>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering AWS re:Invent 2019. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services and Intel. Along with it's ecosystem partners. >> Okay, welcome back everyone. It's theCUBE's live coverage here in Las Vegas for Amazon Web Series today, re:Invent 2019. It's theCUBE's seventh year covering re:Invent. Eight years they've been running this event. It gets bigger every year. It's been a great wave to ride on. I'm John Furrier, my cohost, Dave Vellante. We've been riding this wave, Dave, for years. It's so exciting, it gets bigger and more exciting. >> Lucky seven. >> This year more than ever. So much stuff is happening. It's been really exciting. I think there's a sea change happening, in terms of another wave coming. Quantum computing, big news here amongst other great tech. Our next guest is Bill Vass, VP of Technology, Storage Automation Management, part of the quantum announcement that went out. Bill, good to see you. >> Yeah, well, good to see you. Great to see you again. Thanks for having me on board. >> So, we love quantum, we talk about it all the time. My son loves it, everyone loves it. It's futuristic. It's going to crack everything. It's going to be the fastest thing in the world. Quantum supremacy. Andy referenced it in my one-on-one with him around quantum being important for Amazon. >> Yes, it is, it is. >> You guys launched it. Take us through the timing. Why, why now? >> Okay, so the Braket service, which is based on quantum notation made by Dirac, right? So we thought that was a good name for it. It provides for you the ability to do development in quantum algorithms using gate-based programming that's available, and then do simulation on classical computers, which is what we call our digital computers today now. (men chuckling) >> Yeah, it's a classic. >> These are classic computers all of a sudden right? And then, actually do execution of your algorithms on, today, three different quantum computers, one that's annealing and two-bit gate-based machines. And that gives you the ability to test them in parallel and separate from each other. In fact, last week, I was working with the team and we had two machines, an ion trap machine and an electromagnetic tunneling machine, solving the same problem and passing variables back and forth from each other, you could see the cloud watch metrics coming out, and the data was going to an S3 bucket on the output. And we do it all in a Jupiter notebook. So it was pretty amazing to see all that running together. I think it's probably the first time two different machines with two different technologies had worked together on a cloud computer, fully integrated with everything else, so it was pretty exciting. >> So, quantum supremacy has been a word kicked around. A lot of hand waving, IBM, Google. Depending on who you talk to, there's different versions. But at the end of the day, quantum is a leap in computing. >> Bill: Yes, it can be. >> It can be. It's still early days, it would be day zero. >> Yeah, well I think if you think of, we're about where computers were with tubes if you remember, if you go back that far, right, right? That's about where we are right now, where you got to kind of jiggle the tubes sometimes to get them running. >> A bug gets in there. Yeah, yeah, that bug can get in there, and all of those kind of things. >> Dave: You flip 'em off with a punch card. Yeah, yeah, so for example, a number of the machines, they run for four hours and then they come down for a half hour for calibration. And then they run for another four hours. So we're still sort of at that early stage, but you can do useful work on them. And more mature systems, like for example D-Wave, which is annealer, a little different than gate-based machines, is really quite mature, right? And so, I think as you go back and forth between these machines, the gate-based machines and annealers, you can really get a sense for what's capable today with Braket and that's what we want to do is get people to actually be able to try them out. Now, quantum supremacy is a fancy word for we did something you can't do on a classical computer, right? That's on a quantum computer for the first time. And quantum computers have the potential to exceed the processing power, especially on things like factoring and other things like that, or on Hamiltonian simulations for molecules, and those kids of things, because a quantum computer operates the way a molecule operates, right, in a lot of ways using quantum mechanics and things like that. And so, it's a fancy term for that. We don't really focus on that at Amazon. We focus on solving customer's problems. And the problem we're solving with Braket is to get them to learn it as it's evolving, and be ready for it, and continue to develop the environment. And then also offer a lot of choice. Amazon's always been big on choice. And if you look at our processing portfolio, we have AMD, Intel x86, great partners, great products from them. We have Nvidia, great partner, great products from them. But we also have our Graviton 1 and Graviton 2, and our new GPU-type chip. And those are great products, too, I've been doing a lot on those, as well. And the customer should have that choice, and with quantum computers, we're trying to do the same thing. We will have annealers, we will have ion trap machines, we will have electromagnetic machines, and others available on Braket. >> Can I ask a question on quantum if we can go back a bit? So you mentioned vacuum tubes, which was kind of funny. But the challenge there was with that, it was cooling and reliability, system downtime. What are the technical challenges with regard to quantum in terms of making it stable? >> Yeah, so some of it is on classical computers, as we call them, they have error-correction code built in. So you have, whether you know it or not, there's alpha particles that are flipping bits on your memory at all times, right? And if you don't have ECC, you'd get crashes constantly on your machine. And so, we've built in ECC, so we're trying to build the quantum computers with the proper error correction, right, to handle these things, 'cause nothing runs perfectly, you just think it's perfect because we're doing all the error correction under the covers, right? And so that needs to evolve on quantum computing. The ability to reproduce them in volume from an engineering perspective. Again, standard lithography has a yield rate, right? I mean, sometimes the yield is 40%, sometimes it's 20%, sometimes it's a really good fab and it's 80%, right? And so, you have a yield rate, as well. So, being able to do that. These machines also generally operate in a cryogenic world, that's a little bit more complicated, right? And they're also heavily affected by electromagnetic radiation, other things like that, so you have to sort of faraday cage them in some cases, and other things like that. So there's a lot that goes on there. So it's managing a physical environment like cryogenics is challenging to do well, having the fabrication to reproduce it in a new way is hard. The physics is actually, I shudder to say well understood. I would say the way the physics works is well understood, how it works is not, right? No one really knows how entanglement works, they just knows what it does, and that's understood really well, right? And so, so a lot of it is now, why we're excited about it, it's an engineering problem to solve, and we're pretty good at engineering. >> Talk about the practicality. Andy Jassy was on the record with me, quoted, said, "Quantum is very important to Amazon." >> Yes it is. >> You agree with that. He also said, "It's years out." You said that. He said, "But we want to make it practical "for customers." >> We do, we do. >> John: What is the practical thing? Is it just kicking the tires? Is it some of the things you mentioned? What's the core goal? >> So, in my opinion, we're at a point in the evolution of these quantum machines, and certainly with the work we're doing with Cal Tech and others, that the number of available cubits are starting to increase at an astronomic rate, a Moore's Law kind of of rate, right? Whether it's, no matter which machine you're looking at out there, and there's about 200 different companies building quantum computers now, and so, and they're all good technology. They've all got challenges, as well, as reproducibility, and those kind of things. And so now's a good time to start learning how to do this gate-based programming knowing that it's coming, because quantum computers, they won't replace a classical computer, so don't think that. Because there is no quantum ram, you can't run 200 petabytes of data through a quantum computer today, and those kind of things. What it can do is factoring very well, or it can do probability equations very well. It'll have affects on Monte Carlo simulations. It'll have affects specifically in material sciences where you can simulate molecules for the first time that you just can't do on classical computers. And when I say you can't do on classical computers, my quantum team always corrects me. They're like, "Well, no one has proven "that there's an algorithm you can run "on a classical computer that will do that yet," right? (men chuckle) So there may be times when you say, "Okay, I did this on a quantum computer," and you can only do it on a quantum computer. But then someone's very smart mathematician says, "Oh, I figured out how to do it on a regular computer. "You don't need a quantum computer for that." And that's constantly evolving, as well, in parallel, right? And so, and that's what's that argument between IBM and Google on quantum supremacy is that. And that's an unfortunate distraction in my opinion. What Google did was quite impressive, and if you're in the quantum world, you should be very happy with what they did. They had a very low error rate with a large number of cubits, and that's a big deal. >> Well, I just want to ask you, this industry is an arms race. But, with something like quantum where you've got 200 companies actually investing in it so early days, is collaboration maybe a model here? I mean, what do think? You mentioned Cal Tech. >> It certainly is for us because, like I said, we're going to have multiple quantum computers available, just like we collaborate with Intel, and AMD, and the other partners in that space, as well. That's sort of the nice thing about being a cloud service provider is we can give customers choice, and we can have our own innovation, plus their innovations available to customers, right? Innovation doesn't just happen in one place, right? We got a lot of smart people at Amazon, we don't invent everything, right? (Dave chuckles) >> So I got to ask you, obviously, we can take cube quantum and call it cubits, not to be confused with theCUBE video highlights. Joking aside, classical computers, will there be a classical cloud? Because this is kind of a futuristic-- >> Or you mean a quantum cloud? >> Quantum cloud, well then you get the classic cloud, you got the quantum cloud. >> Well no, they'll be together. So I think a quantum computer will be used like we used to use a math coprocessor if you like, or FPGAs are used today, right? So, you'll go along and you'll have your problem. And I'll give you a real, practical example. So let's say you had a machine with 125 cubits, okay? You could just start doing some really nice optimization algorithms on that. So imagine there's this company that ships stuff around a lot, I wonder who that could be? And they need to optimize continuously their delivery for a truck, right? And that changes all the time. Well that algorithm, if you're doing hundreds of deliveries in a truck, it's very complicated. That traveling salesman algorithm is a NP-hard problem when you do it, right? And so, what would be the fastest best path? But you got to take into account weather and traffic, so that's changing. So you might have a classical computer do those algorithms overnight for all the delivery trucks and then send them out to the trucks. The next morning they're driving around. But it takes a lot of computing power to do that, right? Well, a quantum computer can do that kind of problemistic or deterministic equation like that, not deterministic, a best-fit algorithm like that, much faster. And so, you could have it every second providing that. So your classical computer is sending out the manifests, interacting with the person, it's got the website on it. And then, it gets to the part where here's the problem to calculate, we call it a shot when you're on a quantum computer, it runs it in a few seconds that would take an hour or more. >> It's a fast job, yeah. >> And it comes right back with the result. And then it continues with it's thing, passes it to the driver. Another update occurs, (buzzing) and it's just going on all the time. So those kind of things are very practical and coming. >> I've got to ask for the younger generations, my sons super interested as I mentioned before you came on, quantum attracts the younger, smart kids coming into the workforce, engineering talent. What's the best path for someone who has an either advanced degree, or no degree, to get involved in quantum? Is there a certain advice you'd give someone? >> So the reality is, I mean, obviously having taken quantum mechanics in school and understanding the physics behind it to an extent, as much as you can understand the physics behind it, right? I think the other areas, there are programs at universities focused on quantum computing, there's a bunch of them. So, they can go into that direction. But even just regular computer science, or regular mechanical and electrical engineering are all neat. Mechanical around the cooling, and all that other stuff. Electrical, these are electrically-based machines, just like a classical computer is. And being able to code at low level is another area that's tremendously valuable right now. >> Got it. >> You mentioned best fit is coming, that use case. I mean, can you give us a sense of a timeframe? And people will say, "Oh, 10, 15, 20 years." But you're talking much sooner. >> Oh, I don't, I think it's sooner than that, I do. And it's hard for me to predict exactly when we'll have it. You can already do, with some of the annealing machines, like D- Wave, some of the best fit today, right? So it's a matter of people want to use a quantum computer because they need to do something fast, they don't care how much it costs, they need to do something fast. Or it's too expensive to do it on a classical computer, or you just can't do it at all on a classical computer. Today, there isn't much of that last one, you can't do it at all, but that's coming. As you get to around 52, 50, 52 cubits, it's very hard to simulate that on a classical computer. You're starting to reach the edge of what you can practically do on a classical computer. At about 125 cubits, you probably are at a point where you can't just simulate it anymore. >> But you're talking years, not decades, for this use case? >> Yeah, I think you're definitely talking years. I think, and you know, it's interesting, if you'd asked me two years ago how long it would take, I would've said decades. So that's how fast things are advancing right now, and I think that-- >> Yeah, and the computers just getting faster and faster. >> Yeah, but the ability to fabricate, the understanding, there's a number of architectures that are very well proven, it's just a matter of getting the error rates down, stability in place, the repeatable manufacturing in place, there's a lot of engineering problems. And engineering problems are good, we know how to do engineering problems, right? And we actually understand the physics, or at least we understand how the physics works. I won't claim that, what is it, "Spooky action at a distance," is what Einstein said for entanglement, right? And that's a core piece of this, right? And so, those are challenges, right? And that's part of the mystery of the quantum computer, I guess. >> So you're having fun? >> I am having fun, yeah. >> I mean, this is pretty intoxicating, technical problems, it's fun. >> It is. It is a lot of fun. Of course, the whole portfolio that I run over at AWS is just really a fun portfolio, between robotics, and autonomous systems, and IOT, and the advanced storage stuff that we do, and all the edge computing, and all the monitor and management systems, and all the real-time streaming. So like Kinesis Video, that's the back end for the Amazon ghost stores, and working with all that. It's a lot of fun, it really is, it's good. >> Well, Bill, we need an hour to get into that, so we may have to come up and see you, do a special story. >> Oh, definitely! >> We'd love to come up and dig in, and get a special feature program with you at some point. >> Yeah, happy to do that, happy to do that. >> Talk some robotics, some IOT, autonomous systems. >> Yeah, you can see all of it around here, we got it up and running around here, Dave. >> What a portfolio. >> Congratulations. >> Alright, thank you so much. >> Great news on the quantum. Quantum is here, quantum cloud is happening. Of course, theCUBE is going quantum. We've got a lot of cubits here. Lot of CUBE highlights, go to SiliconAngle.com. We got all the data here, we're sharing it with you. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante talking quantum. Want to give a shout out to Amazon Web Services and Intel for setting up this stage for us. Thanks to our sponsors, we wouldn't be able to make this happen if it wasn't for them. Thank you very much, and thanks for watching. We'll be back with more coverage after this short break. (upbeat music)

>> So, we see this picture, right, of the hybrid cloud. And we've talked about how we do that for the private cloud. So, let's look over at the public cloud, and let's dig into this a little bit more deeply. You know, we're taking this incredible power of the VMware Cloud Foundation and making it available for the leading cloud providers in the world. And, with that, the partnership that we announced almost two years ago with Amazon, and on this stage, last year, we announced our first generation of products. No better example of the hybrid cloud. And for that, it's my pleasure to bring to the stage my friend, my partner, the CEO of AWS. Please welcome Andy Jassy. (crowd applauding) (upbeat music) Thank you, Andy. You know, you honor us with your presence. You know, and it really is a pleasure to be able to come in front of this audience and talk about what our teams have accomplished together over the last year. Can you give us some perspective on that, Andy, and what customers are doing with this? >> Well, first of all, thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. It's great to be here with all of you. You know, the offering that we have together, VMware Cloud and AWS, is very appealing to customers because it allows them to use the same software they've been using to manage their infrastructure for years, but be able to deploy it in AWS. And we see a lot of customer momentum, and a lot of customers using it. You see it in every imaginable vertical business segment. In transportation, you see it with Stagecoach. In media and entertainment you see it with Discovery Communications. In education, MIT and Cal Tech, in consulting, Accenture and Cognizant and DXC. You see it in every imaginable vertical business segment. And the number of customers using the offering is doubling at every quarter. So, people are really excited about it. And I think that probably the number one use case we see so far, although there are a lot of them, is customers who are looking to migrate on-premises applications to the cloud. And a good example of that is MIT, where they're right now in the process of migrating, in fact they just did migrate 3,000 VMs from their data centers to VMware Cloud and AWS. And this would've taken them years before, to do in the past, but they did it in just three months. >> Yeah, it was really, really spectacular. And they're just a fun company, and, you know, to work with, and the team there. But we're also seeing other use cases, as well. And, you know, probably the second most common example is, well I'll say, on demand capabilities for things like disaster recovery. And we have great examples of customers using it for that. And, one in particular is Brink's, right? Everybody knows the Brink's security trucks, and you know, armored trucks coming by. And they had a critical need to retire a secondary data center that they were using, you know, for DR. So we quickly built a DR protection environment for 600 of the VMs. You know, they migrated their mission-critical workloads, and voila, stable and consistent DR, and now they're eliminating that site, and looking for other migrations, as well. >> It saved 10 to 15 percent in the process, doin' it. >> Yeah, it was just great. You know, one of the things I believe, Andy, customers should never spend capital on DR, ever again, with this kind of capability in place. It is just that game changing. You know, and, obviously we've been working on expanding our reach. We promised to make the service available a year ago, with the global footprint of Amazon. And now we've delivered on that promise. And, in fact, today, or yesterday if your an Aussie, right down under, we announced in Sydney as well. And now we're in US, Europe, and in APJ. >> Yeah, it's really, I mean it's very exciting. Of course, Australia is one of the most virtualized places in the world, and it's pretty remarkable how fast European customers have started using the offering, too, in just the quarter that's been out there. And probably, of the many requests customers have had, you've had, probably the number one request has been that we make the offering available in all of the regions that AWS has regions. And, I can tell you, by the end of 2019, we'll largely be there, including with GovCloud. So, GovCloud-- >> Oh yeah, you guys have been, that's been huge for you guys. >> Yeah, it's a government-only region that we have, that a lot of federal government workloads live in. And, we are pretty close together having the offering, FedRAMP authority to operate, which is a big deal and a game-changer for governments, because then they'll be able to use the familiar tools that they use in VMware not just to run their workloads on premises, but also in the cloud as well, with the data privacy requirements and security requirements they need. So it's a real game-changer for government, too. >> Yeah, and as you can see by the picture here, basically before the end of next year, everywhere that you are, and have an availability zone, we're going to be there running on top of you. >> Giddyup! >> Yeah, let's get with it (laughs). Okay, we're a team, go faster, okay. You know, and, it's not just making it available, but this pace of innovation. And, you know, you guys have really taught us a few things in this respect. And since we went life, in the Oregon region, we've been on a quarterly cadence of major releases. M2 was really about mission-critical at scale, and we added our second region. We added our Hybrid Cloud Extension. With M3, we moved the global rollout, and we launched in Europe. With M4, we really added a lot of these mission-critical governance aspects, started to attack all of the industry certifications. And today, we're announcing M5, alright? And, with that, I think we have this little cool thing that we're doing with EBS and storage. >> Yeah, well you know, two of the most important priorities for customers are cost and performance. And so, we have a couple things to talk about today that we're bringing to you that I think hit both of those. On the storage side, we've combined the elasticity of Amazon Elastic Block Store, or EBS, with VMware's vSAN. And we've provided now a storage option that you'll be able to use that is much, it's very high-capacity and much more cost-effective. You'll start to see this initially on the VMware Cloud native USR5 instances, which are compute instances that are memory-optimized. And so, this will change the cost equation. You'll be able to use EBS by default, and it'll be much more cost-effective for storage or memory-intensive workloads. It's something that you guys have asked for, it's been very frequently requested, and it hits preview today. And then, the other thing is that we've worked really hard together to integrate VMware's NSX along with AWS's Direct Connect, to have a private, even higher performance connectivity between on-premises and the cloud. So, you know, very, very exciting new capabilities that show deep integration between the companies. >> Yeah, you know, and that aspect of the deep integration has really been the thing that we committed to. You know, we have large engineering teams that are working literally every day, right, on bringing together, and how do we fuse these platforms together at a deep and intimate way, so that we can deliver new services. Just like Elastic DRS, and the vSAN EBS, really powerful capabilities. And, that pace of innovation continues. So, M Next maybe, maybe M, maybe six? I dunno, we'll see. Alright, but we're continuing this toward pace of innovation. You know, completing all of the capabilities of NSX, you know, full integration for all of the direct-connect capabilities, really expanding that. You know, improving license capabilities on the platform. We'll be adding PKS on top of, for expanded developer capabilities. >> Yeah! >> So just, oh, thank you. (audience applauding) I think that was formerly known as storage Chad, so anyway, alright. And, you know, we're continuing this pace of innovation, going forward, but I think we also have a few other things to talk about today, Andy. >> Yeah, I think we have some news that hopefully people here will be pretty excited about. We have a pretty big database business in AWS, and it's both on the relational and on the non-relational side. And the business does billions of dollars in revenue for us. And, on the relational side, we have a service called Amazon Relational Database Service, or Amazon RDS, that we have hundreds of thousands of customers using, because it makes it much easier for them to set up, operate, and scale their databases. And, so many companies now are operating in hybrid mode, and will be for a while. And a lot of those customers have asked us, can you give us the ease of manageability of those databases, but on premises? And so, we talked about it, and we thought about it, and we worked with our partners in VMware, and I'm excited to announce today, right now, Amazon RDS on VMware. (audience applauding) And so that will bring all the capabilities of Amazon RDS to VMware's customers for their on-premises environments. So, what you'll be able to do is, you'll be able to provision databases, you'll be able to scale the compute, or the memory, or the storage for those database instances. You'll be able to patch the operating system or database engines. You'll be able to create read replicas, to scale your database reads. And you can deploy those replicas either on premises or in AWS. You'll be able to deploy in high-availability configuration by replicating the data to different VMware clusters. You'll be able to create online backups that either live on premises, or in AWS. And then, you'll be able to take all those databases, and if you eventually want to move them to AWS, you'll be able to do so rather easily. You have a pretty smooth path. This is going to be available in a few months. It'll be available on Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL, Postgres, and MariaDB. I think it's very exciting for our customers. And I think it's also a good example of where we're continuing to deepen the partnership, and listen to what customers want, and then innovate on their behalf. >> Absolutely. Thank you, Andy, it is thrilling to see this. (audience applauding) And as we said when we began the partnership, it was a deep integration of our offerings and our go-to-market. But also building this bi-directional hybrid highway to give customers the capabilities where they want it. Cloud, on premise, right, on premise to the cloud, it really is a unique partnership that we've built, the momentum we're feeling to our customer base, and the cool innovations that we're doing. Andy, thank you so much for joining us here, >> Yeah, thanks for having me. >> At the Emerald 2018. >> Thank you guys. Appreciate it. (upbeat music)