The past 18 months have seen an acceleration in digital adoption, driven by the need to be able to scale up operations rapidly to adapt to economic and environmental challenges. Startup innovation has accelerated in tandem, solving the problems and fulfilling the needs of the digital economy.

Incubating these startups are ecosystems such as the Amazon Web Services Inc.’s Partner Network. A look at the leaders within the AWS community offers a glimpse into the solutions that will be driving tomorrow’s digital enterprise.

“I often think that I’m effectively living in the future because I get to see all this really cool stuff that we’re building just a little bit before our customers,” said Jeff Barr (pictured), vice president and chief evangelist at AWS.

Barr spoke with Dave Vellante and John Furrier, co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, as the AWS Startup Showcase: New Breakthroughs in DevOps, Analytics, and Cloud Management Tools event got under way. They discussed the event lineup and how breakthroughs happening in the AWS startup community are influencing the future of cloud computing. (Disclosure below.)

Decentralized data mesh and a DevOps shakeup

There are, to date, three great waves of cloud, according to Vellante. The first was experimentation; then came migration to the cloud as momentum started to build. Now, cloud is entering its third wave: deep business integration. This is made possible by data mesh technology, which bypasses transporting data into a lake or warehouse by allowing query and analysis on data where it lives.

Globally successful meal-kit innovator HelloFresh SE is an early data mesh adopter, and the company described its journey from on-premises Hadoop systems to data mesh during the Showcase.

“Hello Fresh was scaling, and they realized that they couldn’t keep up. So they had to rethink their entire data architecture, and they built it around data mesh,” Vellante said.

HelloFresh exemplifies how startups nurtured in the AWS ecosystem are able to scale fast to reach escape velocity early in their growth trajectory.

“As these startups grow, they start to lean into the power of the cloud,” Barr said. Relying on AWS to take care of the hard work behind the scenes, the startups can “focus on the fun part … which is listening to customers and building up an awesome business,” Barr stated. “If they’ve got their autoscaling or if they’re serverless, the infrastructure simply grows to meet their demand.”

Another way startups in the AWS ecosystem are meeting customer demand is by revolutionizing the DevOps pipeline. This was the subject of “DevOps for Dummies” author Emily Freeman’s keynote, and a common theme for many showcase participants.

“A lot of the companies we’re featuring here in the Startup Showcase represent that new kind of systems thinking,” Furrier said. “It’s finally here. The revolution of DevOps is going to the next generation.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS Startup Showcase: New Breakthroughs in DevOps, Analytics, and Cloud Management Tools event. (* Disclosure: This event was sponsored by participating companies. Neither AWS nor sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE