Tim Kelton, Descartes Labs | Google Cloud Next 2018
>> Live from San Francisco, it's The Cube, covering Google Cloud Next 2018. Brought to you by, Google Cloud and its ecosystem partners. >> Hello everyone, welcome back this is The Cube, live in San Francisco for Google Cloud's big event. It's called Google Next for 2018, it's their big cloud show. They're showcasing all their hot technology. A lot of breaking news, a lot of new tech, a lot of new announcements, of course we're bringing it here for three days of wall-to-wall coverage live. It's day two, our next guest is Tim Kelton, co-founder of Descartes Labs, doing some amazing work with imagery and data science, AI, TensorFlow, using the Google Cloud platform to analyze nearly 15 petabytes of data. Tim, welcome to The Cube. >> Thanks, great to be here >> Thanks for coming on. So we were just geeking out before we came on camera of the app that you have, really interesting stuff you guys got going on. Again, really cool, before we get into some of the tech, talk to me about Descartes Labs, you're co-founder, where did it come from? How did it start? And what are some of the projects that you guys are working on? >> I think, therefore I am. >> Exactly, exactly. Yeah, so we're a little different story than maybe a normal start-up. I was actually at a national research laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and there was a team of us that were focused on machine learning and using datasets, like remotely sensing the Earth with satellite and aerial imagery. And we were working on that from around 2008 to 2014 and then we saw just this explosion in things like, use cases for machine learning and applying that to real world use cases. But then, at the same time, there was this explosion in cloud computing and how much data you could store and train and things like that. So we started the company in late 2014 and now here we are today, we have around 80 employees. >> And what's the main thing you guys do from a data standpoint, where does the data come from? Take a minute to explain that. >> Yeah, so we focus on kind of a lot of often geospatial-centric data, but a lot of satellite and aerial imagery. A lot of what we call remote sensing, sensors orbiting the Earth or at low aerial over the Earth. All different modalities, such as different bands of light, different radio frequencies, all of those types of things. And then we fuse them together and have them in our models. And what we've seen is there's not just the magic data set that gives you the pure answer, right? It's fusing of a lot of these data sets together to tell you what's happening and then building models to predict how those changes affect our customers, their businesses, their supply chain, all those types of things. >> Let's talk about, I want to riff on something real quick, I know I want to get to some of the tech in a second. But my kids and I talk about this all the time, I got four kids and they're now, two in high school, two in college and they see Uber. And they see Uber remapping New York City every five minutes with the data that they get from the GPS. And we started riffing on drones and self-driving cars or aerial cars, if we want to fly in the air with automated helicopters or devices, you got to have some sort of coordinate system. We need this geospatial, and so, I know it's fantasy now, but what you guys are kind of getting at could be an indicator of the kind of geospatial work that's coming down later. Right now there's some cool things happening but you'd need kind of a name space or coordinates so you don't bump into something or are these automated drones don't fly near airports, or cell towers, or windmills, wind farms. >> Yeah, and those are the types of problems we solve or we look to solve, change is happening over time. Often it's the temporal cadence that's almost the key indicator in seeing how things are actually changing over time. And people are coming to us and saying, "Can you quantify that?" We've done things like agriculture and looking at crops grown, look at every single farm all over the whole U.S. and then build that into our models and say how much corn is grown at this field? And then test it back over the last 15 years and then say, as we get new imagery coming in, just daily flooding in through our Cloud Native platform, then just rerunning those models and saying, are we producing more today or less today? >> And then how is that data used, for example, take the agriculture example and that's used to say, okay, this region is maybe more productive than this region? Is it because of weather? Is it because of other things that they're doing? >> You can go back through all different types of use cases, everything from maybe if you're insuring that crop, you would might want to know if that's flooded more on the left side of the road or the right side of the road, as a predictive indicator. You might say, this is looking like a drought year. How have we done in drought years of 2007 and-- >> You look at irrigation trends. >> And you were talking off-camera about the ground truth, can you use IOT to actually calibrate the ground truth? >> Yeah and that's the sensor infusion we're seeing, everywhere around us we're seeing just floods and floods of sensors, so we have the sensors above the Earth looking down, but then as you have more and more sensors on the ground, that's the set of ground truth that you can train and calibrate. You could go back and train and train over again. It's a lot harder problem than, is this a cat or a dog? >> Yeah that's why I was riffing on the concept of a name space, the developer concept around, this is actually space. If you want to have flying drones deliver packages to transportation, you're going to need to know, some sort of triangulation, know what to do. But I got to ask you a question, so what are some of the problems that you're asked to look at, now that you have, you have the top-down view geospace, you got some ground truth sensor exploding in with more and more devices at the network, as a instrument anywhere it can have the IP or whatnot. What are some of the problems that you guys get asked to look at, you mentioned the agriculture, what else are you guys solving? >> Any sort of land use or land classification, or facilities and facility monitoring. It could be any sort of physical infrastructure that you're wanting to quantify and predict how those changes over time might impact that business vertical. And they're really varied, they're everything from energy and agriculture, and real estate, and things like that. Just last Friday, I was talking with, we have a two parts to our company. We have from the tech side, we have the engineering side which is normal engineering, but then we also have this applied science, where we have a team of scientists that are trying to build models often for our customers. 'Cause they're not, this is geospatial and machine learning, that's a rare breed of person. >> You don't want to cross pollinate. >> Yeah, and that's just not everywhere. Not all of our customers have that type of individual. But they were telling me, they were looking at the hurricane season coming up this Fall, and they had a building detector and they can detect all the buildings. So in just a couple hours, they ran that over all of the state of Florida and identified every building in the whole state of Florida. So now, as the seasons come in, they have a way to track that. >> They can be proactive and notify someone, hey you're building might need some boards on it or some sort of risk. >> Yeah and the last couple years look at all the weather events. In California we've had droughts and fires, but then you have flooding and things like that. And you're even able to start taking new types of sensors that are coming out, like the European Space Agency has a sensor that we ingest and it does synthetic aperture radar, where it's sending a radar signal down to the Earth and capturing it. So you can do things like water levels in reservoirs and things like that. >> And look at irrigation for farming, where is the droughts going to be? Where is the flooding going to be? So, for the folks watching, go to descarteslabs.com/search they got a search engine there, I wish we could show it on screen here but we don't have the terminal for it on this show. But it's a cool demo, you can search and find, you can pick an area, football field, and irrigation ditch, anything, cell tower, wind farm, and find duplicates and it gives you a map around the country. So the question is, is that, what is going on in the tech? 'Cause you got to use Cloud for this, so how do you make it all happen? >> Yeah, so we have two real big components to our tech space the first is, obviously we have lots and lots of satellite and aerial imagery, that's one of the biggest and messiest data sets and there's all types of calibration workloads that we have to do. So we have this ingest pipeline that processes it, cleans it, calibrates it, removes the clouds, not as in cloud computing infrastructure, but as in clouds over the head and then the shadows they emit down on the Earth. And we have this big ingestion process that cleans it all. And then finally compresses it and then we use things like GCS as an infinitely scalable object store. And what we really like on the GCS side is the performance we get 'cause we're reading and pulling in and out that compressed imagery all day long. So every time you zoom in or zoom out, like we're expanding it and removing that, but then our models, sometimes what we've done is, we'll want to maybe we're making a model in vegetation and we just want to look at the infrared bands. So we'll want to fuse together satellites from many different sources, fuse together ground sources, sensor sources, and just maybe pull in just one of those bands of light, not pull the whole files in. So that's what we've been building on our API. >> So how do you find GCP? What do you like? We've been all the users this week, what are the strengths? What are some of the weaknesses? What's on their to-do list? Documentation comes up a lot, we'd like to see better documentation, okay that's normal but what's your perspective? >> If you write code or develop, you always want something, you know it's always out of feature parody and stuff. From our perspective, the biggest strengths of GCP, one of the most core strengths is the network. The performance we've been able to see from the network is basically on par with what used to have, when we were at national laboratories we'd have access to high performance, super computing, some of the biggest clusters in the world. And in the network, in GCS and how we've been able scale linearly, like our ingest pipelines, we processed a petabyte of data on GCP in 16 hours through our processing pipeline on 30,000 cores. And we'll just scale that network bandwidth right up. >> Do you tap the premium network service or is it just the standard network? >> This is just stock. That was actually three years ago that we got to our bandwidth. >> How many cores? >> That was 30,000. >> Cause Google talked this morning about their standard network and the premium network, I don't know if you saw the keynote, with you get the low latency, if you pay a little bit more, proximate to your users, but you're saying on the standard network, you're getting just incredible... >> That was early 2015, it's just a few people in our company scaling up our ingest pipeline. We look at that, from then that was 40 years of imagery from NASA's Landsat program that we pulled in. And not that far off in the future, that petabyte's going to be a daily occurrence. So we wanted our ingest to scale and one of our big questions early on is actually, could the cloud actually even handle that type of scale? So that was one of the earliest workloads on things like-- >> And you feel good now about right? >> Oh yeah, and that was one of the first workloads on preemptible instances as well. >> What's on the to-do list? What would make your life better? >> So we've been working a lot with Istio that was shown here. So we actually gave a demo, we were in a couple talks yesterday on how we leverage and use Istio on our microservices. Our APIs are all built on that and so is our multi tenant SAS platform. So our ML team, when they're building models, they're all building models off different use cases, different bands of light, different geographic regions, different temporal windows. So we do all of that in Kubernetes and so those are all-- >> And what does Istio give you guys? What's the benefit of Istio? >> For us, we're using it on a few of our APIs and it's things like, really being able to see when you've start splitting out these microservices that network and that node-to-node or container-to-container latency and where things break down. Being about to do circuit retries or being able to try a response three different times before I return back a 500 or rate limit some of your APIs so they don't get crushed or you can scale them appropriately. And then actually being able to make custom metrics and to be able to fuse that back into how GKE scales on the node pools and stuff like that. >> So okay, that's how you're using it. So you were talking about Istio before, there's things that you'd like to see that aren't there today? More maturity or? >> Yeah I think Istio's like a very early starting point on all of this types of tools. >> So you want more? >> Oh yeah, definitely, definitely but I love the direction they're going and I love that it's open and if I ever wanted to I could build it on prem. But we were built basically native in the cloud so all of our infrastructure's in the cloud. We don't even have a physical server. >> What does open do for you, for your business? Is it just a good feeling? Do you feel like you're less locked in? Does it feel like you're giving back to the community? >> We read the Kubernetes source code. We've committed changes. Just recently, there's Google's open source, the OpenCensus library for tracing and things like that. We committed PRs back into that last week. We're looking for change. Something that doesn't quite work how we want, we can actually go.. >> Cause you're upstream >> Add value... >> For your business. >> We get in really hard problems, you kind of need to understand that code sometimes at that level. Build Tools, where Google took their internal tool, Blaze and opened source that bezel and so we're been using that. We're using that on our monorepos to do all of our builds. >> So you guys take it downstream, you work on it, and then all upstream contributions, is that how it works? >> Sometimes. >> Whenever you need to. >> Even Kubernetes, we've looked, if nothing else we've looked at the code multiple times and say, "Oh, this is why that autoscaler is behaving this way." Actually now I can understand how to change my workload a little bit and alter that so that the scaler works a little bit more performantly or we extract that last 10% of performance out to try and save that last 10%. >> This is a fascinating, I would love to come visit you guys and check out the facilities. It's the coolest thing ever. I think it's the future, there's so much tech going on. So many problems that are new and cool. You got the compute to boot behind it. Final question for you, how are you using analytics and machine learning? What's the key things you're using from Google? What are you guys building on your own? If anything, can you share a quick note on the ML and the analytics, how you guys are scaling that up? >> We've been using TensorFlow since very early days that geovisual search that you were saying, where we user TensorFlow models in some of those types of products. So we're big fans of that as well. And we'll keep building out models where it's appropriate. Sometimes we use very simple packages. You're just doing linear regression or things like that. >> So you're just applying that in. >> Yeah, it's the right tool for the right problem and always picking that and applying that. >> And just quick are you guys are for-profit, non-profit? What's the commercial? >> Yeah, we're for-profit, we're a Silicon Valley VC-backed company, even though we're in the mountains. >> Who's in the VCs? Which VCs are in? >> CrosslinK Capital is one our leading VCs, Eric Chin and that team down there and they've been great to work with. So they took a chance in a crazy bunch of scientists from up in the mountains of New Mexico. >> That sounds like a good VC back opportunity. >> Yeah and we had a CEO that was kind of from the Bay Area, Mark Johnson, and so we needed kind of both of those to really be successful. >> I mean I'm a big believer you throw money at great smart people and then merging markets like this. And you got a mission that's super cool, it's obvious that it's a lot to do and there's opportunities as well. >> Tremendous opportunities. Congratulations, Tim. Thanks for coming on The Cube. Tim Kelton, he's the co-founder at Descartes Labs. Here in The Cube, breaking down, bringing the technology, they got applied physicists, all these brains working on the geospatial future for The Cube. We are geospatial here in The Cube, in Google Next in San Francisco, I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante, stay with us, for more coverage after this short break.
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Brought to you by, Google Cloud a lot of new announcements, of of the app that you have, and applying that to real world use cases. And what's the main thing you guys do that gives you the pure answer, right? of the tech in a second. and then say, as we get on the left side of the road Yeah and that's the But I got to ask you a question, We have from the tech side, So now, as the seasons come in, and notify someone, Yeah and the last couple years and it gives you a map around the country. the first is, obviously we And in the network, in GCS that we got to our bandwidth. and the premium network, And not that far off in the future, one of the first workloads Kubernetes and so those are all-- on the node pools and stuff like that. So you were talking about Istio before, on all of this and I love that it's open We read the Kubernetes source code. and opened source that bezel so that the scaler works and the analytics, how you that you were saying, and always picking that and applying that. Yeah, we're for-profit, Eric Chin and that team down there That sounds like a Mark Johnson, and so we And you got a mission that's super cool, Tim Kelton, he's the
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Clint Crosier, AWS | AWS Summit DC 2021
>> Welcome back to theCUBE's covering of AWS Public Sector Summit. In-person here in Washington, DC. I'm John Furrier, your host, great to be back face to face. We've got a great, special guest Clint Crosier, who is the Director of AWS' Aerospace & Satellite. Major General of The Air Force/Space Force. Retired. Great to see you in person again. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you for having me. I appreciate that. >> First of all, props to you for doing a great job at Amazon, bringing all your knowledge from Space Force and Air Force into the cloud. >> Thank you. >> So that's great, historical context. >> It's been valuable and it's provided a whole lot of insight into what we're building with the AWS space team, for sure. >> So number one question I get a lot is: We want more space content. What's the coolest thing going on in space? Is there a really a satellite behind the moon there, hidden there somewhere? What's the coolest thing going on in space? >> Well, the coolest thing that's going on in space, I think is you're seeing the rapid growth of the space industry, I mean, to me. I've been in the space industry for 34 years now, and there have been periods where we projected lots of growth and activity and it just didn't really come about, especially in the 80's and the 90's. But what we're seeing today is that growth is taking place. Whether it's the numbers of satellites that are being launched around the globe every year, there's some 3,000 objects on orbit today. Estimates are that there'll be 30,000 objects at the end of the decade, or the number of new companies, or the number of global spinning. It is just happening right now, and it's really exciting. >> So, when people say or hear space, there's a lot of economic changes in terms of the cost structures of how to get things deployed into space. That brings up the question of: Is space an opportunity? Is it a threat vector? What about congestion and security? >> Yeah, well three great things, absolutely an opportunity. We're seeing the rapid growth of the space industry, and we're seeing more commercialization than ever before. In my whole career, The Air Force or, NASA, or the NRO would sort of, hold things and do them themselves Today, you're seeing commercial contracts going out from the National Reconnaissance Office, NASA, from The Air Force, from the Space Force. So lots of opportunity for commercial companies. Security. Absolutely, priority number one should be security is baked into everything we do at AWS. And our customers, our Government classified customers tell us the reason they came to AWS is our security is top notch and certified for all their workloads. And as you well know, we have from unclassified all the way up to top secret capabilities on the AWS cloud. So just powerful opportunities for our customers. >> Yeah. And a lot of competitors will throw foot on that. I know, I've reported on some of that and not a lot of people have that same credential. >> Sure. >> Compared to the competition. >> Sure. >> Now I have to ask you, now that you have the top secret, all these clouds that are very tailorable, flexible with space: How are you helping customers with this Aerospace Division? Is it is a commercial? In the public sector together? What's the... >> All of the above. >> Take us through the value proposition. >> Yeah, happy to do this. So what we recognized over the last two years or so we, at AWS, recognized all this rapid growth that we're talking about within the space industry. Every sector from launch to on-orbit activities, to space exploration, all of it. And so AWS saw that and we looked at ourselves and said: "Do we have the right organization and expertise in place really to help our customers lean into that?" And the answer was: we decided to build a team that had deep experience in space, and that was the team that we grew because our thesis was: If you have a deep experience in space, a deep experience in cloud, you bring those two together and it's a powerful contribution. And so we've assembled a team with more than 500 years of collective hands-on experience, flying satellites, launching rockets. And when we sit down with our customers to innovate on their behalf, we're able to come up with some incredible solutions and I'm happy to talk about those. >> I'd love to, but tell you what, first of all, there's a lot of space nerds out there. I love space. I love space geeking out on the technology, but take us through the year you had, you've had a pretty incredible year with some results. You have that brain trust there. I know you're hiring. I know that people want to work for you. I'm sure the resumes are flying in, a lot of action. >> There is. >> What are the highlights from this year? >> So the highlights I think is, we've built a team that the industry is telling us was needed. Again, there was no organization that really served the space cloud industry. And so we're kind of building this industry within the industry, the space cloud industry. And so number one, just establishing that team and leaning into that industry has been valuable. The other thing that we're real proud of is we built a global team, because space is a global enterprise. We have teams in Europe and in Asia and South America here in the U.S., so we built a global team. One of the things that we did right up front, we weren't even six months old, when we envisioned the idea of doing the AWS Space Accelerator. And some of the folks told me: "Clint, six months under your belt, maybe you ought to get your feet under you." And I said: "No, no. We move fast to support our customers." And so we made a call for any space startup that wanted to come on board with AWS and go through our four week Space Accelerator. We partnered with Sarah from Capital. And the idea was: if you're a small company that wants to grow and build and learn how you can use the cloud to gain competitive advantage, come with us. And so John, I would have been happy if we had 50 companies applied, we had 194 companies across 44 countries that applied to our accelerator. We had to down select a 10, but that was a tremendous accomplishment, two of those are speaking this afternoon, where they met each other at our accelerator and now have formed a partnership: Ursa Space and HawkEye 360 on how they build on the cloud together. Fascinating. >> Well, I love that story. First of all, I love the military mindset. No, we're not going to wait. >> Move it out. >> It's not take that hill, it's take that planet. >> Our customers won't wait, innovation, doesn't wait, the future doesn't wait. We have to move out. >> So, this brings up the entrepreneurship angle. We got there a little early, but I want to talk about it because it's super important. There's an entrepreneurial culture happening right now in the space community >> There is. At large, and it's getting bigger and wider. >> Bigger every day. >> What is that? What if someone says: "Hey, what's going on with entrepreneurship in this space? What are the key dynamics? What's the power dynamics?" It's not money, there's money out there, but like what's the structural thing happening? >> The key dynamic, I think, is we're seeing that we can unlock things that we could never do before. And one of our goals is: the more space data we can make more accessible to more people around the world. It unlocks things we couldn't do. We're working with space companies who are using space data to track endangered whales off the coast of California. We're working with companies that are using space data to measure thermal and greenhouse emissions for climate change and climate management. We're working with one company, Edgybees, who has a small satellite constellation, and they're using it to build satellite based, augmented reality, to provide it to first responders as they go into a disaster response area. And they get a 3D-view of what they're going into. None of those workloads were possible five years ago. And the cloud and cloud-based technologies are really what opens those kinds of workloads up. >> What kind of higher level services do you see emerging from space cloud? Because you know, obviously you have to have some infrastructure. >> Absolutely. Got to put some stuff into space. That's a supply chain, reliability, also threat. I mean, I can have a satellite attack, another satellite, or I'm just making that up, but I'm sure there's other scenarios that the generals are thinking about. >> So space security and cyberspace security is critical. And as I said, it's built into everything we do in all of our platforms, so you're absolutely right about that, but when we think about the entrepreneurship, you know, what we're seeing is, and I'll give you a good example of why the industry is growing so fast and why cloud. So one company we work with, LeoLabs. So Leo identified the growth in the LEO: Low Earth Orbit segment. 3,000 objects on orbit today, 30,000 tomorrow. Who's going to do the space traffic management for 30,000 objects in space that are all in the same orbital regime? And so LeoLabs built a process to do space traffic management, collision avoidance. They were running it on premises. It took them eight hours to do a single run for a single satellite conjunction. We got them to help understand how to use the cloud. They moved all that to AWS. Now that same run they do in 10 seconds. Eight hours to 10 seconds. Those are the kind of workloads as space proliferates in and we grow, that we just can't execute without cloud and cloud-based technologies. >> It's interesting, you know, the cloud has that same kind of line: move your workloads to the cloud and then refactor. >> Yeah. So space workloads are coming to the cloud. >> They are. >> Just changing the culture. So I have to ask you, I know there's a lot of young people out there looking for careers and interests. I mean, Cal poly is going into the high school now offering classes. >> Yeah So high school, there's so much interest in space and technology. What is the cultural mindset to be successful? Andy Jassy last year, reading and talk about the mindset of the builder and the enterprise CXO: "Get off your butt and start building" There's a space ethos going on. What is the mindset? Would you share your view on it? >> The mindset is innovation and moving fast, right? We, we lived, most of my career, in the time where we had an unlimited amount of money and unlimited amount of time. And so we were really slow and deliberate about how we built things. The future won't wait, whether it's commercial application, or military application, we have to move fast. And so the culture is: the faster we can move, The more we'll succeed, and there's no way to move faster than when you're building on the AWS cloud. Ground station is a good example. You know, the proposition of the cloud is: Don't invest your limited resources in your own infrastructure that doesn't differentiate your capability. And so we did that same thing with ground station. And we've said to companies: "Don't spend millions of dollars on developing your own ground station infrastructure, pay by the minute to use AWS's and focus your limited resources back in your product, which differentiate your space mission." and that's just been power. >> How is that going from customer perspective? >> Great. It's going great. We continue to grow. We added another location recently. And just in the last week we announced a licensed accelerator. One of the things our customers told us is it takes too long to work with global governments to get licensed, to operate around the world. And we know that's been the case. So we put together a team that leaned in to solve that problem, and we just announced the licensed accelerator, where we will work with companies to walk them through that process, and we can shave an 18 month process into a three or four month process. And that's been... we've gotten great response on that from our company. >> I've always said: >> I remember when you were hired and the whole space thing was happening. I remember saying to myself: "Man, if democratization can bring, come to space" >> And we're seeing that happening >> You guys started it and you guys, props to your team. >> Making space available to more and more people, and they'll dazzle us with the innovative ways we use space. 10 years ago, we couldn't have envisioned those things I told you about earlier. Now, we're opening up all sorts of workloads and John, real quick, one of the reasons is, in the past, you had to have a specific forte or expertise in working with space data, 'cause it was so unique and formatted and in pipeline systems. We're making that democratized. So it's just like any other data, like apps on your phone. If you can build apps for your phone and manage data, we want to make it that easy to operate with space data, and that's going to change the way the industry operates. >> And that's fundamentally, that's great innovation because you're enabling that. That's why I have to ask you on that note Of the innovation trends that you see or activities: What excites you the most? >> So a lot of things, but I'll give you two examples very quickly: One is high-performance compute. We're seeing more and more companies really lean in to understanding how fast they can go on AWS. I told you about LeoLabs, eight hours to 10 seconds. But that high-performance computes going to be a game changer. The other thing is: oh, and real quick, I want to tell you, Descartes Labs. So Descartes Labs came to us and said: "We want to compete in the Annual Global Top 500 supercomputer challenge" And so we worked with them for a couple of weeks. We built a workload on the AWS standard platform. We came in number 40 in the globe for the Top 500 super computer lists, just by building some workloads on our standard platform. That's powerful, high-performance compute. But the second example I wanted to give you is: digital modeling, digital simulation, digital engineering. Boom Aerospace is a company, Boom, that we work with. Boom decided to build their entire supersonic commercial, supersonic aircraft, digital engineering on the AWS cloud. In the last three years, John, they've executed 6,000 years of high-performance compute in the last three years. How do you do 6,000 years in compute in three years? You spin up thousands of AWS servers simultaneously, let them do your digital management, digital analysis, digital design, bring back a million different perturbations of a wing structure and then pick the one that's best and then come back tomorrow and run it again. That's powerful. >> And that was not even possible, years ago. >> Not at that speed, no, not at that speed. And that's what it's really opening up in terms of innovation. >> So now you've done it so much in your career, okay? Now you're here with Amazon. Looking back on this past year or so, What's the learnings for you? >> The learning is, truly how valuable cloud can be to the space industry, I'll admit to you most people in the space industry and especially in the government space industry. If you ask us a year ago, two years ago: "Hey, what do you think about cloud?" We would have said: "Well, you know, I hear people talk about the cloud. There's probably some value. We should probably look at that" And I was in the same boat, but now that I've dug deeply into the cloud and understand the value of artificial intelligence, machine learning, advanced data analytics, a ground station infrastructure, all those things, I'm more excited than ever before about what the space industry can benefit from cloud computing, and so bringing that, customer by customer is just a really fulfilling way to continue to be part of the space industry. Even though I retired from government service. >> Is there a... I'm just curious because you brought it up. Is there a lot of people coming in from the old, the space industry from public sector? Are they coming into commercial? >> Absolutely. >> Commercial rising up and there's, I mean, I know there's a lot of public/private partnerships, What's the current situation? >> Yeah, lots of partnerships, but we're seeing an interesting trend. You know, it used to be that NASA led the way in science and technology, or the military led the way in science and technology, and they still do in some areas. And then the commercial industry would follow along. We're seeing that's reversed. There's so much growth in the commercial industry. So much money, venture capital being poured in and so many innovative solutions being built, for instance, on the cloud that now the commercial industry is leading technology and building new technology trends that the military and the DOD and their government are trying to take advantage of. And that's why you're seeing all these commercial contracts being led from Air Force, Space Force, NASA, and NRO. To take advantage of that commercialization. >> You like your job. >> I love my job. (laughing) -I can tell, >> I love my job. >> I mean, it is a cool job. I kind of want to work for you. >> So John, space is cool. That's our tagline: space is cool. >> Space is cool. Space equals ratings in the digital TV realm, it is really, super exciting a lot of young people are interested, I mean, robotics clubs in high schools are now varsity sports, eSports, all blend together. >> Space, robotics, artificial intelligence, machine learning, advanced analytics. It's all becoming a singular sector today and it's open to more people than ever before, for the reasons we talked about. >> Big wave and you guys are building the surf boards, everyone a ride it, congratulations. Great to see you in person. >> Thank you. Again, thanks for coming on theCUBE, appreciate that. >> Thanks for having us. >> Clint Crosier is the Director of AWS Aerospace & Satellite. Legend in the industry. Now at AWS. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Thanks for watching.
SUMMARY :
Great to see you in person again. Thank you for having me. First of all, props to you for of insight into what we're building What's the coolest of the space industry, I mean, to me. changes in terms of the cost growth of the space industry, I know, I've reported on some of that the public sector together? And the answer was: we decided I'm sure the resumes are in the U.S., so we built a global team. I love the military mindset. It's not take that hill, the future doesn't wait. in the space community There is. the more space data we can make obviously you have to have other scenarios that the in the same orbital regime? know, the cloud has that coming to the cloud. into the high school now and talk about the mindset of And so the culture is: And just in the last week we and the whole space thing was happening. you guys, props to your team. the way the industry operates. Of the innovation trends We came in number 40 in the And that was not even And that's what it's really opening up What's the learnings for you? especially in the coming in from the old, on the cloud that now the I love my job. kind of want to work for you. So John, space is cool. the digital TV realm, it before, for the reasons building the surf boards, Thank you. Legend in the industry.
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