Momento

Ernest Hemingway said — The shortest answer is doing the thing. When Khawaja was an engineer at NASA, working on processing images from the Mars Rover, he noticed something surprising — it took longer to process an image than it did to send it from Mars to Earth. — He was impatient with the slow process and decided to change it. — He discovered AWS, which gave him access to all the compute he needed. — He used his personal credit card and test data to create a new image processing pipeline. — Fast forward — NASA was using Khawaja's new pipeline to process images from Mars Rover. — Eventually, Khawaja left NASA, went on to work on AWS DynamoDB and AWS Elemental, and discovered serverless caching was broken. — He was impatient yet again. — He launched Momento to solve the problem with Co-founder Daniela Miao. — Figured out what customers want. Raised $15M Series A led by Bain Capital Ventures. — I spoke to Khawaja about the early days at NASA and the challenges in building Momento. — Here are some highlights from my conversation with the Cofounder and CEO of Momento, Khawaja Shams Full conversation ??: → YouTube: https://lnkd.in/gekASenu → Spotify: https://lnkd.in/grU4ia7v → Apple Podcasts: https://lnkd.in/gJZHDS4t → For weekly insights, subscribe here: startupproject.beehiiv.com Website: https://lnkd.in/g8c27Ve2 #Startup #TechPodcast #Serverless #CloudComputing #AWS #InteractiveApps #B2BMarketing #Entrepreneurship #Leadership #AI #Fintech #MediaTech #GamingTech #ProductMarketFit #Caching #CustomerObsession #FoundersJourney

Good metrics make great products! Best metrics capture actual customer experience. Zero Buffer Rates in a Live Video Stream is my favorite metric ??. Instrumenting components manifests leading indicators of problems that may be about to happen and they help quickly root cause problems. Component level metrics are necessary but not sufficient. In a live video stream, the error rates and latencies at the origin really don't capture the direct customer experience. What if the origin latency goes up by an extra 10ms? What if the error rates go up by .001%? Does it matter to the viewers? ZBR captures the percentage of viewers that were able to stream the entire content without a single buffering event. Having this metric allows broadcasters to compare performances of various devices, CDNs, origins, media shields, and even AWS regions (in multi-region scenarios) - while maintaining a baseline for events. This way, they can be clinical about the impact of new capabilities like manifest manipulation or server side ad insertions, etc. Whether you are instrumenting an existing service or building a new one, ask yourself: are your metrics reflecting customer experience? Personally, I like to start from the outside in: customer experience metrics -- > internal component metrics that would impact the customer experience.

S3 is my favorite AWS service! It powers much of AWS behind the scenes, and directly powers much of the internet. It is designed for extreme durability, throughput, and cost of storage. There is no service that beats it on those three dimensions. Nevertheless, it is not a Live Events Media Origin. A media origin needs low tail latencies, incredibly high TPS, and near zero error rates. These dimensions directly impact viewer experience on Zero Buffer Rates, Time to First Frame, and simply enabling viewers to watch an event at the highest possible bit rate. With the help of the S3 and AWS elemental teams, we have been spending a ton of time with media customers to really understand what a purpose built simple origin ought to look like, and we have captured some thoughts on the dimensions that really impact viewer experience and the power of using the right tool for the job ??. https://lnkd.in/gh3Dbf5J

I've been prepping for the training that Anita Ruangrotsakun and I will be giving at #QConSF in November. By porting just a few lines of my node.js Lambda code to Rust, I'm getting almost a 10x perf improvement! ? Come join us for our QCon session to learn how you can get these types of performance improvements in your own apps! It was such a ??moment for me to realize that I could get these kinds of wins without rewriting my whole app, and without knowing very much Rust at all! Here's the link for our training session: https://lnkd.in/ggmAfHWR If you're interested in attending and you're not already registered for QCon, reach out to me for a discount code for the conference! See you in San Francisco!