(mellow electronic music) >> Welcome back, we're here live in Las Vegas. This is SiliconANGLE and Wikibon's theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events, extract the signal from the noise. We are live in Las Vegas at Amazon Web Services re:Invent conference, about developers, large-scale cloud, big data, the future. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. I'm joined by co-host, Dave Vellante, co-founder of Wikibon.org, and our guest is James Hamilton, VP and Distinguished Engineer at Amazon Web Services. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Well thank you very much. >> You're a tech athlete, certainly in our book, is a term we coined, because we love to use sports analogies You're kind of the cutting edge. You've been the business and technology innovating for many years going back to the database days at IBM, Microsoft, and now Amazon. You gave a great presentation at the analyst briefing. Very impressive. So I got to ask you the first question, when did you first get addicted to the notion of what Amazon could be? When did you first taste the Cool-Aide? >> Super good question. Couple different instances. One is I was general manager of exchange hosts and services and we were doing a decent job, but what I noticed was customers were loving it, we're expanding like mad, and I saw opportunity to improve by at least a factor of two I'm sorry, 10, it's just amazing. So that was a first hint that this is really important for customers. The second one was S3 was announced, and the storage price pretty much froze the whole industry. I've worked in storage all my life, I think I know what's possible in storage, and S3 was not possible. It was just like, what is this? And so, I started writing apps against it, I was just blown away. Super reliable. Unbelievably priced. I wrote a fairly substantial app, I got a bill for $7. Wow. So that's really the beginnings of where I knew this was going to change the world, and I've been, as you said, addicted to it since. >> So you also mentioned some stats there. We'll break it down, 'cause we love to talk about the software defined data center, which is basically not even at the hype stage yet. It's just like, it's still undefined, but software virtualization, network virtualization really is pushing that movement of the software focus, and that's essentially you guys are doing. You're talking about notifications and basically it's a large-scale systems problem. That you guys are building a global operating system as Andy Jassy would say. Well, he didn't say that directly, he said internet operating system, but if you believe that APIs are critical services. So I got to ask you that question around this notion of a data center, I mean come on, nobody's really going to give up their data center. It might change significantly, but you pointed out the data center costs are in the top three order, servers, power circulation systems, or cooling circulation, and then actual power itself. Is that right, did I get that right? >> Pretty close, pretty close. Servers dominate, and then after servers if you look at data centers together, that's power, cooling, and the building and facility itself. That is the number two cost, and the actual power itself is number three. >> So that's a huge issue. When we talk like CIOs, it's like can you please take the facility's budget off my back? For many reasons, one, it's going to be written off soon maybe. All kinds of financial issues around-- >> A lot of them don't see it, though, which is a problem. >> That is a problem, that is a problem. Real estate season, and then, yes. >> And then they go, "Ah, it's not my problem" so money just flies out the window. >> So it's obviously a cost improvement for you. So what are you guys doing in that area and what's your big ah-ha for the customers that you walk in the door and say, look, we have this cloud, we have this system and all those headaches can be, not shifted, or relieved if you will, some big asprin for them. What's the communication like? What do you talk to them about? >> Really it depends an awful lot on who it is. I mean, different people care about different things. What gets me excited is I know that this is the dominate cost of offering a service is all of this muck. It's all of this complexity, it's all of this high, high capital cost up front. Facility will run 200 million before there's servers in it. This is big money, and so from my perspective, taking that way from most companies is one contribution. Second contribution is, if you build a lot of data centers you get good at it, and so as a consequence of that I think we're building very good facilities. They're very reliable, and the costs are plummeting fast. That's a second contribution. Third contribution is because... because we're making capacity available to customers it means they don't have to predict two years in advance what they're going to need, and that means there's less wastage, and that's just good for the industry as a whole. >> So we're getting some questions on our crowd chat application. If you want to ask a question, ask him anything. It's kind of like Reddit. Go to crowdchat.net/reinvent. The first question came in was, "James, when do you think ARM will be in the data center?" >> Ah ha, that's a great question. Well, many people know that I'm super excited about ARM. It's early days, the reason why I'm excited is partly because I love seeing lots of players. I love seeing lots of innovation. I think that's what's making our industry so exciting right now. So that's one contribution that ARM brings. Another is if you look at the history of server-side computing, most of the innovation comes from the volume-driven, usually on clients first. The reason why X86 ended up in such a strong position is so many desktops we running X86 processors and as a consequence it became a great server processor. High R&D flow into it. ARM is in just about every device that everyone's carrying around. It's almost every disk drive, it's just super broadly deployed. And whenever you see a broadly deployed processor it means there's an opportunity to do something special for customers. I think it's good for the industry. But in a precise answer to your question, I really don't have one right now. It's something that we're deeply interested in and investigating deeply, but at this point it hasn't happened yet, but I'm excited by it. >> Do you think that... Two lines of questioning here. One is things that are applicable to AWS, other's just your knowledge of the industry and what you think. We talked about that yesterday with OCP, right? >> Yep. >> Not a right fit for us, but you applaud the effort. We should talk about that, too, but does splitting workloads up into little itty, bitty processors change the utilization factor and change the need for things like virtualization, you know? What do you think? >> Yeah, it's a good question. I first got excited about the price performance of micro-servers back in 2007. And at that time it was pretty easy to produce a win by going to a lower-powered processor. At that point memory bandwidth wasn't as good as it could be. It was actually hard on some workloads to fully use a processor. Intel's a very smart company, they've done great work on improving the memory bandwidth, and so today it's actually harder to produce a win, and so you kind of have workloads in classes. At the very, very high end we've got database workloads. They really love single-threaded performance, and performance really is king, but there are lots of highly parallel workloads where there's an opportunity for a big gain. I still think virtualization is probably something where the industry's going to want to be there, just because it brings so many operational advantages. >> So I got to ask the question. Yesterday we had Jason Stowe on, CEO of Cycle Computing, and he had an amazing thing that he did, sorry, trumping it out kids say, but it's not new to you, but it's new to us. He basically created a supercomputer and spun up hundreds of thousands of cores in 30 minutes, which is like insane, but he did it for like 30 grand. Which would've cost, if you try to provision it to the TUCO calculator or whatever your model, it'd be months and years, maybe, and years. But the thing that he said I want to get your point on and I'm going to ask you questions specifically on is, Spot instances were critical for him to do that, and the creativity of his solutions, so I got to ask you, did you see Spot pricing instances being a big deal, and what impact has that done to AWS' vision of large scale? >> I'm super excited by Spot. In fact, it's one of the reasons I joined Amazon. I went through a day of interviews, I met a bunch of really smart people doing interesting work. Someone probably shouldn't have talked to me about Spot because it hadn't been announced yet, and I just went, "This is brilliant! "This is absolutely brilliant!" It's taking the ideas from financial markets, where you've got high-value assets, and saying why don't we actually sell it off, make a market on the basis of that and sell it off? So two things happen that make Spot interesting. The first is an observation up front that poor utilization is basically the elephant in the room. Most folks can't use more than 12% to 15% of their overall server capacity, and so all the rest ends up being wasted. >> You said yesterday 30% is outstanding. It's like have a party. >> 30% probably means you're not measuring it well. >> Yeah, you're lying. >> It's real good, yeah, basically. So that means 70% or more is wasted, it's a crime. And so the first thing that says is, that one of the most powerful advertisements for cloud computing is if you bring a large number of non-correlated workloads together, what happens is when you're supporting a workload you've got to have enough capacity to support the peak, but you only get to monetize the average. And so as the peak to average gets further apart, you're wasting more. So when you bring a large number of non-correlated workloads together what happens is it flattens out just by itself. Without doing anything it flattens out, but there's still some ups and downs. And the Spot market is a way of filling in those ups and downs so we get as close to 100%. >> Is there certain workloads that fit the spot, obviously certain workloads might fit it, but what workloads don't fit the Spot price, because, I mean, it makes total sense and it's an arbitrage opportunity for excess capacity laying around, and it's price based on usage. So is there a workload, 'cause it'll be torrent up, torrent down, I mean, what's the use cases there? >> Workloads that don't operate well in an interrupted environment, that are very time-critical, those workloads shouldn't be run in Spot. It's just not what the resource is designed for. But workloads like the one that we were talking to with Cycle Computing are awesome, where you need large numbers of resources. If the workload needs to restart, that's absolutely fine, and price is really the focus. >> Okay, and question from crowd chat. "Ask James what are his thoughts "on commodity networking and merchant silicon." >> I think an awful lot about that. >> This guy knows you. (both laughing) >> Who's that from? >> It's your family. >> Yeah, exactly! >> They're watching. >> No, network commoditization is a phenomenal thing that the whole industry's needed that for 15 years. We've got a vertical ecosystem that's kind of frozen in time. Vertically-integrated ecosystem kind of frozen in time. Costs everywhere are falling except in networking. We just got to do something, and so it's happening. I'm real excited by that. It's really changing the Amazon business and what we can do for customers. >> Let's talk a little bit about server design, because I was fascinated yesterday listening to you talk how you've come full circle. Over the last decade, right, you started with what's got to be stripped down, basic commodity and now you're of a different mindset. So describe that, and then I have some follow-up questions for you. >> Yeah, I know what you're alluding to. Is years ago I used to argue you don't want hardware specialization, it's crazy. It's the magic's in software. You want to specialize software running on general-purpose processors, and that's because there was a very small number of servers out there, and I felt like it was the most nimble way to run. However today, in AWS when we're running ten of thousands of copies of a single type of server, hardware optimizations are absolutely vital. You end up getting a power-performance advantage at 10X. You can get a price-performance advantage that's substantial and so I've kind of gone full circle where now we're pulling more and more down into the hardware, and starting to do hardware optimizations for our customers. >> So heat density is a huge problem in data centers and server design. You showed a picture of a Quanta package yesterday. You didn't show us your server, said "I can't you ours," but you said, "but we blow this away, "and this is really good." But you describe that you're able to get around a lot of those problems because of the way you design data centers. >> Yep. >> Could you talk about that a little bit? >> Sure, sure, sure. One of the problems when you're building a server it could end up anywhere. It could end up in a beautiful data center that's super well engineered. It could end up on the end of a row on a very badly run data center. >> Or in a closet. >> Or in a closet. The air is recirculating, and so the servers have to be designed with huge headroom on cooling requirements, and they have to be able to operate in any of those environments without driving warranty costs for the vendors. We take a different approach. We say we're not going to build terrible data centers. We're going to build really good data centers and we're going to build servers that exploit the fact those data centers are good, and what happens is more value. We don't have to waste as much because we know that we don't have to operate in the closet. >> We got some more questions coming here by the way. This is awesome. This ask me anything crowd chat thing is going great. We got someone, he's from Nutanix, so he's a geek. He's been following your career for many years. I got to ask you about kind of the future of large-scale. So Spot, in his comment, David's comment, Spot instances prove that solutions like WMare's distributed power management are not valuable. Don't power off the most expensive asset. So, okay, that brings up an interesting point. I don't want to slam on BMWare right now, but I just wanted to bring to the next logical question which is this is a paradigm shift. That's a buzz word, but really a lot's happening that's new and innovative. And you guys are doing it and leading. What's next in the large-scale paradigm of computing and computer science? On the science-side you mentioned merchant silicon. Obviously that's, the genie's out of the bottle there, but what's around the corner? Is it the notifications at the scheduling? Was it virtualization, is it compiler design? What are some of the things that you see out on the horizon that you got your eyes on? >> That's interesting, I mean. I've got, if you name your area, and I'll you some interesting things happening in the area, and it's one of the cool things of being in the industry right now. Is that 10 years ago we had a relatively static, kind of slow-pace. You really didn't have to look that far ahead, because of anything was coming you'd see it coming for five years. Now if you ask me about power distribution, we've got tons of work going on in power distribution. We're researching different power distribution topologies. We're researching higher voltage distribution, direct current distribution. Haven't taken any of those steps yet, but we're were working in that. We've got a ton going on in networking. You'll see an announcement tomorrow of a new instance type that is got some interesting characteristics from a networking perspective. There's a lot going on. >> Let's pre-announce, no. >> Gary's over there like-- >> How 'about database, how 'about database? I mean, 10 years ago, John always says database was kind of boring. You go to a party say, oh welcome to database business, oh yeah, see ya. 25 years ago it was really interesting. >> Now you go to a party is like, hey ah! Have a drink! >> It a whole new ballgame, you guys are participating. Google Spanner is this crazy thing, right? So what are your thoughts on the state of the database business today, in memory, I mean. >> No, it's beautiful. I did a keynote at SIGMOD a few years ago and what I said is that 10 years ago Bruce Linsey, I used to work with him in the database world, Bruce Linsey called it polishing the round ball. It's just we're making everything a little, tiny bit better, and now it's fundamentally different. I mean what's happening right now is the database world, every year, if you stepped out for a year, you wouldn't recognize it. It's just, yeah, it's amazing. >> And DynamoDB has had rapid success. You know, we're big users of that. We actually built this app, crowd chat app that people are using on Hadoop and Hbase, and we immediately moved that to DynamoDB and your stack was just so much faster and scalable. So I got to ask you the-- >> And less labor. >> Yeah, yeah. So it's just been very reliable and all the other goodness of the elastic B socket and SQS, all that other good stuff we're working with node, et cetera So I got to ask you, the area that I want your opinion around the corner is versioning control. So at large-scale one of the challenges that we have is as we're pushin' new code, making sure that the integrated stack is completely updated and synchronized with open-source projects. So where does that fit into the scaling up? 'Cause at large scale, versioning control used to be easy to manage, but downloading software and putting in patches, but now you guys handle all that at scale. So that, I'm assuming there's some automation involved, some real tech involved, but how are you guys handling the future of making sure the code is all updated in the stack? >> It's a great question. It's super important from a security perspective that the code be up to date and current. It's super important from a customer perspective and you need to make sure that these upgrades are just non-disruptive. One customer, best answer I heard was yesterday from a customer was on a panel, they were asked how did they deal with Amazon's upgrades, and what she said is, "I didn't even know when they were happening. "I can't tell when they're happening." Exactly the right answer. That's exactly our goal. We monitor the heck out of all of our systems, and our goal, and boy we take it seriously, is we need to know any issue before a customer knows it. And if you fail on that promise, you'll meet Andy really quick. >> So some other paradigm questions coming in. Floyd asks, "Ask James what his opinion of cloud brokerage "companies such as Jamcracker or Graviton. "Do they have a place, or is it wrong thinking?" (James laughs) >> From my perspective, the bigger and richer the ecosystem, the happier our customers all are. It's all goodness. >> It's Darwinism, that's the answer. You know, the fit shall survive. No, but I think that brings up this new marketplace that Spot pricing came out of the woodwork. It's a paradigm that exists in other industries, apply it to cloud. So brokering of cloud might be something, especially with regional and geographical focuses. You can imagine a world of brokering. I mean, I don't know, I'm not qualified to answer that. >> Our goal, honestly, is to provide enough diversity of services that we completely satisfy customer's requirements, and that's what we intend to do. >> How do you guys think about the make versus buy? Are you at a point now where you say, you know what, we can make this stuff for our specific requirements better than we can get it off the shelf, or is that not the case? >> It changes every few minutes. It really does. >> So what are the parameters? >> Years ago when I joined the company we were buying servers from OEM suppliers, and they were doing some tailoring for our uses. It's gotten to the point now where that's not the right model and we have our own custom designs that are being built. We've now gotten to the point where some of the components in servers are being customized for us, partly because we're driving sufficient volume that it's justified, and partly because the partners that the component suppliers are happy to work with us directly and they want input from us. And so it's every year it's a little bit more specialized and that line's moving, so it's shifting towards specialization pretty quickly. >> So now I'm going to be replaced by the crowd, gettin' great questions, I'm going to be obsolete! No earbud, I got it right here. So the question's more of a fun one probably for you to answer, or just kind of lean back and kind of pull your hair out, but how the heck does AWS add so much infrastructure per day? How do you do it? >> It's a really interesting question. I kind of know how much infrastructure, I know abstractly how much infrastructure we put out every day, but when you actually think about this number in context, it's mind boggling. So here's the number. Here's the number. Every day, we deploy enough servers to support Amazon when it was a seven billion dollar company. You think of how many servers a seven billion dollar e-commerce company would actually require? Every day we deploy that many servers, and it's just shocking to me to think that the servers are in the logistics chain, they're being built, they're delivered to the appropriate data centers, there's back positions there, there's networking there, there's power there. I'm actually, every day I'm amazed to be quite honest with you. >> It's mind-boggling. And then for a while I was there, okay, wait a minute. Would that be Moors' Law? Uh no, not even in particular. 'Cause you said every day. Not every year, every day. >> Yeah, it really is. It's a shocking number and one, my definition of scale changes almost every day, where if you look at the number of customers that are trusting with their workloads today, that's what's driving that growth, it's phenomenal! >> We got to get wrapped up, but I got to ask the Hadoob World SQL over Hadoob question solutions. Obviously Hadoob is great, great for storing stuff, but now you're seeing hybrids come out. Again this comes back down to the, you can recognize the database world anymore if you were asleep for a year. So what's your take on that ecosystem? You guys have a lasting map or a decent a bunch of other things. There's some big data stuff going on. How do you, from a database perspective, how do you look at Hadoob and SQL over Hadoob? >> I personally love 'em both, and I love the diversity that's happening in the database world. There's some people that kind of have a religion and think it's crazy to do anything else. I think it's a good thing. Map reduce is particularly, I think, is a good thing, because it takes... First time I saw map reduce being used was actually a Google advertising engineer. And what I loved about his, I was actually talking to him about it, and what I loved is he had no idea how many servers he was using. If you ask me or anyone in the technology how many servers they're using, they know. And the beautiful thing is he's running multi-thousand node applications and he doesn't know. He doesn't care, he's solving advertising problems. And so I think it's good. I think there's a place for everything. >> Well my final question is asking guests this show. Put the bumper sticker on the car leaving re:Invent this year. What's it say? What does the bumper sticker say on the car? Summarize for the folks, what is the tagline this year? The vibe, and the focus? >> Yeah, for me this was the year. I mean, the business has been growing but this is the year where suddenly I'm seeing huge companies 100% dependent upon AWS or on track to be 100% dependent upon AWS. This is no longer an experiment, something people want to learn about. This is real, and this is happening. This is running real businesses. So it's real, baby! >> It's real baby, I like, that's the best bumper... James, distinguished guest now CUBE alum for us, thanks for coming on, you're a tech athlete. Great to have you, great success. Sounds like you got a lot of exciting things you're working on and that's always fun. And obviously Amazon is killing it, as we say in Silicon Valley. You guys are doing great, we love the product. We've been using it for crowd chats. Great stuff, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> We'll be right back with our next guest after this short break. This is live, exclusive coverage with siliconANGLE theCUBE. We'll be right back.