AWS Blog

Twitch is one of the leading community streaming video platforms today for developers, gamers, and the artists. Each day, millions visit Twitch to watch and discuss their passions by joining live sessions with other passionate online streamers. Amazon Web Services has joined the fun by adding the AWS Twitch Channel this past November to bring the latest AWS technologies to the Twitch audience. The AWS Twitch Channel hosts weekly live interactive coding and maker sessions targeted toward all levels of cloud enthusiasts.  For more information on upcoming episodes, past broadcasts, or to meet the team, visit https://aws.amazon.com/twitch/.

The AWS Twitch channel will have multiple shows throughout the year, each with various themes, broadcasters, and topics. Currently, there are two shows available for you to tune into; Live Coding with AWS and AWS Maker Studio show.

The Live Coding with AWS show features fellow technical evangelists; Randall Hunt, Julio Faerman, and Abby Fuller building apps and solutions covering practically every AWS service from the perspective of the developer. What’s great about being part of the Twitch audience for the show is that you drive the direction of the broadcast.  Additionally, guests from Amazon, AWS, and the community will join our Twitch hosts to talk about cool new projects and implementations built on the AWS platform.

The AWS Maker Studio show premieres on May 17^th and will cover projects and solutions especially for the Maker in all of us. The hosts; Todd Varland, Trevor Hykes, and Anupam Mishra will be building a cloud-connected robot over the course of the first season. Watch the first episode to see the first steps, and consider following along and building your own robot.

This May, there are several exciting Twitch sessions that we invite you to join, build, code, and make with us. This month’s schedule is as follows:

Live Coding with AWS

Wednesday, May 10

Presenter: Randall Hunt

2:00 PM PT – Building Chatbots with Lex

Thursday, May 11

Presenter: Julio Faerman

8:00 AM PT – Machine Learning

Friday, May 19

Presenter: Julio Faerman

8:00 AM PT – Cloud Concepts Review

AWS Maker Studio

Wednesday, May 17

4:30 PM PT – Build your First Cloud Connected Robot

Wednesday, May 24

4:30 PM PT – Sensing the Environment for your First Robot

Wednesday, May 31

4:30 PM PT – Connecting Your Robot to the Cloud

If you are interested the latest in AWS technologies or interested in connecting with other developers in the community, tune in each week on https://twitch.tv/aws for interactive live coding with AWS experts. Also, don’t worry if you happen to miss a session, several episodes are available on demand.

We would love for you all to join the Twitch community by tuning into Twitch and the AWS Twitch Channel to stream, view, and interact with other developers, gamers, and makers while building in the cloud with us!

Hope to see you on the stream!

– Tara

Spring has officially sprung. As you enjoy the blossoming of May flowers, it may be worthy to also note some of the great tech talks blossoming online during the month of May. This month’s AWS Online Tech Talks features sessions on topics like AI, DevOps, Data, and Serverless just to name a few.

May 2017 – Schedule

Below is the upcoming schedule for the live, online technical sessions scheduled for the month of May. Make sure to register ahead of time so you won’t miss out on these free talks conducted by AWS subject matter experts. All schedule times for the online tech talks are shown in the Pacific Time (PDT) time zone.

Webinars featured this month are:

Monday, May 15

Artificial Intelligence

9:00 AM – 10:00 AM: Integrate Your Amazon Lex Chatbot with Any Messaging Service

Tuesday, May 16

Compute

10:30 AM – 11:30 AM: Deep Dive on Amazon EC2 F1 Instance

IoT

12:00 Noon – 1:00 PM: How to Connect Your Own Creations with AWS IoT

Wednesday, May 17

Management Tools

9:00 AM – 10:00 AM: OpsWorks for Chef Automate – Automation Made Easy!

Serverless

10:30 AM – 11:30 AM: Serverless Orchestration with AWS Step Functions

Enterprise & Hybrid

12:00 Noon – 1:00 PM: Moving to the AWS Cloud: An Overview of the AWS Cloud Adoption Framework

Thursday, May 18

Compute

9:00 AM – 10:00 AM: Scaling Up Tenfold with Amazon EC2 Spot Instances

Big Data

10:30 AM – 11:30 AM: Building Analytics Pipelines for Games on AWS

12:00 Noon – 1:00 PM: Serverless Big Data Analytics using Amazon Athena and Amazon QuickSight

Monday, May 22

Artificial Intelligence

9:00 AM – 10:00 AM: What’s New with Amazon Rekognition

Serverless

10:30 AM – 11:30 AM: Building Serverless Web Applications

Tuesday, May 23

Hands-On Lab

8:30 – 10:00 AM: Hands On Lab: Windows Workloads on AWS

Big Data

10:30 AM – 11:30 AM: Streaming ETL for Data Lakes using Amazon Kinesis Firehose

DevOps

12:00 Noon – 1:00 PM: Deep Dive: Continuous Delivery for AI Applications with ECS

Wednesday, May 24

Storage

9:00 – 10:00 AM: Moving Data into the Cloud with AWS Transfer Services

Containers

12:00 Noon – 1:00 PM: Building a CICD Pipeline for Container Deployment to Amazon ECS

Thursday, May 25

Mobile

9:00 – 10:00 AM: Test Your Android App with Espresso and AWS Device Farm

Security & Identity

10:30 AM – 11:30 AM: Advanced Techniques for Federation of the AWS Management Console and Command Line Interface (CLI)

Tuesday, May 30

Databases

9:00 – 10:00 AM: DynamoDB: Architectural Patterns and Best Practices for Infinitely Scalable Applications

Compute

10:30 AM – 11:30 AM: Deep Dive on Amazon EC2 Elastic GPUs

Security & Identity

12:00 Noon – 1:00 PM: Securing Your AWS Infrastructure with Edge Services

Wednesday, May 31

Hands-On Lab

8:30 – 10:00 AM: Hands On Lab: Introduction to Microsoft SQL Server in AWS

Enterprise & Hybrid

10:30 AM – 11:30 AM: Best Practices in Planning a Large-Scale Migration to AWS

Databases

12:00 Noon – 1:00 PM: Convert and Migrate Your NoSQL Database or Data Warehouse to AWS

The AWS Online Tech Talks series covers a broad range of topics at varying technical levels. These sessions feature live demonstrations & customer examples led by AWS engineers and Solution Architects. Check out the AWS YouTube channel for more on-demand webinars on AWS technologies.

– Tara

My colleague Jed Sundwall runs the AWS Public Datasets program. He wrote the guest post below to tell you about an important new dataset that is available as an Amazon RDS Snapshot. In the post, Jed introduces the dataset and shows you how to create an Amazon RDS DB Instance from the snapshot.

— Jeff;

I am very excited to announce that, starting today, the entire public USAspending.gov database is available for anyone to copy via Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS). USAspending.gov data includes data on all spending by the federal government, including contracts, grants, loans, employee salaries, and more. The data is available via a PostgreSQL snapshot, which provides bulk access to the entire USAspending.gov database, and is updated nightly. At this time, the database includes all USAspending.gov for the second quarter of fiscal year 2017, and data going back to the year 2000 will be added over the summer. You can learn more about the database and how to access it on its AWS Public Dataset landing page.

Through the AWS Public Datasets program, we work with AWS customers to experiment with ways that the cloud can make data more accessible to more people. Most of our AWS Public Datasets are made available through Amazon S3 because of its tremendous flexibility and ability to scale to serve any volume of any kind of data files. What’s exciting about the USAspending.gov database is that it provides a great example of how Amazon RDS can be used to share an entire relational database quickly and easily. Typically, sharing a relational database requires extract, transfer, and load (ETL) processes that require redundant storage capacity, time for data transfer, and often scripts to migrate your database schema from one database engine to another. ETL processes can be so intimidating and cumbersome that they’re effectively impossible for many people to carry out.

By making their data available as a public Amazon RDS snapshot, the team at USASPending.gov has made it easy for anyone to get a copy of their entire production database for their own use within minutes. This will be useful for researchers and businesses who want to work with real data about all US Government spending and quickly combine it with their own data or other data resources.

Deploying the USASpending.gov Database Using the AWS Management Console
Let’s go through the steps involved in deploying the database in your AWS account using the AWS Management Console.

1. Sign in to the AWS Management Console and select the US East (N. Virginia) region in the menu bar.
2. Open the Amazon RDS Console and choose Snapshots in the navigation pane.
3. In the filter for the search bar, select All Public Snapshots and search for 515495268755:
   
4. Select the snapshot named arn:aws:rds:us-east-1:515495268755:snapshot:usaspending-db.
5. Select Snapshot Actions -> Restore Snapshot. Select an instance size, and enter the other details, then click on Restore DB Instance.
6. You will see that a DB Instance is being created from the snapshot, within your AWS account.
7. After a few minutes, the status of the instance will change to Available.
8. You can see the endpoint for your database on the main page along with other useful info:
   

Deploying the USASpending.gov Database Using the AWS CLI
You can also install the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI) and use it to create a DB Instance from the snapshot. Here’s a sample command:

$ aws rds restore-db-instance-from-db-snapshot --db-instance-identifier my-test-db-cli \
  --db-snapshot-identifier arn:aws:rds:us-east-1:515495268755:snapshot:usaspending-db \
  --region us-east-1

This will give you an ARN (Amazon Resource Name) that you can use to reference the DB Instance. For example:

$ aws rds describe-db-instances \
  --db-instance-identifier arn:aws:rds:us-east-1:917192695859:db:my-test-db-cli

This command will display the Endpoint.Address that you use to connect to the database.

Connecting to the DB Instance
After following the AWS Management Console or AWS CLI instructions above, you will have access to the full USAspending.gov database within this Amazon RDS DB instance, and you can connect to it using any PostgreSQL client using the following credentials:

• Username: root
• Password: password
• Database: data_store_api

If you use psql, you can access the database using this command:

$ psql -h my-endpoint.rds.amazonaws.com -U root -d data_store_api

You should change the database password after you log in:

ALTER USER "root" WITH ENCRYPTED PASSWORD '{new password}';

If you can’t connect to your instance but think you should be able to, you may need to check your VPC Security Groups and make sure inbound and outbound traffic on the port (usually 5432) is allowed from your IP address.

Exploring the Data
The USAspending.gov data is very rich, so it will be hard to do it justice in this blog post, but hopefully these queries will give you an idea of what’s possible. To learn about the contents of the database, please review the USAspending.gov Data Dictionary.

The following query will return the total amount of money the government is obligated to pay for contracts awarded by NASA that include “Mars” or “Martian” in the description of the award:

select sum(total_obligation) from awards, subtier_agency 
  where (awards.description like '% MARTIAN %' OR awards.description like '% MARS %') 
  AND subtier_agency.name = 'National Aeronautics and Space Administration';

As I write this, the result I get for this query is $55,411,025.42. Note that the database is updated nightly and will include more historical data in the coming months, so you may get a different result if you run this query.

Now, here’s the same query, but looking for awards with “Jupiter” or “Jovian” in the description:

select sum(total_obligation) from awards, subtier_agency
  where (awards.description like '%JUPITER%' OR awards.description like '%JOVIAN%') 
  AND subtier_agency.name = 'National Aeronautics and Space Administration';

The result I get is $14,766,392.96.

Questions & Comments
I’m looking forward to seeing what people can do with this data. If you have any questions about the data, please create an issue on the USAspending.gov API’s issue tracker on GitHub.

— Jed

Spring is in the air, new technologies are budding, and the community is buzzing.

Which means it’s also springtime in the city by the bay and AWS is thrilled to announce an exciting event, AWS Community Day.

AWS Community Day is a community-led event in San Francisco where AWS Community Heroes, user group leaders, and other AWS enthusiasts will come together to deliver a full day of technical sessions on the latest in cloud computing.

During the event, you will get an opportunity to learn about the latest cloud computing trends, optimization best practices, and practical insights securing your infrastructure. Additionally, you will have the chance to discuss approaches to building healthy AWS meetups and community knowledge-sharing sessions.

In order to learn more details about the AWS Community Day in San Francisco, take a look at the blog post written by Community Hero, Eric Hammond, found here: https://alestic.com/2017/05/aws-community-day-san-francisco/.

Don’t miss this great event, register today to take part in the AWS Community Day.

– Tara

I first told you about Amazon Chime this past February (Amazon Chime – Unified Communications Service) and told you how I connect and collaborate with people all over the world.

Since the launch, Amazon Chime has quickly become the communication tool of choice within the AWS team. I participate in multiple person-to-person and group chats throughout the day, and frequently “Chime In” to Amazon Chime-powered conferences to discuss upcoming launches and speaking opportunities.

Today we are adding two new features to Amazon Chime: the ability to claim a domain as your own and support for your existing Active Directory.

Claiming a Domain
Claiming a domain gives you the authority to manage Amazon Chime usage for all of the users in the domain. You can make sure that new employees sign up for Amazon Chime in an official fashion and you can suspend accounts for employees that leave the organization.

To claim a domain, you assert that you own a particular domain name and then back up the assertion by entering a TXT record to your domain’s DNS entry. You must do this for each domain and subdomain that your organization uses for email addresses.

Here’s how I would claim one of my own domains:

After I click on Verify this domain, Amazon Chime provides me with the record for my DNS:

After I do this, the domain’s status will change to Pending Verification. Once Amazon Chime has confirmed that the new record exists as expected, the status will change to Verified and the team account will become an enterprise account.

Active Directory Support
This feature allows your users to sign in to Amazon Chime using their existing Active Directory identity and credentials. After you have set it up, you can enable and take advantage of advanced AD security features such as password rotation, password complexity rules, and multi-factor authentication. You can also control the allocation of Amazon Chime’s Plus and Pro licenses on a group-by-group basis (check out Plans and Pricing to learn more about each type of license).

In order to use this feature, you must be using an Amazon Chime enterprise account. If you are using a team account, follow the directions at Create an Enterprise Account before proceeding.

Then you will need to set up a directory with the AWS Directory Service. You have two options at this point:

1. Use the AWS Directory Service AD Connector to connect to your existing on-premises Active Directory instance.
2. Use Microsoft Active Directory, configured for standalone use. Read How to Create a Microsoft AD Directory for more information on this option.

After you have set up your directory, you can connect to it from within the Amazon Chime console by clicking on Settings and Active directory and choosing your directory from the drop-down:

After you have done this you can select individual groups within the directory and assign the appropriate subscriptions (Plus or Pro) on a group-by-group basis.

With everything set up as desired, your users can log in to Amazon Chime using their existing directory credentials.

These new features are available now and you can start using them today!

If you would like to learn more about Amazon Chime, you can watch the recent AWS Tech Talk: Modernize Meetings with Amazon Chime:

Here is the presentation from the talk:

— Jeff;

As AWS grows, we continue to find ways to make it an even better value. We work with our suppliers to drive down costs while also finding ways to build hardware and software that is increasingly more efficient and cost-effective.

In addition to reducing our prices on a regular and frequent basis, we also give customers options that help them to optimize their use of AWS. For example, Reserved Instances (first launched in 2009) allow Amazon EC2 users to obtain a significant discount when compared to On-Demand Pricing, along with a capacity reservation when used in a specific Availability Zone.

Our customers use multiple strategies to purchase and manage their Reserved Instances. Some prefer to make an upfront payment and earn a bigger discount; some prefer to pay nothing upfront and get a smaller (yet still substantial) discount. In the middle, others are happiest with a partial upfront payment and a discount that falls in between the two other options. In order to meet this wide range of preferences we are adding 3 Year No Upfront Standard Reserved Instances for most of the current generation instance types. We are also reducing prices for No Upfront Reserved Instances, Convertible Reserved Instances, and General Purpose M4 instances (both On-Demand and Reserved Instances). This is our 61^st AWS Price Reduction.

Here are the details (all changes and reductions are effective immediately):

New No Upfront Payment Option for 3 Year Standard RIs – We previously offered a no upfront payment option with a 1 year term for Standard RIs. Today, we are adding a No Upfront payment option with a 3 year term for C4, M4, R4, I3, P2, X1, and T2 Standard Reserved Instances.

Lower Prices for No Upfront Reserved Instances – We are lowering the prices for No Upfront 1 Year Standard and 3 Year Convertible Reserved Instances for the C4, M4, R4, I3, P2, X1, and T2 instance types by up to 17%, depending on instance type, operating system, and region.

Here are the average reductions for No Upfront Reserved Instances for Linux in several representative regions:

Lower Prices for Convertible Reserved Instances – Convertible Reserved Instances allow you to change the instance family and other parameters associated with the RI at any time; this allows you to adjust your RI inventory as your application evolves and your needs change. We are lowering the prices for 3 Year Convertible Reserved Instances by up to 21% for most of the current generation instances (C4, M4, R4, I3, P2, X1, and T2).

Here are the average reductions for Convertible Reserved Instances for Linux in several representative regions:

Similar reductions will go into effect for nearly all of the other regions as well.

Lower Prices for M4 Instances – We are lowering the prices for M4 Linux instances by up to 7%.

Visit the EC2 Reserved Instance Pricing Page and the EC2 Pricing Page, or consult the AWS Price List API for all of the new prices.

Learn More
The following blog posts contain additional information about some of the improvements that we have made to the EC2 Reserved Instance model:

• New – Instance Size Flexibility for EC2 Reserved Instances – This post introduces the ability to use a single RI for multiple instance sizes within an instance family and region.
• EC2 Reserved Instance Update – Convertible RIs and Regional Benefit – This post introduces the regional benefit (waiving the capacity reservation in exchange for the ability to run an instance in any AZ within the region) and the Convertible RIs that allow you to change the instance family and other parameters.
• Simplifying the EC2 Reserved Instance Model – This post introduces the 3 payment options (All Upfront, Partial Upfront, and No Upfront).

You can also read AWS Pricing and the Reserved Instances FAQ to learn more.

— Jeff;

At AWS we have had a number of HIPAA eligible service announcements. Patrick Combes, the Healthcare and Life Sciences Global Technical Leader at AWS, and Aaron Friedman, a Healthcare and Life Sciences Partner Solutions Architect at AWS, have written this post to tell you all about it.

-Ana

We are pleased to announce that the following AWS services have been added to the BAA in recent weeks: Amazon API Gateway, AWS Direct Connect, AWS Database Migration Service, and Amazon SQS. All four of these services facilitate moving data into and through AWS, and we are excited to see how customers will be using these services to advance their solutions in healthcare. While we know the use cases for each of these services are vast, we wanted to highlight some ways that customers might use these services with Protected Health Information (PHI).

As with all HIPAA-eligible services covered under the AWS Business Associate Addendum (BAA), PHI must be encrypted while at-rest or in-transit. We encourage you to reference our HIPAA whitepaper, which details how you might configure each of AWS’ HIPAA-eligible services to store, process, and transmit PHI. And of course, for any portion of your application that does not touch PHI, you can use any of our 90+ services to deliver the best possible experience to your users. You can find some ideas on architecting for HIPAA on our website.

Amazon API Gateway
Amazon API Gateway is a web service that makes it easy for developers to create, publish, monitor, and secure APIs at any scale. With PHI now able to securely transit API Gateway, applications such as patient/provider directories, patient dashboards, medical device reports/telemetry, HL7 message processing and more can securely accept and deliver information to any number and type of applications running within AWS or client presentation layers.

One particular area we are excited to see how our customers leverage Amazon API Gateway is with the exchange of healthcare information. The Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) specification will likely become the next-generation standard for how health information is shared between entities. With strong support for RESTful architectures, FHIR can be easily codified within an API on Amazon API Gateway. For more information on FHIR, our AWS Healthcare Competency partner, Datica, has an excellent primer.

AWS Direct Connect
Some of our healthcare and life sciences customers, such as Johnson & Johnson, leverage hybrid architectures and need to connect their on-premises infrastructure to the AWS Cloud. Using AWS Direct Connect, you can establish private connectivity between AWS and your datacenter, office, or colocation environment, which in many cases can reduce your network costs, increase bandwidth throughput, and provide a more consistent network experience than Internet-based connections.

In addition to a hybrid-architecture strategy, AWS Direct Connect can assist with the secure migration of data to AWS, which is the first step to using the wide array of our HIPAA-eligible services to store and process PHI, such as Amazon S3 and Amazon EMR. Additionally, you can connect to third-party/externally-hosted applications or partner-provided solutions as well as securely and reliably connect end users to those same healthcare applications, such as a cloud-based Electronic Medical Record system.

AWS Database Migration Service (DMS)
To date, customers have migrated over 20,000 databases to AWS through the AWS Database Migration Service. Customers often use DMS as part of their cloud migration strategy, and now it can be used to securely and easily migrate your core databases containing PHI to the AWS Cloud. As your source database remains fully operational during the migration with DMS, you minimize downtime for these business-critical applications as you migrate your databases to AWS. This service can now be utilized to securely transfer such items as patient directories, payment/transaction record databases, revenue management databases and more into AWS.

Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS)
Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) is a message queueing service for reliably communicating among distributed software components and microservices at any scale. One way that we envision customers using SQS with PHI is to buffer requests between application components that pass HL7 or FHIR messages to other parts of their application. You can leverage features like SQS FIFO to ensure your messages containing PHI are passed in the order they are received and delivered in the order they are received, and available until a consumer processes and deletes it. This is important for applications with patient record updates or processing payment information in a hospital.

Let’s get building!
We are beyond excited to see how our customers will use our newly HIPAA-eligible services as part of their healthcare applications. What are you most excited for? Leave a comment below.

Spring is here, the flowers are blooming and Tina Barr is back with more great startups for you to check out!

-Ana

Welcome back to another month of hot AWS-powered startups! Today we have three exciting startups:

• Beekeeper – simplifying employee communication in the workplace.
• Betterment – making investing easier for everyone.
• ClearSlide – a leading sales engagement platform.

Be sure to check out our March hot startups in case you missed them.

Beekeeper (Zurich, Switzerland)
Flavio Pfaffhauser and Christian Grossmann, both graduates of ETH Zurich, were passionate about building a technology that would connect and bring people together. What started as a student’s social community soon turned into Beekeeper – a communication platform for the workplace that allows employees to interact wherever they are. As Flavio and Christian learned how to build a social platform that engaged people properly, businesses began requesting a platform that could be adapted to their specific processes and needs. The platform started with the concept of helping people feel as if they are sitting right next to each other, whether they’re at a desk or in the field. Founded in 2012, Beekeeper is focused on improving information sharing, communication and peer collaboration, and the company strongly believes that listening to employees is crucial for organizations.

The “Mobile First, Desktop Friendly” platform has a simple and intuitive interface that easily integrates multiple operating systems into one ecosystem. The interface can be styled and customized to match a company’s brand and identity. Employees can connect with their colleagues anytime and anywhere with private and group chats, video and file sharing, and feedback surveys. With Beekeeper’s analytical dashboard leadership teams can identify trending topics of discussion and track employee engagement and app usage in real-time. Beekeeper is currently connecting users in 137 countries across industries including hospitality, construction, transportation, and more.

Beekeeper likes using AWS because it allows their engineers to focus on the things that really matter; solving customer issues. The company builds its infrastructure using services like Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, and Amazon RDS, all of which allow the technical teams to offload administrative tasks. Amazon Elastic Transcoder and Amazon QuickSight are used to build analytical dashboards and Amazon Redshift for data warehousing.

Check out the Beekeeper blog to keep up with their latest news!

Betterment (New York, NY)
Betterment is on a mission to make investing easier and more accessible for everyone, no matter their financial goal. In 2008, Jon Stein founded Betterment with the intent to reinvent the industry and save future investors from making the same common mistakes he had been making. At that time, most people only had a couple of options when it came to investing their money – either do it yourself or hire another person to do it for you. Unfortunately, financial advisors are sometimes paid to recommend certain investments even if it’s not what is best for their clients. Betterment only chooses investments that are in their customer’s best interest and align with their financial goals. Today, they are the largest, independent online investment advisor managing more than $8 billion in assets for over 240,000 customers.

Betterment uses technology to make investing easier and more efficient, while also helping to increase after-tax returns. They offer a wide range of financial planning services that are personalized to their customer’s life goals. To start an investment plan, customers can input their age, retirement status, and annual income and Betterment will recommend how much money to invest and which type of account is the right choice. They will invest and manage it in a way that many traditional investment services can’t at a lower cost.

The engineers at Betterment are constantly working to build industry-changing technology as quickly as possible to help customers maximize their money. AWS gives Betterment the flexibility to easily provision infrastructure and offload functions to various services that once required entire teams to manage. When they first started in the cloud, Betterment was using standard implementations of Amazon EC2, Amazon RDS, and Amazon S3. Since they’ve gone all in with AWS, they have been leveraging services like Amazon Redshift, AWS Lambda, AWS Database Migration Service, Amazon Kinesis, Amazon DynamoDB, and more. Today, they are using over 20 AWS services to develop, test, and deploy features and enhancements on a daily basis.

Learn more about Betterment here.

ClearSlide (San Francisco, CA)
ClearSlide is one of today’s leading sales engagement platforms, offering a complete and integrated tool that makes every customer interaction successful. Since their founding in 2009, ClearSlide has looked for ways to improve customer experiences and have developed numerous enablement tools for sales leaders and teams, marketing, customer support teams, and more. The platform puts content, communication channels, and insights at their customer’s fingertips to help drive better decisions and manage opportunities. ClearSlide serves thousands of companies including Comcast, the Sacramento Kings, The Economist, and so far their customers have generated over 750 million minutes of engagement!

ClearSlide offers a solution for all parts of the sales process. For sales leaders, ClearSlide provides engagement dashboards to improve deal visibility, coaching, and sales forecast accuracy. For marketing and sales enablement teams, they guide sellers to the right content, at the right time, in the right context, and provide insight to maximize content ROI. For sales reps, ClearSlide integrates communications, content, and analytics in a single platform experience. Communications can be made across email, in-person or online meetings, web, or social. Today, ClearSlide customers report a 10-20% increase in closed deals, 25% decrease in onboarding time for new reps, and a 50-80% reduction in selling costs.

ClearSlide uses a range of AWS services, but Amazon EC2 and Amazon RDS have made the biggest impact on their business. EC2 enables them to easily scale compute capacity, which is critical for a fast-growing startup. It also provides consistency during deployment – from development and integration to staging and production. RDS reduces overhead and allows ClearSlide to scale their database infrastructure. Since AWS takes care of time-consuming database management tasks, ClearSlide sees a reduction in operations costs and can focus on being more strategic with their customers.

Watch this video to learn how LiveIntent reduced sales cycles by 22% using ClearSlide. Get all the latest updates by following them on Twitter!

Thanks for checking out another month of awesome AWS-powered startups!

-Tina

As one of the most venerable members of the AWS family of services, Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) is an essential part of many applications. Presentations such as Amazon SQS for Better Architecture and Massive Message Processing with Amazon SQS and Amazon DynamoDB explain how SQS can be used to build applications that are resilient and highly scalable.

Today we are making SQS even more useful by adding support for server-side encryption. You can now choose to have SQS encrypt messages stored in both Standard and FIFO queues using an encryption key provided by AWS Key Management Service (KMS). You can choose this option when you create your queue and you can also set it for an existing queue.

SSE encrypts the body of the message, but does not touch the queue metadata, the message metadata, or the per-queue metrics. Adding encryption to an existing queue does not encrypt any backlogged messages. Similarly, removing encryption leaves backlogged messages encrypted.

Creating an Encrypted Queue
The newest version of the AWS Management Console allows you to choose between Standard and FIFO queues using a handy graphic:

You can set the attributes for the queue and the optional Dead Letter Queue:

And you can now check Use SSE and select the desired key:

You can use the AWS-managed Customer Master Key (CMK) which is unique for each customer and region, or you can create and manage your own keys. If you choose to use your own keys, don’t forget to update your KMS key policies so that they allow for encryption and decryption of messages.

You can also configure the data reuse period. This interval controls how often SQS refreshes cryptographic information from KMS, and can range from 1 minute up to 24 hours. Using a shorter interval can improve your security profile, but increase your KMS costs.

To learn more, read the SQS SSE FAQ and the documentation for Server-Side Encryption.

Available Now
Server-side encryption is available today in the US West (Oregon) and US East (Ohio) Regions, with support for others in the works.

There is no charge for the use of encryption, but you will be charged for the calls that SQS makes to KMS. To learn more about this, read How do I Estimate My Customer Master Key (CMK) Usage Costs.

— Jeff;

It is really interesting to watch as technology evolves and improves. For example, today’s mobile phones offer screens with resolution that rivals a high-end desktop, along with multiple connectivity options and portability.

Earlier this week I had the opportunity to get some hands-on experience with the brand-new Samsung Galaxy S8+ phone and a unique new companion device called the Samsung DeX Station. I installed the Amazon WorkSpaces client for Android tablet on the phone, entered the registration code for my WorkSpace, and logged in. You can see all of this in action in my new video:

DeX includes USB connectors for your keyboard and mouse, and can also communicate with them using Bluetooth. It also includes a cooling fan, a fast phone charger, plus HDMI and Ethernet ports (You can also use your phone’s cellular or Wi-Fi connections).

Bring it all together and you can get to your cloud-based desktop from just about anywhere. Travel light, use the TV / monitor in your hotel room, and enjoy full access to your corporate network, files, and other resources.

— Jeff;

PS – If you want to know more about my working environment, check out I Love my Amazon WorkSpace.