Remind101, Inc. was one of the select AWS customers to take the stage during Amazon re:Invent 2015. Remind isn’t the largest technology company, but it does have an important mission: to improve how teachers communicate with parents.

“If you can get the parents engaged in the students’ education, they’re going to be able to help their kids to do better,” said Jason Fischl, VP of engineering for Remind. “We try to close that loop. We brought that communication to mobile. When we did, we saw a big impact.”

Fischl told John Furrier, cohost of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, that Remind moved most of its infrastructure to Amazon’s ECS container platform. “We’re starting to see a lot of traction on that platform that we open sourced,” he said.

Fischl said that using Amazon ECS, Remind created a process for teachers to instant message parents with homework and other information about their students. “Getting parents engaged is hard, and e-mail is a poor channel,” he said. “If parents get messages on their mobile phone, they’ll look at them right then and there, and be more interactive.”

Using ECS means that Remind has almost no downtime. “We use auto-scaling with ECS,” Fischl explained. “We have about 36 container instances that run all of the containers. If servers go down, auto-scaling brings them back up.”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of Amazon re:Invent 2015.

Photo by SiliconANGLE