>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCube, covering the AWS re:Invent 2017 presented by AWS, Intel, and our ecosystem of partners. >> Welcome back, everyone. Here, in Las Vegas for TheCUBE's exclusive coverage of AWS re:Invent 2017 Amazon Web Service's Annual Conference. It's a zoo every year. Forty-five thousand people. Just seven years ago they couldn't get 4000 people to come, now the business exploding. Eighteen billion dollars of infrastructure, completely changing the game. I'm John Furrier. Our next two guests are Josh Stella who is the CEO of Fugue and Peter O'Donoghue, vice president of application services at Unisys Federal. Guys, welcome to theCUBE. Welcome back. >> Thank you. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, John. >> So you guys are in the heart of it. We've talked many times about the DevOps ethos at the Amazon public sector event. Man, it's a changing of the guard happening in front of our eyes. >> Peter: Absolutely. >> Seeing a whole new way of re-imagining how to deploy services in kind of the old school infrastructure world. But now taking over the applications. This is disruption. Share some insight, what's going on? >> Well, actually I really appreciate your lead in because, we're seeing like lots of big patterns happening at the same time, particularly with, my business that I look after, that I look at, is the federal sector. And actually, I think in the precursor we were talking about federal used to be slower and more staid. And that's still true in some cases, but actually the rate of acceleration is really taken off, but I think the big patterns we're seeing is you know, the CIO who looks at the Cloud as compute, network, and storage, that CIO is alive and well, and actually we sell and we provide managed services to that type of business. But we're seeing kind of like a greater focus and greater concentration on folks who actually want, they see the Cloud as really kind of an inflection point to break with tradition and actually to be able to consume native services, so they can actually affect and bring mission outcomes more effectively. In my own experience I've seen like two mission customers in a space of months to be able to solve like really serious problems and significant problems that they faced, but they wouldn't have been able to do it without being able to access RDS or ELB or Lamda, and these are becoming like the essential building blocks, the Lego blocks, if you will, of building modern Cloud native applications. >> So you're saying they solved the problem that was unique right there on the spot, which is great, you know, good job Cloud. But the question really is, would that ever have been solved in the old model? They would have been probably in a room arguing over architecture. I mean a lot of this is about looking at a solution, jumping on it, making it happen, not sitting in a room arguing. >> That's right. >> Get RFP out there. >> Josh: Yeah, exactly. Well, I think a lot of this has to do with infrastructure and policy as code. Because if you can express these thing as code, you can try things in an hour or two, instead of having to go through the RFP, sit on a whiteboard, waterfall design it. You can experiment without fear of failure because the costs are so low. And that's also bleeding over into public sector as well. >> I heard a quote this morning, I'll share it with you. I know it's a public sector kind of quote. The guy was up onstage really presenting how he transformed his entire, you know, I won't say the name to protect the innocent, but it was pretty massive transformation. He goes, "We couldn't use Amazon a few years ago because it was too cool." Meaning it's new. So the government's kind of like, well, you know, it's not yet tested, security. And security's always been the issue for this one group. He goes, "But now it's not cool to use it, so we can use it." Meaning, it's proven. So, it's kind of the opposite. When it's boring it's cool. When it's boring it must be good. Kind of a federal mindset, I won't try to pitch into the whole federal too much there, but the reality is tried, proven, tested, certified. There are some serious things that have to go on in both enterprise and now on federal. Amazon is continuing to move the needle while doing the heavy work. I mean, that's hard. So once they break through that, then you got the creativity going on. So take us through where we are in this, because the GovCloud is pretty disruptive. How far are we in the Cloud game in you guys' opinion of that getting the job done, checking the boxes of the certifications. I know there's FedRAMP, there's a bunch of other stuff. Is that mostly done right now? I mean how much more work is needed before everyone goes, okay Cloud is the standard? >> Well actually, (mumbles) >> Well let me try to answer, and I think Josh'll have an opinion on, too. Is I think the FedRAMP certification, I think, has been, I would say, probably if not the single most, one of the most important kind of factors in amplifying or accelerating Clouded option in the federal government. And actually, we've also seen that manifest in the state and local markets as well. Which is, we don't really have an equivalent, but if you're on FedRAMP, that's definitely good enough for us. That has become the defacto standard. But we find, though, is, and actually this is where, we really appreciate a product like Fugue, is actually folks find that, I mean actually, you asked about like major patterns or major trends. Like another major trend that we see, and actually I'll kind of come back to your question is, is that there's a significant shortage in talent and knowledge and skills to be able to manage the Cloud, and actually it's such a phenomenally different kind of mindset, so, like to properly govern and manage the Cloud, is actually a really difficult thing. So, you know, >> Good point. >> As a tradition, we got a lot of managed service provider business in our history. And if you look at, say Amazon, you know some folks would look at it as almost an existential threat. But in fact, we don't. It just means that you need to move into a different place in the stack to add value. And actually that place for us is that, you know, in terms of being able to amplify and accelerate that, the planning for, the migrating to, the running workloads in, in a scalable way, cost effective way, securely, and being able to build Cloud natively, our customers are really struggling with that. And they can do it, we've seen them do it one offs, but to be able to do a scale, so being able to really attack the knowledge gap from a human resource perspective? >> John: Great point. >> But also, encapsulating that into templatizing and putting nanny guardrails in are really important. Well that's a great point. There was a conversation I was involved in this morning with the CIA where they basically admitted, we got a lot of smart people, we can build a Cloud. Running and maintaining it... >> Josh: That's right. >> Are two different things. So this is kind of a false trap that a lot of people could fall into. Oh yeah, the Cloud, it's no problem. >> Josh: Yeah. >> So this is where the issues come in. Thoughts on that? >> Yes. >> And what you guys are doing? So I think we've entered the second phase of Clouded option. The first phase was kind of shadow IT bought them up. When I was at AWS I'd go into a customer, they'd say we're not on the Cloud. And then we found out we had 130 accounts that were swiped credit cards. >> John: Don't tell anyone. >> Yeah, don't tell anybody. Help us... >> Secret region. >> Help us sort this out. >> How is this the prototype? Honest, that's right. >> But now the market has changed. And so whether it's commercial or federal or other spaces, we're now in this phase two where these are strategic adoption of Cloud at an enterprise level. And to do that you need automation, you need repeatability, you need consistency, you need policy enforcement, and so that's where a system like Fugue packages all that together, which accelerates the whole operation of that. You know, I don't like the term centralized, because what Fugue allows you to do is assert some things and then decentralize the innovation aspect. >> It reminds me of the whole fabric and the whole grid days. But you bring up a good point, phase two is about kind of grownup Cloud. And so, that begs the question, now what are you guys working on, Unisys and, what's the story between your partnership? Talk about that. Because you know, people are relying on you guys as suppliers, so you have to stand alone and be successful. We talked about your company, but partnering is now important. >> Peter: That's right. >> Who you partner with and why, and what's the outcome options for the customers? >> Well, we're super excited about our relationship with Fugue. And actually primarily, as I talked earlier, we do see the big challenges that the market has right now. There is this huge gap from a knowledge and talent perspective. And also, the pioneers have gone into the Cloud, but now you have to have the settlers there. So how do we kind of attack those at the same time? So, when we're looking for a management platform, you know, we look for three things that really were important to us. The first is, is what I call expressiveness. So actually, I've got a lot of experience implementing kind of like more IT ops, like classical, like Cloud broker solutions, and we found that, you know, in order to be able to build a solution quickly for customers, you need to be able to express yourself. I mean, you can't manage and you can't govern, and you can't meter, you can't bill for, you can't apply policy for what Dr Vogels calls the primitives, right? So if I've only got like three or four primitives, my ability to manage and govern is really limited, right? It's almost like, the metaphor I would use would be maybe somebody gives you a keyboard, you got a half a dozen keys on there, and you're trying to write the great American novel. You can't do that, right? So, expressiveness, being able to articulate the right models and templatize and govern. That's kind of concern number one. Concern number two that we think is really important is, is it kind of goes at that knowledge management piece. We're making a major investment within Unisys Federal, and we're looking at hundreds and hundreds of our associates to be trained and certified, and we're building it a Cloud (mumbles) enablement. But we're looking to encapsulate our best practices and templatize those. So to the point... >> And Josh fits in there what, from a software standpoint? >> Well, he actually provides the way for us to capture that knowledge. So, in terms of what our policies in terms of governing say, you know, load balancers or EC2 instances or you know, how we're gonna manage S3 and gonna protect S3. You know, policies and best practices up and down the stack. Like, even governance processes around dev test environments. We're not gonna leave dev environments flapping in the wind for months on end where people are running up big bills, right? >> John: Got it. >> So Josh's product helps us manage that. And the third thing is what I call like the nanny rails. Now my daughter has just learned how to drive a car. And some of the choices that we made, we took into consideration like lane changing things and like crash avoidance and so and so forth. So, what we want, and actually Josh brought this up very elegantly is, is we want, the forward-leaning federal agencies to be able to go quick. But we want to put the guardrails behind them and have like that nanny kind of supervision behind them so that if things start drifting out of compliance we can drag them back. >> You can notify them, right? >> Some instrumentation. >> Absolutely. Absolutely. >> And management. >> Well, it's not just notification with Fugue. We don't let you do the wrong thing. And then if somebody goes in later and breaks it, we fix it. So instead of mean time to response of 15 minutes for your monitoring solution, then however long for somebody to pick up the notification, then to respond to it. With Fugue, within 30 seconds we've seen it and we've fixed it. And so that is a real game changer in terms of... >> Yeah, you guys are very impression with DevOps, they way you connect it. And the theme is connecting the tech to business. And in this case it's government, but that's your customer. What's new with you guys? Any announcements here? What's the story? >> Oh yeah, we have... >> Give us the update quick. >> Thank you very much. We have two big announcements. So it used to be, to use all the great management features of Fugue you had to build things using Fugue. So as of today you can download the new version of the system, you can point it at your existing AWS infrastructure. We autogenerate code and diagrams to show you what you're running. You can compare policy against that. So you don't have to write any code. And then when you've got it right, you can just apply Fugue to that. You can import that infrastructure into Fugue management. So a lot of our customers are telling us we have years of development on AWS. It was not done using best practices. We allow you to go back and fix that really quickly without recreating your infrastructure. >> So go in, do some maintenance without breaking it, tearing it down, building it up. >> and then you get all the benefits of Fugue enforcement. Every 30 seconds we examine the environment. If anything breaks we fix it. And so the ability to just pull that into Fugue and do it easily. >> Well it's great that you guys are successful. Congratulations on the partnership with Unisys. Big name, brand name. You guys obviously experienced, trusted advisors and partners to Federal. Personal question for you, Josh. You know, as you look back at the Amazon mothership. >> Josh: Yes. >> You gotta be like, damn that was a good ride. As an alumni and an extender, you're bringing that DNA to your company that you founded. What's it like? I mean, you feel good? You got a spring in your step? You kinda wish you were back on the mothership? >> Oh no, you know it's great working with AWS because I love doing what I'm doing now more than anything I've ever done. And they are great partners to us. They are so helpful. So I love coming back and seeing all my friends at Amazon. >> They're all bosses now. They're managers. >> Josh: That's right, that's right. >> Promoted. >> But being able to go out and do something that's really your vision, there's nothing like it in the world. >> John: I agree. >> Yeah. >> Being an entrepreneur certainly you can control your own destiny. It's a lot of fun, lot of passion. >> Josh: Yeah. >> Congratulations. >> Josh: Thank you. >> The Fugue CEO here with his partner in Unisys here in theCUBE. Live coverage day one. We've got two more live days. It'll be wall to wall. Big parties tonight. Lot of events, lot of action. Forty-five thousand people here in Las Vegas. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching. We'll be right back.