 is Nevada, extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE, covering AWS re-event 2015. Now your host, John Furrier. Okay, welcome back everybody. You're watching theCUBE here at Amazon re-event in Las Vegas, I'm John Furrier. It's theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm here with Jason Fishel, VP of Engineer of Remind. On stage on the keynote today with Werner Vogels, which had a huge announcement. Obviously the IOT was a huge success. We had exclusive footage on silkenangle.com and silkenangle.tv. But talk about your, what is Remind? Cause you're a big customer. You gave, you were a big case study on stage. Talk about the company and why were you on stage? I think we were on stage for a couple of reasons. One, we, you know, I think we're a very interesting company, we're trying to solve a big problem in education, which is how did, how did teachers communicate with parents and students? But we were also on stage because we're a big user of AWS services. And most recently, we moved a lot of our infrastructure and most of it onto Amazon ECS, which is their container platform. And it's been really great for us. And we're starting to see a lot of traction on that, on that platform that we open sourced a few months ago. So are you guys a startup growing company? How big is the company? What's the size? We're about 60 people right now. About half of that is engineering. We're venture backed based in San Francisco. Which the VCs funded you? Kleiner Perkins was the lead for R&B and C and Social Plus Capital also participated. So they, so Social Plus, they invest in a lot of game changing opportunities. So I know Chimoth just, you know, he's always outspoken but education is a huge thing, access to data. This is kind of democratization. It's also freedom. I guess that's the theme that they had here, but education is broken. And a lot of it's the closed loop, right? I mean, to the parents. What are you guys actually solving? What is the core problem you're solving? And what services are you using to do that? Well, I think one of the challenges that we discovered when we talked to teachers in the classroom was that it's how they communicate with students and with their parents. If you can get the parents engaged in the student's education, then they're going to have they're going to be able to get their kids to do better. And so we try to close that loop because today or maybe in the past, the thing that teachers have been using is paper and email to communicate. They're like, it hasn't changed in a long time. And we have technology of mobile phones. We needed to bring that communication to mobile. And when we started to do that, we started to see big impacts in the classroom. A lot of the time, you know, as a parent, and I'd love to get your take on this. Parents don't know how to approach the teachers or vice versa. And the channels of communications are often non-personal and also lagging, like email. Who checks them in? Some parents are busy. They might not be the personal emails, but they're work email, they table it. Of course they care about their kids. Some parents out there that may not. But if that's not the case as well, you can communicate with them. Is it a parent issue? Is it a technology issue? Is it everything? I mean, what's your big takeaway on that? I think getting parents engaged is hard. And email is a poor channel for it. Because if you're a parent and you're getting, I don't know, you're probably getting hundreds of emails every day. You get an email from your teacher. You maybe don't see it until in the end of the day. You notice it. And then you don't really take action. Whereas, if you get a message on your mobile phone that, you know, here's what your kids are doing for homework, you'll look at it right then and there and take any of that. It's also a lighter gesture touch too. Email can be a formal communication. Hey, do you have time on your schedule? Another test. Can you call me or get me in schedule where an instant message on an app is cleaner? It is cleaner. And you can have rich media and it can be more interactive. Just this year, we started doing two-way messaging where we allow the teacher to go back and forth with the student or the parent or small groups. In the past, we mainly did one-way messaging which is effective, but this is a new use case that we're starting to see a lot of usage of. So do you guys use auto-scaling? We do use auto-scaling. You must need that when the surge of August kicks in or when the school year kicks in. Yep, we use auto-scaling, especially together with ECS. So what happens is, you know, we have about 36 container instances right now that run all of our containers. And if a bunch of servers go down, auto-scaling just brings them right back up for us. And, you know, we don't have, we have almost no downtime. It's, it works super well. Using SQS at all, some queuing stuff as well. We aren't using SQS, we use RabbitMQ, but we're starting to use more and more Kinesis as well for some of the... What about Redshift? What are you guys doing for Redshift? What's your use case for Redshift? That's our data warehouse. So we send every event, every, you know, user interface events, we send all of our deliveries there. And then we can do analysis to figure out what works, what doesn't work. We have a growth team that looks at all of our metrics to try to figure out how to, you know, how to make it work better. How to make it easier for teachers to invite students and parents. How to make it easier for teachers to tell other teachers about the product. How to do these kinds of things. And it's very, very useful for us. Jason, talk about an anecdotal example of where Amazon and your software clicked together, really worked well. That rendered us something that surprised you, like an epiphany or teacher interaction that spawned some great event of, you know, the Epic A plus paper or some social change or anything that, any change. Well, I'll tell you a technical impact first, which is like last year before, or two years ago back to school, we kind of squeaked by without any, we didn't have any major incidents, but we knew that we wouldn't be ready for the one that followed with the current architecture. So that was the first big adoption of AWS. Was that hosted? Was that hosted? That was on Amazon. It was running on Heroku, but we were using Postgres as our, as our main database for everything. And we knew, and Postgres was not going to be able to handle the volume of traffic we were sending it. So we decided to pull out, as a separate set of microservices, the delivery infrastructure. And we built that on top of DynamoDB and Redshift and it worked so well for us. Like we, we did a major overhaul to our architecture. We built it, it took us about five months. We load tested it and then we, we put it in production a couple of months before back to school started last year and it went off without a hitch. And this year as well, that same architecture has scaled with us. We can basically just turn up the volume knobs. And what that does for us is it means that the amount of time that it takes to deliver a message to a teacher, to a student or a parent is reduced. We can start focusing on how long, you know, can we get that down to seconds instead of minutes even when we're sending hundreds of thousands of messages a minute, which is what we do in our peak times. And what about the EC2 container service? What is the use case of that? You port your, do you have a port, older applications or older code? What's the container used for? Well, when we were on Heroku, we were effectively doing containers and we liked the model. You have a nice set of applications with which you can scale up and down independently. And it's in the workflow for developers to deploy stuff is super simple. They just run a CLI client and they can say, oh, I want to create an application. I want to scale it up. I want to scale it down. I want to do, you know, I want to roll back a deployment. And we built a layer called Empire, which is thin layer on top of ECS. And that allows us to do the same things. But now we have more control over the infrastructure because it's running directly on AWS instead of through Heroku. Look, it's your AWS customer, great services you're using. My final question for you is, what's your big takeaway from this show this year? Besides being on stage in front of all those people, I mean, it was packed house. I mean, yesterday, standing room only again today. What was your big takeaway from this event? What's the aha moment? What's the vibe here? Share with the folks who aren't here. What's happening? I think there were a few things, a few of the announcements that we find interesting. You know, like the database migration tool and the fire hose product, which are all things and the analytics, the kinesis analytics, these are all products that my team is already in, like they started investigating on all of the, like four or five of the different services that got announced today. And I suspect that several of those things will end up getting integrated into our services over the next few months. I think containers are the biggest trend though, like from my perspective, I think a lot of people are going to start running Docker containers in production on AWS and other places. It was not, I think a year ago, there were not that many people doing it, but people could see the promise of it. And we decided to take a little bit of a risk in building our technology on top of that, but we couldn't be happier with how well that went for us. Awesome. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE and sharing your insight with us, sharing the data, congratulations on stage. And good luck with your success. Education needs help. They need more apps to get the students, we need more jobs and we need more computer science students. Is there an app for that? We need more engineers working on socially impactful. Can you put a subliminal message in the app, like learn how to code, throw some scripts at them? I think kids are learning how to code now in school. I've got two eight year olds and they're already learning how to code. Yeah, they need more mentoring, that's awesome. And I think this is great app. Good luck with your continued success. This is theCUBE, HeatLive in Las Vegas for eight of us re-invent. We'll be right back with more after this short break.