>> From theCUBE's studios in Palo Alto, in Boston, connecting with thought leaders around the globe. These are Cloud Native Insights. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, the host of Cloud Native Insights. And when we talk about cloud native, we're talking about how do I take advantage of the agility in innovation, in cloud and the ecosystem out there? And a big question is if I'm a company that's not born in the cloud, or if I'm person that's not steeped in the knowledge of leveraging and using all of these wonderful tools out there, how do I get there? To help us dig into the people and company moving to cloud and adopt the use of these technologies, happy to welcome to the program, Forrest Brazeal. He is a senior manager with A Cloud Guru is his official title, but he is the cloud bard, as many people know in a bard, of course, an oral transition. He creates poems, he sings, he's got a book coming out to illustrate the cloud and really great to be able to talk to you Forrest. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Hey, it's great to be on the show, Stu, thanks for having me. >> All right, so first if you could just share a little bit about your background. So you joined A Cloud Guru, you know, relatively recently, I'd seen some of the cartoons and videos you've done in the past. You've got kind of a renaissance man look, you're not just a tech guy, as I said, you do have some of those musical pursuits also. So I'd love to hear a little of your background. >> Yeah, so I've been an engineer for a long time. I've been an engineer, been a manager of engineers, a consultant, and that's from, you know, startups ranging all the way up to the fortune 50. So I've seen a lot of enterprises in other companies at various stages of their cloud journey. From, you know, just trying to figure out how to get to the cloud out of the data center, all the way to being very cloud native. As you were saying in your intro, you know, figuring out how to build directly on cloud services. I'm very passionate about that. Very passionate about helping people figure out how to take that next step. Not to be a stucker, to get into a state where they are, but to figure out how to get, as I say up the Serverless ladder, right to that next stage of cloud native adoption. And I've realized that, you know, a lot of these technologies and a lot of these concepts, these practices are very abstract. And sometimes what helps the most is to put that in a format that people can engage with. And so I draw and I sometimes sing and I write all sorts of things just to try to help people understand. You know, even though these technologies and practices, these ideas are abstract, they don't have to be difficult, right? Everybody's got some intuitive understanding of why a doctor exists or why a lawyer exists. It's a little bit harder to get your head around, you know, why does a cloud architect exist? What do they build, right? And that's what I try to do with things like the book, The Read Aloud Cloud, that's coming out in just a couple of months. >> All right, so I love that, you know, helping companies understand these things because, you know, for so many years it was like, ah, well we need a mandate for the cloud. You know, cloud, cloud, cloud. When I started this, it was, you know, cloud is not a destination. There is how do we really take advantage of cloud? And there was one post that you wrote talking about lift and shift. And it was one of those things that we've seen for years, there's arguments of, you know, is lift and shift good, if it's bad? And of course the reality is sometimes lift and shift is needed, but it is step one of what you need to do, because if you're not taking advantage of the cloud, the rift reaches a certain point that you say, oh my gosh, maybe I'm not taking advantage of it, maybe the cost don't make sense, and therefore we scrambled and we pull things back and we celebrate repatriation, which to my mind was always, oh, geez, we kind of didn't understand it, we failed. And then we kind of went back to doing what we didn't want to do. So walk us through, if you could, we've even got an illustration of yours that we'll talk about, but you know, give us, you know, what is the proper way that people should think about lift and shift? >> Yeah, exactly. And to be clear, I'm not dissing lift and shift as a concept. It's very necessary in a lot of cases and you can reel off a bunch of reasons why lift and shift would be an important stepping stone in a cloud journey. And of course, that could be just, you know, I've got to get out of the data center, right? Because my lease is expiring or, you know, my servers are haunted and the whole thing is on fire. I've talked to people who, you know, have fireworks stored in their data center, literally that they're afraid are going to go off, right? The roof is leaking. It's time to get out of there and just get to someplace that's professionally managed. You could be using a lift and shift migration almost as like a financial engineering tactic to go from a CapEx to an OPEX model, right? And tie what you're doing a little bit more closely to what you're spending. There's several other reasons that you might choose to have lift and shift is that first stage you might want just to get your feet wet a little bit in cloud. You know, you might not have the confidence or the expertise in-house to build on fully cloud native services right now, you've got to go in and get your Ops teams hands-on right with the technologies and with the tooling so that they understand a little better, how to get you to that next step. But the really, really key thing is lift and shift is a phase you've got to get through it, you've got to keep innovating. And a lot of people don't realize that they think they can go to the cloud, pick up their servers, run them pretty much as they did in the data center, they can stop there, and they're going to get longterm benefits from cloud. And over time, that gets less and less true. Because as I say, once you move that first VM into EC2 or whatever the case may be, you've started a shot clock on your chances for success in the cloud. That clock is ticking cause your initial benefits are very front-loaded. You're potentially getting some initial cost wins as your, hopefully matching your usage a little bit better to what you're spending on infrastructure, right? You're potentially getting some time to learn and plan for version two of your cloud infrastructure. But the longer you stay in that lift and shift states, some dangers are going to start compounding. Because in the absence of a true cloud native strategy, your teams, your Ops teams, your governance teams, if you have those, right? They're going to continue to do things the way they did it in the data center. Because they don't have true SRE, they don't have true automation, they're going to build manual slow error-prone processes that are going to drag down your time to value your MTTR, all those operational metrics at you look at. You're going to see those costs winds actually start to evaporate because you know, you're still running that legacy monolith, You can't effectively charge back spend to different units inside of your business, you realize you're not getting that value, you thought you were running. You know, because you're running the cloud like a data center, and let's be honest, that's super expensive. And then unfortunately over time, and usually you start hitting this threshold 18 months, two years out, your best people, the experts who were bringing you to the cloud in the first place, they get disillusioned because they're not seeing the continued forward motion that they'd been led to believe was going to happen. And so they start moving on, you get brain drain, and now you've created this new legacy swamp of poor procedures and practices, the very thing that you were hoping to avoid. And so at that point, the negative side effects of the lift and shift have overwhelmed, the benefits you thought you were going to get. That's when you're lift and shift shot clock has expired. And that's what you want to avoid by continuing to innovate and continuing to refactor towards a true cloud native deployment. >> Yeah, well, again, I thought that the visual was excellent and it's so good to explain, you know, what is the journey we're going through? What are the decision points? You might look through some of these and say, oh, well, you know, these three definitely apply to my business, some of the others I might not be concerned about, but I can take that and apply it to what I'm doing. So that that's the company side of things. You know, Forrest, you're an AWS Serverless Hero, and also in your day job, your company helps people with the training. So let's talk about people. You know, when it comes to, you know, how do we get involved? One of the things I loved about the Serverless community from the early times that I met it, was, it seemed that the bar to enter was relatively low. So many of these things, it's like, ah, well, do I have the basic skill set? Do I understand how to get there? How do I actually get to where I need to be? And that so many people are hesitant to start that journey, cause it just seems so daunting. So what are you seeing out there? You know, give us the landscape in 2020 as to, you know, how we move forward. And I know you've got a project you've been doing called the cloud resume challenge. So, you know, definitely talk a little bit about that too. >> Yeah, for sure. So look, even going beyond 2020, I think the numbers I've heard, we're looking at potentially a hundred million software developers being added to the workforce over the course of the next decade and change. That's a lot of people who are going to have to interact with these services who are going to have to build and create value on top of cloud infrastructure. And so there's a huge need for us to continue to create abstractions and to create guided, you know, best practices and principles that will help people get where they need to be with as little unnecessary work as possible. And really that's a lot of what underlay the Serverless community and the ideas behind that. I've been involved in Serverless for a long time, going back to when I was, you know, building on Serverless inside of large companies early on in that revolution. And I've carried that forward now with my work as an AWS Serverless Hero, even the work that I'm doing at A Cloud Guru. And really the bar to entry, as you mentioned, is so low, because you're cutting out a lot of things that were seen as sort of gate keeping mechanisms in the past. You know, oh, if you haven't learned this underlying protocol or whatever, then you don't qualify as a real developer. Serverless turns out on its head and says, no, I'm providing you with abstractions that you're going to be able to build on top of. And you're going to be able to focus so much more of your energy on things that actually provide value for the business. And yeah, that kind of started as a very leading edge, early adopter thing, but we're seeing more and more even large enterprises. We're seeing that start to click and they're realizing, you know, wherever I can, wherever I'm not potentially constrained by legacy practices or other code bases, I do want to explore, you know, seeing how quickly I can turn a prototype around, how quickly I can A, B, C, D, E, F, G test something if you will, by spinning up these low cost prototypes in the cloud, right on infrastructure, that's just costing me fractions of a cent to run. There's some really, really compelling avenues that even larger businesses can explore. But taking it back to the individual for a second, Think about, you know, I'm in the middle of a global pandemic, okay? And potentially I'm looking for a career switch now more than ever, I'm thinking, you know, I'd like to get into development, I'd like to get into IT. And it's so close to me now. You look at these services out there, like Networkify which you and I were talking about before the break, right? Talking about how easy those technologies make it for someone to get out there and actually we do web development. But you still need someone to kind of step alongside you and say, you know, these are the things you need to care about, these are things that might be irrelevant. There's an explosion, almost like an infodemic, if you will, of information out there that makes it really hard for folks who are trying to actually skill up, and who're trying to make that transition into tech and into code. That's what A Cloud Guru does of course, which is that the company I work for. We've got about 2.2 million learners on our platform right now that we're helping to scale up and take that step toward the modern tech skills that they need to succeed. The cloud resume challenge, which you mentioned is something I've been doing kind of on the side. And that's a project-based approach that compliments a lot of the additional training that I was talking about. Where we say, you know, I'm going to give you a project, it's going to have some sort of spec based steps to it. So you're going to create a resume, but it's going to be deployed, you know, in the cloud, you're going to have to do some source control, some CICD, some, you know, all these other things that are going to be built into a basic DevOps competency. You're going to have to go away and do some Googling and open some tabs, in order to figure this out on your own cause the project doesn't tell you exactly how to do it. So you actually wind up with some kind of some pain. There's some failure involved there, and that of course is what makes the learning stick. And so we've got people working this on every continent now, we've had many people that have completed it, we've seen people get interviewed. We've seen people get hired coming out of a totally non tech background. So that's really exciting. And you know, those stories, aren't going to be unusual forward. We're going to see more and more of this, and really that's what these cloud abstracting technologies have allowed us to do. Probably it wouldn't be possible to do something like the cloud resume challenge 20 years ago, the barrier to entry with, you know, even just procuring the infrastructure you'd need to be successful in a reasonable amount of time, you know, was accessible to everybody, but now we're there. Those services are at your fingertips. You just need a little bit of guidance, a little bit of curation to get you down the right path. >> Well, yeah, it was actually, you know, what excited me when I first met the ACG team was the bar to entry was so low. In previous decades, you talk about, you know, how much time and how much money I needed to spend just to get some of these courses, even if they were online. And it was just order of magnitudes easier and, you know, built for that cloud environment that I can start I can pause, I have learning resources, and it's been really impressive to watch the expansion of the team there. I'm curious, when you look at, you know, certifications out there, when you look at the need for jobs out there, if I'm not, you know, if I'm in the tech industry, what are some of the things that you think that people should be learning moving forward to? Where would you recommend people start looking there? >> Yeah, absolutely. So I think one thing, a lot of people miss is, you know, it's a good idea to get started with technologies that are new, if you're new. Because let's be real, you can't ask for five years of experience in a technology that's only been around for 18 months. So it's really smart to major on something and get good at something that not a lot of people are good at yet. And you say, well, how do I know that technology is going to take off and succeed? Well, the fact of the matter is even if that specific technology doesn't, you still have a much greater understanding of the problem space, and you'll be right at the cutting edge, ready to jump in on, you know, whatever the next thing is. So I always recommend that people look at things like Serverless and the managed services that are coming out. Get really good at automating, you know, services on the major cloud providers pick AWS, Azure, GCP, right? And just make that your thing, don't specialize in too niche of an area, you know, especially if you're very new, but especially pick a cloud provider, get good at working with the basic services, you'll find that that sets you apart more than, for example, I don't know, going after a certification that's been around for 20 years, that tons and tons of people in the job market have, right? That doesn't necessarily set you apart as much as some of these modern skills do. So I definitely recommend that. >> Yeah, it's funny for us, actually, I laugh a little bit. You mentioned that you've been doing Serverless for a long time, and I'm like, well, okay, I remember sitting in the audience at 80 bus Re-invent when Lambda was unveiled, I think it was re:Invent 2014. So, you know, there's nobody out there that's been, "Oh, I've been doing this for a decade." We always laugh, when there's a job applications out there and say, oh, okay, you know, I want 10 years of a technology that's been around for five years. But yeah, maybe there's one other, a cartoon that you brought along talking about the difference between transition cloud, excuse me, cloud translation and cloud fluency. Maybe just walk through that difference. And especially people that have been in the industry for awhile, how do we make sure that we're actually embracing and understanding and moving to that cloud world, not just, you know, cloud washing? >> Yeah, that's a good word. You know, something that struck me, I think a bit of an epiphany that I had around the time that I started at A Cloud Guru and keep in mind, I'm coming out of years of having worked with these large organizations and try and help them figure out how to migrate to cloud. And what I had seen is there's a lot of these kind of central cloud teams, if you will, that get established right at the beginning of an organization's cloud adoption. And that's a well known pattern, you know, this "cloud center of excellence", if you will, that people establish. A lot of times, those are small teams. You take your best cloud people and you say, okay, you define the standards and the processes that are going to get us to cloud, and they do that. And then they're shocked when nobody adopts the standards, right? And the migration sort of stalls, and they're not having the impact that they expected to have. And what turns out is going on is just having that small group of people who understands cloud, surrounded by this huge legacy, diaspora of legacy, you know, product and engineering teams that don't speak the language of cloud, if you will. Means that anytime you want to innovate, or anytime you want to make a move, you've got to go through this process of translation. You've got to go to those legacy teams who were saying, what's EC2 instance again? You know, how do you spell S3? I thought that I wanted to log into the AWS Console, but this access and secret key, isn't going into my password box, right? You know, they have that low level of competency. And so you're constantly having to explain everything you're going back and forth, and that of course leads to kind of less sophisticated architectures that leads to poor outcomes, and it takes you much longer to get where you want to go. That's that process of cloud translation. That's an anti-pattern. So instead of that, what we try to advocate for is what we call cloud fluency. Just like with any other language you want your entire organization as much as possible to speak the language of cloud at some baseline level. We do that through a couple of things. Of course, obviously through training and certification, cloud certifications can be a great proxy to measure how well your organization's cloud competency is improving. But also through taking those cloud experts, those central experts that previously were kind of in their ivory tower doing their own thing and embed them as much as you can in a roving fashion with these legacy product teams and help them to improve, right? Sort of teach them to fish so that you're not putting all the weight on that central team to be the only experts. Because that doesn't scale, those people are going to burn out. They're going to get overwhelmed with support tickets, we see that over and over again. So you want to empower those teams. And we want to actually talk a little bit less about a cloud center of excellence sometimes, and a little more about a cloud center of enablement, right? Where we want to, instead of knowing the most about cloud, we want to show the most about cloud to those other teams. That's a sustainable pattern for success. That's what we try to do through A Cloud Guru, and that's what I try to advocate for individually, wherever I can, because I've seen people burnt out. I don't want that to happen. >> Yeah, for those of us that have been through a few of these waves here, it's something that you're right, you need to actually be involved in embracing these technologies. You don't have a center for internet usage anymore. If you think about, you know, everybody now for the most part has used the internet, understand some of pieces, it needs to be the same way when it comes to cloud. It just becomes the underlying substrate and, you know, bring forward the innovation and agility that people are looking for. All right, Forrest, last thing we talked about, you've got a book coming out a little bit later this year, The Read Aloud Cloud, give us the quick thing, you know, love, it's visual, is very accessible and definitely looking forward to hearing about that. >> Yes, yes, exciting. So it'll be out in September from Wiley. And basically you've seen a couple of the cartoons over the course of this time here. But, you know, I've been drawing for a long time trying to help people get a sense for what the cloud is and in a way that they can understand and get a grasp on. And so what The Read Aloud Cloud is, it's the history and practice of cloud computing. And it takes you from the mainframe days through artificial intelligence. And along the way, we talk about the basics of cloud architecture, we talk about security, We talk about resilience and all those important things. But it's written and drawn in a way that can be accessible even to a nontechnical person. So the person who's never been able to understand what it is that you do. And I include, you know, potentially your CEO in that conversation, right? This is a book you can hand to them that you can put on your desk, it'll give you a chuckle. But I think there's actually some really strong ability for you to gain actually a concrete visual understanding those really abstract terminologies that float around with cloud. Again, what we're doing is not necessarily complicated, it's just really abstract, it's really arcane. So let's put it in a format where we can get our heads around and hopefully have a good laugh while we're doing it. That's what The Read Aloud Cloud is, and you can check that out, wherever books are sold. >> All right, well Forrest Brazeal. Thank you so much for joining us, real pleasure talking with you. And absolutely we need to make sure that "cloud" becomes as ubiquitous as computers and the internet have before us. Really pleasure chatting with you, thanks so much for joining. >> Awesome, thanks so much Stu, it's great to be here. All right, and I'm Stu Miniman, looking forward to hearing more about your Cloud Native Insights. (bright upbeat music)

from the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is a cube conversation hi I'm Stu minimun and welcome to the cube from our Boston area studios we've been doing a series of CXO leadership discussions talking about how everyone's dealing with the global global endemic I've been welcome program a first-time guest Katy Bullard she is the president of a tile guru of course a cloud guru a online learning company we've had on the cube many times over the years Katy thanks so much thank you so much sue for having me I really appreciate it all right so Katie I remember I saw the in I think the announce was the end of at the beginning of the year your based at the headquarters in Austin you know online you know learning is a huge topic cloud of course you know one of those mega waves that we've been walking a long time and then you know out of nowhere global pandemic you know it's striking us so you know bring us inside you know obviously you know taking a new role in a new organization as it own challenges normally it's like okay what am I going to do for the first 90 days and make that plan tell us you know how were you reacted in how the company has reacted with the koban 19 did you get a chance to look at my 90-day plan dude that was exactly where it was no well let me take you back I'll take you back to kind of why I chose to come to ECG because I think it informs actually what's happening right now as well when I when I was looking for the next opportunity what I look for is I look for two things primarily in a company one is a product that's in a market that's growing really really fast and a product that has raving customer bands and obviously ACG really you know check both of those boxes you think about this is pre Co but if you think about the cloud computing market growing you know 50 60 % a year and the number one challenge for people who are both moving to the cloud or moving to a multi cloud strategy was having enough skilled workers to to do that effectively there really wasn't a better intersection of two you know two who value propositions than what a CG offered which was serving the cloud computing market and skilling up workers in that market fast forward to February you know was interesting I actually went out to Australia offices in mid-february as this was starting to heat up came back just in time I think to not go into quarantine but we very quickly saw the impact and you know this isn't easy for anybody in in any situation but what we are hearing from our customers and from the market is that that move to the cloud is even more important now I think the latest that I saw from the the 2028 odd report said 65 percent of companies are planning a cloud migration 95 percent are of companies are employing a multi cloud strategy so that is accelerating and then of course we're all sitting at home right now and you're getting me in my in my dining room and we have the both learn online versus in person there's no longer in-person training there's no longer events for us to go to lives we're doing that online we also are seeing that you know the way that we use our time is changing so we're not spending hours anymore muting we have a lot of customers who are saying let's use that time instead of muting to learn improve ourselves improve our skills so you know everything is very unpredictable in this environment but we do feel like at ACG our fundamental mission is to help customers get through this to give them the skills that they need so that hopefully as everybody emerges from this later this year they're better positioned to take advantage of the opportunities in front of them ya know you hit on a lot of topics you know so much right now you know remote learning remote work or you know a big discussion the developer world has been looking at that for a long time and you know when I see you know the the the elementary and high school children as well as you know colleges and how they're handling distant learning I was well come on the Cronenberg's brothers you know built something in you know two or three week from your mother's basement Amazon and serverless and they framed millions of people now yeah you know good absolutely translate but it's challenging so I'm curious yes you know and you're working with the team is there anything you're doing to connect to some of the broader audience you know lessons that can be learned as I said you're you know highly scalable you know large scale and you know you have nowhere near the budget of you know these municipalities and colleges yet you do reach you know a very broad audience with some very important skill yes I mean if I think about the actual products itself and why it worked worked so well previously right why the Cronenberg brothers brought to market something that was so beloved but but more importantly why I think it's working so well now is that there was a recognition that we learn these days in bite-sized chunks right most of us don't have four hours a day or three days a week just to sit leave our job and go learn something and so from the very beginning their concept was let's break every single lesson up into these 20 minutes chunks so whether you know I'm on my commute in a previous world or whether I'm you know using some time that I used to spend on the road learning something new I can do it in very digestible forms and in a way that's really engaging to me so I think that model that they've employed from day one is even more valuable now in today's environment I think the other thing is that there was a recognition that we all have different learning styles right we all learn a little bit differently and so whether it's learning in 20 minute chunks so that's learning through video and PowerPoint or whether it's learning hands-on testing things breaking things building things the platform has evolved in a way to enable people no matter where they are in that cloud learning journey whether they're novice that's just getting started and wanting to learn kind of you know the PowerPoint basics like me when I first came on board right of the or a seasoned architect who's trying to get in and build new applications so I think those things are the things that allowed the platform to really resonate with the developer audience for so long and now as we have you know added out of the platform specifically for enterprises where previously you know is for individual developers we now have both I think that's the other thing that is really attractive to large enterprises is the fact that they now right are trying to train thousands of workers at the same time realizing again that every single one of them has a different learning style yeah Katie is as you said before there is you know a broad need or the skill set of cloud computing I'm curious have you seen anything in kind of your customer base either from the enterprise side or individuals is there are there any skill sets that are bubbling up right now that are a critical need or anything that is grown and you know we're curious we're always you know there's some people it's like oh I'm gonna come out of this you know whole experience and you know I love you know work in my home gym and you know learn new languages and become a master baker of sourdough you know me personally I've been really busy so you know I wish I had more spare time travel has definitely reduced thing but it's also given up the time that normally I was gonna you know read a book or you know catch up on raining yeah the sourdough bread is definitely not in my wheelhouse so we well we have seen some really interesting trends actually over the last few months the first one is that we've seen the percentage of our users that are logging in on a daily basis go up about 30 percent so people are taking advantage I think of a little bit of extra time to accelerate their learning the other thing that we are seeing and I was just looking at these stats last week is the kinds of courses and content that are being consumed are changing some of this was happening free covert and some of this was happening post covitz all split those up freako but what we've seen over the last order two 2/4 actually is a pretty significant increase in consumption across multi-cloud skills as you're in particular is seeing about a three times higher increase in consumption than the other two large CCS these although they're all three increasing rapidly so as we think about like the curriculum and our instructors that we're bringing on and what we're building up know historically ACG specifically had grown up in the AWS world but we are responding to that change very very late and in investing in you know a juror GCP and some of the other cloud adjacent courses so that we had been seeing happening over the last couple of quarters most recently what we're seeing is an increase in what i call our beginner or fundamental courses they think that is a direct reflection of people who are looking at this as an opportunity to rescale to set themselves up for a new career i'm so you know our introduction to AWS or introduction to Azure fundamentals or the introduction to DCP those are actually the courses that are increasing the fastest in ranking and anecdotally one of my favorite things to do is to go on LinkedIn or Twitter each day and look at you know what people are saying about ACG and over the last week especially I can't even count the number of folks who've said I'm using my lock down I'm for you know learning or I'm putting my my time and Quarantine to the best use by you know getting trained on ECG and so I think that what we are seeing there is a direct reflection of that alright yeah Katie maybe you can give us a little bit of the update on you know a cloud guru there was the Linux Academy acquisition and if you can share a little bit about this kind of the the the numbers of how many people have gone through your programmed you attract how many people actually get certifications afterwards which I know they need to go to the providers you know pay a fee for that kind of thing yeah we do yeah there's only been a few things happening over here in the last six months right I've got a small acquisition and then you know we're dealing with this now so we acquire Linux Academy in December so actually I came on board about the same time that we acquired the business one of my favorite stories is when I first started talking to Sam and team back in June a cg had about a hundred employees total by the time I was actually accepting an offer in October I think it was 200 employees in total so in a four month span the company had actually doubled we acquired Lenox Academy which was of equivalent size the ACG and so by the end of December we were a 400 person company a company that had been a hundred people know in in the middle of 2019 so 400 people now we are our biggest office is here in Austin we do have a large office in Melbourne Australia which was where the company was originally founded and where Sam is we have an office in London where Ryan is and Linux Academy was actually headquartered right outside of Fort Worth Texas so we've got an office there in Fort Worth as well so it's been amazing to see this company essentially quadruple in size over the last six months everything that goes into scaling a business like that bringing two competitors together integrating the business you know we are in the process of integrating the products and the content and the course dialogues right now so we're excited to bring that market later this year all in the midst of everyone also getting used to this very new and unprecedented environment yeah you know congratulations you know that you know always good to see great growth you know the thing I've noticed is you know ACG just as really goodwill in the community I see the orange shirts at many of the shows I you know right many of the other teams yeah we'll definitely have to get back to you about being on brain feed I was trying to coordinate with my background um one of the other things you know is some of my favorite content over the last few years that we've done the cube has been the serverless cough event so you know any discussion about you know will there be smokers to that or are we just going to need the weight or you know the physical events return before we see those so we actually have just started a new virtual event calendar actually our very first one was yesterday we had almost 3,000 people registering to attend and so it will be a series it's a series of virtual events and webinars that are done in partnership with other leading influencers and practitioners in the industry so expects if anyone's interested you can go online and register for one of the ACG webinars but we'll be having those every two week through the course of this year awesome love that and I guess the last thing Katie there's some other things you've been doing help unity in this need of the pandemic tell us a little bit about that yeah so two things in particular that we've really focused on the first one is across both the Linux Academy and the ACG platforms we have lowered permanently the price of our individual memberships so for individuals from 449 down to 379 we've seen that that has helped enable more people to be able to afford it who otherwise couldn't afford it so that's now in in market the other thing that we're really excited about that we launched this week is a free educational assistance program so we are offering 1,000 subscriptions to ACG for the year so annual subscriptions for people who have been most impacted by kovat so we have a couple of different specific criteria but if you've lost your job due to Ovid and you're in one of the the most heavily impacted industries whether that you know retail or hospitality or travel and are looking to really change careers get into the tech field get your initial certification we do now have a program for that so you go online to our website you're able to apply to that program we launched it yesterday maybe two days ago and I know we already have hundreds of applications so we're really excited to offer that all right well we'll make sure to get this out to the community is build out of that all right Katie thanks so much really pleasure to act up with you and I'm glad Congrats on all the progress thank you so much - thanks for having me alright serverless absolutely one of the topics I've been personally enjoying digging into the last couple years hope you've enjoyed I'm an attorney I'm sue minimun and as always thank you for watching thank you [Music]

>> Narrator: From Hell's Kitchen in New York City, it's theCUBE, on the ground at Serverlessconf brought to you by SiliconAngle Media >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, here with theCUBE at Serverless Conference in New York City, Hell's Kitchen. Happy to have with me, first time guest on the program Sam Kroonenburg, we had your brother on the program at the AWS Summit not far from here, at the Javits Center in New York City, but you're also one of the co-founders its the two brothers for A Cloud Guru. Thanks so much for joining me, and thank you for allowing us to come get some phenomenal content here. >> Yeah, no problem. Thank you for coming for the conference today. >> Alright, so Sam, take me back, you know, we talked to your brother a little bit about, well it was an interesting story, he said actually I got turned down for a job from Amazon and ended up creating a training company. But you built this and you built it on Serverless. >> I did yeah. >> So walk us through a little bit the thought process, the timing, you know, aren't you a little bit ahead of your time on that? >> Yeah, it was mid 2015, it was a strange time. We decided we wanted to build this school, this online learning platform, but the challenge we had was that we didn't have a lot of time, we both had families, kids, you know, mortgages, financial commitments. Basically I had four weeks. I had four weeks of leave owing to me, from my employer at the time. My wife and I had been planning this big family holiday with the kids for years and we were about to take it, and I remember having this phone call with Ryan and we were talking about how there were these people taking these online courses and they were really liking them. And we thought, what if we could build this school to teach people cloud computing. It was such a buzz and we just thought, there's something in this. But the challenge was the timing. I remember my wife turned to me and she said, "Look you've got to do it, we'll cancel the holiday, "take the four weeks and give it a try." So that's what we did, we actually flew down to live with Aaron, my in-laws and help look after the kids and I locked myself in a bedroom for four weeks and tried to build an online school. And that was there was no epiphany to go Serverless there was no grand plan. It was, we had a constraint, which was time. I had no time to build this thing. And so ended up using some of the latest technologies like AWS Lambda, API Gateway, a whole bunch of Serverless technologies because I saw that they would help me build this faster. And I could get something to market in the four weeks that I had. I actually spent the first couple of days trying to skin and configure Moodle, the learning management system and I tore my hair out and yeah, ended up putting this thing together with Serverless technologies. >> Ryan just walked by-- >> Oh, there he is. >> It's a llama unicorn with a cat or something like that. >> I'm going to put in the background. >> In the back of our video. Sam, what's your brother doing here? >> He's always trying to troll me. >> So talk to us, you know one of the things the maturation, kind of the speed of change in the industry for new technologies is just so fast these days. Take us through from those early days to you know Serverless today. What's your experience been? What would you say to people that look at this technology? >> I think it's a lot easier to get into now than it was two years ago. The ecosystem has grown around it, the core technologies are pretty much the same as they were two years ago, function as a service, execute functions in the cloud very similar, but the tooling around it, the ecosystem around it has grown. There's great deployment tools, orchestration systems that have come along. It's a lot easier to just get in now and early on, when we started we had to roll a lot of things ourselves, which took a lot of time, and that's what you're trying to stop, is losing time. Yeah, so there's that and the community has really grown, there's a lot of support in the community now. >> So if you had to do it all over, you could have done it in a weekend, rather than the four weeks. >> Yeah, instead of the four weeks. >> Yeah, I mean what's-- >> That's the interesting thing about what happened to us, we would not exist, our business would not exist if it wasn't for Serverless technologies. I literally couldn't, we could not have, built that school. It's not like it was the most amazing school when we launched it, but it was enough. It was just enough to get people using it, to get to market, to start to build a business around it. >> Alright, talk to me about this event. So, its the 5th Serverlessconf, not unheard of a company that does training to get involved with physical events, 'cause you bring them together, you know, what's the thought process, talk to us a little bit about that journey and this event itself. >> Yeah, I mean, a lot of this is organic for us. We built, it was early last year, you know we're part of the Serverless communities, a lot of pioneering going on here, a lot of people facing the same challenges. And we thought, well there's no event to bring all of these people together. And there's a lot of very fast pace of change here, a lot of rapid ideation and new technologies. Let's bring everyone together and see what we can do. That's what we did with Serverlessconf. We've never run a conference before, we just hired a warehouse in Brooklyn, a bunch of Australians and British guys coming over and we just invited a bunch of people on Twitter and 250 people turned out to the first one. It just got bigger and bigger from there. So this is actually the 5th Serverlessconf now. >> Well, its a hot week again, so we appreciate that the air conditioning works at this one. >> Yes, we have air conditioning at this one. >> 460 people here, you brought in some great speakers, we had a number of them on our program this week, speak to us, I mean you've got sponsors here, you've got good speakers, give us some of the highlights. >> We've got all of the main Cloud vendors are here, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Amazon and it's actually the product teams who build this stuff. That's what I love about this event, it's actually the people who build it. It's vendor neutral, it's really cool. You get great thought leaders from the community, Simon Wardley was a highlight this morning, his talk on Value Chain Mapping and Strategy was really interesting. Randall Hunt from AWS X Space X, talking about the continuous integration process when building rockets. Space X was absolutely fascinating and what bugs in production mean when you're building a rocket. It means the rocket blows up. Really interesting variety of talks from those tooling providers, companies like us who are just building on Serverless and then Serverless tooling companies and vendors. Really fascinating. >> Alright, Sam what should we be looking for in the future from Serverless and from A Cloud Guru? >> We're going to be doing a whole lot more Serverless content. You're going to see a lot of really interesting new content through our site, a lot of teaching on Serverless, we're going to be doing more Serverless Conferences. You'll see a lot from us, not just us, but from the wider community who come to the conference, who we know well, a lot of the experts, we're going to be doing a lot of work with those people. >> Well Sam Kroonenburg, really appreciate you joining us, appreciate the media sponsorship to allow theCube to come get some great content and share it with our communities, hope to see you at many more events in the future. >> Thank you for coming. >> Thank you so much. Sam Kroonenburg, I'm Stu Miniman. Thank you for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from Manhattan, It's theCUBE. Covering AWS Summit, New York City, 2017. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Welcome back to Midtown. We're at the Javits Center here. (sound cuts out) 2017, along with Stu Miniman, I'm John Walls and you're watching The Cube as we continue with what's happening here. About five thousand people on the show floor and they said some twenty thousand registrants. Right Stew? That people came in and wanted to watch the keynotes live. >> It could be ten thousand that walked through before the days-- >> Right, it's hard to tell. >> Yeah. >> And right now half of them are outside looking for a cab I think. That's the way it works here. Ryan Kroonenburg is also here. He's the founder of a company called A Cloud Guru. >> Yes. >> I like Ryan already. I liked him as soon as we met him because he said, "like the beer, Kroonenburg." So you resonated with the two of us, Ryan. >> Ryan like the airline and Kroonenburg like the beer. >> We appreciate that. Alright, so you're a cloud education company. >> Yes. >> And you bill yourself or at least in the conversation as you want to be the Netflix of cloud education. That's what you're doing. Tell us a little bit about the founding of the company. It began with your brother? >> Yes, yeah. >> Just two years ago and now you've grown to some 40 employees. >> Yeah, so I used to be a solutions architect and I was desperate to get a job at AWS so I became obsessed with getting trained in AWS. And at the time, a company I worked for had a training freeze. So we couldn't go out and do in-classroom training. If I had to do that myself, I'd have to pay for it myself. And I found that there wasn't a lot of good on-line training companies two years ago. I didn't get the job with AWS and turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to me. And so I decided to create my own course on AWS. Launched that, started going viral and that was the birth of A Cloud Guru. >> Ryan, bring is in a little inside of building the company, so you're not only teaching cloud, but you're built on cloud and not just any cloud, but using the LAN to server list from pretty early on that. >> Exactly, so we practice what we preach. You know, we are real AWS engineers. We built the entire platform serverlessly. We think we're the world's first serverless start-up. We're certainly the world's first serverless learning management system. So we don't pay for any servers whatsoever. There's no virtual/physical servers. And we're basically, purely AWS native. We do use a bunch of third party services like Xero and PayPal and things like that. But most of our platforms are AWS. >> Yeah, in the keynote this morning, Adrian Cockroft talked about Bustle, A New York based start-up that uses a lot of serverless, but you built the company before you even had funding and now you've got a little bit of funding. Can you give any insight? Do the investors looks at that and say, wow, this is a great model? >> Yeah, so we raised a decent series A. One of the founders of Warby Parker is on our board now so that's really exciting. A guy called Andy and he's helping us scale. One of the reasons we took funding was helping to scale. So our infrastructure scales automatically with AWS because it's built on Lambda and API Gateway. But we as a company are struggling to scale in like finding the right employees and all of that sort of thing, so that's where we're getting some help. >> Alright, what are you hearing from people taking your courses? What new things are they asking for? How are you expanding the scope of your offerings? >> Everyone is obviously very interested in AWS, but they also want to learn other cloud-computing platforms now, especially Azure, so we are expanding the scope of our content to do Azure as well as Guru. The other problem people are having is, AWS innovates so quickly. You know, there's like a thousand updates last year. There's 19 new updates last week. So there having trouble keeping up so we run just a weekly TV show called, AWS This Week, and we basically just tell people what's new this week. And the great thing about New York Summit is there's been like five or six announcements here so I'm going to be busy on Friday, filming. >> Is there any one particular area of training that you see more people drifting toward or following toward? >> I think serverless and big data are the hot topics. Big data, by that I mean AI, machine learning. That's just exploding right now. And just serverless architectures because the future of cloud is serverless. Why pay for virtual, physical machines by the hour or by the minute and have system administrators, network administrators, database administrators when all you actually want to focus on is your code and your end customers and serverless allows you to do that. >> So what's your process then? In terms of you staying on top of it, right? Because now you have to. >> Ryan: Yeah. >> I mean, you, you're it, right? You're the point of expertise. So how do you ... I guess, remain in that kind of relationship with AWS that you're the cusp? >> So, I obviously read all the blogs. Our students, We've got 300,000 students right now and our discussion forums are very very active so if they have announced something that I've missed, the students tell me, like, we'll know within a few hours. So, that's it really. It's just forever learning, but I love learning anyway so it's fun to get paid to learn. >> John: Sure. You bet. >> Ryan, how many people have gone through the training so far? Do you know how many of them get certified after they do that? And how many are kind of repeat customers? >> We've got 300,00 have gone through the training so far. We do track our pass rates. Our pass rates vary from anywhere between, normally 80 to 90%. Not everyone will pass on the first go because the exams are tough and it's also quite stressful. Sitting these exams can be quite stressful. In terms of the number of students that actually go on to get certified, that's not something we track just yet, but we're looking to change that as well. But yeah, we have a very good pass rate. >> So how does it work? I want to learn, you know, whatever. I want to dive into AI, whatever it is. I come to you, you've got something for me there right? You've got, I don't know how many hours of work I have to do, but take us through how it really works. >> Yeah so, it's video training. Online video training. So say you want to learn DynamoDB. We have a 19 hour course on that. And we go right into the very depths of DynamoDB. So you watch the videos. we'll show you what we're doing in the labs. We'll give you all the sample code if we're using code and then you can go and do it yourself. We very much believe in, the only way to learn Cloud is by getting your hands dirty. To actually go and do it yourself. So people watch the labs, do the stuff themselves and then complete the course. If it's a certification course, then at the end what they'll do is go and book the exam and hopefully, they'll pass the exam as well. >> So Ryan, you're in there looking at all this stuff, especially things like server lists. What are you looking for, for kind of the maturation? Is there anything that do you give feedback to Amazon? The community give you feedback? I have to imagine that there's some good feedback loops there? >> Yeah, I'm lucky enough to be an AWS community hero. So we get get briefed by Amazon on things that are coming out. You know, under MDA of course. We give a lot of feedback on that. No, I think serverless is the next big revolution. I hate hype and buzz words and things like that, but the thing about serverless is that, now you don't have to worry about servers. You can just focus on your code and you don't need to worry about any of the normal administration behind it and it's like ridiculously cheap. You get a million lambda implications a month for free. That's just part of Free Tier. We actually only just came off of Lambda Free Tier a couple of months ago and we've got 300,000 students. So, it's very very very cheap so its amazing. It's driving new revolution. >> What advice would you give to someone if they were looking to start a business and using serverless as a platform? >> Yeah, definitely check out AWS of course, we build our entire business off AWS. Design, try if you can, architect everything in a serverless fashion because like I keep saying, you don't have to worry about management of operating systems, virus patching, security, any of that. AWS, they take all... They take care of all of the heavy lifting for you. >> So I know you are a big fan of Lambda, but have you looked at some of the other serverless options out there? Is there any concern around, there's open source options out there. >> Ryan: Yeah. >> How do we get compatibility and not be just locked into Amazon? >> Azure Functions looks really good. See, this thing about vendor lock-in, I mean, you've got the serverless framework as well. If you build your applications on the serverless framework, you can move between platforms quite easily. That is coming so you could build it out on AWS and then move over to Azure if you wanted. The founder of serverless frameworks is a good friend of mine. So I definitely recommended checking it out. And that would be my advice. If you are going to go serverless use the serverless framework so then you don't have to worry about vendor lock in. But at the same time, Amazon, they reduce their prices all the time. So it is a good vendor to be with. >> I just think your story is great. I think that the best "no" you ever got in your life was from AWS. And now you're giving them a big "yes". >> Yeah, absolutely, I love AWS. They're such amazing people as well. They've all become my-- through my business and people I used to work with have all become really good friends of mine as well. It's been a great journey in last two years. >> You've done well for them, they've done well for you. It's a good relationship. >> Exactly. >> Ryan, thanks for being with us. >> Thank you. >> And continued success. >> Right, thanks guys. >> Good for you. You bet, Ryan Kroonenburg. The founder of A Cloud Guru. Along with his brother, Sam, making a pretty good business out of things on the AWS platform right now. Back with more here from AWS Summit, right after this. You're watching The Cube. (fast music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE. With digital coverage of AWS reInvent Executive Summit 2020, sponsored by Accenture and AWS. >> Hello and welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of AWS reInvent 2020. This is special programming for the Accenture Executive Summit where all the thought leaders are going to extract the signal from those share with you their perspective of this year's reInvent conference as it respects the customers' digital transformation. Brian Bohan is the director and head of Accenture, AWS Business Group at Amazon web services. Brian, great to see you. And Chris Wegmann is the Accenture Amazon Business Group technology lead at Accenture. Guys this is about technology vision this conversation. Chris, I want to start with you because you're Andy Jackson's keynote. You heard about the strategy of digital transformation, how you got to lean into it. You got to have the guts to go for it and you got to decompose. He went everywhere.(chuckles) So what did you hear? What was striking about the keynote? Because he covered a lot of topics. >> Yeah. It was epic as always from Andy. Lot of topics, a lot to cover in the three hours. There was a couple of things that stood out for me. First of all, hybrid. The concept, the new concept of hybrid and how Andy talked about it, bringing the compute and the power to all parts of an enterprise, whether it be at the edge or are in the big public cloud, whether it be in an Outpost or wherever it'd be, right with containerization now. Being able to do Amazon containerization in my data center and that's awesome. I think that's going to make a big difference. All that being underneath the Amazon console and billing and things like that, which is great. I'll also say the chips, right? I know computer is always something that we always kind of take for granted but I think again, this year, Amazon and Andy really focused on what they're doing with the chips and compute and the compute is still at the heart of everything in cloud. And that continued advancement is making an impact and will make and continue to make a big impact. >> Yeah, I would agree. I think one of the things that really... I mean the container thing was I think really kind of a nuance point. When you've got Deepak Singh on the opening day with Andy Jassy and he runs a container group over there. When we need a small little team, he's on the front stage. That really is the key to the hybrid. I think this showcases this new layer. We're taking advantage of the Graviton2 chips, which I thought was huge. Brian, this is really a key part of the platform change, not change, but the continuation of AWS. Higher level servers, >> Yep. building blocks that provide more capabilities, heavy lifting as they say but the new services that are coming on top really speaks to hybrid and speaks to the edge. >> It does. Yeah. I think like Andy talks about and we talked about we really want to provide choice to our customers, first and foremost. And you can see that in the array of services we have, we can see it in the the hybrid options that Chris talked about. Being able to run your containers through ECS or EKS anywhere. It just get to the customers choice. And one of the things that I'm excited about as you talk about going up the stack and on the edge are things, most certainly Outpost, right? So now Outpost was launched last year but then with the new form factors and then you look at services like Panorama, right? Being able to take computer vision and embed machine learning and computer vision, and do that as a managed capability at the edge for customers. And so we see this across a number of industries. And so what we're really thinking about is customers no longer have to make trade-offs and have to think about those choices, that they can really deploy natively in the cloud and then they can take those capabilities, train those models, and then deploy them where they need to whether that's on premises or at the edge, whether it be in a factory or retail environment. I think we're really well positioned when hopefully next year we start seeing the travel industry rebound and the need more than ever really to kind of rethink about how we kind of monitor and make those environments safe. Having this kind of capability at the edge is really going to help our customers as we come out of this year and hopefully rebound next year. >> Chris, I want to go back to you for a second. It's hard to pick your favorite innovation from the keynote because, Brian, just reminded me of some things I forgot happened. It was like a buffet of innovation. Some keynotes have one or two, there was like 20. You got the industrial piece that was huge. Computer vision, machine learning, that's just a game changer. The connect thing came out of nowhere in my opinion. I mean, it's a call center technology so it's boring as hell, what are you going to do with that?(Brian and Chris chuckle) It turns out it's a game changer. It's not about the calls but the contact and that's distant intermediating in the stack as well. So again, a feature that looks old is actually new and relevant. What was your favorite innovation announcement? >> It's hard to say. I will say my personal favorite was the Mac OS. I think that is a phenomenal just addition, right? And the fact that AWS has worked with Apple to integrate the Nitro chip into the iMac and offer that out. A lot of people are doing development for IOS and that stuff and that's just been a huge benefit for the development teams. But I will say, I'll come back to Connect. You mentioned it but you're right. It's a boring area but it's an area that we've seen huge success with since Connect was launched and the additional features that Amazon continues to bring, obviously with the pandemic and now that customer engagement through the phone, through omni-channel has just been critical for companies, right? And to be able to have those agents at home, working from home versus being in the office, it was a huge advantage for several customers that are using Connect. We did some great stuff with some different customers but the continue technology like you said, the call translation and during a call to be able to pop up those keywords and have a supervisor listen is awesome. And some of that was already being done but we are stitching multiple services together. Now that's right out of the box. And that Google's location is only going to make that go faster and make us to be able to innovate faster for that piece of the business. >> It's interesting not to get all nerdy and business school like but you've got systems of records, systems of engagement. If you look at the call center and the Connect thing, what got my attention was not only the model of disintermediating that part of the engagement in the stack but what actually cloud does to something that's a feature or something that could be an element like say call center, the old days of calling the 800 number and getting some support. You got infra chip, you have machine learning, you actually have stuff in the in the stack that actually makes that different now. The thing that impressed me was Andy was saying, you could have machine learning detect pauses, voice inflections. So now you have technology making that more relevant and better and different. So a lot going on. This is just one example of many things that are happening from a disruption innovation standpoint. What do you guys think about that? Am I getting it right? Can you share other examples? >> I think you are right and I think what's implied there and what you're saying and even in the other Mac OS example is the ability... We're talking about features, right? Which by themselves you're saying, Oh, wow! What's so unique about that? But because it's on AWS and now because whether you're a developer working with Mac iOS and you have access to the 175 plus services that you can then weave into your new application. Talk about the Connect scenario. Now we're embedding that kind of inference and machine learning to do what you say, but then your data Lake is also most likely running in AWS, right? And then the other channels whether they be mobile channels or web channels or in-store physical channels, that data can be captured and that same machine learning could be applied there to get that full picture across the spectrum, right? So that's the power of bringing you together on AWS, the access to all those different capabilities and services and then also where the data is and pulling all that together for that end to end view. >> Can you guys give some examples of work you've done together? I know there's stuff we've reported on, in the last session we talked about some of the connect stuff but that kind of encapsulates where this is all going with respect to the tech. >> Yeah. I think one of them, it was called out on Doug's Partner Summit is a SAP Data Lake Accelerator, right? Almost every enterprise has SAP, right? And getting data out of SAP has always been a challenge, right? Whether it be through data warehouses and AWS, or sorry, SAP BW. What we've focused on is getting that data when you have SAP on AWS, getting that data into the Data Lake, right? Getting it into a model that you can pull the value out and the customers can pull the value out, use those AI models. So that's one thing we worked on in the last 12 months. Super excited about seeing great success with customers. A lot of customers had ideas. They want to do this, they had different models. What we've done is made it very simplified. Framework which allows customers to do it very quickly, get the data out there and start getting value out of it and iterating on that data. We saw customers are spending way too much time trying to stitch it all together and trying to get it to work technically. And we've now cut all of that out and they can immediately start getting down to the data and taking advantage of those different services that are out there by AWS. >> Brian, you want to weigh in as things you see as relevant builds that you guys done together that kind of tease out the future and connect the dots to what's coming? >> I'm going to use a customer example. We worked with, it just came out, with Unilever around their blue air, connected, smart air purifier. And what I think is interesting about that, I think it touches on some of the themes we're talking about as well as some of the themes we talked about in the last session, which is we started that program before the pandemic, but Unilever recognized that they needed to differentiate their product in the marketplace, move to more of a services oriented business which we're seeing as a trend. We enabled this capability. So now it's a smart air purifier that can be remote managed. And now when the pandemic hit, they are in a really good position, obviously, with a very relevant product and capability to be used. And so, that data then as we were talking about is going to reside on the cloud. And so the learning that can now happen about usage and about filter changes, et cetera can find its way back into future iterations of that picked out that product. And I think that's keeping with what Chris is talking about where we might be systems of record like in SAP, how do we bring those in and then start learning from that data so that we can get better on our future iterations? >> Hey, Chris, on the last segment we did on the business mission session, Andy Tay from your team talked about partnerships within a century and working with other folks. I want to take that now on the technical side because one of the things that we heard from Doug's keynote and during the partner day was integrations and data were two big themes. When you're in the cloud technically, the integrations are different. You're going to get unique things in the public cloud that you're just not going to get on-premise access to other cloud native technologies and companies. How do you see the partnering of Accenture with people within your ecosystem and how the data and the integration play together? What's your vision? >> Yeah. I think there's two parts of it. One there's from a commercial standpoint, right? Some marketplace, you heard Dave talk about that in the partner summit, right? That marketplace is now bringing together this ecosystem in a very easy way to consume by the customers and by the users and bringing multiple partners together. And we're working with our ecosystem to put more products out in the marketplace that are integrated together already. I think one from a technical perspective though. If you look at Salesforce, I talked a little earlier about Connect. Another good example technically underneath the covers, how we've integrated Connect and Salesforce, some of it being pre-built by AWS and Salesforce, other things that we've added on top of it, I think are good examples. And I think as these ecosystems these ISVs put their products out there and start exposing more and more APIs on the Amazon platform may opening it up, having those pre-built network connections there between the different VPCs of the different areas within within a customer's network and having them all opened up and connected and having all that networking done underneath the covers. It's one thing to call the APIs, it's one thing to have access to those and that's not a big focus of a lot of ISVs and customers who build those APIs and expose them but having that network infrastructure underneath and being able to stay within the cloud, within AWS to make those connections that pass that data. We always talk about scale, right? It's one thing if I just need to pass like a simple user ID back and forth, right? That's fine. We're not talking massive data sets, whether it be seismic data or whatever it be, passing those large data sets between customers across the Amazon network is going to open up the world. >> Yeah, I see huge possibilities there and love to keep on this story. I think it's going to be important and something to keep track of. I'm sure you guys will be on top of it. One of the things I want to dig into with you guys now is Andy had kind of this philosophical thing in his keynote talk about societal change and how tough the pandemic is. Everything's on full display and this kind of brings out kind of like where we are and the truth. If you look at the truth it's a virtual event. I mean, it's a website and you got some sessions out there, we're doing remote best we can and you've got software and you've got technology and the other concept of a mechanism, it's software, it does something It does a purpose. Accenture, you guys have a concept called Living Systems where growth strategy powered by technology. How do you take the concept of a living organism or a system and replace the mechanism staleness of computing and software? And this is kind of interesting because we're on the cusp of a major inflection point post COVID. I get the digital transformation being slow. That's yes, that's happening. There's other things going on in society. What do you guys think about this Living Systems concept? Yeah. I'll start. I think the living system concept, it started out very much thinking about how do you rapidly change your system, right? And because of cloud, because of DevOps, because of all these software technologies and processes that we've created, that's where it started making it much easier, make it a much faster being able to change rapidly. But you're right. I think if you now bring in more technologies, the AI technology, self-healing technologies. Again, you heard Andy in his keynote talk about the systems and services they're building to detect problems and resolve those problems, right? Obviously automation is a big part of that. Living Systems, being able to bring that all together and to be able to react in real time to either when a customer asks, either through the AI models that have been generated and turning those AI models around much faster and being able to get all the information that came in the last 20 minutes, right? Society is moving fast and changing fast and even in one part of the world, if something in 10 minutes can change. And being able to have systems to react to that, learn from that and be able to pass that on to the next country especially in this world of COVID and things changing very quickly and diagnosis and medical response all that so quickly to be able to react to that and have systems pass that information, learn from that information is going to be critical. >> That's awesome. Brian, one of the things that comes up every year is, oh, the cloud's scalable. This year I think we've talked on theCUBE before, years ago certainly with the Accenture and Amazon. I think it was like three or four years ago. Yeah. The clouds horizontally scalable but vertically specialized at the application layer. But if you look at the Data Lake stuff that you guys have been doing where you have machine learning, the data is horizontally scalable and then you got the specialization in the app changes the whole vertical thing. You don't need to have a whole vertical solution or do you? So, how has this year's cloud news impacted vertical industries? Because it used to be, oh, oil and gas, financial services. They've got a team for that. We got a stack for that. Not anymore. Is it going away? What's changing? >> Well. It's a really good question. I think what we're seeing, and I was just on a call this morning talking about banking and capital markets and I do think the challenges are still pretty sector specific. But what we do see is the kind of commonality when we start looking at the, and we talked about this, the industry solutions that we're building as a partnership, most of them follow the pattern of ingesting data, analyzing that data and then being able to provide insights and then actions, right? So if you think about creating that kind of common chassis of that in just the Data Lake and then the machine learning, and you talk about the nuances around SageMaker and being able to manage these models, what changes then really are the very specific industries' algorithms that you're writing, right, within that framework. And so, we're doing a lot and Connect is a good example of this too, where you look at it and yeah, customer service is a horizontal capability that we're building out, but then when you stamp it into insurance or retail banking, or utilities, there are nuances then that we then extend and build so that we meet the unique needs of those industries and that's usually around those models. >> Yeah. I think this year was the first reInvent that I saw real products coming out that actually solved that problem. I mean, it was there last year SageMaker was kind of moving up the stack, but now you have apps embedding machine learning directly in and users don't even know it's in there. I mean, cause this is kind of where it's going, right? I mean-- >> You saw that was in announcements, right? How many announcements where machine learning is just embedded in? I mean, CodeGuru, DevOps Guru, the Panorama we talked about, it's just there. >> Yeah. I mean having that knowledge about the linguistics and the metadata, knowing the business logic, those are important specific use cases for the vertical and you can get to it faster. Chris, how is this changing on the tech side, your perspective? >> Yeah. I keep coming back to AWS and cloud makes it easier, right? All this stuff can be done and some of it has been done, but what Amazon continues to do is make it easier to consume by the developer, by the customer and to actually embed it into applications much easier than it would be if I had to go set up the stack and build it all on them and embed it, right? So it's shortcoming that process and again, as these products continue to mature, right, and some of this stuff is embedded, it makes that process so much faster. It reduces the amount of work required by the developers the engineers to get there. So, I'm expecting you're going to see more of this, right. I think you're going to see more and more of these multi connected services by AWS, that has a lot of the AI ML pre-configured Data Lakes, all that kind of stuff embedded in those services. So you don't have to do it yourself and continue to go up the stack. And we always talk about Amazon's built for builders, right? But, builders have been super specialized and are becoming, as engineers were being asked to be bigger and bigger and to be be able to do more stuff and I think these kind of integrated services are going to help us do that >> And certainly needed more now when you have hybrid edge that they're going to be operating with microservices on a cloud model and with all those advantages that are going to come around the corner for being in the cloud. I mean, I think there's going to be a whole clarity around benefits in the cloud with all these capabilities and benefits. Cloud Guru I think it's my favorite this year because it just points to why that could happen. I mean that happens because of the cloud data.(laughs) If you're on-premise, you may not have a little Cloud Guru. you are going to get more data but they're all different. Edge certainly will come in too. Your vision on the edge, Chris, how you see that evolving for customers because that could be complex, new stuff. How is it going to get easier? >> Yeah. It's super complex now, right? I mean, you got to design for all the different edge 5G protocols are out there and solutions, right? Amazon's simplifying that. Again, I come back to simplification, right? I can build an app that works on any 5G network that's been integrated with AWS, right. I don't have to set up all the different layers to get back to my cloud or back to my my bigger data set. And that's kind of choking. I don't even know where to call the cloud anymore. I got big cloud which is a central and I go down then you've got a cloud at the edge. Right? So what do I call that? >> Brian: It's just really computing.(laughing) Exactly. So, again, I think is this next generation of technology with the edge comes right and we put more and more data at the edge. We're asking for more and more compute at the edge, right? Whether it be industrial or for personal use or consumer use, that processing is going to get more and more intense to be able to maintain under a single console, under a single platform and be able to move the code that I developed across that entire platform, whether I have to go all the way down to the very edge at the 5G level, right, or all the way back into the bigger cloud and how that processing in there, being able to do that seamlessly is going to allow the speed of development that's needed. >> Wow. You guys done a great job and no better time to be a techie or interested in technology or computer science or social science for that matter. This is a really perfect store. A lot of problems to solve, a lot of change happening, positive change opportunities, a lot of great stuff. Final question guys. Five years working together now on this partnership with AWS and Accenture. Congratulations, you guys are in pole position for the next wave coming. What's exciting you guys? Chris, what's on your mind? Brian, what's getting you guys pumped up? >> Well, again, I come back to Andy mentioned it in his keynote, right? We're seeing customers move now, right. Five years ago we knew customers were going to do this. We built a partnership to enable these enterprise customers to make that journey, right? But now, even more we're seeing them move at such great speed, right? Which is super excites me, right? Because I can see... Being in this for a long time now, I can see the value on the other end. We've been wanting to push our customers as fast as they can through the journey and now they're moving. Now they're getting the religion, they're getting there. They see they need to do it to change your business so that's what excites me. It just the excites me, it's just the speed at which we're going to to see the movement. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. I'd agree with that. I mean, I just think getting customers to the cloud is super important work and we're obviously doing that and helping accelerate that. It's what we've been talking about when we're there all the possibilities that become available, right? Through the common data capabilities, the access to the 175 somewhat AWS services. I also think and this is kind of permeated through this week at Re:invent is the opportunity, especially in those industries that do have an industrial aspect, a manufacturing aspect, or a really strong physical aspect of bringing together IT and operational technology and the business with all these capabilities and I think edge and pushing machine learning down to the edge and analytics at the edge is really going to help us do that. And so I'm super excited by all that possibility because I feel like we're just scratching the surface there. >> It's a great time to be building out. and this is the time for reconstruction, reinvention. Big theme, so many storylines in the keynote and the events . It's going to keep us busy here at SiliconANGLE on theCUBE for the next year. Gentlemen, thank you for coming on. I really appreciate it. Thanks. >> Thank you. All right. Great conversation. We're getting technical. We're going to go another 30 minutes A lot to talk about. A lot of storylines here at AWS Re:Invent 2020 at the Accenture Executive Summit. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(soft music) >> Hello everyone and welcome back to theCUBE on Cloud, where we're talking to CEOs, CIOs, Chief Technology Officers, and investors on the future of Cloud, with me is Dave Humphrey. Who's the Managing Director, and co-head of private equity in North America at Bain Capital. Dave, welcome to theCUBE first time, I think. >> First time, yeah, Dave, thanks very much for having me. >> So, let's get right into it, as an investor, how are you thinking about the evolution of cloud, when you look back at the last decade? It's not going to be the same, in this coming decade it's ironic 2020 is thrown us into, the accelerated digital transformation and cloud. How do you look at the evolution of cloud, from an investment perspective? What's your thesis? >> That's a great question, David for us we're focused on investing, in technology and really across the economy. And I'd say ,the cloud is the overarching trend, and dynamic in the technology markets. It really affect two reasons. One is a major shift ,of course that's going on. But the second and frankly even more interesting one, just as all the growth, that the cloud is creating, in the technology marketplace. The shift, think is been well covered, but five years ago in 2015, by our analysis, 2/3 of all computing workloads were done on premises. And only five years later, that's that's split. So, 2/3 of all computing workloads now done in the cloud and of course that shift, there's a lot of ramifications, as an investor. But even more interesting to us, is the growth in technology and the usage of technology, that the cloud is creating. So, over that same period of time, the total number of computing workloads run has increased, by 2.6 times, in just a five-year period of time which is really a dramatic thing and it makes sense when you think about, all the new software applications that could be created, all the data that can be used by new users and new segments, and the real-time insight that can be gleaned from there cause that growth, that really were focused on investing behind, as investors in technology. >> It's interesting you share those numbers, and you hear a lot of numbers. I actually think you're even being conservative. Ginni Rometty, used to talk about 80% of workloads, are still on-prem. Andy Jassy at re:Invent said that, 96% of the spending is still on premises. So, that was kind of an interesting stat. And I guess the other thing that I would note is it's not just a share shift, it is, it's not just, the cloud eating away on-prem. We've clearly seen that. But there's also incremental opportunity as well. If you look at Snowflake, for example adding value across multiple clouds and creating new markets. So there's that one-two punch, of stealing share from on-prem (clears throat). Also incremental growth, which is probably accelerated as a result, of this compressed digital transformation. So when you look at the big three Cloud players. I mean, roughly speaking, there probably account for $80 billion in total revenue. Which I guess, is a small portion of the overall IT market. So, it has a long way to go, but what's the best way to get good returns, from an investment standpoint, without getting clobbered, by their tendency to sometimes co-opt some of the best ideas and put them on their primary services. >> Yeah, absolutely, well, for us, it really comes back to the same fundamental principles, we look for in any investment. Which is finding, a business that solves, a really important problem for its customers, and does so in a way that's really advantage, versus competition and can do something, that other competitors just can't do. Whether those be the hyperscalers that you're describing, or other specialized and focused competitors. And then finding a way ,that we can partner with those companies to help them to accelerate their growth. So, surely the growth of the likes of AWS and Microsoft and Google, as you were describing has been a profound, competitive shift, along with the cloud shift, that we've all talked about. And those companies of course can offer, and do things that you asked, purveyors of computing couldn't. But, fundamentally they're selling an infrastructure layer, and there is room for all sorts of new competitors, and new applications that can do something better than anybody else can. So, any company that we're looking at, we're asking ourselves the question, why are they the best ones, to do what they're doing? How can they solve the most problems, for their customers and do that, in a way that's resilient? And we see lots of those opportunities. >> And I want to pick your brain, about the Nutanix investment, but before we get there. I wonder if you could just talk, about Bain Capital their history of investment in both cloud and infrastructure software and how do those investments, how would they perform and how do they inform your current thesis? >> Yeah, absolutely. So, Bain Capital was started in the mid 80s, 1984. Actually, as a spin out Bain Company Consulting. And the basic premise was that, if we're good at advising and supporting businesses. We should partner with them and invest behind them and if they do well, we'll do well. And as I said, focusing on these businesses but do something really valuable for their customers in a real advantage way with some discontinuous growth opportunity. That's led us to grow a lot. We started out actually in the venture business, and grew into the private equity business, but now we invest across all life stages of company all over the world. So we're $105 billion in assets that we manage, across 10 lines of business and we're truly global. So I think we have about 470 investment professionals and 210 of those, at this point are located outside the US. One of the really interesting things for us in investing in technology broadly and in infrastructure and the Cloud more specifically is that we're able to do that all over the world and we're able to do that across all the different life stages of a company. So we have a thrive in venture capital business, that really we've been in, since the origins of Bain Capital has invested across countless cloud and security and infrastructure businesses, taken successful companies public like SolarWinds sold companies to strategic and grown businesses in really thriving ways. We have a growth mid-market growth technology business, that we launched last year, called our Technology Opportunities Fund. They've made a really interesting, cloud-based investment in a company called the Cloud Gurus, Cloud Guru, excuse me. That trains, the next generation of IT professionals to be successful in the cloud. And then of course in our private equity business where I spend my time. We are highly focused on technologist sector. And the impacts of the cloud in that sector broadly, we have invested in many infrastructure businesses, scale businesses like, BMC Software and Rocket Software, security businesses like, Blue Coat Systems and Symantec. And of course, for those big businesses they've got both on premises solutions. They've got cloud solutions and often we're focused on helping them continue to grow and innovate and take their solutions to the cloud. And then, this taken us to our most recent investment in Nutanix that we're very excited about it. We think it's truly a growth business in a large market that has an opportunity to capitalize, on these trends we're talking about. >> I wonder if you could comment on some of the changes that have occurred, you guys have been in the private equity business, for a long time. And if you look at kind of the early days of private equity, it was all, EBITDA suck as much cash out of the company as possible and whatever's left over we'll figure out what to do with it. And it's, it seems like investors have realized, wow, we can actually, if we put a little investment in and do some engineering, and some go to market we can actually, get better multiples. And so you've got the kind of rule of 30, 35 and 40 where EBITDA plus growth is kind of the metric. How do you think about that and look at that evolution? >> Yeah, it's interesting because in many ways Bain Capital was started as the antithesis to what you're describing. >> Great. >> So we started again as, with a strategic lens and a focus on growth and a focus on, if we got the longterm and the lasting impact of our businesses right, that the returns would follow and you're right that the market has evolved in that way. I mean, I think some of the dynamics that we've seen, has been certainly growth of the private equity business. It's become a much larger piece of the capital markets than it was certainly 10 years ago and 20 years ago. Also with that growth comes the globalization of that business all over the world and the specialization. So you certainly see technology focused firms and technology focused funds in a way that you didn't see 10 years ago or certainly 20 years ago. Actually Bain Capital interestingly enough, we had a technology focused fund in 1989 called Bain Information Partners. So we've been focused on the sector for a very long time. But you certainly see a lot more technology investors, than you did in your 10 to 20 years ago. >> How are you thinking about valuations these days? I mean, it's good to be in tech, it's even better to be in the cloud, software, cloud, if you're looking at, some of the companies, especially the work from home pivot. But a lot of that appears to be, many people believe it's going to be permanent. How are you feeling about the both public market and private market valuations in that dynamic? >> Yeah, well, it's amazing, right? I don't think any of us in March when the COVID crisis was just emerging, would've anticipated that come November, the markets and certainly the technology markets, would be even more robust and stronger than they were say in January, February. But I think it's a testament to the resilience of the technology and just how intricate and intertwined technology has become with our daily lives. And how much companies depend on its use. And frankly, it's been, the COVID environment has been an accelerant, for many of the ways in which we depend on technology. So witness this interview, of course, through the cloud, and you're seeing the way that we operate our business day-to-day, the way companies are accessing their data and information it has only further, accelerated the need for technology, and the importance of that technology to how businesses operate. So I think you're seeing that, you're reflected in the market values out there, but for us we're focused on businesses, that still have that catalytic opportunity ahead that can, do more to compensate for the price of entry. >> Let's talk about ,this massive investment you guys made in Nutanix, $750 million. I guess it's a small piece of your 105 billion, but still massive investment. How did that opportunity come to you? What was your thinking behind that investment and what are you looking for in terms of the go-forward plan and growth plan for 2021 and really important beyond? >> Yeah, absolutely, we're thrilled to be partnered with and invested in Nutanix. We think is a terrific company and our most recent technology investment are private equity business. It really came about through a proactive efforts that we had in the spring. We've got a team focused on the technology sector, focused across infrastructure and applications and internet and digital media businesses and financial technology. And through those efforts, we were looking for businesses, that we felt had faced some dislocation in their market values, associated with the COVID environment that we're facing. But that we thought were really attractive businesses, well positioned have leading solutions, and had substantial and discontinuous growth opportunities. And as we look through that effort, we really felt that Nutanix stood out just as a core leader and in fact, really the innovator and the inventor of the market, in which it competes with a substantial market share and position, solving a really important problem for its customers, with a big growth opportunity ahead. But, the stock price had come down, because the business has been undergoing a transition. And we didn't think that was fully understood, by the market. And so, we saw an opportunity to partner with Nutanix, to invest money into the business, to help to fund its transition and its growth, and to be partners along for all the value of the business we'll continue to create, we think it's a terrific company and we're excited to be invested. >> Well, you and I have talked about this, that transition from a traditional license model, to one that's an annual recurring revenue model which many companies have gone through. Adobe certainly has done it, Tableau successfully did it. Splunk is kind of in the middle of that transition right now, and maybe not well understood. You've got companies like, Datadog and Snowflake again to doing consumption-based pricing. So there's a lot of confusion in the marketplace. And I wonder if you could talk about, that transition and why it was attractive to you, to actually place that bet now. >> Yeah, absolutely and as you say, number of companies at this point have been through, various forms of of this shift from selling their technology upfront to selling it over time. And we find that the model of selling the technology over time, is one that can be powerful. It can be aligning for customers, as well as for the vendor of the software solutions. And in Nutanix in particular, again, we saw all the ingredients that we think, make this an opportunity for the business. Again, market-leading technology that customers love that is solving a really important problem that technology because Nutanix had been grown, and bootstrapped under the leadership Dheeraj when it was built and founded. Had been selling its software together within appliance. Often in a upfront sale. And has been undergoing under their own initiative, transitioned from selling that software with an appliance to a software based model to one that's more rattle over time. And we thought that there was the opportunity to continue that transition and by doing that. To be able to offer more growth, and more innovation that we can bring to our customers to continue to fund their shifts. So, something that frankly was well underway before we invested. As the business makes this transition, from collecting upfront to more evenly over time. We saw a potential use for our capital, to help to fund that growth. And we're just focused on being a good partner, to help the company keep investing and innovating, as it continues to do that. >> As I was talking to somebody other day, Dave and I told him, I was interviewing you. And I was mentioning the Nutanix investment. And I said, I'm definitely going to cover that. As part of this Cube on Cloud program and they said, well, then Nutanix, that's not cloud. I'm like, well, wait a minute, what's cloud? So, we heard Andy Jassy at re:Invent, talking all lot about hybrid. Antonio Neri ,right after HPE, made its earning last earnings announcement. He came on and said that, well we heard the big cloud player talk about hybrid. And so the definition is changing. But so how are you looking at the market? Certainly, there's this hyper converged infrastructure, but there's also this software play, there's this cloud play. Help us squint through, how you see that. >> Absolutely, so, Nutanix as you alluded to pioneer the market for hyper converged infrastructure, for bringing compute and storage and networking together. Often in private Cloud environments, in a way that was really powerful for your customers and they can of course continue to be the leaders in that marketplace. But they've continued to innovate and invest in ways that can, solve problems for customers and related problems across the hybrid cloud. So, combining both the public cloud with that private cloud and across multiple public clouds, with things like clusters and lots of innovation, that the business is doing, in partnership with the likes of Amazon and Microsoft and others. And so we think that Nutanix has a powerful role to play, in that hybrid cloud world, in a multi-cloud world. And we're excited to back them in. >> Well, I think too, what maybe people don't understand, is that not only is Nutanix, compatible with AWS and compatible with Azure and GCP, but it's actually trying, to create an abstraction layer across those, those clouds. Now, there's two sides of that debate. Some will say, well, that has latency issues or yes it reduces complexity, but at the same time it doesn't give you, that fine-grained access that's kind of the AWS narrative customers, want simplicity and we're seeing the uptake across clouds. I have a multi-part question for you, Dave. So, obviously Bain very strong in strategy. I'm curious ,as to how much you get involved, in the operational details. I mean, obviously $750 million you've got a stake there. But what are the two or three major strategic considerations for not just even just Nutanix, but Cloud and software infrastructure companies? And how much focus do you put on the operational and what are the priorities there? >> Absolutely, well, we pride ourselves in being good partners to our businesses and in helping them to grow, not just with our capital, which I think is of course important, but also with our sweat equity and our human capital, and our partnership and we can do that in lots of ways. It's fundamentally about supporting our businesses, however, is needed to help them to grow. We've been investing in the technology sector, as I described over, over 30 years. And so, we've built up a set of capabilities around things like, helping to a partner with the Salesforce of a company is helping them to think about the ways in which they allocate their research and development and their innovation ways in which they, continue to do acquisitions, to further that pipeline. We support our businesses in lots of ways. But we're not engineers, we're not developers. Of course, we're looking for businesses that are fundamentally great. They've got great technology. They solve problems for customers in a way, we could never replicate. That's, what's all amazing about a business like Nutanix and just over a 10 year period of time, it literally has customer satisfaction levels, that we haven't seen from any other infrastructure software company that we've had the pleasure of diligencing over the last several years. So, what we're focused on, is how can we take those great products and offerings that Nutanix has, and continue to support them, through the further growth and expansion of areas like, the further Salesforce investment, to expand into these new areas like clusters, that we were talking about and thinking about, things that they can do, to further expand the strategic hold. And so, we have a large team of Bain Capital as I mentioned, 260 investment professionals, in our private equity business alone. About a third of those are just available to our companies to help support them, with various initiatives and efforts after we invest. And we'll certainly, of course make all of those available to Nutanix as well. >> Somebody was asking me the other day, what's hyper-converged infrastructure? How did that come about? And I was explaining, back in the day you had, you'd buy some servers and some storage, and you'd have a network. And you sort of have different teams. And you'd put applicant, you figure it out all out and put the applications on top, test it and make sure it all works and then the guys at VCE and VMware and Cisco and EMC, they got together and said, okay, we're going to bolt together a bunch of different components and pretest it here you go, here's a, here's a skew. And then, what Nutanix did was actually, really transformational and said, okay. Look, we can do this through software. And now that was what late 2000? Now, we're sort of entering this new era, this next generation of cloud, cross clouds. So, I wonder how you think about, based on what you were just talking about the whole notion of MA versus organic. There's a lot of organic development that needs to be done but perhaps you could buy in or inorganically through MA to actually get there faster. How do you think about that balance? >> Look I think that was an articulate by the way explanation of I think that the origins of a hyperconverged infrastructure, so I enjoyed that very much. But I think that with any of our businesses and with Nutanix we're of course looking at where are we trying to get to in several years and what are the best ways to support the business to get there? Of course, they'll primarily that will be through continuing organic investment in the company and all the innovation in the product, that they've been doing. Will the company contemplate acquisitions, to further achieve the development goals and the objectives for solving paying points for customers, to get to the strategic places they're trying to get to of course, but it all, is a part of the package of what's a good fit for the company and its growth objective. >> I mean, with the size of your portfolio, I mean, you're a full stack investor, I would say. Is there any part of the so-called tech stack that you won't touch that you would actually not walk, but run away from? (laughs) >> Well, I wouldn't say that we're running away from anything, but the questions that we're asking ourselves are, is the technology that we're investing endurable? Is it advantaged and does have a growing role in the world? And if we think that those things are true, we're absolutely, thrilled to invest behind those things. If there are things that we feel like, that's not the case. then we would tend to shy away from those investments. We've certainly found opportunities in businesses that people perceived as one, but we believe to be another. >> Well, so, let me ask you specifically about Nutanix. I mean, clearly they achieved escape velocity. One of the few companies actually, from last decade, it was Nutanix pure, not a whole lot of others that actually were able to maintain independence as a public company. What do you see as their durability? They're, moat if you will. >> Yeah, absolutely, well clearly we think that it's a very durable and very advantaged business. Yeah, thus the investment. Look, we think that Nutanix has been able to offer the best hyperconverged infrastructure product in the market bar none. One that is got the best ease of use is the most nimble and flexible for customers. And you just see that resulting customer feedback. And also that plays across very heterogeneous architectures in a way that it's really powerful. Because of that we think that they're best positioned to be able to leverage that technology as they have been, to continue to play across both public and private hybrid cloud environments. And so we're excited to back them in that journey. It really starts from solving an acute customer paying point, better than anybody else can. And we're looking to back them to continue to expand that vision. >> Yeah, well, I've talked to a lot of Nutanix customers, over the years and that is the fundamental value proposition it's really simple, very high, customer satisfaction. So, that makes a lot of sense. Well, Dave, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE and participating in theCUBE on Cloud. Really appreciate your perspectives, wish you best of luck. And hopefully we can do this again in the future. Maybe face to face >> Yeah, face to face maybe someday. Dave, I really appreciate it. It's been a pleasure and good luck with the rest of your interviews. >> All right, thank you. Well keep it right there, everybody for more Cube on Cloud. This is Dave Vellante, we'll be right back. (soft music)

>> From the Regency Center in San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Serverlessconf, San Francisco, 2018. Brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and you're watching theCUBE here at Serverlessconf, 2018 in San Francisco. Happy to welcome to the program Michael Garski, who's the director of platform engineering at Fender. Thanks so much for joining me. >> Thanks, Stu. Thanks for having me on. >> All right, so, luckily, I don't need to introduce Fender because I think most of our audience will be familiar with, you know, Fender, guitars, music, all that stuff, but we're going to talk a little bit about the tech side. >> Okay. >> Even though, let me ask, there's a question I usually ask. Most companies, you know, going through the digital transformation, lots of changes there. How does digital impact Fender? >> Digitally, Fender started a digital division in late 2015 and it was a focus on all-new digital products to complement our well-known physical products. Since then we've launched Fender Mod Shop, where a user can order a customized guitar online, have it delivered in a month. We have a single sign-on solution across all of our web and mobile applications, a guitar tuner, we have connected amplifiers, with companion apps to control amplifiers remotely. And our flagship product is Fender Play, which is an instructional app which allows the user to learn to play guitar, ukulele, and coming soon, bass. >> Love it. I'm guessing that has something to do with what you're involved with on the cloud and Serverless side to enable those technologies on the mobile side. >> Exactly. We've fully embraced AWS Lambda to support all of the services for the web and mobile applications. >> Okay, so A Cloud Guru's a training company and we've talked to them extensively as to why Serverless was a good fit for them, and enabled them to do it, but bring us through what led to your adoption of AWS Lambda, give us a little bit about what kind of technologies you were using before, and how you got to this solution. >> Well, we started out building services and go, just standard EC2 based microservices, and then we started tinkering a bit with Lambda. We had to adjust the product catalog from SAP. They could deliver a file, drop it into an S3 bucket, so it was simple enough to create a function that can process that file and ingest it into elastic search. From there, we used custom authorizers with API Gateway mapping templates to save custom tunings for users, and then as we started building for Tone and Play, Tone especially is a very limited audience. It's whoever buys the amplifiers. So we're not talking millions of people, it's going to be hundreds of thousands. So, it was a very good use case to go ahead and do that. Same thing with Play, we're starting a new business that's a great model for us, that we can just pay per usage. >> All right, so, yeah it sounds like you were using cloud and the usage model fit for what Serverless was built for, correct? >> Exactly, yes. >> All right, how much is management aware of, you know, kind of the underlying technology? Is your group, kind of just allowed free reign to kind of deal with this? Or are there anything you need to go to the CFO, and be like, well, you know our billings going to change a little bit compared to what you might have known in the past? >> It's, we pretty much have free reign. And our biggest AWS expense is actually what we pay for, in AWS Glacier for storage for the raw footage, of all the 4K footage from, instructional video shoots, and Lambda on top of that is simply a rounding error. >> Yeah, excellent. And the mobile apps that you've built, are there trials on there? Is everybody up to sign-up to be able to use it? Is it a freemium model or is it a paid model? >> The Tuner is a completely free application. There is an in-app purchase for cord and scale libraries, and some pro features of the tuner. Custom tunings are free. The Play application comes with a 30-day free trial, so user can sign up either on the web, or via the Google or Apple app stores on their mobile device. >> Okay, so, with that kind of model, I would think that Lambda would be nice. There's, you know, you said your expenses aren't that high using this kind of service. >> No, not at all, like I, in the month of June, we spent, I think it was like $132 for 68 million Lambda invocations. And to kind of put that in perspective a bit, it's what we pay for some EC2 services, EC2 instances that support our legacy authentication service, but we're also moving that over to Cognito now so we can get rid of all the EC2 instances. >> Okay, when you started using this technology, how'd you first learn about it? How'd you get up to speed on it? Tell us a little bit about kind of, training adoption. >> It was a lot of experimentation. So, we have it set up where we use one account for our QA and production environments and another account for our development environment. All the engineers on the team have free-reign to do whatever they want to in the development environment. They can spin up whatever they need to. So we just started playing around with things and experimenting. Like, let's hook up Lambda function to API Gateway, oh, this is going to work really well! And just kind of proceeded down that path. >> All right, great, and any learnings, anything that you tried playing with and said, like wow, this just isn't going to be a fit for what I need? Tell us, you know, what worked, what didn't? >> I would say about the only thing we found that really doesn't fit within Lambda and Serverless would be really very low latency applications. You're doing an auto complete for a search system. You want that snappy. It's, humans observe, I think it's about 100 milliseconds things seemed instantaneous, and that's going to be very challenging to get from API Gateway Lambda to get that consistently. >> Okay, great. And you're speaking here at the conference, how'd that end up happening, what are you looking to share with your peers? >> How it happened was I submitted a talk for a conference and then Drew from A Cloud Guru approached me and asked me to submit I had to tell him I already did, so they went ahead and approved it. And, I'm sharing what we've done and built at Fender Digital, and sort of what we found as far as tools for monitoring, performance optimization, as well as some things to really be cautious of when you're dealing with Lambda, especially with regards to concurrency controls. >> 'Kay, great and, how have you found the show so far? You were at the keynote, got about 500 people here. >> Yeah, it's really interesting. I'd really like the focus all on Serverless. You see, go to a lot of conferences, there might be one or two talks that kind of focus on that. It's nice to have something completely focused in that space. >> All right, and, you know, from a maturity standpoint, are there things that you're looking for in the roadmap from Amazon? They've been baking Serverless kind of into all of their services, so do you expect to stay on Lambda, or are there other services that kind of, you know FAZ or Serverless built into it that you might be using? >> We expect to stay on Lambda for the near term. I don't, we don't have any plans or looking at anything else like Azure or Google Cloud functions, our intention is to stay with AWS. They have a lot of other services, their new machine learning services, we use DynamoDB quite extensively, and so we're probably going to stick with them. >> Yeah, but inside Amazon, they've been expanding their Serverless portfolio as it was. >> Oh, yeah. >> And I remember, I was at the show when Lambda was announced, and then, you know it's Aurora with Serverless underneath and all those, so do you expect to adopt some of those other services that have AWS Serverless kind of baked into it as opposed to just using, kind of a Lambda tool. >> Absolutely, especially with, you just mentioned the Aurora Serverless model. That's one that we're taking a look at and evaluating as we've got some data in DynamoDB, but as requirements have shifted in the business over time it's really, it's becoming very difficult to model in DynamoDB, so we're going to kind of take a look at that, and possibly move to Aurora Serverless. >> I'm curious, how does Fender, does Fender think of the data involved? Is that something that, you mentioned AI, some of these, is that something that you'll be able to take the data and leverage that potentially even make new business revenue streams out of that in the future? >> We're doing some of that already by just watching user, analyzing user behavior so we can improve our products internally. And we're looking at adding more features to where we can really understand what people are doing, and then make our products better. >> All right. Michael, want to give you the final word. For your peers out there that might be saying hey, I've heard of Serverless, I'm kind of thinking at it, what advice would you give them? >> Just dive in, get started, don't hesitate. It's, it doesn't cost you anything, really to experiment with it. That model works very, very nice. >> Yeah, and it's one of the things that's great. It used to be you would take a lot of period of time and some big investment to be able to try a technology out or maybe you would get some demo, but Serverless is pretty easy to get started on. >> Exactly. Especially if you're using a framework like say, Serverless framework, or maybe using AWS. Excuse me, AWS's Serverless application model, it really helps as far as setting up all the resources that your function needs as well. >> All right well, Michael really appreciate you riffing with us on your deployments with Serverless and hope your peers will definitely check it out. All right, lots more coverage here from The Serverless Conference here in San Fransisco. I'm Stu Miniman, and thanks for watching theCUBE. (electronic music)

>> Announcer: From Hell's Kitchen in New York City, it's the Cube on the ground at Serverlessconf Brought to you by SiliconAngle Media. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman with the Cube, here at Serverlessconf in Hell's Kitchen, New York City. Our first time doing the Cube here. Happy to welcome back to the program, a multi-time guest, Mark Nunnikhoven who is the Vice President of Cloud Research at Trend Micro. Mark, great to see you. >> Thanks for having me. Great to see you Stu. >> Alright, so Mark repeat after me. >> Stu and Mark: Security is everybody's responsibility. >> Yeah. >> So you did a keynote talking about security, and I love, unfortunately I didn't get to see it in person, but I feel like I was there 'cause we had the Twitter's and the commentary. >> Yeah. >> And stuff like that. So security, it's a non-issue right? Serverless it's all set, containers and everything before it, everything's secure right? >> Yeah. As you know from looking at the headlines, we do security really well in the IT community. So you can sleep well at night. We don't have to worry about anything. No, unfortunately it continues to be a challenge, and the point of the keynote yesterday was, sort of, give the state of the nation, how we're doing in the Serverless environment. And the good news is we're doing well in security for Serverless designs, but the bad news is not through any individual or purpose action. Simply by just building in these methods, we get a huge amount of security advantages. >> Yeah. >> But we can do better. >> Alright so Mark, what can we learn? It's funny, we see these repetitive things go on in the industry. It's like "Oh well, I'm just going to use Sass." "I don't need to worry about security, right?" "Oh, I'm going to go public Cloud, they'll take care of it for me." >> Yeah. >> Now containers, Serverless it feels like we have the same trope over, and over, and over again, right? >> We do, very very much so. And one of the things I called out yesterday was actually highlighting how the OWASP Top 10, which is the 10 most common vulnerabilities in web applications, have not really changed since 2010. Yet we didn't have even the concept of Serverless in 2010, but we're still making the same mistakes. SQL injection, still the top mistake that we've been making for the last decade. >> Alright, so we're talking about security. Let's step back for a second. So I believe a lot of the people watching these interviews are going to be like "Serverless, I don't get it." I love the, the Cloud Guru folks have the t-shirt, the update of the Cloud one. There is no Cloud, it's just somebody else owns the computer now. I forget the full thing. >> Somebody else's informal execution environment that last's for milliseconds, something along that. >> So what from your standpoint, you've been talking to a lot of customers >> Yeah. >> that you're speaking at this conference. You know, the what and the why of Serverless? >> Yeah, so Serverless is really that sort of, I won't say conclusion, but the logical next step of Cloud where you start to realize, when you move out of your own data center where you were doing everything, and you move into the Cloud and go, well half of the responsibility is on Amazon, or Google, or Microsoft, or whoever. And then you go, well hold on a second, why am I even managing Windows or Linux? What advantage is that to me? I make widgets, or I sell shirts or whatever. And so you move up into something like containers, and you ask the same question. Go, well why am I even running those? Serverless is that last step on the current line of going, I don't have to run any of this stuff. I can just write code that's directly tied to my business. >> Yeah, and I like how you said it's the next step. I think back to science, and it was like when we found the atom. Everybody was super excited, and then oh, there were protons and neutrons, and they were like oh my gosh, and electrons and everything. And then they're like "Oh and then there's the quark." >> Yeah. >> Everything like that. So the digger, the further down we deep, but what is the value of that? So we went from the server, to virtualized environments, to microservices, to containers. Why is that important? What's the business outcome that people are getting when they get excited and start playing with Serverless? >> For sure, so there's really two main points for me. One is that you have a direct tie between IT and the business, both from performance as well as cost. So now you can actually say that application had cost me $1.10 per transaction, and I normally make $9 on each transaction. So this is good, let's continue to invest there. So there's finally a breakdown between the separation, and you get that unity with the business and IT. And the second is accessibility. Because there's far less infrastructure and plumbing to worry about, you have people who aren't traditionally viewed as developers, more of the business analysts, starting to actually write solutions that are far more directly in line with what you want to do as a business. >> Alright, one of the things I liked seeing in the keynotes was can we do today and what can't we do today? So web applications, great, IOT, things like the Amazon Button, or the Amazon Alexa. >> Yeah. >> All leverage that. What are some of the cool applications that you've seen leveraging Serverless today? >> Yeah, so a lot of cool robots. A friend of mine, Ben Kehoe from iRobot gave a great talk on it. A lot of their stuff leverages that, and I'm a nerd, I love robots. >> Who doesn't like robots? >> Exactly, right? >> We welcome our robot overlords here at the Cube. >> Absolutely. And if they're listening, when they process this, thank you for your service. But yeah, there's a lot of great things where we're crossing out of the digital world into the real world. Because we can connect these things up with the advantage of Serverless. We don't have to build out a huge infrastructure. If you need smart lighting, if you need smart appliances, all of the IOT world, it's all Serverless. >> Yeah. So I'm going to bring up this word >> Yeah. >> That has some weight to it enterprise. >> Uh oh, let me brace. Yeah. >> So companies, we're talking, the Cloud is being used for whole businesses and everything like that. Is Serverless for, it's web, and robots, and cool toys, and everything like this. What are you seeing? What are the limitations, and does this become a predominant operating model in the future? >> Yeah, there's a lot of hesitancy in the enterprise because they're not familiar with it. >> Yeah. >> But realistically, any enterprise today should have a very simple, sort of, fall down model. When they're building something new, start at Serverless. If that doesn't meet your needs, put it in a container. If that doesn't meet your needs, build a server. Again, you want to do less work. The challenge, again, is comfort level. Serverless breaks a lot of our tooling. >> Yeah. >> So you need to learn a lot of stuff, but it's definitely where enterprises should be looking today if they want to get ahead. >> Okay, and Mark what advice do you give to companies today as they think about security across some of these various environments? >> Well you led the cheer at the start. Security is everybody's responsibility. From a security practitioners side, point of view, we've done ourselves a disservice in isolating ourselves in teams and not talking to people. We need to be educators within our organizations to help people understand what they can do. It goes all the way back to the Mythical Man-Month. It's easier to squash a bug before you ever write it, rather than when it's deployed to millions of people. Same thing for security, the earlier you're on it, the more people are looking at it, the better off you're going to be. >> Alright Mark, I want to give you the final word. Take aways, the event isn't done, but for people that aren't familiar where do they get started? Where should they dig in for Serverless? >> Yeah, there's a ton of great content here. So this is the fifth Serverless event. A lot of the old talks are up on YouTube, and Cloud Guru's done a fantastic job on pulling this community together. Check out all that stuff. The major providers, all of them are here. All of them have excellent entry level projects to help you get rolling and really that's the best way to start. Fire up the console, start building something. Why not? >> Alright Mark, really appreciate you joining. Thank for sharing with the community here, our community. Look forward to seeing you at many more events, and thank you so much for watching the Cube. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From Hell's Kitchen in New York City, it's theCUBE on the ground at Serverlessconf brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman here with theCUBE and we're at Serverlessconf in New York City in Hell's Kitchen. Happy to have on the program a first time guest, Linda Nichols, who is does Cloud Enablement Reader at Cloudreach. Linda, thanks so much for joining me. >> Thanks. >> Alright, so, it's the fifth one of these events, the first time we've been doing some interviews. I know I'm excited to be here. Tell our audience a little bit about yourself, Cloudreach and what brings you to the event. >> Sure, well, I'm at this event because I love this community. I'm really passionate about Serverless. I was at the event in Austin, I loved it, I had a great time. I submitted talks this time and they accepted mine. And I was so excited. Honestly, I would have come anyway, even if they hadn't invited me. So I work at Cloudreach, it's a company originally based in London, we have an office here in New York and we're a Cloud adoption company. So we're helping companies go from on-premises servers into the Cloud and then once they're in the Cloud, that's sort of where my team comes into play. Where we work with app-modernization, taking the software apps that are now in the cloud, and helping to break apart monoliths and modernize the apps using Serverless. >> Yeah, Linda, tell me a little bit about the community. Because you talked Cloud adoption, most companies I talk to, they're figuring out their Cloud strategy. Some of them are getting on board with containerization, coo-ver-net-tees is the latest hotness, so Serverless is still new, so tell us a little bit about that community, how long you've been a part of it and what is it that excites you so much about it? >> It's been about a year and I think as soon as I started kind of getting into it and creating apps on my own and kind of doing some things for clients, immediately the community was there. I was on Twitter, I was on Gitter, I was talking to Serverless framework people, asking questions and immediately people came back with answers. Yeah, they've really embraced me and everyone else really quickly. And I think that when new people come on the scene and they say, what is this? People in the community are like, we don't really know either, it changes every day. Every time I see a talk from someone, their definition of Serverless is different. And mine is changing, too, with every talk. >> I know we've had that discussion, kind of what is it, but what are the outcomes? What are you excited about? What's helping your users? Any proof points or roll outs or things that have- what has that game changer been? >> I think it's cheap and it's fast. Those are the two really important things, especially with a startup community. They don't have the money, they don't have the funding to really be having an entire development team. And now they can bring in one or two people and they can get something written and deployed really quickly. It's good for prototyping, non-profits, and now, for enterprises too. 'Cause now we're saying it's not just for non-profits, you can save money too. We've brought you into the cloud, you're more secure, you're saving money and now, we're going to save you more money and we're going to make your developers happy too. 'Cause they're having a great time. >> Yeah, I've been looking in the events, so far, and it seems like there's big focus on tooling, helping to understand really digging into it. Because, yes, fast, easy, let me get up, I can save some money, but, there's always the wait, but. Okay, we know we need to work on security. I need to make sure I have visibility. What have you been seeing? What are you impressed that you've seen so far? And what are some of the open things that you think the community still needs to work on? >> Well, one thing that's really interesting is you have the four Cloud platforms and they have similar products which are competing, but they still really are working together. IBM and Google are hanging out behind us, no pressure there really and they're all like, oh great, you have a new tool. That seems cool, it's like what we have. Maybe we can work on ours, make it better. So, they're kind of working together. I think the thing that, maybe, we have to work on is maybe a little bit of standardization, which I think is kind of starting to happen. Because people want to be able to use a hybrid system, or maybe they use multiple Cloud platforms and so standardizing some of the events and the services I think is going to kind of help that. >> Okay, Linda, I want to give you the last takeaway. For people that don't know about Serverless, haven't attended, and any tools or place of view, how do they get started, how do they get into the community that you love so much? >> I think, I would say, start with AWS Lambda, maybe. There's some tutorials on the site. A Cloud Guru has some great tutorials, I have to go give them a plug. And, just start building something. And once you start building, if you have a problem, reach out to the community, they'll help you. They'll answer your questions. >> Absolutely, A Cloud Guru, of course, puts on this event. Really, not only are they, they use the Serverless to be able to build their company, but dramatically, those price points, though. Less time and less money to get involved. Linda, thanks so much for joining us, really appreciate, great, great talking with you. >> Yeah, thanks for having me. >> Thank you so much for watching theCUBE. (electric bubbly music)