>>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020, sponsored by Intel and AWS. >>Welcome back to the cubes coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 I'm Lisa Martin. Joining me next is one of our cube alumni. Breton McMillan is back the director of us, federal for AWS. Right. It's great to see you glad that you're safe and well. >>Great. It's great to be back. Uh, I think last year when we did the cube, we were on the convention floor. It feels very different this year here at reinvent, it's gone virtual and yet it's still true to how reinvent always been. It's a learning conference and we're releasing a lot of new products and services for our customers. >>Yes. A lot of content, as you say, the one thing I think I would say about this reinvent, one of the things that's different, it's so quiet around us. Normally we're talking loudly over tens of thousands of people on the showroom floor, but great. That AWS is still able to connect in such an actually an even bigger way with its customers. So during Theresa Carlson's keynote, want to get your opinion on this or some info. She talked about the AWS open data sponsorship program, and that you guys are going to be hosting the national institutes of health, NIH sequence, read archive data, the biologist, and may former gets really excited about that. Talk to us about that because especially during the global health crisis that we're in, that sounds really promising >>Very much is I am so happy that we're working with NIH on this and multiple other initiatives. So the secret greed archive or SRA, essentially what it is, it's a very large data set of sequenced genomic data. And it's a wide variety of judge you gnomic data, and it's got a knowledge human genetic thing, but all life forms or all branches of life, um, is in a SRA to include viruses. And that's really important here during the pandemic. Um, it's one of the largest and oldest, um, gen sequence genomic data sets are out there and yet it's very modern. It has been designed for next generation sequencing. So it's growing, it's modern and it's well used. It's one of the more important ones that it's out there. One of the reasons this is so important is that we know to find cures for what a human ailments and disease and death, but by studying the gem genomic code, we can come up with the answers of these or the scientists can come up with answer for that. And that's what Amazon is doing is we're putting in the hands of the scientists, the tools so that they can help cure heart disease and diabetes and cancer and, um, depression and yes, even, um, uh, viruses that can cause pandemics. >>So making this data, sorry, I'm just going to making this data available to those scientists. Worldwide is incredibly important. Talk to us about that. >>Yeah, it is. And so, um, within NIH, we're working with, um, the, um, NCBI when you're dealing with NIH, there's a lot of acronyms, uh, and uh, at NIH, it's the national center for, um, file type technology information. And so we're working with them to make this available as an open data set. Why, why this is important is it's all about increasing the speed for scientific discovery. I personally think that in the fullness of time, the scientists will come up with cures for just about all of the human ailments that are out there. And it's our job at AWS to put into the hands of the scientists, the tools they need to make things happen quickly or in our lifetime. And I'm really excited to be working with NIH on that. When we start talking about it, there's multiple things. The scientists needs. One is access to these data sets and SRA. >>It's a very large data set. It's 45 petabytes and it's growing. I personally believe that it's going to double every year, year and a half. So it's a very large data set and it's hard to move that data around. It's so much easier if you just go into the cloud, compute against it and do your research there in the cloud. And so it's super important. 45 petabytes, give you an idea if it were all human data, that's equivalent to have a seven and a half million people or put another way 90% of everybody living in New York city. So that's how big this is. But then also what AWS is doing is we're bringing compute. So in the cloud, you can scale up your compute, scale it down, and then kind of the third they're. The third leg of the tool of the stool is giving the scientists easy access to the specialized tool sets they need. >>And we're doing that in a few different ways. One that the people would design these toolsets design a lot of them on AWS, but then we also make them available through something called AWS marketplace. So they can just go into marketplace, get a catalog, go in there and say, I want to launch this resolve work and launches the infrastructure underneath. And it speeds the ability for those scientists to come up with the cures that they need. So SRA is stored in Amazon S3, which is a very popular object store, not just in the scientific community, but virtually every industry uses S3. And by making this available on these public data sets, we're giving the scientists the ability to speed up their research. >>One of the things that Springs jumps out to me too, is it's in addition to enabling them to speed up research, it's also facilitating collaboration globally because now you've got the cloud to drive all of this, which allows researchers and completely different parts of the world to be working together almost in real time. So I can imagine the incredible power that this is going to, to provide to that community. So I have to ask you though, you talked about this being all life forms, including viruses COVID-19, what are some of the things that you think we can see? I expect this to facilitate. Yeah. >>So earlier in the year we took the, um, uh, genetic code or NIH took the genetic code and they, um, put it in an SRA like format and that's now available on AWS and, and here's, what's great about it is that you can now make it so anybody in the world can go to this open data set and start doing their research. One of our goals here is build back to a democratization of research. So it used to be that, um, get, for example, the very first, um, vaccine that came out was a small part. It's a vaccine that was done by our rural country doctor using essentially test tubes in a microscope. It's gotten hard to do that because data sets are so large, you need so much computer by using the power of the cloud. We've really democratized it and now anybody can do it. So for example, um, with the SRE data set that was done by NIH, um, organizations like the university of British Columbia, their, um, cloud innovation center is, um, doing research. And so what they've done is they've scanned, they, um, SRA database think about it. They scanned out 11 million entries for, uh, coronavirus sequencing. And that's really hard to do in a typical on-premise data center. Who's relatively easy to do on AWS. So by making this available, we can have a larger number of scientists working on the problems that we need to have solved. >>Well, and as the, as we all know in the U S operation warp speed, that warp speed alone term really signifies how quickly we all need this to be progressing forward. But this is not the first partnership that AWS has had with the NIH. Talk to me about what you guys, what some of the other things are that you're doing together. >>We've been working with NIH for a very long time. Um, back in 2012, we worked with NIH on, um, which was called the a thousand genome data set. This is another really important, um, data set and it's a large number of, uh, against sequence human genomes. And we moved that into, again, an open dataset on AWS and what's happened in the last eight years is many scientists have been able to compute about on it. And the other, the wonderful power of the cloud is over time. We continue to bring out tools to make it easier for people to work. So what they're not they're computing using our, um, our instance types. We call it elastic cloud computing. whether they're doing that, or they were doing some high performance computing using, um, uh, EMR elastic MapReduce, they can do that. And then we've brought up new things that really take it to the next layer, like level like, uh, Amazon SageMaker. >>And this is a, um, uh, makes it really easy for, um, the scientists to launch machine learning algorithms on AWS. So we've done the thousand genome, uh, dataset. Um, there's a number of other areas within NIH that we've been working on. So for example, um, over at national cancer Institute, we've been providing some expert guidance on best practices to how, how you can architect and work on these COVID related workloads. Um, NIH does things with, um, collaboration with many different universities, um, over 2,500, um, academic institutions. And, um, and they do that through grants. And so we've been working with doc office of director and they run their grant management applications in the RFA on AWS, and that allows it to scale up and to work very efficiently. Um, and then we entered in with, um, uh, NIH into this program called strides strides as a program for knowing NIH, but also all these other institutions that work within NIH to use the power of the cloud use commercial cloud for scientific discovery. And when we started that back in July of 2018, long before COVID happened, it was so great that we had that up and running because now we're able to help them out through the strides program. >>Right. Can you imagine if, uh, let's not even go there? I was going to say, um, but so, okay. So the SRA data is available through the AWS open data sponsorship program. You talked about strides. What are some of the other ways that AWS system? >>Yeah, no. So strides, uh, is, uh, you know, wide ranging through multiple different institutes. So, um, for example, over at, uh, the national heart lung and blood Institute, uh, do di NHL BI. I said, there's a lot of acronyms and I gel BI. Um, they've been working on, um, harmonizing, uh, genomic data. And so working with the university of Michigan, they've been analyzing through a program that they call top of med. Um, we've also been working with a NIH on, um, establishing best practices, making sure everything's secure. So we've been providing, um, AWS professional services that are showing them how to do this. So one portion of strides is getting the right data set and the right compute in the right tools, in the hands of the scientists. The other areas that we've been working on is making sure the scientists know how to use it. And so we've been developing these cloud learning pathways, and we started this quite a while back, and it's been so helpful here during the code. So, um, scientists can now go on and they can do self-paced online courses, which we've been really helping here during the, during the pandemic. And they can learn how to maximize their use of cloud technologies through these pathways that we've developed for them. >>Well, not education is imperative. I mean, there, you think about all of the knowledge that they have with within their scientific discipline and being able to leverage technology in a way that's easy is absolutely imperative to the timing. So, so, um, let's talk about other data sets that are available. So you've got the SRA is available. Uh, what are their data sets are available through this program? >>What about along a wide range of data sets that we're, um, uh, doing open data sets and in general, um, these data sets are, um, improving the human condition or improving the, um, the world in which we live in. And so, um, I've talked about a few things. There's a few more, uh, things. So for example, um, there's the cancer genomic Atlas that we've been working with, um, national cancer Institute, as well as the national human genomic research Institute. And, um, that's a very important data set that being computed against, um, uh, throughout the world, uh, commonly within the scientific community, that data set is called TCGA. Um, then we also have some, uh, uh, datasets are focused on certain groups. So for example, kids first is a data set. That's looking at a lot of the, um, challenges, uh, in diseases that kids get every kind of thing from very rare pediatric cancer as to heart defects, et cetera. >>And so we're working with them, but it's not just in the, um, uh, medical side. We have open data sets, um, with, uh, for example, uh, NOAA national ocean open national oceanic and atmospheric administration, um, to understand what's happening better with climate change and to slow the rate of climate change within the department of interior, they have a Landsat database that is looking at pictures of their birth cell, like pictures of the earth, so we can better understand the MCO world we live in. Uh, similarly, uh, NASA has, um, a lot of data that we put out there and, um, over in the department of energy, uh, there's data sets there, um, that we're researching against, or that the scientists are researching against to make sure that we have better clean, renewable energy sources, but it's not just government agencies that we work with when we find a dataset that's important. >>We also work with, um, nonprofit organizations, nonprofit organizations are also in, they're not flush with cash and they're trying to make every dollar work. And so we've worked with them, um, organizations like the child mind Institute or the Allen Institute for brain science. And these are largely like neuro imaging, um, data. And we made that available, um, via, um, our open data set, um, program. So there's a wide range of things that we're doing. And what's great about it is when we do it, you democratize science and you allowed many, many more science scientists to work on these problems. They're so critical for us. >>The availability is, is incredible, but also the, the breadth and depth of what you just spoke. It's not just government, for example, you've got about 30 seconds left. I'm going to ask you to summarize some of the announcements that you think are really, really critical for federal customers to be paying attention to from reinvent 2020. >>Yeah. So, um, one of the things that these federal government customers have been coming to us on is they've had to have new ways to communicate with their customer, with the public. And so we have a product that we've had for a while called on AWS connect, and it's been used very extensively throughout government customers. And it's used in industry too. We've had a number of, um, of announcements this weekend. Jasmine made multiple announcements on enhancement, say AWS connect or additional services, everything from helping to verify that that's the right person from AWS connect ID to making sure that that customer's gets a good customer experience to connect wisdom or making sure that the managers of these call centers can manage the call centers better. And so I'm really excited that we're putting in the hands of both government and industry, a cloud based solution to make their connections to the public better. >>It's all about connections these days, but I wish we had more time, cause I know we can unpack so much more with you, but thank you for joining me on the queue today, sharing some of the insights, some of the impacts and availability that AWS is enabling the scientific and other federal communities. It's incredibly important. And we appreciate your time. Thank you, Lisa, for Brett McMillan. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cubes coverage of AWS reinvent 2020.

>> Live from San Francisco, it's The Cube, covering Google Cloud Next 2018. Brought to you by, Google Cloud and its ecosystem partners. >> Hello everyone, welcome back this is The Cube, live in San Francisco for Google Cloud's big event. It's called Google Next for 2018, it's their big cloud show. They're showcasing all their hot technology. A lot of breaking news, a lot of new tech, a lot of new announcements, of course we're bringing it here for three days of wall-to-wall coverage live. It's day two, our next guest is Tim Kelton, co-founder of Descartes Labs, doing some amazing work with imagery and data science, AI, TensorFlow, using the Google Cloud platform to analyze nearly 15 petabytes of data. Tim, welcome to The Cube. >> Thanks, great to be here >> Thanks for coming on. So we were just geeking out before we came on camera of the app that you have, really interesting stuff you guys got going on. Again, really cool, before we get into some of the tech, talk to me about Descartes Labs, you're co-founder, where did it come from? How did it start? And what are some of the projects that you guys are working on? >> I think, therefore I am. >> Exactly, exactly. Yeah, so we're a little different story than maybe a normal start-up. I was actually at a national research laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and there was a team of us that were focused on machine learning and using datasets, like remotely sensing the Earth with satellite and aerial imagery. And we were working on that from around 2008 to 2014 and then we saw just this explosion in things like, use cases for machine learning and applying that to real world use cases. But then, at the same time, there was this explosion in cloud computing and how much data you could store and train and things like that. So we started the company in late 2014 and now here we are today, we have around 80 employees. >> And what's the main thing you guys do from a data standpoint, where does the data come from? Take a minute to explain that. >> Yeah, so we focus on kind of a lot of often geospatial-centric data, but a lot of satellite and aerial imagery. A lot of what we call remote sensing, sensors orbiting the Earth or at low aerial over the Earth. All different modalities, such as different bands of light, different radio frequencies, all of those types of things. And then we fuse them together and have them in our models. And what we've seen is there's not just the magic data set that gives you the pure answer, right? It's fusing of a lot of these data sets together to tell you what's happening and then building models to predict how those changes affect our customers, their businesses, their supply chain, all those types of things. >> Let's talk about, I want to riff on something real quick, I know I want to get to some of the tech in a second. But my kids and I talk about this all the time, I got four kids and they're now, two in high school, two in college and they see Uber. And they see Uber remapping New York City every five minutes with the data that they get from the GPS. And we started riffing on drones and self-driving cars or aerial cars, if we want to fly in the air with automated helicopters or devices, you got to have some sort of coordinate system. We need this geospatial, and so, I know it's fantasy now, but what you guys are kind of getting at could be an indicator of the kind of geospatial work that's coming down later. Right now there's some cool things happening but you'd need kind of a name space or coordinates so you don't bump into something or are these automated drones don't fly near airports, or cell towers, or windmills, wind farms. >> Yeah, and those are the types of problems we solve or we look to solve, change is happening over time. Often it's the temporal cadence that's almost the key indicator in seeing how things are actually changing over time. And people are coming to us and saying, "Can you quantify that?" We've done things like agriculture and looking at crops grown, look at every single farm all over the whole U.S. and then build that into our models and say how much corn is grown at this field? And then test it back over the last 15 years and then say, as we get new imagery coming in, just daily flooding in through our Cloud Native platform, then just rerunning those models and saying, are we producing more today or less today? >> And then how is that data used, for example, take the agriculture example and that's used to say, okay, this region is maybe more productive than this region? Is it because of weather? Is it because of other things that they're doing? >> You can go back through all different types of use cases, everything from maybe if you're insuring that crop, you would might want to know if that's flooded more on the left side of the road or the right side of the road, as a predictive indicator. You might say, this is looking like a drought year. How have we done in drought years of 2007 and-- >> You look at irrigation trends. >> And you were talking off-camera about the ground truth, can you use IOT to actually calibrate the ground truth? >> Yeah and that's the sensor infusion we're seeing, everywhere around us we're seeing just floods and floods of sensors, so we have the sensors above the Earth looking down, but then as you have more and more sensors on the ground, that's the set of ground truth that you can train and calibrate. You could go back and train and train over again. It's a lot harder problem than, is this a cat or a dog? >> Yeah that's why I was riffing on the concept of a name space, the developer concept around, this is actually space. If you want to have flying drones deliver packages to transportation, you're going to need to know, some sort of triangulation, know what to do. But I got to ask you a question, so what are some of the problems that you're asked to look at, now that you have, you have the top-down view geospace, you got some ground truth sensor exploding in with more and more devices at the network, as a instrument anywhere it can have the IP or whatnot. What are some of the problems that you guys get asked to look at, you mentioned the agriculture, what else are you guys solving? >> Any sort of land use or land classification, or facilities and facility monitoring. It could be any sort of physical infrastructure that you're wanting to quantify and predict how those changes over time might impact that business vertical. And they're really varied, they're everything from energy and agriculture, and real estate, and things like that. Just last Friday, I was talking with, we have a two parts to our company. We have from the tech side, we have the engineering side which is normal engineering, but then we also have this applied science, where we have a team of scientists that are trying to build models often for our customers. 'Cause they're not, this is geospatial and machine learning, that's a rare breed of person. >> You don't want to cross pollinate. >> Yeah, and that's just not everywhere. Not all of our customers have that type of individual. But they were telling me, they were looking at the hurricane season coming up this Fall, and they had a building detector and they can detect all the buildings. So in just a couple hours, they ran that over all of the state of Florida and identified every building in the whole state of Florida. So now, as the seasons come in, they have a way to track that. >> They can be proactive and notify someone, hey you're building might need some boards on it or some sort of risk. >> Yeah and the last couple years look at all the weather events. In California we've had droughts and fires, but then you have flooding and things like that. And you're even able to start taking new types of sensors that are coming out, like the European Space Agency has a sensor that we ingest and it does synthetic aperture radar, where it's sending a radar signal down to the Earth and capturing it. So you can do things like water levels in reservoirs and things like that. >> And look at irrigation for farming, where is the droughts going to be? Where is the flooding going to be? So, for the folks watching, go to descarteslabs.com/search they got a search engine there, I wish we could show it on screen here but we don't have the terminal for it on this show. But it's a cool demo, you can search and find, you can pick an area, football field, and irrigation ditch, anything, cell tower, wind farm, and find duplicates and it gives you a map around the country. So the question is, is that, what is going on in the tech? 'Cause you got to use Cloud for this, so how do you make it all happen? >> Yeah, so we have two real big components to our tech space the first is, obviously we have lots and lots of satellite and aerial imagery, that's one of the biggest and messiest data sets and there's all types of calibration workloads that we have to do. So we have this ingest pipeline that processes it, cleans it, calibrates it, removes the clouds, not as in cloud computing infrastructure, but as in clouds over the head and then the shadows they emit down on the Earth. And we have this big ingestion process that cleans it all. And then finally compresses it and then we use things like GCS as an infinitely scalable object store. And what we really like on the GCS side is the performance we get 'cause we're reading and pulling in and out that compressed imagery all day long. So every time you zoom in or zoom out, like we're expanding it and removing that, but then our models, sometimes what we've done is, we'll want to maybe we're making a model in vegetation and we just want to look at the infrared bands. So we'll want to fuse together satellites from many different sources, fuse together ground sources, sensor sources, and just maybe pull in just one of those bands of light, not pull the whole files in. So that's what we've been building on our API. >> So how do you find GCP? What do you like? We've been all the users this week, what are the strengths? What are some of the weaknesses? What's on their to-do list? Documentation comes up a lot, we'd like to see better documentation, okay that's normal but what's your perspective? >> If you write code or develop, you always want something, you know it's always out of feature parody and stuff. From our perspective, the biggest strengths of GCP, one of the most core strengths is the network. The performance we've been able to see from the network is basically on par with what used to have, when we were at national laboratories we'd have access to high performance, super computing, some of the biggest clusters in the world. And in the network, in GCS and how we've been able scale linearly, like our ingest pipelines, we processed a petabyte of data on GCP in 16 hours through our processing pipeline on 30,000 cores. And we'll just scale that network bandwidth right up. >> Do you tap the premium network service or is it just the standard network? >> This is just stock. That was actually three years ago that we got to our bandwidth. >> How many cores? >> That was 30,000. >> Cause Google talked this morning about their standard network and the premium network, I don't know if you saw the keynote, with you get the low latency, if you pay a little bit more, proximate to your users, but you're saying on the standard network, you're getting just incredible... >> That was early 2015, it's just a few people in our company scaling up our ingest pipeline. We look at that, from then that was 40 years of imagery from NASA's Landsat program that we pulled in. And not that far off in the future, that petabyte's going to be a daily occurrence. So we wanted our ingest to scale and one of our big questions early on is actually, could the cloud actually even handle that type of scale? So that was one of the earliest workloads on things like-- >> And you feel good now about right? >> Oh yeah, and that was one of the first workloads on preemptible instances as well. >> What's on the to-do list? What would make your life better? >> So we've been working a lot with Istio that was shown here. So we actually gave a demo, we were in a couple talks yesterday on how we leverage and use Istio on our microservices. Our APIs are all built on that and so is our multi tenant SAS platform. So our ML team, when they're building models, they're all building models off different use cases, different bands of light, different geographic regions, different temporal windows. So we do all of that in Kubernetes and so those are all-- >> And what does Istio give you guys? What's the benefit of Istio? >> For us, we're using it on a few of our APIs and it's things like, really being able to see when you've start splitting out these microservices that network and that node-to-node or container-to-container latency and where things break down. Being about to do circuit retries or being able to try a response three different times before I return back a 500 or rate limit some of your APIs so they don't get crushed or you can scale them appropriately. And then actually being able to make custom metrics and to be able to fuse that back into how GKE scales on the node pools and stuff like that. >> So okay, that's how you're using it. So you were talking about Istio before, there's things that you'd like to see that aren't there today? More maturity or? >> Yeah I think Istio's like a very early starting point on all of this types of tools. >> So you want more? >> Oh yeah, definitely, definitely but I love the direction they're going and I love that it's open and if I ever wanted to I could build it on prem. But we were built basically native in the cloud so all of our infrastructure's in the cloud. We don't even have a physical server. >> What does open do for you, for your business? Is it just a good feeling? Do you feel like you're less locked in? Does it feel like you're giving back to the community? >> We read the Kubernetes source code. We've committed changes. Just recently, there's Google's open source, the OpenCensus library for tracing and things like that. We committed PRs back into that last week. We're looking for change. Something that doesn't quite work how we want, we can actually go.. >> Cause you're upstream >> Add value... >> For your business. >> We get in really hard problems, you kind of need to understand that code sometimes at that level. Build Tools, where Google took their internal tool, Blaze and opened source that bezel and so we're been using that. We're using that on our monorepos to do all of our builds. >> So you guys take it downstream, you work on it, and then all upstream contributions, is that how it works? >> Sometimes. >> Whenever you need to. >> Even Kubernetes, we've looked, if nothing else we've looked at the code multiple times and say, "Oh, this is why that autoscaler is behaving this way." Actually now I can understand how to change my workload a little bit and alter that so that the scaler works a little bit more performantly or we extract that last 10% of performance out to try and save that last 10%. >> This is a fascinating, I would love to come visit you guys and check out the facilities. It's the coolest thing ever. I think it's the future, there's so much tech going on. So many problems that are new and cool. You got the compute to boot behind it. Final question for you, how are you using analytics and machine learning? What's the key things you're using from Google? What are you guys building on your own? If anything, can you share a quick note on the ML and the analytics, how you guys are scaling that up? >> We've been using TensorFlow since very early days that geovisual search that you were saying, where we user TensorFlow models in some of those types of products. So we're big fans of that as well. And we'll keep building out models where it's appropriate. Sometimes we use very simple packages. You're just doing linear regression or things like that. >> So you're just applying that in. >> Yeah, it's the right tool for the right problem and always picking that and applying that. >> And just quick are you guys are for-profit, non-profit? What's the commercial? >> Yeah, we're for-profit, we're a Silicon Valley VC-backed company, even though we're in the mountains. >> Who's in the VCs? Which VCs are in? >> CrosslinK Capital is one our leading VCs, Eric Chin and that team down there and they've been great to work with. So they took a chance in a crazy bunch of scientists from up in the mountains of New Mexico. >> That sounds like a good VC back opportunity. >> Yeah and we had a CEO that was kind of from the Bay Area, Mark Johnson, and so we needed kind of both of those to really be successful. >> I mean I'm a big believer you throw money at great smart people and then merging markets like this. And you got a mission that's super cool, it's obvious that it's a lot to do and there's opportunities as well. >> Tremendous opportunities. Congratulations, Tim. Thanks for coming on The Cube. Tim Kelton, he's the co-founder at Descartes Labs. Here in The Cube, breaking down, bringing the technology, they got applied physicists, all these brains working on the geospatial future for The Cube. We are geospatial here in The Cube, in Google Next in San Francisco, I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante, stay with us, for more coverage after this short break.