(upbeat techno music) >> From around the globe, it's theCUBE. With digital coverage of Postgres Vision 2021. Brought to you by EBD. >> Hello everyone, this is David Vellante, for the CUBE. And we're here covering Postgres Vision 2021. The virtual version, thCUBE virtual, if you will. And welcome to our power-panel. Now in this session, we'll dig into database modernization. We want to better understand how and why customers are tapping open source to drive innovation. But at the same time, they've got to deliver the resiliency and enterprise capabilities that they're used to that are now necessary to support today's digital business requirements. And with me are three experts on these matters. Abdul Sheik, is Global CTO and President of Cintra. Young Il Cho, aka Charlie, is High Availability Cluster Sales Manager, at Daone CNS. And Alan Villalobos, is the Director of Development Partnerships, at IBM. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, Dave, nice to be here. >> Thank you, Dave. >> All right, let's talk trends and frame the problem. Abdul, I want to start with you? Cintra you're all about this topic. Accelerating innovation using EDB Postgres helping customers move to modern platforms. And doing so, you got to do it cost-effectively but what's driving these moves? What are the problems that you're seeing at the organizations that you serve? >> Oh, so let me quickly introduce, Abdul Sheik, CTO. I'll quickly introduce Cintra. So we are a multicloud and database architecture MSP. And we've been around for 25 plus years. Headquartered in New York and the UK. But as a global organization, we're serving our SMB customers as well as large enterprise customers. And the trends we're seeing certainly in this day and age is transformation and modernization. And what that means is, customers looking to get out of the legacy platforms, get out of the legacy data centers and really move towards a modern strategy with a lower cost base, while still retaining resiliency and freedom. Ultimately, in terms of where they're going. The key words that really I see driving this, number one is choice. They've been historically locked into vendors. With limited choice with a high cost base. So choice, freedom to choose in terms of what database technologies they apply to which workloads and certainly EDB and the work that has been done to closely marry what enterprise RD platforms offer with EDBs in a work that they've done in terms of filling those gaps and addressing where the resiliency monitoring performance and security requirements are, are certainly are required from an enterprise customer perspective. Choice is driving the move that we see and choice towards a lower cost platform that can be deployed anywhere. Both on-prem modernization customers are looking to retain on premise platforms or moving into any multi clouds whether it's an infrastructure cloud play or a platform cloud play. And certainly with EDBs offering in terms of, you know the latest cloud native offerings also very interesting. And lastly, aside from just cost and the freedom to choose where they deploy those platforms the SLA, the service level model where is the resiliency requirement where the which system is going to bronze, silver, gold? Which ones are the tier one revenue platform revenue generating platforms which are the lower, lower utility platforms. So a combination of choice, a combination of freedom to deploy anywhere and while still maintaining the resiliency and the service levels that the customers need to deliver to their businesses >> Abdul that was a beautiful setup. And, and we've got so much to talk about here because customers want to move from point A to point B but getting there and they, they need help. It's sometimes not trivial. So Charlie Daone is a consultancy. You've got a strong technical capabilities. What are you seeing in this space? You know, what are the major trends? Why are organizations considering that move? And what are some of the considerations there? >> Well, like in other country in South Korea or so our a lot of customers, banking's a manufacturing distributor. They are 90, over 90%. They are all are using Oracle DB and a rack system. But as the previous presenters pointed out, a lot of customers that are sick of the Oracle and they have to undergo the huge cost of a maintenance costs. They want to move away from this cost stress. And secondly, they can think about they're providing service to customer on their cloud base which is a private or the public. So we cannot imagine running on database, Oracle database running on the cloud the system that's not matches on this cloud. And first and second, and finally the customer what they want is the cost and they want to move away from the Oracle locking. They cannot be just a slave at Oracle for a long time and the premium for the new cloud the service for the customer. >> Great. Thank you for that. Oh, go ahead. Yeah. Did you have something else to add Charlie go ahead and please. >> No that's all. >> Okay, great. Yeah, Allen, welcome to theCUBE. You know, it's very interesting to us. IBM, you, you, of course, you're a big player in database. You have a lot of expertise here. And you partner with EDB, you're offering Postgres to customers, you know, what are you seeing? Charlie was talking about Oracle and RAC. I mean, the, the, the thing there is obviously, we talked about the maintenance costs but there's also a lot of high availability capabilities. That's something that IBM really understands well. Do you see this as largely a cloud migration trend? Is it more modernization? Interested in what's IBM's perspective on this? >> I think modernization is the right word. The points that the previous panelists brought up or are on point, right? You know, lower TCO or lower costs in general but that of agility and then availability for developers and data scientists as well. And then of course, you know, hybrid cloud, right? You know, you want to be able to deploy on prem or in the cloud, or both in a mixture of all of that. And I think, I think what ties it together is the customers are looking for insights, right? And, you know, especially in larger organizations there's a myriad of data sources that they're already working with. And, you know, we, you know we want to be able to play in that space. We want to give an offering that is based on Postgres and open source and be able to further what they're strong at at and kind of, you know on top of that, you know, a layer of, of of need that we see is, is seamless data governance across all of those different stores. >> All right, I'm going to go right to the heart of the hard problem here. So if, I mean, I want to, it's just that I want to get from point A to point B, I want to save money. I want to modernize, but if I'm the canary in the coal mine at the customer, I'm saying guys, migration scares me. How do I do that? What are the considerations? And what do I need to know that I don't know. So Abdul, maybe you could walk us through what are some of the concerns that customers have? How do you help mitigate those? Whether it's other application dependencies, you know freezing code, you know, getting, again from that point A to point B without risking my existing business processes how do you handle that? >> Yeah, certainly I think a customer needs to understand what the journey looks like to begin with. So we've actually developed our own methodology that we call Rocket Cloud, which is also part of our cloud modernization strategy that builds in and database modernization strategy built into it starts with an assessment in terms of current state discovery. Not all customers totally understand where they are today. So understanding where the database state is, you know where the risks lie what are the criticality of the various databases? What technologies are used, where we have RAC or we don't have RAC but we have data God, where we have encryption. And so on. That gives the customer a very good insight in terms of the current state, both commercially and technically that's a key point to understand how they're licensed today and what costs could be freed up to free the journey to effectively fund the journey. It's a big, big topic, but once we do that, we get an idea and we've actually developed a tool called rapid discovery. That's able to discover a largest stake without knowing the database list. We just put the scripts at the database servers themselves and it tells us exactly which databases are suited to be you know, effectively migrated to Postgres with in terms of the feature function usage in terms of how heavy they are, would store procedures in the database amount of business logic use of technologies like RAC data guard and how they convert over to to Postgres specifically. That ultimately gives us the ability to give that customer an assessment and that assessment in a short sharp few weeks and get the customer view of all of my hundreds of databases. Here are the subset of candidates for Postgres and specifically than we do the schemer advisor tool the actual assessment tool from EDB, which gives us a sense of how well the schema gets converted and how best to then also look at the stored procedure conversion as well. That gives the customer a full view of their architecture mapping their specific candidate databases and then a cost analysis in terms of what that migration looks like and how we migrate. We also run and maintain those platforms once we're on EDB. >> Thank you for that again, very clear but so you're not replacing, doing an organ transplant. You may, you're you're, you know, this is not I don't mean this as a pejorative, but you're kind of cherry picking those workloads that are appropriate for EDB and then moving those and then maybe, maybe through attrition or, you know over time, sun-setting those other, those other core pieces. >> Exactly. >> Charlie, let me ask you, so we talked about RAC, real application clusters, data guard. These are, you know kind of high profile Oracle capabilities. Can you, can you really replicate the kind of resiliency at lower costs with open source, with EDB Postgres and how do you do that? >> It's my turn? >> yes, please. >> Quite technically, again, I go on in depths and technically the RAC, RAC system is so-called is the best you know, best the tool to protect data and especially in the Unix system, but apart from the RAC by the some nice data replication solution we just stream the application and log shipping and something and then monitor Pam and, and EFM solution which is enterprise failover manager. So even though it be compared to Apple the Apple RAC versus with EDB solution, we can definitely say that RAC is more stable one, but after migration, whatever, we can overcome the, you know, drawbacks of the HA cluster system by providing the EDB tools. So whatever the customer feel that after a successful migration, utilizing the EDB high availability failable solution they can make of themselves at home. So that's, that's how we approach it with the customers. >> So, Alan, again, to me, IBM is fascinating here with your level of involvement because you're the, you guys are sort of historically the master of proprietary the mainframes, VCM, CICF, EB2, all that stuff. And then, you know IBM was the first I remember Steve Mills actually announced we're going to invest a billion dollars in open source with Linux. And that was a major industry milestone. And of course, the, the acquisition of red hat. So you've got now this open source mindset this open source culture. So we, you know, as it's all about recovery in, in database and enterprise database and all the acid properties in two phase commits, and we're talking about, you know the things that Charlie just talked about. So what's your perspective here? IBM knows a lot about this. How do you help customers get there? >> Yeah, well, I mean the main, the main thrust right now IBM has a offering called IBM cloud Pak for data which from here, which runs EDB, right? EDB, Postgres runs on top of cloud Pak for Data But the, you know I think going back to Abdul's points about, you know migrating whatever's needed and whatever can be migrated to Postgres and maybe migrating other things other places, we have data virtualization and autoSQL, right? So once you have migrated those parts of your database or those schemes that can be, having, you know a single point where you can query across them and by the way, being able to query across them you know, before, during and after migration as well. Right? So we're kind of have that seamless experience of layer of SQL. And now with autoSQL of spark SQL as well, as you're, as you're migrating and after is, I'd say, you know, key to this. >> What, what's the typical migration look like? I know I'm sorry, but it's a consultant question but thinking about the, you know, the average, in terms of timeframe, what are the teams look like? You know who are the stakeholders that I need to get involved? If I'm a customer to really make this a success? maybe Abdul, you could talk about that and Charlie and Alan can chime in. >> Well, I think, well, number one you knew the exact sponsors bought into it in terms of the business case, supporting the business case an architect has got a big picture understanding not only database technology but also infrastructure that they're coming from as well as the target cloud platforms and how you ensure that the infrastructure can deliver the performance. So the architect role is important, of course the core DBA that lives within the scope of the database understands the schema of the data model the business logic itself, and the application on it. That's key specifically around the application certification testing connectivity and the migration of the code. And specifically in terms of timeline just to touch on that quickly. I mean, in our experience so far and we're seeing the momentum really really take off the last 18 months, a small project with limited business logic within the database itself can we migrate it in a couple of months but typically with all the testing and rigor around that you typically say three months timeline a medium-sized complexity projects, a six month timeline and a large complex project could be anything from nine months and beyond, but it really comes down to how heavy the database is with business logic and the database and how much effort it will take to re-engineer effectively migrate that PLC code, business logic into EDB given the compatibility level between Oracle and EDB it's relatively certainly an easier path than any other target platform in terms of options. Yeah. Not perspective. That's certainly looks like the composition of a team and timeline >> Charlie or Alan, anything you guys would add. >> Yeah. So, so I think all those personas make sense. I think you might, on the consumer side of the consumer the consumer of the data side the data scientists often we see, you know during migrations and then obviously the dev ops, I think or any operations, right, have to be heavily involved. And then lastly, you know, you see more and more data steward role or data steward type persona, CDO office type type person coming in there make sure that, you know, whatever data governance that is already in place or wants to be in place after the migration is also part of the conversation. >> Why EDB? You know, there's a lot of databases out there you know, it's funny, I always say like, you know, 10, 15 years ago databases were kind of sort of a boring market, right? It was like, okay, you're going to work or whatever. And now it's exploded. You got open source databases, you got, you know not only sequel databases, you got graph databases you know, you get cloud databases, it's going crazy. Why EDB? You wonder if you guys could address that? >> Allan why don't you go first this time? I'll compliment your answers. >> Yeah. I mean, again, I think it goes back to, to the, the I guess varying needs and, and enterprises. Right. And I think that's, what's driven this explosion in databases, whether it's a document store like you're saying, or, or new types of RDBMS, the needs that we talked about at the beginning, like lower TCO, and the push to open source. But you know, the fact of the matter is that that yes, there is a myriad, an ecosystem of databases, pretty much any organization. And so, yeah, we want to tap into that. And why EDB? EDB has done a great job of taking Postgres and making it enterprise ready, you know, that's what they're, they're good at and that, you know fits very nicely with the IBM story obviously. And, and so, you know, and they've they've worked with us as well. They have an operator on, on the runs on red hat OpenShift. So that makes it portable as well but also part of the IBM cloud Pak for data story. And, and yeah, you know, we want to break down those silos. We realized that that need is there for all of these, you know, there's this ecosystem of databases. And so, you know, we're, we see our role as being that platform, whether it's red hat OpenShift, or IBM cloud Pak for data that, that unifies, and kind of gives you that single pane of glass across all of those sources. >> And Charlie, you're obviously all in, you've got EDB in your background. Why EDB for you? >> Before talking about EDB you asked about the previous question about how the migration was different from Oracle to EDB. We had a couple of success story in Korea telecom and some banking area, and it was easier. So EDB provide MTK tool as a people know but it was an appropriate, like a 90%. So we are the channel partner of the EDB for four years. So what we have done was to hire the Oracle expert. So we train Oracle export as as EDB expert at the same time so that they can approach customer and make it easy. So you have no worry about that. Just migrating EDB, Oracle to EDB. There is a no issue. Those telltales include all the tasks, you know Stratus test and trainee, and a POC that we there. So by investing that Oracle expert that we could overcome and persuade the customer to adopt EDB. So, why EDB? Simply I can say there, is there any database they can finally replaced Oracle in the world? Why is the, it's the interoperability between Oracle to EDB as the many experts pointed out there is no other DBE. They can, you know, 90, 90% in compatibility and intercooperability with EDB. That's why, of course, there's the somewhat, you know budget issues or maintenance issue cost the issue escape from Oracle lock-in. But I think the the number one reason was the interoperability and the compatibility with database itself, Oracle database. That was a reason, I guess >> Great Abdul we've talked about, we all know the, as is, you've got a high maintenance costs. You got a lot of tuning, and it's just a lot of complexity. What about the 2B maybe you could share with us sort of the outcome some of the outcomes you've seen what the business impact has been of some of these migrations? >> Sure. I mean, I'll give you a very simple example then just the idea of running Oracle on prem a lot of customer systems teams, for example will drive a virtualization VMware strategy. We know some of the challenges of running Oracle MBM where from a license perspective. So giving the business the ability where I want to go customer in the financial services market in New York, heavy virtualization strategy the ability for them to move away from Oracle on, you know expensive hardware on to Postgres EDB on virtualization just leverage existing skillsets, leveraging existing investment in terms of infrastructure, and also give them portability in AWS. The other clouds, you know, in terms of a migration. More from a business perspective as well, I would say about some of the Allan's points in terms of just freeing up the ability for data scientists and data consumers, to, you know, to consume some of that data from an Postgres perspective more accessibility spinning up environments quicker less latency in terms of the agility is another key word in terms of the tangible differences, the business, lower cost agility, and the freedom to deploy anywhere at the end of the day. Choices, I think the key word that we could come back to and knowing that we can do that to Charlie's point specifically around maintaining service levels. And as architects, we support some of the big, big names out there in terms of airlines, online, cosmetic retailers, financial services, trading applications, hedge funds, and they all want one thing as architect: for us to deliver that resiliency and stand behind them. And as the MSP we're accountable to ensure those systems are up and running and performing. So knowing that the EDB is provided the compatibility but also plugged the specific requirements around performance management, security availability that's fundamentally been key. >> [Dave I mean, having done a lot of TCO studies in this area, it's, it's it Oracle's different. You know, normally the biggest component of TCO is labor with Oracle. The biggest component of TCO is licensed and maintenance costs. So if you can virtualize and reduce those costs and of course, of course the Oracle will fight you and say we won't support it in a VMware environment. Of course, you know, they will, but, but you got to really, you got to battle. But, so here's my last question. So if I'm a customer in that state that you described you know, a lot of sort of Oracle sprawl a lot of databases out there, high maintenance costs, the whole lock-in thing. I got to choices. I, you know, a lot of choices out there. One is EDB. You guys have convinced me that you've got the expertise If I can partner with firms like yours, it's safer route. Okay, cool. My other choice is Oracle is going to, The Oracle sales reps is going to get me in a headlock and talk about exit data and how their Oracle cloud, and how it's, they've invested a lot there. And they have, and, I can pay by the drink all this sort of modern sort of discussion, you know, Oracle act like they invented it late to the game. And then here we are. So, so help me. What's the pitch as to, well, that's kind of compelling. It's maybe the safe bet they're there. They're working with my CIO, whatever. Why should I go with the open source route versus that route? It sounds kind of attractive to me, help me understand that each of you maybe take me through that. Abdul, why don't you start. >> Yeah. I'd say, you know, Oracle's being the defacto for so many years that people have just assumed and defaulted saying, high availability, RAC, DR. Data guard, you know, and I'll apply to any database need that I have. And at the end of the day customers have a three tier database requirement: the lowest, less critical, bronze level databases that really don't need RAC or a high availability, silver tier that are departmental solutions. That means some level of resiliency. And then you've got your gold revenue producing brand impact databases that are they're down. And certainly they won. You see no reason why the bronze and silver databases can be targeted towards EDB. Admittedly, we have some of our largest customers are running platforms, are running $5 million an hour e-commerce platform or airlines running large e-commerce platforms. And exit data certainly has a place. RAC has a place in those, in those scenarios. Were not saying that the EDB is a solution for everything in all scenarios, but apply the technology where it's appropriate where it's required and, you know, generally wherever Oracle has being the defacto and it's being applied across the estate, that's fundamentally what's changed. It doesn't have to be the only answer you have multiple choices now. EDB provides us with the ability to probably address, you know more than 50% of the databases' state, and comfortably cope with that and just apply that more expensive kind of gold tier one cost-based but also capability, you know from the highest requirements of performance and availability where it's appropriate. >> Yeah. Very pragmatic approach. Abdul, thank you for that. And Charlie. Charlie, what's your perspective? Give us your closing thoughts. >> Well, it has been, Oracle has been dominating in Asia in South Korea has market or over many years. So customers got tired of this, continuous spending money for the maintenance costs and there is no discount. There is no negotiation. So they want to move away from expensive stuff. And they were looking for a flexible platform with the easygoing and the high speed and performance open source database like a possibly as career. And now the EDB cannot replace a hundred percent of existing legacy worker, but 10%, 20% 50% as time goes on the trend that will continue. And it will be reaching some high point or replacing the existing Oracle system. And it can, it can also leading to good business chance to a channel partner and EDB steps and other related business in open source. >> Great. Thank you, Charlie and Allen, bring us home here. Give us your follow up >> I think my, co- panelists hit the nail on the head, right? It's a menu, right? That's as things become more diverse and as people make more choices and as everybody wants more agility, you have to provide, I mean, and so that, that's where that's coming in and I liked the way that Andul I kind of split it into gold silver and bronze. Yeah. And I think that that's where, we're going, right? I mean you should ask your developers right? Are your developers like pining to start up a new instance of Oracle every time you're starting a new project? Probably not reach for their Postgres right? And so, because of that, that's where this is coming from and that's not going to change. And, and yeah, that that ecosystem is going to continue to, to thrive. And there'll be lots of different flavors in the growing open source ecosystem. >> Yeah. I mean, open source absolutely is the underpinning you know, the, the bedrock of innovation, these days. Gentlemen, great power panel. Thanks so much for bringing your perspectives and best of luck in the future. >> Thank you, next time we'll try and match our backgrounds >> Next time. Well, we'll up our game. Okay. And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Volante for theCUBE. Stay tuned for more great coverage. Postgres vision, 21. Be right back. (upbeat techno music)

(upbeat techno music) >> From around the globe, it's theCUBE. With digital coverage of Postgres Vision 2021. Brought to you by enterprise Enterprise DB. >> Hello everyone, this is David Vellante, for the CUBE. And we're here covering Postgres Vision 2021. The virtual version, thCUBE virtual, if you will. And welcome to our power-panel. Now in this session, we'll dig into database modernization. We want to better understand how and why customers are tapping open source to drive innovation. But at the same time, they've got to deliver the resiliency and enterprise capabilities that they're used to that are now necessary to support today's digital business requirements. And with me are three experts on these matters. Abdul Sheik, is Global CTO and President of Cintra. Young Il Cho, aka Charlie, is High Availability Cluster Sales Manager, at Daone CNS. And Alan Villalobos, is the Director of Development Partnerships, at IBM. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, Dave, nice to be here. >> Thank you, Dave. >> All right, let's talk trends and frame the problem. Abdul, I want to start with you? Cintra you're all about this topic. Accelerating innovation using EDB Postgres helping customers move to modern platforms. And doing so, you got to do it cost-effectively but what's driving these moves? What are the problems that you're seeing at the organizations that you serve? >> Oh, so let me quickly introduce, Abdul Sheik, CTO. I'll quickly introduce Cintra. So we are a multicloud and database architecture MSP. And we've been around for 25 plus years. Headquartered in New York and the UK. But as a global organization, we're serving our SMB customers as well as large enterprise customers. And the trends we're seeing certainly in this day and age is transformation and modernization. And what that means is, customers looking to get out of the legacy platforms, get out of the legacy data centers and really move towards a modern strategy with a lower cost base, while still retaining resiliency and freedom. Ultimately, in terms of where they're going. The key words that really I see driving this, number one is choice. They've been historically locked into vendors. With limited choice with a high cost base. So choice, freedom to choose in terms of what database technologies they apply to which workloads and certainly EDB and the work that has been done to closely marry what enterprise RD platforms offer with EDBs in a work that they've done in terms of filling those gaps and addressing where the resiliency monitoring performance and security requirements are, are certainly are required from an enterprise customer perspective. Choice is driving the move that we see and choice towards a lower cost platform that can be deployed anywhere. Both on-prem modernization customers are looking to retain on premise platforms or moving into any multi clouds whether it's an infrastructure cloud play or a platform cloud play. And certainly with EDBs offering in terms of, you know the latest cloud native offerings also very interesting. And lastly, aside from just cost and the freedom to choose where they deploy those platforms the SLA, the service level model where is the resiliency requirement where the which system is going to bronze, silver, gold? Which ones are the tier one revenue platform revenue generating platforms which are the lower, lower utility platforms. So a combination of choice, a combination of freedom to deploy anywhere and while still maintaining the resiliency and the service levels that the customers need to deliver to their businesses >> Abdul that was a beautiful setup. And, and we've got so much to talk about here because customers want to move from point A to point B but getting there and they, they need help. It's sometimes not trivial. So Charlie Daone is a consultancy. You've got a strong technical capabilities. What are you seeing in this space? You know, what are the major trends? Why are organizations considering that move? And what are some of the considerations there? >> Well, like in other country in South Korea or so our a lot of customers, banking's a manufacturing distributor. They are 90, over 90%. They are all are using Oracle DB and a rack system. But as the previous presenters pointed out, a lot of customers that are sick of the Oracle and they have to undergo the huge cost of a maintenance costs. They want to move away from this cost stress. And secondly, they can think about they're providing service to customer on their cloud base which is a private or the public. So we cannot imagine running on database, Oracle database running on the cloud the system that's not matches on this cloud. And first and second, and finally the customer what they want is the cost and they want to move away from the Oracle locking. They cannot be just a slave at Oracle for a long time and the premium for the new cloud the service for the customer. >> Great. Thank you for that. Oh, go ahead. Yeah. Did you have something else to add Charlie go ahead and please. >> No that's all. >> Okay, great. Yeah, Allen, welcome to theCUBE. You know, it's very interesting to us. IBM, you, you, of course, you're a big player in database. You have a lot of expertise here. And you partner with EDB, you're offering Postgres to customers, you know, what are you seeing? Charlie was talking about Oracle and RAC. I mean, the, the, the thing there is obviously, we talked about the maintenance costs but there's also a lot of high availability capabilities. That's something that IBM really understands well. Do you see this as largely a cloud migration trend? Is it more modernization? Interested in what's IBM's perspective on this? >> I think modernization is the right word. The points that the previous panelists brought up or are on point, right? You know, lower TCO or lower costs in general but that of agility and then availability for developers and data scientists as well. And then of course, you know, hybrid cloud, right? You know, you want to be able to deploy on prem or in the cloud, or both in a mixture of all of that. And I think, I think what ties it together is the customers are looking for insights, right? And, you know, especially in larger organizations there's a myriad of data sources that they're already working with. And, you know, we, you know we want to be able to play in that space. We want to give an offering that is based on Postgres and open source and be able to further what they're strong at at and kind of, you know on top of that, you know, a layer of, of of need that we see is, is seamless data governance across all of those different stores. >> All right, I'm going to go right to the heart of the hard problem here. So if, I mean, I want to, it's just that I want to get from point A to point B, I want to save money. I want to modernize, but if I'm the canary in the coal mine at the customer, I'm saying guys, migration scares me. How do I do that? What are the considerations? And what do I need to know that I don't know. So Abdul, maybe you could walk us through what are some of the concerns that customers have? How do you help mitigate those? Whether it's other application dependencies, you know freezing code, you know, getting, again from that point A to point B without risking my existing business processes how do you handle that? >> Yeah, certainly I think a customer needs to understand what the journey looks like to begin with. So we've actually developed our own methodology that we call Rocket Cloud, which is also part of our cloud modernization strategy that builds in and database modernization strategy built into it starts with an assessment in terms of current state discovery. Not all customers totally understand where they are today. So understanding where the database state is, you know where the risks lie what are the criticality of the various databases? What technologies are used, where we have RAC or we don't have RAC but we have data God, where we have encryption. And so on. That gives the customer a very good insight in terms of the current state, both commercially and technically that's a key point to understand how they're licensed today and what costs could be freed up to free the journey to effectively fund the journey. It's a big, big topic, but once we do that, we get an idea and we've actually developed a tool called rapid discovery. That's able to discover a largest stake without knowing the database list. We just put the scripts at the database servers themselves and it tells us exactly which databases are suited to be you know, effectively migrated to Postgres with in terms of the feature function usage in terms of how heavy they are, would store procedures in the database amount of business logic use of technologies like RAC data guard and how they convert over to to Postgres specifically. That ultimately gives us the ability to give that customer an assessment and that assessment in a short sharp few weeks and get the customer view of all of my hundreds of databases. Here are the subset of candidates for Postgres and specifically than we do the schemer advisor tool the actual assessment tool from EDB, which gives us a sense of how well the schema gets converted and how best to then also look at the stored procedure conversion as well. That gives the customer a full view of their architecture mapping their specific candidate databases and then a cost analysis in terms of what that migration looks like and how we migrate. We also run and maintain those platforms once we're on EDB. >> Thank you for that again, very clear but so you're not replacing, doing an organ transplant. You may, you're you're, you know, this is not I don't mean this as a pejorative, but you're kind of cherry picking those workloads that are appropriate for EDB and then moving those and then maybe, maybe through attrition or, you know over time, sun-setting those other, those other core pieces. >> Exactly. >> Charlie, let me ask you, so we talked about RAC, real application clusters, data guard. These are, you know kind of high profile Oracle capabilities. Can you, can you really replicate the kind of resiliency at lower costs with open source, with EDB Postgres and how do you do that? >> It's my turn? >> yes, please. >> Quite technically, again, I go on in depths and technically the RAC, RAC system is so-called is the best you know, best the tool to protect data and especially in the Unix system, but apart from the RAC by the some nice data replication solution we just stream the application and log shipping and something and then monitor Pam and, and EFM solution which is enterprise failover manager. So even though it be compared to Apple the Apple RAC versus with EDB solution, we can definitely say that RAC is more stable one, but after migration, whatever, we can overcome the, you know, drawbacks of the HA cluster system by providing the EDB tools. So whatever the customer feel that after a successful migration, utilizing the EDB high availability failable solution they can make of themselves at home. So that's, that's how we approach it with the customers. >> So, Alan, again, to me, IBM is fascinating here with your level of involvement because you're the, you guys are sort of historically the master of proprietary the mainframes, VCM, CICF, EB2, all that stuff. And then, you know IBM was the first I remember Steve Mills actually announced we're going to invest a billion dollars in open source with Linux. And that was a major industry milestone. And of course, the, the acquisition of red hat. So you've got now this open source mindset this open source culture. So we, you know, as it's all about recovery in, in database and enterprise database and all the acid properties in two phase commits, and we're talking about, you know the things that Charlie just talked about. So what's your perspective here? IBM knows a lot about this. How do you help customers get there? >> Yeah, well, I mean the main, the main thrust right now IBM has a offering called IBM cloud Pak for data which from here, which runs EDB, right? EDB, Postgres runs on top of cloud Pak for Data But the, you know I think going back to Abdul's points about, you know migrating whatever's needed and whatever can be migrated to Postgres and maybe migrating other things other places, we have data virtualization and auto-sequel, right? So once you have migrated those parts of your database or those schemes that can be, having, you know a single point where you can query across them and by the way, being able to query across them you know, before, during and after migration as well. Right? So we're kind of have that seamless experience of layer of sequel. And now with auto sequel of sparks sequel as well, as you're, as you're migrating and after is, I'd say, you know, key to this. >> What, what's the typical migration look like? I know I'm sorry, but it's a consultant question but thinking about the, you know, the average, in terms of timeframe, what are the teams look like? You know who are the stakeholders that I need to get involved? If I'm a customer to really make this a success? maybe Abdul, you could talk about that and Charlie and Alan can chime in. >> Well, I think, well, number one you knew the exact sponsors bought into it in terms of the business case, supporting the business case an architect has got a big picture understanding not only database technology but also infrastructure that they're coming from as well as the target cloud platforms and how you ensure that the infrastructure can deliver the performance. So the architect role is important, of course the core DBA that lives within the scope of the database understands the schema of the data model the business logic itself, and the application on it. That's key specifically around the application certification testing connectivity and the migration of the code. And specifically in terms of timeline just to touch on that quickly. I mean, in our experience so far and we're seeing the momentum really really take off the last 18 months, a small project with limited business logic within the database itself can we migrate it in a couple of months but typically with all the testing and rigor around that you typically say three months timeline a medium-sized complexity projects, a six month timeline and a large complex project could be anything from nine months and beyond, but it really comes down to how heavy the database is with business logic and the database and how much effort it will take to re-engineer effectively migrate that PLC code, business logic into EDB given the compatibility level between Oracle and EDB it's relatively certainly an easier path than any other target platform in terms of options. Yeah. Not perspective. That's certainly looks like the composition of a team and timeline >> Charlie or Alan, anything you guys would add. >> Yeah. So, so I think all those personas make sense. I think you might, on the consumer side of the consumer the consumer of the data side the data scientists often we see, you know during migrations and then obviously the dev ops, I think or any operations, right, have to be heavily involved. And then lastly, you know, you see more and more data steward role or data steward type persona, CDO office type type person coming in there make sure that, you know, whatever data governance that is already in place or wants to be in place after the migration is also part of the conversation. >> Why EDB? You know, there's a lot of databases out there you know, it's funny, I always say like, you know, 10, 15 years ago databases were kind of sort of a boring market, right? It was like, okay, you're going to work or whatever. And now it's exploded. You got open source databases, you got, you know not only sequel databases, you got graph databases you know, you get cloud databases, it's going crazy. Why EDB? You wonder if you guys could address that? >> Allan why don't you go first this time? I'll compliment your answers. >> Yeah. I mean, again, I think it goes back to, to the, the I guess varying needs and, and enterprises. Right. And I think that's, what's driven this explosion in databases, whether it's a document store like you're saying, or, or new types of RDBMS, the needs that we talked about at the beginning, like lower TCO, and the push to open source. But you know, the fact of the matter is that that yes, there is a myriad, an ecosystem of databases, pretty much any organization. And so, yeah, we want to tap into that. And why EDB? EDB has done a great job of taking Postgres and making it enterprise ready, you know, that's what they're, they're good at and that, you know fits very nicely with the IBM story obviously. And, and so, you know, and they've they've worked with us as well. They have an operator on, on the runs on red hat OpenShift. So that makes it portable as well but also part of the IBM cloud Pak for data story. And, and yeah, you know, we want to break down those silos. We realized that that need is there for all of these, you know, there's this ecosystem of databases. And so, you know, we're, we see our role as being that platform, whether it's red hat OpenShift, or IBM cloud Pak for data that, that unifies, and kind of gives you that single pane of glass across all of those sources. >> And Charlie, you're obviously all in, you've got EDB in your background. Why EDB for you? >> Before talking about EDB you asked about the previous question about how the migration was different from Oracle to EDB. We had a couple of success story in Korea telecom and some banking area, and it was easier. So EDB provide MTK tool as a people know but it was an appropriate, like a 90%. So we are the channel partner of the EDB for four years. So what we have done was to hire the Oracle expert. So we train Oracle export as as EDB expert at the same time so that they can approach customer and make it easy. So you have no worry about that. Just migrating EDB, Oracle to EDB. There is a no issue. Those telltales include all the tasks, you know Stratus test and trainee, and a POC that we there. So by investing that Oracle expert that we could overcome and persuade the customer to adopt EDB. So, why EDB? Simply I can say there, is there any database they can finally replaced Oracle in the world? Why is the, it's the interoperability between Oracle to EDB as the many experts pointed out there is no other DBE. They can, you know, 90, 90% in compatibility and intercooperability with EDB. That's why, of course, there's the somewhat, you know budget issues or maintenance issue cost the issue escape from Oracle lock-in. But I think the the number one reason was the interoperability and the compatibility with database itself, Oracle database. That was a reason, I guess >> Great Abdul we've talked about, we all know the, as is, you've got a high maintenance costs. You got a lot of tuning, and it's just a lot of complexity. What about the 2B maybe you could share with us sort of the outcome some of the outcomes you've seen what the business impact has been of some of these migrations? >> Sure. I mean, I'll give you a very simple example then just the idea of running Oracle on prem a lot of customer systems teams, for example will drive a virtualization VMware strategy. We know some of the challenges of running Oracle MBM where from a license perspective. So giving the business the ability where I want to go customer in the financial services market in New York, heavy virtualization strategy the ability for them to move away from Oracle on, you know expensive hardware on to Postgres EDB on virtualization just leverage existing skillsets, leveraging existing investment in terms of infrastructure, and also give them portability in AWS. The other clouds, you know, in terms of a migration. More from a business perspective as well, I would say about some of the Allan's points in terms of just freeing up the ability for data scientists and data consumers, to, you know, to consume some of that data from an Postgres perspective more accessibility spinning up environments quicker less latency in terms of the agility is another key word in terms of the tangible differences, the business, lower cost agility, and the freedom to deploy anywhere at the end of the day. Choices, I think the key word that we could come back to and knowing that we can do that to Charlie's point specifically around maintaining service levels. And as architects, we support some of the big, big names out there in terms of airlines, online, cosmetic retailers, financial services, trading applications, hedge funds, and they all want one thing as architect: for us to deliver that resiliency and stand behind them. And as the MSP we're accountable to ensure those systems are up and running and performing. So knowing that the EDB is provided the compatibility but also plugged the specific requirements around performance management, security availability that's fundamentally been key. >> [Dave I mean, having done a lot of TCO studies in this area, it's, it's it Oracle's different. You know, normally the biggest component of TCO is labor with Oracle. The biggest component of TCO is licensed and maintenance costs. So if you can virtualize and reduce those costs and of course, of course the Oracle will fight you and say we won't support it in a VMware environment. Of course, you know, they will, but, but you got to really, you got to battle. But, so here's my last question. So if I'm a customer in that state that you described you know, a lot of sort of Oracle sprawl a lot of databases out there, high maintenance costs, the whole lock-in thing. I got to choices. I, you know, a lot of choices out there. One is EDB. You guys have convinced me that you've got the expertise If I can partner with firms like yours, it's safer route. Okay, cool. My other choice is Oracle is going to, The Oracle sales reps is going to get me in a headlock and talk about exit data and how their Oracle cloud, and how it's, they've invested a lot there. And they have, and, I can pay by the drink all this sort of modern sort of discussion, you know, Oracle act like they invented it late to the game. And then here we are. So, so help me. What's the pitch as to, well, that's kind of compelling. It's maybe the safe bet they're there. They're working with my CIO, whatever. Why should I go with the open source route versus that route? It sounds kind of attractive to me, help me understand that each of you maybe take me through that. Abdul, why don't you start. >> Yeah. I'd say, you know, Oracle's being the defacto for so many years that people have just assumed and defaulted saying, high availability, RAC, DR. Data guard, you know, and I'll apply to any database need that I have. And at the end of the day customers have a three tier database requirement: the lowest, less critical, bronze level databases that really don't need RAC or a high availability, silver tier that are departmental solutions. That means some level of resiliency. And then you've got your gold revenue producing brand impact databases that are they're down. And certainly they won. You see no reason why the bronze and silver databases can be targeted towards EDB. Admittedly, we have some of our largest customers are running platforms, are running $5 million an hour e-commerce platform or airlines running large e-commerce platforms. And exit data certainly has a place. RAC has a place in those, in those scenarios. Were not saying that the EDB is a solution for everything in all scenarios, but apply the technology where it's appropriate where it's required and, you know, generally wherever Oracle has being the defacto and it's being applied across the estate, that's fundamentally what's changed. It doesn't have to be the only answer you have multiple choices now. EDB provides us with the ability to probably address, you know more than 50% of the databases' state, and comfortably cope with that and just apply that more expensive kind of gold tier one cost-based but also capability, you know from the highest requirements of performance and availability where it's appropriate. >> Yeah. Very pragmatic approach. Abdul, thank you for that. And Charlie. Charlie, what's your perspective? Give us your closing thoughts. >> Well, it has been, Oracle has been dominating in Asia in South Korea has market or over many years. So customers got tired of this, continuous spending money for the maintenance costs and there is no discount. There is no negotiation. So they want to move away from expensive stuff. And they were looking for a flexible platform with the easygoing and the high speed and performance open source database like a possibly as career. And now the EDB cannot replace a hundred percent of existing legacy worker, but 10%, 20% 50% as time goes on the trend that will continue. And it will be reaching some high point or replacing the existing Oracle system. And it can, it can also leading to good business chance to a channel partner and EDB steps and other related business in open source. >> Great. Thank you, Charlie and Allen, bring us home here. Give us your follow up >> I think my, co- panelists hit the nail on the head, right? It's a menu, right? That's as things become more diverse and as people make more choices and as everybody wants more agility, you have to provide, I mean, and so that, that's where that's coming in and I liked the way that Andul I kind of split it into gold silver and bronze. Yeah. And I think that that's where, we're going, right? I mean you should ask your developers right? Are your developers like pining to start up a new instance of Oracle every time you're starting a new project? Probably not reach for their Postgres right? And so, because of that, that's where this is coming from and that's not going to change. And, and yeah, that that ecosystem is going to continue to, to thrive. And there'll be lots of different flavors in the growing open source ecosystem. >> Yeah. I mean, open source absolutely is the underpinning you know, the, the bedrock of innovation, these days. Gentlemen, great power panel. Thanks so much for bringing your perspectives and best of luck in the future. >> Thank you, next time we'll try and match our backgrounds >> Next time. Well, we'll up our game. Okay. And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Volante for theCUBE. Stay tuned for more great coverage. Postgres vision, 21. Be right back. (upbeat techno music)

>>Hello, My name is John John Sheikh from Iran Tous. Welcome to our session on new extensions for doctors CLI as we all know, containers air everywhere. Kubernetes is coming on strong and the CNC F cloud landscape slide has become a marvel to behold its complexities about to surpass that of the photo. Letha dies used to fabricate the old intel to 86 and future generations of the diagram will be built out and up into multiple dimensions using extreme ultraviolet lithography. Meanwhile, complexity is exploding and uncertainty about tools, platform details, processes and the economic viability of our companies in changing and challenging times is also increasing. Mirant ous, as you've already heard today, believes that achieving speed is critical and that speed results from balancing choice with simplicity and security. You've heard about Dr Enterprise Container Cloud, a new framework built on kubernetes, the less you deploy compliant, secure by default. Cooper nineties clusters on any infrastructure, providing a seamless self service capable cloud experience to developers. Get clusters fast, Justus, you need them, Update them seamlessly. Scale them is needed all while keeping workloads running smoothly. And you've heard how Dr Enterprise Container Cloud also provides all the day one and Day two and observe ability, tools, the integration AP ICE and Top Down Security, Identity and Secrets management to run operations efficiently. You've also heard about Lens, an open source i D for kubernetes. Aimed at speeding up the most banding, tightest inner loop of kubernetes application development. Lens beautifully meets the needs of a new class of developers who need to deal with multiple kubernetes clusters. Multiple absent project sufficiently developers who find themselves getting bogged down and seal I only coop CTL work flows and context switches into and out of them. But what about Dr Developers? They're working with the same core technologies all the time. They're accessing many of the same amenities, including Docker, engine Enterprise, Docker, Trusted registry and so on. Sure, their outer loop might be different. For example, they might be orchestrating on swarm. Many companies are our future of Swarm session talks about the ongoing appeal of swarm and Miranda's commitment to maintaining and extending the capabilities of swarm Going forward. Dr Enterprise Container Cloud can, of course, deployed doctor enterprise clusters with 100% swarm orchestration on computes just Aziza Leah's. It can provide kubernetes orchestration or mixed swarming kubernetes clusters. The problem for Dr Dev's is that nobody's given them an easy way to use kubernetes without a learning curve and without getting familiar with new tools and work flows, many of which involved buoys and are somewhat tedious for people who live on the command line and like it that way until now. In a few moments you'll meet my colleagues Chris Price and Laura Powell, who enact a little skit to introduce and demonstrate our new extended docker CLI plug in for kubernetes. That plug in offers seamless new functionality, enabling easy context management between the doctor Command Line and Dr Enterprise Clusters deployed by Dr Enterprise Container Cloud. We hope it will help Dev's work faster, help them adapt decay. TSA's they and their organizations manage platform coexistence or transition. Here's Chris and Laura, or, as we like to call them, developer A and B. >>Have you seen the new release of Docker Enterprise Container Cloud? I'm already finding it easier to manage my collection of UCP clusters. >>I'm glad it's helping you. It's great we can manage multiple clusters, but the user interface is a little bit cumbersome. >>Why is that? >>Well, if I want to use docker cli with a cluster, I need to download a client bundle from UCP and use it to create a contact. I like that. I can see what's going on, but it takes a lot of steps. >>Let me guess. Are these the steps? First you have to navigate to the web. You i for docker Enterprise Container Cloud. You need to enter your user name and password. And since the cluster you want to access is part of the demo project, you need to change projects. Then you have to choose a cluster. So you choose the first demo cluster here. Now you need to visit the U C p u I for that cluster. You can use the link in the top right corner of the page. Is that about right? >>Uh yep. >>And this takes you to the UCP you. I log in page now you can enter your user name and password again, but since you've already signed in with key cloak, you can use that instead. So that's good. Finally, you've made it to the landing page. Now you want to download a client bundle what you can do by visiting your user profile, you'll generate a new bundle called Demo and download it. Now that you have the bundle on your local machine, you can import it to create a doctor context. First, let's take a look at the context already on your machine. I can see you have the default context here. Let's import the bundle and call it demo. If we look at our context again, you can see that the demo context has been created. Now you can use the context and you'll be able to interact with your UCP cluster. Let's take a look to see if any stacks are running in the cluster. I can see you have a stack called my stack >>in >>the default name space running on Kubernetes. We can verify that by checking the UCP you I and there it iss my stack in the default name space running on Kubernetes. Let's try removing the stack just so we could be sure we're dealing with the right cluster and it disappears. As you can see. It's easy to use the Docker cli once you've created a context, but it takes quite a bit of effort to create one in the first place. Imagine? >>Yes. Imagine if you had 10 or 20 or 50 clusters toe work with. It's a management nightmare. >>Haven't you heard of the doctor Enterprise Container Cloud cli Plug in? >>No, >>I think you're going to like it. Let me show you how it works. It's already integrated with the docker cli You start off by setting it up with your container cloud Instance, all you need to get started is the base. You are all of your container cloud Instance and your user name and password. I'll set up my clothes right now. I have to enter my user name and password this one time only. And now I'm all set up. >>But what does it actually dio? >>Well, we can list all of our clusters. And as you can see, I've got the cluster demo one in the demo project and the cluster demo to in the Demo project Taking a look at the web. You I These were the same clusters we're seeing there. >>Let me check. Looks good to me. >>Now we can select one of these clusters, but let's take a look at our context before and after so we can understand how the plug in manages a context for us. As you can see, I just have my default contact stored right now, but I can easily get a context for one of our clusters. Let's try demo to the plug in says it's created a context called Container Cloud for me and it's pointing at the demo to cluster. Let's see what our context look like now and there's the container cloud context ready to go. >>That's great. But are you saying once you've run the plug in the doctor, cli just works with that cluster? >>Sure. Let me show you. I've got a doctor stack right here and it deploys WordPress. Well, the play it to kubernetes for you. Head over to the U C P u I for the cluster so you can verify for yourself. Are you ready? >>Yes. >>First I need to make sure I'm using the context >>and >>then I can deploy. And now we just have to wait for the deployment to complete. It's as easy as ever. >>You weren't lying. Can you deploy the same stack to swarm on my other clusters? >>Of course. And that should also show you how easy it is to switch between clusters. First, let's just confirm that our stack has reported as running. I've got a stack called WordPress demo in the default name space running on Kubernetes to deploy to the other cluster. First I need to select it that updates the container cloud context so I don't even need to switch contexts, since I'm already using that one. If I check again for running stacks, you can see that our WordPress stack is gone. Bring up the UCP you I on your other cluster so you can verify the deployment. >>I'm ready. >>I'll start the deployment now. It should be appearing any moment. >>I see the services starting up. That's great. It seems a lot easier than managing context manually. But how do I know which cluster I'm currently using? >>Well, you could just list your clusters like So do you see how this one has an asterisk next to its name? That means it's the currently selected cluster >>I'm sold. Where can I get the plug in? >>Just go to get hub dot com slash miran tous slash container dash cloud dash cli and follow the instructions

>> From Bahrain, it's theCUBE. Covering AWS Public Sector Bahrain. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Welcome back, everyone, to CUBE coverage here in Bahrain for AWS Summit. Cloud computing's changing the landscape, startups, business, government, and society. We're here with a special guest, His Excellency, Aymen Tawfiq Almoayed. Thank you very much, thanks for coming, thanks for joining us. >> Thank you for having me. >> And of course Max Peterson, Vice President of International Sales, Worldwide Public Sector for Amazon Web Services. >> Good to be here, John. >> Your Excellency, this program you're doing with Amazon, this MOU you've signed is interesting, I want to unpack it, because it speaks to the bigger picture of how the region is shaped by its generational shift of cloud computing and the people here. This is a really big part of this modernization plan. >> No question, no question. So the program that the government adopted, so Vision 2030, which was adopted a while ago, is based on one premise, one key premise. That the government is going to move from operator to regulator, and our focus would be to focus on and establish, create almost, an open, just, competitive environment. So the idea is for us to provide the platform and then allow the meritocratic system to let those that can aspire to opportunities and reach these opportunities come up through the system. So this program really sets the stage to get a new level going. >> Explain the difference with this program and why it's different than some of the things we've been hearing. We saw a cloud computing degree coming out of the University of Bahrain. We're seeing a lot of job skill training. This is different, this is a unique thing. Can you give a more detail around how it works. >> So, what we're doing is we're looking at very quick wins. And for us, six months, for somebody to spend six months, one year, in Amazon is a very quick win. This is not an extended degree. What this is is it's an opportunity to interact with the best of the best in their world sector. And to, honestly it's almost like a reset, where what Max and I were talking about earlier is somebody that spends a year with Amazon, I think that something happens to the pulse rate, right. So your pulse literally starts to beat much faster. >> Max knows all about that. >> Exactly, exactly. We hear about their traveling patterns, and that in itself is amazing. So in any case, so the reason it's different from a degree is it gives you real-life vocational experience. It gives you the networking opportunity. It gives you the lifestyle exposure. And then it gives you the shortcuts in organization. >> So you're exposing them to the excellence of what a culture looks like, Amazon in this case. They're hard-charging, they're fast. Anyone who's worked with Amazon knows that they move pretty quickly. But they're disciplined. It's a world-class organization. It's like a sports team being promoted to varsity or the pro team. Work their way up from the entry-level. >> So maybe the difference as well is, in this sort of program it's sink or swim. It's really as simple as that. I mean, you need to hit the ground running and take off. Maybe with a degree, it's much less so. With a degree, you go through your first year, your second year, your sophomore and so on. So what we do, what we want, is we want our youth to hit the ground running. We want very quick wins and I have no doubt that once the first trench, first team goes out to Amazon, comes back, I'm sure that the ripple effect that you see in industry and you see in the marketplace will be tremendous. >> Max, what's your take on this? 'Cause obviously you're on the Amazon side. You're taking them in Amazon Web Services here in Bahrain, or is it outside corporate headquarters in Seattle? Is there a definition around? >> All good questions. First, we're excited to be the first company that is partnered with the Ministry on this effort. We're sure many others are going to join, but we're excited to be first. I think what makes it different is the aspect of experiential. There's a lot of experiential learning that's going on different than the academic learning. Equally or maybe even more necessary is the sort of organizational cultural learning. Just what does it take to operate at world scale or at pace. And then to be able to bring that back to the region. We'll do that wherever we've got the right mix of skills. So it could be in Bahrain, where we've got a big office now, it could be in London, could be Washington, D.C., could be Seattle. >> Your Excellency, we always talk about on theCUBE over the years, tech athletes. Because, you know, to be an athlete, you got to have durability, intelligence, stability. Being a tech athlete, the travel schedules, we were just joking last night about it, you mentioned it. But also the intelligence and the integrity to do this at this speed. So this is kind of, I love the theme, so I want you to elaborate why this connects in with your vision and how did this idea get started, what was the origination around this effort? >> So initially the, again, if one takes a step back, we started experimenting about a year ago, a year and a half ago with the sports sector. So what we were doing with the sports sector, because it was a much smaller sector. What we're trying to experiment there is, if you were to allow our athletes to interact with the best in class, what would happen? Would they live up to that experience or not? And so one of the segments that we were looking at is, for example, triathlons. So about two years ago, this sport, triathlons in general, just simply didn't exist in the region. So two, maximum three years ago, they just, they were nonexistent. So His Highness had ordered that we go ahead and see if we can develop this and see if we can develop the athletes for it. And so what we needed to do, essentially, was pick some-- >> Find the athletes. (laughs) >> Is find the athletes, exactly. Send them out, we did a few triathlons. They did Kuna and Florida, came back, loved it, the addiction and the adrenaline kicked in, and then we started arranging duathlons and then triathletes here in Bahrain. Of course, I don't know if you know this, a year, fast forward, a year and a half later, and BE13, which is our triathlon team, is number one in the world. Simply it's number one in the world. Now we're doing this, we tried this with biking. So we sent a team to the Tour de France, and we started to do exactly the same thing. We were aspiring to look at greats like Sky team and the rest, and just learning from them, imitate, and then innovate, and-- >> One, if you have to have the talent to begin with, your theory is put 'em in, let 'em see it, and they'll either level up or they won't. It's self selection. >> Absolutely, no question. >> And you want to bring that formula to tech. >> It's pure meritocratic sink or swim. So we've got, so there's two, there's two phrases that we live by, all right. Number one, our role is open, competitive, just environment. That's it, all right. The number two is we open doors with no hand-holding. Simply no hand-holding, but we'll get you the opportunity. But if Amazon calls us and says participant number 606 or whatever isn't up to the cut, then they're not up to the cut. And what our youth have proven to us time after time is they're always up to the cut. As long as you make that clear, they-- >> The expectation defines the experience. So if you say this is what it is, you can swim or you can sink, your choice, people will tap out, they won't even jump in. >> I like the tech athletes piece. >> Yeah, I'm loving it, absolutely. >> Well, I mean, a lot of tech athletes, it takes a lot of energy, it is like you said, you don't know what it takes to build a company, it's really hard, I mean, it's not easy. >> It is, and the thing, just like this program, the thing that was interesting about the University of Bahrain idea was they're going to try and immerse everybody, because cloud and technology now is immersed in any field. I mean, anything becomes digital. And we were talkin' earlier about e-sports, so you need a whole bunch of great tech athletes to start bringing e-sports services to the world. >> Absolutely. >> Do you see e-sports emerging? >> Yeah, no doubt. So what we did on Friday is we signed the first agreement, this is the first time that a region hosts, we're hosting BLASTPro's finals in Bahrain, this is going to be on the 13th and the 14th of December, and that's running, streaming on Twitch. So we're excited, we're excited to be doing this with the guys at BLASTPro, and we're excited to be using Amazon's infrastructure to do it. So yes, absolutely, there is amazing things to be seen in e-sports and we're excited. >> This is awesome, digital disruption, you guys have been so proactive on this. I was commenting this morning on Twitter, then stats went out about entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley in the U.S., 51% of all ventures fail. And some other ones, 4% become unicorns, but it was all about optionality, et cetera, et cetera, and entrepreneurs are about getting on the right wave and falling and trying again, and this is, you guys have been very proactive on this. >> Right, so that's exactly why we think that sports plays a big role. So the idea behind the program was simply to gamify everything. The idea behind this program, the idea behind adopting the new bankruptcy law in Bahrain, and the new reform regulations that are coming in, all we're doing is we're gamifying things. What we're simply saying is when you fall, it's OK to fall. As long as you get back up and hit the ground running once again, we're OK with that. So you'll start to hear phrases that are pretty interesting. Like I said, with the entrepreneurships, what we're looking at is unlocking levels. So we're gamifying. With education we're doing exactly the same thing, we're looking at vocational training where you get to unlock levels. So as long as people know that the name of the game is just to stay in the game, and then outpace everybody else, then we're good. >> And the funding's been fantastic. You guys have been supporting it with resources. Now that the region's up and running, Max, do you feel good about the development so far with the new region? Therese was just on earlier, she mentioned first day they turned it on, a bunch of companies were launched already. >> Besides the cannons and the confetti that shot out today at the summit, the other exciting thing's I think when we launched the region, we had over 350 different companies, many small businesses, small and medium enterprises that put their offerings into the AWS Marketplace. When it was launched, anybody in the region, anybody in Bahrain, could literally turn on 1,700 different types of software solutions at the push of a button, so I think that's big. I think we heard how 35 local companies have created migration offerings and fast-start offerings. We heard from one great entrepreneur on stage today and we heard from government about how government's operating faster than business, I think Sheikh Salman threw down a bit of a challenge to the rest of the government and state enterprises and even corporations. And then of course I think we saw the digital bank of the future from Bank ABC with their first virtual banking assistant up on stage who, by the way, lives in the cloud over Bahrain. >> Yeah, digital employee, we had a great chat about that. This speaks to the generational shift, this is something that's going to be an interesting footnote in history. The sea change around expectations, you brought this up earlier, I think this is important. The younger generation, they want the world to be at a different speed, and they don't want an intolerant blockers in their way. And so whoever can be out front on setting up the environment, whether it's society, government, citizen services, but money-making potential, banks got to operate. So this is the replatforming of society is happening. >> No question, yeah, no question. I'll give you just the, when you compare ministries, when you compare government entities, you would walk in and you'd assume the ultra-bureaucratic system is still in place where you've got to go through tiers and so on and so forth. As far as the youth at the Ministry of Youth is involved, these guys are running things with chats, we've got internal chat systems, and so there is no memo-writing process where you then have to escalate it, and then it goes to the minister's office and so on. Absolutely not. These guys are on the likes of Slack, the likes of Teams from Microsoft and so on, and that's how government is run. >> Max, email's for old people like us. >> Hey, modern digital governments are redesigning the way all this stuff works, and it doesn't, the thing that's interesting to me is it doesn't just impact these things that you would think of as tech. I thought the example of going from 130 days to 5 days for permitting approvals-- >> For building permits, sure. >> That takes out a massive amount of inefficiency from the industry, right, and it enables that very industry to then move faster, instead of government as a blocker to so many of these things, becomes an enabler. And I think it's that attitude about modernized, customer-focused or citizen-focused that is the hallmark of what folks are doing now to make a difference. >> Well, thanks for coming in and sharing the insights. Your Excellency, great to see you. I have one final question, take a minute to explain to the folks what is the Ministry of Youth and Sports Affair, what's the charter, you going to add tech athletes to the mix now that we've kind of defined that term? But take a minute to explain-- >> Tech athletes. So the vast majority of the population is under the age of 35. The ministry's mandate is to make sure that anybody within that constituency, their touchpoints are being managed in the right way. So our job, very, very simply, is to be effectively the change agent for them, number one, and number two, to protect their interests. So we're the ones that are negotiating regulations that come in, but what touchpoint really is relevant? We're negotiating new laws that impact youth when it comes to their trades, new laws that impact youth when it comes to their rights, new laws-- >> Whether it's culture or art or whatever. >> Any touchpoints, so effectively we're customer-relations for youth, or client relations for youth. So that's that from one perspective. With regards to sports, we're simply regulators. So what we're doing is we're moving from an operator model to a regulator model, and what we're trying to do is we're trying to create a sports industry. So instead of us focusing on the actual tournament itself only, we're looking at sports diplomacy, we're looking at sports industry, we're looking at human performance and things like that. So any sectors that we can catalyze to grow in Bahrain that relates in any way, shape, or form to sports, whether it was medicinal development, technological development, regulations or otherwise, that falls under Ministry of Youth and Sports. >> You're charged to look at the whole individual across all spectrums touchpoints. >> Exactly >> That's awesome. >> So we're a horizontal as opposed to a vertical. >> Your Excellency, great to have you on theCUBE, great topic, could talk about it forever. We love sports, of course, on theCUBE, we love talkin' sports, Max, you're a tech athlete. >> I'm a tech athlete, I learned that today. Brilliant. >> You go from city to city, hit a home run everywhere you go. >> I'm looking for the next league to compete in. >> Guys, thanks so much for the insights. CUBE coverage here at AWS Summit in Bahrain, I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (bright music)