>> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE conversation. >> Everyone, welcome to the Cube special coverage of the AWS Summit San Francisco, North America all over the world, and most of the parts Asia, Pacific Amazon Summit is the hashtag. This is part of theCUBE Virtual Program, where we're going to be covering Amazon Summits throughout the year. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. And of course, we're not at the events. We're here in the Palo Alto Studios, with our COVID-19 quarantine crew. And we got a great guest here from AWS, Dave Brown, Vice President of EC2, leads the team on elastic compute, and its business where it's evolving and most importantly, what it means for the customers in the industry. Dave, thanks for spending the time to come on theCUBE virtual program. >> Hey John, it's really great to be here, thanks for having me. >> So we got the summit going down. It's new format because of the shelter in place. They're going virtual or digital, virtualization of events. And I want to have a session with you on EC2, and some of the new things they're going on. And I think the story is important, because certainly around the pandemic, and certainly on the large scale, SaaS business models, which are turning out to be quite the impact from a positive standpoint, with people sheltering in place, what is the role of data in all this, okay? And also, there's a lot of pressure financially. We've had the payroll loan programs from the government, and to companies really looking at their bottom lines. So two major highlights going on in the world that's directly impacted. And you have some products, and news around this, I want to do a deep dive on that. One is AppFlow, which is a new integration service by AWS, that really talks about taking the scale and value of AWS services, and integrating that with SaaS Applications. And the migration acceleration program for Windows, which has a storied history of database. For many, many years, you guys have been powering most of the Windows workloads, ironic that you guys are not Microsoft, but certainly had success there. Let's start with the AppFlow. Okay, this was recently announced on the 22nd of April. This is a new service. Can you take us through why this is important? What is the service? Why now, what was the main driver behind AppFlow? >> Yeah, absolutely. So with the launcher AppFlow, what we're really trying to do is make it easy for organizations and enterprises to really control the flow of their data, between the number of different applications that they use on premise, and AWS. And so the problem we started to see was, enterprises just had this data all over the place, and they wanted to do something useful with it. Right, we see many organizations running Data Lakes, large scale analytics, Big Machine Learning on AWS, but before you can do all of that, you have to have access to the data. And if that data is sitting in an application, either on-premise or elsewhere in AWS, it's very difficult to get out of that application, and into S3, or Redshift, or one of those services, before you can manipulate it, that was the challenge. And so the journey kind of started a few years ago, we actually launched a service on the EC2 network, inside Private Link. And it was really, it provided organizations with a very secure way to transfer network data, both between VPCs, and also between VPC, and on-prem networks. And what this highlighted to us, is organizations say that's great, but I actually don't have the technical ability, or the team, to actually do the work that's required to transform the data from, whether it's Salesforce, or SAP, and actually move it over Private Link to AWS. And so we realized, while private link was useful, we needed another layer of service that actually provided this, and one of the key requirements was an organization must be able to do this with no code at all. So basically, no developer required. And I want to be able to transfer data from Salesforce, my Salesforce database, and put that in Redshift together with some other data, and then perform some function on that. And so that's what AppFlow is all about. And so we came up with the idea about a little bit more than a year ago, that was the first time I sat down, and actually reviewed the content for what this was going to be. And the team's been hard at work, and launched on the 22nd of April. And we actually launched with 14 partners as well, that provide what we call connectors, which allow us to access these various services, and companies like Salesforce and ServiceNow, Slack, Snowflake, to name a few. >> Well, certainly you guys have a great ecosystem of SaaS partners, and that's you know well documented in the industry that you guys are not going to be competing directly with a lot of these big SaaS players, although you do have a few services for customers who want end to end, Jassy continues to pound that home on my Cube interviews. But I think this, >> Absolutely. is notable, and I want to get your thoughts on this, because this seems to be the key unlocking of the value of SaaS and Cloud, because data traversal, data transfer, there's costs involved, also moving traffic over the internet is unsecure, and unreliable. So a couple questions I wanted to just ask you directly. One is did the AppFlow come out of the AWS Private Link piece of it? And two, is it one directional or bi-directional? How is that working? Because I'm guessing that you had Private Link became successful, because no one wants to move on the internet. They wanted direct connects. Was there something inadequate about that service? Was there more headroom there? And is it bi-directional for the customer? >> So let me take the second one, it's absolutely bi-directional. So you can transfer that data between an on-premise application and AWS, or AWS and the on-premise application. Really, anything that has a connector can support the data flow in both directions. And with transformations, and so data in one data source, may need to be transformed, before it's actually useful in a second data source. And so AppFlow takes care of all that transformation as well, in both directions, And again, with no requirement for any code, on behalf of the customer. Which really unlocks it for a lot of the more business focused parts of an organization, who maybe don't have immediate access to developers. They can use it immediately, just literally with a few transformations via the console, and it's working for you. In terms of, you mentioned sort of the flow of data over the internet, and the need for security of data. It's critically important, and as we look at just what had happened as a company does. We have very, very strict requirements around the flow of data, and what services we can use internally. And where's any of our data going to be going? And I think it's a good example of how many enterprises are thinking about data today. They don't even want to trust even HTTPS, and encryption of data on the internet. I'd rather just be in a world where my data never ever traverses the internet, and I just never have to deal with that. And so, the journey all started with Private Link there, and probably was an interesting feature, 'cause it really was changing the way that we asked our customers to think about networking. Nothing like Private Link has ever existed, in the sort of standard networking that an enterprise would normally have. It's kind of only possible because of what VPC allows you to do, and what the software defined network on AWS gives you. And so we built Private Link, and as I said, customers started to adopt it. They loved the idea of being able to transfer data, either between VPCs, or between on-premise. Or between their own VPC, and maybe a third party provider, like Snowflake, has been a very big adopter of Private Link, and they have many customers using it to get access to Snowflake databases in a very secure way. And so that's where it all started, and in those discussions with customers, we started to see that they wanted us to up level a little bit. They said, "We can use Private Link, it's great, "but one of the problems we have is just the flow of data." And how do we move data in a very secure, in a highly available way, with no sort of bottlenecks in the system. And so we thought Private Link was a great sort of underlying technology, that empowered all of this, but we had to build the system on top of that, which is AppFlow. That says we're going to take care of all the complexity. And then we had to go to the ecosystem, and say to all these providers, "Can you guys build connectors?" 'Cause everybody realized it's super important that data can be shared, and so that organizations can really extract the value from that data. And so the 14 of them at launch, we have many, many more down the road, have come to the party with with connectors, and full support of what AppFlow provides. >> Yeah us DevOps purists always are pounding the fist on the table, now virtual table, API's and connectors. This is the model, so people are integrating. And I want to get your thoughts on this. I think you said low code, or no code on the developer simplicity side. Is it no code, or low code? Can you just explain quickly and clarify that point? >> It's no code for getting started literally, for the kind of, it's basic to medium complexity use case. It's not code, and a lot of customers we spoke to, that was a bottleneck. Right, they needed something from data. It might have been the finance organization, or it could have been human resources, somebody else in organization needed that. They don't have a developer that helps them typically. And so we find that they would wait many, many months, or maybe even never get the project done, just because they never ever had access to that data, or to the developer to actually do the work that was required for the transformation. And so it's no code for almost all use cases. Where it literally is, select your data source, select the connector, and then select the transformations. And some basic transformations, renaming of fields, transformation of data in simple ways. That's more than sufficient for the vast majority of use cases. And then obviously through to the destination, with the connector on the other side, to do the final transformation, to the final data source that you want to migrate the data to. >> You know, you have an interesting background, was looking at your history, and you've essentially been a web services kind of guy all your life. From a code standpoint software environment, and now I'll say EC2 is the crown jewel of AWS, and doing more and more with S3. But what's interesting, as you build more of these layers services in there, there's more flexibility. So right now, in most of the customer environments, is a debate around, do I build something monolithic, and or decoupled, okay? And I think there's a world where there's a mutually, not mutually exclusive, I mean, you have a mainframe, you have a big monolithic thing, if it does something. But generally people would agree that a decoupled environment is more flexible, and more agile. So I want to kind of get to the customer use case, 'cause I can really see this being really powerful, AppFlow with Private Link, where you mentioned Snowflake. I mean, Snowflake is built on AWS, they're doing extremely, extremely well, like any other company that builds on AWS. Whether it's theCUBE Cloud, or it's Snowflake. As we tap those services, customers, we might have people who want to build on our platform on top of AWS. So I know a bunch of startups that are building within the Snowflake ecosystem, a customer of yours. >> Yeah. >> So they're technically a customer of Amazon, but they're also in the ecosystem of say, Snowflake. >> Yes. >> So this brings up an interesting kind of computer science problem, which is architecturally, how do I think about that? Is this something where AppFlow could help me? Because I certainly want to enable people to build on a platform, that I build if I'm doing that, if I'm not going to be a pure SaaS turnkey application. But if I'm going to bring partners in, and do integration, use the benefits of the goodness of an API or Connector driven architecture, I need that. So explain to me how this helps me, or doesn't help me. Is this something that makes sense to you? Does this question make sense? How do you react to that? >> I think so, I think the question is pretty broad. But I think there's an element in which I can help. So firstly, you talk about sort of decoupled applications, right? And I think that is certainly the way that we've gone at Amazon, and been very, very successful for us. I think we started that journey back in 2003, when we decoupled the monolithic application that was amazon.com. And that's when our service journey started. And a lot of that sort of inspired AWS, and how we built what we built today. And we see a lot of our customers doing that, moving to smaller applications. It just works better, it's easier to debug, there's ownership at a very controlled level. So you can get all your engineering teams to have very clear and crisp ownership. And it just drives innovation, right? 'Cause each little component can innovate without the burden of the rest of the ecosystem. And so that's what we really enjoy. I think the other thing that's important when you think about design, is to see how much of the ecosystem you can leverage. And so whether you're building on Snowflake, or you're building directly on top of AWS, or you're building on top of one of our other customers and partners. If you can use something that solves the problem for you, versus building it yourself. Well that just leaves you with more time to actually go and focus on the stuff that you need to be solving, right? The product you need to be building. And so in the case of AppFlow, I think if there's a need for transfer of data, between, for example, Snowflake and some data warehouse, that you as an organisation are trying to build on a Snowflake infrastructure. AppFlow is something you could potentially look at. It's certainly not something that you could just use for, it's very specific and focused to the flow of data between services from a data analytics point of view. It's not really something you could use from an API point of view, or messaging between services. It's more really just facilitating that flow of data, and the transformation of data, to get it into a place that you can do something useful with it. >> And you said-- >> But like any of our services-- (speakers talk over each other) Couldn't be using any layer in the stack. >> Yes, it's a level of integration, right? There's no code to code, depending on how you look at it, cool. Customer use cases, you mentioned, large scale analytics, I thought I heard you say, machine learning, Data Lakes. I mean, basically, anyone who's using data is going to want to tap some sort of data repository, and figure out how to scale data when appropriate. There's also contextual, relevant data that might be specific to say, an industry vertical, or a database. And obviously, AI becomes the application for all this. >> Exactly. >> If I'm a customer, how does AppFlow relate to that? How does that help me, and what's the bottom line? >> So I think there's two parts to that journey. And depending on where customers are, and so there's, we do have millions of customers today that are running applications on AWS. Over the last few years, we've seen the emergence of Data Lakes, really just the storage of a large amount of data, typically in S3. But then companies want to extract value out of, and use in certain ways. Obviously, we have many, many tools today, from Redshift, Athena, that allow you to utilize these Data Lakes, and be able to run queries against this information. Things like EMR, and one of our oldest services in the space. And so doing some sort of large scale analytics, and more recently, services like SageMaker, are allowing us to do machine learning. And so being able to run machine learning across an enormous amount of data that we have stored in AWS. And there's some stuff in the IoT, workload use space as well, that's emerging. And many customers are using it. There's obviously many customers today that aren't using it on AWS, potential customers for us, that are looking to do something useful with data. And so the one part of the journey is taking up all of that infrastructure, and we have a lot of services that make it really easy to do machine learning, and do analytics, and that sort of thing. And then the other problem, the other side of the problem, which is what AppFlow is addressing is, how do I get that data to S3, or to Redshift, to actually go and run that machine learning workload? And that's what it's really unlocking for customers. And it's not just the one time transfer of data, the other thing that AppFlow actually supports, is the continuous updating of data. And so if you decide that you want to have that view of your data in S3, for example, and Data Lake, that's kept up to date, within a few minutes, within an hour, you can actually configure AppFlow to do that. And so the data source could be Salesforce, it could be Slack, it could be whatever data source you want to blend. And you continuously have that flow of data between those systems. And so when you go to run your machine learning workload, or your analytics, it's all continuously up to date. And you don't have this problem of, let me get the data, right? And when I think about some of the data jobs that I've run, in my time, back in the day as an engineer, on early EC2, a small part of it was actually running the job on the data. A large part of it was how do I actually get that data, and is it up to date? >> Up to date data is critical, I think that's the big feature there is that, this idea of having the data connectors, really makes the data fresh, because we go through the modeling, and you realize why I missed a big patch of data, the machine learnings not effective. >> Exactly. >> I mean, it's only-- >> Exactly, and the other thing is, it's very easy to bring in new data sources, right? You think about how many companies today have an enormous amount of data just stored in silos, and they haven't done anything with it. Often it'll be a conversation somewhere, right? Around the coffee machine, "Hey, we could do this, and we can do this." But they haven't had the developers to help them, and haven't had access to the data, and haven't been able to move the data, and to put it in a useful place. And so, I think what we're seeing here, with AppFlow, really unlocking of that. Because going from that initial conversation, to actually having something running, literally requires no code. Log into the AWS console, configure a few connectors, and it's up and running, and you're ready to go. And you can do the same thing with SageMaker, or any of the other services we have on the other side that make it really simple to run some of these ideas, that just historically have been just too complicated. >> Alright, so take me through that console piece. Just walk me through, I'm in, you sold me on this. I just came out of meeting with my company, and I said, "Hey, you know what? "We're blowing up this siloed approach. "We want to kind of create this horizontal data model, "where we can mix "and match connectors based upon our needs." >> Yeah. >> So what do I do? I'm using SageMaker, using some data, I got S3, I got an application. What do I do? I'm connecting what, S3? >> Yeah, well-- >> To the app? >> So the simplest thing is, and the simplest place to find this actually, is on Jeff Bezos blog, that he did for the release, right? Jeff always does a great job in demonstrating how to use our various products. But it literally is going into the standard AWS console, which is the console that we use for all of our services. I think we have 200 of them, so it is getting kind of challenging to find the ball in that console, as we continue to grow. And find AppFlow. AppFlow is a top level service, and so you'll see it in the console. And the first thing you got to do, is you got to configure your Source-Connect. And so it's a connector that, where's the data coming from? And as I said, we had 14 partners, you'll be able to see those connectors there, and see what's supported. And obviously, there's the connectivity. Do you have access to that data, or where is the data running? AppFlow runs within AWS, and so you need to have either VPN, or direct connect back to the organization, if the data source is on-premise. If the data source happens to be in AWS, and obviously be in a VPC, and you just need to configure some of that connectivity functionality. >> So no code if the connectors are there, but what if I want to build my own connector? >> So building your own connector, that is something that we working with third parties with right now. I could be corrected, but not 100% sure whether that's available. It's certainly something I think we would allow customers to do, is to extend sort of either the existing connectors, or to add additional transformations as well. And so you'd be able to do that. But the transformations that the vast majority of our customers are using are literally just in the console, with the basic transformations. >> It comes bigger apps that people have, and just building those connectors. How does a partner get involved? You got 14 partners now, how do you extend the partner base contact in Amazon Partner Manager, or you send an email to someone? How does someone get involved? What are you recommending? >> So there are a couple of ways, right? We have an extensive partner ecosystem that the vast majority of these ISVs are already integrated with. And so, we have the 14 we launched with, we also pre announced SAP, which is going to be a very critical one for the vast majority of our customers. Having deep integration with SAP data, and being able to bring that seamlessly into AWS. That'll be launching soon. And then there's a long list of other ones, that we're currently working on. And they're currently working on them themselves. And then the other one is going to be, like with most things that Amazon, feedback from customers. And so what we hear from customers, and very often you'll hear from third party partners as well, who'll come and say, "Hey, my customers are asking me "to integrate with the AppFlow, what do I need to do?" And so, you know, just reaching out to AWS, and letting them know that you'd be interested in integrating, that you're not part of the partner program. The team would be happy to engage, and bring you on board, so-- >> (mumbles) on playbook, get the top use cases nailed down, listen to customers, and figure it out. >> Exactly. >> Great stuff Dave, we really appreciate it. I'm looking forward to digging in AppFlow, and I'll check on Jeff Bezos blog. Sure, it's April 22, was the launch day, probably had up there. One of the things that want to just jump into, now moving into the next topic, is the cost structure. A lot of pressure on costs. This is where I think this Migration Acceleration Program for Windows is interesting. Andy Jassy always likes to boast on stage at Reinvent, about the number of workloads of Windows running on Amazon Web Services. This has been a big part of the customers, I think, for over 10 years, that I can think of him talking about this. What is this about? Are you still seeing uptake on Windows workloads, or, I mean,-- >> Absolutely. >> Azure has got some market share, >> Absolutely. >> but now you, doesn't really kind of square in my mind, what's going on here. Tell us about this migration service. >> Yeah, absolutely, on the migration side. So Windows is absolutely, we still believe AWS is the best place to run a Windows workload. And we have many, many happy Windows customers today. And it's a very big, very large, growing point of our business today, it used to be. I was part of the original team back in 2008, that launched, I think it was Windows 2008, back then on EC2. And I remember sort of working out all the details, of how to do all the virtualization with Windows, obviously back then we'd done Linux. And getting Windows up and running, and working through some of the challenges that Windows had as an operating system in the early days. And it was October 2008 that we actually launched Windows as an operating system. And it's just been, we've had many, many happy Windows customers since then. >> Why is Amazon so peak to run workloads from Windows so effectively? >> Well, I think, sorry what did you say peaked? >> Why is Amazon so in well positioned to run the Windows workloads? >> Well, firstly, I mean, I think Windows is really just the operating system, right? And so if you think about that as the very last little bit of your sort of virtualization stack, and then being able to support your applications. What you really have to think about is, everything below that, both in terms of the compute, so performance you're going to get, the price performance you're going to get. With our Nitro Hypervisor, and the Nitro System that we developed back in 2018, or launched in 2018. We really are able to provide you with the best price performance, and have the very least overhead from a hypervisor point of view. And then what that means is you're getting more out of your machine, for the price that you pay. And then you think about the rest of the ecosystem, right? Think about all the other services, and all the features, and just the breadth, and the extensiveness of AWS. And that's critically important for all of our Windows customers as well. And so you're going to have things like Active Directory, and these sort of things that are very Windows specific, and we can absolutely support all of those, natively. And in the Windows operating system as well. We have things like various agents that you can run inside the Windows box to do more maintenance and management. And so I think we've done a really good job in bringing Windows into the larger, and broader ecosystem of AWS. And it really is just a case of making sure that Windows runs smoothly. And that's just the last little bit on top of that, and so many customers enterprises run Windows today. When I started out my career, I was developing software in the banking industry, and it was a very much a Windows environment. They were running critical applications. And so we see it's critically important for customers who run Windows today, to be able to bring those Windows workloads to AWS. >> Yeah, and that's certainly-- >> We are seeing a trend. Yeah, sorry, go ahead. >> Well, they're certainly out there from a market share standpoint, but this is a cost driver, you guys are saying, and I want you to just give an example, or just illustrate why it costs less. How is it a cost savings? Is it just services, cycle times on EC2? I mean what's the cost savings? I'm a customer like, "Okay, so I'm going to go to Amazon with my workloads." Why is it a cost saving? >> I think there are a few things. The one I was referring to in my previous comment was the price performance, right? And so if I'm running on a system, where the hypervisor is using a significant portion of the physical CPU that I want to use as well. Well there's an overhead to that. And so from a price performance point of view, I look at, if I go and benchmark a CPU, and I look at how much I pay for that per unit of that benchmark, it's better on AWS. Because with our natural system, we're able to give you 100% of the floor. And so you get a performance then. So that's the first thing is price performance, which is different from this price. But there's a saving there as well. The other one is a large part, and getting into the migration program as well. A large part of what we do with our customers, when they come to AWS, is supposed to be, we take a long look at their license strategy. What licenses do they have? And a key part of bringing in Windows workloads AWS, is license optimization. What can we do to help you optimize the licenses that you're using today for Windows, for SQL Server, and really try and find efficiencies in that. And so we're able to secure significant savings for many of our customers by doing that. And we have a number of tools that they use as part of the migration program to do that. And so that helps save there. And then finally, we have a lot of customers doing what we call modernization of their applications. And so it really embraced Cloud, and some of the benefits that you get from Cloud. Especially elasticities, so being able to scale for demand. It's very difficult to do that when you bound by license for your operating system, because every box you run, you have to have a license for it. And so tuning auto scaling on, you've got to make sure you have enough licenses for all these Windows boxes you've seen. And so the push the Cloud's bringing, we've seen a lot of customers move Windows applications from Windows to Linux, or even move SQL Server, from SQL server to SQL Server on Linux, or another database platform. And do a modernization there, that already allows them to benefit from the elasticity that Cloud provides, without having to constantly worry about licenses. >> So final question on this point, migration service implies migration from somewhere else. How do they get involved? What's the onboarding process? Can you give a quick detail on that? >> Absolutely, so we've been helping customers with migrations for years. We've launched a migration program, or Migration Acceleration Program, MAP. We launched it, I think about 2016, 2017 was the first part of that. It was really just a bringing together of the various, the things we'd learned, the tools we built, the best strategies to do a migration. And we said, "How do we help customers looking "to migrate to the Cloud." And so that's what MAP's all about, is just a three phase, we'll help you assess the migration, we'll help you do a lot of planning. And then ultimately, we help you actually do the migration. We partner with a number of external partners, and ISVs, and GSIs, who also worked very closely with us to help customers do migrations. And so what we launched in April of this year, with the Windows migration program, is really just more support for Windows workload, as part of the broader Migration Acceleration Program. And there's benefits to customers, it's a smoother migration, it's a faster migration in almost all cases, we're doing license assessments, and so there's cost reduction in that as well. And ultimately, there's there's other benefits as well that we offer them, if they partner with us in bringing the workload to AWS. And so getting involved is really just reaching out to one of our AWS sales folks, or one of your account managers, if you have an account manager, and talk to them about workloads that you'd like to bring in. And we even go as far as helping you identify which applications are easiest to migrate. And so that you can kind of get going with some of the easier ones, while we help you with some of the more difficult ones. And strategies' about removing those roadblocks to bring your services to AWS. >> Takes the blockers away, Dave Brown, Vice President of EC2, the crown jewel of AWS, breaking down AppFlow, and the migration to Windows services. Great insights, appreciate the time. >> Thanks. >> We're here with Dave Brown, VP of EC2, as part of the virtual Cube coverage. Dave, I want to get your thoughts on an industry topic. Given what you've done with EC2, and the success, and with COVID-19, you're seeing that scale problem play out on the world stage for the entire population of the global world. This is now turning non-believers into believers of DevOps, web services, real time. I mean, this is now a moment in history, with the challenges that we have, even when we come out of this, whether it's six months or 12 months, the world won't be the same. And I believe that there's going to be a Cambrian explosion of applications. And an architecture that's going to look a lot like Cloud, Cloud-native. You've been doing this for many, many years, key architect of EC2 with your team. How do you see this playing out? Because a lot of people are going to be squirreling in rooms, when this comes back. They're going to be video conferencing now, but when they have meetings, they're going to look at the window of the future, and they're going to be exposed to what's failed. And saying, "We need to double down on that, "we have to fix this." So there's going to be winners and losers coming out of this pandemic, really quickly. And I think this is going to be a major opportunity for everyone to rally around this moment, to reset. And I think it's going to look a lot like this decoupled, this distributed computing environment, leveraging all the things that we've talked about in the past. So what's your advice, and how do you see this evolving? >> Yeah, I completely agree. I mean, I think, just the speed at which it happened as well. And the way in which organizations, both internally and externally, had to reinvent themselves very, very quickly, right? We've been very fortunate within Amazon, moving to working from home was relatively simple for the vast majority of us. Obviously, we have a number of our employees that work in data centers, and performance centers that have been on the front lines, and be doing a great job. But for the rest of us, it's been virtual video conferencing, right? All about meetings, and being able to use all of our networking tools securely, either over the VPN, or the no VPN infrastructure that we have. And many organizations had to do that. And so I think there are a number of different things that have impacted us right now. Obviously, virtual desktops has been a significant sort of growth point, right? Folks don't have access to the physical machine anymore, they're now all having to work remote, and so service like Workspaces, which runs on EC2, as well, has being a critical service data to support many of our largest customers. Our client VPN service, so we have within EC2 on the networking side, has also been critical for many large organizations, as they see more of their staff working everyday remotely. It has also seen, been able to support a lot of customers there. Just more broadly, what we've seen with COVID-19, is we've seen some industries really struggle, obviously travel industry, people just aren't traveling anymore. And so there's been immediate impact to some of those industries. They've been other industries that support functions like the video conferencing, or entertainment side of the house, has seen a bit of growth, over the last couple of months. And education has been an interesting one for us as well, where schools have been moving online. And behind the scenes in AWS, and on EC2, we've been working really hard to make sure that our supply chains are not interrupted in any way. The last thing we want to do is have any of our customers not be able to get EC2 capacity, when they desperately need it. And so we've made sure that capacity is fully available, even all the way through the pandemic. And we've even been able to support customers with, I remember one customer who told me the next day, they're going to have more than hundred thousand students coming online. And they suddenly had to grow their business, by some crazy number. And we were able to support them, and give them the capacity, which is way outside of any sort of demand--. >> I think this is the Cambrain explosion that I was referring to, because a whole new set of new things have emerged. New gaps in businesses have been exposed, new opportunities are emerging. This is about agility. It's real time now. It's actually happening for everybody, not just the folks on the inside of the industry. This is going to create a reinvention. So it's ironic, I've heard the word reinvent mentioned more times now, over the past three months, than I've heard it representing to Amazon. 'Cause that's your annual conference, Reinvent, but people are resetting and reinventing. It's actually a tactic, this is going on. So they're going to need some Clouds. So what do you say to that? >> So, I mean, the first thing is making sure that we can continue to be highly available, continue to have the capacity. The worst scenario is not being able to have the capacity for our customers, right? We did see that with some providers, and that honesty on outside is just years and years of experience of being able to manage supply chain. And the second thing is obviously, making sure that we remain available, that we don't have issues. And so, you know, with all of our stuff going remote and working from home, all my teams are working from home. Being able to support AWS in this environment, we haven't missed a beat there, which has been really good. We were well set up to be able to absorb this. And then obviously, remaining secure, which was our highest priority. And then innovating with our customers, and being able to, and that's both products that we're going to launch over time. But in many cases, like that education scenario I was talking about, that's been able to find that capacity, in multiple regions around the world, literally on a Sunday night, because they found out literally that afternoon, that Monday morning, all schools were virtual, and they were going to use their platform. And so they've been able to respond to that demand. We've seen a lot more machine learning workloads, we've seen an increase there as well as organizations are running more models, both within the health sciences area, but also in the financial areas. And also in just general business, (mumbles), yes, wherever it might be. Everybody's trying to respond to, what is the impact of this? And better understand it. And so machine learning is helping there, and so we've been able to support all those workloads. And so there's been an explosion. >> I was joking with my son, I said, "This world is interesting." Amazon really wins, that stuff's getting delivered to my house, and I want to play video games and Twitch, and I want to build applications, and write software. Now I could do that all in my home. So you went all around. But all kidding aside, this is an opportunity to define agility, so I want to get your thoughts, because I'm a bit a big fan of Amazon. As everyone knows, I'm kind of a pro Amazon person, and as other Clouds kind of try to level up, they're moving in the same direction, which is good for everybody, good competition and all. But S3 and EC2 have been the crown jewels. And building more services around those, and creating these abstraction layers, and new sets of service to make it easier, I know has been a top priority for AWS. So can you share your vision on how you're going to make EC2, and all these services easier for me? So if I'm a coder, I want literally no code, low code, infrastructure as code. I need to make Amazon more programmable and easier. Can you just share your vision on, as we talk about the virtual summits, as we cover the show, what's your take on making Amazon easier to consume and use? >> It's been something we thought a lot over the years, right? When we started out, we were very simple. The early days of EC2, it wasn't that rich feature set. And it's been an interesting journey for us. We've obviously become a lot more, we've written, launched local features, which narrative brings some more complexity to the platform. We have launched things like Lightsail over the years. Lightsail is a hosting environment that gives you that EC2 like experience, but it's a lot simpler. And it's also integrated with a number of other services like RDS and ELB as well, basic load balancing functionality. And we've seen some really good growth there. But what we've also learned is customers enjoy the richness of what ECU provides, and what the full ecosystem provides, and being able to use the pieces that they really need to build their application. From an S3 point of view, from a board ecosystem point of view. It's providing customers with the features and functionality that they really need to be successful. From the compute side of the house, we've done some things. Obviously, Containers have really taken off. And there's a lot of frameworks, whether it's EKS, or community service, or a Docker-based ECS, has made that a lot simpler for developers. And then obviously, in the serverless space, Landers, a great way of consuming EC2, right? I know it's serverless, but there's still an EC2 instance under the hood. And being able to bring a basic function and run those functions in serverless is, a lot of customers are enjoying that. The other complexity we're going after is on the networking side of the house, I find that a lot of developers out there, they're more than happy to write the code, they're more than happy to bring their reputation to AWS. But they struggle a little bit more on the networking side, they really do not want to have to worry about whether they have a route to an internet gateway, and if their subnets defined correctly to actually make the application work. And so, we have services like App Mesh, and the whole mesh server space is developing a lot. To really make that a lot simpler, where you can just bring your application, and call it on an application that just uses service discovery. And so those higher level services are definitely helping. In terms of no code, I think that App Mesh, sorry not App Mesh, AppFlow is one of the examples for already given organizations something at that level, that says I can do something with no code. I'm sure there's a lot of work happening in other areas. It's not something I'm actively thinking on right now , in my role in leading EC2, but I'm sure as the use cases come from customers, I'm sure you'll see more from us in those areas. They'll likely be more specific, though. 'Cause as soon as you take code out of the picture, you're going to have to get pretty specific in the use case. You already get the depth, the functionality the customers will need. >> Well, it's been super awesome to have your valuable time here on the virtual Cube for covering Amazon Summit, Virtual Digital Event that's going on. And we'll be going on throughout the year. Really appreciate the insight. And I think, it's right on the money. I think the world is going to have in six to 12 months, surge in reset, reinventing, and growing. So I think a lot of companies who are smart, are going to reset, reinvent, and set a new growth trajectory. Because it's a Cloud-native world, it's Cloud-computing, this is now a reality, and I think there's proof points now. So the whole world's experiencing it, not just the insiders, and the industry, and it's going to be an interesting time. So really appreciate that, they appreciate it. >> Great, >> Them coming on. >> Thank you very much for having me. It's been good. >> I'm John Furrier, here inside theCUBE Virtual, our virtual Cube coverage of AWS Summit 2020. We're going to have ongoing Amazon Summit Virtual Cube. We can't be on the show floor, so we'll be on the virtual show floor, covering and talking to the people behind the stories, and of course, the most important stories in silicon angle, and thecube.net. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a CUBE conversation. >> Hello everyone, welcome to this special CUBE virtual coverage of the AWS summit virtual online. This is an event that Amazon normally has in-person in San Francisco, but now it's virtual around the world, Seoul, Korea, in Tokyo, all over the world and Asia-Pacific and in North America. I'm John Furrier here joined with Stu Miniman. So Stu, we're kicking off AWS virtual with theCUBE virtual. I'm in Palo Alto with the quarantine crew. You're in Massachusetts, in Boston and the quarantine crew there. Stu, great to have you on to talk about AWS virtual summit. >> Yeah, John, it's great to see you. It's been, you know, interesting times doing all these remote interviews. As many of us say, I sure don't miss the planes and the hotels, but I do miss the communities. I do miss the hallway conversation, but great to see you John. Love the Midnight Madness shirt from re:Invent last year. >> Well, we want to thank Amazon for stepping up with some sponsorship for allow us to do the virtual CUBE alongside their virtual event, because now it's a global community. It's all virtual, there are no boundaries theCube has no boundary. Stu, we've got a great program. We have Corey Quinn coming up and expect to hear from him last week in AWS. He's known for, he's a rising star in the community, certainly CUBE guest and also guest host and analyst for theCUBE. We expect to hear all the latest from his big Zoom post controversy, to really what's going on in AWS, around what services are high. I know you're going to do a great interview with him, but let's start with Amazon. We're seeing a ton of activity. Obviously most recently, last week was the JEDI thing, which was an agency protest, kind of confidential. Microsoft blew that up big time with a post by their worldwide comms person Frank Shaw, countered by Drew Herdener, who's the comms global lead for AWS. And so a war of words is ensuing. This is again, pointing to the cloud native war that's going on with a JEDI conference. I mean, the JEDI contract for $10 billion, which is worth to Microsoft. This shows that the heat is on, Stu. This is a absolute bloodbath between AWS and Microsoft. We're seeing it play out now virtually with Amazon, A.I. large scale cloud. This is huge, this is another level. A DEFCON one basically, your thoughts? >> Yeah, John, you've covered this really well. It's been really interesting plot, number one, you talked about the security requirement, when AWS launched the GovCloud had the CIA as a client, early on many years ago. It was the green light for many companies that go from "Wait, is the cloud secure enough?" to "Well, if it's good enough for "the federal government in the U.S., "it's probably good enough for the enterprise." When Microsoft won JEDI, they didn't have all the certification, to meet what was in the contract. They had a ticking clock to make sure that they could meet those security engagements, as well as one of the pieces on the task board that moved was Oracle made a partnership announcement with Azure. We know the federal government uses Oracle quite a bit, so they can now run that in Azure and not have the penalties from Oracle. So that many have said, "Hey AWS, "why don't you kind of let that one piece of business go? "You've got federal business." But those ripple effects we understand from one contract kind of move things around. >> Well, my take on this is just the tempest in the teapot. Either Microsoft's got something that we don't know or they're running scared. My prediction, Stu, is that the clock is going to tick out. D.O.D. is going to award the contract again to Microsoft because I don't think the D.O.D. wants to change based upon the data that I'm getting from my reporting. And then ultimately Amazon will keep this going in court because Microsoft has been deficient on winning the deal. And that is by the judge and in government contracts, as you know, when you're deficient, you're ineligible. So essentially on the tech specs, Microsoft failed to meet the criteria of the contract and they're deficient. They still can't host top secret content even if they wanted to. This is going to be a game changer. If this comes out to be true, it will be a huge tech scandal. If it's true, then AWS is going to have egg on their face. Okay, so moving past JEDI, this speaks to the large scale problems that are having with COVID. You seeing Amazon, they're all working at home, but they still get to run the servers. They can do it, they've got cloud native, you got DevOps, but for their customers Stu, but people who are trying to do hybrid, what are you hearing in terms of the kinds of situations that people are doing? Are they still going to work with masks on? Are there still data centers that need to be managed? What are you hearing Stu, in the tech worlds do around COVID-19 and as the cloud becomes more apparent, it's obvious that if you're not cloud native, you're going to be on the wrong side of history here, it's pretty obvious. >> Well, absolutely John, there is a bit of a tailwind behind cloud or with COVID-19, everything from, you mentioned work from home. Everybody needs to be on their VPN. They need to access their services, where they are. If you've got a global workforce, if you thought that your infrastructure was going to be able to handle that, you might not be in for a good story. AWS is meeting that need. There's been some of the cloud providers that have had performance issues, that have had to prioritize which customers can get access to things. AWS is standing strong, they're meeting their customers and they're answering the call of cloud. We know that AWS puts a huge investment into their environment. If you compare an availability zone or from AWS, it is very, very sturdy. It's not just, you know, a small cluster and they say, "Hey, we can run all over the place." To be specific Azure, has been having some of those performance issues and there's been some concerns. Corey actually wrote a really good article talking about that it actually puts a bad view on public cloud in general, but we know not all public clouds are the same. So, Google has been doing quite well, managing the demand spike, so has AWS. Microsoft has needed to respond a little bit. >> Since you just mentioned, Microsoft's outages, Microsoft actually got caught on their 8K filing, which I just had me going through and I noticed that they said they had all this uptime for the cloud. It turns out it wasn't the cloud, it was the team's product. They had to actually put a strike a line through it legally. So a lot of people getting called out, but it doesn't matter, it's a crisis. I think that's not going to be a core issue. This is going to be what technology has been needed the most. And I got to ask you Stu, when was the last time you and I talked about virtual desktops? Because hey, if you're working at home and you're not at your desk, you might need some stuff on your desk. This is a real issue. I mean it's kind of a corner case in tech, but virtual desktops, if you're not at the office, you need to have that at home. This is a huge issue and it's been a surge of demand. >> Yeah, there were jokes in the community that, you know, finally at the year of V.D.I., but desktop as the service John, is an area that took a little while to get going. So, Dave Vellante and I were just having a conversation about this. You and Dave interviewed me when Amazon released workspaces and it was like, you know, Citrix is doing so well and V.D.I. isn't the hotness anymore, but desktop as a service, has grown, if you talk about desktop as a service compared to VDI, VDI is still a bit of a heavy lift. Even if you've got hyper converged infrastructure, roll this out, it's a couple of months to put these whole solutions together. Now if you have some of that infrastructure, can you scale it, can you build them up much faster? Yes you can. But if you're starting to enable your workforce a little bit faster, desktop as a service is going to be faster. AWS has a strong solution with workspaces. It really is that enablement and it's also putting pressure on the SaaS providers. One, they need scale and two, they need to be responsive that some of their customers need to scale up really fast and some of them need to dial things down. Always worry about, some of these contracts that the SaaS providers put you in. So, customers need to make sure they're being loud and clear with their providers. If you need help, if you need to adjust something, push back on them because they should be responsive, because we know that there is a broad impact on this, but it will not be a permanent impact. So, these are the times that companies need to work closely with customers, because otherwise you will, either make a customer for life or you will have somebody that will not be saying good about you for a long time. >> Well Stu, so let's just quickly run through some of the highlights so far on the virtual conference, virtual event. Obviously Amazon pre-announced last month, the Windows migration service, which has been a big part of their business. They've been doing it for 11 years. So we're going to have an interview with an AWS person to talk about that. Also AppFlow is announced as well as part of the virtual kind of private connects. So, you know, you're seeing that right here, large scale data lakes breaking down those silos, moving data from the cloud, from the console into the top applicants, like Salesforce is the big one. So that was kind of pre announced. The big story here is the Kendra availability and the augmented A.I. availability, among other things. This is this big story. This kind of shows the Amazon track record. They pre-announced that re:Invent and try to run as fast as they can to get it shipping. The focus of AI, the focus of large scale capacity, whether it's building on top of EC2, serverless, Lambda, A.I., all this is kind of coming together. Data, high capacity operational throughput and added value. That seems to be the highlights, your reaction? >> Yeah, so John, AppFlow is an interesting one, we were just talking about task providers. An area that we've been spending a lot of time talking with the East coast system is my data is all over the place. Yes, there's my data centers, public cloud, but there's all of these task providers. So, if I have data in ServiceNow I have it in Workday, I have it in Salesforce, how do I have connectors there? How do I secure that? How do I protect that? So Amazon, working with a broad ecosystem and helping to pull that together is definitely an interesting one to watch. Kendra definitely been some good buzz in the ecosystem for a while there. The question is on natural language processing and A.I., where are the customers with these deployments? Because some of them, if they're a little bit more longterm strategic might be the kind of projects that get put on pause rather than the ones that are critical for me to run the business today. >> And I just did a podcast with the VMware ecosystem last week talking about which projects will be funded, which ones won't. It brings up this new virtual work environment, where some people are going to get paid and some people aren't. If you're not core to the enterprise, you're probably not going to get paid. If you're not getting a phone call to come into work, you're probably going to get fired. So there will be projects that will be cut and projects that will be funded. Certainly virtual events, which I want to talk to you about in a minute, to applications that are driving revenue and or engagement around the new workforce. So the virtualization of business is happening. Now, we joke because we know server virtualization actually enabled the cloud, right? So I think there's going to be a huge Cambrian explosion of applications. So I want to get your thoughts, the folks you've been talking through the past few months, what are you hearing in terms of those kinds of projects that people are going to be leaning into and funding, versus ones they might put on hold? Have you heard anything? >> Yeah, well, John, it's interesting, when you go back at its core, what is AWS? And they want to enable build. So the last couple of years we've been talking about all of the new applications that will get built. That's not getting put on hold, John. What I do, not just to run the business but grow the business. I need to still have applications at the core of what we do. Data and application really are what driving companies today. So that piece is so critically important and therefore AWS is a very strategic partner there. >> Yeah, I've been seeing the same things too. I think the common trend that I would just add to that would be I'm seeing companies looking at the COVID crisis as an opportunity. And frankly in some cases an excuse to lay people off and that's kind of, you're seeing some of that. But at the end of the day that people are resetting, re-inventing and then putting new growth strategies together, that still doesn't change. business still needs to get done, so great point. All right, Stu, virtual events. We're here with the AWS summit. Normally we're on the show floor with theCUBE, we are here with the virtual CUBE doing our virtual thing. It's been interesting, Stu. A lot of our events have converted to virtual, some have been canceled but most of them have been been running on the virtual. We've been plugged in. But theCUBE is evolving, and I want to get your thoughts on how you see theCube evolving. I've been getting a lot of questions. This came up again on the VMware community podcast. How has theCUBE morphed? And I know that we've been working hard with a lot of our customers, how have we evolved? Because we're in the middle of this digital wave. This is a virtualization wave. theCUBE is in there. We've been successful, there's been different use cases. Some have been embedded into the software. Amazon's got their own run a show. But events are more than just running the show content. There's a lot more community behind this Stu, your thoughts on how theCUBE has evolved and what are you seeing? >> I'm glad John, you just mentioned community. So you and I have talked many times on air and did this too about theCUBE is as much a network and a community as it is a media company. So, first of all it's been so heartening over the last couple of months that we've been putting out content. We're still getting some great feedback from the community. One of the things I personally miss is, when we step off the stage and you walk the hallway and you bump into people that know and they ask you questions or they share some of the things that they're going through. That data that we always look for is something we still need. So I'm making sure to reach out to friends diving back into the social panels to make sure that we understand the pulse of what's going on. But, John, our community has always been online so a big piece of theCUBE is relatively unchanged other than we're doing all of the interviews remote. We have to deal with everyone's home systems and home network. Every once in a while you hear a dog barking in the background or a child running, but it actually humanized. So there's that opportunity for the communities to rally together. Some of my favorite interviews have been, the open source communities that are gathering together to work on common issues. A lot of them specifically for the global pandemic. And so there are some really good stories out there. I worry when you talk about companies that are saying, Hey, this is the-- (sound cuts out) There have been so many job losses, in this pandemic that it just is heartbreaking. So, we love when the tech community is helping to spur new opportunities, great new industries. I had a great interview that I did with our friends from A Cloud Guru and they've seen about a 20 to 30% increase on people taking the online training. And one of the main things that they're taking training on is the 101 courses on AWS, on Google and on Azure as well as an interesting point John, they said multicloud is something that has come up. So, 2020, we've been wondering is AWS going to admit that multicloud is a thing? Or are they going to stick with their hybrid message and ask that their partners not talk about multicloud? >> It's been interesting on the virtual queue, because we and Amazon's been a visionary in this and letting theCUBE be virtual with them. It's become a connective tissue, Stu, between the community and if you think about how much money the companies are saving by not running the physical events and with the layoffs as you mentioned, I think there could be an opportunity for theCUBE to be that connective tissue to bring people together. And I think that's the mission that we hope will unfold. But ultimately digital investments will probably go up from this. I'm seeing a lot of great conversion around, okay, so the content, what does it mean to me? Is that my my friend group, how are my friends involved? How do I learn, how do I discover? How do I connect? And I think the interesting thing about theCube is we've seen that upfront and I think there's a positive sign ahead, Stu, around virtualization of the media and the community and I think is going to be an economic opportunity and I hope that we could help people find either jobs or ways to reengage and reconnect. So again, re:Invent's coming, you've got VMworld, all these big shows too, they drop so much cash! Can you imagine if they put all that cash into the community? I think that's a viable scenario. >> Yeah, no, absolutely, John. There is big money in events. Yes, there are less costs. There are also almost none of them are charging for people to attend and very few of them are charging their sponsors. So, big shift in how we have to look at these. It needs to be a real focus on content. I mean, from our standpoint, John, from day one, and we've been doing this a decade now, in the early days when it was a wing and a prayer on the technology, it was always about the content and the best people help extract that signal from the noise. So, some things have changed, the mission overall stays the same. >> And you know what, Amazon is being humble. They're saying we're figuring it out. Of course, we're psyched that we're there with the virtual CUBE. Stu, thanks for spending the time kicking off this virtual coverage, wrap up. Not as good as face-to-face, love to be there on site, but I think it's going to be easier to get guests too Stu in the virtual world, but we're going to go to a hybrid as soon as it comes back to normal. It sounds like cloud Stu, public hybrid virtual. There it is. Stu, thanks so much. >> Thanks John. >> Okay, that's theCUBE coverage for AWS Summit Virtual Online. It's theCUBE virtual coverage. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman. Thanks for watching. Stay tuned for the next segment. (upbeat music)