(intro upbeat music) >> Hello everyone and welcome to our continued coverage of AWS re:Invent here on theCUBE. My name is Savannah Peterson and I am very excited about the conversation coming up. Not only are we joined by two brilliant minds in the cloud, one of them happens to be a CUBE alumni. Please welcome Mike from AMD and Ali from Dropbox. Ali, welcome back to the show, how you been? >> Thanks Savannah. I'm doing great and really excited to be back on theCUBE. It was great discussion last time and really excited for both re:Invent and also to see how this video turns out. >> Hey, that makes two of us and probably three of us. How are you doing today, Mike? >> Doing great. It's really nice to be getting back to in-person events again and to be out solving problems with customers and partners like Dropbox. >> I know, isn't it? We've all missed each other. Was a lonely couple of years. Mike, I'm going to open it up with you. I'm sure a lot of people are curious. What's new at AMD? >> Well, there's a lot that's new at AMD, so I'll share a subset of what's new and what we've been working on. We've expanded our global coverage in Amazon EC2 with new regions and instance types. So users can deploy any application pretty much anywhere AWS has a presence. Our partner ecosystems for solutions and services has expanded quite a bit. We're currently focused on enabling partners and solutions that focus on cloud cost optimization, modernizing infrastructure, and pushing performance to the limit, especially for HPC. But the biggest buzz, of course, is around AMD's new fourth generation of our EPYC CPU Genoa. It's the world's fastest data center CPU with transformative energy efficiency and that's a really interesting combination, highest performance and most efficient. So on launch day, AWS announced their plans to roll out AMD EPYC Genoa processor-based EC2 instances. So we're pretty excited about that and that's what we'll be working on in the near term. >> Wow, that's a big deal and certainly not a casual announcement. Obviously, power and efficiency hot topics here at re:Invent but also looking at the greater impact on the planet is a big conversation we've been having here as well. So this is exciting and timely and congratulations to you and the team on all that seems to be going on. Ali, what's going on at Dropbox? >> Yeah, thanks Savannah. The Q3 2022 was actually a very strong quarter for Dropbox during a very difficult macroeconomic backdrop. Our focus has continued to be on innovation and this is around both new products and also driving multi-product adoption which is paying a lot of dividends for us, so essentially, bringing products like Dropbox Sign, DocSend, Capture, and other exciting products to our customers. On the infra side, it's all about how do we scale our infrastructure to meet the business needs, right? How do we keep up with the accelerated growth during the pandemic and also leveraging both AMD and AWS for investments in our public cloud? >> Let's talk about the cloud a bit. You are both cloud experts and I'm glad that you brought that up. We'll keep it there with Ali. When, why, and how should users leverage public cloud? >> Yeah, so Dropbox is hybrid cloud which means we are running applications both in private and public cloud and within a unique position to leverage the best of both worlds. And Savannah, this is a decision we continue to reevaluate on a regular basis. And there are really three key factors that come into play here. First is scale and scale, are we operating at a scale where customization is cost-efficient for us? Next is uniqueness. Is our workload unique compared to what the public cloud supports? And lastly, innovation. Do we have the expertise to innovate faster than public cloud or not? So based on these three key factors, we try and balance all of them and then come up with the best option for us at Dropbox. And kind of elaborating over here, things like international storage, we're leveraging public cloud, things like AI and ML, we're leveraging public cloud, but when we talk about Magic Pocket, which is our multi-exabyte storage system, that has the scale which is why we are doing that on our own private cloud. >> Wow, I think you just gave everybody a fantastic framework for thinking about their decision matrix there if nothing else. Mike, is there anything that you'd like to add to that? Anything that AMD considers when contemplating public cloud versus private? >> Yeah, so there's really three main drivers that I see when users consider when, why, and how should they leverage public cloud. Three main drivers: establishing a global footprint, accelerating product release cycles, and efficiently rightsizing infrastructure. So customers looking to establish a global footprint often turn to public cloud deployments to quickly reach their clients in workforces around the world, most importantly with minimal capital expense. I understand Dropbox uses public cloud to establish their global presence scaling out from their core data centers in North America. And then a lot of industries have tremendous pressure to accelerate product release cycles. With public cloud, organizations can immediately deploy new applications without a long site and hardware acquisition cycle and then the associated ongoing maintenance and operational overhead. And the third thing is customers that need to rightsize and dynamically scale their infrastructure and application deployments are drawn to public cloud, for example, customers that have cyclical compute or application load peaks can efficiently deploy in the cloud without overdeploying their on-prem infrastructure for most of the year which is off-peak during those off-peak times. That infrastructure idle time is a waste of resources and OPEX. So scalable rightsizing draws a lot of users to cloud deployment. >> Yeah, wow. I think there's a lot of factors to consider but also it seems like a pretty streamlined process for navigating that or at least you two both made it sound that way. Another hot topic in the space right now is security. Mike, let's start with you a little bit. What are the most important security issues for AMD right now that you can talk about? >> Yeah, sure. So, well, first of all, AWS provides a wide variety of really good security services to protect customers that are working in the cloud. Like from a processor technology perspective, there's three main security aspects to consider, two of which are common practice today and one of which AMD brings significant differentiation and value. The first two are protecting data at rest and data in transit. And these two are part of the prevalent security models of today where AMD provides distinct value and differentiation is in protecting data in use. So EPYC Milan and Genoa processors support a function called SEV-SNP and this enables users to reside and their applications to reside within their own cryptographic context and environment with data integrity protection to accomplish what's called comprehensive confidential computing. Ethics confidential computing solution is hardware-based. So it's easy to leverage, there's no code rewrite required unlike comparable solutions that are software-based that require recoding to a proprietary SDK and come with a significant performance trade-off. So with EPYC processors, you can protect your data at rest, in transit, and most importantly, in use. >> Everybody needs to protect their data everywhere it is. So I love that. That's fantastic to hear and I'm sure gives your customers a lot of confidence. What about over at Dropbox? What security issues are you facing, Ali? >> Yeah, so the first company value at Dropbox is actually being worthy of trust, and what this really means from a security perspective is how do we keep all of our users content safe? And this means keeping everything down to all of the infrastructure hardware secure. So partnering with AMD, which is one of our strongest partners out there, the new security features that AMD have and the hardware are critical for us and we are able to take advantage of some of these best security practices within our compute infrastructure by leveraging AMD's secure ship architecture. >> How important, you just touched on it a little bit, and I want to ask, how important are partnerships like the one you have with each other as you innovate at scale? Ali, you're nodding, I'm going to go to you first. >> Yeah, so like I mentioned, the partnership with with AMD is one of the strongest that we have and it just goes beyond like a regular partnership where it's just buy and sell. We talk about technology together, we talk about innovation together, we talk about partnership together, and for us, as I look look at our hybrid cloud strategy, we would not be able to get the benefits in terms of efficiency, scale, or liability performance without having a strong partner like AMD. >> That's awesome. Mike, anything you want to add there? >> I'd reiterate some of what Ali had to say. One of my favorite parts about my job is getting together with partners and customers to figure out how to optimize their applications and deployments around the world to get the most efficient use of the cloud infrastructure for servers that are based on AMD technology. In many cases, we can find 10% or better performance or cost optimization by working closely with partners like Dropbox. And then in addition, if we keep in lock step together to look at what's coming on the roadmap, by the time the latest and greatest technology is finally deployed, our customers and our partners are ready to take advantage of it. So that's the fun part of the job and I really appreciate the Dropbox's cooperation, optimizing their infrastructure, and using AMD products >> Well, what a synergistic relationship of mutual admiration and support. We love to hear it here in the tech world. Mike, last question for you. What's next for AMD? >> Well, heading into 2023, considering the current challenge macroeconomic environment and geopolitical instability, doing more with less will be top of mind for many CFOs and CEOs in 2023. And AMD can help accomplish that. AMD's EPYC processors, leadership performance, and lower EC2 retail costs can help users reduce costs without impacting performance, or the flip side of that, they can scale capacity without increasing costs. And because of EPYC's higher core counts, really high core density, applications can be deployed with fewer servers or smaller instances that has both economic and environmental benefits that reduce usage costs as well as environmental impacts. And that allows customers to optimize their application and infrastructure spend. And then the second thing that I've seen over the last couple of years and I see this trajectory continuing is increased geographic distribution of our colleagues and workforces is here to stay, people work from everywhere. In modern cross platform, collaboration platforms, that bring teams, tools, and content together have a really important role to play to enable that new, more flexible style of working. And those tools need to be really agile and easy to use. I think Dropbox is really well positioned to enable this new style of working. AMD's really happy to work closely with Dropbox to enable these modern work styles, both on premises, hybrid, and fully in the public cloud. >> Well, it sounds like a very exciting and optimistically, bright future for you all at AMD. We love to hear that here at theCUBE. Ali, what about you? What is 2023 going to hold for Dropbox? >> Yeah, so I think we're going to continue on this journey of transformation where our focus is on new products and also multi-product adoption. And from a cloud perspective, how do we continue to evolve our hybrid cloud so that we remain a competitive advantage for our business and also for our customers? I think right now, Savannah, we're in a very unique position to utilize some of the best AMD technology that's out there and that's both on premise and in the cloud. Some of the AMD Epic processors delivered the performance that we need for our hybrid cloud and we want to continue to leverage these also in public cloud which is the EC2 instances that are powered by AMD in the long run. So overall, Dropbox is looking forward to continue to evaluate some of the AMD's Genoa CPUs that are coming out but also want to continue to grow our EC2 footprint powered by AMD in the long run. >> Fantastic. Well, it sounds like this second showing here on theCUBE is just the tee up for your third and we'll definitely have to have Mike back on for the second time around to hear how things are going. Thank you both so much for taking the time today to join me here. Mike and Ali, it was fantastic getting to chat to you and thank you to our audience for tuning into theCUBE's special coverage of AWS re:Invent. My name's Savannah Peterson and I hope we can learn together soon. (outro upbeat music)