>>Mhm >>Welcome to the cube where we're celebrating the EC 2/15 birthday anniversary. My name is Dave Volonte and we're joined right now by Sandy carter, Vice President of AWS. Welcome Sandy, it's great to see you again, >>David. So great to see you too. Thanks for having me on the show today. >>Very welcome. We were last physically together. I think it was reinvent 2019. Hopefully I'll see you before 2022. But first happy birthday to EC two. I mean, it's hard to imagine back in 2006, the degree to which EC two would impact our industry. Sandy, >>I totally agree. You know, I joined a W S about 4.5 years ago in EC two and it's, it's even amazing to see what's just happened in the last 4.5 years. So I'm with you. Nobody really expected the momentum, but EC two has really shone brightly in value to our customers. >>You know, we've done the public sector summit, you know, many times. It's a great event. Things are a little different in public sector as you well know. So talk about the public sector momentum with EC two and that journey. What have you seen? >>Yeah, so it's a great question day. So I had to go back in the time vault. You know, public sector was founded in 2010 and we were actually founded by the amazon process writing a paper setting up a two pizza team, which happened to be six people. And that journey really started with a lot of our public sector customers thinking that we don't know about the cloud. So we might want to do a pilot or just look at non mission critical workloads now public sector and I know you know this day but public sector is more than just government, it has education, not for profit healthcare and now space. But everybody at that time was very skeptical. So we had to really work hard to migrate some workloads over. And one of our very first non mission critical workloads was the U. S. Navy. Um and what they did was the Navy Media Services actually moved images over to EC two. Now today that seems like oh that's pretty easy. But back then that was a big monumental reference. Um and we had to spend a lot of time on training and education to win the hearts and souls of our customers. So back then we had half of the floor and Herndon Washington, we just had a few people and that room really became a training room. We trained our reps, we trained our customers um research drive. A lot of our early adopters accounts like Nasa and jpl. And um then when cloud first came out and governments that started with the U. S. A. And we announced Govcloud, you know, things really picked up, we had migration of significant workloads. So if you think back to that S. A. P. And just moving media over um with the Navy, the Navy and S. A. P. Migrated their largest S A P E R P solution to the cloud in that time as well. Um, then we started international. Our journey continued with the UK International was UK and us was us. Then we added a P. J. And latin America and Canada. And then of course the partner team which you know, is very close to my heart. Partners today are about 73% of our overall public sector business. And it started out with some interesting small pro program SVS being very crucial to that, accelerating adoption. And then of course now the journey has continued with Covid. That has really accelerated that movement to the cloud. And we're seeing, you know, use of ec two to really help us drive by the cute power needed for A I N. M. L. And taking all that data in from IOT and computing that data. And are they are. Um, and we're really seeing that journey just continue and we see no end in sight. >>So if we can stay in the infancy and sort of the adolescent years of public sector, I mean, remember, I mean as analysts, we were really excited about, you know, the the the introduction of of of of EC two. But but there was a lot of skepticism in whatever industry, financial services, healthcare concerns about security, I presume it was similar in public sector, but I'm interested in how you you dealt with those challenges, how you you listen to folks, you know, how did you drive that leadership to where it is today? >>Yeah, you're right. The the first questions were what is the cloud? Doesn't amazon sell books? What is this clown thing? Um, what is easy to, what is easy to stand for and then what the heck is an instance? You know, way back when there was one instance, it didn't even have a name. And today of course we have over 400 instant types with different names for each one. Um and the big challenges you asked about challenges, the big challenges that we had to face. Dave were first and foremost, how do we educate? Um we had to educate our employees and then we had to educate our customers. So we created these really innovative hands on training programmes, white boarding um, sessions that we needed. They were wildly popular. So we really have to do that and then also prove security as you know. So you asked how we listen to our customers and of course we followed the amazon way we work backwards from where we were. So at that time, customers needed education. And so we started there um, data was really important. We needed to make customer or data for government more available as well. So for instance, we first started hosting the Census Bureau for instance. Um and that was all on EC two. So we had lots of early adopters and I think the early adopters around EC two really helped us to remember. I said that the UK was our international office for a while. So we had NIH we had a genomes project and the UK Ministry of Justice as well. And we had to prove security out. We had to prove how this drove a structured GovCloud and then we had to also prove it out with our partners with things like helping them get fed ramped or other certifications. I'll for that sort of thing as well. And so we really lead in those early days through that education and training. Um we lead with pilots to show the potential of the possible and we lead with that security setting those security standards and those compliance certifications, always listening to the customer, always listening to the partner, knowing how important the partners we're going to be. So for example, recovery dot gov was the first government wide system that moved to the cloud. Um the recovery transparency board was first overseeing that Recovery act spending, which included stimulus tracking website. I don't know if you remember that, but they hosted the recovery dot gov On amazon.com using EC two. And that site quickly made information available to a million visitors per hour and at that time, that was amazing. And the cost savings were significant. We also launched Govcloud. You'd asked about GovCloud earlier and that federal cloud computing strategy when the U. S. Government came out with cloud first and they had to consider what is really going to compel these federal agencies to consider cloud. They had Public-sector customers had 70 requirements for security and safety of the data that we came out with Govcloud to open up all those great opportunities. And I think Dave we continue to leave because we are customer obsessed uh you know, still supporting more security standards and compliance sort than any other provider. Um You know, now we lead with data not just data for census or images for the US Navy, but we've got now data in space and ground station and data at scale with customers like Finra who's now doing 100 billion financial transactions. Not just that one million from the early days. So it has been a heck of a ride for public sector and I love the way that the public sector team really used and leveraged the leadership principles. Re invent and simplify dive deep. Be obsessed with the customers start where they are. Um and make sure that you're always always always listening to what they need. >>You know, it's interesting just observing public sector. It's not uncommon, especially because of the certifications that some of the services, you know come out after they come out for the commercial sector. And I remember years ago when I was at I. D. C. I was kind of the steward of the public sector business. And that was a time when everybody was trying to focus in public sector on commercial off the shelf software. That was the big thing. And they want to understand, they wanted to look at commercial use cases and how they could apply them to government. And when I dug in a little bit and met with generals and like eight different agencies, I was struck by how many really smart people and the things that they were doing. And I said at the time, you know, a lot of my commercial clients could learn a lot from you. And so the reason I bring that up is because I saw the same thing with Govcloud because there was a lot of skepticism in various industries, particularly regulated industries, financial services, healthcare. And then when Govcloud hit and the CIA deal hit, people said, whoa CIA, they're like the most security conscious industry or organization in the world. And so I feel as though in a way public sector led that that breakthrough. So I'm wondering when you think about EC two today and the momentum that it has in the government, Are there similar things that you see? Where's the momentum today in public sector? >>You are right on target day? I mean that CIA was a monumental moment and that momentum with ever increasing adoption to the cloud has continued in public sector. In fact today, public sector is one of our fastest growing areas. So we've got um, you know, thousands of startups or multiple countries that were helping out today to really ignite that innovation. We have over 4000 government agencies, 9000 education agencies. Um 2000 public sector partners from all over the globe. 24,000 not for profit organizations. And what I see is the way that they're using EC two um is is leading the pack now, especially after Covid, you know, many of these folks accelerated their journey because of Covid. They got to the cloud faster and now they are doing some really things that no one else is doing like sending an outpost postbox into space or leveraging, you know robots and health care for sure. So that momentum continues today and I love that you were the champion of that you know way back when even when you were with I. D. C. >>So I want to ask you, you sort of touched on some interesting use cases, what are some of the more unusual ones and maybe breakthrough use cases that you see? >>Oh so yeah we have a couple. So one is um I mentioned it earlier but there is a robot now that is powered by IOT and EC two and the robot helps to take temperature and and readings for folks that are entering the hospital in latin America really helped during Covid, one of my favorites. It actually blew the socks off of verne or two and you know that's hard to do is a space startup called lunar outpost and they are synthesizing oxygen on mars now that's, that's driven by Ec two. That's crazy. Right? Um, we see state governments like new york, they've got this vision zero traffic and they're leveraging that to prevent accidents all through new york city. I used to live in new york city. So this is really needed. Um, and it continues like with education, we see university of Illinois and Splunk one of our partners, they created a boarding pass for students to get back to school. So I have a daughter in college. Um, and you know, it's really hard for her to prove that she's had the vaccine or that she's tested negative on the covid test. They came out with a past of this little boarding pass, just like you used to get on an airplane to get into different classes and labs and then a couple of my favorites and you guys actually filmed the Cherokee nation. So the Cherokee nation, the chief of the Cherokee nation was on our silicon um show and silicon angles show and the cube featured them And as the chief talked about how he preserves the Cherokee language. And if you remember the Cherokee language has been used to help out the US in many different ways and Presidio. One of our partners helped to create a game, a super cool game that links in with unity To help teach that next generation the language while they're playing a game and then last but not least axle three d out of the UK. Um, they're using easy to, to save lives. They've created a three D imaging process for people getting ready to get kidney transplants and they have just enhanced that taken the time frame down for months. Now today's that they can actually articulate whether the kidney transplant will work. And when I talked to roger their Ceo, they're doing R. O. L return on life's not return on investment. So those are just some of the unusual and breakthrough use cases that we see powered by E. C. To >>Sandy. I'll give you the last word. Your final closing comments. >>Well, my final closing comments are happy birthday to ec two celebrating 15 years. What a game changer and value added. It has been the early days of Ec two. Of course we're about education like what is the cloud? Why is a bookseller doing it. But um, easy to really help to create a new hub of value Now. We've got customers moving so fast with modernization using a I. M and M. L. Containers survivalists. Um, and all of these things are really changing the game and leveling it up as we increased that business connection. So I think the future is really bright. We've only just begun. We've only just begun with EC two and we've only just begun with public sector. You know, our next great moments are still left to come. >>Well, Sandy, thanks so much. Always Great to see you. Really appreciate your time. >>Thank you so much. Dave. I really appreciate it. And happy birthday again to E. C. To keep >>It right there were celebrating Ec 2's 15th birthday right back. >>Mhm.

>> Announcer: Live, from Washington D.C. It's Cube Conversations, with John Furrier. >> Hello there, welcome to the special Cube Conversation, I'm John Furrier with the Cube here in Washington D.C. at the headquarters of Amazon Web Services Public Sector, here in Arlington, Virginia, right around the corner from D.C. Our next guest is Robert Groat, with the Executive Vice President of Technology at Smartronix, a service provider in Cloud and an IT. Thanks for joining us. >> Thank you John. >> So we're in D.C. and the Cube's getting the lay of the land, so much innovation happening around Cloud and disruption, you got one group going, scratching their heads, wondering what's happening, some groups saying what happened, and you got people making it happen, right? >> Exactly. >> What's the big "ah-ha" moment people might not know looking into D.C. now? What is the real trend? What are the people that are making it, what are they doing? Is it the Cloud, is it mobile, is it data-driven? >> Yeah, I think it's all of those components, but I think one of the things that you're really seeing is that the Cloud is enabling these organizations, these traditional organizations, to really transform in the way that they deliver and consume IT services. IT services have been a mess in this town for a long time, the contracting process has been a mess, some of the things that happened, some of the smaller organizations have had a chance to be really innovative and take a leadership role in delivering services to the community and not just the large beltway bandits that we've seen in the past. So I think some of the "ah-ha" moments are probably around, you know, we've been working, Smartronix has been working with the public sector and Cloud since 2009, so really one of the early pioneers, and we used to run across all of these issues where security was the blocker, and it would take a long time to convince people that the security in the Cloud really was what it needed to be. Now we're seeing, in terms of an "ah-ha" moment, we're seeing that security is the enabler, we're seeing that these organizations are really embracing the fact that you can do things in the Cloud from the security perspective that you could never do before. And I think that you've got this kind of next generation of managed service provider that embraces those tenants of how to manage services and manage security services and it's really disrupting the way that the Federal Government's done business in the past. >> You know, we were at the Public Sector Summit last June, and we were commeters, the first time the Cube was at an event, which we had been to other ones before that, but it was very clear to me that we're in a no-excuses government at this point, cause there's a lot of forcing functions. You have one, connected social media, and everyone's like hey, why can't I do that over there? It's like the old iPhone moment on the enterprise. Why can't I bring me iPhone to work? You know, years ago, right? >> Exactly. >> Now you have security looking down the barrel, and IOT happening, and you don't have a thing, so you have Swiss cheese called malware, attacking every hole, every corner of the network potentially is compromised. >> Exactly. >> So security is forcing, and we're at cyberwar. >> We are! >> You can't deny that, so why isn't the Congress emergency funding for more security, or is it happening? >> Well, they need to be, but if you look at, if you look at the way traditional data centers are built and on-premise infrastructure is built, you had a variety of contractors coming in, each kind of doing their own thing, you had this heterogeneous infrastructure that was all built and kind of tangled together, and there wasn't this great way of being able to look at Cloud services or be able to look at a Greenfield environment, and have everything that's happening in that environment aware to you. And that's really what the Cloud is enabling. You're actually. >> You mean program the whole infrastructure? >> Programmable infrastructure, exactly. You're actually, every single thing that happens in a Cloud environment ends up being an API call. Each one of those API calls ends up being logged, and when you have every event that's happening in your environment, you don't have that in a traditional data center. When you have every event that's happening in that environment, and you can apply some of these new primatives that AWS is providing around machine learning and AI, now you're using those to attack those vectors that you're talking about, to protect critical infrastructure, really in ways that you couldn't do before, and you can actually, with this programmable infrastructure, you can actually really look at being able to respond to events, and have autonomic response and remediation of these events. So when something happens, you've programmatically defined how you're going to respond to those events, and it's repeatable. >> Yeah, one of the things I'll share with you, I did an interview with, I think it was the CTO or the CSO of Fortinet, which is a security vendor, >> Mhmm. >> And we were talking, and we were totally geeking out, he was like the complexity of the Cloud actually is an advantage in the security, and I said what do you mean by that? He goes, most of the hackers will focus the main payload of their vector on one particular item, and that's where all their energy, if they have to hunt too far, they kind of give up.6 >> It's just like on the battlefield. The surface area of attack matters, and when you have such a wide, vast surface area of attack, there's no way for them to. >> So you agree with that? >> 100% agree with that. >> How is that, how do I turn that complexity, obviously there's a main range of tools to make the Cloud easier, but complexity of scale, how do I turn that as an IT person or a manager, or an executive, into a security advantage? What do I do? >> So the security advantage is that every time you build a rule, every time you think about compliance and maintaining compliance for your organization, you're actually starting to build knowledge and a new capability. That can be applied programmatically now, across your entire set of enclaves that you use for managing infrastructure, so when we develop one thing as a manage service provider, to make sure we're meeting some kind of compliance mandate, that now can be shared across all of our clients in the space, and this can start to really help create that protective ops infrastructure. >> So you scale more observation space to get more data, that gives you also an advantage. >> It does, it does. And then when you can actually take that data and use it to train to understand where these advance persistent threats are, you can then really start to do things, that this was the province of really large organizations, only in the past. And now AWS has democratized that ability to use these tools around artificial intelligence and machine learning to improve security. >> Robert, you can't go back five years without hearing, are you kidding me, that Cloud is insecure. Turns out, Cloud is becoming a better security paradigm than building on site because of human error or other force majors or any kind of other acts. >> That's exactly right. Anybody who's looking at it from a security perspective and thinks that they can have the same kind of security that, you know, a multi-billion dollar company like AWS can provide, they're mistaken. And the main thing around that is, they don't have transparency to every event happening in that environment, and that's what you get when you start to utilize Cloud services. >> Yeah, I think Verizon was the first company that notified me that this might be the trend. I think this was like a 2011 time-frame. Don't discount a multi-tenant Cloud. >> Exactly. >> Like okay, and they realized and have been tracking that like okay, so big trends in technology, tailwinds and headwinds. What trends are tailwinds for the growth, and what are the headwinds, what's the blockers? >> Well the tailwinds is the fact that I think everybody's kind of not resigned to the fact, but they're seeing the Cloud first as probably a strategy that they should take. And, you know, we've seen the government be laggards in the past with adopting new technology, I think what they're seeing now, especially in the Department of Defense, and then some of the Federal organizations that we're working with, they're actually seeing that perhaps their adversaries are having a competitive advantage by moving into the Cloud, maybe they should look at the competitive advantages that they should have moving into the Cloud infrastructure. Not just security, but the ability to be innovative and agile and deliver services much faster than they've ever been able to deliver them before. >> Well we had a different approach and automated actual code bases so that you can actually deploy services and automatically code them up with glue instantly, so it's interesting. >> That is one of the fundamental things, that when you start looking at infrastructure's code, and you look at things that you can make repeatable in these environments, then look at how many times the government's probably built out a particular enterprise software staff, whether it's Share-A-Plan or >> Authentication. >> It all gets repeated, once that gets cauterized and done right with the right subject-matter experts, then you can start to create service catalogs that these organizations can use and rapidly deploy things in a repeatable and manageable fashion. >> This is an open-source ethos. >> It is. >> We're on the shoulders of others, why replicate something that's already a service, throw it in a service catalog, make it a micro-service, make it an API. >> And that culture's finally transformed in the Federal Government, that didn't used to be the culture, right? >> People must be like, finally! >> It used to be, I have to have my arms wrapped around this, I have to be able to understand everything that's happening, and you would always hear some of these larger organizations say, you know, I don't want to have vendor lock-in. Even now sometimes, you'll see it a little bit. I don't want go with, maybe AWS, because I'll have vendor lock-in, yet for dozens of years, they've been locked into proprietary databases to commercial enterprise platforms, these behemoth software things that AWS again has helped to democratize by providing these primitives and allowing people to build things backed on open-source. >> You're speaking our language, we talk about this all the time, the lock-in, there's always a lock-in spec somewhere, if it's good, the issue is proprietary software and switching costs. >> Yes. >> And choice, right? So that the dimensions to evaluate for customers that we've seen that's successful is, okay, I don't mind lock-in if it's a damn good solution, I'm going to lock that in. >> Right. >> But I have choice. This is going to be interesting, right? So the multi-cloud conversation that is going on around the DOD is interesting, we've been reporting and out in the field, we've been getting the data coming in, saying hey, this DOD kind of overture is interesting, because now if they take the same route as the CIA, we're talking about massive infiltration of Amazon Web Services across the government, because that CIA's kicking ass and taking names with Amazon. >> Mhmm. >> Now you've got the DOD looking down potentially a single-cloud option, other vendors are crying foul calling, we need spec in policy, which is a hijack model of putting in multi-cloud requirement. What's your thoughts on that? Should it be requirement or should we jump off? >> Well, for one, when you have innovators in a space and they take a lead in the space, you're going to get, that's a forcing function for other companies to compete, and that's not a bad thing, it really isn't. And a lot of these organizations, there might be reasons that are very valid reasons for them to consider multi-cloud, or even consider what they have within their own on-premise infrastructure. You've got, you know, tens and tens of years of legacy technical debt in your data center, there's not a reason to pull everything into the Cloud environment, there might be reasons to just let that die a slow death and sunset that. >> Got the mainframe. >> And, like the mainframe stuff, for them to look at even migrating mainframe capabilities into the Cloud, it's a lot of rewrite, it's a lot of things that need to happen. And maybe there's ways that you can extend that on-premise environment, breathe a little bit of life into the on-premise environment, while you're building out your new infrastructure. And that's probably the right path to take. >> And some people choose to have Cobalt code running banks right now, and just because they have that process. >> And it's working, and you know, they'll inevitably come to the time that they have to do that migration. >> Great commentary, great to have you on, great to chat about the technology trends. Smartronix, what are you guys doing, how do you guys fit into this trend, take a minute to talk about what you guys do, and your opportunity. >> Sure, Smartronix is about a 20-year-old company, we talk about some of our competitors will talk about being born in the Cloud, we were actually pretty much born in the enterprise, we helped the Marine Core establish their network operation security command, 20 some years ago, we were first to kind of lead virtualization technologies to help the forward-deployed forces move in and create kind of these tactical data centers, mobile data centers that can move into theater, so it's always kind of been on the forefront of network operations and cybersecurity, and innovative solutions, innovative use of technology, in government. >> The battle field's an instant case of how to deploy. >> Absolutely. >> You need wireless. >> Austere environments, you know, low-power, they used to bring trucks in to be able to set up their mobile data center, and we actually using virtualization technology back in 2004, you know. >> You got to push the envelope. >> You have to. >> Your job is to push the envelope. >> And that's really where I think Smartronix has done a really good job, is that we've helped these large organizations that are in very secure and highly-regulated compliance-driven environments, and utilize technology in innovative ways. More securely, and more optimally in these environments. So when we had a chance in 2009, to do a solution for President Obama at the time, they introduced the Recovery Act, they needed a website to track 750 billion dollars worth of funding. We came in with a pretty innovative solution. They said they had 10 weeks to build this, you're not going to do that in a data center environment. We came in with a solution that said on day one, we're going to utilize Amazon Web Services capabilities, we're going to build out the test endeavor while we build out the data center environment, and we're going to make your deadline by October 1st. And that was really the jumpstart of what we did. >> Do you meet your deadline? >> We absolutely did. >> What was that other website that you didn't actually get the deadline done, they had to bring in? >> Yeah, the healthcare. >> Oh, the Obama. >> So this one was recovery.gov, a very well-documented success, it ended up being the very first cloud-first initiative for the Federal Government. The very first government property running on public Cloud infrastructure, and then from there we migrated to >> Well, he doesn't get the credit he deserves on open government. >> He doesn't. >> He opened up data sets, he changed the game. >> He did, and again, that was, I think when you look at historically, when you look back at the CTOs and CIOs of the Federal Government at that time, they were really trying to look to see how commercial technologies could be applied in the government, how you could get that agility and innovation, and speed of business of commercial and do that in the Federal Government. And I think we embraced that at Smartronix pretty early on, and we were kind of on the leading edge sometimes of delivering this kind of abilities and services. >> Literally. So, you guys are the right group to call for IT to get modernized, because this is is problem. No one can hide anymore, there's no more excuses. And again, this is the lack of innovation. If you've been sitting around not innovating, now there's cyberwars attacking, you got cybersecurity, IT needs to transform, they got to do it like really fast. >> You got all of these competing pressures, security, you've got time, you've got cost, you've got capabilities, all of those things competing. You need to have a trusted advisor, a partner, to get you through that. What Smartronix has created, we call it our four pillars, and these are very simple pillars, but it's really really required for really looking at Cloud services strategy. You have to help the organization define what the business outcomes are that they want in these environments, help them think through what the roadmap and strategy is to get there, and then when you go to the second pillar, which is design, there's unique ways to design things to make it cloud-native, to utilize cloud-native services that also, when you get to the implementation and migration point, you're building these in a programmatic way that makes it easier to operate and manage, and that's the fourth pillar. So if you can get these organizations to think from strategy all the way through to run, all the way through to operations management, you're going to have the more effective organization and better services in your environment. >> Robert Groat, Executive Vice President of Technology at Smartronix, thanks for spending that time with me. >> Thanks, John. >> I'm John Furrier with the Cube, in Washington D.C., actually in Arlington, Virginia at Amazon Web Services Public Sector headquarters, thanks for watching. (bright music)