AWSstartups. See you next year!