Building companies with entirely new serverless-style architectures is becoming completely normal. It’s indeed now so accepted, for the tech-savvy, that those who find themselves having to spin-up a sever, for one reason or another, look at that server-launch as an imperfection in their vision.

“It’s almost this attitude of: If I’ve had to spin up a server, I’ve kind of failed in some way,” said Paul Duffy (pictured), head of startup solutions architecture, North America, at Amazon Web Services Inc. “Or, it’s not the right kind of thing. Why would we do that?”

Duffy spoke with John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during AWS re:Invent. They discussed how startups are taking advantage of AWS at an entirely new level. (* Disclosure below.)

Compression of startup timeframe

The key advantages for startups to adopt AWS has actually been changing over the years. While, in the past, principal drivers included that a company could simply focus on its business development rather than backend hardware, today, the reasons include off-the-shelf components, like AI and ML, for example.

“Appropriately lazy,” is how Duffy puts it, quoting a colleague. “Like, let us do the hard work; let us do the undifferentiated heavy lifting so people can come up with these super-cool ideas.”

Letting AWS do the computing heavy lifting massively compresses the timeframe for the startup, according to Duffy. “They’re constrained by time, money, [and] by the engineering talent they have,” he said.

Identity verification plug-ins and general backend APIs are examples of what they can grab, Duffy pointed out. “That time thing, it gets smaller and smaller.”

AWS’ Activate program is an example of how Amazon is attempting to cater to the urgency of the startup users. “Templatized stuff to go from naught-to-sixty and that kind of thing,” he said. “The old world’s horrible, you had to do all this provisioning,”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent. (*Disclosure: Amazon Web Services Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither AWS nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE