Rapid Prototyping on AWS for SMBs

Key Business Priorities for SMBs

• Growing revenue by creating new value streams and innovative services/products
• Attracting and retaining customers to enhance the business
• Reducing total cost of ownership while driving innovation and efficiency
• Leveraging data-driven decision-making

Challenges Faced by SMBs

• Limited IT staff and skills gap
• Security concerns while building solutions rapidly
• Budget constraints
• Siloed applications and data

The Prototyping Journey

1. Launch: Define functional and non-functional requirements.
2. Demo: Prove the technology can meet requirements, without full business context.
3. Proof of Concept (POC): Add business context to the demo and validate the technology solution.
4. Prototype: Build a full prototype with the business benefits framework, focusing on key business metrics.
5. Pilot: Release the prototype to a small set of users and monitor performance.
6. Market Launch: Roll out the solution to all production users, continuing to monitor and improve.

Serverless Services for Rapid Prototyping

• Serverless services on AWS help focus on business logic, not infrastructure management.
• Benefits include no infrastructure to manage, automatic scaling, pay-only-for-what-you-use pricing, high availability, and security.
• AWS offers a wide portfolio of serverless services for compute, databases, event handling, and more.
• Customers can reduce TCO by up to 68% and development time by up to 54% with serverless.

Using AWS Cloud Development Tools

• Infrastructure as Code (IaC) frameworks like AWS SAM and AWS CDK enable consistent, repeatable environment setup.
• AWS Infrastructure Composer provides a visual interface to compose and configure serverless services.
• Amazon CodeGuru provides recommendations and automated code generation to improve code quality and security.

Demonstrating a Serverless Prototype

• Use case: Automate product image processing and API for retrieving product specifications.
• Architecture:
  • S3 for storing product images
  • Lambda for image processing using Bedrock
  • DynamoDB for storing product specifications
  • API Gateway and Lambda for exposing the product API
• Leverage AWS Infrastructure Composer to visually design the architecture.
• Use Amazon CodeGuru to generate and refine the Lambda function code.

Key Takeaways

• Rapid prototyping on AWS can help SMBs innovate faster and deliver value to customers.
• Leverage serverless services to address infrastructure challenges and focus on business logic.
• Use AWS cloud development tools like Infrastructure Composer and Amazon CodeGuru to accelerate the prototyping process.
• Adopt an agile, iterative approach to continuously improve the solution based on customer feedback.