>> Narrator: 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.
(sound cuts out)
2017, along with Stu Miniman,
I'm John Walls and you're watching The Cube
as we continue with what's happening here.
About five thousand people on the show floor
and they said some twenty thousand registrants.
Right Stew?
That people came in and wanted to watch the keynotes live.
>> It could be ten thousand that walked
through before the days--
>> Right, it's hard to tell.
>> Yeah.
>> And right now half of them are
outside looking for a cab I think.
That's the way it works here.
Ryan Kroonenburg is also here.
He's the founder of a company called A Cloud Guru.
>> Yes.
>> I like Ryan already.
I liked him as soon as we met him because he said,
"like the beer, Kroonenburg."
So you resonated with the two of us, Ryan.
>> Ryan like the airline and Kroonenburg like the beer.
>> We appreciate that.
Alright, so you're a cloud education company.
>> Yes.
>> And you bill yourself or at least in the 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.
It began with your brother?
>> Yes, yeah.
>> 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 on-line 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.
>> Ryan, bring is in a little inside 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 LAN to server list
from pretty early on that.
>> Exactly, so we practice what we preach.
You know, we are real AWS engineers.
We built the entire platform serverlessly.
We think we're the world's first serverless start-up.
We're certainly the world's first
serverless learning management system.
So we don't pay for any servers whatsoever.
There's no virtual/physical servers.
And we're basically, purely AWS native.
We do use a bunch of third party services
like Xero and PayPal and things like that.
But most of our platforms are AWS.
>> Yeah, in the keynote this morning,
Adrian Cockroft talked about Bustle,
A New York based start-up
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?
Do the investors looks at that
and say, wow, this is a great model?
>> 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.
A guy called Andy
and he's 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 like finding the right employees
and all of that sort of thing, so that's
where we're getting some help.
>> Alright, 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?
>> 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 Guru.
The other problem people are having is,
AWS innovates so quickly.
You know, there's like a thousand updates last year.
There's 19 new updates last week.
So there 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 the great thing about New York Summit
is there's been like five or six announcements here
so I'm 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?
In terms of you staying on top of it, right?
Because now you have to. >> Ryan: Yeah.
>> I mean, you, you're it, right?
You're the point of expertise.
So how do you ...
I guess, remain in that kind
of relationship with AWS that you're the cusp?
>> So, I obviously read all the blogs.
Our students, We've got 300,000
students right now and our discussion forums
are very very active so if they have announced
something that I've missed, the students
tell me, like, we'll 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.
>> John: Sure. 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 how many are kind of repeat customers?
>> We've got 300,00 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.
Sitting these exams can be quite stressful.
In terms of the number of students that actually go on
to get certified, that's not something we track just yet,
but we're looking to change that as well.
But yeah, we have a very good pass rate.
>> So how does it work?
I want to learn, you know, whatever.
I want to dive into AI, whatever it is.
I come to you, you've got something for me there right?
You've got, 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 video training.
Online video training.
So say you want to learn DynamoDB.
We have a 19 hour course on that.
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.
To actually go and do it yourself.
So people watch the labs, do the stuff
themselves and then complete the course.
If it's a certification course,
then at the end what they'll do is 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 server lists.
What are you looking for,
for kind of the maturation?
Is there anything that do you give feedback to Amazon?
The community give you feedback?
I have to imagine that there's
some good feedback loops there?
>> Yeah, I'm lucky enough to be an AWS community hero.
So we get get briefed by Amazon
on things that are coming out.
You know, under MDA of course.
We give a lot of feedback on that.
No, I think serverless is the next big revolution.
I hate hype and buzz words and things like that,
but the thing about serverless is that,
now you don't have to worry about servers.
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 like ridiculously cheap.
You get a million lambda implications a month for free.
That'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 its amazing.
It's driving new revolution.
>> 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 build our entire business off AWS.
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, they take all...
They take care of all of the heavy lifting for you.
>> So I know you are 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. >> Ryan: Yeah.
>> 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
is a good friend of mine.
So I definitely recommended 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 reduce their prices all the time.
So it is a good vendor to be with.
>> I just think your story is great.
I think that the best "no" you
ever got in your life was from AWS.
And now you're giving them a big "yes".
>> Yeah, absolutely, I love AWS.
They're such amazing people as well.
They've all become my--
through my business and people I used to work with
have all become really good friends of mine as well.
It's been a great journey in last two years.
>> You've done well for them, they've done well for you.
It's a good relationship.
>> Exactly.
>> Ryan, thanks for being with us.
>> Thank you.
>> And continued success.
>> Right, thanks guys.
>> Good for you.
You bet, Ryan Kroonenburg.
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 Cube.
(fast music)