>> Announcer: Live from New York, it's theCube, covering AWS Global Summit 2019. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Welcome back. We're reaching towards the end of theCube's coverage of AWS Summit in New York City. I'm Stu Miniman, my co-host is Corey Quinn. Behind us, they're starting to roll out the beer trucks, but before we get there, we're really excited to have on the program first-time guest, Dmitry Traytel, who's the CTO of Timehop. Dmitry, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks for having me. >> All right, so Timehop, for our audience that's not familiar with it, I'm familiar with it on social media, is the "oh hey, here's your memory from a year ago, three years ago, five years ago." It's interesting always to know. I know I go to a lot of events, so it's like "Groundhog Day" to me. It's like, "oh hey, AWS New York City, I remember two years ago where I saw this person, this person, this person." We capture lots of videos and photos. We should probably figure out some partnership to bring some of those memories back when we do it, but >> Dmitry: Exactly. give us a little bit for those of us that might not know Timehop. Seems like there's more than just kind of the one thing. What's the company do? >> So, Timehop, the consumer product, the mobile app, is essentially a place for you to celebrate your digital memories, right? We are the nostalgia company, where you can look back on what you did on this day, and the kind of things that you posted on social media, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, et cetera. And relive those things, share them with your friends, and also look at what's on your phone, in your local device. Stuff you haven't shared. So, the thousand photos you took of your kid at year one, you'll see a year later, and the year after that, and you get to relive those moments. >> Okay, very cool. So, boy there must be some good metadata underneath there. You talk about the content creation that goes on with most people. It's nice that in 2019, I don't really think too much about the thousands of photos that I have in my library. Boy, I know people that are pretty noisy on social media, and boy, you'd think their feed would be overwhelmed looking back on certain days, especially the guy sitting next to me. If it's a keynote day at a conference, Corey would be like, "oh boy, did I say those things?" Is it just, I get all of it, or is there some intelligence behind that? Give us a little bit of insight. What happens? >> Sure, there's definitely some intelligence behind it, a random link you might've shared out probably won't make it, but photos and videos certainly do. And any sort of text posts, tweet threads, Facebook statuses that you might've added, particularly those from 10 plus years ago, those are the most interesting ones, because people used Facebook in a very different way back then, then they do these days. Some people used it more, some less, and we try to feature especially those that have the most engagement, we try to surface those ahead of everything else. >> Yeah, I remember back in the old days of Facebook, where it was like, "Stu is," and then it was my thing there, it's like wow. The engagement that you'd have, and photos were all very different on all of these platforms before Facebook realized, "oh hey, photos are a pretty important thing there." So, you're the CTO. Bring us a little bit inside. I'm sure architecture is something you're talking about at a show like this. I have to believe AWS is a piece, if not a major piece, of what goes behind the scenes. So, bring us inside the technology a little bit. >> Absolutely. AWS is the bedrock upon which everything is built. We run over 200 instances on EC2. We're probably running about 20 different back-end services across around 15 to 20 different AWS services, and we're doing all of this with four back-end engineers. We're a very small company. One of those engineers, Mark, he's here, he spoke earlier today about how we were able to leverage AWS to essentially spin-off a whole new line of business that's not a consumer product, but a B2B offering for the ad industry. And that's kind of what we're announcing and talking about this week. We launched a new website about it, we have some early partners that we're working with, and this is the sort of thing that saved us as a company, and allowed us to become financially independent. Amazon was the bedrock of our ability to do that without increasing staff at all. >> So, what is the capability story that AWS unlocked as a part of that, or Cloud to the larger point. We don't necessarily need to be vendor-specific, despite the room we're sitting in. What was it that empowered for you that unlocked, I guess, the opportunity? >> There were a few things. Skill ability for one thing. We were able to go from 115, 120 instances, up to 200 very quickly when our clients needed us to, because a lot of them are larger than Timehop is, in terms of user base and access. The second one would've been global reach. We expanded from one availability zone, or rather one region, out to seven, because some of them are international, or have an international user base that requires us to be global. And then beyond that, just the breadth of services, like Elasticsearch, Kinesis Firehose. All of those things that let us connect the data from what we import from social media services, over to the user themselves, when they send push notifications or show the memories. The breadth of services that Amazon as a Cloud provider offers, means we don't have to write this stuff ourselves. We can just leverage what's already there, and we can connect all those dots, and deploy quickly. >> Yeah, the undifferentiated heavy lifting is the phrase that they're in love with to describe that. I always used to frame it slightly differently, as far as you're spending time locally, solving a global problem, where the things that the infrastructure provider can do at massive scale, it just makes sense. There's no competitive value for anyone anymore, and being able to go down to the data center, and replace a failing hard drive. So, why not make that someone who can get economies and scale out of it? And focus on >> Exactly. the way they're doing things that drive business value. But, that said, you said this awhile as well, and then the slide deck yet again today for the keynote, in the future, the only code you write is business value. And then, in a very tiny font that no one except me could read was probably in JavaScript, but that's neither here nor there. How close are we to that future, based upon what you're seeing? >> Close. I know we demonstrated the CDK, and the demonstration was in TypeScript, so we're one step away from the JavaScript world. Everything that we do, we do in Go, obviously other than some of the descriptor files that allow us to spin-off that infrastructure. But, we're incredibly close to being there, and Go is so close to the hardware itself, that I'm assuming Amazon will eventually support Go for that kind of CDK as well. I know they already do for Lambda, and that's relatively recent. I think it'll take a lot of companies a long time to get there, because there's a lot of processes than some of the larger enterprise words. We're fairly small, and we can pivot very quickly, as we've proven with the ad server called Nimbus. But, we're not that far away, at least at Timehop. >> So Dmitry, we live in the enterprise world a lot, and I have to imagine that there's some companies that would be like, "why am I going to work with this consumer social media company?" So, is being on a public Cloud, and specifically AWS, does that help give credibility behind the new services that you're offering? >> I think so. I think from a reliability and dependability standpoint, when we tell a mobile app publisher that they can trust us to run their ads for them, they know because we're on AWS that that's always going to be there. And, because we monetize for them, we end up having to depend on that reliability in order to promise them four nines above time. And, the fact that they can keep a revenue stream going at all times to keep the lights on and the doors open. >> And it's funny we're having this conversation today, when Twitter was hard down globally for an hour. So, nothing is going to be impenetrable. Nothing's going to stay up forever. I don't believe in making fun of companies for their down time, but at some point, past a certain point, it's okay. If there is a region-wide outage in AWS, for example, on that day, the internet's not going to be working super great for an awful lot of people. Depending on what your business model is, and what your use case is, maybe that's acceptable. Maybe in the case of my nonsense, the world is better off if it's not on the internet for that hour or two. But, it is a difference, I think, in the business modeling, between life-critical things, versus things that people use as entertainment. It feels like the B2B story that you're telling is somewhere in between those two ends of the spectrum. >> It certainly can be. One of the reasons we did go global is to prevent that sort of thing from happening. So, everything has a backup somewhere in a different hemisphere, which is awesome. But, depending on the kind of partner that we're working with, some of them are for looking through memories like us. Some of them are for reading short stories on the internet, which you can pause on that for an hour if Amazon goes down. For some others, they might be more mission-critical, like posting portfolios or resumes, and the free version might show ads. And in that case, you might be at a job interview, and you don't need that to go down. Now, the ad side can take a minute, and I'm sure whoever's depending on it has other fires to fight at the time. But for us, we have an obligation to all of our partners to make sure that we deliver on what we promised to them, and the same way that Amazon has to us. >> So Dmitry, what learnings can you share spinning off this new line of business, moving forward, working with Amazon there. What would you be talking to your peers about as to, is there anything you would've done a little bit differently, or now that you've gone through this, that you might recommend to them? >> I would say, build in-house what you can, if nobody else is doing it better than you can. I kind of wish that we had built Nimbus a lot earlier in our life cycle, because as soon as we built it, we prototyped it over a weekend, and we learned immediately that it was going to work better than any third-party ad-tech that we could've tried. At the same time, always evaluate what you're doing against your competition. Run those A/B tests, run them properly, measure, instrument everything, and in the end, understand where your dependencies are on third-parties. And eliminate them as much as possible. Again, we're so small that we do leverage as much third-party code. The best kind of code is the code you didn't have to write in the first place. But, in certain cases, you end up bringing a lot of value to the table by writing something proprietary, and kind of the way Amazon did with AWS when they built Rotor for themselves, and started offering it to everybody else. We're doing the same with Nimbus, where we wrote this Cloud-based ad platform, and we realized that it could help us. We're now realizing that it could help everybody else in our position. >> Okay. >> So Dmitry, we want to give you the final word here. Coming to an Amazon event like this, what's it mean to Timehop? What do you personally, you and the team, get out of it? >> It means a lot. It meant a lot to my colleague Mark to be able to speak today, to share with people some of our journey. Amazon is one of the partners that we work with, even on the ad side, 'cause that is a line of business Amazon has. And, we get to announce Nimbus as a service on adsbynimbus.com, with a website we just launched this week, to share with the world that Timehop is not just the consumer Timehop product. But, we are also this ad-tech company at this point that is growing very quickly, that is hiring. And, we want to continue to work with Amazon, and all of our other partners in order to scale that business. >> All right, well Dmitry, congratulations on the launch of the new product. We know a year from now what you'll be looking back at from this event. Apologies for that, but thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you too. >> All right. For Corey Quinn, I'm Stu Miniman. We're at the end now of our day of coverage here from AWS New York City Summit for 2019. As always, go to thecube.net for all of the content here. We're at lots of AWS shows, many of the other Cloud infrastructure, big-data, AI, IOT, you name it. If there's a show out there with great information, great content, please contact us. Thank you as always for watching theCube.

>> Hi, I'm Peter Burris with another Wikibon Action Item Quick Take. David Floyer, you've been at the vanguard of talking about the role that Flash, SSD's, and others, other technologies are going to have in the technology industry, predicting early on that it was going to eclipse HDD, even though you got a lot of blow back about the "We're going to remain expensive and small". That's changed. What's going on? >> Well, I've got a prediction that we'll have petabyte drives, SSD drives, within five years. Let me tell you a little bit why. So there's this new type of SSD that's coming into town. It's the mega SSD, and Nimbus Data has just announced this mega SSD. It's a hundred terabyte drive. It's very high density, obviously. It has much fewer, uh, much fewer? It has fewer IOPS and bandwidth than SSD. The access density is much better than HDD, but still obviously lower than high-performance SSD. Much, much lower space power than either SSD or HDD in terms of environmentals. It's three and a half inch. That's compatible with HDD. It's obviously looking to go into the same slots. A hundred terabytes today, two hundred terabytes, 10x, that 10x of the Hammer drives that are coming in from HDD's in 2019, 2020, and the delta will increase over time. It's still more expensive than HDD per bit, but it's, and it's not a direct replacement, but much greater ability to integrate with data services and other things like that. So the prediction, then, is get ready for mega SSD's. It's going to carve out a space at the low end of SSD's and into the HDD's, and we're going to have one petabyte, or more, drives within five years. >> Big stuff from small things. David Floyer, thank you very much. And, once again, this has been a Wikibon Action Item Quick Take. (chill techno music)

>> Hi I'm Peter Burris, and welcome once again to another Wikibon Action Item Quick Take. David Floyer you were at OCP, the Open Compute Platform show, or summit this week, wandered the floor, talked to a lot of people, one company in particular stood out, Nimbus Data, what'd you hear? >> Well they had a very interesting announcement of their 100 terrabyte three and a half inch SSD, called the ExaData. That's a lot of storage in a very small space. It's high capacity SSDs, in my opinion, are going to be very important. They are denser, much less power, much less space, not as much performance, but fit in very nicely between the lowest level of disc, hard disc storage and the upper level. So they are going to be very useful in lower tier two applications. Very low friction for adoption there. They're going to be useful in tier three, but they're not direct replacement for disc. They work in a slightly different way. So the friction is going to be a little bit higher there. And then in tier four, there's again very interesting of putting all of the metadata about large amounts of data and put the metadata on high capacity SSD to enable much faster access at a tier four level. So action item for me is have a look at my research, and have a look at the general pricing: it's about half of what a standard SSD is. >> Excellent so this is once again a Wikibon Action Item Quick Take. David Floyer talking about Nimbus Data and their new high capacity, slightly lower performance, cost effective SSD. (upbeat music)