(electronic music) >> Live, from Washington, DC, it's theCUBE, covering AWS Public Sector Summit 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services and its ecosystem partners. >> Hey, welcome back. We're here live in Washington, D.C. It's theCUBE's coverage of AWS Public Sector Summit Amazon Web Services, Public Sector Summit. It's like re:Invent but also for public sector. But it's a global public sector. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman. Our next guest is Vincent Quah, who's the head of education, nonprofits, and healthcare in Asia, Pacific, and Japan for AWS. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thanks, John, Stu. Great to be able to be here. >> You know, we constantly talk about cloud in the United States here, and people use the word GovCloud, and Teresa and I always kind of jokingly say, "No, it's bigger than GovCloud. It's global public sector." You bring an international perspective covering APAC for AWS? >> Yes, absolutely. >> Public sector, okay. Outside of China, which is a different division with Amazon, you got the whole world. So Teresa and the team are looking not just at the US, it's the entire world. What's different? How's that working? Give us an update. >> I think one of the key differences that we see is that the US has really led the way in terms of the adoption of cloud technologies. We had great examples of universities that have really gone all in. What we are seeing now is that universities and education institutions in Asia, they're beginning to pick up their pace. And it's exciting to see some of the universities really coming very strongly using AWS. And we're seeing this across not just in mature countries and developed countries, but also in developing countries. And so it is a very widespread adoption of the cloud. And we're very excited by that. Tell us about the AWS Educate. Teresa Carlson on stage yesterday very highlighted much in her keynote about education, as well as some of the that they're doing with retraining and educating young people and whatnot, but really education has been a real growth area, from interest with cloud. Because old IT (laughs) okay, you look at that, okay, there's never had a lot of IT guys. (Vincent laughs) But it's really changed both technology procurement and delivery, but also the impact. >> Right. >> Talk about the AWS Educate program. >> So the AWS Educate program is a free program that all institutions can join. It comes with content from AWS, it comes with content from some of the top computer science universities in the world, as well as Cloud Credits, where individual student members, or the educator's members, they can actually get access to using the real platform that AWS provide. Now, this is really game-changing for students and for the institution. And it's game-changing because they have exactly the same access to all the 125-plus technologies that AWS provide to enterprises and now they are in the hands of students. So can you imagine, if they have the experience using some of these services, building capabilities, building solutions and services, and bringing out to the market. So now, innovation is in the hands of every single individual. And Educate is such an important program to re-skill and skill graduates to be ready for the working world. >> I love that, Vincent. I think back, most of my career, when you talked about education, you talked about research and universities. So it was a certain top-tier and a very limited amount. You're really democratizing what's happening. Wonder if you have any examples, or what sort of innovations are coming out of some of these global initiatives? One of the great example is NOVA, right. So we've announced that NOVA is now building this cloud associate degree as part of their information systems technology. >> What's NOVA again? >> The Northern Virginia Community College. >> In the keynote yesterday, not to be confused with Villanova, the basketball champs. >> Northern Virginia, got it, sorry. >> So, there's a need there that the institutions see because there's so much that the industry would need in terms of skills and graduates graduating with the right skill set. If you look at the World Economic Forum that was published in 2016, more about Internet and cloud computing are the two key technological drivers that's creating all these change in the industry. And many, many organizations are now investing into skilling and re-skilling. Educate sits so nicely to this particular part of the agenda. Apart from what NOVA has done here in the US, there are two other examples I want to quickly highlight to you. The first is, in the first week of June, we actually did an event in the Philippines. It was a large-scale student event. We had more than hundreds of students in a single location, with probably close to 100 educators. We took them through a four-day event. Two days of skills and content learning with hands-on experience. A third day on a gamified challenge that we put the students through so that they can compete with one another in groups, and thereby achieving top-notch scores in the leaderboard. And at the end of the day, they actually get to also develop a curriculum vitae, a CV, that they can actually submit to companies. And on the fourth day, we brought more than 20 companies as part of this whole event, and we got the students to actually connect with the companies, and the companies to the students, so that where the companies are looking for jobs, these are the students that are ready with skills that they have learned over the past three days, that they can apply to jobs that these company are looking for. So that's a really strong case of what we see working. Connecting skills to companies that are looking for students with the right set of skills. >> Talk about the international global landscape for a minute. You have a unique perspective in your job. What are the key things going on out there? What's the progress look like? What are some of the successes? Can you share a little bit about what's going on in Asia, Pacific, and Japan? >> Sure. There'll be two examples that I'll be sharing. The first is, we know that AWS Educate started off at the tertiary level. But then, last re:Invent is now being extended to 14 years and above. So now children at that age can learn about the cloud and be made aware of what's the potential of the cloud and what they can learn and use the cloud for. We've also begun to extend that work into the adult working workforce. One very specific example that I can share with you. There is an organization in Singapore called the National Trade Unions Congress LearningHub. They're an education service provider and they provide education services to citizens of Singapore. We have worked with them. They're using the AWS Educate content, and they develop two courses. Fundamentals in Cloud Computing and Fundamentals in IoT. They bring this pilot courses for the Fundamentals in IoT to a group of individuals age 45 to 74 years old. And they came away, the course just simply blew their mind away. They were so excited about what they have learned. How to program, actually, I have with me, an Internet of Things button. Now they can actually come up with an idea, program an activity on this button, so that it trigger off a particular reaction. And that's the excitement that these individuals 45 to 74 years old. They have the domain expertise, now they need is just an idea and a platform. >> It's also entrepreneurial too. >> Absolutely. >> They can tinker with the software, learn about the cloud at a very young age, and they can grow into it and maybe start something compelling, have a unique idea, fresh perspective. >> Correct. >> Or, someone who's retraining, to get a new job. >> Correct. And innovation is, we keep thinking of innovation as something that's really big. But actually, innovation doesn't have to be that way. It can start very small and then scale up from there. And all you need is just an idea to apply. >> All right. So Vincent, one of the themes we've been talking a lot about at the show is cybersecurity. Can you speak how that discussion plays specifically in the education markets? >> What we want to do is really raise the awareness of every individual's understanding of cloud computing. And by that I mean from 14 years to 74 years old. We want to let them know, actually, they are already interacting with cloud technologies. For example, if you have a Samsung Smart TV at home, if you have made a hotel booking through Expedia or through Airbnb, or if you have called for home delivery from McDonald's, you've already interacted with the cloud. And so what we want to do is make sure that everybody actually understand that. And then through some of these courses that are being provided by our partners, then they can go and learn about the security part of it. And help them have a much better sense of idea of, look, the cloud is actually a lot more secure. And we've heard many examples of that today and yesterday. And we want to give them that assurance that what they are doing and consuming, they can be part of that entrepreneur process to create something new and very exciting. >> Vincent, I'll give you the last word on this interview by sharing the update from Asia Pacific AWS. How many people are out there's a growing, you're hiring. What are some of the priorities you guys have. They have a big event in Singapore, I know that. We've been watching it, thinking about bringing theCUBE there. Give us some idea of the growth around the AWS people. What's the head count look like, give us some estimations. John, you know I can't really talk too much about head count, but I can say that we are definitely growing our AWS head count very, very rapidly. The needs and requirements out there in the market is so tremendous, and we want to be able to serve the customer as best as we can. We are a customer-obsessed company, and so we want to be there with the customer, work with them to really meet the objective and the goals that they have. And help them achieve that vision. And so we are just the enabler. We empower the customer to make. >> You have events out there too, right? You have the re:Invent, Summit? >> We have the AWS Summit, and this coming October we have the Public Sector Summit here in Singapore, as well as in Canberra in September. >> Right. >> And there's an education event coming domestically, too. >> And there's an education, a global education event that is happening in Seattle in August. So we're very excited about that. >> Lot of action on the AWS ecosystem. Congratulations, you guys do a great job. Thanks for coming on theCUBE, Vincent. Really appreciate it. We're here live in Washington, DC. It's theCUBE's coverage of AWS Public Sector Summit. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman. We've got Dave Vellante here as well, coming and joining us for some interviews. We'll be right back, stay with us for more coverage after this short break. (electronic music)

(techno music) >> Live, from Washington DC, it's theCUBE. Covering AWS Public Sector Summit, 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services and its ecosystem partners. >> Okay, welcome back, everyone, this is the live CUBE coverage here in Washington DC for AWS Public Sector Summit 2018. This is the, kind of like the reinvent for Public Sector. I'm John Furrier, f my co-host Stu Miniman, our next guest is Hardik Bhatt, Smart Cities Vertical Lead for Amazon Web Services, been a former CIO, knows the state and local governments cold. This is a very key area around Internet of Things and technology with cloud, because smart cities have to do not only technology roll outs for some of the new capabilities, but all manage some of the societal changes, like self-driving cars and a variety of other things, from instrumenting sensors and traffic lights and video cam ... I mean, this is a little, just a little ... Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you very much, John. Good to see you, Stu, good morning. Looking forward to having a great conversation. >> So, smart cities obviously is really hot, but we love it, because it brings life, and work, life, and play together, because we all live in towns, and we live in cities, and the cities provide services to the residents, transportation, sidewalks, and things that we take for granted in the analog world. Now there's a whole digital set of services coming big time. So, are they prepared? (laughs) It used to be buy a mainframe, then move it to a minicomputer, get a Local Area Network, buy some PCs, buy some network tablets, now the cloud's here. What's your assessment of the smart cities landscape for state and local governments? Because it really is something that's on the front burner, in terms of figuring it out. What's the architecture? Lot of questions. What's your, what's the state of the union, if you will, for-- >> You know it has been, like, how the governments have been for many years, right? Governments exist so that they can provide better services, they can provide better quality of life, they can create an environment where businesses thrive, jobs can be created, education can be given, and you can build a workforce and talent, et cetera. And smart cities is just, I'd say, a trend where, you know, you're using multitudes of technology to kind of help the government get its mission accomplished in a smoother, faster, better, cheaper manner. And a lot of times, I've seen, because how smart cities movement started a decade ago, we kind of compare smart cities with the Internet of Things or the sensors, but smart cities is much more than just the IoT, or the Internet of Things, I mean if you're talking about creating a new stream of data that is real-time, whether coming in from sensors, coming from video, you already as a government, I used to be a CIO for the City of Chicago, we used petabytes of data that was already sitting in my data center, and then there's also this whole third-party data. So smart cities is a lot about how do you as a city are aggregating this different sources of data and then making some action from it, so that ultimately, going back to the city's priorities, you are giving better public safety, or you're providing better public health, or you're providing better education or you're providing, better providing government services. So that's what we are seeing. Our customers are, when we say smart cities, they jump right into, "What problems are you solving?" And that, to me, is the core for Amazon, core for Amazon Web Services. We want to know our customers' problems and then work backwards to solve them. >> What are some of the problems right now that are low-hanging fruit? Because obviously it's an evolution. You set the architecture up, but ultimately governments would love to have some revenue coming in from businesses. You mention that. Education is certainly there. What are some of the challenges there? Is it pre-existing stuff, or is it new opportunities? What are some of the trends you're seeing for use cases? It is actually both pre-existing stuff that they are trying to solve, as well the new stuff, the new opportunities that are getting created, because the technology is much different than what it used to be 10 years ago. The cloud, especially, is creating a lot more new opportunities, because of the nimbleness it brings, the agility it brings. So, in transportation side, we are seeing on one hand, multiple departments, multi-jurisdictional, so state transportation department, as well as a local transportation department, working together to create kind of a virtual information sharing environment or a virtual command center, so that they can detect an accident, a traffic incident, much quicker and respond to that, because now they can aggregate this data. And they're also now adding to that some public safety information. So whether it is a police department, fire department, EMS, so that they can address that incident quickly and then not only clear the traffic and clear the congestion, or reduce the congestion time, but they can also address the, any public safety issue that may have arisen out of that incident that has happened. So, the Department of Transportation, the USDOT, through the Federal Highway Administration, has been giving out $60 million worth of grants to six to ten recipients. The grant, this year's grant period, just closed on Monday, and we worked with multiple customers who are looking to kind of respond to that. So on one hand, it is that. So this is an age-old problem, but new technology can help you solve that. On the other hand, another customer that we worked with is looking for on-demand micro-transit solutions. As you can see, all the ride-sharing applications are making easier to jump in a car and move to one place to the other. It is causing a dip in transit ridership. So the public transit agents, they are looking for solutions to that. So they are looking at, "Can we build an on-demand microtransit "so you can pool your friends and jump into a transit van, as opposed to a private car?" And then you can go from point A to point B in a much more affordable manner. So they are looking at that. On the public health side, you know, we have the DC Benefits Exchange, Health Benefits Exchange, is on AWS, and they have seen significant savings. They have seen $1.8 million of annual savings because they are using cloud and cloud services. On the other hand, you have State of Georgia, which is using Alexa. So they have built Alexa Skills where you can ask, as a resident of State of Georgia getting SNAP benefit, the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance, the food-stamp program, you can say, "Alexa, what's my SNAP balance?" So based on the answer then, based on the balance you know, you can plan your, you know, where you're going to use that money. So we are seeing large volume of data now coming on the cloud where the governments are looking to move kind of the needle. We are also seeing this nimble, quick solutions that can start going out. And we are seeing a lot of driver behind the innovation is our City on a Cloud challenge. So we have seen the City on a Cloud winners, since last so many years, are kind of the ones who are driving innovation and they're also driving a lot of collaboration. So I can, there are three trends that I can jump into as we kind of talk more. >> Yeah, it's interesting. I think back a decade ago, when you talk smarter cities, you'd see this video, and it would look like something out of a science fiction. It's like, you know, "Oh, the flying taxi'll come, "and it will get you and everything." But what I, the stories I have when I talk to CIOs in cities and the like, it's usually more about, it's about data. It's about the underlying data, and maybe it's a mobile app, maybe it's a thing like Alexa Skills. So help us understand a little bit, what does the average citizen, what do they see? How does their, you know, greater transparency and sharing of information and collaboration between what the agencies are doing and, you know, the citizenship. >> I think that's a great question. I mean that is what, as a former CIO, I always had to balance between, what I do creates internal government efficiency, but the citizens don't feel it, don't see it, they don't, it doesn't get in the news media. And on the other hand, I also have to, to my governor, to my mayor, to the agency directors, have to give them visible wins. So, I'll give you an example, so City of Chicago, back in the day, in 2010 when I was the CIO. We did a contract with our AWS, currently AWS Partner Socrata, to open up the data. So that was kind of the beginning of the Open Data Movement, and eventually, I left the city, I went work for Cisco, and the city government continued to kind of build on top of Socrata. And they build what they called the Windy Grid, which is basically bringing all of their various sets of data, so 311, code violations, inspections, crime, traffic, and they built an internal data analytics engine. So now, agencies can use that data. And now, what they did, two years ago, they were one of the City on a Cloud Challenge winners, and they, Uturn Data Solutions is our partner that was the winner of that, and they built Chicago Open Grid. So they basically opened that up on a map-based platform. So now as a citizen of Chicago, I can go on Chicago Open Grid, and I can see which restaurants in, surrounding my area, have failed inspections. Have they failed inspection because of a mice infestation, or was it something very minor, so I can decide whether I want to go to that restaurant or not. I can also look at the crime patterns in my area, I can look at the property values, I can look at the education kind of quality in the schools in my neighborhood. So, we have seen kind of now, and it's all on AWS cloud. >> This open data is interesting to me. Let's take that to another level. That's just the user side of it, there's also a delivery value. I saw use cases in Chicago around Health and Human Services, around being more efficient with either vaccines, or delivery of services based on demographics and other profile, all because of open data. So this brings up a question that comes up a lot, and we're seeing here is a trend, is Amazon Web Services public sector has been really good. Teresa Carlson has done an amazing job leaning on partners to be successful. Meaning it's a collaboration. What's that like in the state and local government? What's the partner landscape look like? What are the benefits for partners to work with AWS? Because it seems obvious to me, it might not be obvious to them. But if they have an innovative idea, whether it's to innovate something on the edge of the network in their business, they can do it, and they can scale with Amazon. What is the real benefits of partnering with AWS? >> You hit a key point on there. Teresa has done a fantastic job in customer management as well as building our partners. Similarly, we have a great leader within the state and local government, Kim Majerus. She leads all of our state and local government business. And her focus is exactly like Teresa: How can we help the customers, and also how can we enable partners to help customers? So I'll give you and example. The City of Louisville in Kentucky. They were a City on a Cloud winner, and they, basically what they're building with a partner of ours, Slingshot, they (laughs) get, I was, I used to be in Traffic Management Authority, back in my days, and we used to do traffic studies. So, basically, they send an intern out with clicker or have those black strips to count the number of cars, and based on that, we can plan whether we want to increase the signal timing on this approach, or we can plan the detours if we close the street, what's the, and it's all manual. It used to take, cost us anywhere from 10 to 50 thousand dollars, every traffic study. So what Louisville did with Slingshot is they got the free Waze data that they get gives all of the raw traffic information. Slingshot brought that on to a AWS platform, and now they are building a traffic analysis tool, which now you can do like a snap of a finger, get the analysis and you can manage the signal-approach timing. The cool thing about this is, they're building it in open source code. And the code's available on GitHub, and I was talking to the Chief Data Officer of Louisville, who's actually going to be speaking at this event later today. 12 other cities have already looked into this. They've started to download the code, and they are starting to use it. So, collaboration through partners also enables collaboration amongst all of our customers. >> And also, I'd just point out, that's a great example, love that, and that's new for me to hear that. But also, to me the observation is, it's new data. So being able to be responsive, to look at that opportunity. Now, it used to be in the old world, and I'm sure you can attest to this, being a CIO back in the day, is okay, just say there's new data available, you have to provision IT. >> Oh my God, yeah. >> I mean, what, old way, new way. I mean, compare and contrast the time it would take to do that with what you can do today. >> It's a big, huge difference. I'll tell you as the CIO for the State of Illinois, when I started in early 2015, in my first performance management session, I asked my Infrastructure Management Team to give me the average days it takes to build a server, 49 days. I mean, you're talking seven weeks or maybe, if you talk, 10 business weeks. It's not acceptable. I mean the way the pace of innovation is going, with AWS on cloud, you are talking about minutes you can spin up that server. And that's what we are seeing, a significant change, and that's why Louisville-- >> And I think you got to think it's even worse when you think about integration, personnel requirements, the meetings that have to get involved. It's a nightmare. Okay, so obviously cloud, we know cloud, we love cloud, we use cloud ourselves. So I got to ask you this could, City in a Cloud program, which we've covered in the past, so last year had some really powerful winners. This has been a very successful program. You're involved in it, you have unique insights, you've been on both sides of the table. How is that going? How is it inspiring other cities? What's the camaraderie like? What's the peer review? Is there a peer, is there a network building? How is that spreading? >> That is actually enabling collaboration in a significant manner. Because, you know, you are openly telling what you want to do, and then you are doing that. Everybody is watching you. Like Louisville is a perfect example where they built this, they're building this, and they're going to share it through open source code to all the cities. 12 is just the beginning. I'd not be surprised if there are 120 cities that are going to do this. Because who doesn't want to save two hundred, three hundred thousand dollars a year? And also lots of time to do the traffic studies. Same thing we have seen with, as Virginia Beach is building their Early Flood Warning System. There are other cities who are looking into, like how do we, New Orleans? And others are looking at, "How do we take what Virginia Beach has built? "And how can we use it for us?" And yesterday, they announced this year of the winners that includes Las Vegas, that includes LA Information Technology Department, that includes the City of Philadelphia, and I've been in conversations with all of the CIOs, CDOs, and the leaders of these agencies. The other thing, John, I have seen is, there's a phenomenal leadership that's out there right now in the cities and states that they want to innovate, they want to collaborate, and they want to kind of make a big difference. >> Hold on, hold on, so one more question, this is a really good question, want to get, follow-up on that. But this, what you're talking about to me signifies really the big trend going on right now in this modern era. You've got large cloud scale. You have open source, open sharing, and collaboration happening. This is the new network effect. This is the flywheel. This is uniquely different. This kind of categorizes cloud. And this wasn't available when IT systems and processes were built, 20, 30 years ago. I mean, this is the big shift, you, I mean do you agree? >> Absolutely, this is the big shift, the availability of the cloud, the ubiquitous nature of mobile platform that people have. The newer way of, like, the natural language processing, use of Alexa is becoming so prevalent in government. I mean, in City of Chicago, 50% of the 311 calls that we used to get in 2010, 3 1/2 million of those were informational in nature. If I could offload that on to my Alexa Skills, I can free up my workforce, the 311 call-takers, to do much better, higher-level, you know, call-taking, as opposed to this. So you're absolutely right. I've seen the trends we are seeing is, there is lots of collaboration going on between the governments and partners. I'm also seeing the governments are going at modernization from different points based on their pain points. And I'm also seeing a definite acceleration in modernization. Government, because the technology, AWS, the cloud, our services that we are seeing. And the pace of innovation that AWS brings is also enabling the acceleration in governments. >> Yeah, to help put a point on the, on the conversation here, there's been for years discussion about, "Well, what is the changing role of the CIO?" You've sat on that side of the table, you know, worked with lots of COs, what do you see is the role of the future for the CIO when, specifically when you talk state and local governments? >> I would say CIO is the kind of has to be an enabler of government services. Because if I go back to my city days and working with a mayor, or my state days, working with a governor, at the end of the day, the governor or the mayor is looking at creating better quality of life, providing better health, better education, better safety, et cetera. And CIO is kind of the key partner in that metrics to enable what the governor, what the mayor, the agency directors want to do. And because now data enables the CIO to kind of quickly give solutions, or AI services, Alexa and Polly and Rekog ... All of these things give you, give me as a CIO, ability to provide quick wins to the mayor, to the governor, and also very visible wins. We are seeing that, you know, CIO is becoming a uniquely positioned individual and leader to kind of enable the government. >> All right, thanks so much for comin' on theCUBE. Love the insight, love to follow up. You bring a great perspective and great insight and Amazon's lucky to have you on the team. Lot of great stuff goin' on in the cities and local governments. It's a good opportunity for you guys. Thanks for coming on, appreciate it. >> Thank you very much. >> It's theCUBE live here in Washington DC for AWS, Amazon Web Services Public Sector Summit, I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman, again second year of live coverage. It's a packed house, a lot of great cloud action. Again, the game has changed. It's a whole new world, cloud scale, open source, collaboration, mobile, all this new data's here. This is the opportunity, this is what theCUBE's doing. We're doin' our part, sharing the data with you. Stay with us, more coverage from day two, here in Washington, after this short break. (techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from the Moscone Center, it's theCUBE covering AWS Summit San Francisco, 2018, brought to you by Amazon Web Services. (techy music playing) >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman joined by my cohost Jeff Frick, and this is theCUBE's live coverage of AWS Summit San Francisco. We are thrilled to welcome back to the program Sandy Carter, who's a vice president with Amazon Web Services. Been with the company about a year. We've had you on the program many times, but first time since you've been at AWS, so... >> That's right, I'm celebrating my year yesterday with Amazon Web Services. >> Stu: And no cake, all right. >> I had a cake yesterday, actually, cake and champagne, by the way. (laughing) >> Sandy, we always love to hear, you know, you talk to so many customers, you know, bring us back for a little bit. What brought you to AWS, what's exciting to your customers when you're talking to them today? >> Well, you know, I really love innovation, I love being innovative, and you know, bar none Amazon is the most innovative company out there today, but really what brought me to Amazon was their focus on the customer, really "obsession" on the customer. When they say obsession they really mean obsession. They work backwards from the customer. We really have this big, big thrust. In fact, one of my favorite stories is when I first came to Amazon we'd be in these meetings and people would say, "Well, what does Low Flying Hawk think about this," or "What does Low Flying Hawk think about that," and I was like, "Who is Low Flying Hawk?" Well, he's a person who would give comments on a forum and just a person who wasn't even spending millions of dollars with Amazon but just had a lot of big clout. We actually just opened a building named Low Flying Hawk, believe it or not. >> Jeff: Have you identified this person? >> They do know who he is, yes. (laughing) But it's really, it just symbolizes the focus that Amazon has on the customer and why that's so important. >> And Sandy, at re:Invent you actually, you spoke to the analyst, I was listening to the session. It's not just kind of, people think AWS they think public cloud. You work for Amazon, it's everything kind of across what you think of Amazon.com, AWS, everything from drones and using Kindles and everything like that. Can you give us a little bit of kind of that pan view of how Amazon looks at innovation? >> Yeah, so it's really interesting. Amazon is very methodical in the way that we innovate, and what we do is we really try to understand the customer. We work backwards from the customer, so we do a press release first, we do frequently asked questions next, and then we do a narrative-- >> You're saying you do an internal press release, yes, yes. >> Yeah, internal press release. Internal frequently asked questions, and then we review a six-page document, no PowerPoints whatsoever, which enables us to debate and learn from each other and just iterate on the idea that makes it better and better and better so that when we come out with it it's a really powerful idea and powerful concept, something that the customers really want. >> So, we'll ask you what you're doing now, but one more kind of transition question, what was your biggest surprise? You know, there's a lot of kind of mystery from people on the outside looking in in terms of culture, and we know it's car driving and innovative growing like crazy company, not only in business but in terms of people. What was your biggest surprise once you kind of got on the inside door? >> My biggest surprise was just how incredibly encouraging and supportive the team is at AWS. My boss is Matt Garman, he's been supportive since day one, you know, Andy, they just cheer you on. They want you to do well and I've really never been at a company that everybody's really pulling for you to be successful, not political infighting but really pulling for you to be successful. So, that's really was the biggest surprise to me, and then that customer obsession. Like, it's not customer focus, it really is customer obsession. >> Right, I think it's so well illustrated by the, again not AWS, but Amazon with the store, right, with no cash register, no people. >> Sandy: Amazon Go. >> To think about that-- >> Sandy: Yeah. >> From the customer point of view is nobody likes to stand in line at the grocery store, so it's such a clean illustration of a customer centric way to attack the problem. >> And I love that because what we did is we opened up the beta first for employees, so we would go in and play with it and test it out, and then we opened it up in Seattle and we would give customer tours. Now it's open to the public in Seattle, so it just again shows you that iterative process that Amazon uses and it's super cool, have you guys been? >> Jeff: Have not been. >> Ugh, in fact, my daughter went in. She put on a mask, she was going to fool the system but it wasn't fooled. All the ML and all the AI worked brilliantly. >> I love how everyone loves to get so creative and try to, you know, get through the system, right, try to break the system. >> I know, but my daughter, that's what I would figure for sure. (laughing) >> So, what are you working on now? You've been there a year, what are you working on? >> So, we are innovating around the enterprise workload, so we know that a lot of startups and cloud native companies have moved to the cloud, but we're still seeing a lot of enterprises that are trying to figure out what their strategy is, and so, Stu and Jeff, what I've been working on is how do we help enterprises in the best way possible. How can we innovate to get them migrated over as fast as possible? So for instance, we have Windows that runs on AWS. It's actually been running there longer than with any other vendor and we have amazing performance, amazing reliability. We just released an ML, machine learning OMI for Windows so that you can use and leverage all that great Windows support and applications that you have, and then you guys saw earlier I was talking to VMware. We know that a lot of customers want to do hybrid cloud on their journey to going all-in with the cloud, and so we formed this great partnership with VMware, produced an offering called VMware Cloud on AWS and we're seeing great traction there. Like Scribd's network just talked about how they're using it for disaster recovery. Other customers are using it to migrate. One CIO migrated 143 workloads in a weekend using that solution. So, it just helps them to get to that hybrid state before they go all-in on the cloud. >> So, are they, I was going to say, are they building a mirror instance of what their on-prem VMware stack is in the Amazon version? Is that how they're kind of negotiating that transition or how does that work? >> So, with VMware they don't have to refactor, so they can just go straight over. With Microsoft workloads what we're seeing a lot of times is maybe they'll bring a sequel app over and they'll just do a lift and shift, and then once they feel comfortable with the cloud they'll go to Aurora, which as you've found was the fastest growing service that AWS has ever had, and so we see a lot of that, you know, movement. Bring it over, lift and shift, learning and you know, if you think about it, if you're a large enterprise one of your big challenges is how do I get my people trained, how do I get them up to speed, and so we've done... Like, we've got a full dot net stack that runs on AWS, so their people don't even have to learn a new language. They can develop in Visual Studio and use PowerShell but work on AWS and bring that over. >> You know, Sandy, bring us inside your customers because the challenge for most enterprises is they have so many applications. >> Sandy: Yeah. >> And you mentioned lift and shift. >> Sandy: Yeah. >> You know, I know some consultant's out there like, "Lift and shift is horrible, don't do it." It's like, well, there's some things you'll build new in the cloud, there's some things you'll do a little bit, and there's some stuff today lift and shift makes sense and then down the road I might, you know, move and I've seen, you know, it was like the seven Rs that Amazon has as to do you re-platform, refactor-- >> That's right. >> You know, all that and everything, so I mean, there's many paths to get there. What are some of the patterns you're hearing from customers? How do they, how is it easier for them to kind of move forward and not get stuck? >> Well, we're seeing a lot of data center evacuations, so those tend to be really fast movement and that's typically-- >> Jeff: Data center evacuation-- >> Yeah, that's what-- >> I haven't heard that one. >> Yeah, that's what, evacuation, they've got to get out of their data center buyer for a certain date for whatever reason, right? They had a flood or a corporate mandate or something going on, and so we are seeing those and those are, Stu, like lift and shift quickly. We are seeing a lot of customers who will create new applications using containers and serverless that we talked about today a lot, and that's really around the innovative, new stuff that they're doing, right. So, Just Eat, for instance, is a large... They do online food service out of the UK. I love their solution because what they're doing is they're using Alexa to now order food, so you can say, "Alexa, I want a pizza delivered "in 20 minutes, what's the best pizza place "that I can get in 20 minutes?" Or "I want sushi tonight," and Alexa will come back and say, "Well, it's going to take "an hour and a half, you had sushi two days ago. "Maybe you want to do Thai food tonight." (laughing) And so it's really incredible, and then they even innovated and they're using Amazon Fire for group ordering. So, if there's a big football game or something going on they'll use Amazon Fire to do that group ordering. All that is coming in through Alexa, but the back end is still Windows on AWS. So, I love the fact that they're creating these new apps but they're using some of that lift and shift to get the data and the training and all that moving and grooving, too. >> Yeah, what do you, from the training standpoint, how, you know, ready are customers to retrain their people, you know, where are there shortages of skillsets, and how's Amazon, you know, helping in that whole movement? >> Well, training is essential because you've got so many great people at enterprises who have these great skills, so what we see a lot of people doing is leveraging things like dot net on AWS. So, they actually... They have something they know, dot net, but yet they're learning about the cloud, and so we're helping them do that training as they're going along but they still have something very familiar. Folks like Capital One did a huge training effort. They trained 1,000 people in a year on cloud. They did deep dives with a Tiger Team on cloud to get them really into the architecture and really understanding what was going on, so they could leverage all those great skills that they had in IT. So, we're seeing everything from, "I got to use some of the current tools that I have," to "Let me completely move to something new." >> And how have you, you've been in the Bay Area also for about a year, right, if I recall? >> Actually, I just moved, I moved to Seattle. >> Jeff: Oh, you did make the move, I was going to say-- >> I did. (laughing) >> "So, are they going to make you move up north?" >> I did because I was-- >> You timed it in the spring, not in November? >> I did, there you go. (laughing) When it's nice and sunny, but it's great. >> Exactly. >> It's great to live in Seattle. Amazon has such a culture that is in person, you know, so many people work there. It's really exhilarating to go into the office and brainstorm and whiteboard with people right there, and then our EBCs are there, so our executive briefing center is there, so customers come in all the time because they want to go see Amazon Go, and so it's really an exciting, energizing place to be. >> Yeah, I love the line that Warner used this morning is that AWS customers are builders and they have a bias for action. So, how do you help customers kind of translate some of the, you know, the culture that Amazon's living and kind of acting like a startup for such a large company into kind of the enterprise mindset? >> That's a great question, so we just proposed this digital innovation workshop. We are doing this now with customers. So, we're teaching them how to work backwards from the customer, how to really understand what a customer need is and how to make sure they're not biased when they're getting that customer need coming in. How to do, build an empathy map and how to write that press release, that internal press release and think differently. So, we're actually teaching customers to do it. It's one of our hottest areas today. When customers do that they commit to doing a proof of concept with us on AWS on one of the new, innovative ideas. So, we've seen a lot of great and exciting innovation coming out of that. >> All right, well, Sandy Carter, so glad we could catch up with you again. Thanks for bringing discussion of innovation, what's happening in the enterprise customers to our audience. For Jeff Frick, I'm Stu Miniman, we'll be back will lots more coverage here, you're watching theCUBE. (techy music playing)

live from New York it's the cube covering AWS summit New York 2018 hot GUI Amazon Web Services and its ecosystem partners hello and welcome back here live cube coverage in New York City for AWS Amazon Web Services summit 2018 I'm John Fourier with Jeff Rick here at the cube our next guest is dr. Matt wood general manager of artificial intelligence with Amazon Web Services keep alumnae been so busy for the past year and been on the cubanía thanks for coming back appreciate you spending the time so promotions keep on going on you got now general manager of the AI group AI operations ai automation machine learning offices a lot of big category of new things developing and a you guys have really taken AI and machine learning to a whole new level it's one of the key value propositions that you guys now have for not just a large enterprise but down to startups and developers so you know congratulations and what's the update oh well the update is this morning in the keynote I was lucky enough to introduce some new capabilities across our platform when it comes to machine learning our mission is that we want to be able to take machine learning and make it available to all developers we joke internally that we just want to we want to make machine learning boring we wanted to make it vanilla it's just it's another tool in the tool chest of any developer and any any data data scientist and we've done that this idea of taking technology that is traditionally only within reached a very very small number of well-funded organizations and making it as broadly distributed as possible we've done that pretty successfully with compute storage and databases and analytics and data warehousing and we want to do the exact same thing for the machine learning and to do that we have to kind of build an entirely new stack and we think of that stack in in three different tiers the bottom tier really for academics and researchers and data scientists we provide a wide range of frameworks open source programming libraries the developers and data scientists use to build neural networks and intelligence they're things like tend to flow and Apache mx9 and by torch and they're really they're very technical you can build you know arbitrarily sophisticated says most she open source to write mostly open source that's right we contribute a lot of our work back to MX net but we also contribute to buy torch and to tend to flow and there's big healthy open source projects growing up around you know all these popular frameworks plus more like chaos and gluon and horror boredom so that's a very very it's a key area for for researchers and academics the next level up we have machine learning platforms this is for developers and data scientists who have data they see in the clout although they want to move to the cloud quickly but they want to be able to use for modeling they want to be able to use it to build custom machine learning models and so here we try and remove as much of the undifferentiated heavy lifting associated with doing that as possible and this is really where sage maker fits in Cersei's maker allows developers to quickly fill train optimize and host their machine learning models and then at the top tier we have a set of AI services which are for application developers that don't want to get into the weeds they just want to get up and running really really quickly and so today we announced four new services really across those their middle tier in that top tier so for Sage maker we're very pleased to introduce a new streaming data protocol which allows you to take data straight from s3 and pump it straight into your algorithm and straight onto the computer infrastructure and what that means is you no longer have to copy data from s3 onto your computer infrastructure in order to be able to start training you just take away that step and just stream it right on there and it's an approach that we use inside sage maker for a lot of our built-in algorithms and it significantly increases the the speed of the algorithm and significantly of course decreases the cost of running the training because you pay by the second so any second you can save off it's a coffin for the customer and they also it helps the machine learn more that's right yeah you can put more data through it absolutely so you're no longer constrained by the amount of disk space you're not even constrained by the amount of memory on the instance you can just pump terabyte after terabyte after terabyte and we actually had another thing like talked about in the keynote this morning a new customer of ours snap who are routinely training on over 100 terabytes of image data using sage maker so you know the ability to be able to pump in lots of data is one of the keys to building successful machine learning applications so we brought that capability to everybody that's using tensorflow now you can just have your tensor flow model bring it to Sage maker do a little bit of wiring click a button and you were just start streaming your data to your tents upload what's the impact of the developer time speed I think it is it is the ability to be able to pump more data it is the decrease in time it takes to start the training but most importantly it decreases the training time all up so you'll see between a 10 and 25 percent decrease in training time some ways you can train more models or you can train more models per in the same unit time or you can just decrease the cost so it's a completely different way of thinking about how to train over large amounts of data we were doing it internally and now we're making it available for everybody through tej matrix that's the first thing the second thing that we're adding is the ability to be able to batch process and stage make them so stage maker used to be great at real-time predictions but there's a lot of use cases where you don't want to just make a one-off prediction you want to predict hundreds or thousands or even millions of things all at once so let's say you've got all of your sales information at the end of the month you want to use that to make a forecast for the next month you don't need to do that in real-time you need to do it once and then place the order and so we added batch transforms to Sage maker so you can pull in all of that data large amounts of data batch process it within a fully automated environment and then spin down the infrastructure and you're done it's a very very simple API anyone that uses a lambda function it's can take advantage of this again just dramatically decreasing the overhead and making it so much easier for everybody to take advantage of machine load and then at the top layer we had new capabilities for our AI services so we announced 12 new language pairs for our translation service and we announced new transcription so capability which allows us to take multi-channel audio such as might be recorded here but more commonly on contact centers just like you have a left channel on the right channel for stereo context centers often record the agent and the customer on the same track and today you can now pass that through our transcribed service long-form speech will split it up into the channels or automatically transcribe it will analyze all the timestamps and create just a single script and from there you can see what was being talked about you can check the topics automatically using comprehend or you can check the compliance did the agents say the words that they have to say for compliance reasons at some point during the conversation that's a material new capability for what's the top surface is being used obviously comprehend transcribe and barri of others you guys have put a lot of stuff out there all kinds of stuff what's the top sellers top use usage as a proxy for uptake you know I think I think we see a ton of we see a ton of adoption across all of these areas but where a lot of the momentum is growing right now is sage maker so if you look at a formula one they just chose Formula One racing they just chose AWS and sage maker as their machine learning platform the National Football League Major League Baseball today announcer they're you know re offering their relationship and their strategic partnership with AWS cream machine learning so all of these groups are using the data which just streams out of these these races all these games yeah and that can be the video or it can be the telemetry of the cars or the telemetry of the players and they're pumping that through Sage maker to drive more engaging experiences for their viewers so guys ok streaming this data is key this is a stage maker quickly this can do video yeah just get it all in all of it well you know we'd love data I would love to follow up on that so the question is is that when will sage maker overtake Aurora as the fastest growing product in history of Amazon because I predicted that reinvent that sage maker would go on err is it looking good right now I mean I sorta still on paper you guys are seeing is growing but see no eager give us an indicator well I mean I don't women breakout revenue per service but even the same excitement I'll say this the same excitement that I see Perseids maker now and the same opportunity and the same momentum it really really reminds me of AWS ten years ago it's the same sort of transformative democratizing approach to which really engages builders and I see the same level of the excitement as levels are super super high as well no super high in general reader pipe out there but I see the same level of enthusiasm and movement and the middle are building with it basically absolutely so what's this toy you have here I know we don't have a lot of time but this isn't you've got a little problem this is the world's first deep learning in April were on wireless video camera we thought it D blends we announced it and launched it at reinvent 2017 and actually hold that but they can hold it up to the camera it's a cute little device we modeled it after wall-e the Pixar movie and it is a HD video camera on the front here and in the base here we have a incredibly powerful custom piece of machine learning hardware so this can process over a billion machine learning operations per second you can take the video in real time you send it to the GPU on board and we'll just start processing the stream in real time so that's kind of interesting but the real value of this and why we designed it was we wanted to try and find a way for developers to get literally hands-on with machine learning so the way that build is a lifelong learners right they they love to learn they have an insatiable appetite for new information and new technologies and the way that they learn that is they experiment they start working and they kind of spin this flywheel where you try something out it works you fiddle with it it stops working you learn a little bit more and you want to go around around around that's been tried and tested for developers for four decades the challenge with machine learning is doing that is still very very difficult you need a label data you need to understand the algorithms it's just it's hard to do but with deep lens you can get up and running in ten minutes so it's connected back to the cloud it's good at about two stage makeup you can deploy a pre-built model down onto the device in ten minutes to do object detection we do some wacky visual effects with neural style transfer we do hot dog and no hot dog detection of course but the real value comes in that you can take any of those models tear them apart so sage maker start fiddling around with them and then immediately deploy them back down onto the camera and every developer on their desk has things that they can detect there are pens and cups and people whatever it is so they can very very quickly spin this flywheel where they're experimenting changing succeeding failing and just going round around a row that's for developers your target audience yes right okay and what are some of the things that have come out of it have you seen any cool yes evolutionary it has been incredibly gratifying and really humbling to see developers that have no machine learning experience take this out of the box and build some really wonderful projects one in really good example is exercise detection so you know when you're doing a workout they build a model which detects the exerciser there and then detects the reps of the weights that you're lifting now we saw skeletal mapping so you could map a person in 3d space using a simple camera we saw security features where you could put this on your door and then it would send you a text message if it didn't recognize who was in front of the door we saw one which was amazing which would read books aloud to kids so you would hold up the book and they would detect the text extract the text send the text to paly and then speak aloud for the kids so there's games as educational tools as little security gizmos one group even trained a dog detection model which detected individual species plug this into an enormous power pack and took it to the local dog park so they could test it out so it's all of this from from a cold start with know machine learning experience you having fun yes absolutely one of the great things about machine learning is you don't just get to work in one area you get to work in you get to work in Formula One and sports and you get to work in healthcare and you get to work in retail and and develop a tool in CTO is gonna love this chief toy officers chief toy officers I love it so I got to ask you so what's new in your world GM of AI audition intelligence what does that mean just quickly explain it for our our audience is that all the software I mean what specifically are you overseeing what's your purview within the realm of AWS yeah that's that's a totally fair question so my purview is I run the products for deep learning machine learning and artificial intelligence really across the AWS machine learning team so I get I have a lot of fingers in a lot of pies I get involved in the new products we're gonna go build out I get involved in helping grow usage of existing products I get it to do a lot of invention it spent a ton of time with customers but overall work with the rest of the team on setting the technical and pronto strategy for machine learning at AWS when what's your top priorities this year adoption uptake new product introductions and you guys don't stop it well we do sync we don't need to keep on introducing more and more things any high ground that you want to take what's what's the vision I didn't the vision is to is genuinely to continue to make it as easy as possible for developers to use Ruggiero my icon overstate the importance or the challenge so we're not at the point where you can just pull down some Python code and figure it out we're not even we don't have a JVM for machine learning where there's no there's no developer tools or debuggers there's very few visualizers so it's still very hard if you kind of think of it in computing terms we're still working in assembly language and you're seen learning so there's this wealth of opportunity ahead of us and the responsibility that I feel very strongly is to be able to continually in crew on the staff to continually bring new capabilities to mortar but well cloud has been disrupting IT operations AI ops with a calling in Silicon Valley and the venture circuit Auto ml as a term has been kicked around Auto automatic machine learning you got to train the machines with something data seems to be it strikes me about this compared to storage or compared to compute or compared to some of the core Amazon foundational products those are just better ways to do something they already existed this is not a better way to do something that are exists this is a way to get the democratization at the start of the process of the application of machine learning and artificial intelligence to a plethora of applications in these cases that is fundamentally yeah different in it just a step up in terms of totally agree the power to the hands of the people it's something which is very far as an area which is very fast moving and very fast growing but what's funny is it totally builds on top of the cloud and you really can't do machine learning in any meaningful production way unless you have a way that is cheap and easy to collect large amounts of data in a way which allows you to pull down high-performance computation at any scale that you need it and so through the cloud we've actually laid the foundations for machine learning going forwards and other things too coming oh yes that's a search as you guys announced the cloud highlights the power yet that it brings to these new capabilities solutely yeah and we get to build on them at AWS and at Amazon just like our customers do so osage make the runs on ec2 we wouldn't we won't be able to do sage maker without ec2 and you know in the fullness of time we see that you know the usage of machine learning could be as big if not bigger than the whole of the rest of AWS combined that's our aspiration dr. Matt would I wish we had more time to Chad loved shopping with you I'd love to do a whole nother segment on what you're doing with customers I know you guys are great customer focus as Andy always mentions when on the cube you guys listen to customers want to hear that maybe a reinvent will circle back sounds good congratulations on your success great to see you he showed it thanks off dr. Matt would here in the cube was dreaming all this data out to the Amazon Cloud is whether they be hosts all of our stuff of course it's the cube bringing you live action here in New York City for cube coverage of AWS summit 2018 in Manhattan we'll be back with more after this short break

>> Live from New York, it's theCUBE, covering AWS Summit New York 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services and its ecosystem partners. >> Hello, welcome back everyone. This is theCUBE live in New York City for AWS Amazon Web Services Summit 2018. I'm John Furrier with Jeff Frick here for wall-to-wall coverage here for the one day event. Our next guest is TK Keanini, distinguished engineer at Cisco. Great to have you on theCUBE. Thanks for joining us today. >> Thanks, great to be here. >> We had some chat on before they came on camera about protocols, deep-packet inspection, networking. I see Cisco now, moving up the stack. I'm sure, back in the day when you were there and recently, that's been the big debate for Sysco of the stack but the cloud has created a whole new stack, right, so a lot of action. Seems like the same movie from a couple generations ago happening out in real time at a much more accelerated rate, welcome to theCube, what's your toughs? >> Thank you so much, yeah, you know, anybody who's been in this business for the last 20-25 years, I always joke and say, you know, same circus, different clowns. You know, it's the same thing again and it's exciting because I mean, you saw the keynote, the people here, everybody's excited about doing develop on this new thing. It's got new economics, new scale, it's definitely got more security, I think, and yeah, we're just really moving aggressively with our customers towards the future. >> You know, TK, I want to get your thoughts 'cause one of the thing we've been saying on theCube, we've been covering Amazon reinvent since 2012, 2013 timeframe and so we've seen the growth but it's always been a developer haven, you know, cloud native, you were born in the cloud, like most startups were back in the day, you had great goodness and then you could become a drop box and be so big you had to do your own data so I get that but for the most part developers check small, medium sized businesses, check now large enterprises, great developers. Now, you're getting clear visibility on operators. So the confluence between operators of networks and infrastructure and IT operations merging together and having some synergy and cohesiveness with developers for applications, new work loads. What's your thoughts on that because this is really becoming the big ah-ha moment where I can now operate now at a level and have a developer haven going on, your thoughts? >> Yeah, no, so I think you heard it in the keynote today, security is everybody's problem, right? And it certainly is the developer's problem, it maybe even starts with the developer. You know, threat actors are clever, you could say that threat actors were the first to go cloud first and they're not ashamed of what they use, they're going to get what they want and so you know, the idea of providing security as a service to those developers is a new thing I will say. Usually I'm building product and service for the security expert. Now, it's this web app developer, right? And their first question to me is "where's the API?", right? "Where's my libraries", right? How can I treat you like I treat storage, like I treat networking? They don't want to grow up and become a networking expert, they just want to have their application scale and so that's the real focus is, understanding the customer and building that service at the highest quality. Much of the expertise, I have to mechanize inside of my algorithms and my machine learning but again, delivering them a service so that they can protect and become incredibly expensive for those threat actors to pursue. >> And the alternative in the old days was provision a lot of hardware, do a lot of configuration management, security audits, meeting, put up a perimeter, now you can create sets of services. >> Yeah, and a lot of automation, right? That's key. Like, you don't have enough people to test. You have to automate your tests. You don't have enough people to read over documents, you have to automate that acquisition. Everything's about augmentation and automation. Security, all aspects of security are following suit. >> Yeah. >> TK, I wonder, you talk a lot about the threat-act revolution, through some other interviews and that's really an recurring theme because it's kind of your way of saying how you have this kind of have this arms race but the other big thing that's happened in the threat act is that it's gone the hacker, maybe trying to cause a disruption to nation states and much more organize. Is that as evolved in the amount of resources that they now have to deploy versus just some stand alone hacker? Have have you seen that evolve, what are some of the responses? >> Yeah, I still get goosebumps thinking about it. 'Cause back when we started it was more like, you know, we were just sharing a craft, you know. It was a lot like amateur radio, you know? You broke into something, you shared that skill, not anymore. I mean these are real, a nation state, threat actors, criminals and they're running a real business, okay? >> Right. And if you do really good security, you're essentially adding to their cost of operation and they don't like that. So it is really a business against a business. And they think like a business. They're well resourced like a business, they're patient and sometimes you know, in certain cases going after the weak, in some cases they're incredibly targeted, they're coming after you because you are a center of excellence for that sector and it doesn't matter, you know, how high you build the wall. They're going to find a way to go under it (laughs) or go around it or find a way to declare no wall but yeah, it's fun because like I said, instead of waiting for something to fail, like a hard drive or you're just building IT systems for resiliency, in my world, these threat actors are talented. >> Right. Right? So everyday if intervene, I force them to intervene. If they intervene, they force me to intervene. That's funny you say they're running a business, so is that part of your defense is just increasing their cost of goods to hold in a major, major way? >> It really is, you know, we've seen a lot of trends shift. For instance, you know, Ransomware a little while ago, that was a big deal because you know, they'd hold your machine hostage, it'd cost you $200 maybe $300 to get out of it, okay? The problem with that is tomorrow their gig's up, okay? Now the shift has been to cryptomining or cryptojacking. If they compromise your machine and can get a quarter out of that machine just by doing Bitcoin mining, they will essentially make 25 cents tomorrow, so they've shifted to a recurring revenue stream, okay? This is important, okay? >> Right, right. >> Because tomorrow and the next day and the next day, they're still undetected, okay? And when I say about raising their cost of operations if you can find that cryptomining on your network, no matter where your network is and shut them down, you've just taken a little bit away from their recurring revenue stream, right? And that's the dynamics we're facing daily. >> Disruption is key. Making it complex and keeping disruption. >> Having more visibility than they do, having more detection than they do and basically knowing yourself better than they do. >> Right. >> Is absolutely critical. >> I want to hear your thoughts, TK, on a couple things. One observation is you know, during the Snowden era, you know, the mainstream population and world whether it's capital markets or IT, didn't talk much about "metadata", but then after Snowden, "metadata" became a big thing and we now know what metadata is and now obviously with the Russian involvement in the election, spearfishing is now, I mean its been out there, but you're seeing specifically what was done there with spearfishing, so easy to pull off. >> Yeah. >> How are we getting better at detecting, preventing, against the humans who just think oh hey, a job offer for you, or a real elegant bait and certainly with mobile, doesn't have that DNS visibility, mobile makes it easier to do some spearfishing. Spearfishing is a big deal. >> Yeah. >> Your thoughts on it? >> Yeah, and that's again, that big trend in shift is a long time ago, you know, we built security systems to watch for people breaking into networks. Today, the threat actors are logging into your network 'cause they've already gotten your credentials through some means, okay? So how do you detect somebody who's actually impersonating you on the network? The same sort of security bells are not going to ring. And this applies for a cloud or on pram, or anything. >> Right, right. >> It's the same game and really, you know, being able to do that detection from the telemetry that comes native from then environment is critical. >> And so really just more analytics, more telemetry, more instrumentation? >> It's not about the data, it really is about the analytics. I mean, yes the telemetry has to be necessary and sufficient but the analytical outcome has to be pointed at exactly that, you are trying to detect fraud, you are trying to detect. You know, it's like in the old days, if I gave you my general ledger, right, and you were an accountant, you would just be looking for errors. Okay, that's fine for operation but say you're trying to cath a crook. I hand you that same general ledger, you're going to come at it with a different pair of eyes. >> Right. >> A different mental model. You're trying to find the crook. >> Right. >> Who is actively hiding from you. That's the type of analytics we're focused on. >> So this is interesting, talk about machine learning, and AI could be assist you mention, automation, Stealthwatch Cloud is something that you've mentioned. What is that, what's going on around there, how do you get that lens to be turned on quickly in context? 'Cause real time is about contextual relevance. >> That's right. >> At any given moment you've got to be ready alert and looking for things. >> So the beauty of AWS is they can deploy in any one way. You can have your virtual servers, you can have the containerized, or you can be serverless. That's the thing, the cool kids are doing serverless, okay? >> Right, right. >> You have to provide the same level of threat analytics for all three, no matter what. The good news is, it's not about not having the data. AWS gives you a rich set of telemetry from many, many sources. What we do is first synthesize all that together, run our analytics on it and point out where you may be exposed or there are threat activities that's either, maybe even from the inside, not necessarily from the outside, you know, in your Snowden account but there's anonymous activity that requires attention. All of those things, all that developer wants to do is make sure that they you know, delivered to their customers. Business continuity. >> Right, right, yeah. >> They're not interested in security. >> TK, I've got to ask you the question around security around you know, can you see the papers, so you know, Pat Gelsinger, Cube alumni, now CEO of VMware, said on theCube, Dave Vellante co-host theCube, asked him years ago "is security a do-over with the cloud?". This was back when the cloud was being poo-pood as a security mod, oh it's not secure in the cloud, now it's looking damn good, right, so. >> And now it's more secure, I think, yeah. >> Now it's more secure, and yeah, that's pretty clear. >> Yeah. >> So there's a chance for people to get a mulligan, get a re-do, to rethink security. How do you engage conversations and how do you advise friends, colleagues, customers around if there's a chance to do security over, with a no-perimeter model, with a API microservices centric view. Whats the strategy, what's the architecture, what's the approach? >> Yeah, you know, I don't know, there's a couple of cases, it's not a one size fits all. We have a lot of successful businesses transitioning and they really can't turn their back on yesterday, you know, they have to bring that transition forward. >> Right. >> So there's that one crowd and they're going to have a different playbook because they have a set of skills and a set of things that are different. On the other end of the extreme, you have businesses that don't know on print, I mean, honestly, they were born in the cloud and their cloud made it. >> Yeah. >> And then you have most of everybody who is in between, you know, hybrid, multi-cloud, they're just doing, but functionally they're all trying to achieve the same thing which is, you're trying to get the elastic economics, you're tying to get parts of their business that elastic to that elastic compute, right? But all-in-all, the treat actor doesn't care whether they come in through your mobile device or through that cloud workload, they're after something very specific, which is, there's something in your organization, in your digital business that they want. >> So a couple of thing I want to follow up with. One is kind of the changing world of identity and security because of firewalls and you know, the walls have got to come down, they've got a lot of holes in them. You know, so much more focus on who are you? But to your point, oftentimes they're coming in as you, so the identity maybe not necessarily is a great way. >> That's right. >> Then you've got this other thing which is basically pattern detection, right, and online detection, right and we hear over and over that the average time to know that you've been breached is months and many, many days. So, how are you kind of factoring in those two things to do a better job? >> Yeah, and it is accretive, meaning there are net new ways of establishing identity. For instance, you know, if this thing is acting like a printer and its acted like a printer for the last ten years and one day that device gets up and starts checking out source code, that's a problem, (laughs) right? Okay, so there's all these sort of things around novelty and around the dimensions of novelty. It may be a volumetric novelty, it might be a protocol novelty, in serverless, I'll give you an example with serverless. We treat serverless as a first-class object, as if it actually was persistent and if it makes a very novel API call that it never did before, I think you should probably know about that. >> Yeah. >> If it starts to exfiltrate 20 gigs of data and never did that before, you probably should take a look at that, right? And these are all things from a DevOps standpoint, they want to know first, certainly. You know, there really is no excuse in cloud for you to be like "oh, I wouldn't have been able to know that", no, you can, 'cause it's all there. >> Right, right. >> And microservices in containers provide great value here. >> Incredible value, incredible value. And just again, that dynamic nature of that orchestration, you know, that orchestration brought us to basically a way where, you know, me as a developer, I used to know exactly where I was going to run and how long I was going to run and everything. I have no idea where my code runs anymore, right? And that's the case here and so security takes a completely different turn there because a lot of things that in your analytics were things that you needed to persist, those things are gone, everything's ephemeral now. So what if I wanted to run a report for ten years? Like what in that ten years stayed the same? Probably nothing, okay? So you actually have to use a lot of algorithms to say that heres a composite type of set of data features and if these things persist over time, it's kind of like the way humans work. >> Right, right. >> TK, great to have you on theCube, thanks for joining us, thanks for sharing your insight. Real quick, you're giving a talk for Cisco here? >> Yep. >> Which you're doing in a, working the hallway, give an update. >> Come join me at five o'clock, I think, it's going to be on self-launched clouds, so it will be a great talk. >> Self-launched cloud, again, thanks for coming out to Cisco Systems. >> Alright, thanks. >> And of course we're covering all the Cisco action at DevNet and Cisco Live just recently and DevNet create the cloud native portions of Cisco, and we're going to dissect TK here on theCube. Breaking it down, I'm John Furrier with Jeff Frick, stay with us, we'll be right back.

(upbeat music) >> Hello there and welcome to a special Cube conversation here at The Cube's Palo Alto studios, I'm John Furrier. Join with me for this special Cube Conference, Stu Miniman with Wikibon and The Cube co-host as well just up at Amazon Web Services Summit. Stu, great to see you again. Our next guest is Ben Golub, who's the executive chairman and interim CEO of Storj, pronounced storage. So it's a really hot cryptocurrency, blockchain based storage solution. I should say decentralized storage, not necessarily cryptocurrency, but tokens are involved, encryption. Great to see you. >> Great to see you, it's good to be back. >> Formerly Docker CEO and now advising at Mayfield Fund as a venture partner and also interim CEO of a hot-- >> Yeah really exciting company. And I'm really excited to talk to you about it today. >> So let's just jump into it. So obviously the ICO craze is awesome and we've always speculated that the blockchain and the decentralized applications are coming is going to be the real action. But yet it's going to create efficiencies where there's inefficiencies. >> Sure. >> Venture capital is one of them and that's why the ICO craze is going. People are raising a boatload of money that they probably wouldn't have gotten that amount. >> Wouldn't have gotten, yeah no dilution, things like that. It's interesting yeah. >> So give us an update on Storj or storage. How much in ICO did they raised, whitepapers out there? It's peer to peer, give a quick, take a minute to explain what the company's doing. >> Yeah well I guess that I should probably start by saying that I think that blockchain is bigger than just cryptocurrency, and decentralized is bigger than blockchain, and Storj is primarily a decentralized storage company. So we're about decentralized apps and the whole thing would absolutely work even if we were just using dollars. But I think it does make it a whole lot more exciting. And so the company, kind of unique in the crypto space in that we actually had a running service that was providing real value, before we did the large token sale. And the token sale raised about $30 million. Fortunately they took about 10 of that in Ethereum and Bitcoin which rose up. So there's a good deal more than that in the bank account right now. >> John: Hopefully they converted to fiat currency. >> And then they converted to fiat along the way. >> It's at an all-time high of $20,000 right now. It's like $7,000, something like that. >> Yeah, so you know, didn't sell everything at the peak, but didn't sell at the-- >> Yeah, so we've been having many blockchain and crypto or token-based economic kind of things. But the real question is what's happening? Now we know the action's been on the infrastructure side. We look at all the top hedge funds, Polychain, amongst others. They love these deals because it's infrastructure. Is that where the action is and how are you guys looking at that because at the same time, there's a wave of decentralized applications also known as Dapps coming on. So there's a relationship going on between how fast the infrastructure can go, and then how applications are going to work with either on chain or off chain dynamics. >> Sure, sure. So maybe it would be helpful to give you a sense of what it is that we do. 'Cause I think that if you do that, then I think it makes sense in the context of decentralized infrastructure, decentralized apps, but also actually traditional infrastructure as well. I've always been searching for a company that I could describe at Thanksgiving. I've never succeeded, so I always end up saying that I'm in computers, and fixing somebody's printer. (laughing) But I guess if I were to describe Storj at Thanksgiving, I'd say it's basically the Airbnb of storage, or the Airbnb of disc drives. So Airbnb, people have lots of condos or vacation properties that aren't being used all the time, and so Airbnb brings them together with people who want to rent those, and they're the largest hotel company in the world, without owning a single property. And we're kind of doing the same thing with Storj, in that there is, first of all, this explosion in the amount of data that's getting created. It would fill a stack of CD-ROMs to Mars and back this year. Yet the price of cloud storage hasn't come down. And 90% of all the disc drives that are out there are only about 10% utilized. So seems like a problem that needs a solution. And that's what we've done. We've basically brought together a very large network of individuals and companies that have spare storage capacity and matched them up with people who need storage. The really cool aspect, there are many cool aspects about it, but one of them is that basically if you want to store on the Storj network, we take your file, you encrypt it, so we never hold the keys. You encrypt it, it's all scrambled up, we break it up into between 20 and 80 pieces, and we spread those out across 150,000 or so nodes that we have in our network. So it's super cheap, but it's also super secure. Great performance because the data's way out at the edge. And super available because there's no storm or power outage or idiot tripping over a power cord that can take out your storage. >> So, Ben, you touched on, first question I was going to ask, of course, trust and security. Storage I absolutely have to worry about, so it sounds like that's at the core, but there's a number of dynamics going on in the industry. Object storage was great, let's spread it out, let's make it more decentralized, but most of the core storage industry is speeds and feeds and latency's super important, and even when you start getting to distributed architecture, I worry about that latency. So what are kind of the use cases, what are some of the key customer issues? Is price a big piece of it? Or what solutions does Storj solve that others can't? >> I always said when I was at Cluster, which was a storage company that there were four things that mattered in storage. There's certainly price; there was security; as in I don't want anybody to be able to access it; there's availability, I never want to drop or lose files; and finally there's performance, how fast I can get it. And so for a huge range of use cases that involve files, basically everything that object storage is kind of used for today, the design of our system is actually much better because we've encrypted it locally and then spread it out, you really can't attack it. First of all, you'd have to figure out... So a would-be attacker who wanted to find one of your files in the storage network would have to figure out which of the 80 or the 20 nodes out of 150,000 it's located on. If they found one of those, and they got the small portion of the file that's there, they wouldn't be able to do anything with it 'cause it's encrypted. Even if they were somehow able to decrypt it by stealing the key from you, not from us... >> So encryption and immutability... >> And immutability, right. So you get all of that. So for the security piece, it's great. For the availability piece, I never lose a file. It's really, really good, because if you just look at the math, the chances that somehow... You can basically lose 10 out of 20 nodes and still be able to recover your files. And all of our nodes are run by different people, different power supply. >> So let's take a step back. How many nodes are on the network now, you said? >> 150,000 now, run by 70,000 farmers, is what we call them. They're not miners, 'cause they're not just solving that problem, they're just producing something of value. 70,000 farmers, and then we have on the network right now, over 50 petabytes of data, which is a really large amount, and yet, we don't run a single data center. >> Have you guys raised any venture at all, or is it all ICO proceeds? >> There was a small seed round that was done, before the ICO craze. But other than that, it's all-- >> And how many people are working on the company? >> 25. >> So you guys are a classic startup. The working product, how does that look now? Is it on the blockchain, is it off the chain, how's it working, Bitcoin? >> So I've described to you what the product does. So far nothing I've described to you involves blockchain. The way the economics work is that as a user, somebody who wants to store on our network, we quote a price in dollars. You can either pay us in dollars or in the Storj token, and as a farmer, you get compensated with a Storj token. And that's done, of course, using blockchain we're actually part of Ethereum. >> Is that ERC-20 token? >> ERC-20 token, yeah. There are also interesting things that we are working on using blockchain for things like you just mentioned, data integrity, so I can make sure that if I'm doing a snapshot of a database, and I want to make sure that it's exactly what it is, nobody can tamper with it, et cetera, then that's a perfect use of blockchain. But using blockchain for the stuff I was talking about before, like figuring out where the shards are and making sure that they're uptime and reliable, that's actually stuff where blockchain isn't the best answer. >> Ben, tell us a little bit about the customers that you find there, 'cause storage administrators, that role's been changing a lot, but the typical storage administrator, if you tell them, "Oh yeah, I'm doing some distributed thing, "somewhere else, and paying in crypto-currency," they'd be like, are you kidding me? I want this thing that I can lock and hold and guard with a gun. >> This is like anything else, there's an adoption curve, and right now it's clearly very much early adopters. And actually similarly to Docker and similar to the cloud in general, it's developers who are leading the way. Developers are saying, oh, wow, I can write to the storage network in the same way that I would have written to S3, only it's cheaper, for many use cases, more performing, and not centralized, so I'm not trusting one cloud provider. So for certain use cases, this is fantastic. >> Are there certain cloud native apps that you're finding have strong affinity here? >> Yeah, so basically what we have affinity with right now, and let's be clear, this is early days. I wouldn't recommend that people store their most sensitive data on this, but-- >> Not Oracle certified yet, is what you're saying? >> We're not Oracle certified, no. (laughing) Basically anything involving a large file that you're not writing to very frequently, but you're reading a lot, or that's getting read by lots of people around the world, we're a really good solution. It's one of the things I think I mentioned to you. So we've got 150,000 nodes. They're located in I think it's now 180 countries, and all over the U.S. So if you want to get your data close to the edge, the people who are consuming your data are really close to the edge, this is actually really good. And because it's spread across so many, you get the benefit of parallelism, so it's super fast, in addition to being super safe and super secure. >> How does it work for the farmers? Because we have video files, so we would love to spread our video files on the Storj network. So let's just say... >> I'd do a special deal for you, too, you know. >> Of course, yeah, get a little token action going on both sides, Cube coins. But the availability thing is concerning. Whose computers is it being stored on? Is it extra capacity? Is it servers? Is it people's home computers? What's the, is it that kind of model? >> Sure, so basically yeah, we, just as Airbnb measures reputation, we measure reputation, too. And so if you don't have a good reputation, certain characteristics, we won't send data to you. What it basically means is you've got to have dedicated hardware and a dedicated connection. So we do have people who are running things in their home, but it's not a laptop, it's not on your phone. But if you have a disc drive that's connected with reasonably high capacity and reasonably well connected, then you'll establish good reputation. But what we are seeing is we are seeing a lot of universities, a lot of small businesses, some data center operators who have spare capacity or just want to use us as like, be both a farmer and a user. So backup and get stuff on their capacity as a good idea. And interestingly enough, we also are getting a lot of people who were Bitcoin miners and bought equipment, which is good quality equipment, but there's such an arms race in doing that. >> So they abandoned, because it was too hard for them to get coins. >> It's too hard to make money, right, and very expensive, specialized equipment, and in our case, basically general high quality equipment works well. >> What's the profit model? How do the farmers make money? Take our Cube videos, as an example, so I'm paying you guys, and you're distributing those tokens? >> You're paying us and you're paying us either in dollars or tokens. And then farmers get compensated in tokens. Right now, about 60 cents on every dollar goes to farmers. And farmers get more storage based off of their reputation. We charge people based on both how much you're storing as well as how much bandwidth egress that you're doing, and we compensate farmers exactly the same way. >> It's handled through a consensus protocol that you guys have? >> Yeah, yeah, so the payment and assessing reputation we actually use good distributed blockchain as well there, right, so you're not counting on Storj to be in the middle there. Now, with the remaining 40 cents, which I think is actually the really interesting part, we keep some of that, we put some back into the network, but what I'm really excited about is that this is now a way for us to economically empower demand partners as well. The first thing we announced was FileZilla, but we have lots of other open source projects waiting in the wings, and we're happy to share with them. So as opposed to centralized cloud, where it's really hard to make money as an open source company, we're not an open source project in our case, right? We're happy if you're sending us users and data, to give you a really meaningful percentage. >> Any kind of freemium model you guys are playing with? I can imagine this being pretty interesting, because S3 democratized and lowered the cost barrier, obviously with cloud. >> S3 has been great for many things. >> How low are you in terms of the disruption? You guys are probably going to have to come in and undercut S3, is that the strategy? Or is that the price value? >> I think what I learned from my time in storage, is price is important but you have to be really safe and available and reliable, 'cause people's data is really important. But we looked across a pretty broad set of use cases, in comparing us to the traditional cloud providers we're probably a third. And we could go lower. What I think is really interesting in our case is that the economics just work really well. So from our perspective, if you're a farmer, you've already got, it's spare capacity, you don't need any more electricity to run this thing, you've got bandwidth, right? You don't need to hire any more people. So it's almost pure margin for a farmer, which is great for them. And so we can give economic value to farmers, we can give economic value to our customers, we can give economic value to partners. >> Any kind of economic models you can share in terms of what someone would make? Let's just say that I had this big music library that's not being used anymore, and I had a-- >> Well, as a customer of course, if you've got data that you want to store on our network, you'll save a lot of money, and it's probably a third of what you might pay. >> But is there any kind of, if I'm a farmer, I want to join the network? >> But if you're a farmer. >> How much am I going to make? >> It really depends on how much you're storing and how good your connection is, but as a farmer, I think you can make decent money. This could probably be I don't know off the top of my head, $20, $30 a month per drive, which isn't bad, and certainly much easier than making money-- >> So it kind of depends like the Airbnb model, depends how well you're using-- >> How well you're used. So some people earn less, some people earn more. And again, for most of the farmers, this is pure margin. >> Great, we got a couple back to back rooms, Stu. We should get some drives up there and get on board. We could pay for the cameras. >> And look, I think for videos, you guys would actually be a perfect use case with a lot of the stuff that's going to be coming out later this year. You get both storage and CDN like things for free, in the sense that because-- >> I'm really glad you brought that up, 'cause I want to ask you about Videocoin, 'cause Halsey Minor has Videocoin, another ICO, he raised $50 million. We covered that on Silicon Angle. But he's trying to democratize Acromi. Is that similar to what you guys are doing? >> I guess you could say yeah, we're further democratizing object storage, democratizing S3, but I think we can also democratize Acromi, we can democratize Isilon, there's certain other really exciting things that are-- >> What other services, you mentioned CDN, so it's not just storing the information, but that global dispersion, what does that enable? >> It used to be that people had a really big difference between archival which is slow, hard to get at, and CDN, right? And but actually, given the way that we're doing this thing, we can be pretty seamless. Pay archival for stuff that's staying in archival, but go up market if you're going to be having a lot of people read it. >> So I got to ask you about the, obviously, security. You're looking at it for additional services around redundancy, I can see that being a nice headroom for you. On a personal note, you've been involved in a lot of industry companies that have done very well, entrepreneurial success. >> Ben: Why am I doing this? (laughing) >> I can tell you're having fun. How could you not have fun, it's a whole 'nother generation of innovation, disruption coming, a whole 'nother price point. So what's it like, are you having fun? And if you could talk to your 22-year-old self right now, 'cause I wish I was 22 right now in this market-- >> Are you saying I'm not 22? >> How do you explain this? And when you go to parties, even in the Valley, and people say, "Man, you're crazy, it's a fricken' "scam out there," how do you explain to 'em this revolution? Because this is like a special, unique wave. How would you talk about that? >> Actually I describe it the same way to people in the Valley the same way that I described at the beginning, which is that blockchain is bigger than cryptocurrency, and decentralized is much bigger than blockchain. And Storj is first and foremost decentralized. It's about decentralized computing, decentralized storage, supporting decentralized apps, keeping the internet from ending up in the hands of just three people, three companies, which I think is really important. But also I feel very good that, to the extent that Storj does touch on cryptocurrency, that we've done it the right way. We had the service working first before we did the token sale. We raised what now appears to be a modest amount in the token sale, tried to be very transparent and at the forefront. >> You probably could've gotten more if you wanted to. >> Probably, right? But we were trying to be forefront in terms of governance and transparency, and I think that it'll probably be a good thing, just as it was kind of a good thing that the bubble burst in the late '90s and you got rid of a lot of such not great companies and not such great operators. I think that the current corrections, or whatever, in the crypto market I think will-- >> Like pets.com is gone, but DogeCoin still exists. (laughing) >> So I'm sure that somebody has a crypto base pets.com or webvan lurking in the wings somewhere. Kodak just did it. >> I got to ask you, you're super smart. You went to some really good schools, I think Princeton, Harvard Business School. So you got a good education, so I got to get your take on the whole token economics vision. 'Cause this is, if you look at outside the tech trends, there's actually new economic models that are coming out. Have you looked at token economics? New liquidity on the one side, you've got sovereignty, you've got consensus. These are not just tech issues, these are society issues. What's your vision around that? How are you viewing it? What's the upside? How is this shaping the future? >> Yeah, I think if you're a token network, you sort of have to have some central bank chops as well, right? And we actually have a central banker. >> John: So you have a chief economic officer? >> So we don't, no, we have an advisor-- >> John: Public policy. >> I actually had a degree in public policy at one point. But we need to think about the token supply in the same way you'd think about the money supply. We're backed by something real, so it's sort of like having currencies backed by gold. We need to make sure that the market grows and the network grows. And my fundamental belief is that the more the network grows, the more people use it, the more value that we're able to provide, that'll be good for token economics in the long run. In the short run, though, what we've done, is again, we price based off of dollars, and we compensate farmers based off the token based off of the spot price. So for farmers, we've tried to remove any need to worry about volatility or things like that. >> So I want your reaction-- >> Or the price. >> I've said on The Cube multiple times that in the old days of venture startups, the CTO was everything. You had to have a great CTO or VP of engineering and great senior executive team on the entrepreneurial team. Now it's almost like the chief economic officer is a critical piece, 'cause you've got public policy intersecting with economics. You've got new kinds of math that's not technical algorithm but it's kind of business algorithms. >> It is, business algorithms. Just like any economy, the money supply matters. And people's trust in that money matters. And the supply matters. All that stuff like that, and stability matters. So I think absolutely this new breed of network based token companies will have to worry about that, and probably should think about a chief economics officer, but it doesn't mean that you don't also have to have a great CTO and great technology, 'cause that's how you make the network valuable and grow. And one of the reasons that gave me both excitement and comfort about going to Storj is that the economic model works, fundamentally, even if the crypto's not there. >> John: 'Cause technology is decentralized. >> Decentralized storage makes sense even if you're buying and selling it with dollars or pounds or rubles, or whatever. >> Ben, great to see you, thanks for coming in and sharing the Ben Golub School of Economics, Public Policy for Tokens. You can give a class at Stanford on that soon, although that's the competition's school. >> Maybe, yes. Slightly different. We still like them. >> Great to see you, congratulations. Storj, pronounced storage. Great, successful ICO, hot startup, really, an example of the infrastructure opportunities of a new decentralized infrastructure that can be and will soon, we think, it will be critical infrastructure in a whole new way. Great to see you. >> Ben: Really good to see you, great to be back with you. >> It's the Cube Conversation, I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from the Moscone Center. It's theCUBE! Covering AWS Summit San Francisco 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. (upbeat techno music) >> Hey, welcome back, everyone. We're live here in San Francisco. This is theCUBE's exclusive coverage of AWS Amazon Web Services Summit 2018 with my co-host Stu Miniman. We have two great guests. Hot startup from SingleFx, the CEO, Karthik Rau, and the CTO, Arijit Mukherji. Welcome to theCUBE. Good to see you again. >> Karthik: Yeah, great to see you again. Thanks for having us. >> So, we've been following you guys. You've been out five years. Two years in stealth, three years ago you launched on theCUBE. >> Karthik: Right here on theCUBE. >> We see you at AWS and VMware. Cloud's changed a lot. So, let's get an update. Karthik, take a minute to explain where you guys are at now company-wise, employees, traction momentum, product. Where are you guys at now? >> Karthik: Yeah, absolutely. So, SignalFx, first of all, let me tell you what we do. SignalFx is a realtime streaming operational intelligence solution. Basically, what that means is we collect monitoring data, operational data across the entire cloud environment, from the infrastructure all the way up to the applications. And we apply realtime analytics on that data to help people be a lot more proactive in their monitoring of these distributed environments. We launched the company in 2015. We come ... I'll let Arijit talk about our origins. We came out of Facebook. And we had a lot of experience building this to Facebook. In the past three years, we've been building up our company aggressively. We've now got hundreds of customers including several large Fortune 500 accounts, large web scale accounts like Acquia and HubSpot and Yelp and KAYAK. And we're over 100 employees now, about 120 employees. And yeah, doing great. >> So, Werner Vogels, the CTO, laid out on stage plus a great Matt Wood conversation about machine learning but the real thing that Werner laid out was the old way, the web server, multi-tier architecture stack kind of thing going on there to a more cloud DevOps horizontally scalable where sets of servers that could be spawned in parallel creates a new kind of operating model but also creates challenges around what to instrument. You know, as we would joke, someone left the lights on, implying EC2s been running. And all these kinds of things are going on. And you mentioned some of the Facebook kind of challenges. People were building their own scale. What have you guys learned and how does that apply today's modern infrastructure? What are some of the threshold challenges that companies are facing when they say, one, already there or I want to get there? How do you guys look at the main issues? >> Karthik: Do you want to take that? >> Yeah, so monitoring modern environments and infrastructure is actually quite a challenge. There's obviously a few things going around. One, as you mentioned, is the variety, the sheer variety of things. No longer just the three-tier architecture I have cloud services. I have containers. I have lambdas. I have my own applications. I have the cloud infrastructure itself that all needs to be monitored. And things are also becoming far more numerous. So, there's just many more of everything, right? And so, making sense of that space is becoming a big challenge. And our company was founded on the idea that monitoring is becoming an analytics problem. So, it's no longer about looking at individual servers or applications instances. It's more about making sense holistically over what's going on and being able to combine different types of data from different systems together to provide you with that high level view and that's the kind of functionality that we at SignalFx have been trying to provide. >> What are some of the data flows volumes look like. Cause I've heard multiple people talk about either Facebook or in open compute environments where there's just so much data coming in from the instrumentation that no human could actually get their arms around it. And you need to supplement it with machine learning and intelligence. I mean, is that something that you're seeing? What are some of the -- >> Yes, so actually what we see is different prospects or customers will be in different stages of a spectrum where maybe they were in a stage one where they're sort of using traditional architectures and then moving to these more modern systems. And as they get more modernized themselves, their use cases or the ways they wanted to do monitoring also gets more advanced. And so, we see the whole spectrum of it, as you mentioned. And so, understanding analytically how what we're is doing is great. But then you also want to take the human out of things as much as possible, right? >> Yeah. >> And make things more automated. And you want to look at the data and how things are behaving to learn from existing patterns to find outlines. So, that's really a very interesting challenge. And what I look at what we can do as a company going forward, like all the technological stuff that we can invest in, it's quite interesting. >> Yeah, Karthik, take us inside your customers. How does this modern monitoring, how does it change their business? How does it impact things like feedback loops and DevOps and everything that customers are having to deal in this kind of ever changing environment? >> Yeah, well I'll give you an example. There's a Fortune 500 company. They do product launches. And this is one of our customers and their product launches drive so much traffic that they do 80% of their business in the first two minutes of a product launch. And this is not at all uncommon in today's economy. And they're leveraging a lot of modern technologies, container architectures, serverless function architectures to spin up a bunch of capacity during these launches. And they were effectively flying blind most of the time. Because most of the traditional systems management monitoring solutions are not designed, A, to handle that volume. But, B, to handle the instant discovery requirements of if you're going to do 80% of your business in the first two minutes. So, the challenge is you're always playing defense. You're reacting to issues. And you're mostly flying blind. By leveraging SignalFx, they're getting realtime visibility, realtime discovery of these components as they're coming up. We're the only solution that can do that. So, literally within seconds of spinning up all of these containers, they're getting live streams into their dashboards, and live analytics, and live alerts. And what that's enabled them to do is be a lot more aggressive and effectively doing a lot more of these launches. So, that's driving their business and it's helping them drive their digital strategy forward. >> And microservices is really enabling you guys to be more relevant. Because truly the signal from the noise is where all these services reporting to? >> Karthik: Yeah. >> You talk about container madness. >> Karthik: There are two fundamental problems. So, one there's an architecture shift. And that's driving massive amounts of volume. You have physical machines that will live for three years in a data center. Divide it up into VMs, 10, 20 VMs per server. That'll maybe live for a few months. To now every process running in it's own container that might live for a few minutes. So, you have a massive exponential explosion in the number of components. But that's not the only problem. I was part of an architectural shift at VMware for a number of years. We weren't just affecting an architecture change. What's happening now is there's a cultural change and a process change that's happening as well. Because with containers, your development team can push changes directly out into a production environment. And what you're finding is you're going from sequential product development to parallel product development and a massive exponential increase in the number of code pushes. The only way you can operationalize that is you have to have realtime visibility in everything that's happening. Otherwise, the left arm doesn't know what the right arm is doing. >> John: And you need prescriptive and predictive analytics. >> Exactly. And you need predictive analytics to identify there's something unusual here. It's not a problem yet. But this is highly unusual and maybe it's your canary release. We need to do a code push. So, you want to roll it back. So, having that level of predictiveness becomes absolutely critical. >> Yeah, you mentioned realtime. We used to argue what really is realtime. And it was usually well in time to react to what the customer needs. What does realtime mean to your customers? Architecturally, is there something you do different to kind of understand what that means? >> Arijit: Yeah, so we actually fundamentally took a very different approach when we build a product. Where, typically, monitoring our metrics, monitoring was done with what we call a store and create or a batch-like architecture where you store all the data points that are coming in, then you create from it to any other use cases. While what we build at SignalFx is a fully end-to-end streaming architecture which is realtime. And what we mean by realtime is like two to three seconds between a data point coming through us and it's firing an alert or showing up in your chart. So, that's the kind of realtime. And it requires us to do lots of innovations up and down the stack. And we've built a lot of IP. We've got now patterns. And more are coming because the approach we took was quite novel. Different from-- >> John: You guys got a great management team. And looking at what you guys have done. I've been impressed with you guys. I want to just ask, Karthik, you mentioned about all these parallel processes that are going on. Totally agree. The process change, operationalizing an all new cultural way to create software manage the data. I mean, it really is the perfect storm for innovation. But also, it could literally screw people up. So, I got to ask you, who are you targeting for your customer? Who is the person that you talk to? Assuming it's kind of DevOps, so it's more like a cloud architect. Who do you target? Who do you sell to? Who's the buyer? Who uses your service? >> Karthik: Well, we see ... Every enterprise we see following a very similar journey. So, the first stage is, typically, you're just getting familiar with cloud. And you're probably just lifting and shifting enterprise workloads into the cloud. Probably experimenting with big data on the cloud. You're not yet doing microservices or containers or DevOps. And for them, we're still selling largely to classic IT. There just trying to get better visibility into their digital environment, you know, they're cloud environment. But then, what ends up happening is they very quickly get to what we call basically chaos. It's stage two. And it has a lot of parallels to shadow IT. What happened with SAS, where you have hundreds of different SAS tools is happening all over again with cloud but you've got hundreds or thousands of different operational tools. Different ways of doing monitoring, logging, security. And every team is doing it's own thing. And so, that's a big problem for enterprises who are trying to build best practices across their broader team. In that place, we're typically selling to departments because they don't have a centralize strategy yet. But what we find is the organizations at maturity have figured out that it's important to have certain centralized core services. And that doesn't mean they're forced on the end users. But they provide best practices around monitoring, logging, and such. And just make it easy for them to use those solutions. So, that's almost a new IT organization. It's platform engineering -- >> John: Is that a cloud architect? >> Platform engineering team, infrastructure engineering team, and they are effectively building best practices around the new stack not the traditional stack. >> So, you are or aren't targeting department level? Are you are? >> We sell to departments. But we also sell to the teams that are standardizing across the entire organization. >> So, cloud architects, for instance? >> Depends on the stage of the cloud journey. >> Or company. >> And the company, exactly. >> From an architectural standpoint, you talked that there's virtualization, there's containers, now serverless. How do you even figure out what to monitor in serverless? How fast is that changing? And how is that impacting your road map? >> So, serverless brings a very interesting challenge because they are very, very ephemeral. Like they're ephemeral in some sense. So, we realize there are two things. One is serverless, there's a reason why things are moving faster. It's because you want to be able to move faster. But then you also need to be able to monitor faster. It's no good monitoring serverless at five minutes later, for example. So, one of the things we invested in was how to get metrics, etc. and telemetry from these serverless environments in a very fast fashion. And that's something that we've done. The second thing we are doing that really works for this environment is afterall it's not about how many times a serverless function ran, it's about the value that it's providing the application that's running on it. And by focusing on a platform that let's you send these application metrics in great detail and then be able to monitor and analyze them, I think really amplifies the value in some sense. So, those are the two ... >> John: And talk about the ecosystems. One of the things I want to ask you guys because we've been seeing a collision between a lot of the different clouds. Clients want multicloud. Well, obviously, we're here at Amazon. They believe they should be the only cloud. But I think most customers would look at either legacy systems with some instrumentation and operational data to edge of the network, for instance. I mean, look at the edge of the network. That's just an extension of the data center depending on how you look at it. So, how do you guys view that kind of direction where customer says, "Hey, you know, I got a cloud architect. We're on Amazon. Of course, we have some old Microsoft stuff. So, we've got Azure going up there. We're kicking the tires on Google. And I got this whole IoT Edge project. SignalFx, instrument that for me. (laughs) Is that what you do? Or how do you deal with that? How would you deal with that kind of conversation? >> Well, I think most enterprises, the larger companies we see looking at multiple clouds. And they have different workloads running in different clouds, depending on the needs and what they're looking to do. So, the nice thing about a solution like SignalFx is we span all of these different architectures. And what we find is that most of the larger companies want to separate their business process solutions from their runtime architectures. Because they want to have a solution like SignalFx that it doesn't matter who you're using. If you choose to have your analytics intensive workloads in Google Cloud and your eCommerce workloads in Amazon, but you only want one system that will page someone in the middle of the night if there's a problem, then you have SignalFx to do that. And then you have your choice of runtime environments depending on what your developers need or what the business demands. We provide a lot of that glue across the different environments. >> Do you see that as the preferred architecture with most customers? Cause that makes a lot of sense. I mean, whether you're doing other data services, it kind of makes sense to separate out. Is that consistent? >> To have different applications >> Yeah. >> In different clouds? It depends. I mean, I think we see some people who are more comfortable running on a single cloud vendor and they make the decision based on what a portfolio of platforms and service features that are available. And they really like those, and they say it's easy to just go with one. But more often, we find people wanting to at least have some percentage running in a different cloud vendor. >> John: All right, final question. What's the secret sauce for the company? Tell us about the secret sauce. >> Arijit: I think-- >> We got the patents. I heard patents. You don't have to show all this exactly. But what is the secret DNA of the tech? What's the magic? >> I think it's our very unique architecture. It's entirely different from what you have. It's streaming and it focuses on scale, on timeliness, as well as on analytics capability. I think that unique combination is very special for us. And that, in a way, sort of allows us to address very, very different use cases, including this hybrid environments and what not, in a very effective way. So, it's a very, very powerful platform that can be used for many use cases. >> All right, so that was John's final question. Karthik, I've got one last one for you. What's it like being a CEO of a software company in the cloud era today compared to what it's been earlier in our career? >> Well, it's moving very, very quickly, right? I mean, technology always move very quickly. But I think compared to when I was at VMware in the mid 2000s, it just feels like every 18 months there's a new technology wave. You know, when we started our company five years ago, that was the first year that AWS eclipsed a billion dollars in sales and Dagra hadn't even launched. It launched a month after we started the company. And then serverless came. And now function architecture is all there. So, there's just so much change happening, and it's happening so quickly, it forces vendors like us to really be on the cutting edge and forward looking and making sure that you're keeping an eye out for what's coming cause the markets are moving way faster, I think, then they were 15 years ago. >> John: Well, Karthik, thanks so much. We appreciate you guys coming on, SignalFx. I'll give you the final word on the interview. Take a minute to share something with the audience that they might not know about SignalFx that they should know about. >> Well, I think what people may not realize is how realtime we can actually get. I think most people are used to doing all their monitoring and observation, and they think of realtime in the order of minutes, or if you can get stuff every 30 seconds. We really are the only realtime solution. That's why we say real realtime. We're on the order of seconds. You can build really, really sophisticated analytics and get visibility like you can't anywhere else. So, it's real, realtime. >> And that's soon to be table stakes. TheCUBE is realtime. We're live right here, on theCUBE here, in San Francisco at Amazon Web Services, AWS Summit 2018. We've been covering all the Amazon re:Invents since it started, of course. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman. Back with more live coverage after this short break. (upbeat techno music) (gentle instrumental music)

>> Announcer: Live from the Moscone Center, it's The Cube covering AWS Summit San Francisco 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Welcome back to our exclusive Cube coverage here at AWS, Amazon Web Services Summit 2018 in San Francisco. I'm John Furrier with my cohost, Stu Miniman. We have a special guest. We have an influencer, authority figure on AWS, Corey Quinn, editor of Last Week in AWS, also has got a podcast called Screaming, >> Corey: In the Cloud. >> Screaminginthecloud.com just launched. Corey, great to have you on. Thanks for joining us. >> No, thank you for letting me indulge my ongoing love affair with the sound of my own voice. (laughing) >> Well we love to have you on and again, love the commentary on the keynote on Twitter. Lot of action, we were in the front row, kind of getting all the scene. Okay, if you're going to write the newsletter next week for what happened this week, if this week was last week, next week, what's your take on this? Because again, Amazon keeps pounding the freight train that's just the cadence of AWF announcements. But they're laying it out clear. They're putting up the numbers. They're putting out the architecture. They're putting out machine learning. It's more than developers right now. What's your analysis, what's your take of what's happening this week? >> I think that certain trends are continuing to evolve that we've seen before where it used to be that if you're picking an entire technology that you're going to bet your business on, what you're going to build on next. It used to be which vendor do I pick, which software do I pick? Now even staying purely within the AWS ecosystem, that question still continues to grow. Oh so I want to use a database, great. I have 12 of them that I can choose between. And whatever I pick, the consensus is unanimous, I'm wrong. So there needs to be, I still think there needs to be some thoughtful analysis done as far as are these services solving different problems. If so, what are the differentiating points? Right now, I think the consensus emerges that when you look into a product or service offering from AWS, the first reaction all of us feel is to some extent confusion. I'm lost, I'm scared. I don't really know what's going on. And whatever I'm about to do, I feel like I'm about to do it badly. >> Yes, scale is the big point. I want to get your reaction. Matt Wood, Dr. Matt Wood, Cube alum, been on many times, he nailed it I thought when he said, look it, machine learning and data analysis was on megabytes and gigabytes, they're offering petaflop level compute, high performance, and then Werner Vogels has also said something around the services where, you can open things up in parallel scale. So, what's your reaction to that, as you look at that and say whoa, I've got a set of services I can launch in parallel, and the scale of leveraging that petaflops. I mean, this is kind of like the new, you know, compute model. Your reaction is it real? Are customers ready for it? Where are we in that evolutionary customer journey? Are they still cavemen trying to figure out how to make fire and make the wheel? I mean where are we with this? >> I think that we see the same thing continuing to emerge as far as patterns go, where they talk about, yes there's this service. Just start using it and it scales forever. And that's great in theory, but in practice, all of the demos, all of the quick starts, all of the examples, paint by numbers examples that they'll give you, tend to be at very small scale. And yes, it works really well when you have effectively five instances all playing together. When you have 5,000 of those instances, a lot of sharp edges start to emerge. Scale becomes a problem. Fail overs take far longer. And let's not even talk about what the bill does at that point. Additionally once you're at that point, it's very difficult to change course. If I write a silly blog, and effectively baby seals get more hits than this thing does, it's not that difficult for me to migrate that. Whereas if I'm dealing with large scale production traffic that's earning me money on a permanent basis, moving that is no longer trivial or in some cases feasible at all. >> Yeah Corey, how does anybody reasonably make a decision as to how they're going to build something because tomorrow, everything might change. You said oh okay great, I had my environment and I kind of you know, built my architecture a certain way, oh wait there's a new container service. Oh, and start building a, oh wait now there's the orchestrated version of that that I need to change to. Oh wait, now there's a serverless built way that kind of does it in a similar way. So you know, it seems like it used to be the best time to do things would've been two months ago, but now I should do it now. Now the answer is, the best time for me to do things would be if I could wait another quarter, but really I have to get started now. >> I tend to put as much on future Corey as I possibly can. The problem is that at one time I could've sat here and said the same thing to you about, oh virtualization is the way to go. You should migrate your existing bare metal servers there. And then from virtualization to Cloud and Cloud to containers. Then containers to serverless. And this narrative doesn't ever change. It's oh what you're doing is terrible and broken. The lords of thought have decried that now it's time to do this differently, and that's great, but what's the business use case for doing it? Well, we did this thing that effectively people get on stage at keynotes and make fun of us for now, so we should really change it. Okay maybe, but why? Is there a business value driving that decision? And I think that gets lost in the weeds of the new shiny conference ware that gets trotted out. >> Well I mean Amazon's not, I mean they're being pretty forthright. I mean, you can't deny what Intuit put out there today. The Intuit head of machine learning and data science laid out old way, new way. Classic case of old way, new way. Eight months, six to eight months, ton of cluster, you-know-what going on as things changed it. They're just data scientists. They're not back-end developers. They went to one week. Nine months to one week. That's undeniable right? I mean how do you, I mean that's a big company but, that seems to be the big enchilada that Amazon's going for, not the pockets of digital disruption. You know what I'm saying? So it's like, how do you square that out? I mean how do you think about that? >> Cloudability had a great survey that they released the results of somewhat recently where they were discussing that something like four or five of the, or I'm sorry 85% of the global spend on AWS went to four or five services that all have been around for a long time. RDS, EC2, S3, PBS, Data Transfer. And so as much as people talk about this and you're seeing pockets of this, it's not the common gaze by a wide margin. People don't get up on stage and talk about, well I have these bunch of EC2 instances behind a low balancer, storing data on S3 and that's good enough for me, because that's not interesting anymore. People know how to do that. Instead, they're talking about these far future things that definitely add capability, but do come at a cost-- >> I mean it's the classic head room. It's like here's some head room, but at the end of the day it's EC2, S3, Kinesis, Redshift, bunch of services that's U.S that seem to dominate. The question I want to ask you is that they always flaunt out the, every year it changes, Kinesis was at one point the fastest growing service in the history of AWS. Now it's Aurora. We made a, I made a prediction on the opening that a SageMaker will be the fastest growing service, because there just seemed to be so much interest in turn-key machine learning. It's hard as you-know-what to do it. >> I agree. >> Your thoughts on SageMaker? >> In one of my issues a few weeks back, I wound up asking, so who's using SageMaker and for what? And the response was ridiculous. What astounded me was that no two answers were alike as far as what the use case was. But they all started the same way. I'm not a data scientist, but. So this is something that's becoming-- >> John: What does that mean to you? What does that tell you? >> It tells me that everyone thinks they're unqualified to be playing around in the data science world, but they're still seeing results. >> But Corey I wonder because you know, think back a few years ago. That's what part of the promise of big data, is we have all this data and we're going to be able to have the business analysts rather than you know, some PhD sort this out. And machine learning is more right. We want to have these tools and we want to democratize data, you know. Data is the new bacon. It's the new oil. Data's the new everything. So you know, machine learning, you think this is all vapor and promise, or do you think it's real? >> I think big data is very real and very important. Ask anyone who sells storage by the gigabyte. And they will agree with me. In practice I think it's one of those areas where the allure is fascinating but the implementation is challenging. Okay we have history going back 20 years of every purchase someone has ever made in our book store. That's great, why do I still wind up getting recommendations? >> Well yeah and I guess, I want to talk that it was the, I see it more as, everything that was big data is now kind of moving to the ML and AI stage. Because big data didn't deliver on it, will this new wave deliver on the promise of really extracting value from my data? And it's things like this, live data. It's doing things now with my data, not the historical, lots of different types of data that we were trying to do with like the Hadoops of the world. >> Got ya. I think it's a great move because either yes it will or no it won't, but if it doesn't, you're going to see emergent behaviors of so why didn't it work? Well we don't understand the model that this system has constructed, so we can't even tell you why it's replacing the character I with some weird character that's unprintable, so let alone why we decide to target a segment of customers who never buys anything. So it does become defensible from that perspective. Whether there's something serious there that's going to wind up driving a revolution in the world of technology, I think it's too soon to say and I wouldn't dare to predict. But I will be sarcastic about it either way. >> Okay well let's get sarcastic for a second. I wan to talk to you about some moves other people are making. We'll get to the competition in a minute but Salesforce required MuleSoft. That got a lot of news and we were speculating on our studio session this week or last week with the CEO of Rubric that it's great for Salesforce. It can bring structured data in, on PRIM and the Cloud. Salesforce is one big SaaS platform. Amazon is trying to SaaS-ify business through the Cloud. So, but one of the things that's missing from MuleSoft is the unstructured data. So the question for you is, how are you seeing and how is your community looking at the role of the data as a strategic asset in a modern stack, one, both structured and unstructured data, is that becoming, even happening or is it more like, well we don't even know what it means. Your thoughts? >> I think that there's been a long history of people having data in a variety of formats and being able to work with that does require some structure. That's why we're seeing things emerging around S3's, increasing capabilities, being able to manipulate data at rest. We're seeing that with S3 and Glacier Select. We're seeing it with Athena which is named after the goddess of spending money on Cloud services, and there's a number of different tooling options that are, okay we're not going to move three x-abytes of data in so we have to do something with where it is. As far as doing any form of analysis on it, there needs to be some structure to it in order for that to make sense. From that perspective, MuleSoft was a brilliant acquisition. The question is, is what is SalesForce going to do with that? They have a history of acquisition, some of which have gone extremely well. Others of which we prefer not to talk about in polite company. >> It comes back down to the IDE thing. How many IDE's does Salesforce have now? I mean it's a huge number. >> I'm sure there's three more since we've started talking. (laughing) >> Yeah so Corey, you brought up, you know, money. So you know, the trillion dollar, what feedback are you getting from the community? You know there's always, well I get on Amazon and then my bills continue to grow and continue to grow. Same thing at Salesforce by the way if you use them. So you know, there's always as you gain power, people will push back against it. We saw with with Mike Hichwa with Oracle. I hear it some but it's not an overriding thing from when I talk to customers about Amazon. But I'm curious what you're hearing. Where are the customers feeling they're getting squeezed? Where is it you know, phenomenal? What are you seeing kind of on the monetary side of Cloud? >> In my day job, I solve one problem. I fix the horrifying AWS bill, both in terms of dollars and cents as well as analysis and allocation. And what astonishes me, and I'm still not sure how they did it. It's that AWS has somehow put the onus onto the customer. If you or I go out and we buy a $150,000 Ferrari, we wake up with a little bit of buyer's remorse of dear lord, that was an awful lot of money. When you do the equivalent in AWS, you look at that, and instead of blaming the vendor for overcharging, instead we feel wow, I'm not smart enough. I haven't managed that appropriately. Somehow it's my fault that I'm writing what looks like a phone number of a check every month over to AWS. >> John: It creeps up on you. >> It does. It's the boiling a frog problem. And by the time people start to take it seriously, there's a lot of ill will. There's a sense of, our team is terrible, and wasn't caring about this. But you don't ever cost-optimize your way to success. That's something you do once you have something that's up and working and viable. You don't start to build a product day one for the least possible amount of money and expect to attain any success. >> Well let's talk about that real quick to end the segment because I think that's a really important thing. Success is a double-edged sword. The benefit of the Cloud is to buy what you need, get proof of concept going, get some fly wheels going or whatever, virtuous circle of the application. But at some point, you hit a tipping point of oh shit this is working. And then the bill is huge. Better than over-provisioning and having a failed product. So where's that point with you guys or with your customers? Is there like analytics you do? Is that more of a subjective qualitative thing? You say, okay are you successful? Now let's look at it. So how do you deal with customers? 'Cause I can imagine that success is, it becomes the opportunity but also the problem. >> I think it's one of those, you know it when you see it type of moments, where if a company is spending $80,000 a month on their Cloud environment and could be spending 40, that's more interesting to a company that's three people than it is to an engineering team of 50. At that point, sorry they're embezzling more than that in office supplies every month. So that's not the best opportunity to start doing an optimization pass. More important than both of those scales to me has always been about understanding the drivers of it. So what is it that's costing that? Is it a bunch of steady state things that aren't doing work most of the time? Well, maybe there's an auto-scaling story in there. Maybe there's a serverless opportunity. Maybe nobody's using that product and it's time to start looking at rolling it in to something. >> They've left the lights on right? So to speak. >> Exactly. >> The server's are still up. Wait a minute, take them down. So, writing code, analytics, is that the answer? >> All of the above. In a vacuum, if you spin up an instance today, and don't touch it again, you will retire before that instance does. And it will continue to charge you every hour of every day. Understanding and being able to attribute who spun that up, when was it done, why was it done, and what project is it tied to? Is it some failed experiment someone did who hasn't worked here in six months? Or is that now our master database? We kind of need to know in either direction what that looks like. >> Alright before we wrap, you got to tell us, what do we expect to hear from your podcast? >> Good question. My podcast generally focuses on one-on-one conversations with people doing interesting things in the world of Cloud, which is vague enough for me to get away with almost anything as far as it goes. It's less sarcastic and snarky than some of my other work, and more at the why instead of the how. I'm not going to sit here and explain how to use an ABI. There are people far better at that than I am. But I will talk about why you might use a service, and what problem it reports to solve. >> Alright Corey, great to have you on. Uh the Screaming Pod, Screaming Cloud, >> Corey: ScreamingInTheCloud.com >> ScreamingInTheCloud.com, it's a podcast. Corey thanks for coming on and sharing the commentary, the insight on AWS, the how and the why, the Cube breaking down. All the action here in Moscone Western San Francisco, AWS 2018 Summit, back after more, after this short break. (spacey music)

>> Announcer: Live from the Moscone Center it's theCUBE, covering AWS Summit San Francisco 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Hello everyone, welcome to theCUBE here in San Francisco at Moscone West, theCUBE's exclusive coverage of Amazon Web Services Summit 2018. It's the first of their kickoff of their little satellite events, really about developers and training and educating people on Amazon Web Services products and services. Again theCUBE covers re:Invent, that's their big show, This is more of a, less of a sales and marketing but more of a really get down and dirty with the developers and practitioners. I'm John Furrier, with my cohost this week Stu Miniman all day today, wall to wall coverage. Stu, the keynotes just kicked off, Andy Jassy is not here, notable. Werner Vogels does all the summits so he's always been the headline. Last year Andy Jassy kind of did the keynote, fireside chat, we had that up on our YouTube channel, SiliconANGLE theCUBE, but here the story is all about SageMaker and the continued dominance of Amazon Web Services, and then again as we were speculating at re:Invent, and we've been saying on theCUBE, the maturization of Amazon Web Services is clear. Everyone knows the numbers, they're breaking out the reporting, they clearly got competitive forces for the first time in AWS's history, they have some serious competition upping their game. Microsoft nipping at their heels, Google putting out some open source tech, Oracle trying to throw FUD into the fire and say, change the rules and kind of keep the rules on their terms, so the competitive pressure. But at the end of the day there's a whole new era of modern software development, modern business applications and we're seeing it with things like cloud expansion, on-premise consolidation, hybrid-cloud, multi-cloud, decentralized infrastructure, blockchain AI, these are the themes, this is what developers want, this is what businesses are doing, let's analyze and discuss the keynotes. What's your thoughts? >> Yeah, so John, I mean, first of all, we watched the rolling thunder that is AWS just rolling through the entire industry, and now rolling all over the globe. So the AWS Summit, I think they actually had an idea about Summit in Singapore like, last night, and we're going to be covering a few of them. I was last year at the AWS New York City Summit, and I tell you, that New York City show alone was one of the best shows I went to all year. The amount of people, the excitement, what really differentiates as you said, the big re:Invent versus the summit, first of all, the summit, they tend to be a local audience, it's free for basically everybody to come in. So numbers are great, you know, we're in San Francisco, they going to 10, 15 thousand people here probably. Google Cloud Next was here last year in February and it feels almost the same amount of people here for a regional Amazon show. So the numbers are wow, the announcements, every day Amazon's running an announcement, so Doctor Werner Vogels, Doctor Matt Wood, get up stage, go through some of the usual we're dominating every industry and every service and everything there, but when you piece apart there's like, ooh, there's real announcements that are coming, things that jumped out, we talked about machine learning, Matt Wood talked about SageMaker is really growing super fast, people that I talked to that have been using it are loving it. They came out with SageMaker local, which means that I can develop it on my laptop and do it with that cool, you take ML with that cool, what was it, that deep lens, that they've got. It's how do I get these environments? Amazon isn't just about infrastructure cloud anymore, They've gone to paths, they're pushing to edge, they're doing all of these things. They had a whole ton of announcements, when they were already past the time that the keynotes were going to be done, Oh, you thought we're done, well security, security, security and secrets manager, firewall manager, there's so many services. The theme I've been looking at the past couple years, how do we keep up with all of this, even internally? You talk to Amazon people, they don't know everything that everyone's doing, because it's all those two pizza teams and how they're growing. >> And they always have to get all their sound bites in because they don't have a lot of time to get all that packed into one powerful punch. Just on a quick side note for the folks that watching knows theCUBE, we've been covering Amazon really since the beginning, since the re:Invent started, you know we've been covering data center infrastructure and big data, Hadoop and now beyond. You're starting to see coverage around blockchain and cryptocurrency. So again, we are expanding our coverage of the AWS ecosystem and cloud to include most of the major regional shows of AWS Summit, continuing to go deep into the AWS re:Invent and the community, we are also initiating coverage heavily on Google, Google Cloud Next, we'll be at their show and soon to be at Microsoft show, that's still to be determined with Microsoft that they will let us in, we're working on that, we think that's going to be good, but we'll be nailing and doubling down on the cloud coverage. So Stu, with that as a backdrop, people know we've been deep with Amazon, I've been called an Amazon fanboy many times, but the numbers are clear. I'm a Google fanboy, by the way, too, I love Google stuff. Microsoft I got to learn more about, obviously they have bundling and Office so they're a legacy player, Oracle a legacy player, so you got two legacy players, you got Amazon and Google, I would put them in two different categories, but then Alibaba in China trying to dip in as you got those, the real kind of cloud native companies, Google and Amazon on one end, you get the legacy players with Microsoft and Oracle and IBM on the other. So you have this really highly competitive environment. We're seeing for the first, or second time, Andy Jassy did it at re:Invent, but Werner Vogels put up the competitive slide. He said "This is what we're doing." And he showed the number of services that Amazon offers, vis a vis the competition, and he didn't actually call out the vendors but we kind of know, I put on my Twitter feed, you can see his number one, the second one's Microsoft. Google they put in the Google colors, that's obviously Google, and red is Oracle. Amazon is clearly dominating on the number of services available across the cloud. So when we've been squinting through the numbers on who's leading who, you've really got look at two perspectives. The broad range of available services and the number of customers using those services versus point solutions that might be one instance of the cloud. This is a new architecture, it's not the old waterfall model it's not the old six months to provision into it, mentioned that. This is like a highly competitive environment. So Stu I've got to ask you, how do you squint through that and look at the competition that Amazon has, obviously the numbers aren't great. But how should customers look at the competition, how are you looking at it, how is our team evaluating the competition? >> Well first of all John, it is not a zero sum game and it is very nuanced and complicated. And for most customers it's not a solution, it's many solutions and it's something that Amazon doesn't love, is that you talk about things like multi-cloud and they would say "Well, we have the "best service everywhere and we're the cheapest everywhere "and everyone's all in on us," well, when you get down to it, You know, I hate I have to defend a little bit, you say Microsoft and Oracle, legacy. Microsoft has business productivity applications. They are the leader in the space when you talk about... >> Yeah they're the leader in legacy applications. >> But you know, you start with the Microsoft Office Suite, and say what you will, it's still dominant out there, it's there. Microsoft gave enterprises the green light to go to SaaS, and they really helped drive that. >> John: Whoah, whoah, that's a direction. >> Yeah. >> John: But they're a legacy vendor, what you just said is that they're legacy. >> But Azure is doing quite well... >> John: Oracle's going to the cloud, are they legacy? >> Oracle's got a phenomenal team, have been building some really interesting things in cloud, but obviously no doubt about it, Amazon's leading, but when you talk to users and you say, okay, there's lots of reasons they might be using Azure for various pieces. Everybody is using AWS, except for those people, John, and you used the example, the ones that compete against Amazon and obviously that's a concern. Because today Amazon is competing against more and more companies, so that's a little bit... >> I'm not, I'm not down on the legacy, what I'm trying to point out is that IBM was clear about this, they were up front about it at IBM Think we were just at, which is, they're saying the legacy has to evolve. Doesn't mean legacy's going to die, I mean Microsoft clearly is going to the cloud, their stock's at like 90 plus, it was at 26 a few years ago so, Satya Nadella taking over from Ballmer. Clearly that's the direction Microsoft has to go, and they're doing it. Now, they're a legacy company doing cloud. Oracle, legacy company, doing cloud. IBM, legacy company, doing cloud. So that's necessarily a bad thing, I'm just saying vis a vis the competition I would put Google and I would put Amazon in a new, modern, non-legacy kind of world. >> Yeah, well okay, and you find one of the lines I love that Werner Vogels was talking about is we talked about AWS customers are builders, and he said builders have a bias for action. And I love that, because if you talk to companies, and you know, we've talked a lot on theCUBE, digital transformation, much more than a buzzword, John, I've not talked to anybody, that they're like, "Oh, kind of hogwash, you know, I'm just going to "keep doing the same thing I've been doing "for the last 10 years and I'll keep being successful." We understand that change needs to happen and it's not easy. So if you've got data scientists, if you've got, you know, understanding data, if you're embracing developers, Amazon has affinity with these groups, and that's why they build and they listen to their customers and there's new services and another thing, Amazon gets up on stage and it's not so much "Oh, here's the vision of where we're going," it's here's the stuff that we GAed that we already had you in the beta. Here's the new things, and they might give you a couple things in preview, but they iterate and move so fast. >> Yeah, checking the boxes on the product side, but... >> But much more than checking the boxes, they listen to their customers. >> Well, well of course, that's what they say, but we know they're doing that, but the thing, I mean checking the boxes, they're on the cadence of the Amazon releases, which we've talked about that. But fundamentally, Stu, I think the two big things and this is what I want to get your reaction to is, what's going on with Amazon, the consistent thing is that they lay out the preferred architecture of the modern stack and it's not the same architecture as the old way. Two, the SageMaker and machine learning and where AI is going, if you look at what Matt Wood discussed, SageMaker, my prediction, will surpass Aurora as the number one shipping service for Amazon in the history of their product. That thing is on a torrent pace, and the way they lay it out architecturally, they're not head figment, they're saying this is what we're doing, they lay out the architecture, and they're putting in the machine learning. So, to me, I love that. Now, all the other stuff that they're doing it's just the cadence of Amazon. More announcements, more services, general availability, they're moving the ball down the field, as Jeff Frick would say, matriculating the ball down the field. So your reaction to the modern architecture, and the SageMaker, machine learning for all developers. >> Yeah, absolutely, Amazon is setting the bar for how we think about architecture today. They're leaders in serverless, an area I've been hot on the last year or so. You know, Werner was up on stage talking about Ai Roba who I got the chance to interview last year. So absolutely they are the bar that everything is measured on in this industry. And if they're not, have the leading product in everything, they are close second and they have so many services that there is just this flywheel of not only services and customers and the new flywheel we talked about on theCUBE two years ago with Andy Jassy is data. John, I want to throw back at you a question. Amazon released something called AWS Secrets Manager. Do we trust Amazon with our secrets? Is the government coming after Amazon now? There's some of these macroeconomic things happening, you're hearing everything in Silicon Valley, what are you hearing lately? >> Well what I'm hearing is one, people are really kind of not happy with Amazon's success because it, you know, market share at the expense of other old guard or legacy vendors, and so that's taking it's toll. Oracle to me is the biggest company that's impacted most by Amazon. It's clear that a war of words is happening between Ellison and Jassy. Two, there's a big policy battle going on in D.C. I think Bloomberg broke a story that Oracle is trying to incite Trump to tackle Amazon proper, but and then Amazon is affected, Amazon Web Services is affected, because they have all that Department of Defense and the CIA deal, so you're seeing Amazon, Amazon Web Services for the first time dealing with competitive pressures that's old school tactics, which is policy formulation, and as they say in the policy game in D.C., Stu, the battle is won before it's even fought. This is new territory for Amazon, they really got to get their act together, and if I had to tell Andy Jassy any advice would be like look it, you got to start thinking chess game at this point, and understand that the competition is not going to roll over. We've said this on theCUBE many times. Oracle's not going to roll over, IBM's not going to roll over. Now, other companies, like Cloud Air who's down thirty percent on earnings, they're going to have to do a deal with Amazon, just like VMware did. So I think you have these big cloud players sucking the oxygen out of the room, and there are impacts. The growing startups who are pre-public companies or are public companies have to either join the ecosystem or find another partner. The major cloud players are going to fight tooth and nail for market share as stakes on the table is the future internet, it's basically everything in cloud that's going to extend to democratization around decentralization, the future of money, sovereignty, government, digital nations, internet of things, these are, it's a high stakes chess game and Amazon is now on new territory, and I think that to me is the big walkaway is that no one is going to let them take this uncontested. >> Yeah, John, look at this crowd. The expo hall is filling up, customers are still excited. The buzz that I hear is that Amazon, they listen, they still move really fast when they need to make changes, I remember a year ago when we were here for the Google event I was talking, it's like, ah, Google's got such better pricing for the small business and everything like that. A week later Amazon changed all of their pricing, billing by the microsecond, I talked back to some of my sources and they're like, "Yeah Amazon listened and totally flipped the game." >> Yeah, well Jassy, he... >> There are sustainable advantages, so difficult in the fast pace of change but Amazon is doing better than what Oracle used to do in the past, they were kind of like, we'd get the lead and kind of want the competition intact, with them with the old sailing analogy, Amazon doesn't worry about the competition, they listen to their customers, they're moving forward. >> Well, I think that they do, they don't admit it but they have to watch, they've got to look in their rear view mirror a little bit, but Stu, to end out the analysis I would say the following, my observation is this: Andy Jassy and his team are very customer-centric. He sat on theCUBE many times, so as an organization they're very process oriented, they'll listen to customers. But if you look at what's happening in the world today, is that in the old way, the way that Intuit laid it out that took months to provision the software, the old technology business model or venture architecture for a business was make a sound technology decision, and all the chits will fall in the right places. This is completely opposite now, if you look at what's going on with cloud and blockchain and cryptocurrency and decentralized applications, it's the business model that matters, the technology switching costs are now fungible with Lambda you're starting to see these sets of services that can be spun up in parallel. So the scale and flexibility of the platform, and Werner Vogels pointed this out on the keynote, this is fundamental. The decisions that are fatal to a company is the business model and the business logic, this is where the action is. That means it's not just a developer game any more, it's the CTO, it's the data scientists, and Werner Vogels laid that out and I think that to me was my big walkaway from today's keynote is that Amazon recognizes that it's not just about developers, make developers more productive, but bring all those people together to do the right for the business model, the business logic and applications. >> Yeah, John, we're always looking for what are those things that are slow down the company and the roadblocks, one thing Amazon I think did a great job they're out in front of GDPR, that are super hot topic out there, and they just say categorically, "We're ready for GDPR on all of our services," so full steam ahead, don't stop your spending, keep growing. >> Couldn't be a better time to be a theCUBE host to analyze and talk about the competition. Let's see how Amazon handles the competition, do they just keep pedal to the metal, or do they address it and play those 3D chess games? TheCUBE here in San Francisco for live coverage of AWS Summit 2018 in San Francisco, more coverage after this short break. We'll be right back. (techno music)