(bright music) >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021 in person. So a live event, physical in-person, also virtual hybrid. So a lot of great action online, check out the website. All the videos are there on theCUBE, as well as what's going on all of the actions on site and theCUBE's here. I'm John Furrier, your host with Dave Vellante, my cohost. Finally, we've got David Brown, VP of Elastic Compute Cloud. EC2, the bread and butter. Our favorite part of Amazon. David, great to have you back on theCUBE in person. >> John, it's great to be back. It's the first time I'd been on theCUBE in person as well. A lot of virtual events with you guys, but it's amazing to be back at re:Invent. >> We're so excited for you. I know, Matt Garman and I've talked in the past. We've talked in the past. EC2 is just an amazing product. It's always been the core block of AWS. More and more action happening and developers are now getting more action and there's well, we wrote a big piece about it. What's going on? The Silicon's really paying off. You've got to also general purpose Intel and AMD, and you've got the custom silicon, all working together. What's the new update? Give us a scoop. >> Well, John, it's actually 15 years of EC2 this year and I've been lucky to be on that team for 14 years and so incredible to see the growth. It's been an amazing journey. The thing that's really driven us, two things. One is supporting new workloads. And so what are the workloads that customers have available out there trying to do on the cloud that we don't support and launch new instance types. And that's the first thing. The second one is price performance. How do we give customers more performance at a continuously decreasing price year-over-year? And that's just driven innovation across EC2 over the years with things like Graviton. All of our inferential chips are custom silicon, but also instance types with the latest Intel Ice Lake CPU's, latest Milan. We just announced the AMD Milan instance. It's just constantly innovation across the ever-increasing list of instances. So super exciting. >> So instances become the new thing. Provision an instance, spin up an instance. Instance becomes, and you can get instances, flavors, almost like flavors, right? >> David: Yeah. >> Take us through the difference between an instance and then the EC2 itself. >> That's correct, yeah. So we actually have, by end of the year, right now we have over 475 different instances available to you whether it's GPU accelerators, high-performance computing instances, memory optimized, just enormous number. We'll actually hit 500 by the end of the year, but that is it. I mean, customers are looking for different types of machines and those are the instances. >> So the Custom Silicon, it's one of the most interesting developments. We've written about it. AWS secret weapon is one of them. I wonder if you could take us back to the decision points and the journey. The Annapurna acquisition, you started working with them as a partner, then you said, all right, let's just buy the company. >> David: Yeah. >> And then now, you're seeing the acceleration, your time to tapeout is way, way compressed. Maybe what was the catalyst and maybe we can get into where it's going. >> Yeah, absolutely. Super interesting story 'cause it actually starts all the way back in 2008. In 2008, EC2 had actually been around for just a little under two years. And if you remember back then, everybody was like, will virtualize and hypervisors, specialization would never really get you the same performances, what they were calling bare metal back then. Everybody's looking at the cloud. And so we took a look at that. And I mean, network latencies, in some cases with hypervisors were as high as 200 or 300 milliseconds. And it was a number of real challenges. And so we knew that we would have to change the way that virtualization works and get into hardware. And so in 2010, 2011, we started to look at how could I offload my network processing, my IO processing to additional hardware. And that's what we delivered our first Nitro card in 2012 and 2013. We actually offloaded all of the processing of network to a Nitro card. And that Nitro card actually had a Annapurna arm chip on it. Our Nitro 1 chip. >> For the offload? >> The offload card, yeah. And so that's when my team started to code for Arm. We started to work on our Linux works for Arm. We actually had to write our own operating system initially 'cause there weren't any operating systems available we could use. And so that's what we started this journey. And over the years, when we saw how well it worked for networking, we said, let's do it for storage as well. And then we said, Hey, we could actually improve security significantly. And by 2017, we'd actually offloaded 100% of everything we did on that server to our offload cards Leaving a 100% of the server available for customers. And we're still actually the only cloud provider that does that today. >> Just to interject, in the data center today, probably 30% of the general purpose cores are used for offloads. You're saying 0% in the cloud. >> On our nitro instances, so every instance we've launched since 2017, our C5. We use 0% of that central core. And you can actually see that in our instance types. If you look at our largest instance type, you can see that we're giving you 96 cores and we're giving you, and our largest instance, 24 terabytes of memory. We're not giving you 23.6 terabytes 'cause we need some. It's all given to you as the customer. >> So much more efficient, >> Much, much more efficient, much better, better price performance as well. But then ultimately those Nitro chips, we went through Nitro 1, Nitro 2, Nitro 3, Nitro 4. We said, Hey, could we build a general purpose server chip? Could we actually bring Arm into the cloud? And in 2018, we launched the A1 instance, which was our Graviton1 instance. And what we didn't tell people at the time is that it was actually the same chip we were using on our network card. So essentially, it was a network card that we were giving to you as a server. But what it did is it sparked the ecosystem. That's why we put it out there. And I remember before launch, some was saying, is this just going to be a university project? Are we going to see people from big universities using Arm in the cloud? Was it really going to take off? And the response was amazing. The ecosystem just grew. We had customers move to it and immediately begin to see improvements. And we knew that a year later, Graviton2 was going to come out. And Graviton2 was just an amazing chip. It continues to see incredible adoption, 40% price performance improvement over other instances. >> So this is worth calling out because I think that example of the network card, I mean, innovation can come from anywhere. This is what Jassy always would say is do the experiments. Think about the impact of what's going on here. You're focused on a mission. Let's get that processing of the lowest cost, pick up some workloads. So you're constantly tinkering with tuning the engine. New discovery comes in. Nitro is born. The chip comes in. But I think the fundamental thing, and I want to get your reaction to this 'cause we've put this out there on our post on Sunday. And I said, in every inflection point, I'm old enough, my birthday was yesterday. I'm old enough to know that. >> David: I saw that. >> I'm old enough to know that in the eighties, the client server shifts. Every inflection point where development changed, the methodology, the mindset or platforms change, all the apps went to the better platform. Who wants to run their application on a slower platform? And so, and those inflects. So now that's happening now, I believe. So you got better performance and I'm imagining that the app developers are coding for it. Take us through how you see that because okay, you're offering up great performance for workloads. Now it's cloud workloads. That's almost all apps. Can you comment on that? >> Well, it has been really interesting to see. I mean, as I said, we were unsure who was going to use it when we initially launched and the adoption has been amazing. Initially, obviously it's always, a lot of the startups, a lot of the more agile companies that can move a lot faster, typically a little bit smaller. They started experimenting, but the data got out there. That 40% price performance was a reality. And not only for specific workloads, it was broadly successful across a number of workloads. And so we actually just had SAP who obviously is an enormous enterprise, supporting enterprises all over the world, announced that they are going to be moving the S/4 HANA Cloud to run on Graviton2. It's just phenomenal. And we've seen enterprises of that scale and game developers, every single vertical looking to move to Graviton2 and get that 40% price performance. >> Now we have to, as analysts, we have to say, okay, how did you get to that 40%? And you have to make some assumptions obviously. And it feels like you still have some dry powder when you looked at Graviton2. I think you were running, I don't know, it's speculated anyway. I don't know if you guys, it's your data, two and a half, 2.5 gigahertz. >> David: Yeah. >> I don't know if we can share what's going on with Graviton3, but my point is you had some dry powder and now with Graviton3, quite a range of performance, 'cause it really depends on the workload. >> David: That's right. >> Maybe you could give some insight as to that. What can you share about how you tuned Graviton3? >> When we look at benchmarking, we don't want to be trying to find that benchmark that's highly tuned and then put out something that is, Hey, this is the absolute best we can get it to and that's 40%. So that 40% is actually just on average. So we just went and ran real world workloads. And we saw some that were 55%. We saw some that were 25. It depends on what it was, but on average, it was around the 35, 45%, and we said 40%. And the great thing about that is customers come back and say, Hey, we saw 40% in this workload. It wasn't that I had to tune it. And so with Graviton3, launching this week. Available in our C7g instance, we said 25%. And that is just a very standard benchmark in what we're seeing. And as we start to see more customer workloads, I think it's going to be incredible to see what that range looks like. Graviton2 for single-threaded applications, it didn't give you that much of a performance. That's what we meant by cloud applications, generally, multi-threaded. In Graviton3, that's no longer the case. So we've had some customers report up to 80% performance improvements of Graviton2 to Graviton3 when the application was more of a single-threaded application. So we started to see. (group chattering) >> You have to keep going, the time to market is compressing. So you have that, go ahead, sorry. >> No, no, I always want to add one thing on the difference between single and multi-threaded applications. A lot of legacy, you're single threaded. So this is kind of an interesting thing. So the mainframe, migration stuff, you start to see that. Is that where that comes in the whole? >> Well, a lot of the legacy apps, but also even some of the new apps, like single threading like video transcoding, for example, is all done on a single core. It's very difficult. I mean, almost impossible to do that multi-threaded way. A lot of the crypto algorithms as well, encryption and cryptography is often single core. So with Graviton3, we've seen a significant performance boost for video encoding, cryptographic algorithms, that sort of thing, which really impacts even the most modern applications. >> So that's an interesting point because now single threaded is where the vertical use cases come in. It's not like more general purpose OS kind of things. >> Yeah, and Graviton has already been very broad. I think we're just knocking down the last few verticals where maybe it didn't support it and now it absolutely does. >> And if an ISV then ports, like an SAP's ports to Graviton, then the customer doesn't see any, I mean, they're going to see the performance difference, but they don't have to think about it. >> David: Yeah. >> They just say, I choose that instance and I'm going to get better price performance. >> Exactly, so we've seen that from our ISVs. We've also been doing that with our AWS services. So services like EMR, RDS, Elastic Cache, it will be moving and making Graviton2 available for customers, which means the customer doesn't have to do the migration at all. It's all done for them. They just pick the instance and get the price performance benefits, and so yeah. >> I think, oh, no, that was serverless. Sorry. >> Well, Lambda actually just did launch on Graviton2. And I think they were talking about a 35% price performance improvement. >> Who was that? >> Lambda, a couple of months ago. >> So what does an ISV have to do to port to Graviton. >> It's relatively straightforward, and this is actually one of the things that has slowed customers down is the, wow, that must be a big migration. And that ecosystem that I spoke about is the important part. And today, with all the Linux operating systems being available for Arm running on Graviton2, with all of the container runtimes being available, and then slowly open source applications in ISV is being available. It's actually really, really easy. And we just ran the Graviton2 four-day challenge. And we did that because we actually had an enterprise migrate one of the largest production applications in just four days. Now, I probably wouldn't recommend that to most enterprises that we see is a little too fast, but they could actually do that. >> But just from a numbers standpoint, that's insanely amazing. I mean, when you think about four days. >> Yeah. >> And when we talked on virtually last year, this year, I can't remember now. You said, we'll just try it. >> David: That's right. >> And see what happens, so I presume a lot of people have tried it. >> Well, that's my advice. It's the unknown, it's the what will it take? So take a single engineer, tell them and give them a time. Say you have one week, get this running on Graviton2, and I think the results are pretty amazing, very surprised. >> We were one of the first, if not the first to say that Arm is going to be dominant in the enterprise. We know it's dominant in the Edge. And when you look at the performance curves and the time to tape out, it's just astounding. And I don't know if people appreciate that relative to the traditional Moore's law curve. I mean, it's a style. And then when you combine the power of the CPU, the GPU, the NPU, kind of what Apple does in the iPhone, it blows away the historical performance curves. And you're on that curve. >> That's right. >> I wonder if you could sort of explain that. >> So with Graviton, we're optimizing just across every single part of AWS. So one of the nice things is we actually own that end-to-end. So when it starts with the early design of Graviton2 and Graviton3, and we obviously working on other chips right now. We're actually using the cloud to do all of the electronic design automation. So we're able to test with AWS how that Graviton3 chip is going to work long before we've even started taping it out. And so those workloads are running on high-frequency CPU's on Graviton. Actually we're using Graviton to build Graviton now in the cloud. The other thing we're doing is we're making sure that the Annapurna team that's building those CPUs is deeply engaged with my team and we're going to ultimately go and build those instances so that when that chip arrives from tapeout. I'm not waiting nine months or two years, like would normally be the case, but I actually had an instance up and running within a week or two on somebody's desk studying to do the integration. And that's something we've optimized significantly to get done. And so it allows us to get that iteration time. It also allows us to be very, very accurate with our tapeouts. We're not having to go back with Graviton. They're all A1 chips. We're not having to go back and do multiple runs of these things because we can do so much validation and performance testing in the cloud ahead of time. >> This is the epiphany of the Arm model. >> It really is. >> It's a standard. When you send it to the fab, they know what's going to work. You hit volume and it's just no fab. >> Well, this is a great thread. We'll stay on this 'cause Adam told us when we met with them for re:Invent that they're seeing a lot more visibility into use cases at the scale. So the scale gives you an advantage on what instances might work. >> And makes the economics works. >> Makes the economics work, hence the timing, the shrinking time to market, not there, but also for the apps. Talk about the scale advantage you guys have. >> Absolutely. I mean, the scale advantage of AWS plays out in a number of ways for our customers. The first thing is being able to deliver highly optimized hardware. So we don't just look at the Graviton3 CPU, you were speaking about the core count and the frequency and Peter spoke about a lot of that in his keynote yesterday. But we look at how does the Graviton3 CPU work with the rest of the instance. What is the right balance between the CPU and memory? The CPU and the Hydro. What's the performance and the drive? We just launched the Nitro SSD, which is now we've actually building our own custom SSDs for Nitro getting better performance, being able to do updates, better security, making it more cloudy. We're just saying, we've been challenged with the SSD in the parts. The other place that scales really helping is in capacity. Being able to make sure that we can absorb things like the COVID spike, or the stuff you see in the financial industry with just enormous demand for compute. We can do that because of our scale. We are able to scale. And the final area is actually in quality because I have such an enormous fleet. I'm actually able to drive down AFR. So annual failure rates, are we well below what the mathematical theoretical tenant or possibility is? So if you look at what's put on that actual sticker on the box that says you should be able to get a full percent AFR. At scale and with focus, we're actually able to get that down to significantly below what the mathematical entitlement was actually be. >> Yeah, it's incredible. I've got a great, and this is the advantage, and that's why I believe anyone who's writing applications that has includes a database, data transfer, any kind of execution of code will use the stack. >> Why would they? Really, why? We've seen this, like you said before, whether it was PC, then the fastest Pentium or somebody. >> Why would you want your app to run slower? >> Unix box, right? ISVS want it to run as fast and as cheaply as possible. Now power plays into it as well. >> Yeah, well, we do have, I agree with what you're saying. We do have a number of customers that are still looking to run on x86, but obviously customers that want windows. Windows isn't available for Arm and so that's a challenge. They'll continue to do that. And you know the way we do look at it is most law kind of died out on us in 2002, 2003. And what I'm hoping is, not necessarily bringing wars a little back, but then we say, let's not accept the 10%, 15% improvement year-over-year. There's absolutely more we can all be doing. And so I'm excited to see where the x86 world's going and they doing a lot of great stuff. Intel Ice Lakes looking amazing. Milan is really great to have an AWS as well. >> Well, I'm thinking it's fair point 'cause we certainly look what Pat's doing it at Intel and he's remaking the company. I've said he's going to follow on the Arm playbook in my mind a little bit, and which is the right thing to do. So competition is a good thing. >> David: Absolutely. >> We're excited for you and a great to see Graviton and you guys have this kind of inflection point. We've been tracking for a while, but now the world's starting to see it. So congratulations to your team. >> David: Thank you. >> Just a couple of things. You guys have some news on instances. Talk about the deprecation issue and how you guys are keeping instances alive real quick. >> Yeah, we're super customer obsessed at Amazon. And so that really drives us. And one of the worst things for us to do is to have to tell a customer that we no longer supporting a service. We recently actually just deprecated the ECG classic network. I'm not sure if you saw that and that's actually off the 10 years of continuing to support it. And the only reason we did it is we have a tiny percentage of customers still using that from back in 2012. But one of the challenges is obviously instance hardware eventually will ultimately time out and fail and have hardware issues as it gets older and older. And so we didn't want to be in a place, in EC2, where we would have to constantly go to customers and say that M1 small, that C3, whatever you were running, it's no longer supported, please move. That's just a text that customers shouldn't have to do. And if they still getting value out of an older instance, let them keep using it. So we actually just announced at re:Invent, in my keynote on Tuesday, the longevity support for EC2 instances, which means we will never come back to you again and ask you to please get off an instance, because we can actually emulate all those instances on our Nitro system. And so all of these instances are starting to migrate to Nitro. You're getting all the benefits of Nitro for now some of our older zen instances, but also you don't have to worry about that work. That's just not something you need to do to get off in all the instance. >> That's great. That's a great test service. Stay on as long as you want. When you're ready to move, move. Okay, final question for you. I know we've got time, I want to get this in. The global network, you guys are known for AWS cloud WAN serve. Gives you updates on what's going on with that. >> So Werner just announced that in his keynote and over the last two to three years or so, we've seen a lot of customers starting to use the AWS backbone, which is extensive. I mean, you've seen the slides in Werner's keynote. It really does span the world. I think it's probably one of the largest networks out there. Customers starting to use that for actually their branch office communication. So instead of going and provisioning the own international MPLS networks and that sort of thing, they say, let me onboard to AWS with VPN or direct connect, and I can actually run the AWS backbone around the world. Now doing that actually has some complexity. You got to think about transit gateways. You got to think about those inter-region peering. And AWS cloud when takes all of that complexity away, you essentially create a cloud WAN, connecting to it to VPN or direct connect, and you can even go and actually set up network segments. So essentially VLANs for different parts of the organization. So super excited to get out that out of there. >> So the ease of use is the key there. >> Massively easy to use. and we have 26 SD-WAN partners. We even partnering with folks like Verizon and Swisscom in Switzerland to telco to actually allow them to use it for their customers as well. >> We'll probably use your service someday when we have a global rollout date. >> Let's do that, CUBE Global. And then the other was the M1 EC2 instance, which got a lot of applause. >> David: Absolutely. >> M1, I think it was based on A15. >> Yeah, that's for Mac. We've got to be careful 'cause M1 is our first instance as well. >> Yeah right, it's a little confusion there. >> So it's a Mac. The EC2 Mac is with M1 silicon from Apple, which super excited to put out there. >> Awesome. >> David Brown, great to see you in person. Congratulations to you and the team and all the work you guys have done over the years. And now that people starting to realize the cloud platform, the compute just gets better and better. It's a key part of the system. >> Thanks John, it's great to be here. >> Thanks for sharing. >> The SiliconANGLE is here. We're talking about custom silicon here on AWS. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. You're watching theCUBE. The global leader in tech coverage. We'll be right back with more covers from re:Invent after this break. (bright music)

>>from >>around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel, AWS and our community partners. >>Hello and welcome back to the Cube Coverage of eight of us reinvent 2020 Virtual. I'm John for your host of the Cube. Normally we're in person this year. It's a virtual event. It is reinvent and cube virtual here. We got great interview here. Segment with VM ware and A W s. Two great guests. Keep both Cube alumni. Marc Lemire, senior vice president, general manager, The Cloud Services Business Unit VM Ware and Dave Brown, Vice president Elastic Compute Cloud easy to from Amazon Web services Gentlemen, great to see you guys. Thanks for coming on. >>Great. Thank you. Good to be back. >>Thanks. Great to be back. >>So you know, Dave, we love having you on because ec2 obviously is the core building block of a device. Once the power engine, it's the core product. And Mark, we were just talking a few months ago at VM World of momentum you guys have had on the business front. It's even mawr accelerated with co vid on the pandemic. Give us the update The partnership three years ago when Pat and Andy in San Francisco announced the partnership has been nothing but performance. Business performance, technical integration. Ah, lots happened. What's the update here for reinvent? >>Yeah, I guess the first thing I would say is look, you know, the partnership has has never been stronger. You know, as you said, uh, we announced the partnership and delivered the initial service three years ago. And I think since then, both companies have really been focused on innovating rapidly on behalf of our customers bringing together the best of the VM, or portfolio, and the best of, you know, the entire AWS. A set of capabilities. And so we've been incredibly pleased to be able to deliver those that value to our joint customers. And we look forward to continue to work very closely together. You know, across all aspects of our two companies toe continue to deliver more and more value to our joint customers. >>Well, I want to congratulate you guys at VM where, you know, we've been following that story from day one. I let a lot of people skeptical on the partnership. We were pretty bullish on it. We saw the value. It's been just been great Synergy day. I want to get your thoughts because, you know, I've always been riffing about enabling technologies and and the way it works is enabling technologies. Allow your partners to make more money, too. Right? So you guys do that with the C two, and I know that for a fact because we're doing well with our virtual event cloud, but are easy to bills are up, but who cares? We're doing well. This is the trend you guys are enabling partners, and VM Ware in particular, has a lot of customers that are on AWS. What's your perspective on all this? >>You know the part. The part maker system is so important for us, right? And we get from our customers. We have many customers who, you know, use VM ware in their own environment. They've been using it for years and years, um, true for many other software applications as well and other technologies. Andi, when they moved to AWS there very often. When you use those tools on those services on AWS is well and so you know, we we partner with many, many, many, many companies, and so it's a high priority for us. The VM Ware partnership, I think, is being sort of role model for us in terms of, you know, sitting out outside Sana goal back in 2016. I think it waas and, you know, delivering on that. Then continue to innovate on features over the last three years listening to our customers, bringing larger customers on board, giving them more advanced networking features, improving. You know that the instance types of being whereas utilizing to deliver value to their customers and most recently, obviously, with Outpost AWS outposts and parking with VM ware on VM are enabled outposts and bringing that to our customers and their own data centers. So we see the whole partner ecosystem is critically important. Way were spent a lot of time with VM and other partners on something that our customers really value. >>Mark, I want to get your thoughts on this because I was just riffing with Day Volonte about this. Um, heightened awareness with that covert 19 in the pandemic has kind of created, which is an accelerant of the value. And one >>of the >>things that's a parent is when you have this software driven and software defined kind of environment, whether it's in space or on premise or in the cloud. Um, it's the software that's driving everything, but you have to kind of components. You have the how do you operate something, And then how does the software works? So you know, it's the hand in the glove operators and software in the cloud really is becoming kind of the key things. You guys have been very successful as a company with I t operations, and now you're moving into the cloud. Can you share your thoughts on how VM Ware cloud on AWS takes that next level for your customers? So I think that's a key point that needs to be called that. What's your What's your thoughts on that? >>Yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head, and I think, you know, look, every company is on a journey to transform the level of capability they're able to offer to their customers and their employees, right? And a big part of that is how do they modernize their application environment? How do they how do they deliver new applications and services? And so this has been underway for for a while now. But if if anything, I think Cove, it has only accelerated. Um, the need for customers to be able to continue to go down that path. And so, you know, between VM ware in AWS, um, you know, we're looking to provide those customers a platform that allows them to accelerate their path to application, modernization and new services and capabilities. And, um, you know, Dave talked about the ecosystem and the importance of the ecosystem that AWS and I think you know, together. What we've been able to do if you sort of think about it, is, you know, bringing together this rich set of VM Ware services and capabilities. Um, that we've talked about before, as well as new VM Ware capabilities, for example, the ability to enable kubernetes based applications and services on top of this Corby, um or platform with Tan Xue. Right. So customers can get access to all of that is they go down this modernization path. But, you know, right next door in the same ese is 375 native AWS services that they can use together in conjunction, uh, with that environment. And so if you think about accelerating that journey right Being ableto rapidly migrate those VM ware based workloads into the AWS cloud. When you're in the AWS cloud, be able to modernize that environment using the VM Ware Tansu capability, the native AWS services and then the infrastructure that needs to come together to make that possible, for example, the network connectivity that needs to be enabled, um, to take advantage of some of those services together. Um, you know, we're really we're trying to accelerate our delivery of those capabilities so that we can help our customers accelerate the delivery of that application value thio to their customers. >>David want to get your thoughts on the trends If you speak to the customers out there at VM Ware, customers that are on the cloud because you know the sphere, for instance, very popular on the Ws Cloud with VM Ware Cloud as well as these new modern application trends like Tan Xue, Project Monterey is coming around the corner that was announced that VM world what trends do you see from the two perspective that you could share to the VM ware eight of his customers? What's the key wave right now that they should be riding on. >>Yeah, I think a few things, you know, we definitely are seeing an acceleration in customers Looking Thio looking to utilize humor on AWS You know, there was a lot of interest early on, really, over the last year, I think we've seen 140% growth in the service, which has been incredibly exciting for both of us and really shows that we we're providing customers with the service that works. You know, I think one of the key things that Mark called out just talking previously was just how simple it is for customers to move. You know, often moving to the cloud gets muddled with modernization, and it takes a long time because customers to kind of think about how do they actually make this move? Or are they stuck within their own facility on data center or they need to modernize? We moved to a different hyper visor with PM on AWS. You literally get that same environment on AWS, and so whether it's a a migration because you want to move out of your on premise facility, whether it's a migration because you want to grow and expand your facility without needing to. You know, build more data centers yourself Whether you're looking to build a d. R site on AWS on whether you looking just, you know, maybe build a new applications tank that you wanna build in a modern way, you know, using PMR in Tanzania and all the AWS services, all of those a positive we're seeing from customers. Um, you know, I think I think as the customers grow, the demand for features on being were in AWS grows as well. And we put out a number of important features to support customers that really, really large scale. And that's something that's being exciting. It's just some of the scale that we're seeing from very, very large being, we customers moving over to AWS. And so I think you know a key messages. If you have a Vienna installation today and you're thinking about moving to the cloud, it's really a little that needs to stop you in starting to move. It is is very simple to set up, and very little you have to do to your application stack to actually move it over. >>Mark, that's a great point. I want to get your thoughts on that in reaction toe. What? Dave just said Because this is kind of what you guys had said many years ago and also a VM world when we were chatting, disrupting operations just to stand up the clubs shouldn't be in place. It should be easy on you. Heard what Dave said. It's like you got >>a >>lot of cultures that are operating large infrastructure and they want to move to the cloud. But they got a mandate toe make everything. Is a services more cloud native coming. So, yeah, you gotta check off the VM where boxes and keep things running. But you gotta add more modern tooling mawr application pressure there. So there's a lot of pressure from the business units and the business models to say We gotta take advantage of the modern applications. How do you How do you look at that? >>Yeah, yeah, I mean, I think Look, making this a simple is possible is obviously a really important aspect of what we're trying Thio enable for our customers. Also, I think the speed is important, right? How you know, how can we enable them? Thio accelerate their ability to move to the cloud, but then also accelerate their ability Thio, um, deliver new services and capabilities that will differentiate their business. And then how do we, uh, kind of take some of the heavy lifting off the customers plate in terms of what it actually takes to operate and run the infrastructure and do so in a highly available way that they could depend upon for their business? And of course, delivering that full capabilities of service is a big part of that. You know, one of my when my favorite customer examples eyes a company called Stage Coach, uh, European based transportation company. And they run a network of Busses and trains, etcetera, and they actually decided to use VM. Tosto run one of their most mission critical applications, which is involved with basically scheduling, scheduling those systems right in the people that they know, the bus drivers in the train conductors etcetera. And so if you think about that application right, its's a mission critical application for them. It's also one that they need to be able to iterate involved and improve very quickly, and they were able to take advantage of a number of fairly unique capabilities of the joint service we built together to make that possible. Um, you know, the first thing that they did is they took advantage of something called stretch clusters. The M we're cloud on AWS stretch clusters Where, uh, we basically take that VM Ware environment and we stretch it. We stretch the network across to aws availability zones in the same region, Onda. Then they could basically run their applications on top of that that environment. And this is a really powerful capability because it ensures the highest levels of s L. A. For that application for four nines. In this case, if anything happens, Thio fail in one of those, uh, Aziz, we can automatically fail over and restart the application in the second ese on DSO provides this high level of availability, but they're also able to take advantage of that without on day one. Talk about keeping it simple without on day one, requiring any changes to the application of myself because that application knew how to work in the sphere. And so you know that I work in the sphere in the cloud and it can fail over on the sphere in the cloud on dso they were able to get there quickly. They're able Thio enable that application and now they're taking the next step. Which is how do I enhance and make that application even better, you know, leveraging some of the VM or capabilities also looking to take advantage of some of the native AWS capabilities. So I think that sort of speed, um you know that simplicity that helps helps customers down that path to delivering more value to their employees and their customers. That and we're really excited that were ableto offer that your customers >>just love the philosophy that both companies work back from the customer customer driven kind of mentality certainly key here to this partnership, and you can see the performance. But I think one of the differentiations that I love is that join integration thing engineering that you guys were doing together. I think that's a super valuable, differentiated VM where Dave, this is a key part of the relationship. You know, when I talked to Pat Gelsinger and and again back three years ago and he had Raghu from VM, Ware was like, This is different engineering together. What's your perspective from the West side when someone says, Yeah. Is that Riel? You know, it is easy to really kind of tied in there and his Amazon really doing joint engineering. What do you say to that? >>Oh, absolutely. Yeah, it's very real. I mean, it's been an incredible, incredible journey together, Right? Right, Right from the start, we were trying to work out how to do this back in 2016. You know, we were using some very new technology back then that we hadn't honestly released yet. Uh, the nitrous system, right? We started working with family and the nitrous system back in late 2016, and we only launched our first nitrous system enabled instance that reinvent 2017. And so we were, you know, for a year having being a run on the nitrous system, internally making sure that, you know, we would support their application and that VM Ware ran well on BC around. Well, on aws on, that's been ongoing. And, you know, the other thing I really enjoy about the relationship is learning how to best support each other's customers on on AWS and being where, and Mark is talking about stretch clusters and are being whereas, you know, utilizing the availability zones. We've done other things in terms of optimizing placement with across, you know, physical reaction in data centers. You know, Mark and the team have put forward requirements around, you know, different instance types and how they should perform invest in the Beamer environment. We've taken that back into our instance type definition and what we've released there. So it happens in a very, very low level. And I think it's both teams working together frequently, lots of meetings and then, you know, pushing each other. You know, honestly. And I think for the best experience or at the end of the day, for our joint customers. So it's been a great relationship. >>It helps when both companies are very fluent technically and pushing the envelope with technology. Both cultures, I know personally, are very strong technically, but they also customer centric. Uhm, Mark, I gotta put you on the spot on this question because this comes up every year this year more than ever. Um, is the question around VM ware on A W S and VM ware in general, and it's more of a general industry theme. But I wanna ask you because I think it relates to the US Um vm ware cloud on aws. Um, the number one question we get is how can I automate my I t operations? Because it's kind of a no brainer. Now it's kind of the genes out of the bottle. That's a mandate. But it's not always easy. Easy as it sounds to dio, you still got a lot to dio. Automation gets you level set to take advantage of some of these higher level services, and all customers want to get there fast. Ai i o t a lot of goodness in the cloud that you kinda gotta get there through kinda automating the based up first. So how did how are your customers? How are you guys helping customers automate their infrastructure operations? >>Yeah, I mean, Askew articulated right? This is a huge demand. The requirement from our customer base, right? Uh, long gone are the days that you wanna manually go into a u I and click around here, click there to make things happen, right? And so, um, you know, obviously, in addition to the core benefit of hey, we're delivering this whole thing is a service, and you don't have to worry about the hardware, the software, the life cycle all of that, Um you know, at a higher level of the stack, we're doing a lot of work to basically expose a very rich set of AP eyes. We actually have enabled that through something called the VM, or Cloud Developer center, where you can go and customer could go and understand all of the a p i s that we make available to that they can use to build on top of to effectively automated orchestrate their entire VM or cloud on AWS based infrastructure. And so that's an area we've we've invested a lot in. And at the end of the day, you know we want Thio. Both enable our customers to take their existing automation tooling that they might have been using on their VM ware based environment in their own data center. Obviously, all of that should continue to work is they bring that into the emcee aws. Um but now, once we're in AWS and we're delivering, this is a service in AWS. There's actually a higher level of automation, um that we can enable, and so you know everything that you can do through the VM or cloud console. Um, you can do through a P. I s So we've exposed roughly a piece that allow you to add or remove instance capacity ap eyes that allow you to configure the network FBI's that allow you toe effectively. Um, automate all aspects of sort of how you want Thio configure and pull together that infrastructure. Onda. You know, as Dave said, a lot of this, you know, came from some of those early just customer discussions where that was a very, very clear expectations. So, you know, we've we've been working hard. Thio make that possible. >>So can customers integrate native Cloud native technologies from AWS into APS running on VM ware cloud on any of us? >>Yeah. I mean, I'll give you one example for so we you know, we've been able to support for cloud formation right on top of the M C. Mehta best. And so that's, you know, one way that you can leverage these 80 best tools on top of on top of the m. C at best. Um and you know, as we talked about before, uh, you know everything on the VM ware in the VM ware service. We're exposing through those AP eyes. And then, of course, everything it best does has been built that way from the start. And so customers can work. Um, you know, seamlessly across those two environments. >>Great stuff. Great update. Final question for both of you. Uh, Dave will start with you. What's the unique advantages? When you people watching? That's gonna say, OK, I get it. I see the momentum. I've now got a thing about post pandemic growth strategies. I gotta fund the projects, so I'm either gonna retool while I'm waiting for the world to open up. Two. I got a tail wind. This is good for my business. I'm gonna take advantage of this. How do they modernize our application? What? The unique things with VM Ware Cloud on AWS. What's unique? What would you say? I >>mean, I think the big thing for me eyes the consistency, um, the other way that were built This between the the sphere on prime environment and the the sphere that you get on aws with BMC on aws. Um you know, when I think about modernization and honestly, any project that I do, we do it Amazon I don't like projects that required enormous amount of planning and then tooling. And then, you know, you've this massive waterfall stock project before you do anything meaningful. And what's so great about what we built here is you can start that migration almost immediately, start bringing a few applications over. And when you do that, you can start saying, Okay, where do we want to make improvements? But just by moving over to aws NBN were on AWS, you start to reap the benefits of being in the child right from day one. Many of the things Mark called out about infrastructure management and that sort of thing. But then you get to modernize off to that as well. And so just the richness in terms of, you know, being where a tan xue and then the you know, I think it's more than 200 AWS services. Now you get to bring all that into your application stack, but at a time at a at a at a cadence or time that really matters to you. But you could get going immediately, and I think that's the thing that customers ready need to do if you find yourself in a situation you know, with just how much the world's changed in the last year. Looking Thio. Modernize your applications deck, Looking for the cost benefits. Looking to maybe get out of the data center. Um, it's a relatively easy both forward and just put in a couple of engineers a couple of technicians on to actually starting to do the process. I think you'll be very surprised at how much progress you can actually make in a short amount of time. >>Mark, you're in charge of the Cloud Services business unit at VM Ware CPM. Where cloud on AWS successful more to do a lot of action kubernetes cloud native automation and the list goes on and on. What are the most unique advantages that you guys have? What would you say? >>Yeah, I mean, I would maybe just build on Dave's comments a bit. I think you know, if you look at it through the customer lens three ability to reiterate and the ability to move quickly and not being forced into sort of a one size fits all model, right? And so there may be certain applications that they run into VM, and they want to run into VM forever. Great. We could enable that there might be other applications that they want to move from a VM into a container, remove into kubernetes and do that in a very seamless way. And we can enable that with, uh, with Tan Xue, right? By the way, they may wanna actually many applications. They're gonna require, uh, complex composite applications that have some aspects of it running in communities, other aspects running on VMS. You know, other aspects connecting to some native AWS services. And so, you know, we could enable those types of, you know, incremental value that's delivered very, very quickly that allows them at the end of the day to move, move fast on behalf of their own customers and deliver more about it to them. So I think this this sort of philosophy, right that Dave talked about I think is is one of the really important things we've tried to focus on, um, together. But, you know, on behalf of our joint customers and you know that that sort of capabilities just gets richer and richer. Overtime right. Both of us are continuing to innovate, and both of us will continue to think about how we bring those services together as we innovate in our respective areas and how they need to link together as part of this This intense solution. Um, so, uh, you know that I think that you're gonna see us continue to invest, continue to move quickly. Um, continue to respond to what our customers together are asking us. Thio enable for them. >>Well, really appreciate the insight. Thanks for coming on this cube virtual, um, segment. Um, virtualization has hit the cube where we have multiple virtual stages out there at reinvent on the site. Obviously, it's a virtual event over three weeks, so it's a little bit not four days or three days. It's three weeks. So, um, if you're watching this, check out the site. Tons of good V o D. The executive leaderships Check out the keynotes that air there. It's awesome. Big news. Of course. Check out the cube coverage, but I have one final final question is you guys are leaders in the industry and within your companies, and we're virtual this year. You gotta manage your teams. You still gotta go to work every day. You gotta operate your business is a swell as work with customers. What have you guys learned? And can you share any, um, advice or observations of how to be effective as a leader, a za manager, and as a customer interface point for your companies? >>Well, I I think, uh, let me go first, then Mark Mark and had some things, you know, I think we're moving to certainly in the last year, specifically with covert. You know, we've we've we've just passed out. I think we just passed out seven months off, being remote now on, obviously doing reinvent as well. Um, it zits certainly taken some adjusting. I think we've done relatively well, um, with, you know, going virtual. We were well prepared at Amazon to go virtual, but from a leadership point of view, you know, making sure that you have been some positives, right? So for one, I have I have teams all over the world, and, uh, being virtually actually helped a lot with that. You know, everybody is virtually all on the same stage. It's not like we have a group of us in Seattle and a few others scattered around the world. Everybody's on the same cold now. on that has the same you know, be able to listen to in the same way. But I better think a lot about sort of just my own time. Personally, in the time that my team spends, I think it's been very easy for us. Thio run a little too hot waken start a little too early and run a little too late in the evenings on DSO, making sure that we protect that time. And then, obviously, from a customer point of view, you know, we found that customers are very willing to engage virtually as well around the world s Oh, that's something we've been able to utilize very well to continue to have. You know what we call our executive briefing center and do those sorts of things customer meetings on in some ways. You know, without the plane trip on either side to the other side of the world, you're able to do more of those and stay even more in contact with your customers. So it's been it's been a lot of adjustment for us. I think we've done well. I think you know, a zay said. We've had a look at Are we keeping it balanced because I think it's very easy to get out of balance and just from a time point of view. But I think I'm sure it'll show. It'll change again as the world goes back to normal. But in many ways, I think we've learned a lot of valuable lessons that I hope in some cases don't go away. I think well will probably be more virtual going forward. So that's what a bit of from my side >>creating. Yeah. Confronting hot people run hard. You can, you know, miss misfire on that and burnout gonna stay, Stay tuned. Mark your thoughts. Is leader customers defeating employees? Customers? >>Yeah. I mean, in many ways, I would say similar experience. I think, uh, I mean, if you sort of think back, right, uh, it's in many ways amazing that within the course of literally a week, right, I think about some of the BMR experience we went from, uh, you know, 90 95% of our employees, at least in the US, working in an office right to immediately all working from home. And, uh, you know, I think having the technology is available to make that possible and really? For the most part, without skipping a beat. Um, it is pretty pretty amazing, right? Um and then, you know, I think from a productivity perspective, in many ways, you know, it z increased productivity. Right? Um, they have mentioned the ability engage customers much more easily you think about in the past, you would have taken a flight to Europe to maybe meet with, you know, 5 to 10 customers and spent an entire week. And now you can do that in, you know, in the morning, right? Um, and the way we sort of engaged our teams, I think in many ways, um, sort of online, uh, can create a very, very rich experience, right? In a way to bring people together across many locations in a much more seamless way than if maybe part of the team is there in the office. And some other part of the team is trying toe connect in through resume or something else. A little bit of a fragmented experience. But if everyone's on the same platform, regardless of where you are e think we've seen some benefits from that. >>It's interesting. You see virtualization. What that did to the servers created cloud, you know. Hey, Productivity. >>You also have to be careful. You don't run those servers too hot. You >>gotta have a cooling. You got the cooling Eso I You know, this is really an interesting, you know, social, uh, equation Global phenomenon of productivity Cloud. Combined with this notion of virtual changes, the workloads, the work flows, the workplace and the workforce, right, The future work. So I think, you know, we're watching this closely. I know you guys have both had great success from the pandemic with this new pressure on the cloud, because it's a new model, a new way to do things, So we'll keep watching it. Thanks for the insight. Thanks for coming on and and enjoy the rest of reinvent. >>Great. Thank >>you. Great to be here. >>Okay, this the cubes coverage. I'm John for your host of Cuban, remember? Go to the reinvent site. Three weeks of great virtual content over this month, Of course. Cube coverage for three weeks. Stay tuned off. All the analysis and a lot of great thought leadership in the industry commentary. Stay with us throughout the month. Thank you. Yeah,

>> Narrator: Live from Nice, France, it's theCUBE, covering .NEXT Conference 2017 Europe, brought to you by Nutanix. (upbeat music) >> Welcome back. I'm Stu Miniman and you're watching theCUBE's live coverage of Nutanix .NEXT here in Nice. Happy to welcome back to the program Sunil Potti. Fresh off the keynote here, 2200 in attendance here at the second annual European show. Sunil is the chief product and development officer, and Sunil, your team's been busy. >> Yes. >> Product development-- >> Sunil: I hope so. >> 5.5, ton of new features in development, a lot of things going on. So let's step back for a second though, and it's a year after the IPO, I watched The Wall Street guys, they're always like, "Wait, are they boxes, or are they software, "are they infrastructure, are they cloud?" You know, you kind of step back, it's, I liked it, it was, "simplicity takes real genius," and then you're like, to try to appeal to the European cloud, it was "more tea, less clicks." So what's the kind of, as people think of Nutanix, when do we think of you, why do we think of you? >> Gotcha, gotcha. Yeah, I think there's a bunch of moving parts there, but I think our core thesis hasn't changed from where it was pre-IPO, post-IPO, multiple conferences. I think the core thesis as you know, Stu, is that we fundamentally think folks talk about hybrid cloud. Hybrid cloud, the first step is we know public clouds exist, true private clouds haven't been built yet. And they have to be first standardized, commoditized, and then harmonized with the public clouds, right? So I think, from our perspective, the core thesis is the fact that, if you can bottle up the AWS or GCP experience and funnel it inside the data center, there'll be a ton of workloads that stay inside. But with the right experience, for the right cost, right? >> Yeah. >> And essentially, that journey hasn't wavered from our perspective, right? So we're still on that. >> Yeah, absolutely, at Wikibon, we said, you know, cloud isn't a destination, it's really more of an operational model. >> Sunil: Sure, sure. >> So, if we can capture that, as you say, true private cloud, we said, we're starting to get there, and we actually credit Nutanix. So you know, of course, the messaging of enterprise cloud was probably a little bit aspirational-- >> Sure, sure. >> At the beginning, but you're filling in the pieces, you've got the partnerships, you've got the products rolling out, so, let's talk about your bread and butter. You know, what's new, what's launching now, I like that you're as a software company, you show a little bit more. Here's when we test some things out, it's that balance of, for the enterprise it's like, "Wait, is this going to work the way I think it is?" You put stuff out like the community edition first, let people play with it and then you GA it-- >> I think we talked a little bit about it and essentially, rather than me list out a whole series of functionality, I think the way we are also looking at it as well as building it, as well as rolling it out is in the form of what a customer can consume. So we are investing at Nutanix, like, capabilities that cross the life cycle, right? So we're investing and ensuring that communication gets a lot more emphasis because we think this paradigm of one-click data centers is something that people need the ubiquity to kind of play around with, right? So you see community relation from a learning side, then we're looking for capabilities for people to actually say and compare, "Look, Nutanix is one architecture, "we experienced another architecture, "three tiers in other architecture, "maybe public cloud." At some point in time people need the flexibility to actually have in the old world of TPC benchmarks the new world of what I would call production world benchmarks so we had a whole bunch of tools such as X-Ray coming out, then rather than leave it to professional services and so forth, rather than just worry about reducing the number of clicks once you have Nutanix, even before you get to Nutanix, how do you reduce the number of clicks? You get to Nutanix, right? That's where Xtract, which is a very popular tool from us again, that has been shipping for a month, for now, where you can actually click at a certain VM environment, at a certain database environment, and essentially, literally, without a whole bunch of lift and shift move into a private cloud environment, right? >> And my understanding, Xtract is, I could take my VMs really from VM environment to an AHV environment-- >> That's correct. And it also works on databases as well, like SQL databases, and so forth, right? >> Yeah, absolutely, that migration is something that, you know, it's like a four letter word for most people in IT. One of the things that we were early on kind of beating the drum on, is traditional three-tier architecture with the storage, your migration cost was at least 30% of the total cost of ownership because you had to bring data on, eventually you had to take data off, as opposed to, if you really have more like a pool, which is what HCI does, you know, that first, once I get on to it, that's the last time you need to do a migration because now I can move and add, remove, it knows, and we just kind of manage it there. Absolutely the other company I hear talking a lot about this thing is Amazon. You know, they've been working on database migration lots of companies, changing away their environment, and it's something that customers are looking for. >> Yeah, and it's almost like, for us with the public cloud at least you have a genuine sort of big hop in lift and shift, just because of the boundaries. It's a shame if we can't solve that problem without what we call make lift and shift invisible inside the data center at least so that's why we invest in things like Xtract so that people can, look, we're still less than one percent of the market so we expect a whole lot of migration to happen over the next few years. So anything that we can do to kind of accelerate customers to the point of ensuring that their architectural integrity is preserved in terms of environment I think it's a big focus for us. So you're going to see as emphasize Xtract not just for there for VM's or databases to Nutanix on pRAM. We're also going to see that as a fundamental construct for app mobility because imagine Calm as a construct that you're able to go in, proficient work loads and it's on pRAM or off pRAM but at some point in time you want to move them back and forth. You know the thing that we used to always say? "App mobility is slowly coming to fruition "with some of these constructs." >> Calms is the centerpiece of really your multi-cloud strategy. We've talked to some customers that some of the early folks pretty excited about it. A lot of the others have been like, "Okay, well, I've seen some slides and a demo," kind of squinting, looking at it. Reminds me of the early days, "I bet it can't really "do what they say it does." >> I think they have to taste the wine, just like everything else. There were a bunch of early believers who saw the product, who used the product, which we used as an early access program. But we took a step back when we acquired Calm a year ago, we had the choice of releasing a reasonably big product to mainstream. It's been seven years building our product, they had rewritten it two times. So they had already done a rewrite or two. What we took was, we took the time to ensure that it was burned into the Nutanix fabric. It had to fit into a Prism, it had to fit into a life cycle manager, it had to fit into a one-click update. It needs to look and feel like a natural extension versus a power-sucking alien, which is what we've seen with many of our competitor's products where you just buy some things and you put it in there and the more successful it is, the harder it is to homogenize. So we took our time, and that's what you're going to see in 5.5, customers can now actually genuinely use the product. And day one it'll have AHV support, AWS support, very quickly it'll have ESX, and GCP and Azure and it's a separate code train by the way, in a sense that the same code-base but it's being delivered as a service and you're going to see more and more of that paradigm where Nutanix is no longer going to be this blob of capabilities that in itself comes out fast but there's a bunch of microservices now that are going to be released. Not just on the cloud, but also on pRAM. So AFS is a good example, Xtract is a good example, Calm is a good example and now with 5.5 even Prism Central is going to be detached so that you can consume that at a different velocity than the code. >> How do you make sure that you balance that with the simplicity that really is the core piece of your business proposition? >> Yeah, yeah. I mean I think this is where we just have to be measured in ensuring that it's still one single code-base for example. What we want, we can't afford to have 18 different branches. So simple things like that will actually go a long way to make sure that somebody can still go to a console and say upgrade, it checks the right provisions. It's a little bit invisible, sort of like version mismatch of that is our problem, not a customer problem. >> Absolutely, so a lot in 5.5, which we haven't touched there but also really unveiling some of the next step in the journey, what you're working on for the next six months. What's the focus there, ya know cloud is, I think you talked about visible infrastructure to invisible cloud so looks like kind of expanding out and building out some of those cloud services. Take us through some of that. >> So I think the general theme is continue to fulfill our ambition around making infrastructure more invisible and then at the same time in parallel try to make clouds invisible and I'll break it down into three kinds of products. The first one is, we still have our journey, our things cut out to actually fulfill what I would call the A block, the Amazon block for the enterprise, and you can call it the Azure block or you can call it the Alphabet block now that we support multiple clouds. The point being that simple things suggest, we've done a great job of computer storage and virtualization. What about networking? And we've always said look, the problem is not in the data plane not working, top of the ax switches are pretty commodity, they work, you name it. The issue is always in the control plane, when something goes wrong, what are doing wrong, so that's one of the big things coming in 5.5 is built in network virtualization, provisioning, and one-click micro segmentation. And again the point being rather than buy very expensive products such as NSX or some other overlay products where you're virtualizing the network to secure the network. If you go to Amazon, or you go to Google, or you go to Azure not only do they not require to virtualize, the way that micro segmentation is built is genuinely with the simplicity of one click. You take out 10 VM's, put them in a secular group you're off to the races right? And the same paradigm then basically moves to us so in that vein of fulfilling that stack is one dimension. And a couple of key things that are new there that are in the next six months timeframe, not in the 5.5, the fact that when everything's said and done we've got a file service, we've got blocks, we've got containers, everything else, but what about object storage? Sounds obvious, right? So we've taken our time to kind of build a next generation object storage service, not a first generation one that can scale obviously to the levels of webscale that these days customers want, but is deployed with gentle requirements. An example of a gentle requirement is, you can't build an object story service that is simply on pRAM or simply off pRAM anymore. It has to be hybrid from day one. My primary needs to be data locality quote unquote to be invisible under the cover so my primary stuff is closer to my compute whereas my secondary and backup can be pulled out into the cloud. And the same thing applies on, even something much more simpler, which is EC2. What about EC2 for the enterprise? And that's where I think we were inspired to actually go build us Acropolis Compute Cloud, AC2, which essentially says you can take my Nutanix class, computer storage, and all of that, but then only have compute only nodes, and you could have SAB, SK lab requirements, you could have IBM power, you could have Oracle running on those, but they are essentially being managed with that single pane of glass. So this is the first time that you're seeing, based on a customer demand, now EH3 is now almost one of the three nodes being shipped is an EH3 node. We've come a long way in the last two years right? So people covet that simple virtualization, especially if we can, we extend it from a computer only fabric to the hyper-con only fabric. So I think that's one dimension-- >> It's interesting, just happenstance, that in the news recently, Amazon just announced that they're switching from Zen to KVM base so similar. Come on, you couldn't get Amazon to just sign on for AHV? >> No, see I think see what it is is that frankly AHV from our perspective was all about just ruggedizing KVM right, make it storage, Iops work well, the management plan work well, in fact, the fact that AWS is doing that is actually a good sign for us to go deeper with them frankly just as a tangent, rather than just go deeper with say Zi or GCP and so forth just natively as well now with C-fi instances there's an opportunity for Nutanix fabric to kind of seamlessly leverage that because the core constructs are similar with KBM right? So you're going to see some interesting stuff come up there, maybe that's for the next CUBE, the next conference. >> Sunill, it's interesting I've had a chance to talk to a few customers already and we talk about kind of that cloud, everything from the Germans that well I've got governance and compliance and I'm not not doing public cloud to, you've got a customer speaking today in a session that's like "I'm going to do "everything SAS and what I can't do SAS "I'll do infrastructure service," and then there's a little bit of stuff I can't do because I don't have enough network or things like that, and that's when Nutanix fit in for me. Making products and dealing with customers on such a broad spectrum is a little challenging and trying to fit where Nutanix is on that cloud because right if they're buying SAS from a lot of pieces it's like well you're not going to be as critical as opposed to somebody that's like well hey my data center is really my temple and you can help there so-- >> Yeah I think the philosophy that we use in terms of our product strategy and roadmap there is to maybe just give some color on it is it's the curse of the platform. The wealth of the platform which is like we are a platform company and we've internalized that, we're not a simple product company, so a lot of this comes down to what do we not do as well right which is versus what we just do. And one simple filter that we use is, is it directionally in a secular motion for enterprises or not. So a simple example is look, a lot of customers, and we would have probably quite a bit of sales if we simply said look I can take my existing Nutanix class serve, I just bought a three part array, I've bought a narat box, why don't you guys just co-exist with that. But then if you really think about it, it's like AWS coming to you and saying, "Oh by the way, take my service environment, "put my AWS software on it." It's like Apple coming out and saying, "Here's iOS, "I want it on Blackberry." So one click upgrades won't work, it's not the right thing. So there are things like that that we stayed away from that allows us to, even if we are stretched, lean in on the forward looking circular motions such as first, continue to finish the job inside, then harmonize inside and outside, and then go provide specialized services like Zi, in addition to what we're doing with DCP or Amazon, and others. >> Alright, last question I have for you, what's exciting you in the marketplace today, getting your engineers kind of fired up as kind of this next wave? >> Yeah I think look, I think some of the biggest thing is around how apps are now being re-platformed themselves, not just infrastructure and people used to word pass and all that other stuff but essentially I think we are now getting into the golden era, or the initial golden era where IAS re-platforming is more or less known. Now, of course it's going to take you five, 10 years to do it, but I don't think people are debating the way to do that. It's no longer open stack inside, it's no longer hosted clouds and all that crap right? It's two clouds, right? I think that wave has to emerge on the application side as well, you're starting to see some of that with communities, now becoming a defacto for one sliver of it, but there's so many other services that are up for grabs. So I think you're going to see in the next 12 to 18 months and you're obviously going to see Nutanix play a role there, is what does it mean to not hybridize my data center but what does it mean to hybridize my app. And I think there's a lot of interesting opportunity, interesting inspirational stuff there from an innovation perspective that keeps our guys going. >> Absolutely well Sunil, always a pleasure to chat with you, look forward to catching up with you at the next time and we'll be back with lots more coverage here from the Nutanix .NEXT conference in Nice, France. I'm Stu Miniman, you're watching theCUBE.