>> Announcer: Live, from Manhattan, it's theCUBE. Covering AWS Summit New York City 2017. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> John Walls: Welcome back here at the Javits Center. We're in midtown, New York, with Stu Miniman, I'm John Walls, here on theCUBE, continuing our coverage here all day, livestreaming from AWS Summit. Thanks for being with us here. Aaron Newman now joins us, he's the co-founder and CEO of CrowdCheckr, and... CloudCheckr rather, and Aaron, the first employee of the company, period, to be on theCUBE, so you're really breaking out in a big way today. >> Yeah, thanks for having us here, and we're excited to be a part of this. >> I see your tag, first I thought it was "I love AWS," and then I saw it closer, "I CloudChecked AWS." >> Absolutely, but also we love AWS. So it works either way. >> So, CloudCheckr, first off tell us a little bit about you, and then how did you get here? >> Okay so, CloudCheckr is a software company. I am the CEO and one of the founders of it. Been around about six years. We build software to help enable, um, enable you to move workloads into the cloud and then manage them successfully. So there's lots of challenges as you move, and how you're going to deal with those is a little different than you did in your data center, so it's important you have the right tools, and processes, and people in place, to manage that move. >> So is the game changing any in that respect? Has it changed any in the last year or two? Is it just that you've got more options now? >> Well, I mean absolutely, this is the disruption for our generation, right? This idea of moving from the data center into the cloud is that disruption. Previously, it was the internet was the big disruption. The cloud is really this generation's disruption, and it's really a matter of how quickly are people moving workloads. Every year AWS gets more mature, they offer more services and more regions, you know, more robust service, so it's just a case of how quickly can people move workloads over. If you go back to a couple years, people thought this was for test workloads, dev workloads. It's just not the case. It's for production workloads, and the people who are taking advantage of it have a competitive advantage today. >> This is a real complex space, so last year at re:Invent I believe, Amazon gave a presentation, they were like, the eight R's to get from where you were to where you want to be. There's lift-and-shift was replatform, there was refactoring, you know, to completely building from scratch, to kind of just trying to move the whole piece. What are you seeing from customers, I'm sure it's a lot of everything, but what are kind of some of the main challenges, what's really slowing things down, and what is changing over the last couple of years? >> Yeah, absolutely, I mean change never comes fast enough, and we'd all love to be able to rewrite all our apps to work in the cloud the way that it was meant to, and that's the right and the best way to do it, you're just going to get way more return in terms of cost and security, and all the other great things that come out of the cloud, but the fact is most people are still lifting and shifting, right? They're taking their apps the way that it ran at the data center, moving into the cloud. And so you see some advantages, but you just clearly don't see the real 10x advantages. So most people are doing that, and it's just that it's expensive. New workloads, as they go in, are architected with this cloud in mind, and that's really powerful, and that's great, but it's going to take time, and it's not going to take five years, it's not going to take ten years, it's going to take 20, 30, 40 years to really get rid of all this old architecture, and convert it over. The same way nobody's putting anything on a mainframe today, but there's a whole lot of the world that's still run by mainframes, right? But you would never put a new app on a mainframe. >> Yeah, if you look at refresh cycles, you know, your server, your network takes a certain amount of time, it's your applications that's a huge amount of time, and the problem we had is, I think back and most of your applications, they kind of suck, and your users of those applications would love for you to update them. So the migration costs are so high, how do we get over that hump? >> Well, it is just going to take time for the refresh cycles, but even more important, I think we need to start looking at going back to the universities. Are universities teaching the right architectures for how to build this stuff? And I can go for hours and hours on some of the minute details, but the idea was, I used to have an application, I'd buy 20 servers, and that's what I ran it on. Now it's like, I build an application, and I don't know where it's really going to sit, it's going to sit on a server somewhere, and that server may use it for minutes or hours, and then it may be on a different server, and all of a sudden you have to think about, how am I going to architect, how am I going to write the code, how am I going to deploy that code? All that stuff is a little different than when you had 20 servers. How am I going to patch it for security holes? So we need to be educating people about that. We need to show them how to do that, back to universities, continuing education programs, all of that, needs to get brought up to date. >> A couple years ago, it seemed like security was the thing that would stop a lot of people, to say, "I'm not ready to go into it." We were talking to one of the Amazon spokespeople about security, and it seems that it's almost a driver now, because I know I need to stay up to date, I need to manage my security much closer, and in many ways, if you're running on Amazon, if you're running on Azure, if you're running on a public hub, they're going to manage some of the patching and testing and everything. So what are you seeing in kind of the security landscape? Is it an opportunity, is it still a challenge? Is it still some of both? >> I think you're absolutely right, security was the biggest fear factor that people were like, and I'm from Rochester, New York, and there are some more older, old-school technology companies there that, their attitude was, "We're not going to go to the cloud, because we don't know where the data sits," and there's a lot of server huggers, that if I can't see the server, it's not secure, and that's just not the case. Let me start with, Amazon has way better security people than you could hire, right? They just have a scale, caliber, programs, all of that that's so much better than anyone else. And you know what, if you had any question about it, the day the head of technology, the CIO for the CIA, stood on stage at an Amazon conference, and said we are going to the cloud, it's like if you think your security needs to be higher than the CIA's, you're wrong. So, it absolutely does, if you do things in the cloud properly, it can be 10 times more secure than what you're in your own data center, right? But you need to do things like think about, how am I doing deployment, so I can get out patches, right? What's the big problem with security in the data center is I have a patch, it hits, and it's going to take me a year to get that out to my 10,000 servers. In the cloud, if I've done things where I have this idea of no-patching strategies, and redeploying instantaneously, then you could fix a patch in a day, right? And all of a sudden it can create a much more secure world, where we don't have these ransomware problems. You don't have all these worms and such causing havoc. >> Go ahead, John. >> You touched on something just a few minutes ago, and you're talking about 20, 30, 40 years, right, catching up, and legacy systems, and people who can leapfrog, and I'm thinking, that's like this perpetual cycle of never catching up, because the technology innovates so quickly, and things are moving so fast. So somebody that might feel like they're really behind? How do they ever just relax and get there if they feel like they really can't catch up? >> Well, so I guess I'll start by saying that people in this room are on the leading edge, and I like to say if you're not bleeding, you're not leading, right? If you're on that leading edge, you're going to have more challenges, you're not going to be able to relax and take it easy. The question is, you know, do you want to be a firm that's trying to take advantage of every competitive edge they can, trying to drive a little bit more, then you're not going to be relaxed. That's just the state of technology today is, it is a marathon, it's not a sprint. But that means you have to find a pace that's appropriate for you, and if you're a brand new software company, like CloudCheckr, I've never bought a server, I built everything in the cloud day-one, so I never have the old legacy architecture. That makes my life much easier. If I am the postal service, it's going to take me a long time to get off the system, and that's just the fact of life, you know. You don't have to throw away your old apps, they'll be around for a long time, but be proactive about saying, "I'm going to build something new," do it the right way so you don't have to wait for a refresh cycle for that. >> Walls: Right, gotcha. >> I mean think about, on the mainframe, remember some of the problems with getting apps off the mainframe was? Nobody had the source code anymore. You couldn't fix Y2K bugs, because you didn't have source code, so you couldn't redeploy it, because they wrote code, and the person that wrote it retired 15 years ago, and now what do I do? I'm stuck. So we're going to be in that same scenario for a long time. >> The other place where you're involved is, once we'd actually got in the cloud, how do we make sure my expenses don't just run away? So you know, maybe talk to us a little bit about that. Amazon's always an interesting one. I was talking in our intro this morning, early in this year, I was talking to a lot of SMB customers that were just like, Google's really attractive, and Amazon doesn't seem to be listening to us, and a week after the Google conference, Amazon changed their pricing, to be able to really match what Google's doing. So what are the some of the biggest challenges in pricing, how are you helping customers, where are some of the pitfalls that they're seeing? >> I mean, absolutely, AWS is the smartest people out there, they know when they need to change and pivot, and somehow they're a billion dollar company that can still pivot, which is a miracle. I don't know how they do it, but they are amazing at that. But let me start by giving you a little of the analogy of, think back to in the 1850's when you had power plants. Everybody built their own power plant, right? And it would cost a million dollars to build a power plant, and then most of your power would be free, right? And then they decided, let's build power plants, I'll spend 50 million dollars to build it, and then everyone will use that, right? We're in the same place now, 150 years later, but it's just different, it's technology. Instead of building a data center and spending millions of dollars on it, instead Amazon has built a data center that's designed for everybody to use, and it's so much more efficient to do that, just like, God, who would build their own power plant anymore? That's the analogy. But think about the other side of it, though, is now if I'm getting my power from a power plant, well I got to start putting in a meter, and understanding turning off the lights at night, and I got to put windows in to keep the heat in the house, and put insulation, right? So we're in the same situation. Yes, Amazon is cheaper, except if you turn all of your servers on, you leave them on, and you don't meter it, you don't understand it, you don't try to put insulation in. So you got to do those things in the cloud. It was easy before, because I just paid for the servers and I was done. Now it's complicated, but it's complicated because you're going to save a lot of money if you do it right. But you know, I love to make that analogy of the physical world, we're no different. You got to actually do things to get your build out. >> Are you starting to see many customers looking at Lambda, because that's something, at least many customers we've talked to, significantly reduced the cost of your infrastructure, because it's not just, I'm choosing when to use it, but only when the function calls it. >> So I think, AWS, you can effectively drive your cost to zero by using the cloud, and by effectively, it never gets to zero, but you can really keep driving it down the more work you put into it. But there's a balance, right? If you put too much work, you offset the savings you're going to have, right? So you go to the cloud, and you start doing work, more work to reduce costs by rightsizing, turning things off, and then you say, let me go to Lambda, because that's even cheaper, but today Lambda still, it doesn't have all the bells and whistles, it's still very much the bleeding edge. So, if you can do it, if you have a fresh application, the expertise to do it, it's a great place to go, and I think in 20 years, everybody's going to be doing everything serverless, all new stuff. We're very early though, right now. We're still inventing this stuff, we're still figuring it out, we're still trying to understand how do I structure an entire application using this serverless architecture? It's trickier than doing it, when you go out there and you try to find 20 programmers to run a project, to get ones that know how to build serverless is very hard, so that's the real challenge. It's not the technology challenge, it's the people, where am I going to find the resources, how much is it going to cost me, all of that. >> I'm still thinking about the power plant. I'm still back in 1850 right now. (laughs) Thanks for being with us. >> You're welcome. >> I appreciate the time here on theCUBE, and best of luck down the road, and glad to see that you are cloudchecking with AWS. >> Check your cloud before you wreck your cloud, right? >> There you go, alright. Aaron Newman, CloudCheckr. Continuing our coverage, we are just a moment here from AWS Summit 2017, we are live at the Javits Center, in New York City. (electronic music)