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

>>Mm. Welcome back to the cubes. Continuous coverage of A W s reinvent 2021 were running one of the industry's most important and largest hybrid tech events of the year with A W S and its ecosystem partners. And, of course, special thanks to a M D for supporting this year's editorial coverage at the event we got to live sets we had to remote sets one in Boston, one in Palo Alto. We've got more than 100 guests coming on the programme and we're looking >>deep into >>the next decade of cloud innovation. We're super excited to be joined by Ali Zafar, who is the senior director of platform strategy and operations at Dropbox Ali. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >>Awesome. It's a pleasure to be here with you, Dave. >>So Hey, what's your day job like at Dropbox? What's your role? >>Got it? Yeah. So I actually oversee the global supply chain at Dropbox. Also all of the capacity planning which entails both our budget and also capacity requirements and Dropbox. And then I also focus on the platform product management side which is basically building our build vs buy and our overall roadmap for our platform in the long run. >>Great. Thank you. So I mean, everybody knows Dropbox, But maybe you can talk a little bit about your business, your mission and how that's evolved. Over the past several years. >>Dropbox is a global collaboration platform, and our mission at Dropbox is to help design a more enlightened way of working. Dropbox has over 700 million registered users and over 550 billion pieces of content. So taking a step back, they've dropbox health. Let's use all of your content. Think of this as videos as music. Even your tax returns allows you to organise all of this content. And then you can share this content with anybody at any time. You can also take Dropbox to work. And actually, it makes you even more productive in the workplace integrating all of your tools seamlessly, also allowing you to collaborate with all of your teams internally and also externally. >>Yeah, so thank you. Uh, when Dropbox was founded, I mean, the cloud was really nascent, right? So it was early days, and so a lot has changed since you know, the mid last decade. And of course, with remote work and hybrid work that had to be a real tailwind to your business. But maybe you could explain your cloud and your hybrid cloud strategy. >>You're spot on Dave. So Dropbox has always been hybrid since its inception in 2000 and seven. And when I say hybrid, I mean, we have our own on prime infrastructure, and then we also leverage Public Cloud. Now, Public cloud still to these days remains absolutely critical for Dropbox to serve all of its customer needs. And when we talk about the decision between public or private, we think about three or four key things. One is the total cost of ownership. Look at the market. We also look at our customer requirements and the latest technology that's available in the market and then any international data storage requirements to make the decision of going towards public or private for that specific use case. >>So what if we could follow up on that? Like maybe you can talk about the key business, these conditions as a as a SAS storage provider? What are the real drivers in in your business framework? >>Got it at the end of the day, what really matters for us. There is to actually think about our customers and delight them And what better than to focus on performance, reliability and also security. Right. So we want to make sure that the infrastructure that we have today allows Dropbox to actually solve for the specific use case for our customers. What do they care about while also doing this in a very efficient management Manage, uh, way So to summarise that looking at performance, looking at liability, looking at scalability, looking at efficiency and then also compliance >>So that leads me to My next question is about the EC two instances that you use. I know you. You make heavy use of AMG compute. How >>did you >>come to that decision? Was that these factors was all performance. How did you migrate to really enable that capability? How complex was that? >>MD has has been a key strategic partners the partnership as well over 4 to 5 years right now and we've been leveraging them on our on prem infrastructure for compute. So we've always had aimed in our infrastructure. And when the time came where aws was also leveraging some of the MD instances, we wanted to see how we can expand the partnership with AMG and A W S and also experiment with these instances. So we looked at some of the tooling updates that were required. We also looked at specific instances which are either compute optimised and memory optimised instances. And then we actually build our footprint on M D. And what we saw is that the overall performance improvements and also cost improvements that we got for specific workloads. It was actually extremely, uh, overall awesome results for Dropbox and our customers, and we have been using them ever since. >>What kind of business impact did that make that make a difference to your business? That was noticeable >>on the business side, I think primarily it was more on the TCO side, which is where we got most of the benefits on the cost side. Um, and then also for some of our internal work clothes, we also saw benefit, uh, to our internal developers that are using some of those work clothes. >>Well, so you guys have kind of become the poster child for hybrid. A lot has been talked about about you all, but I wonder if you could help us understand what part of your infrastructure is going to be better served by public cloud versus kind of doing your own. I t on Prem. What are some of the value drivers that are that are making, you know, push workloads into the public cloud? Help us understand that better and squint through that >>got ready. I get asked that question a lot. So public cloud in general allows for faster go to market, Think about this as, like product launches teacher launches also international expansion. It allows us to scale and then also leveraging some of the existing technologies out there in the market for some of the common workloads. So just, you know, taking a step back and thinking about Dropbox. We keep on evaluating also the criteria and then also specific workloads on what makes sense on private or public load. And a W s had some instances, like as three rds and EC to that when we started looking at, we knew that some of our key services, like data platform, some parts of our, um, Melania and even paper platform would make more sense for us to actually leverage. Uh, some of these in public cloud for that. >>So what are the sort of characteristics of the workload that are sort of better suited to be in AWS? You know, what's the ideal workload profile? You know, we talk about ideal customer profile. What's the ideal workload profile for the for the AWS Cloud. >>Got it. So the way we think about it, at least we call it the rule of three at Dropbox. Um, and that means we look at scale. First, we look at technology and innovation. Um, and what I mean by that is, is there faster innovation in the public cloud? And is the workload common enough that there's already a lot of work going on in public Cloud? Then there's no reason for us to actually innovate faster than that. We probably can't. And if the scale is not large enough, right? So when we talk about our storage side like magic pocket, the scale is large enough. We're innovating. There makes sense, and it's better for the end customer, so we will probably go towards private cloud there. But then, when we talk about like international expansion, when we talk about, like, faster go to market or some of the innovation in the space. It really makes sense to use public Cloud because of all of the advancements that we've seen there. >>Yeah, so let me circle back to the sort of business benefits and impact of the sort of a MD based compute specifically. But you talked about TCO before. So there's certain things you mentioned on Prem you sometimes use You mean right. If the thing is hardened, you don't want to necessarily rip and replace it. But if you can accelerate, go to market and you spin up things in the cloud that makes sense. You mentioned customer requirements. So that's just kind of depends. And then the international expansion and scale. So it kind of comes down to those whatever. Four or five factors, right? Tco those other factors that I mentioned kind of the high level benefits, if you could, wouldn't mind summarising for us. Ali. >>Yeah, I think you're spot on there. So it's looking at the overall Decio, right? The cost of serving the overall cloud looking at like go to market in general, like can we leverage public cloud and go to market faster? Obviously, meeting that end customer requirements. We also looked at like international expansion, like any of the customer's data that is stored outside of the US is all on public load for Dropbox. Uh, no plans in the short term to do something different there, Um and then also just looking at, like I mentioned anything in the technology space that is ongoing, that we can leverage features side or the product side for our customers, like at Yale or, uh, VRML. We are going to leverage Public cloud there. >>So of course you know we've we've followed the progression of semiconductor technology for decades. This industry has marched to the cadence of performance improvements. What are the one of the futures hold from a technology roadmap standpoint, particularly as it relates to leveraging AMG EC Two instances, Ali >>got it. So drop boxes in a very unique position where we actually leverage AMG both on Prem and for public le leveraging some of the AWS EC two instances like like you mentioned and epic processors from MDR what we're using today, both on the hybrid infrastructure site and the performance and also the d. C o benefits are real and something that we are observing on a day to day basis. So we are gonna be leveraging that technology even in the future. Um, and the partnership with the MD continues to be very, very strong for Dropbox. >>Well, I really, really appreciate you coming on the cube as part of our coverage is great to have You love to have you back sometime. >>Awesome. Thank you. And also just last thing we wanted to also call out that we are also going to be experimenting with probably Milan that is coming out. Uh, room is the current process is from a m D. That we have been leveraging. And as Milan comes available, we do wanna continue to evaluate it and see how we can fit it in our infrastructure. >>Okay, So their their generations are city based, the all Italian city based. They were going to run out of cities soon. >>God, uh, again, the partnership with both A W s and an M. D is something that I'm very proud of. Execution. Thank you, Dave. >>Great to have you, Ali. And really appreciate you watching. Keep it right there for more action on the cube. Your leader in hybrid tech event coverage. Mhm.

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to "The Cube's" continuous coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. We're running one of the industry's most important and largest hybrid tech events of the year with AWS and its ecosystem partners. And of course, special thanks to AMD for supporting this year's editorial coverage at the event. We got two live sets. We had two remote sets, one in Boston and one in Palo Alto. We got more than 100 guests coming on the program, and we're looking deep into the next decade of cloud innovation. We're super excited to be joined by Ali Zafar, who's the senior director of platform strategy and operations at Dropbox. Ali, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Awesome, it's a pleasure to be here with you, Dave. >> So hey, what's your day job like at Dropbox and what's your role? >> Got it. So I actually oversee the global supply chain at Dropbox. Also all of the capacity planning, which entails both our budget and also capacity requirements at Dropbox. And then I also focus on the platform product management side, which is basically building our build versus buy and our overall roadmap for our platform in the long run. >> Great, thank you. So, everybody knows Dropbox, but maybe you could talk a little bit about your business, your mission, and how that's evolved over the past several years. >> Got it. So Dropbox is a global collaboration platform and our mission at Dropbox is to help design a more enlightened way of working. Dropbox has over 700 million registered users and over 550 billion pieces of content. So taking a step back Dave, Dropbox helps with all of your content. Think of this as videos as music, even your tax returns, allows you to organize all of this content and then you can share this content with anybody at any time. You can also take Dropbox to work and actually it makes you even more productive in the workplace. Integrating all of your tools seamlessly, also allowing you to collaborate with all of your teams internally and also externally. >> Thank you, Ali. When Dropbox was founded, the cloud was really nascent, right? So it was early days, and so a lot has changed since the mid last decade. And of course with remote work and hybrid work, that's had to be a real tailwind to your business, but maybe you could explain your cloud and your hybrid cloud strategy. >> Got it, you're spot on Dave. So Dropbox has always been hybrid since its inception in 2007. And when I say hybrid, I mean we have our own on-prem infrastructure and then we also leverage public cloud. Now public cloud still to these days, remains absolutely critical for Dropbox to serve all of its customer needs. And when we talk about the decision between public or private, we think about three or four key things. One is the total cost of ownership, we look at go-to-market, we also look at our customer requirements and the latest technology that's available in the market. And then any international data storage requirements to make the decision of going towards public or private for that specific use case. >> So, I wonder if we could follow up on that. Maybe you could talk about the key business considerations as an SAS storage provider. What are the real drivers and in your business framework? >> Got it. At the end of the day, what really matters for us Dave, is to actually think about our customers and delight them. And what better than to focus on performance, reliability and also security, right? So we want to make sure that the infrastructure that we have today, allows Dropbox to actually solve for this specific use case for our customers. You know, what do they care about? While also doing this in a very efficient, managed way. So to summarize that, looking at performance, looking at liability, looking at scalability, looking at efficiency, and then also compliance. >> So that leads me to my next question, is about the EC2 instances that you use. I know you make heavy use of AMD compute. How did you come to that decision? Was it these factors? Was it all performance? How did you migrate to really enable that capability? How complex was that? >> Got it. So AMD has always been our key strategic partners partners. The partnership is well over four to five years right now, and we've been leveraging them on our on-prem infrastructure for compute. So we've always had AMD in our infrastructure and when the time came where AWS was also leveraging some of the AMD instances, we wanted to see how we can expand the partnership with AMD and AWS and also experiment with these instances. So we looked at some of the tooling updates that were required. We also looked at specific instances, which are either compute optimized and memory optimized instances, and then we actually built our footprint on AMD. And what we saw is that the overall performance improvement and also cost improvements that we got per specific workloads was actually extremely, was overall awesome results for Dropbox and our end customers. And we have been using them ever since. >> What kind of business impact did that make? Did it make a difference to your business that was noticeable? >> On the business side, I think primarily it was more on the TCO side, which is where we got most of the benefits on the cost side. And then also for some of our internal workloads, we also saw benefit to our internal developers that are using some of those workloads. >> So, you guys have become the poster child for hybrid and a lot has been talked about about you all, but I wonder if you could help us understand what part of your infrastructure is going to be better served by public cloud versus doing your own I T on-prem. What are some of the value drivers that are making you push workloads into the public cloud? Help us understand that better and squint through that. >> Got it, I get asked that question a lot. So public cloud in general allows for faster go-to-market. Think about this as like product launches, feature launches, also international expansion. It allows us to scale and then also leveraging some of the existing technologies out there in the market for some of the common workloads. So just taking a step back and thinking about Dropbox, we keep on evaluating also the criteria and then also specific workloads on what makes sense on private or public cloud. And AWS had some instances like S3 RDS and EC2 that when we started looking at, we knew that some of our key services like data platform, some parts of the MLN A I, and even paper platform would make more sense for us to actually leverage some of these in a public cloud for that. >> So what are the characteristics of the workload that are better suited to be an AWS? What's the ideal workload profile? You know, we talk about ideal customer profile. What's the ideal workload profile for the AWS cloud? >> Got it, so the way we think about it, at least, we call it the rule of three at Dropbox. And that means we look at scale first, we look at technology and innovation and what I mean by that is, is there a faster innovation in the public cloud and is that workload common enough that there's already a lot of work going on in public cloud, then there's no reason for us to actually innovate faster than that, we probably can't. And if the scale is not large enough. So when we talk about our storage side, like magic pocket, the scale is large enough where innovating there makes sense and it's better for the end customer. So we would probably go towards private cloud there. But then when we talk about international expansion, when we talk about faster go-to-market or some of the innovation in the MLN A I space, it really makes sense to use public cloud because of all of the advancements that we've seen there. >> So let me circle back to the business benefits and impact of the AMD based compute specifically, but you talked about TCO before, so there's certain things you mentioned on-prem you sometimes use. If the thing's hardened, you don't want to necessarily rip and replace it, but if you can accelerate go-to-market and you spin up things in the cloud, that makes sense. You mentioned customer requirements, so that just kind of depends. And then the international expansion and scale. So it comes down to those whatever four or five factors, right? The TCO, those other factors that I mentioned. Kind of the high level benefits, if you wouldn't mind summarizing for us, Ali. >> Yeah, I think you're spot on there. So there's looking at the overall TCO, right? The cost of serving the overall cloud, looking at go-to-market in general, can we leverage public cloud and go-to-market faster, obviously meeting our end customer requirements. We also looked at international expansion, any of the customer's data that is stored outside of the U S is all on public cloud for Dropbox. No plans in the short term to do something different there. And then also just looking at, like I mentioned, anything in the technology space that is ongoing, that we can leverage feature side or the product side for our customers, like A I or M L, we are going to leverage public cloud there. >> So of course you know, we've followed the progression of semiconductor technology for decades. This industry is marched to the cadence of performance improvements. What do the futures hold from a technology roadmap standpoint, and particularly as it relates to leveraging AMD EC2 instances, Ali? >> Got it. So Dropbox is in a very unique position where we actually leverage AMD both on-prem and for public cloud, leveraging some of the AWS EC2 instances like you mentioned. And EPYC processors from AMD are what we're using today, both on the hybrid infrastructure side and the performance. And also the TCO benefits are real and something that we are observing on a day-to-day basis. So we are going to be leveraging that technology even in the future, and the partnership with the AMD continues to be very, very strong for Dropbox. >> Well, Ali, I really appreciate you coming on "The Cube" as part of our coverage. It's great to have you. Love to have you back sometime. >> Awesome, thank you. And also just last thing we wanted to also call out that we are also going to be experimenting with probably Milan that is coming out. Rome is the current processors from AMD that we have been leveraging and as Milan comes available, we do want to continue to evaluate it and see how we can fit it in our infrastructure. >> So their are generations are city-based. Are they all Italian city-based, or are we going to run out of cities soon? (both laughing) >> Got it. Again, the partnership with both AWS and AMD is something that I'm very proud of. >> Excellent. >> Thank you so much. Thank you, Dave. >> Great to have you Ali, and really appreciate you watching. Keep it right there for more action on "The Cube", your leader in hybrid tech event coverage. (calm music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to "The Cube's" continuous coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. We're running one of the industry's most important and largest hybrid tech events of the year with AWS and its ecosystem partners. And of course, special thanks to AMD for supporting this year's editorial coverage at the event. We got two live sets. We had two remote sets, one in Boston and one in Palo Alto. We got more than 100 guests coming on the program, and we're looking deep into the next decade of cloud innovation. We're super excited to be joined by Ali Zafar, who's the senior director of platform strategy and operations at Dropbox. Ali, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Awesome, it's a pleasure to be here with you, Dave. >> So hey, what's your day job like at Dropbox and what's your role? >> Got it. So I actually oversee the global supply chain at Dropbox. Also all of the capacity planning, which entails both our budget and also capacity requirements at Dropbox. And then I also focus on the platform product management side, which is basically building our build versus buy and our overall roadmap for our platform in the long run. >> Great, thank you. So, everybody knows Dropbox, but maybe you could talk a little bit about your business, your mission, and how that's evolved over the past several years. >> Got it. So Dropbox is a global collaboration platform and our mission at Dropbox is to help design a more enlightened way of working. Dropbox has over 700 million registered users and over 550 billion pieces of content. So taking a step back Dave, Dropbox helps with all of your content. Think of this as videos as music, even your tax returns, allows you to organize all of this content and then you can share this content with anybody at any time. You can also take Dropbox to work and actually it makes you even more productive in the workplace. Integrating all of your tools seamlessly, also allowing you to collaborate with all of your teams internally and also externally. >> Thank you, Ali. When Dropbox was founded, the cloud was really nascent, right? So it was early days, and so a lot has changed since the mid last decade. And of course with remote work and hybrid work, that's had to be a real tailwind to your business, but maybe you could explain your cloud and your hybrid cloud strategy. >> Got it, you're spot on Dave. So Dropbox has always been hybrid since its inception in 2007. And when I say hybrid, I mean we have our own on-prem infrastructure and then we also leverage public cloud. Now public cloud still to these days, remains absolutely critical for Dropbox to serve all of its customer needs. And when we talk about the decision between public or private, we think about three or four key things. One is the total cost of ownership, we look at go-to-market, we also look at our customer requirements and the latest technology that's available in the market. And then any international data storage requirements to make the decision of going towards public or private for that specific use case. >> So, I wonder if we could follow up on that. Maybe you could talk about the key business considerations as an SAS storage provider. What are the real drivers and in your business framework? >> Got it. At the end of the day, what really matters for us Dave, is to actually think about our customers and delight them. And what better than to focus on performance, reliability and also security, right? So we want to make sure that the infrastructure that we have today, allows Dropbox to actually solve for this specific use case for our customers. You know, what do they care about? While also doing this in a very efficient, managed way. So to summarize that, looking at performance, looking at liability, looking at scalability, looking at efficiency, and then also compliance. >> So that leads me to my next question, is about the EC2 instances that you use. I know you make heavy use of AMD compute. How did you come to that decision? Was it these factors? Was it all performance? How did you migrate to really enable that capability? How complex was that? >> Got it. So AMD has always been our key strategic partners partners. The partnership is well over four to five years right now, and we've been leveraging them on our on-prem infrastructure for compute. So we've always had AMD in our infrastructure and when the time came where AWS was also leveraging some of the AMD instances, we wanted to see how we can expand the partnership with AMD and AWS and also experiment with these instances. So we looked at some of the tooling updates that were required. We also looked at specific instances, which are either compute optimized and memory optimized instances, and then we actually built our footprint on AMD. And what we saw is that the overall performance improvement and also cost improvements that we got per specific workloads was actually extremely, was overall awesome results for Dropbox and our end customers. And we have been using them ever since. >> What kind of business impact did that make? Did it make a difference to your business that was noticeable? >> On the business side, I think primarily it was more on the TCO side, which is where we got most of the benefits on the cost side. And then also for some of our internal workloads, we also saw benefit to our internal developers that are using some of those workloads. >> So, you guys have become the poster child for hybrid and a lot has been talked about about you all, but I wonder if you could help us understand what part of your infrastructure is going to be better served by public cloud versus doing your own I T on-prem. What are some of the value drivers that are making you push workloads into the public cloud? Help us understand that better and squint through that. >> Got it, I get asked that question a lot. So public cloud in general allows for faster go-to-market. Think about this as like product launches, feature launches, also international expansion. It allows us to scale and then also leveraging some of the existing technologies out there in the market for some of the common workloads. So just taking a step back and thinking about Dropbox, we keep on evaluating also the criteria and then also specific workloads on what makes sense on private or public cloud. And AWS had some instances like S3 RDS and EC2 that when we started looking at, we knew that some of our key services like data platform, some parts of the MLN A I, and even paper platform would make more sense for us to actually leverage some of these in a public cloud for that. >> So what are the characteristics of the workload that are better suited to be an AWS? What's the ideal workload profile? You know, we talk about ideal customer profile. What's the ideal workload profile for the AWS cloud? >> Got it, so the way we think about it, at least, we call it the rule of three at Dropbox. And that means we look at scale first, we look at technology and innovation and what I mean by that is, is there a faster innovation in the public cloud and is that workload common enough that there's already a lot of work going on in public cloud, then there's no reason for us to actually innovate faster than that, we probably can't. And if the scale is not large enough. So when we talk about our storage side, like magic pocket, the scale is large enough where innovating there makes sense and it's better for the end customer. So we would probably go towards private cloud there. But then when we talk about international expansion, when we talk about faster go-to-market or some of the innovation in the MLN A I space, it really makes sense to use public cloud because of all of the advancements that we've seen there. >> So let me circle back to the business benefits and impact of the AMD based compute specifically, but you talked about TCO before, so there's certain things you mentioned on-prem you sometimes use. If the thing's hardened, you don't want to necessarily rip and replace it, but if you can accelerate go-to-market and you spin up things in the cloud, that makes sense. You mentioned customer requirements, so that just kind of depends. And then the international expansion and scale. So it comes down to those whatever four or five factors, right? The TCO, those other factors that I mentioned. Kind of the high level benefits, if you wouldn't mind summarizing for us, Ali. >> Yeah, I think you're spot on there. So there's looking at the overall TCO, right? The cost of serving the overall cloud, looking at go-to-market in general, can we leverage public cloud and go-to-market faster, obviously meeting our end customer requirements. We also looked at international expansion, any of the customer's data that is stored outside of the U S is all on public cloud for Dropbox. No plans in the short term to do something different there. And then also just looking at, like I mentioned, anything in the technology space that is ongoing, that we can leverage feature side or the product side for our customers, like A I or M L, we are going to leverage public cloud there. >> So of course you know, we've followed the progression of semiconductor technology for decades. This industry is marched to the cadence of performance improvements. What do the futures hold from a technology roadmap standpoint, and particularly as it relates to leveraging AMD EC2 instances, Ali? >> Got it. So Dropbox is in a very unique position where we actually leverage AMD both on-prem and for public cloud, leveraging some of the AWS EC2 instances like you mentioned. And EPYC processors from AMD are what we're using today, both on the hybrid infrastructure side and the performance. And also the TCO benefits are real and something that we are observing on a day-to-day basis. So we are going to be leveraging that technology even in the future, and the partnership with the AMD continues to be very, very strong for Dropbox. >> Well, Ali, I really appreciate you coming on "The Cube" as part of our coverage. It's great to have you. Love to have you back sometime. >> Awesome, thank you. And also just last thing we wanted to also call out that we are also going to be experimenting with probably Milan that is coming out. Rome is the current processors from AMD that we have been leveraging and as Milan comes available, we do want to continue to evaluate it and see how we can fit it in our infrastructure. >> So their are generations are city-based. Are they all Italian city-based, or are we going to run out of cities soon? (both laughing) >> Got it. Again, the partnership with both AWS and AMD is something that I'm very proud of. >> Excellent. >> Thank you so much. Thank you, Dave. >> Great to have you Ali, and really appreciate you watching. Keep it right there for more action on "The Cube", your leader in hybrid tech event coverage. (calm music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering AWS Executive Summit, brought to you by Accenture. >> Welcome back, everyone, we are wrapping up two days of wall to wall coverage at the Accenture Executive Summit. You are watching theCUBE. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, and co-hosting alongside of Donald Klein. We have two guests for this segment, we have Zafar Razzacki, he is the managing director Digital Industry X at AWS, welcome to the show. >> Thank you. >> Rebecca: And Jon Allen, global automotive professional services leader at AWS, thank you both for coming on the show! >> Thank you so much, thanks for having us. >> So, first, I'm going to start with you, Zafar, I want to hear both, what you do, what is Digital Industry X? It's so mysterious! (laughter) >> So, Industry X.0 is a fairly new practice inside of Accenture, we focus on all things smart and connected. There's a product segment that focuses on smart and connected products specifically, and then certainly we have to think about engineering, so how do you build those products and how do you automate and make the processes for developing those products smarter, and then processes and operations, how do you actually run those types of businesses? So, I'm new to the practice, I actually joined from a number of years at General Motors, where I worked on mobility and innovation there, and prior to that, spent a number of years at Google, working on innovation and new products there, so happy to be at the firm and excited to think about how we bring these types of skills to the mobility industry and change automotive. >> So, Jon, paint a picture for our viewers. The entire industry is being disrupted, we're changing the way we move around from city to city, we have Uber and Lyft, electric scooters, connected cars, just paint the picture for our viewers about the disruption taking place. >> Sure, I mean, I'll use a line from one of our CEOs in the auto industry, Mara Barra, said we'll see more disruption in the next five years than we've seen in the last twenty-five years, in the automotive industry, and it's really fascinating, seeing what's happening. I think the big disruption is that, automotive industry and automotive makers are no longer traditional metal benders. They see themselves as mobility companies. And they see that they need to integrate with this ecosystem, it's just not about driving your car to one spot to another, but it's a full customer experience, from the moment you get into your car, you get to your location, and then how do you actually get further, maybe, take a Lyft, a scooter, maybe you're not using your car, you're using Uber, so it's fascinating to see how the ecosystem is all integrated in. The auto industry also has shifted that, no longer do they think they should just do it alone. I think we're seeing a lot of partnerships, and they're bringing a lot of small businesses and they're bringing in more innovation, they realize that innovation isn't just happening within their four walls, but they're using a much larger ecosystem to really change and transform mobility across the world. >> So, maybe talk a little bit about how broad this ecosystem is, right, 'cause maybe, you know, in the old time, we had maybe sort of car manufacturers, right, and we had cities. You know, cities made the roads, car manufacturers built the vehicles, right? But now we've got a complicated ecosystem, right? We've got data companies that are playing a role in this, that are driving sort of ride hailing, et cetera, we've also got cities thinking about how they offer traffic services differently. Maybe just talk about some of the things you're seeing around the ecosystem. >> Yeah, I mean, certainly, OEMs are re-imagining their role in the ecosystem, suppliers are also thinking about how they can start to add new value and leverage the data off of their systems. We have to talk about startups in this space as well, I mean, the ecosystem with startups is just growing rapidly, we've talked about Uber and Lyft, they've been a great model for the way a startup can come in and disrupt and grow, but across all aspects, from supply chain, to retail, to in-vehicle technologies, you know, there are so many new entrants, and it's exciting. And it's leading to these types of partnerships where, traditionally, an OEM might have said, I'm going to do it all, now there's this comfort with, I'm going to partner with a startup, I might invest in them, I might put some project dollars into that relationship, and work on co-developing a solution together. >> Yeah, what's amazing, I think, is the customer has a lot more power, maybe than in the past, and so, automotive makers, this unique partnership that's happening, is they're really putting the customer in the center. Customers want a seamless experience, they want to be jumping between different apps or different capabilities, that's what's beautiful about what we're doing in AWS, is we're trying to help these OEMs take that full experience end-to-end. Think of your car as a personal assistant. Think of it as, it can help you get to your job, but it can also help with your personal life as well, and so I think it's fascinating that they're really starting to put the customer at the center to have a better customer experience, and it's no longer just horsepower, and how your car works, but it's really the connected ecosystem that extends, theoretically, beyond your car. So you can connect to your home, you can connect with the rest of your life through your vehicle these days, and I think that's the change. >> So, how will that work? Describe the connected car, what are we really talking about here? >> Wow, you want to take that one first? >> Sure, well, let's contrast it to the non-connected car. >> All right, fair enough! >> I mean, you know, literally, getting in, turning the engine on, and the car was a standalone part of your daily life. But to Jon's point, now, with it being really software-driven and having data able to flow from your vehicle to your home, and be able to automate, you know, turning on your thermostat as you're approaching the home, automatically opening the garage just based on proximity, those types of things. Being able to have the convenience of your favorite playlists and your phone book, bringing that digital life into the car, those weren't possible before the connected car and that technology architecture that we see now. But now, you know, that experience becomes much richer and much more personalized. >> Yeah, and I think, look at it latency, look at an IoT, looking at Edge, fascinating, especially with the introduction of 5G coming out, it's going to completely be a game changer for the rest of this. >> So let's build on that. So the roles of the players in the ecosystem are changing, right, so the role of the car manufacturer's changing, the role of the city is changing, the role of the startup's changing, but it seems like the kind of common theme among all of these is that they're leveraging data in different kinds of ways, I was just wondering, how does AWS help these stakeholders be able to leverage that kind of data? >> That's great. So, my role on professional services for AWS is we help our customers use the AWS services to make it real, whether it's from a proof of concepts all the way to operations. So we use our wonderful partner community like Accenture, and we come in together, and so, for example, say a customer wants to create a personal assistant through the vehicle, using Alexa, using other services, we would go in, maybe with a partner, and a lot of times we love to do it with the customer, with the auto maker, and together build. And again, it might be a concept. There is still a long lead time to create devices to be included in the vehicle, but the great thing about now, Cloud, and some other technologies, seven years was generally the design cycle for a vehicle, you can't do that anymore with new technologies. So we as AWS come in and really help, A, let's envision, let's work backwards from the customer, let's think about what we need to have, help them build, and then later on, actually implement and make it operational. >> Maybe I could just add to that real quick. One of the beauties of this partnership is that we see some of the new technologies that AWS is developing and what's in the pipeline, and our teams are actually working on building demos on top of this, so you know, one example of that is a trip planner that we actually have on display here at the show floor, where we can help a family plan a trip, what are all the things they need to take on that trip, because Alexa knows your shopping preferences, you know, we can recommend the snacks and things that you want to take, we can recommend stops along the way. In the future, when we're all driving electric vehicles, you know, how do you plan out your charging, and take the family to a restaurant while you're waiting thirty minutes for the vehicle to charge, so a lot of those things are realities that we can actually build today based on the technologies that AWS has to offer. >> What are some of the best in class auto makers in the sense of who are really at the cutting edge in terms of working with you both Accenture and AWS in terms of really thinking innovatively and creatively? >> Sure, well, I think everyone across the ecosystem is at that point in time where they recognize, it's time for that transformation to happen. So, you can pick any one of the major brands, and look at great examples of the way they're changing the experience inside of the vehicle. From the integration of different types of personalization offerings, to even, you know, some of the newer entrants, like at Tesla, that's really building vehicles from the ground up focused on software and that customer experience. So I think it's an exciting time across the industry, everyone's really making those changes and you guys are probably a seat at the table in all of those conversations. >> Yeah, I hate to point out one specific, but what I think I've seen a theme is that they recognize to draw talent, they can't do the old way of doing business, right, so they're creating these joint innovation centers with AWS, they have innovation centers kind of off campus of the main campus, they kind of have that Silicon feel, because it's a draw of talent, and they got to make it as exciting to get these new coders and developers in to want to join an automaker. They weren't really necessarily seen as that, the joint automaker, and that's completely transforming especially the rise of the digital, the CTO and the CDO, the chief digital officer, we're seeing that completely change and data science, these are themes maybe ten years ago that really weren't talked about in OEMs, and now they have a seat not only at the table, but they're at the board level. These are conversations at the board level now. >> Absolutely. >> So, one of the things we've all experienced, we all spend a lot of time sitting in traffic, right? Maybe talk a little bit about how are cities getting smarter about kind of using mobility in order to move people across cities and avoid traffic, some of the other problems we all experience. >> Well, I think there's cities as consumers of data, so cities are now having conversations with many of the automakers about leveraging vehicle data to make better decisions about the use of their roadways or how they manage traffic light phasing, so there's a lot of interesting things happening there, where manufacturers are able to share their data to cities, and you know, their city planner teams, the way they're building new roadways, are including a lot of that infrastructure now, where you see technologies like DSRC, that's able to talk to vehicles and help those traffic lights phase accordingly. I think cities are playing a really important role in making those new technologies come to bear. >> And I think it's amazing to see some of the investments in some of the smaller cities. So a few years ago, the Department of Transportation put out a challenge, a smart city challenge, and selected a city to actually be the incubator. But that created all these other cities, from Austin to Columbus to Ohio to you name it, to almost have these PMOs or these centers of excellence to create smart cities, and we talked about the ecosystem at the beginning of the conversation, and it's really enabling these cities to bring in maybe big ideas that weren't able to be brought in before. You know, the Cloud and the technologies we have are really leveling the playing field and giving access to maybe companies that didn't have that kind of compute power before, and that's what we're seeing with the smart cities initiatives, is it's not so expensive anymore, and you can bring in some really brilliant ideas of a small business that is maybe a three person shop that could actually transform. But I think we do need to fix the infrastructure, and we've talked about this as a nation for a while, and we continue to invest in our infrastructure to really enable smart cities. >> We've been talking about these smart cars and how they are going to serve as our personal assistants of the future, but what about safety, too? As an innovative USP? In the sense of, here we are using data to make these cars smarter, more connected, and also safer. >> Right, yeah, I mean I think there's a lot of debates right now on safe the autonomous vehicle and we're learning more as we go along that, I think as a couple use cases that I've seen is, you can sign up for apps to become a smarter driver, right? You see, you get your score, right, with my vehicle I get a report card every month to say how I've actually been doing, and as a parent, I can see how my kids are driving and all that, but I think at the end of the year, and it's kind of, I'll be bold here a little bit, we really don't remember the last time there was a major commercial airline crash in the United States. It makes the six o'clock news. By the time I retire, I make a bold prediction, I can be bold here, that a major car accident in the country, now I might be in a nursing home, could make the evening news. 'Cause we could get to that level of safety in the future, okay? >> Meaning, car accidents are so infrequent-- >> So rare. >> Could be so infrequent, rare, right. Now, I'm not saying it's going to happen near turn, I do have a prediction that if, what we're trying to design today, enables that for the future, I think it's pretty proud to be a part of that, right? Again, I think it's, years down the road, I might be at Shady Pines retirement community at that point, but I really, I mean, you think about how we've been able to do the aviation industry and make it safer, even with the challenges around that, I think in the future we could have that for safety in vehicles in my lifetime. >> I totally agree, and I think that's a big promise of autonomous vehicles, that's what so many people are excited about, you know, traffic accidents are one of the leading causes of death in our country, so to be able to address that through technology, I think, is an exciting promise. We see some of that even today, with all the technology that's being built into the vehicle, there are high standards for minimizing driver distraction, and just imagine that future where, you no longer have to worry about driver distraction. And now our relationship with the vehicle is one where we sit back, we live our lives, you know, there's a statistic that we estimate people will get back 4.5 years of their life that they're not spending behind the wheel locked on the road. You know, those types of things are really exciting to think about. >> Somebody out there will probably correct me on the numbers, but I think 39,000 fatality deaths in the United States was reported by Nets, I think that's the number, but I know that the number of distracted driving is going up, and that's a problem. I mean, people are using their phone, and it's not only phone, it's drinking, it's distracted driving, so anyway-- >> And distracted pedestrians, that's the thing, walking around Boston, everyone's just-- >> That's right, walking around here, you see people on their phone, absolutely. And I think that we are on a, it's amazing to see the changes that have happened around this the last couple years, and I think it's just opened new opportunities for companies that could never have really played in this space, are making a change for us. >> So one of the stories I love to hear about is how these kind of connected car and data capabilities are enabling us to use the infrastructure we've got today better. I mean, we'd all love to jump in a flying taxi and zoom over traffic, et cetera, but there's some concepts like smart carpool lanes, things like that, maybe you can talk a little bit about those and kind of how new business models are being allowed by that. >> Sure, yeah. So metering is one way, where it becomes a smart infrastructure, where you understand the traffic patterns, and it'd be HOV or you pay for it, so you can make the decision if you want to spend $30 to try to get into the city, or be stuck in traffic and take you an hour. And so it's interesting, with the smart infrastructure that's actually occurring, within cities right now that changes on how people will use metered lanes, and that's one thing we're seeing today. But there's also integrations with apps that we use every day to help us give us better insights, obviously, that we all use, to be able to have traffic, but it's the integration with that, imagine being able to have an application integrated with emergency management. So, you know, today people are hitting an app cause waves as a cop on the side of the road, well, we have customers, one customer particular, that wants to make sure that's integrated in a smart way, you know, that if a police car is on the side of the road, how is that really feeding the larger infrastructure? So, yes, there's a whole piece on metering and smart infrastructure, but I think that some of these other businesses are finding ways to integrate things like emergency management and some other pieces to really help reduce traffic flow and make it easier. >> Parking is another great example. >> Parking. >> There are a number of startups out there that have created technologies to help map open parking spaces, so how do you feed that data to the end user to help them make smarter decisions. I think there's another data point, we spend about 30% of our time in our vehicle, is spent just looking for parking. Right, so, how can we help to drive those things down, how can we help make it more efficient to find a parking spot, to even transact for that parking spot, and you might come to a situation where, again, when there's peak traffic, are we bidding for a parking spot? And will a parking spot go to the highest bidder? So these are all opportunities that technology really enables, when we connect the vehicle and are able to feed in that type of data around parking, infrastructure, roadway usage, et cetera. >> Well, Zafar and Jon, this has been a really cool conversation, you have great jobs. It's really neat, re-imagining mobility, yes. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you so much. >> Thank you for having us. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Donald Klein, that wraps up our coverage of the Accenture Executive Summit for theCUBE, thank you so much, and we'll catch you next time.