One of the biggest challenges when growing your startup is ensuring your IT infrastructure growth meets your needs in all aspects: from product growth to cost of maintenance. We hope to help you prepare and manage that challenge.

1. Bootstrap to Billions:
Scaling a Startup on AWS

2. The Importance of Scaling
• It is critical to start with growing the business in mind, and
avoid taking shortcuts along the way that leave you
unprepared and your infrastructure vulnerable
• try to strike the right balance of planning for today and
predicting tomorrow
• The last thing a startup needs to encounter is crippling
technical debt: where you engineer with today in mind, and
when your customers come knocking down your door,
everything grinds to a halt while you rebuild an ill-fitting
architecture.

3. Finding Your Balance
• Learn the available services at
AWS
• Whiteboard it
• Mental-scaling
• The ‘What Happens If’ Exercise
• Tool chest
• Apply what you learn

4. Cost Control and Planning for Growth
• Cost is almost universally a leading concern in
the early growth phase. And AWS can get
pricey if you don’t pay attention to exactly
what you’re using and how you’re using it.
• The short of cost control: We recommend
using spot instances for bursting,
development work, and test systems

5. Leveraging AWS Partners
• There are times where it is smarter and
quicker to leverage subject matter experts to
ensure you are taking everything into
consideration when you venture into
unchartered waters
• An effective way to check and balance AWS is
to use a trusted third party tool to monitor
your performance and get reassurance that
nothing is being hidden

6. Summary
• Startups inherently come with huge risks.
• By thinking through the future growth of your
cloud infrastructure and leveraging tools and
partners, IT doesn’t have to be one of them.
• Using the tactical approach described here to
design and build your infrastructure with AWS
will ensure that you are keeping your bases
covered and securing a solid scaffold for future
growth

7. Download the full whitepaper here
http://copperegg.com/whitepapers/bootstraps/