TLDR: Thank you for following us here! Join us on our new blog at https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/startups/

Anyone who blogs knows that writing a post is much harder than it seems. With so many amazing contributions we’ve received, so many of you have kept our blog interesting and insightful. We’ve developed an amazing group of followers who’ve enthusiastically commented on and shared our posts regularly. With so much activity, we wanted to create a space that allowed us to share even more customer stories, more insights, and more announcements with an even wider audience. With that idea in mind, we’ve launched a new site, and we hope you will come check it out and continue to follow our blog posts at the new AWS Startups blog. It has been a sincere pleasure serving you over the last 2 years on Medium.

We welcome any input you might have regarding our new site. Should you have any topic of interest that you would like us to cover, or something you’d like to contribute yourself, please don’t hesitate to contact us. We welcome original content as we want to keep the AWS Startups blog as knowledgeable, helpful, and interesting to others as possible.

Thank you for following us and enjoying our blog, and reading all of the stories we’ve shared with you here. Remember, you can always stay up-to-date by subscribing to our blog’s RSS feed, 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.

Thank you for following AWS Startups! was originally published in AWS Startup Collection on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Thanks for being a part of the AWS Startups community! We love our loyal @AWSstartups Twitter audience, and thank you for making us one of your social channels of choice. Whether you’re already one of our followers, or would like to become one, we want to show our appreciation to you. This week, we will be giving away an Amazon Echo to one lucky winner!

To join in on the fun, please follow these two steps:

· CLICK here to enter this week’s @AWSstartups Follower Appreciation Giveaway and follow the landing page instructions. Once you’re there, click the Amazon box if you’re already following us, or click the button to follow us first, then click the Amazon box that pops up to see if you’ve won.

· SHARE this with your friends and colleagues!

That’s it! And, remember to check back on @AWSstartups each week, or here on the AWS Startups blog, to enter that week’s giveaway. Thank you for playing, and for being part of our AWS Startups community!

See Complete Rules: http://amzn.to/2cd0osu.

Guest bio

Noel is an energetic digital media fanatic, with a diverse background in Technology Partnerships and Channel Sales. When she’s not developing partner strategies or attending industry conferences, you can find Noel enjoying live music or hiking around New England. Follow Noel on Twitter @Media_Banter.

About Crimson Hexagon

At Crimson Hexagon, we focus on delivering actionable social insights for the enterprise. This month we will surpass 1-trillion indexed posts, giving our users access to the largest data set of any social analysis platform.

Our product, ForSight, enables users to analyze conversations to surface trends, find market influencers, and measure the emotional sentiment of consumers. The platform can even be trained with our machine learning algorithm to further categorize the conversation, as shown in the following screenshot.

Growing pains

At the start of 2013, we suffered through growing pains as we tried to keep up with the analysis demand that came with our expanding customer base. With the sharp increase in demand for social media insights from our ForSight platform came spikes in analysis load. At times we were vulnerable to congestion, so analysis run times became unpredictable. We needed to be able to scale our data and analysis resources to meet this demand. Our goal was to enable any monitor to run insights in an hour or less, no matter the concurrent load of historical data.

Why Crimson Hexagon chose the AWS platform

When considering new service offerings, AWS was the clear choice. The initial migration to AWS allowed us to quickly scale our offering and reduce run times by 82%. Using their extensive API, we accommodated our customer needs by dynamically provisioning computing capacity in response to spikes in ForSight analysis demand. We also implemented Amazon SQS to decouple our data, alongside our own internal task queue to accommodate all of our in-depth services.

More data, faster speeds

Thanks to AWS, Crimson Hexagon has been able to easily scale our infrastructure while the size of our social index has more than doubled over the last few years. We can offer our clients access to as much data as they like without limitations on keywords or volume, unlike our competition. Moreover, in recent testing, our median report run time has now been reduced by 97% since initial implementation.

Contact us

Crimson Hexagon’s platform delivers on-demand social insights for the enterprise. If you are interested in learning more about our offering, ForSight, sign up for a free product demonstration.

How Crimson Hexagon Increased Productivity by 82% was originally published in AWS Startup Collection on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Week 3 is here! Thanks for being a part of the AWS Startups community! We love our loyal @AWSstartups Twitter audience, and thank you for making us one of your social channels of choice. Whether you’re already one of our followers, or would like to become one, we want to show our appreciation to you. This week, we will be giving away an Amazon Fire TV Gaming Edition to one lucky winner! Check back here during the next week as well, to enter our week 4 giveaway.

To join in on the fun, please follow these three steps:

· CLICK here to enter this week’s @AWSstartups Follower Appreciation Giveaway and follow the landing page instructions (one new prize awarded each week, for the next two weeks). Once you’re there, click the Amazon box if you’re already following us, or click the button to follow us first, then click the Amazon box that pops up to see if you’ve won.

· WATCH our @AWSstartups Twitter page, or check back here each of the next two Mondays and look for the link to each week’s special prize giveaway.

· SHARE this with your friends and colleagues!

That’s it! And, remember to check back on @AWSstartups each week, or here on the AWS Startups blog, to enter that week’s giveaway. Thank you for playing, and for being part of our AWS Startups community!

See Complete Rules: http://amzn.to/2cd0osu.

I always get the best ideas while I’m in the middle of another task, but trying to capture those thoughts and convince others of their brilliance is another story. Just knowing that your idea could be tossed aside before you’ve had a chance to explain yourself can be nerve-wracking. So I jumped at the chance to attend “Pivots, Disruptions & Synergies — Oh My!,” an event focused on presentation and pitching best practices for startups at the AWS Pop-up Loft in San Francisco.

As we all piled into the third floor on that late Thursday afternoon, our moderator from The Outcast Agency introduced us to our panel of speakers: WIRED staff writer, Davey Alba, TechCrunch Editor-At-Large, Josh Constine, and The New York Times technology reporter, Katie Brenner. The energy in the crowded room was palpable as founders from speech technology companies to developers of the next shared economy app eagerly waited for the event to begin.

So what’s the secret to successfully pitching your startup? By sticking to the following five strategies, your competition won’t stand a chance.

“You’re more likely to try a product because your friend told you about it. Not because we did.” — Josh Constine, TechCrunch, Editor-At-Large

1. Know who your audience is

One pitch does not fit all. A reporter from TechCrunch will be looking for something very different than a reporter from The New York Times. Understanding who your audience is will help you pick the best angle to highlight. For example, at TechCrunch, Constine doesn’t need to tie a story into a larger narrative; instead, he can look for startups of interest, such as those focused in virtual reality (VR), artificial intelligence (AI), drones, and robotics. But, Alba from WIRED likes a good hook, a small story that can lead into a larger story. Knowing who you’re pitching to will help you figure out how best to approach them. Constine explained that all true traction comes from word of mouth, with Brenner echoing that journalists at The New York Times strive to be neutral and want to tell a story, not simply promote your startup.

2. Follow the basic structure of pitching

Pitches are most effective when they are short and simple. These basic principles will help you achieve maximum effectiveness:

· Start by explaining what your startup does

· State the problem that you’re tackling

· Explain how you’re solving the problem

· Provide evidence for why your solution is optimal

All three reporters agreed that if startups can master these principles, their chances of being featured would greatly improve.

3. Select the best method of communication

We’ve come a long way in our quest to communicate, from carrier pigeons to telegrams to postal mail and all the way to electronic mail, but that doesn’t mean email is best. While nearly everyone preferred email to a phone call, others liked text messages instead. And, while all three reporters had different preferences, they all agreed that building relationships was essential. For Brenner, stories are largely published based on relationships. Although she might not publish a story right away, she’ll often look back through her contacts when opportunities arise. How you connect and with whom is just as important as what you communicate.

4. Let your startup stage dictate your PR strategy

Lots of startups focus on getting recognition in a big, national publication, which Constine described as their “unicorn.” Getting that one story might help them, but it’s extremely difficult to land. According to Constine, PR is helpful for recruiting, fundraising, gaining traction and users, but that doesn’t mean you should go all in so soon. Tactics at each stage include the following:

· Pre-series A stage

Ignore press and just focus on your product. A strong product generates buzz on its own.

· Post-series A stage

Find evangelists — users who loves your product — and start building relationships with them. Relationship building should be your main focus.

· Build/Hire a PR team stage

If you’re ready to hire a PR team, then you’re ready to go after big publications like The New York Times.

5. Remember the 3 Bs

Be conversational. Use everyday language instead of dense technical jargon. Don’t say you’re revolutionary, game-changing, or the next Uber, Facebook, or AirBnB. Those are big shoes to fill. If your product really is revolutionary it will speak for itself.

Be concise. Share something short that will peak a journalist’s interest. Don’t tell them how to write the story or provide your entire work history.

Be consistent. Always follow up. That second email helps! Your goal is to maintain a connection with the journalist, not simply send him or her a press release. Constine explained that he responds to only about 10% of the pitches he gets, and that building relationships is extremely important.

Remember that no one likes phone calls. Email is better, but text is best. Engage with journalists and aim to build relationships. Don’t forget that Twitter is insanely popular, and journalists are always paying attention to their mentions (HINT!).

Now you’re all set to put together a successful pitch and land your next big story. Special thanks to The Outcast Agency, Davey Alba, Josh Constine, and Katie Brenner for the insightful and entertaining evening.

Five tips every startup should know for building strong relationships and PR buzz was originally published in AWS Startup Collection on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Thank you for being a part of the AWS Startups community! We love our loyal @AWSstartups Twitter audience, and we thank you for making us one of your social channels of choice. Whether you’re already one of our followers, or would like to become one, we want to show our appreciation to you. This week, we will be giving away an Amazon Fire HD 6 Tablet to one lucky winner! Check back here during the next two weeks as well, to enter our week 3 and week 4 giveaways.

To join in on the fun, please follow these three steps:

· CLICK here to enter this week’s @AWSstartups Follower Appreciation Giveaway and follow the landing page instructions (one new prize awarded each week, for the next three weeks). Once you’re there, click the Amazon box if you’re already following us, or click the button to follow us first, then click the Amazon box that pops up to see if you’ve won.

· WATCH our @AWSstartups Twitter page, or check back here each of the next two Mondays and look for the link to each week’s special prize giveaway.

· SHARE this with your friends and colleagues!

That’s it! And, remember to check back on @AWSstartups each of the next two Mondays, or here on the AWS Startups blog, to enter that week’s giveaway. Thank you for playing, and for being part of our AWS Startups community!

See Complete Rules: http://amzn.to/2cd0osu.

Comparethemarket.com is one of the UK’s leading providers of price comparison services, and also one of the country’s most well-known household brands because of its meerkat marketing campaigns. But its popularity didn’t come from clever marketing alone.

“We view technology as a competitive advantage. When you are operating in an industry as competitive as price comparison services, you need to outpace others by delivering new applications and features faster, at higher quality and lower cost,” says Matthew Collinge, Associate Director of Technology and Architecture at comparethemarket.com. “For us, the key to this is embracing agile development methodologies, continuous delivery, open-source technology, and cloud computing.”

To reduce friction during development and achieve the performance needed for the most demanding workloads, comparethemarket.com is using MongoDB as the operational backend for an increasing number of microservices across the company. MongoDB replaced Microsoft SQL Server, which proved difficult to scale as the company’s services became popular and traffic skyrocketed.

Comparethemarket.com currently runs a hybrid environment with some of its older services running on-premises, while newer microservices are deployed in Amazon Web Services (AWS). However, plans are already in place to move everything to the cloud. Each microservice uses its own MongoDB database, with Apache Kafka used between services to maintain synchronization. Orchestration and continuous delivery is made easier using Docker. Finally, the data is pulled into Hadoop to be aggregated and processed with historical data to build enriched “data products.” Comparethemarket.com is also evaluating Spark and using AWS Lambda functions to further automate data processing.

By moving to a microservices architecture built on MongoDB and AWS, comparethemarket.com was able to cut their project timelines in half and ensure service uptime by distributing their MongoDB deployments across Availability Zones.

MongoDB Atlas: Get Started in Minutes

MongoDB Atlas is a new hosted database as a service for MongoDB that makes it easier than ever to set up, operate, and scale your MongoDB deployments in the cloud. The offering recently debuted on AWS and is offered on demand. With MongoDB Atlas, users get the benefits of a flexible, highly available, and elastically scalable database without having to worry about the operational overhead of managing their clusters. MongoDB best practices are built in and automated, data is highly secure by default, and otherwise complex operations are reduced to just a few clicks in the MongoDB Atlas UI.

Accelerating Innovation at Comparethemarket.com with Microservices Powered by MongoDB and AWS was originally published in AWS Startup Collection on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Thank you for being a part of the AWS Startups community! We love our loyal @AWSstartups Twitter audience, and we thank you for making us one of your social channels of choice. Whether you’re already one of our followers, or would like to become one, we want to show our appreciation to you. Starting today, October 17, we will be giving away a special prize to one winner each week for the next four weeks*!

To join in on the fun, please follow these three steps:

· WATCH our @AWSstartups Twitter page every Monday, starting today, for each of the next three Mondays and look for the link to each week’s special prize giveaway.

· CLICK here to enter this week’s @AWSstartups Follower Appreciation Giveaway and follow the landing page instructions (one new prize awarded each week, for four weeks). Once you’re there, click the Amazon box if you’re already following us, or click to follow us first, then click the Amazon box to see if you’ve won.

· SHARE this with your friends and colleagues!

That’s it! And, remember to check back on @AWSstartups each of the next three Mondays, or here on the AWS Startups blog to enter that week’s giveaway. Thank you for playing, and for being part of our AWS Startups community!

See Complete Rules: http://amzn.to/2cd0osu.

Streaming data processing has become increasingly prevalent. As a result, different platforms and frameworks have been introduced to reduce the complexity. As Datapipe’s data and analytics consultants, we are frequently asked by customers to help pick the right solution for them. As a result of our customer engagements, we decided to share our findings in our Apache Kafka vs. Amazon Kinesis whitepaper. In this post, we summarize some of the whitepaper’s important takeaways.

Apache Kafka or Amazon Kinesis?

Both Apache Kafka and Amazon Kinesis are data ingest frameworks/platforms that are meant to help with ingesting data durably, reliably, and with scalability in mind. Both offerings share common core concepts, including replication, sharding/partitioning, and application components (consumer and producers).

However, before you build a real-time application, you should consider some key differences between the two:

1. Apache Kafka is an open-source, distributed messaging solution that initially was developed at LinkedIn. As a user, you are responsible for installing and managing clusters, and you also are responsible for ensuring high availability, durability, and failure recovery. In contrast, Amazon Kinesis is a managed platform, so you don’t have to be concerned with hosting the software and the resources.

2. The cost of using either solution varies considerably. Apache Kafka requires that you host and manage the framework. That means you are responsible for picking the right compute resources and storage capabilities, getting involved in capacity planning, and managing failure detection and recovery. All of these considerations result in resource costs (such as EC2 instances) and human costs (such as DevOps engineers). In contrast, given the hosted nature of Amazon Kinesis, the resource and human costs are significantly lower. However, in certain cases Apache Kafka is more cost effective and should be carefully considered as a suitable option for certain data ingest patterns.

3. There are also architectural differences such as end-to-end data ingest, consumption latency, and scalability models. For example, in order to scale Apache Kafka, you have to monitor for hot partitions and move or add partitions as needed. In contrast, Amazon Kinesis provides scalability by allowing you to split a given shard to increase capacity or join two shards to reduce capacity for lower cost.

4. The last section of the whitepaper provides a high-level overview of the producer and consumer APIs of the two solutions. Given that the user applications are directly affected by how the APIs work, it’s important to pay attention to what features are supported by either solution. For example, Apache Kafka provides the ability to retain the last known message in the queue. This feature allows users to de-duplicate data based on a given key. Amazon Kinesis, on the other hand, does not provide this feature; you have to build this capability by using the API.

For an in-depth analysis of the two solutions in terms of core concepts, architecture, cost analysis, and the application API differences, see the Apache Kafka vs. Amazon Kinesis whitepaper.

This post and the whitepaper focus on the data ingest component of your architecture, but as your organization evolves, the other components of your data analytics capabilities also will change and evolve. As a next generation managed services provider and experts in the public cloud, Datapipe has helped many customers such as Trulia, Milliman, and others with their data analytics needs. If you have questions regarding this post or other projects, feel free to contact us to get in touch with one of our experts. And, hopefully we had a chance to meet you in person last week in San Francisco, where we sponsored the Big Data & Analytics event during the AWS Loft Architecture Week , October 11–13. We also gave a talk at the event called “Working with Apache Kafka and Amazon Kinesis on AWS.”

The tale of two messaging platforms: Apache Kafka and Amazon Kinesis was originally published in AWS Startup Collection on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Traditionally, companies have had to choose between speed and security.

But times are changing and organizations running in AWS can now take advantage of continuous development practices and security without impacting delivery speed.

How? Here are three practical ways to start implementing security for scale:

Integrate Security from the Ground Up

Traditionally, security has been an afterthought. But backpedaling security into existing processes, applications, and environments causes headaches and inefficiency. Instead, integrate security as early as possible by prioritizing visibility into who is doing what, where and when to know exactly what is happening across your AWS environment.

Gaining visibility across your AWS environment is fast and easy when you use a solution that is built for AWS. Threat Stack’s cloud-native platform deploys across an organization’s entire AWS environment in minutes, providing visibility that scales as you grow. This makes security visibility manageable even for the smallest of teams.

Honor the AWS Shared Responsibility Model

Security in the cloud starts with understanding where your cloud provider’s responsibilities end and yours begin. The AWS Shared Responsibility Model makes these distinctions:

Security of the Cloud: AWS is responsible for the security of the cloud itself.

Security in the Cloud: You’re responsible for implementing security in the cloud.

Some of the best practices for achieving security in the cloud, include:

Focus on protecting the workload

Use easy-to-deploy security tools

Make sure your solution is cloud-native

Auto-Scale Security

Security should grow with you, and with minimal intervention. This is especially necessary for agile startups that lack security personnel. It’s important to select a security solution that can auto-scale, meaning that the solutions can grow with you in the cloud and can auto-deploy coverage as new servers spin up, monitoring any number of users and networks.

When embedded in the cloud as early as possible, security can scale seamlessly. Check out Threat Stack to learn more about getting started with securing your AWS environment.

How to Implement Scalable AWS Security Without the Overhead was originally published in AWS Startup Collection on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.