>> Narrator: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a CUBE conversation. >> Hello everyone, welcome to this special CUBE virtual coverage of the AWS summit virtual online. This is an event that Amazon normally has in-person in San Francisco, but now it's virtual around the world, Seoul, Korea, in Tokyo, all over the world and Asia-Pacific and in North America. I'm John Furrier here joined with Stu Miniman. So Stu, we're kicking off AWS virtual with theCUBE virtual. I'm in Palo Alto with the quarantine crew. You're in Massachusetts, in Boston and the quarantine crew there. Stu, great to have you on to talk about AWS virtual summit. >> Yeah, John, it's great to see you. It's been, you know, interesting times doing all these remote interviews. As many of us say, I sure don't miss the planes and the hotels, but I do miss the communities. I do miss the hallway conversation, but great to see you John. Love the Midnight Madness shirt from re:Invent last year. >> Well, we want to thank Amazon for stepping up with some sponsorship for allow us to do the virtual CUBE alongside their virtual event, because now it's a global community. It's all virtual, there are no boundaries theCube has no boundary. Stu, we've got a great program. We have Corey Quinn coming up and expect to hear from him last week in AWS. He's known for, he's a rising star in the community, certainly CUBE guest and also guest host and analyst for theCUBE. We expect to hear all the latest from his big Zoom post controversy, to really what's going on in AWS, around what services are high. I know you're going to do a great interview with him, but let's start with Amazon. We're seeing a ton of activity. Obviously most recently, last week was the JEDI thing, which was an agency protest, kind of confidential. Microsoft blew that up big time with a post by their worldwide comms person Frank Shaw, countered by Drew Herdener, who's the comms global lead for AWS. And so a war of words is ensuing. This is again, pointing to the cloud native war that's going on with a JEDI conference. I mean, the JEDI contract for $10 billion, which is worth to Microsoft. This shows that the heat is on, Stu. This is a absolute bloodbath between AWS and Microsoft. We're seeing it play out now virtually with Amazon, A.I. large scale cloud. This is huge, this is another level. A DEFCON one basically, your thoughts? >> Yeah, John, you've covered this really well. It's been really interesting plot, number one, you talked about the security requirement, when AWS launched the GovCloud had the CIA as a client, early on many years ago. It was the green light for many companies that go from "Wait, is the cloud secure enough?" to "Well, if it's good enough for "the federal government in the U.S., "it's probably good enough for the enterprise." When Microsoft won JEDI, they didn't have all the certification, to meet what was in the contract. They had a ticking clock to make sure that they could meet those security engagements, as well as one of the pieces on the task board that moved was Oracle made a partnership announcement with Azure. We know the federal government uses Oracle quite a bit, so they can now run that in Azure and not have the penalties from Oracle. So that many have said, "Hey AWS, "why don't you kind of let that one piece of business go? "You've got federal business." But those ripple effects we understand from one contract kind of move things around. >> Well, my take on this is just the tempest in the teapot. Either Microsoft's got something that we don't know or they're running scared. My prediction, Stu, is that the clock is going to tick out. D.O.D. is going to award the contract again to Microsoft because I don't think the D.O.D. wants to change based upon the data that I'm getting from my reporting. And then ultimately Amazon will keep this going in court because Microsoft has been deficient on winning the deal. And that is by the judge and in government contracts, as you know, when you're deficient, you're ineligible. So essentially on the tech specs, Microsoft failed to meet the criteria of the contract and they're deficient. They still can't host top secret content even if they wanted to. This is going to be a game changer. If this comes out to be true, it will be a huge tech scandal. If it's true, then AWS is going to have egg on their face. Okay, so moving past JEDI, this speaks to the large scale problems that are having with COVID. You seeing Amazon, they're all working at home, but they still get to run the servers. They can do it, they've got cloud native, you got DevOps, but for their customers Stu, but people who are trying to do hybrid, what are you hearing in terms of the kinds of situations that people are doing? Are they still going to work with masks on? Are there still data centers that need to be managed? What are you hearing Stu, in the tech worlds do around COVID-19 and as the cloud becomes more apparent, it's obvious that if you're not cloud native, you're going to be on the wrong side of history here, it's pretty obvious. >> Well, absolutely John, there is a bit of a tailwind behind cloud or with COVID-19, everything from, you mentioned work from home. Everybody needs to be on their VPN. They need to access their services, where they are. If you've got a global workforce, if you thought that your infrastructure was going to be able to handle that, you might not be in for a good story. AWS is meeting that need. There's been some of the cloud providers that have had performance issues, that have had to prioritize which customers can get access to things. AWS is standing strong, they're meeting their customers and they're answering the call of cloud. We know that AWS puts a huge investment into their environment. If you compare an availability zone or from AWS, it is very, very sturdy. It's not just, you know, a small cluster and they say, "Hey, we can run all over the place." To be specific Azure, has been having some of those performance issues and there's been some concerns. Corey actually wrote a really good article talking about that it actually puts a bad view on public cloud in general, but we know not all public clouds are the same. So, Google has been doing quite well, managing the demand spike, so has AWS. Microsoft has needed to respond a little bit. >> Since you just mentioned, Microsoft's outages, Microsoft actually got caught on their 8K filing, which I just had me going through and I noticed that they said they had all this uptime for the cloud. It turns out it wasn't the cloud, it was the team's product. They had to actually put a strike a line through it legally. So a lot of people getting called out, but it doesn't matter, it's a crisis. I think that's not going to be a core issue. This is going to be what technology has been needed the most. And I got to ask you Stu, when was the last time you and I talked about virtual desktops? Because hey, if you're working at home and you're not at your desk, you might need some stuff on your desk. This is a real issue. I mean it's kind of a corner case in tech, but virtual desktops, if you're not at the office, you need to have that at home. This is a huge issue and it's been a surge of demand. >> Yeah, there were jokes in the community that, you know, finally at the year of V.D.I., but desktop as the service John, is an area that took a little while to get going. So, Dave Vellante and I were just having a conversation about this. You and Dave interviewed me when Amazon released workspaces and it was like, you know, Citrix is doing so well and V.D.I. isn't the hotness anymore, but desktop as a service, has grown, if you talk about desktop as a service compared to VDI, VDI is still a bit of a heavy lift. Even if you've got hyper converged infrastructure, roll this out, it's a couple of months to put these whole solutions together. Now if you have some of that infrastructure, can you scale it, can you build them up much faster? Yes you can. But if you're starting to enable your workforce a little bit faster, desktop as a service is going to be faster. AWS has a strong solution with workspaces. It really is that enablement and it's also putting pressure on the SaaS providers. One, they need scale and two, they need to be responsive that some of their customers need to scale up really fast and some of them need to dial things down. Always worry about, some of these contracts that the SaaS providers put you in. So, customers need to make sure they're being loud and clear with their providers. If you need help, if you need to adjust something, push back on them because they should be responsive, because we know that there is a broad impact on this, but it will not be a permanent impact. So, these are the times that companies need to work closely with customers, because otherwise you will, either make a customer for life or you will have somebody that will not be saying good about you for a long time. >> Well Stu, so let's just quickly run through some of the highlights so far on the virtual conference, virtual event. Obviously Amazon pre-announced last month, the Windows migration service, which has been a big part of their business. They've been doing it for 11 years. So we're going to have an interview with an AWS person to talk about that. Also AppFlow is announced as well as part of the virtual kind of private connects. So, you know, you're seeing that right here, large scale data lakes breaking down those silos, moving data from the cloud, from the console into the top applicants, like Salesforce is the big one. So that was kind of pre announced. The big story here is the Kendra availability and the augmented A.I. availability, among other things. This is this big story. This kind of shows the Amazon track record. They pre-announced that re:Invent and try to run as fast as they can to get it shipping. The focus of AI, the focus of large scale capacity, whether it's building on top of EC2, serverless, Lambda, A.I., all this is kind of coming together. Data, high capacity operational throughput and added value. That seems to be the highlights, your reaction? >> Yeah, so John, AppFlow is an interesting one, we were just talking about task providers. An area that we've been spending a lot of time talking with the East coast system is my data is all over the place. Yes, there's my data centers, public cloud, but there's all of these task providers. So, if I have data in ServiceNow I have it in Workday, I have it in Salesforce, how do I have connectors there? How do I secure that? How do I protect that? So Amazon, working with a broad ecosystem and helping to pull that together is definitely an interesting one to watch. Kendra definitely been some good buzz in the ecosystem for a while there. The question is on natural language processing and A.I., where are the customers with these deployments? Because some of them, if they're a little bit more longterm strategic might be the kind of projects that get put on pause rather than the ones that are critical for me to run the business today. >> And I just did a podcast with the VMware ecosystem last week talking about which projects will be funded, which ones won't. It brings up this new virtual work environment, where some people are going to get paid and some people aren't. If you're not core to the enterprise, you're probably not going to get paid. If you're not getting a phone call to come into work, you're probably going to get fired. So there will be projects that will be cut and projects that will be funded. Certainly virtual events, which I want to talk to you about in a minute, to applications that are driving revenue and or engagement around the new workforce. So the virtualization of business is happening. Now, we joke because we know server virtualization actually enabled the cloud, right? So I think there's going to be a huge Cambrian explosion of applications. So I want to get your thoughts, the folks you've been talking through the past few months, what are you hearing in terms of those kinds of projects that people are going to be leaning into and funding, versus ones they might put on hold? Have you heard anything? >> Yeah, well, John, it's interesting, when you go back at its core, what is AWS? And they want to enable build. So the last couple of years we've been talking about all of the new applications that will get built. That's not getting put on hold, John. What I do, not just to run the business but grow the business. I need to still have applications at the core of what we do. Data and application really are what driving companies today. So that piece is so critically important and therefore AWS is a very strategic partner there. >> Yeah, I've been seeing the same things too. I think the common trend that I would just add to that would be I'm seeing companies looking at the COVID crisis as an opportunity. And frankly in some cases an excuse to lay people off and that's kind of, you're seeing some of that. But at the end of the day that people are resetting, re-inventing and then putting new growth strategies together, that still doesn't change. business still needs to get done, so great point. All right, Stu, virtual events. We're here with the AWS summit. Normally we're on the show floor with theCUBE, we are here with the virtual CUBE doing our virtual thing. It's been interesting, Stu. A lot of our events have converted to virtual, some have been canceled but most of them have been been running on the virtual. We've been plugged in. But theCUBE is evolving, and I want to get your thoughts on how you see theCube evolving. I've been getting a lot of questions. This came up again on the VMware community podcast. How has theCUBE morphed? And I know that we've been working hard with a lot of our customers, how have we evolved? Because we're in the middle of this digital wave. This is a virtualization wave. theCUBE is in there. We've been successful, there's been different use cases. Some have been embedded into the software. Amazon's got their own run a show. But events are more than just running the show content. There's a lot more community behind this Stu, your thoughts on how theCUBE has evolved and what are you seeing? >> I'm glad John, you just mentioned community. So you and I have talked many times on air and did this too about theCUBE is as much a network and a community as it is a media company. So, first of all it's been so heartening over the last couple of months that we've been putting out content. We're still getting some great feedback from the community. One of the things I personally miss is, when we step off the stage and you walk the hallway and you bump into people that know and they ask you questions or they share some of the things that they're going through. That data that we always look for is something we still need. So I'm making sure to reach out to friends diving back into the social panels to make sure that we understand the pulse of what's going on. But, John, our community has always been online so a big piece of theCUBE is relatively unchanged other than we're doing all of the interviews remote. We have to deal with everyone's home systems and home network. Every once in a while you hear a dog barking in the background or a child running, but it actually humanized. So there's that opportunity for the communities to rally together. Some of my favorite interviews have been, the open source communities that are gathering together to work on common issues. A lot of them specifically for the global pandemic. And so there are some really good stories out there. I worry when you talk about companies that are saying, Hey, this is the-- (sound cuts out) There have been so many job losses, in this pandemic that it just is heartbreaking. So, we love when the tech community is helping to spur new opportunities, great new industries. I had a great interview that I did with our friends from A Cloud Guru and they've seen about a 20 to 30% increase on people taking the online training. And one of the main things that they're taking training on is the 101 courses on AWS, on Google and on Azure as well as an interesting point John, they said multicloud is something that has come up. So, 2020, we've been wondering is AWS going to admit that multicloud is a thing? Or are they going to stick with their hybrid message and ask that their partners not talk about multicloud? >> It's been interesting on the virtual queue, because we and Amazon's been a visionary in this and letting theCUBE be virtual with them. It's become a connective tissue, Stu, between the community and if you think about how much money the companies are saving by not running the physical events and with the layoffs as you mentioned, I think there could be an opportunity for theCUBE to be that connective tissue to bring people together. And I think that's the mission that we hope will unfold. But ultimately digital investments will probably go up from this. I'm seeing a lot of great conversion around, okay, so the content, what does it mean to me? Is that my my friend group, how are my friends involved? How do I learn, how do I discover? How do I connect? And I think the interesting thing about theCube is we've seen that upfront and I think there's a positive sign ahead, Stu, around virtualization of the media and the community and I think is going to be an economic opportunity and I hope that we could help people find either jobs or ways to reengage and reconnect. So again, re:Invent's coming, you've got VMworld, all these big shows too, they drop so much cash! Can you imagine if they put all that cash into the community? I think that's a viable scenario. >> Yeah, no, absolutely, John. There is big money in events. Yes, there are less costs. There are also almost none of them are charging for people to attend and very few of them are charging their sponsors. So, big shift in how we have to look at these. It needs to be a real focus on content. I mean, from our standpoint, John, from day one, and we've been doing this a decade now, in the early days when it was a wing and a prayer on the technology, it was always about the content and the best people help extract that signal from the noise. So, some things have changed, the mission overall stays the same. >> And you know what, Amazon is being humble. They're saying we're figuring it out. Of course, we're psyched that we're there with the virtual CUBE. Stu, thanks for spending the time kicking off this virtual coverage, wrap up. Not as good as face-to-face, love to be there on site, but I think it's going to be easier to get guests too Stu in the virtual world, but we're going to go to a hybrid as soon as it comes back to normal. It sounds like cloud Stu, public hybrid virtual. There it is. Stu, thanks so much. >> Thanks John. >> Okay, that's theCUBE coverage for AWS Summit Virtual Online. It's theCUBE virtual coverage. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman. Thanks for watching. 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