 Live from Manhattan, it's theCUBE, covering AWS Summit, New York City 2017. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. Welcome back to Midtown. We're at the Javits Center here. 2017 along with Stu Miniman. I'm John Walls and you're watching theCUBE as we continue with what's happening here. About 5,000 people on the show floor and they said some 20,000 registrants, right? I'm sure that Stu, that people came in wanted to watch the keynote slide. There could be 10,000 that walked through before the days. Right, hard to tell. And right now half of them are outside looking for a cab, I think. That's the way it works here. Ryan Kronenberg is also here. He's the founder of a company called a Cloud Guru. I like Ryan already. I like them as soon as we met him because he said, you know, like the beer. Kronenberg, so you resonated with the two of us, Ryan. We appreciate that. So you're a cloud education company and you build yourself, or at least in conversation, as you want to be the Netflix of cloud education. That's what you're doing. Tell us a little bit about the founding of the company, began with your brother just two years ago and now you've grown to some 40 employees. Yeah, so I used to be a solutions architect and I was desperate to get a job at AWS. So I became obsessed with getting trained in AWS. And at the time, a company I worked for had a training freeze. So we couldn't go out and do in-classroom training. If I had to do that myself, I'd have to pay for it myself. And I found that there wasn't a lot of good online training companies two years ago. I didn't get the job with AWS and turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to me. And so I decided to create my own course on AWS. Launched that, started going viral and that was the birth of a cloud guru. So yeah. Ryan, bring us in a little side of building the company. So you're not only teaching cloud, but you're built on cloud and not just any cloud, but using the Lambda server list for pretty early on that. So we practice what we preach. You know, we are real AWS engineers. We've built the entire platform serverlessly. We think we're the world's first serverless startup. We're certainly the world's first serverless learning management system. So we don't pay for any servers whatsoever. There's no virtual or physical servers. And we're basically purely AWS native. We do use a bunch of third party services like Auth0 and PayPal and things like that. But most of our platforms are AWS. In the keynote this morning, Adrian Cockroft talked about Buzzel. It's a New York-based startup that uses a lot of serverless, but you built the company before you even had funding and now you've got a little bit of funding. Can you give any insight to the investors? Look at that and say, wow, this is a great model. Yeah, yeah. So we raised a decent series A. One of the founders of Warby Parker is on our board now. So that's really exciting. The guy called Andy and he is helping us scale. One of the reasons we took funding was helping to scale. So our infrastructure scales automatically with AWS because it's built on Lambda and API Gateway. But we as a company are struggling to scale in finding the right employees and all of that sort of thing. So that's where we're getting some help. All right, what are you hearing from people taking your courses? What new things are they asking for? How are you expanding the scope of your offerings? So everyone is obviously very interested in AWS, but they also want to learn other cloud computing platforms now, especially Azure. So we are expanding the scope of our content to do Azure as well as Google. The other problem people are having is AWS innovates so quickly, there's like 1,000 updates last year, there's 19 new updates last week. So they're having trouble keeping up. So we run just a weekly TV show called AWS this week and we basically just tell people what's new this week. And great thing about New York Summit is there's been like five or six announcements here. So we're going to be busy on Friday filming. Is there any one particular area of training that you see more people drifting toward or following toward? I think serverless and big data are the hot topics. Big data, by that I mean AI machine learning that's just exploding right now. And just serverless architectures because the future of cloud is serverless. Why pay for virtual physical machines by the hour or by the minute and have system administrators, network administrators, database administrators when all you actually want to focus on is your code and your end customers and serverless allows you to do that. So what's your process then? I mean, in terms of you staying on top of it, right? Because now you have to. Yeah. I mean, you're it, right? You're the point of expertise. So how do you I guess remain in that kind of a relationship with AWS that you're at the cusp. So I obviously read all the blogs. Our students, we've got 300,000 students right now in our discussion forums are very, very active. So if they have announced something that I've missed the students tell me, like I will know within a few hours. So that's it really. It's just forever learning, but I love learning anyway. So it's fun to get paid to learn. So yeah. You bet. Ryan, how many people have gone through the training so far? Do you know how many of them get certified after they do that? And you know, how many are kind of repeat customers? So we've got 300,000 have gone through the training so far. We do track our pass rates. Our pass rates vary from anywhere between normally 80 to 90%, not everyone will pass on the first go because the exams are tough. And it's also quite stressful. You know, sitting these exams can be quite stressful. In terms of the number of students actually go on to get certified, that's not something we track just yet, but we're looking to change that as well. So, but yeah, we have a very good pass rate. So how does it work? I want to learn, you know, whatever. I'm going to dive in AI, whatever it is. I come to you. You've got something for me there, right? You've got a, I don't know how many hours of work I have to do, but take us through how it really works. Yeah, so it's a video training, online video training. So say you want to learn DynamoDB. We have a 19 hour course on it and we go right into the very depths of DynamoDB. So you watch the videos. We'll show you what we're doing in the labs. We'll give you all the sample code if we're using code and then you can go and do it yourself. We very much believe in the only way to learn cloud is by getting your hands dirty, just to actually go and do it yourself. So people will watch the labs, do the stuff themselves and then, you know, complete the course. If it's a certification course, then at the end what they'll do is they'll go and book the exam and hopefully they'll pass the exam as well. So, Ryan, you're in there looking at all this stuff, especially things like serverless. What are you looking for, for kind of the maturation? Is there anything that you give feedback to Amazon? The community give you feedback? I have to imagine there's some good feedback loops there. Yeah, I'm lucky enough to be an AWS community hero. So we get briefed by Amazon on things that are coming out, you know, under NDA of course. We give a lot of feedback on that. No, I think serverless is the next big revolution. I hate hype and buzzwords and things like that. But the thing about serverless is that now you don't have to worry about service. You can just focus on your code and you don't need to worry about any of the normal administration behind it. And it's ridiculously cheap. You get a million Lambda invocations a month for free. It's just part of free tier. We actually only just came off of Lambda free tier a couple of months ago and we've got 300,000 students. So it's very, very, very cheap. So it's amazing. It's driving new revolution. Yeah, what advice would you give to someone if they were looking to start a business and using serverless as a platform? Yeah, definitely check out AWS of course. We've built our entire business off AWS. Yeah, design, try if you can, architect everything in a serverless fashion because like I keep saying, you don't have to worry about management of operating systems, virus patching, security, any of that, AWS take all the heavy, they take care of all the heavy lifting for you. So I know you're a big fan of Lambda, but have you looked at some of the other serverless options out there? Is there any concern around, there's open source options out there? How do we get compatibility and not be just locked into Amazon? Azure Functions looks really good. See, this thing about vendor lock in, I mean, you've got the serverless framework as well. If you build your applications on the serverless framework, you can move between platforms quite easily. That is coming. So you could build it out on AWS and then move over to Azure if you wanted. The founder of serverless frameworks, a good friend of mine. So I definitely recommend checking it out. And that would be my advice. If you are going to go serverless, use the serverless framework so then you don't have to worry about vendor lock in. But at the same time, Amazon, they've reduced their prices all the time, so it is a good vendor to be with, so yeah. I just think your story is great. I think that, I mean, the best know you ever got in your life was from AWS. And now you're giving them a big yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. I love AWS. The, you know, yeah, they're such amazing people as well. They've all become my, you know, through my business and people I used to work with, they've all become really good friends of mine as well. So it's been a great journey in the last two years. You've done well for them. They've done well for you. It's a good relationship. Yeah, exactly. Ryan, thanks for being with us. Thank you. And continued success. Great, thanks guys. Good for you. You bet, Ryan Kroenerberg, the founder of a cloud guru, along with his brother, Sam, making a pretty good business out of things on the AWS platform right now. Back with more here from AWS Summit right after this. You're watching the Q.