Jay Littlepage, DigitalGlobe | AWS Public Sector Summit 2017
>> Announcer: Live from Washington, DC, it's theCube, covering AWS Public Sector Summit 2017, brought to you by Amazon Web Services and its partner ecosystem. >> Welcome inside the convention center here in Washington, DC. You're looking at many of the attendees of the AWS Public Sector Summit 2017. We're coming to you live from our nation's capital. Several thousand people on hand here for this three-day event, we're here for two days. John Walls, along with John Furrier. John, good to see you again, sir. >> Sir, thank you. >> We're joined by Jay Littlepage, who is the VP of Infrastructure and Operations at Digital Globe, and Jay, thank you for being with us at theCube. >> My pleasure. >> John W: Good to have you. First off, your company, high-resolution, earth imagery satellite stuff. Out-of-this world business. >> Yep. >> Right, tell our viewers a little bit about what you do, I mean, the magnitude of, obviously, the environmental implications of that or defense, safety security, all those realms. >> Okay, well, stop me when I've said too much because I get pretty excited about this. We work for a very cool company. We've been taking earth imagery since 1999, when our first satellite went up in the sky. And, as we've increased our capabilities with our constellation, our latest satellite went up last November. We're flying, basically, a giant camera that we can fly like a drone. So, and when I say giant camera, it's about the size of a school bus, and the lens is about the size of the front of the school bus, and we can take imagery from 700 miles up in space and resolve a pixel about the size of a laptop. So, that gives us an incredible amount of capability, and the flying like a drone, besides just being really cool and geeky, we can sling the lens from basically Kansas City to here in Washington in 15 seconds and take a shot. And so, when world events happen, when an earthquake happens, you know, they're generally not scheduled events, we don't have to have the satellite right above the point where there's something going on on the ground, we can take a shot from an angle of 1,000 miles away, and with compute power and good algorithms, we can basically resolve the picture of the earth, and it looks like we're right overhead, and we're getting imagery out immediately to first responders, to governmental agencies so they can respond very quickly to a disaster happening to save lives. >> So, obviously, the ramifications are endless, almost, right? >> Yes. >> All that data, I mean, you can't even imagine the amount, talk about storage. So, that's certainly a complexity, and then, they are making it useful too all these different sectors. Without getting too simple, how do you manage that? >> Well, you know, it's a big trade-off because, ideally, if storage was free, all of our imagery in its highest consumable form would be available all the time to everybody. Each high-resolution image might be 35 gig by itself. So, you think of that long of flying a constellation, we've got 100 petabytes of imagery. That's too much, it's too expensive to have online all of the time. And so, we have to balance what's going to be relevant and useful to people versus cost. You know, a lot of the imagery goes through cycle where it's interesting until it's not, and it starts to age off. The thing about the planet, though, is we never know what's going to happen, and when something that aged off is going to be relevant again. And so, the balance for my team is really making sure we're hitting the sweet spot on there. The imagery that is relevant is readily accessible, and the imagery that's not is, in its cheapest form, fact or possible, which for us, is compressed, and it's in some sort of archival storage, which for us, now that we've used the Snowmobile, is Glacier. >> Jay, I want to ask to give your thoughts. I want you to talk about DigitalGlobe, before that, some context. This weekend, I was hanging out with my friends in Santa Cruz and kids were surfing. He's a big drone guy, he used to work for GoPro, and she used to buy the drones and, hey, how's it going with the drones. It got kind of boring, here's a great photo I created, but after a while, it just became like Google Earth, and it got boring. Kind of pointed out that he wanted more, and we got virtual reality, augmented reality, experience is coming to users. That puts imagery, place imagery, the globe, pictures, places and things is what you guys do. So, that's not going away any time soon. So, talk about your business, what you guys do, some of the things that you do, your business model, how that's changing, and how Amazon, here in the public sector, is changing that. >> Well, that's a fantastic questions, and our business is changing pretty rapidly. We have all that imagery, and it's beautiful imagery, but increasingly, there's so much of it, and so many of the use cases aren't about human eyeballs staring at pixels. They're about algorithms extracting information from the pixels. And, increasingly, from either the breadth of pixels, instead of just looking at a small area, you can look around it and see what's happening around it and use that as signal information, or you can go deep into an archive and see the same location on the planet over and over over years and see the changes that had happened in terms of time frame. So, increasingly, our market is about extracting information and extracting insights from the imagery more so than it is the imagery itself. And so that's driving an analytics business for us, and it's also driving a services business for us, which is particularly important in the public sector to actually use that for different purposes. >> You can imagine the creativity involved and developers out there watching or even thinking about using satellite imagery in conflux with other data. Remember, they're in the Web 2.0 craze earlier in the last decade. You saw mashups of API with Google Max. Oh yeah, pull a little pin, and then the mobile came. But now, you're seeing mashups go on with other data. And I've heard stats at Uber, for instance, remaps New York City every five days with all that GPS data of the cars, which are basically sensors. So, you can almost imagine the alchemy, the convergence of data. This is exciting for you, I can imagine. Won't you share with us, anecdotally or statistically what you're seeing, how this is playing out? >> Well, yes, some of our biggest commercial customers of our products now are location-based services. So, Uber's using our imagery because the size of the aperture of our lens means we have great resolution. And so, they've been consuming that and consuming our machine learning algorithms to basically understand where traffic is and where people are so that they can refine, on an ongoing basis, where the best pick-up and drop-off locations are. That really drives their business. Facebook's using the imagery to basically help build out the Internet. You know, they want to move into places on the planet where Internet doesn't exist. Well, in order to really understand that, they need to understand where to build, how to build, how many people are there, and you can actually extract all that from imagery by going in in detail and mapping roofs' shapes and roofs' sizes, and, from there, extracting pretty accurate estimates of how many people live in a particular area, and that's driving their project, which is ultimately going to drive access for... >> Intelligence in software, we look at imagery. I mean, we here at Amazon, recognition's their big product for facial recognition, among other pictures. But this is what's getting at, this notion of actually extracting that data. >> Well, you think about it. You know, once the data is available, once our imagery is available, then the sky's the limit. You know, we have a certain set of algorithms that we apply to help different industries, you know, to look at rooftops, to look at water extractions. After a hurricane, we can actually see how the coverage has changed. But, you look at a Facebook, and they're applying their own algorithms. We don't force our algorithms to be used. We provide the information, we try to provide the data. Companies can bring their own algorithms, and then, it's all about what can you learn, and then, what can you do about it, and it's amazing. >> So, here's the question. With the whole polyglot conversation, multiple languages that people speak that's translated into the tech industry, and interdisciplinary forces are in play: Data science, coding, cognitive, machine learning. So, the question is, for you, is that, okay, as this stuff comes together, do you speak DevOps? It's kind of a word, and we hear people say, is that in Russian or is that like English? DevOps is a cloud language mindset. And so, that brings up the question of, are you guys friendly to developers, and because people want to have microservices, I'm from a developer, I'm like, hey, I want those maps. How do I get them, can I buy it as a service, are they loaded on Amazon, how to I gauge with DataGlobe, as a developer or a company? >> Well, you think about what you just said and the customers I just talked about. They're not geospatial customers. You know, they're not staffed with people that are PhDs in extracting information. They're developers that are working for high-tech companies that have a problem that want to solve. >> There are already mobile apps or doing some cool database working in here. >> So, we're providing the raw imagery and the algorithms to very tried and true systems where people can plug into work benches and build artificial intelligence without necessarily being experts in that. And, as a case in point, my team is an IT team. You know, we've got a part of the organization that is all staffed with PhDs. They're the ones that are driving our global... >> John W: PhD is a service. (laughter) >> Well, kind of. I mean, if you think about it, they're driving the leading edge, for these solutions to our customers. But, I've got an IT team, and I've got this problem with all this data that we talked about earlier. Well, how am I actually going to manage that? I'm going to be pulling in all sorts of different sources of data, and I'm going to be applying machine learning using IT guys that aren't PhDs to actually do that, and I'm not going to send them to graduate school. They're going to be using standard APIs, and they're going to be applying fairly generic algorithms, and... >> So, is that your model, is it just API, is there other... >> I think the real key is the API makes it accessible, but a machine learning algorithm is only as good as its training. So, the more it's used, the more it refines itself, the better our algorithm gets. And so, that is going to be the type of thing that the IT developer, the infrastructure engineer of the future becomes, and I've already, basically, in the last couple of years, as we started this journey at AWS, 20% of my staff now, same size staff, but they're software developers now. >> So, I'll take this to the government side. We talked a lot about commercial use. But at the government side, I'm thinking about FEMA, disaster response, maybe a core of engineers, you know, bridge construction, road construction, coastline management. Are all those kind of applications that we see on the dot gov side? >> There are all things that you see that can be done on the dot gov side, but we're doing them all in the commercial environment. The USC's region for AWS, and I think that's actually a really important distinction, and it's something that I think more and more of the government agencies are starting to see. We do a lot of work for one particular government agency and have for years. But 99 point something percent of our imagery is commercial unclassified, and it's available for the purposes that our customers use it for, but they're also available for all those other customers I've talked about. And more and more of what we do, we are doing on the completely open but secure commercial environment because it's ubiquitous for our customers. Not all of our customers do that type of work. They don't need to comply with those rigid standards. It's generally where all AWS products that are released are released to, with the other environments lagging, and they probably don't want me saying that on TV, but I just did. And it's cheaper, you know, we're a commercial company that does public sector work. We have to make a profit, and the best way to do that is to put your environment in a place where if you're going to repeat an operation, like pulling an image of Glacier and build it into something that is consumable by either a human or an algorithm and put it back. If you're going to do something like that a million times, you want to do it really inexpensively. And so, that's where... (crosstalking) >> Lower prices, make things fast, that's Jeff Hayes' ethos, shipping products, that these books in the old days. Now, they're shipping code and making lower-latency systems. So, you guys are a big customer. What are the big implementation features that you have with AWS, and then, the second part of the question is, are you worried about locking. At some point, you're so big, the hours are going to be so massive, you're going to be paying so much cash, should you build your own, that's the big debate. Do you go private cloud, do you stay in the public? Thoughts on those two options? >> Well, we have both. Right now, we're running a 15-year-old system, which is where we create the imagery that comes off the satellites, and it goes into a tape archive. Last year, Reinvent... >> John F: Tape's supposed to be dead! >> Tape will die someday! It's going to die really soon, but, at the Reinvent Conference last year, AWS rolled out a semi truck. Well, the real semi truck was in our parking lot getting loaded with all those tapes, and it's sad... >> John F: Did you actually use the semi? >> We were the first customer ever, I believe, of the Snowmobile. And so, it takes a lot of time and effort to move 12,000 LTO 5 tapes loaded onto a semi and send it off. You know, that represents every image ever taken by DG in the history of our company, and it's now in AWS. So, to your second part of your question, we're pretty committed now. >> John F: Are you okay with that? >> Well, we're okay with that for a couple of reasons. One is, I'm not constraining the business. AWS is cheaper. It will be even cheaper for us as we learn how to pull all the levers and turn all the dials in this environment. But, you know, you think about that, we ran a particular job last year for a customer that consumes 750,000 compute hours in 22 days. We couldn't have done that in our data center. We would have said no. And so, I would... >> I know, I can't do, you can't do it. >> We can't do it! Or, we can do it, come back, the answer will be here in six months. So, time is of the essence in situations like that, so we're comfortable with it for our business. We're also comfortable with it because, increasingly, that's where our customers already are. We are creating something in our current environment and shipping it to Amazon anyway. >> We're going to start a movie about you, with Jim Carrey, Yes Man. (laughter) You're going to say yes to everything now with Amazon. Okay, but this is a good point. Joking aside, this is interesting because we have this debate all the time, when is the cloud prohibitive. In this case, your business model, based on that fact that variables spend that you turn up your Compute is based upon cadence of the business. >> That's exactly right. You know, the thing that's really changed for the business with this model is historically, IT has been a call center, and moving into Amazon, I manage our storage, and I pay for our storage because it's a shared asset. It's something that is for the common good. The business units and different product managers in our business now have the dial for what they spend on the Compute and everything else. So, if they want to go to market really rapidly, they can. If they want to spin it up rapidly, they can. If they want to turn it down, they can. And it's not a fixed investment. So, it allows the business philosophy that we've never had before. >> Jay, I know we're getting tight on time, but I do want to ask you one question, and I did not know that you were the first Snowmobile customers, so, that's good trivia to have on theCube and great to have you. So, while we got you here, being the first customer of AWS Snowmobile when they rolled out at Amazon Reinvent, we covered on SiliconAngle. Why did you jump on that and how was your experience been, share some color onto that whole process. >> Okay, it's been an iterative learning process for both us and for Amazon. We were sitting on all this imagery. We knew we wanted to get in AWS. We started using the Snowballs almost a year and a half ago. But moving 100 petabytes, 80 terabytes at a time, it's like using a spoon to move a haystack. So, when Amazon approached us, knowing the challenge we had about moving it all at once, I initially thought they were kidding, and I realized it was Amazon, they don't kid about things like this, and so we jumped on pretty early and worked with them on this. >> John F: So, you've got blown away like, what? >> Just like. >> What's the catch? >> Really, a truck, really? Yeah, but really. So, it's as secure as it could possibly be. We're taking out the Internet and all the different variables in that, including a lot of cost in bandwidth and strengths, and basically parking and next to our data, and, you know, it's basically a big NFS file system, and we loaded data onto it, the constraint for us being, basically that tape library with 10,000 miles of movement on the tape pads. We had to balance between loading the Snowmobile and basically responding to our regular customers. You know, we pulled 4 million images a year off that tape library. And so, loading every single image we've ever created onto the Snowmobile at the same time was a technical challenge on our side more so than Amazon's side. So, we had to find that sweet spot and then just let it run. >> John F: Now, it's operational. >> So, the Snowmobile is gone. AWS has got it. They're adjusting it right now into the West Region, and we're looking forward to being able to just go wild with that data. >> We got Snowmobiles, we got semis, we have satellites, we have it all, right? >> We have it all, yeah. >> It's massive, obviously, but impressed with what you're doing with this. So, congratulations on that front, and thank you again for being with us. >> My pleasure, thanks for having me. >> You bet, we continue our coverage here from Washington, DC, live on theCube. SiliconAngle TV continues right after this. (theCube jingle)
SUMMARY :
covering AWS Public Sector Summit 2017, brought to you by You're looking at many of the attendees of the thank you for being with us at theCube. John W: Good to have you. the environmental implications of that and the lens is about the size of All that data, I mean, you can't even imagine and the imagery that's not is, and how Amazon, here in the public sector, and so many of the use cases aren't about You can imagine the creativity involved and you can actually extract all that from imagery by Intelligence in software, we look at imagery. and then, what can you do about it, So, the question is, for you, is that, and the customers I just talked about. There are already mobile apps They're the ones that are driving our global... John W: PhD is a service. and I'm going to be applying machine learning So, is that your model, is it just API, and I've already, basically, in the last couple of years, So, I'll take this to the government side. and it's available for the purposes the hours are going to be so massive, that comes off the satellites, Well, the real semi truck was in our parking lot of the Snowmobile. One is, I'm not constraining the business. and shipping it to Amazon anyway. We're going to start a movie about you, It's something that is for the common good. and great to have you. and so we jumped on pretty early and all the different variables in that, So, the Snowmobile is gone. and thank you again for being with us. You bet, we continue our coverage here
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Shayn Hawthorne, AWS | AWS re:Invent 2018
>> Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering AWS re:Invent 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services, Intel, and their ecosystem partners. >> Hey, welcome back everyone. Live, Cube here in Las Vegas for AWS re:Invent. I'm John Furrier with my co-host, Dave Vellante. Day three of wall to wall coverage, holding our voices together, excited for our next guest, Shayn Hawthorne, general manager at AWS, for the exciting project around the Ground Station, partnership with Lockheed Martin. Really kind of outside the box, announced on Tuesday, not at the keynote, but this is a forward thinking real project which satellites can be provisioned like cloud computing resources. Totally innovative, and will change the nature of edge computing, feeding connectivity to anything. So, thanks for joining us. >> Thank you guys for having me. You're right, my voice is going out this week too. We've been doing a lot of talking. (John laughs) >> Great service. This is really compelling, 'cause it changes the nature of the network. You can feed connectivity, 'cause power and connectivity drive everything. Power, you got battery. Connectivity, you got satellite. Totally obvious, now that you look at it, but, not before this. Where did it come from? How did it all start? >> You know, it came from listening to our customers. Our customers have been talking with us and they had a number of challenges in getting the data off of their satellites and down to the ground. So, we listened to these customers and we listened to the challenges they were experiencing in getting their data to the ground, having access to ground stations, having the ability at the network level, to move the data around the world quickly to where they wanted to process it. And then also, having complex business process logic and other things that were required to help them run their satellite downlinks and uplinks. And then finally, the ability to actually have AWS services right there where the data came down into the cloud, so that you could do great things with that data within milliseconds of it hitting the ground. >> So it's a essentially satellite as a service with a back end data capability, data ingestion, analytics, and management capability. That, how'd that idea come about? I mean, it just underscores the scale of AWS. And I'm thinking about other things that you might be able to, where'd the idea come from? How was it germinated? >> Well and actually, let me just say one thing, we actually would call it Ground Station as the service. It's the Ground Station on the surface of the earth that communicates with the satellite. It allows us to get the data off the satellite or send commands up to it. And so, like I was saying, we came up the idea by talking to our customers, and so we went into, I think this is an incredible part of working at Amazon, because we actually follow through with our leadership principals. We worked backwards from the customer. We actually put together a press release and a frequently asked questions document, a PR/FAQ, in a traditional six page format. And we started working it through our leadership and it got all the way to the point that Andy and the senior leadership team within AWS made the decision that they were going to support our idea and the concept and the architecture that we had come up with to meet these customers' requirements, we actually were able to get to that by about March of 2018. By the end of March, Andy had even had us go in and talk with Jeff. He gave us the thumbs up as well, and after six months, we've already procured 24 antennas. We've already built two Ground Stations in the United States and we've downlinked over hundreds of contacts with satellites, bringing Earth imagery down and other test data to prove that this system works. Get it ready for preview. >> It's unbelievable, because you're basically taking the principals of AWS, which is eliminating the heavy lifting, applying that to building Ground Stations, presumably, right, so, the infrastructure that you're building out, do you have partners that you're working with, are there critical players there, that are enabling this? >> Yeah, it's really neat. We've actually had some really great partnerships, both with helping us build AWS Ground Station, as well as partners that helped us learn what the customers need. Let me tell you, first off, about the partnership that we've had with Lockheed Martin to develop a new innovative antenna system that will collaboratively come together with the parabolic reflectors that AWS Ground Station uses. They've been working on this really neat idea that gives them ability to downlink data all over the entire United States in a very resilient way, which means if some of their Ground Stations antennas in Verge don't work, due to man made reasons or due to natural occurrences, then we're actually able to use the rest of the network to still continue to downlink data. And then, we complimentary bring in AWS Astra for certain types of downlinks and then also to provide uplink commanding to other satellites. The other customer partnership that we've worked with was working with the actual customers who are going to use AWS Ground Station, like DigitalGlobe, Black Sky, Capella SAR, HawkEye 360, who all provided valuable inputs to us about exactly what do they need in a Ground Station. They need the ability to rapidly downlink data, they need the ability to pay by the minute so that there are actually able to use variable expense to pay for satellite downlinks instead of capital expenses to go out and build it. And then by doing that, we're able to offer them a product that's 80% cheaper than if they'd had to go out and build a complete network similar to what we built. And, they're able to, like I said before, access great AWS services like Rekognition, or SageMaker, so that they can make sense of the data that they bring down to the Earth. >> It's a big idea and I'm just sort of curious as to, how and if you, sort of, validated it. How'd ya increase the probability that it was actually going to, you know, deliver a business return? Can you talk about that process? >> Well, we were really focused on validating that we could meet customer challenges and really give them the data securely and reliably with great redundancy. So we validated, first off by, we built our antennas and the Ground Stations in the previous software. We finished over a month and a half ago, and we've been rigorously testing it with our customer partners and then letting them validate that the information we've provided back to them was 100% as good as what they would've received on their own network, and we tested it out, and we've actually got a number of pictures and images downloaded over at our kiosk that were all brought in on AWS Ground Station, and its a superb products over there. >> So Shayn, how does it work? You write this press release, this working backwards document, describe that process. Was that process new to you? Had you done it at other companies? How did you find it? Was it a useful process, obviously it was, 'cause you got the outcome you're looking for, but, talk a little bit more about that approach. >> Yeah, it's actually very cool, I've only been at AWS for a year and a half. And so, I would say that my experience at AWS so far completely validates working backwards from customers. We were turned on to the idea by talking to our customers and the challenges they said. I started doing analysis after the job was assigned to me by Dave Nolton, my boss, and I started putting together the first draft of our PR/FAQ, started engaging with customers immediately. Believe it or not, we went through 28 iterations of the PR/FAQ before we even got to Andy. Everybody in our organization took part in helping to make it better, add in, ask hard questions, ensure that we were really thinking this idea through and that we were obsessing on the customer. And then after we got to Andy, and we got through approving that, it probably went through another 28 iterations before we got to Jeff. And then we went through talking with him. He asked additional hard questions to make sure that we were doing the right for the customer and that we were putting together the right kind of product. And finally we've been iterating it on it ever since until we launched it couple of days ago. >> Sounds like you were iterating, raising the bar, and it resonated with customers. >> Totally. And even as part of getting out of it-- >> That's Amazon's language of love. >> And then your engineering resource, you know, if people are asking you hard questions, you obviously need engineering folks to validate that it's doable. At what point do you get that engineering resource, how does that all work? >> Well, it's neat. In my division, Region Services Division, we actually were supporting it completely from within the division, all the way until we got approval from Andy. And then we actually went in and started hiring very good skills. To show you what kind of incredible people we have at Amazon, we only had to hire about 10% space expertise from outside of the company. We were actually able to bring together 80-90% of the needed skills to build AWS Ground Station from people who've been working at Amazon.com and AWS. And we came together, we really learned quickly, we iterated, failed fast, put things together, changed it. And we were able to deliver the product in time. The whole cloth made from our own expertise. >> So just to summarize, from idea to actual, we're going to do this, how long did that take? >> I'd say that took about three months. From idea to making a decision, three months. From decision to have a preview product that we could launch at re:Invent, six months. >> That's unbelievable. >> It is. >> If you think about something of this scope. >> And it was a joy, I mean it was an incredible to be a part of something like this. It was the best work I've ever done in my life. >> Yeah, space is fun. >> It is. >> Shayn, thanks for coming on theCUBE, sharing your story and insight, we love this. We're going to keep following it. And we're going see you guys at the Public Sector Summits, and all the events you guys are at, so, looking forward to seeing and provisioning some satellite. >> I'm looking forward to showing you what we do next. So thank you for having me. >> Great. We'll get a sneak peak. >> Congratulations. >> This is theCUBE here in Las Vegas, we'll be back with more coverage after this short break. (futuristic music)
SUMMARY :
Brought to you by Amazon Web Services, Intel, of edge computing, feeding connectivity to anything. Thank you guys for having me. Totally obvious, now that you look at it, and we listened to the challenges they were experiencing that you might be able to, where'd the idea come from? that we had come up with and then also to provide that it was actually going to, you know, that the information we've provided back to them Was that process new to you? and that we were obsessing on the customer. and it resonated with customers. And even as part of getting out of it-- to validate that it's doable. of the needed skills to build AWS Ground Station that we could launch at re:Invent, six months. to be a part of something like this. and all the events you guys are at, so, I'm looking forward to showing you what we do next. with more coverage after this short break.
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Teresa Carlson, AWS | AWS re:Invent 2018
live from Las Vegas it's the cube covering AWS reinvents 2018 brought to you by Amazon Web Services inhale and their ecosystem partners hey welcome back everyone this the cube live day 3 coverage of Amazon Web Services AWS reinvent 2018 we're here with two cents Dave six years we've been covering Amazon every single reinvent since they've had this event except for the first year and you know we've been following AWS really since its inception one of my startup said I was trying to launch and didn't ever got going years ago and he went easy to launch was still command-line and so we know all about it but what's really exciting is the global expansion of Amazon Web Services the impact that not only the commercial business but the public sector government changing the global landscape and the person who I've written about many times on Forbes and unhooking angle Theresa Carlson she's the chief a public sector vice president of Amazon Web Services public sector public sector great to see you hi hi John I checked great to be here again as always so the global landscape mean public sector used to be this a we talk to us many times do this do that yeah the digital environment and software development growth is changing all industries including public sector he's been doing a great job leading the charge the CIA one of the most pivotal deals when I asked Andy jassie directly and my one-on-one with them that this proudest moments one of them is the CIA deal when I talked to the top execs in sales Carla and other people in Amazon they point to that seminal moment with a CIA deal happen and now you got the DoD a lot of good stuff yeah what's do how do you top that how do you raise the bar well you know it still feels like day one even with all that work in that effort and those customers kind of going back to go forward in 2013 when we won the CIA opportunity they are just an amazing customer the entire community is really growing but there's so much more at this point that we're doing outside of that work which is being additive around the world and as you've always said John that was kind of a kind of a pivotal deal but now we're seeing so many of our government customers we now have customers at a hundred and seventy four countries and I have teams on the ground in 28 countries so we're seeing a global mood but you know at my breakfast this week we talked a lot about one of the big changes I've seen in the last like 18 months is state and local government where we're seeing actually states making a big move California Arizona New York Ohio Virginia so we're starting to see those states really make big moves and really looking at applications and solutions that can change that citizen services engagement and I achieve in these state local governments aren't real I won't say their course they're funded but they're not like funded like a financial services sector but that's women money they got to be very efficient clouds a perfect opportunity for them because they can be more productive I do a lot of good things I can and there's 20 new governor's coming on this year so we've had a lot of elections lots of new governors lots of new local council members coming in but governor's a lot of times you'll see a big shift when a governor comes in and takes over or if there's one that stays in and maintains you'll see kind of that program I was just in Arizona a couple weeks ago and the governor of Arizona has a really big fish toward modernization and utilization of information technology and the CIO of the state of Arizona is like awesome they're doing all this work transformative work with the government and then I was at Arizona State University the same day where we just announced a cloud Innovation Center for smart cities and I went around their campus and it's amazing they're using IOT everywhere you can go in there football stadium and you can see the movement of the people how many seats are filled where the parking spaces are how much water's been used where Sparky is their their backside I've got to be Sparky which was fed but you're seeing these kind of things and all of that revs on AWS and they're doing all the analytics and they're gonna continue to do that one for efficiency and knowledge but to also to protect their students and citizens and make them safer through the knowledge of data analytics you know to John's point about you know funding and sometimes constricted funding at state and local levels and even sometimes the federal levels yeah we talked about this at the public sector summit I wonder if you could comment Amazon in the early days help startups compete with big companies it gave them equivalent resources it seems like the distance between public sector and commercial is closing because of the cloud they're able to take advantage of resources at lower cost that they weren't able to before it's definitely becoming the new normal in governments for sure and we are seeing that gap closing this year 2018 for me was a year that I saw kind of big moves to cloud because in the early days it was website hosting kind of dipping their toes in this year we're talking about massive systems that are being moved to the cloud you know big re-architecting and design and a lot of people say well why do they do that that costs money well the reason is because they may have to Rio architect and design but then they get all the benefits of cloud through the things that examples this week new types of storage new types of databases at data analytics IOT machine learning because in the old model they're kind of just stagnated with where they were with that application so we're seeing massive moves with very large applications so that's kind of cool to see our customers and public sector making those big moves and then the outputs the outcome for citizens tax payers agencies that's really the the value and sometimes that's harder to quantify or justify in public sector but over the long term it's it's going to make a huge difference in services and one of the things I now said the breakfast was our work and something called helping out the agents with that ATO process the authority to operate which is the big deal and it cost a lot of money a lot of times long time and processes and we've been working with companies like smartsheet which we helped them do this less than 90 days to get go plow so now working with our partners like Talos and Rackspace and our own model that's one of the things you're also gonna see check and Jon you're taking your knowledge of the process trying to shrink that down could time wise excessive forward to the partners yes to help them through the journey these fast move fast that kind of just keep it going and that's really the goal because they get very frustrated if they build an application that takes forever to get that security that authority to operate because they can't really they can't move out into full production unless that's completed and this could make or break these companies these contracts are so big oh yeah I mean it's significant and they want to get paid for what they're doing and the good work but they also want to see the outcome and the results yeah I gotta ask you what's new on the infrastructure side we were in Bahrain for the region announcement exciting expansion there you got new clouds gov cloud east yeah that's up and running no that's been running announced customers are in there they're doing their dr their coop running applications we're excited yes that's our second region based on a hundred and eighty five percent year-over-year growth of DEFCON region west so it's that been rare at reading I read an article that was on the web from general Keith Alexander he wrote an op-ed on the rationale that the government's taking in the looking at the cloud and looking at the military look at the benefits for the country around how to do cloud yes you guys are also competing for the jet idea which is now it's not a single source contract but they want to have one robust consistent environment yeah a big advantage new analytics so between general Keith Alexander story and then the the public statement around this was do is actually outlined benefits of staying with one cloud how is that going what how's that Jedi deal going well there's there's two points I'd like to make them this first of all we are really proud of DoD they're just continuing to me and they're sticking with their model and it's not slowing them down everything happening around Jedi so the one piece yes Jedi is out there and they need to complete this transaction but the second part is we're just we're it's not slowing us down to work with DoD in fact we've had great meetings with DoD customers this week and they're actually launching really amazing cloud workloads now what's going to be key for them is to have a platform that they can consistently develop and launch new mission applications very rapidly and because they were kind of behind they their model right now is to be able to take rapid advantage of cloud computing for those warriors there's those war fighters out in the field that we can really help every day so I think general Alexander is spot on the benefits of the cloud are going to really merit at DoD I have to say as an analyst you know you guys can't talk about these big deals but when companies you know competitors can test them information becomes public so in the case of CI a IBM contested the judge wheeler ruling was just awesome reading and it underscored Amazon's lead at the time yeah at Forrest IBM to go out and pay two billion dollars for software the recent Oracle can contestant and the GAO is ruling there gave a lot of insights I would recommend go reading it and my takeaway was the the DoD Pentagon said a single cloud is more secure it's going to be more agile and ultimately less costly so that's that decision was on a very strong foundation and we got insight that we never would have been able to get had they not tested well and remember one of the points we were just talking earlier was the authority to operate that that ability to go through the security and compliance to get it launched and if you throw a whole bunch of staff at an organization if they they're struggling with one model how are they gonna get a hundred models all at once so it's important for DoD that they have a framework that they can do live in real first of all as a technical person and an operating system which is kind of my background is that it makes total sense to have that cohesiveness but the FBI gave a talk at your breakfast on Tuesday morning Christene Halverson yeah she's amazing and she pointed out the problems that they're having keep up with the bad actors and she said quote we are FBI is in a data crisis yes and she pointed out all the bad things that happened in Vegas the Boston Marathon bombing and the time it took to put the puzzle pieces together was so long and Amazon shrinks that down if post-event that's hard imagine what the DoD is to do in real time so this is pointing to a new model it's a new era and on that well and we you know one of the themes was tech4good and if you look at the FBI example it's a perfect example of s helping them move faster to do their mission and if they continue to do what they've always done which is use old technologies that don't scale buying things that they may never use or being able to test and try quickly and effectively test Belfast recover and then use this data an FBI I will tell you it is brilliant how they're the name of this program sandcastle one Evan that they've used to actually do all this data and Linux and she talked about time to mission time to catch the bad guys time to share that analysis and data with other groups so that they could quickly disseminate and get to the heart of the matter and not sit there and say weight on it weight on this bad guy while we go over here and change time to value completely being that Amazon is on whether it's commercial or government I talk about values great you guys could have a short term opportunity to nail all these workloads but in the Amazon fashion there's always a wild card no I was so excited Dave and I interviewed Lockheed Martin yesterday yeah and this whole ground station thing is so cool because it's kind of like a Christopher Columbus moment yeah because the world isn't flat doesn't have an edge no it's wrong that lights can power everything there's spaces involved there's space company yes space force right around the corner yep you're in DC what's the excitement around all this what's going on we surprised a lot of with that announcement Lockheed Martin and DigitalGlobe we even had DigitalGlobe in with Andy when we talked about AWS ground station and Lockheed Martin verge and the benefit of this is two amazing companies coming together a tub yes that knows cloud analytics air storage and now we're taking a really hard problem with satellites and making it almost as a service as well as Lockheed doing their cube stats and making sure that there is analysis of every satellite that moves that all points in time with net with no disruption we're going to bring that all together for our customers for a mission that is so critical at every level of government research commercial entities and it's going to help them move fast and that is the key move very fast every mission leader you talk to you that has these kind of predators will say we have to move faster and that's our goal bringing commercial best practices I know you got a run we got less than a minute left but I want you to do a quick plug in for the work you're doing around the space in general you had a special breakout ibrehem yours public sector summit not going on in the space area that your involvement give it quick yeah so we will have it again this year winner first ever at the day before our public sector summit we had an Earth and space day and where we really brought together all these thought leaders on how do we take advantage of that commercial cloud services that are out there to help both this programs research Observatory in any way shape app data sets it went great we worked with NASA while we were here we actually had a little control center with that time so strip from NASA JPL where we literally sat and watched the Mars landing Mars insight which we were part of and so was Lockheed Martin and so his visual globe so that was a lot of fun so you'll see us continue to really expand our efforts in the satellite and space arena around the world with these partnership well you're super cool and relevant space is cool you're doing great relevant work with Amazon I wish we had more time to talk about all the mentoring you're doing with women you're doing tech4good so many great things going on I need to get you guys and all my public sector summits in 2019 we're going to have eight of them around the world and it was so fantastic having the Cuban Baja rain this year I mean it was really busy there and I think we got to see the level of innovation that's shaping up around the world with our customers well thanks to the leadership that you have in the Amazon as a company in the industry is changing the cube will be global and we might see cube regions soon if Lockheed Martin could do it the cube could be there and they have cube sets yes thank you for coming on theresa carlson making it happen really changing the game and raising the bar in public sector globally with cloud congratulations great to have you on the cube as always more cube covers Andy Jasmine coming up later in the program statements for day three coverage after this short break [Music]
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