The OpenWater Blog

Rev the Engines…the PDF Engines: New Website, New Office. (Plus: We Go Serverless)

New Website, Offices

What a party!

Last Friday we hosted a party to celebrate the launch of our new website and the official opening of our new office at 4401 Fairfax Drive in Ballston.

The website showcases our entire Growth Stack. Now visitors can see how the all-in-one OpenWater Growth Stack supports grants, scholarships, fellowships, call for papers, and other application and review processes, in addition to awards.

The new office suits us well. Arlington Now and GlobeSt both featured us. From real estate journal GlobeSt:

OpenWater’s move to Ballston is also a nod to […] efforts to cultivate its own tech community, with the company planning to use its new space for technology forums and networking events. “OpenWater is a company that thrives on constant and consistent innovation, making them a perfect fit for the robust and fast-growing tech scene in Ballston,” said Tina Leone, CEO of the Ballston Business Improvement District.

To celebrate our new offices Account Coordinator Rebecca Lee hired OpenWater alum Lauren Martin who is now Director of Corporate Catering at Hungry. Lauren and Rebecca worked with Chef Evan for a decadent spread of food. Chef Evan is formerly of MGM National Harbor. Thank you, Evan, Lauren, and Rebecca!

Going “Serverless”

Tim was unable to join in OpenWater Weekly conversation — he arrived from the West Coast just in time for the party.

Instead, General Manager Zack Schwartz sat down with Kunal to describe a newly implemented “serverless solution”.

“Serverless” means that, instead of paying for the maintenance and upkeep of a specialized server, customers access and pay for the server on an as-needed basis.

Zack was able to move our custom .pdf engine to a serverless solution. We offer unlimited pdf exports for clients. Moving this engine to a serverless solution will reduce our costs while gaining speed efficiencies for our clients.

Moving the engine to a serverless option will drop our monthly .pdf costs 14x while increasing reliability of the service.

Snowball-as-a-Service

Additionally, during our recent adventures with an Amazon Snowball, Kunal figured out how to transfer data from the Snowball faster and more efficiently.

Clients who need to “download the cloud” and move a lot of data quickly can now rely on us to provide snowballs upon request. Consider this our “snowball-as-a-service”.

Thanks for reading OpenWater Weekly. Comment below or send an email to marketing @ getopenwater with your thoughts, questions, or feedback.

Above: Zack, in cartoon form. We were so busy with the party and pumping out PDFs, we forget to get photos!
Update: Photo, post-PDFing.

Katie McCaskey

Katie is OpenWater's Content Director. Her interests include entrepreneurship, permaculture, and blockchain. She enjoys spicy food and salty words.

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