(electronic music) >> Hi everybody, welcome back to Supercloud 2. I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host John Furrier. We're here at our tricked out Palo Alto studio. We're going live wall to wall all day. We're inserting a number of pre-recorded interviews, folks like Walmart. We just heard from Nir Zuk of Palo Alto Networks, and I'm really pleased to welcome in David Flynn. David Flynn, you may know as one of the people behind Fusion-io, completely changed the way in which people think about storing data, accessing data. David Flynn now the founder and CEO of a company called Hammerspace. David, good to see you, thanks for coming on. >> David: Good to see you too. >> And Dr. Nelu Mihai is the CEO and founder of Cloud of Clouds. He's actually built a Supercloud. We're going to get into that. Nelu, thanks for coming on. >> Thank you, Happy New Year. >> Yeah, Happy New Year. So I'm going to start right off with a little debate that's going on in the community if you guys would bring out this slide. So Bob Muglia early today, he gave a definition of Supercloud. He felt like we had to tighten ours up a little bit. He said a Supercloud is a platform, underscoring platform, that provides programmatically consistent services hosted on heterogeneous cloud providers. Now, Nelu, we have this shared doc, and you've been in there. You responded, you said, well, hold on. Supercloud really needs to be an architecture, or else we're going to have this stove pipe of stove pipes, really. And then you went on with more detail, what's the information model? What's the execution model? How are users going to interact with Supercloud? So I start with you, why architecture? The inference is that a platform, the platform provider's responsible for the architecture? Why does that not work in your view? >> No, the, it's a very interesting question. So whenever I think about platform, what's the connotation, you think about monolithic system? Yeah, I mean, I don't know whether it's true or or not, but there is this connotation of of monolithic. On the other hand, if you look at what's a problem right now with HyperClouds, from the customer perspective, they're very complex. There is a heterogeneous world where actually every single one of this HyperClouds has their own architecture. You need rocket scientists to build a cloud applications. Always there is this contradiction between cost and performance. They fight each other. And I'm quoting here a former friend of mine from Bell Labs who work at AWS who used to say "Cloud is cheap as long as you don't use it too much." (group chuckles) So clearly we need something that kind of plays from the principle point of view the role of an operating system, that seats on top of this heterogeneous HyperCloud, and there's nothing wrong by having these proprietary HyperClouds, think about processors, think about operating system and so on, so forth. But in order to build a system that is simple enough, I think we need to go deeper and understand. >> So the argument, the counterargument to that, David, is you'll never get there. You need a proprietary system to get to market sooner, to solve today's problem. Now I don't know where you stand on this platform versus architecture. I haven't asked you, but. >> I think there are aspects of both for sure. I mean it needs to be an architecture in the sense that it's broad based and open and so forth. But you know, platform, you could say as long as people can instantiate it themselves, on their own infrastructure, as long as it's something that can be deployed as, you know, software defined, you don't want the concept of platform being the monolith, you know, combined hardware and software. So it really depends on what you're focused on when you're saying platform, you know, I'd say as long as they software defined thing, to where it can literally run anywhere. I mean, because I really think what we're talking about here is the original concept of cloud computing. The ability to run anything anywhere, without having to care about the physical infrastructure. And what we have today is not that, the cloud today is a big mainframe in the sky, that just happens to be large enough that once you select which region, generally you have enough resources. But, you know, nowadays you don't even necessarily have enough resources in one region. and then you're kind of stuck. So we haven't really gotten to that utility model of computing. And you're also asked to rewrite your application, you know, to abandon the conveniences of high performance file access. You got to rewrite it to use object storage stuff. We have to get away from that. >> Okay, I want to just drill on that, 'cause I think I like that point about, there's not enough availability, but on the developer cloud, the original AWS premise was targeting developers, 'cause at that time, you have to provision a Sun box get a Cisco DSU/CSU, now you get on the cloud. But I think you're giving up the scale question, 'cause I think right now, scale is huge, enterprise grade versus cloud for developers. >> That's Right. >> Because I mean look at, Amazon, Azure, they got compute, they got storage, they got queuing, and some stuff. If you're doing a startup, you throw your app up there, localhost to cloud, no big deal. It's the scale thing that gets me- >> And you can tell by the fact that, in regions that are under high demand, right, like in London or LA, at least with the clients we work with in the median entertainment space, it costs twice as much for the exact same cloud instances that do the exact same amount of work, as somewhere out in rural Canada. So why is it you have such a cost differential, it has to do with that supply and demand, and the fact that the clouds aren't really the ability to run anything anywhere. Even within the same cloud vendor, you're stuck in a specific region. >> And that was never the original promise, right? I mean it was, we turned it into that. But the original promise was get rid of the heavy lifting of IT. >> Not have to run your own, yeah, exactly. >> And then it became, wow, okay I can run anywhere. And then you know, it's like web 2.0. You know people say why Supercloud, you and I talked about this, why do you need a name for Supercloud? It's like web 2.0. >> It's what Cloud was supposed to be. >> It's what cloud was supposed to be, (group laughing and talking) exactly, right. >> Cloud was supposed to be run anything anywhere, or at least that's what we took it as. But you're right, originally it was just, oh don't have to run your own infrastructure, and you can choose somebody else's infrastructure. >> And you did that >> But you're still bound to that. >> Dave: And People said I want more, right? >> But how do we go from here? >> That's, that's actually, that's a very good point, because indeed when the first HyperClouds were designed, were designed really focus on customers. I think Supercloud is an opportunity to design in the right way. Also having in mind the computer science rigor. And we should take advantage of that, because in fact actually, if cloud would've been designed properly from the beginning, probably wouldn't have needed Supercloud. >> David: You wouldn't have to have been asked to rewrite your application. >> That's correct. (group laughs) >> To use REST interfaces to your storage. >> Revisist history is always a good one. But look, cloud is great. I mean your point is cloud is a good thing. Don't hold it back. >> It is a very good thing. >> Let it continue. >> Let it go as as it is. >> Yeah, let that thing continue to grow. Don't impose restrictions on the cloud. Just refactor what you need to for scale or enterprise grade or availability. >> And you would agree with that, is that true or is it problem you're solving? >> Well yeah, I mean it, what the cloud is doing is absolutely necessary. What the public cloud vendors are doing is absolutely necessary. But what's been missing is how to provide a consistent interface, especially to persistent data. And have it be available across different regions, and across different clouds. 'cause data is a highly localized thing in current architecture. It only exists as rendered by the storage system that you put it in. Whether that's a legacy thing like a NetApp or an Isilon or even a cloud data service. It's localized to a specific region of the cloud in which you put that. We have to delocalize data, and provide a consistent interface to it across all sites. That's high performance, local access, but to global data. >> And so Walmart earlier today described their, what we call Supercloud, they call it the Walmart cloud native platform. And they use this triplet model. They have AWS and Azure, no, oh sorry, no AWS. They have Azure and GCP and then on-prem, where all the VMs live. When you, you know, probe, it turns out that it's only stateless in the cloud. (John laughs) So, the state stuff- >> Well let's just admit it, there is no such thing as stateless, because even the application binaries and libraries are state. >> Well I'm happy that I'm hearing that. >> Yeah, okay. >> Because actually I have a lot of debate (indistinct). If you think about no software running on a (indistinct) machine is stateless. >> David: Exactly. >> This is something that was- >> David: And that's data that needs to be distributed and provided consistently >> (indistinct) >> Across all the clouds, >> And actually, it's a nonsense, but- >> Dave: So it's an illusion, okay. (group talks over each other) >> (indistinct) you guys talk about stateless. >> Well, see, people make the confusion between state and persistent state, okay. Persistent state it's a different thing. State is a different thing. So, but anyway, I want to go back to your point, because there's a lot of debate here. People are talking about data, some people are talking about logic, some people are talking about networking. In my opinion is this triplet, which is data logic and connectivity, that has equal importance. And actually depending on the application, can have the center of gravity moving towards data, moving towards what I call execution units or workloads. And connectivity is actually the most important part of it. >> David: (indistinct). >> Some people are saying move the logic towards the data, some other people, and you are saying actually, that no, you have to build a distributed data mesh. What I'm saying is actually, you have to consider all these three variables, all these vector in order to decide, based on application, what's the most important. Because sometimes- >> John: So the application chooses >> That's correct. >> Well it it's what operating systems were in the past, was principally the thing that runs and manages the jobs, the job scheduler, and the thing that provides your persistent data (indistinct). >> Okay. So we finally got operating system into the equation, thank you. (group laughs) >> Nelu: I actually have a PhD in operating system. >> Cause what we're talking about is an operating system. So forget platform or architecture, it's an operating environment. Let's use it as a general term. >> All right. I think that's about it for me. >> All right, let's take (indistinct). Nelu, I want ask you quick, 'cause I want to give a, 'cause I believe it's an operating system. I think it's going to be a reset, refactored. You wrote to me, "The model of Supercloud has to be open theoretical, has to satisfy the rigors of computer science, and customer requirements." So unique to today, if the OS is going to be refactored, it's not going to be, may or may not be Red Hat or somebody else. This new OS, obviously requirements are for customers too but is what's the computer science that is needed? Where are we, what's the missing? Where's the science in this shift? It's not your standard OS it's not like an- (group talks over each other) >> I would beg to differ. >> (indistinct) truly an operation environment. But the, if you think about, and make analogies, what you need when you design a distributed system, well you need an information model, yeah. You need to figure out how the data is located and distributed. You need a model for the execution units, and you need a way to describe the interactions between all these objects. And it is my opinion that we need to go deeper and formalize these operations in order to make a step forward. And when we design Supercloud, and design something that is better than the current HyperClouds. And actually that is when we design something better, you make a system more efficient and it's going to be better from the cost point of view, from the performance point of view. But we need to add some math into all this customer focus centering and I really admire AWS and their executive team focusing on the customer. But now it's time to go back and see, if we apply some computer science, if you try to formalize to build a theoretical model of cloud, can we build a system that is better than existing ones? >> So David, how do you- >> this is what I'm saying. >> That's a good question >> How do You see the operating system of a, or operating environment of a decentralized cloud? >> Well I think it's layered. I mean we have operating systems that can run systems quite efficiently. Linux has sort of one in the data center, but we're talking about a layer on top of that. And I think we're seeing the emergence of that. For example, on the job scheduling side of things, Kubernetes makes a really good example. You know, you break the workload into the most granular units of compute, the containerized microservice, and then you use a declarative model to state what is needed and give the system the degrees of freedom that it can choose how to instantiate it. Because the thing about these distributed systems, is that the complexity explodes, right? Running a piece of hardware, running a single server is not a problem, even with all the many cores and everything like that. It's when you start adding in the networking, and making it so that you have many of them. And then when it's going across whole different data centers, you know, so, at that level the way you solve this is not manually (group laughs) and not procedurally. You have to change the language so it's intent based, it's a declarative model, and what you're stating is what is intended, and you're leaving it to more advanced techniques, like machine learning to decide how to instantiate that service across the cluster, which is what Kubernetes does, or how to instantiate the data across the diverse storage infrastructure. And that's what we do. >> So that's a very good point because actually what has been neglected with HyperClouds is really optimization and automation. But in order to be able to do both of these things, you need, I'm going back and I'm stubborn, you need to have a mathematical model, a theoretical model because what does automation mean? It means that we have to put machines to do the work instead of us, and machines work with what? Formula, with algorithms, they don't work with services. So I think Supercloud is an opportunity to underscore the importance of optimization and automation- >> Totally agree. >> In HyperCloud, and actually by doing that, we can also have an interesting connotation. We are also contributing to save our planet, because if you think right now. we're consuming a lot of energy on this HyperClouds and also all this AI applications, and I think we can do better and build the same kind of application using less energy. >> So yeah, great point, love that call out, the- you know, Dave and I always joke about the old, 'cause we're old, we talk about, you know, (Nelu Laughs) old history, OS/2 versus DOS, okay, OS's, OS/2 is silly better, first threaded OS, DOS never went away. So how does legacy play into this conversation? Because I buy the theoretical, I love the conversation. Okay, I think it's an OS, totally see it that way myself. What's the blocker? Is there a legacy that drags it back? Is the anchor dragging from legacy? Is there a DOS OS/2 moment? Is there an opportunity to flip the script? This is- >> I think that's a perfect example of why we need to support the existing interfaces, Operating Systems, real operating systems like Linux, understands how to present data, it's called a file system, block devices, things that that plumb in there. And by, you know, going to a REST interface and S3 and telling people they have to rewrite their applications, you can't even consume your application binaries that way, the OS doesn't know how to pull that sort of thing. So we, to get to cloud, to get to the ability to host massive numbers of tenants within a centralized infrastructure, you know, we abandoned these lower level interfaces to the OS and we have to go back to that. It's the reason why DOS ultimately won, is it had the momentum of the install base. We're seeing the same thing here. Whatever it is, it has to be a real file system and not a come down file system >> Nelu, what's your reaction, 'cause you're in the theoretical bandwagon. Let's get your reaction. >> No, I think it's a good, I'll give, you made a good analogy between OS/2 and DOS, but I'll go even farther saying, if you think about the evolution operating system didn't stop the evolution of underlying microprocessors, hardware, and so on and so forth. On the contrary, it was a catalyst for that. So because everybody could develop their own hardware, without worrying that the applications on top of operating system are going to modify. The same thing is going to happen with Supercloud. You're going to have the AWSs, you're going to have the Azure and the the GCP continue to evolve in their own way proprietary. But if we create on top of it the right interface >> The open, this is why open is important. >> That's correct, because actually you're going to see sometime ago, everybody was saying, remember venture capitals were saying, "AWS killed the world, nobody's going to come." Now you see what Oracle is doing, and then you're going to see other players. >> It's funny, Amazon's trying to be more like Microsoft. Microsoft's trying to be more like Amazon and Google- Oracle's just trying to say they have cloud. >> That's, that's correct, (group laughs) so, my point is, you're going to see a multiplication of this HyperClouds and cloud technology. So, the system has to be open in order to accommodate what it is and what is going to come. Okay, so it's open. >> So the the legacy- so legacy is an opportunity, not a blocker in your mind. And you see- >> That's correct, I think we should allow them to continue to to to be their own actually. But maybe you're going to find a way to connect with it. >> Amazon's the processor, and they're on the 80 80 80 right? >> That's correct. >> You're saying you love people trying to get put to work. >> That's a good analogy. >> But, performance levels you say good luck, right? >> Well yeah, we have to be able to take traditional applications, high performance applications, those that consume file system and persistent data. Those things have to be able to run anywhere. You need to be able to put, put them onto, you know, more elastic infrastructure. So, we have to actually get cloud to where it lives up to its billing. >> And that's what you're solving for, with Hammerspace, >> That's what we're solving for, making it possible- >> Give me the bumper sticker. >> Solving for how do you have massive quantities of unstructured file data? At the end of the day, all data ultimately is unstructured data. Have that persistent data available, across any data center, within any cloud, within any region on-prem, at the edge. And have not just the same APIs, but have the exact same data sets, and not sucked over a straw remote, but at extreme high performance, local access. So how do you have local access to globally shared distributed data? And that's what we're doing. We are orchestrating data globally across all different forms of storage infrastructure, so you have a consistent access at the highest performance levels, at the lowest level innate built into the OS, how to consume it as (indistinct) >> So are you going into the- all the clouds and natively building in there, or are you off cloud? >> So This is software that can run on cloud instances and provide high performance file within the cloud. It can take file data that's on-prem. Again, it's software, it can run in virtual or on physical servers. And it abstracts the data from the existing storage infrastructure, and makes the data visible and consumable and orchestratable across any of it. >> And what's the elevator pitch for Cloud of Cloud, give that too. >> Well, Cloud of Clouds creates a theoretical model of cloud, and it describes every single object in the cloud. Where is data, execution units, and connectivity, with one single class of very simple object. And I can, I can give you (indistinct) >> And the problem that solves is what? >> The problem that solves is, it creates this mathematical model that is necessary in order to do other interesting things, such as optimization, using sata engines, using automation, applying ML for instance. Or deep learning to automate all this clouds, if you think about in the industrial field, we know how to manage and automate huge plants. Why wouldn't it do the same thing in cloud? It's the same thing you- >> That's what you mean by theoretical model. >> Nelu: That's correct. >> Lay out the architecture, almost the bones of skeleton or something, or, and then- >> That's correct, and then on top of it you can actually build a platform, You can create your services, >> when you say math, you mean you put numbers to it, you kind of index it. >> You quantify this thing and you apply mathematical- It's really about, I can disclose this thing. It's really about describing the cloud as a knowledge graph for every single object in the graph for node, an edge is a vector. And then once you have this model, then you can apply the field theory, and linear algebra to do operation with these vectors. And it's, this creates a very interesting opportunity to let the math do this thing for us. >> Okay, so what happens with hyperscale, or it's like AWS in your model. >> So in, in my model actually, >> Are they happy with this, or they >> I'm very happy with that. >> Will they be happy with you? >> We create an interface to every single HyperCloud. We actually, we don't need to interface with the thousands of APIs, but you know, if we have the 80 20 rule, and we map these APIs into this graph, and then every single operation that is done in this graph is done from the beginning, in an optimized manner and also automation ready. >> That's going to be great. David, I want us to go back to you before we close real quick. You've had a lot of experience, multiple ventures on the front end. You talked to a lot of customers who've been innovating. Where are the classic (indistinct)? Cause you, you used to sell and invent product around the old school enterprises with storage, you know that that trajectory storage is still critical to store the data. Where's the classic enterprise grade mindset right now? Those customers that were buying, that are buying storage, they're in the cloud, they're lifting and shifting. They not yet put the throttle on DevOps. When they look at this Supercloud thing, Are they like a deer in the headlights, or are they like getting it? What's the, what's the classic enterprise look like? >> You're seeing people at different stages of adoption. Some folks are trying to get to the cloud, some folks are trying to repatriate from the cloud, because they've realized it's better to own than to rent when you use a lot of it. And so people are at very different stages of the journey. But the one thing that's constant is that there's always change. And the change here has to do with being able to change the location where you're doing your computing. So being able to support traditional workloads in the cloud, being able to run things at the edge, and being able to rationalize where the data ought to exist, and with a declarative model, intent-based, business objective-based, be able to swipe a mouse and have the data get redistributed and positioned across different vendors, across different clouds, that, we're seeing that as really top of mind right now, because everybody's at some point on this journey, trying to go somewhere, and it involves taking their data with them. (John laughs) >> Guys, great conversation. Thanks so much for coming on, for John, Dave. Stay tuned, we got a great analyst power panel coming right up. More from Palo Alto, Supercloud 2. Be right back. (bouncy music)

>>Hello everyone. Welcome to the Super Cloud Event preview. I'm John Forry, host of the Cube, and with Dave Valante, host of the popular Super cloud events. This is Super Cloud two preview. I'm joined by industry leader and Cube alumni, Victoria Vigo, vice president of klos Cross Cloud Services at VMware. Vittorio. Great to see you. We're here for the preview of Super Cloud two on January 17th, virtual event, live stage performance, but streamed out to the audience virtually. We're gonna do a preview. Thanks for coming in. >>My pleasure. Always glad to be here. >>It's holiday time. We had the first super cloud on in August prior to VMware, explore North America prior to VMware, explore Europe prior to reinvent. We've been through that, but right now, super Cloud has got momentum. Super Cloud two has got some success. Before we dig into it, let's take a step back and set the table. What is Super Cloud and why is important? Why are people buzzing about it? Why is it a thing? >>Look, we have been in the cloud now for like 10, 15 years and the cloud is going strong and I, I would say that going cloud first was deliberate and strategic in most cases. In some cases the, the developer was going for the path of risk resistance, but in any sizable company, this caused the companies to end up in a multi-cloud world where 85% of the companies out there use two or multiple clouds. And with that comes what we call cloud chaos, because each cloud brings their own management tools, development tools, security. And so that increase the complexity and cost. And so we believe that it's time to usher a new era in cloud computing, which we, you call the super cloud. We call it cross cloud services, which allows our customers to have a single way to build, manage, secure, and access any application across any cloud. Lowering the cost and simplifying the environment. Since >>Dave Ante and I introduced and rift on the concept of Supercloud, as we talked about at reinvent last year, a lot has happened. Supercloud one, it was in August, but prior to that, great momentum in the industry. Great conversation. People are loving it, they're hating it, which means it's got some traction. Berkeley has come on board as with a position paper. They're kind of endorsing it. They call it something different. You call it cross cloud services, whatever it is. It's kind of the same theme we're seeing. And so the industry has recognized something is happening that's different than what Cloud one was or the first generation of cloud. Now we have something different. This Super Cloud two in January. This event has traction with practitioners, customers, big name brands, Sachs, fifth Avenue, Warner, media Financial, mercury Financial, other big names are here. They're leaning in. They're excited. Why the traction in the customer's industry converts over to, to the customer traction. Why is it happening? You, you get a lot of data. >>Well, in, in Super Cloud one, it was a vendor fest, right? But these vendors are smart people that get their vision from where, from the customers. This, this stuff doesn't happen in a vacuum. We all talk to customers and we tend to lean on the early adopters and the early adopters of the cloud are the ones that are telling us, we now are in a place where the complexity is too much. The cost is ballooning. We're going towards slow down potentially in the economy. We need to get better economics out of, of our cloud. And so every single customers I talked to today, or any sizable company as this problem, the developers have gone off, built all these applications, and now the business is coming to the operators and asking, where are my applications? Are they performing? What is the security posture? And how do we do compliance? And so now they're realizing we need to do something about this or it is gonna be unmanageable. >>I wanna go to a clip I pulled out from the, our video data lake and the cube. If we can go to that clip, it's Chuck Whitten Dell at a keynote. He was talking about what he calls multi-cloud by default, not by design. This is a state of the, of the industry. If we're gonna roll that clip, and I wanna get your reaction to that. >>Well, look, customers have woken up with multiple clouds, you know, multiple public clouds. On-premise clouds increasingly as the edge becomes much more a reality for customers clouds at the edge. And so that's what we mean by multi-cloud by default. It's not yet been designed strategically. I think our argument yesterday was it can be, and it should be, it is a very logical place for architecture to land because ultimately customers want the innovation across all of the hyperscale public clouds. They will see workloads and use cases where they wanna maintain an on-premise cloud. On-premise clouds are not going away. I mentioned edge Cloud, so it should be strategic. It's just not today. It doesn't work particularly well today. So when we say multi-cloud, by default we mean that's the state of the world. Today, our goal is to bring multi-cloud by design, as you heard. Yeah, I >>Mean, I, okay, Vittorio, that's, that's the head of Dell Technologies president. He obvious he runs it. Michael Dell's still around, but you know, he's the leader. This is a interesting observation. You know, he's not a customer. We have some customer equips we'll go to as well, but by default it kind of happened not by design. So we're now kind of in a zoom out issue where, okay, I got this environment just landed on me. What, what is the, what's your reaction to that clip of how multi-cloud has become present in, in everyone's on everyone's plate right now to deal with? Yeah, >>I it is, it is multi-cloud by default, I would call it by accident. We, we really got there by accident. I think now it's time to make it a strategic asset because look, we're using multiple cloud for a reason, because all these hyperscaler bring tremendous innovation that we want to leverage. But I strongly believe that in it, especially history repeat itself, right? And so if you look at the history of it, as was always when a new level of obstruction that simplify things, that we got the next level of innovation at the lower cost, you know, from going from c plus plus to Visual basic, going from integrating application at the bits of by layer to SOA and then web services. It's, it's only when we simplify the environment that we can go faster and lower cost. And the multi-cloud is ready for that level of obstruction today. >>You know, you've made some good points. You know, developers went crazy building great apps. Now they got, they gotta roll it out and operationalize it globally. A lot of compliance issues going on. The costs are going up. We got an economic challenge, but also agility with the cloud. So using cloud and or hybrid, you can get better agility. And also moving to the cloud, it's kind of still slow. Okay, so I get that at reinvent this year and at VMware explorer we were observing and we reported that you're seeing a transition to a new kind of ecosystem partner. Ones that aren't just ISVs anymore. You have ISVs, independent software vendors, but you got the emergence of bigger players that just, they got platforms, they have their own ecosystems. So you're seeing ecosystems on top of ecosystems where, you know, MongoDB CEO and the Databricks CEO both told me, we're not an isv, we're a platform built on a cloud. So this new kind of super cloudlike thing is going on. Why should someone pay attention to the super cloud movement? We're on two, we're gonna continue to do these out in the open. Anyone can participate. Why should people pay attention to this? Why should they come to the event? Why is this important? Is this truly an inflection point? And if they do pay attention, what should they pay attention to? >>I would pay attention to two things. If you are customers that are now starting to realize that you have a multi-cloud problem and the costs are getting outta control, look at what the leading vendors are saying, connect the dots with the early adopters and some of the customers that we are gonna have at Super Cloud two, and use those learning to not fall into the same trap. So I, I'll give you an example. I was talking to a Fortune 50 in Europe in my latest trip, and this is an a CIO that is telling me >>We build all these applications and now for compliance reason, the business is coming to me, I don't even know where they are, right? And so what I was telling him, so look, there are other customers that are already there. What did they do? They built a platform engineering team. What is the platform? Engineering team is a, is an operation team that understands how developers build modern applications and lays down the foundation across multiple clouds. So the developers can be developers and do their thing, which is writing code. But now you as a cio, as a, as a, as a governing body, as a security team can have the guardrail. So do you know that these applications are performing at a lower cost and are secure and compliant? >>Patura, you know, it's really encouraging and, and love to get your thoughts on this is one is the general consensus of industry leaders. I talked to like yourself in the round is the old way was soft complexity with more complexity. The cloud demand simplicity, you mentioned abstraction layer. This is our next inflection point. It's gotta be simpler and it's gotta be easy and it's gotta be performant. That's the table stakes of the cloud. What's your thoughts on this next wave of simplicity versus complexity? Because again, abstraction layers take away complexity, they should make it simpler. What's your thoughts? >>Yeah, so I'll give you few examples. One, on the development side and runtime. You, you one would think that Kubernetes will solve all the problems you have Kubernetes everywhere, just look at, but every cloud has a different distribution of Kubernetes, right? So for example, at VMware with tansu, we create a single place that allows you to deploy that any Kubernetes environment. But now you have one place to set your policies. We take care of the differences between this, this system. The second area is management, right? So once you have all everything deployed, how do you get a single object model that tells you where your stuff is and how it's performing, and then apply policies to it as well. So these are two areas and security and so on and so forth. So the idea is that figure out what you can abstract and make common across cloud. Make that simple and put it in one place while always allowing the developers to go underneath and use the differentiated features for innovation. >>Yeah, one of the areas I'm excited, I want to get your thoughts of too is, we haven't talked about this in the past, but it, I'll throw it out there. I think the, the new AI coming out chat, G P T and other things like lens, you see it and see new kinds of AI coming that's gonna be right in the heavy lifting opportunity to make things easier with AI and automation. I think AI will be a big factor in super cloud and, and cross cloud. What's your thoughts? >>Well, the one way to look at AI is, is one of the main, main services that you would want out of a multi-cloud, right? You want eventually, right now Google seems to have an edge, but you know, the competition creates, you know, innovation. So later on you wanna use something from Azure or from or from Oracle or something that, so you want at some point that is gonna be prone every single service in in the cloud is gonna be prone to obstruction and simplification. And I, I'm just excited about to see >>What book, I can't wait for the chat services to write code automatically for us. Well, >>They >>Do, they do. They're doing it now. They do. >>Oh, the other day, somebody, you know that I do this song par this for. So for fun sometimes. And somebody the other day said, ask the AI to write a parody song for multi-cloud. And so I have the lyrics stay >>Tuned. I should do that from my blog post. Hey, write a blog post on this January 17th, Victoria, thanks for coming in, sharing the preview bottom line. Why should people come? Why is it important? What's your final kind of takeaway? Billboard message >>History is repeat itself. It goes to three major inflection points, right? We had the inflection point with the cloud and the people that got left behind, they were not as competitive as the people that got on top o of this wave. The new wave is the super cloud, what we call cross cloud services. So if you are a customer that is experiencing this problem today, tune in to to hear from other customers in, in your same space. If you are behind, tune in to avoid the, the, the, the mistakes and the, the shortfalls of this new wave. And so that you can use multi-cloud to accelerate your business and kick butt in the future. >>All right. Kicking kick your names and kicking butt. Okay, we're here on J January 17th. Super Cloud two. Momentum continues. We'll be super cloud three. There'll be super cloud floor. More and more open conversations. Join the community, join the conversation. It's open. We want more voices. We want more, more industry. We want more customers. It's happening. A lot of momentum. Victoria, thank you for your time. Thank you. Okay. I'm John Farer, host of the Cube. Thanks for watching.

>>Good afternoon and welcome back to the Classiest Show in Technology. This is the Cube we are at AWS Reinvent 2022 in Fabulous Sin City. That's why I've got my sequence on. We love a little Vegas, don't we? I'm joined by John Farer, another, another Vegas >>Fan. I don't have my sequence, I left it in my room. We're >>Gonna have to figure out how to get us 20 as soon as possible. What's been your biggest shock for you at the show so far? >>Well, I think the data story and security is so awesome. I love how that's front and center. If you look at the minutes of the keynote of Adamski, the CEO on day one, it's all bulked into data and security. All worked hand in hand. That's on top of already the innovation of their infrastructure. So I think you're gonna see a lot of interplay going on in this next segment. It's gonna tell a lot of that innovation story that's coming next. It's pretty awesome. >>It is pretty awesome, and I'm super excited. It's not only what we do here on the Cube, it's also in my show notes. We are gonna be geeking out for the next segment. Please welcome Paul and Puja. Wonderful to have you both here. Paul from Amazon, s3, glacier, and Pujan, CEO of kuo. I wanna turn to you Pujan, to start us off, just in case the audience isn't familiar, give us the Kuo pitch. >>Yeah, so basically Kuo is a, a backup as a service offering, right? Built in AWS four aws, right? And effectively going after, you know, any service that a customer uses on top of aws, right? And so a lot of the data sitting on s3, right? So that's been like our, our big use case going and basically building backup and air gap protection for, for s3. But we basically go to every other service, e c two, ebs, dynamo, you know, you name it, right? So basically do the whole thing >>And the relationship with aws. Can you guys share, I mean, you got you here together. You guys are a great partnership. Born in the cloud, operation in the cloud. Absolutely. I think talk about the partnership with aws. >>Absolutely. I think the last five years of building on AWS has been phenomenal, right? And I love the platform. It's, it's a very pure platform for us. You know, the APIs and, and the access you get and access you get to the service teams like Paul sitting here and the other teams you have gotten access to, I think has been phenomenal. But we also have, I would say, pushed the envelope in terms of how innovative we have been and how aggressive we have been in utilizing all the innovation that AWS has built in over the last few years. But it would not have happened without the fantastic partnership with the service teams. >>Paul, talk about the, AM the S3 part of this. What's the story there? >>Well, it's been great working with the CUO team over the course of the last few years. We were just upstairs diving deep into the, to the features that they're taking advantage of. They really push us hard on behalf of customers, and it's been a, it's just been a great relationship over the last years. >>That's awesome. And the ecosystem at such a, we're gonna hear tomorrow, the keynote on the, from Aruba who's gonna tend over the ecosystem. You guys are working together. There's a lot of strategic partnerships, so much collaboration between you guys that makes it very, this is the next gen cloud of cloud environment we're seeing. And you heard the, the economies around the corner. It's still gonna be challenging, but still there's more growth in the cloud. This is not stopping. This is impacts the customers. What are the customers saying to you guys when you work backwards from their needs? They want it faster, easier, cheaper. They want it more integrated. What are some of the things, all those you guys hearing from customers? >>So for us, you know, if you think about it, like, you know, as people are moving to the cloud, especially like take a use case like s3, right? So much of critical data sitting on top of S3 today. And so what folks have realized that as they're, you know, putting all of those, you know, what, over two 50 trillion objects, you know, sitting on s3, a lot of them need backup and data protection because there could be accidental deletions, there could be software bugs, there could be a ransomware type event due to which you need a second copy of the data that is outside of your security domain, right? But again, that needs to get be done at the, at the right price point, right? And that's where like a technology like Columbia comes in because since we've been built on the cloud, we've optimized it correctly. So especially for folks who are very cost conscious, given the macroeconomic conditions, we are heading into a technology that's built correctly so that, you know, you get the right architecture and the right solution at the right price point and the scale, right? Talking about trillions of objects, billions of objects within a single customer, within a single bucket sometimes. And that's where Columbia comes in. Cause we basically do that at scale without, again, impacting the, the customer's wallet more than it needs to. >>The porridge has to be the right temperature and the right size bowl. With the right spoon. You've got a lot of complexity when it comes to solving those customer challenges. You have a couple customer story examples you're allowed to share with us. Correct? Paul, do you want to kick one off? Go ahead. Oh, puja. All right. >>No, absolutely. I think there's a ton of them. I, I'll talk about, you know, want to begin with like Cox Automotive, right? A phenomenal customer that we, all of us have worked together with them. And again, looking for a solution to backup S3 to essentially go air gap protection outside of their account, right? They looked at doing it themselves, right? They thought they'll go and basically do it themselves. And then they fortunately bumped into Columbia, they looked at our architecture, looked at what it would really go and take to build it. And guess what, sitting in 2022, getting 23 right now, nobody wants to go and build this themselves. They actually want a turnkey solution that just does it, right? And so, again, we are a phenomenal joint customer of ours doing this at a pretty massive scale, right? And there are many more like that. There's Warner Brothers that are essentially going into the cloud from on premises, right? And they're going really fast accelerating the usage on aws again, looking at, you know, backup and data protection and using clum because of our extreme simplicity that we provide. >>Yeah, I think it's, you've got a, a lot of different people solving different problems that you're working with all the time. Millions of customers. Well, how do you prioritize? >>Well, for us, it really all comes down to fundamentals, right? So Amazon, s3 s unique distributed architecture delivers industry leading durability, availability, performance and security at virtually unlimited scale, right? And it's really been delivering on the fundamentals that has earned the trust of so many customers of all sizes and industries over the course of over 16 years. Now, in terms of how we prioritize on behalf of those customers, we always say that 90% of our roadmap comes directly from what customers are telling us is important. And a large number of our customers now are using S3 through lumino, which is why the relationship is so important. We're here talking about customer use cases here at the show, and we do that regularly throughout the year as well. And that's, that's how we land on a road. >>And what are the, what are the top stories from customers? What, what are they telling you? What's the number one top three things you're hearing? >>I tell you, like, again, it just comes down to the fundamentals, right? Of security, availability, durability and performance at virtually unlimited scale. Like that is the first customer first discussions that we have with customers talking about durable storage, for >>Sure. What I find interesting in, you mentioned scale, right? That comes up a lot scale with data. Yeah. That we heard data. The big theme here, security, what's in my S3 bucket? Can you find out what's in there? Is it backed up properly? How do I get it back? Where's the ransomware? Why not just target the ransomware? So how do you navigate the, the security challenges, the, the need to store all that scale data? What's the secret sauce? >>Yeah, so I think the, the big thing is we'll start with the, you know, how we have architected the product, right? If you think about it, this, you're dealing with a lot of scale, right? You get to a hundred million, a billion and billions very fast on S3 few, especially on a cloud native application. So it starts with the visibility, right? It's basically about, like we have things where you do, where you create a subset of your buckets called protection groups that you can essentially, you know, do it based on prefixes. So now you can essentially figure out what prefix you want to back up and what you don't want to back up. Maybe there's log data that you don't care about, so you don't back that up, right? And it all starts with that visibility that you give. And the prefix level data protection then comes the scale, which is where I was telling you, right? We have basically built an orchestration engine, right? It's like we call the ES for Lambdas, right? So we have a internal orchestration engine and essentially what what we have done is we have our own language internally that spawns off these lambdas, right? And they go after these S3 partitions do the right things and then you basically reel them back. So things like that that we do that are not possible if you're not built on the >>Clock. Well also, I mean, just mind blowing and go back 10 years. Yeah. I mean you got Lambda. What you're talking about here is the gift of the cloud innovation. Yeah. So the benefit of S3 is now accelerated. This is the story this year. Yeah. I mean they're highlighting it at scale, not just in the data, but like what we knew when Lambda came out and what S3 could do. But now mainstream solutions are coming in. Does that change your backup plans? Because we're gonna see a lot more end to end, lot more solutions. We heard that on the keynote. Some are saying it's more complexity. Of course it might, but you can abstract another way with the cloud that's the best part of the cloud. So these abstraction leads. So what's your view on that? But I wanna get your thoughts because you guys are perfectly positioned for this scale, but there's more coming. Yes. Yes. Exactly. What, how are you looking at that? >>So again, I think the, you know, obviously the, the S3 teams and every team in AWS is basically pushing the envelope in terms of innovation. But the key for a partner like us is to go and take that innovation. A lot of complex architectures behind the scene. But what you deliver to the customer is simple. I'll give you one more example. One of the things we launched that, you know, Paul and others are very excited about, is this ability to do instant access on the backup, right? So you could have billions of objects that you backed up. Maybe you need just 10,000 of them for a DR test. And we can basically create like an instant virtual bucket on top of that backup that you can instantly restore >>Spinning up a sandbox of temporary data to go check it >>Out. Exactly. Offer an inte application. >>Think we're geeking out right now. >>Yeah, I know. Brought that part of the segment, John. Don't worry, we're safely there. But, >>But that's the thing, right? That all that is possible because of all the, the scale and innovation and all the APIs and everything that, you know, Paul and the team gives us that we go and build on top of >>Paul, geek out on with us on this. We >>Are super excited for instant restore >>For store. I mean, automation programmability. >>It is, I mean it's the logical next step for backup in the cloud. Exactly. Yeah. But it's a super hard engineering problem to go solve for customers. I mean, the RTO benefits alone are super compelling, but then there's a cost element as well of not having to bring back all that stuff for a test restore, for example. And so it's, it's been really great to, to work with the team on that. We have some ideas on how we may help solve it from our side, and we're looking forward to collaborating on it. >>This is a great illustration of what I was writing about this week around the classic cloud, which is great. And as Adam said, and used like to use the word and, and you got this new functionality we're seeing emerge from the growth. Yes. From the companies that are built on Amazon web services that are growing. You're a partner, they have a lot of other partners and people are taking over restaurant here off action. I mean, there's real growth and new functionality on top of aws. You guys are no different. What's, are you prepared for that? Are you ready to go? >>Yeah, no, absolutely. And I think if you think about, if you think about it, right, I think it's also about doing this without impacting the primary application. Like if the customer is running a primary application at scale on s3, a backup application like ours can't come in and really mess with that. So I think being able to do things where, and this is where you solve really hard computer science problems, right? Where you're bottling yourself. If you are essentially seeing any kind of, you know, interfering with the primary, you're going to cut yourself down. You're gonna go after a different partition. So there are a lot of things you need to do behind the scenes, which is again, all the complexity, all of that, but deliver the, to the customer a very, very simple thing. >>You know, Paul, I wanna get your thoughts and I want you to chime in. Yeah. In 2014, I interviewed Steven Schmidt, my first interview with the, he was the CISO then, and now he's a CSO and, and former ciso, he's back at that time, the word was the cloud's not secure. Now we're talking about security. Just in the complexity of how you're partitioning and managing your sub portions, how you explained it, it's harder for the attackers. The cloud in its in its architecture has become a more secure environment. Yeah. Well, and getting more secure as you have laying out this, this is a new dynamic. This is good. Can you explain the, >>I mean, I, I can just tell you that at AWS security is job zero and that it will always be our number one priority, right? We have a, an infrastructure with under AWS that is vetted and approved to run even top secret workloads, which benefits all customers in all regions. >>And your, your security posture is embedded on top of that. And you got your own stuff. >>Yeah. And if you think of it as a shared responsibility model, so security of the cloud is the responsibility of the cloud provider, but then security of the data on top of it. Like you, you go and delete stuff, your software goes and does something that resiliency, the integrity of the data is your responsibility as a customer. And that's where, you know, we come in. Who >>Shared responsibility has been such a hot topic all week. Yeah. >>I gotta ask him one more question. Cause this is fascinating. And we are talking about on the cube all day today after we saw the announcement and Adam's comment on the cube, Adams LE's comment on the keynote. I mean, he said, if you're gonna tighten your belt, meaning economic cost recovery, re right sizing. If you want to tighten your belt, come to the cloud. So I have to ask you guys, Puja, if you can comment, that'd be great. There's a lot of other competitors out there that aren't born on aws. What is the customer gonna do when they tighten the build? What does that mean? They're gonna go to, to the individual contracts. They're gonna work in the marketplace. I mean this, there's a new dynamic in town. It's called AWS 2022. They weren't really around much in the recession of 2008. They were just starting to grow. Now they're an economic force. People like yourselves have embedded in there. There's a lot of competition. What's gonna happen? >>I think people are gonna just go to a place like, you know, AWS marketplace. You're going to essentially look for solutions and essentially like, and, and the right solutions built in are going to be self-service like aws. It's a very self-service thing. A hundred percent. So you go and do self-service, you figure out what's working, what's not working. Also, the model has to be consumption oriented. No longer can you expect the customer to go and pay a bunch of money for shelfware, right? It's like, like how we charge how AWS charges, which is you pay for what you consume. That and all has to be front and center, >>Right? I think that's a really, I think that's a really important >>Point. It's time >>And I think it's time. So we have a new challenge on the cube. We give you 30 seconds roughly to give us your extraordinarily hot take your shining thought leadership moment and, and highlight what you think is the most important takeaway from the show. The biggest soundbite, the juiciest announcement. Paul, I'll >>Start with an Instagram. Real basically. Yeah. Okay. >>Yeah. Hi. Go. I would just say from an S3 perspective, over the course of the last several years, we've really seen workloads shift from just backup and recovery and static images on websites to data lake analytics applications. And you continue to see that here. And I can tell you that some of these scaled applications are running at enormous mind blowing scale, right? And so, so every year we come here, we talk to customers, and it's just every year it sort of blows me away. And I've been in the storage industry for a long time and it's just is, it blows me away. Just the scale at customers are running in >>And >>Blowing scale. And when it comes to backup, let me just say that it's easy to back up and recover a single object, but doing an easy thing, a billion or 10 billion times over, that's actually quite hard. >>And just to, just to bold that a little bit, just pull out my highlighter. S3 now has over 280 trillion objects. That's a lot. >>That's a lot of objects. >>Yeah. You are not, you are not kidding. When you talk about scale, I mean, this is the most scalable. >>That's not solution's not there. Yeah. That, that's right. And we wake up every, we have a culture of durability and we wake up every single day to raise the bar on the fundamentals and make sure that every single one of those objects is protected and safe. >>Okay. You, I, >>I can't imagine worrying about two, two 80 trillion different things. >>Let's go. You're Instagram real >>For me again, you know, between S3 and us, we are two players out there that are really, you know, processing the data at the end of the day, right? And so I'm very excited about, you know, what we are going to do more and more with the instant restore capability where we can integrate third party services on top of it that can do more things with the data that is not, not passively sitting, but now becomes active data that you can analyze and do things with. So that's something where we take this to the next level is something that I'm super excited about. >>There's a lot to be excited about and, and we're excited to have you. We're excited to hear what happens next. Excited to see more collaboration like this. Paul Pon, thank you so much for joining us here on the show. Thank all of you from for tuning into our continuous wall to wall super thrilling live coverage of AWS reinvent here in fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada, with John Furrier. I'm Savannah Peterson. We're the cube, the leading source for high tech coverage.

from the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston bringing you data-driven insights from the cube and ETR this is breaking analysis with Dave vellante over the past decade cloudflare has built a Global Network that has the potential to become the fourth us-based hyperscale class cloud in our view the company is building a durable Revenue model with hooks into many important markets these include the more mature DDOS protection space to other growth sectors such as zero trust a serverless platform for application development and an increasing number of services such as database and object storage and other network services in essence cloudflare could be thought of as a giant distributed supercomputer that can connect multiple clouds and act as a highly efficient scheduling engine at scale its disruptive DNA is increasingly attracting novel startups and established Global firms alike looking for Reliable secure high performance low latency and more cost-effective alternatives to AWS and Legacy infrastructure Solutions hello and welcome to this week's wikibon Cube insights powered by ETR in this breaking analysis we initiate our deeper coverage of cloudflare we'll briefly explain our take on the company and its unique business model we'll then share some peer comparisons with both the financial snapshot and some fresh ETR survey data finally we'll share some examples of how we think cloudflare could be a disruptive force with a super cloud-like offering that in many respects is what multi-cloud should have been cloudflare has been on our peripheral radar Ben Thompson and many others have written about their disruptive business model and recently a breaking analysis follower who will remain anonymous emailed with some excellent insights on cloudflare that prompted us to initiate more detailed coverage let's first take a look at how cloudflare seize the world in terms of its view of a modern stack this is a graphic from cloudflare that shows a simple three-layer Stack comprising Storage and compute the lower level and application layer and the network and their key message is basically that the big four hyperscalers have replaced the on-prem leaders apps have been satisfied and that mess of network that you see and Security in the upper left can now be handled all by cloudflare and the stack can be rented via Opex versus requiring heavy capex investment so okay somewhat of a simplified view is those companies on the the left are you know not standing still and we're going to come back to that but cloudflare has done something quite amazing I mean it's been a while since we've invoked Russ hanneman of Silicon Valley Fame on breaking analysis but remember when he was in a meeting one of his first meetings if not the first with Richard Hendricks it was the whiz kid on the show Silicon Valley and hanneman said something like if you had a blank check and you could build anything in the world what would it be and Richard's answer was basically a new internet and that led to Pied Piper this peer-to-peer Network powered by decentralized devices and and iPhones and this amazing compression algorithm that enabled high-speed data movement and low latency uh up to no low latency access across the network well in a way that's what cloudflare has built its founding premise reimagined how the internet should be built with a consistent set of server infrastructure where each server had lots of cores lots of dram lots of cash fast ssds and plenty of network connectivity and bandwidth and well this picture makes it look like a bunch of dots and points of presence on a map which of course it is there's a software layer that enables cloudflare to efficiently allocate resources across this Global Network the company claims that it's Network utilization is in the 70 percent range and it has used its build out to enter the technology space from the bottoms up offering for example free tiers of services to users with multiple entry points on different services and selling then more services over time to a customer which of course drives up its average contract value and its lifetime value at the same time the company continues to innovate and add new services at a very rapid cloud-like Pace you can think of cloudflare's initial Market entry as like a lightweight Cisco as a service the company's CFO actually he uses that term he calls it that which really must tick off Cisco who of course has a massive portfolio and a dominant Market position now because it owns the network cloudflare is a marginal cost of adding new Services is very small and goes towards zero so it's able to get software like economics at scale despite all this infrastructure that's building out so it doesn't have to constantly face the increasing infrastructure tax snowflake for example doesn't own its own network infrastructure as it grows it relies on AWS or Azure gcp and and while it gives the company obvious advantages it doesn't have to build out its own network it also requires them to constantly pay the tax and negotiate with hyperscalers for better rental rates now as previously mentioned Cloud Fair cloudflare claims that its utilization is very high probably higher than the hyperscalers who can spin up servers that they can charge for underutilized customer capacity cloudflare also has excellent Network traffic data that it can use to its Advantage with its Analytics the company has been rapidly innovating Beyond its original Core Business adding as I said before serverless zero trust offerings it has announced a database it calls its database D1 that's pretty creative and it's announced an object store called R2 that is S3 minus one both from the alphabet and the numeric I.E minus the egress cost saying no egress cost that's their big claim to fame and they've made a lot of marketing noise around about that and of course they've promised in our a D2 database which of course is R2D2 RR they've launched a developer platform cloudflare can be thought of kind of like first of all a modern CDN they've got a simpler security model that's how they compete for example with z-scaler that brings uh they also bring VPN sd-wan and DDOS protection services that are that are part of the network and they're less expensive than AWS that's kind of their sort of go to market and messaging and value proposition and they're positioning themselves as a neutral Network that can connect across multiple clouds now to be clear unlike AWS in particular cloudflare is not well suited to lift and shift your traditional apps like for instance sap Hana you're not going to run that in on cloudflare's platform rather the company started by making websites more secure and faster and it flew under the radar and much in the same way that clay Christensen described the disruption in the steel industry if you've seen that where new entrants picked off the low margin rebar business then moved up the stack we've used that analogy in the semiconductor business with arm and and even China cloudflare is running a similar playbook in the cloud and in the network so in the early part of the last decade as aws's ascendancy was becoming more clear many of us started thinking about how and where firms could compete and add value as AWS is becoming so dominant so for instance take an industry Focus you could do things like data sharing with snowflake eventually you know uh popularized you could build on top of clouds again snowflake is doing that as are others you could build private clouds and of course connect to hybrid clouds but not many had the wherewithal and or the hutzpah to build out a Global Network that could serve as a connecting platform for cloud services cloudflare has traction in the market as it adds new services like zero trust and object store or database its Tam continues to grow here's a quick snapshot of cloudflare's financials relative to Z scalar which is both a competitor and a customer fastly which is a smaller CDN and Akamai a more mature CDN slash Edge platform cloudflare and fastly both reported earnings this past week Cloud Fair Cloud flare surpassed a billion dollar Revenue run rate but they gave tepid guidance and the stock got absolutely crushed today which is Friday but the company's business model is sound it's growing close to 50 annually it has sas-like gross margins in the mid to high 70s and it's it it's got a very strong balance sheet and a 13x revenue run rate multiple in fact it's Financial snapshot is quite close to that of z-scaler which is kind of interesting which zinc sailor of course doesn't own its own network that's a pure play software company fastly is much smaller and growing more slowly than cloudflare hence its lower multiple well Akamai as you can see is a more mature company but it's got a nice business now on its earnings call this week cloudflare announced that its head of sales was stepping down and the company has brought in a new leader to take the firm to five billion dollars in sales I think actually its current sales leader felt like hey you know my work is done here bring on somebody else to take it to the next level the company is promising to be free cash flow positive by the end of the year and is working hard toward its long-term financial model or so working towards sorry it's a long-term financial model with gross margin Targets in the mid 70s it's targeting 20 non-gaap operating margins so so solid you know very solid not like completely off the charts but you know very good and to our knowledge it has not committed to a long-term growth rate but at that sort of operating profit level you would like to see growth be consistently at least in the 20 range so they could at least be a rule of 40 company or perhaps even even five even higher if they're going to continue to command a premium valuation okay let's take a look at the ETR data ETR is very positive on cloudflare and has recently published a report on the company like many companies cloudflare is seeing an across the board slowdown in spending velocity we've reported on this quite extensively using the ETR data to quantify the degree to that Slowdown and on the data set with ETR we see that many customers they're shifting their spend to Flat spend you know plus or minus let's say you know single digits you know two three percent or even zero or in the market we're seeing a shift from paid to free tiers remember cloudflare offers a lot of free services as you're seeing customers maybe turn off the pay for a while and going with the freebie but we're also seeing some larger customers in the data and the fortune 1000 specifically they're actually spending more which was confirmed on cloudflare's earnings call they did say everything across the board was softer but they did also indicate that some of their larger customers are actually growing faster than their smaller customers and their churn is very very low here's a two-dimensional graphic we'd like to share this view a lot it's got Net score or spending momentum on the vertical axis and overlap or pervasiveness in the survey on the horizontal axis and this cut isolates three segments in the etrs taxonomy that cloudflare plays in Cloud security and networking now the table inserted in that upper left there shows the raw data which informs the position of each company in the dots with Net score in the ends listed in that rightmost column the red dotted line indicates a highly elevated Net score and finally we posted the breakdown those colors in the bottom right of cloudflare's Net score the lime green that's new adoptions the forest green is we're spending more six percent or more the gray is flat plus or minus uh five percent and you can see that the majority of customers you can see that's the majority of the customers that gray area the pink is we're spending Less in other words down six percent or worse and the bright red is churn which is minimal one percent very good indicator for for cloudflare what you do to get etr's proprietary Net score and they've done this for many many quarters so we have that time series data you subtract the Reds from the greens and that's Net score cloudflare is at 39 just under that magic red line now note that cloudflare and zscaler are right on top of each other Cisco has a dominant position on the x-axis that cloudflare and others are eyeing AWS is also dominant but note that its Net score is well above the red dotted line it's incredible Palo Alto networks is also very impressive it's got both a strong presence on the horizontal axis and it's got a Net score that's pretty comparable to cloudflare and z-scaler to much smaller companies Akamai is actually well positioned for a reasonably mature company and you can see fastly ATT Juniper and F5 have far less spending momentum on their platforms than does cloudflare but at least they are in positive Net score territory so what's going to be really interesting to see is whether cloudflare can continue to hold this momentum or even accelerate it as we've seen with some other clouds as it scales its Network and keeps adding more and more services cloudflare has a couple of potential strategic vectors that we want to talk about and it'll be going to be interesting to see how that plays out Now One path is to compete more directly as a Cloud Player offering secure access Edge services like firewall as a service and zero Trust Services like data loss prevention email security from its area one acquisition and other zero trust offerings as well as Network Services like routing and network connectivity this is The Sweet Spot of the company load balancing many others and then add in things like Object Store and database Services more Edge services in the future it might be telecom like services such as Network switching for offices so that's one route and cloudflare is clearly on that path more services more cohorts at innovating and and growing the company and bringing in more Revenue increasing acvs and and increasing long-term value and keeping retention high now the other Vector is what we're just going to refer to as super cloud as an enabler of cross-cloud infrastructure this is new value uh relative to the former Vector that we were just talking about now the title of this episode is what multi-cloud should have been meaning cloudflare could be the control plane providing a consistent experience across clouds one that is fast and secure at global scale now to give you Insight on this let's take a look at some of the comments made by Matthew Prince the CEO and co-founder of cloudflare cloudflare put its R2 Object Store into public beta this past May and I believe it's storing around a petabyte of data today I think that's what they said in their call here's what Prince said about that quote we are talking to very large companies about moving more and more of their stored objects to where we can store that with R2 and one of the benefits is not only can we help them save money on the egress fees but it allows them to then use those object stores or objects across any of the different Cloud platforms they're that they're using so by being that neutral third party we can let people adopt a little bit of Amazon a little bit of Microsoft a little bit of Google a little bit of SAS vendors and share that data across all those different places so what's interesting about this in the super cloud context is it suggests that customers could take the best of each Cloud to power their digital businesses I might like AWS for in redshift for my analytic database or I love Google's machine learning Microsoft's collaboration and I'd like a consistent way to connect those resources but of course he's strongly hinting and has made many public statements that aws's egress fees are a blocker to that vision now at a recent investor event Matthew Prince added some color to this concept when he talked about one metric of success being how much R2 capacity was consumed and how much they sold but perhaps a more interesting Benchmark is highlighted by the following statement that he made he said a completely different measure of success for R2 is Andy jassy says I'm sick and tired of these guys meaning cloudflare taking our objects away we're dropping our egress fees to zero I would be so excited because we've then unlocked the ability to be the network that interconnects the cloud together now of course it would be Adam solipski who would be saying that or maybe Andy Jesse you know still watching over AWS and I think it's highly unlikely that that's going to happen anytime soon and that of course but but in theory gets us closer to the super cloud value proposition and to further drive that point home and we're paraphrasing a little bit his comments here he said something the effect of quote customers need one consistent control plane across clouds and we are the neutral Network that can be consistent no matter which Cloud you're using interesting right that Prince sees the world that's similar to if not nearly identical to the concepts that the cube Community has been putting forth around supercloud now this vision is a ways off let's be real Prince even suggested that his initial vision of an application running across multiple clouds you know that's like super cloud Nirvana isn't what customers are doing today that's that's really hard to do and perhaps you know it's never going to happen but there's a little doubt that cloudflare could be and is positioning itself as that cross-cloud control plane it has the network economics and the business model levers to pull it's got an edge up on the competition at the edge pun intended cloudflare is the definition of Edge and it's distributed platform it's decentralized platform is much better suited for Edge workloads than these giant data centers that are you know set up to to try and handle that today the the hyperscalers are building out you know their Edge networks things like outposts you know going out to the edge and other local zones Etc now cloudflare is increasingly competitive to the hyperscalers and those traditional Stacks that it depositioned on an earlier slide that we showed but you know the likes of AWS and Dell and hpe and Cisco and those others they're not sitting in their hands they have a huge huge customer install bases and they are definitely a moving Target they're investing and they're building out their own Super clouds with really robust stacks as well let's face it it's going to take a decade or more for Enterprises to adopt a developer platform or a new database Cloud plus cloudflare's capabilities when compared to incumbent stacks and the hyperscalers is much less robust in these areas and even in storage you know despite all the great conversation that R2 generated and the buzz you take a specialist like Wasabi they're more mature they're more functional and they're way cheaper even than cloudflare so you know it's not a fake a complete that cloudflare is going to win in those markets but we love the disruption and if cloudflare wants to be the fourth us-based hyperscaler or join the the big four as the as the fifth if we put Alibaba in the mix it's got a lot of work to do in the ecosystem by its own admission as much to learn and is part of the value by the way that it sees in its area one acquisition it's email security company that it bought but even in that case much of the emphasis has been on reseller channels compare that to the AWS ecosystem which is not only a channel play but is as much an innovation flywheel filling gaps where companies like snowflake Thrive side by side with aws's data stores as well all the on-prem stacks are building hybrid connections to AWS and other clouds as a means of providing consistent experiences across clouds indeed many of them see what they call cross-cloud services or what we call super cloud hyper cloud or whatever you know Mega Cloud you want to call it we use super cloud they are really eyeing that opportunity so very few companies frankly are not going after that space but we're going to close with this cloudflare is one of those companies that's in a position to wake up each morning and ask who can we disrupt today and very few companies are in a position to disrupt the hyperscalers to the degree that cloudflare is and that my friends is going to be fascinating to watch unfold all right let's call it a wrap I want to thank Alex Meyerson who's on production and manages the podcast as well as Ken schiffman who's our newest addition to the Boston Studio Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight help us get the word out on social media and in our newsletters and Rob Hof is our editor-in-chief over at silicon angle thank you to all remember all these episodes are available as podcasts wherever you listen all you're going to do is search breaking analysis podcasts I publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com you can email me at david.velante at siliconangle.com or DM me at divalante if you comment on my LinkedIn posts and please do check out etr.ai they got the best survey data in the Enterprise Tech business this is Dave vellante for the cube insights powered by ETR thank you very much for watching and we'll see you next time on breaking analysis

>> The rapid rise of ransomware attacks has added yet another challenge that business technology executives have to worry about these days, cloud storage, immutability, and air gaps have become a must have arrows in the quiver of organization's data protection strategies. But the important reality that practitioners have embraced is data protection, it can't be an afterthought or a bolt on it, has to be designed into the operational workflow of technology systems. The problem is, oftentimes, data protection is complicated with a variety of different products, services, software components, and storage formats, this is why object storage is moving to the forefront of data protection use cases because it's simpler and less expensive. The put data get data syntax has always been alluring, but object storage, historically, was seen as this low-cost niche solution that couldn't offer the performance required for demanding workloads, forcing customers to make hard tradeoffs between cost and performance. That has changed, the ascendancy of cloud storage generally in the S3 format specifically has catapulted object storage to become a first class citizen in a mainstream technology. Moreover, innovative companies have invested to bring object storage performance to parity with other storage formats, but cloud costs are often a barrier for many companies as the monthly cloud bill and egress fees in particular steadily climb. Welcome to Secure Storage Hot Takes, my name is Dave Vellante, and I'll be your host of the program today, where we introduce our community to Wasabi, a company that is purpose-built to solve this specific problem with what it claims to be the most cost effective and secure solution on the market. We have three segments today to dig into these issues, first up is David Friend, the well known entrepreneur who co-founded Carbonite and now Wasabi will then dig into the product with Drew Schlussel of Wasabi, and then we'll bring in the customer perspective with Kevin Warenda of the Hotchkiss School, let's get right into it. We're here with David Friend, the President and CEO and Co-founder of Wasabi, the hot storage company, David, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thanks Dave, nice to be here. >> Great to have you, so look, you hit a home run with Carbonite back when building a unicorn was a lot more rare than it has been in the last few years, why did you start Wasabi? >> Well, when I was still CEO of Wasabi, my genius co-founder Jeff Flowers and our chief architect came to me and said, you know, when we started this company, a state of the art disk drive was probably 500 gigabytes and now we're looking at eight terabyte, 16 terabyte, 20 terabyte, even 100 terabyte drives coming down the road and, you know, sooner or later the old architectures that were designed around these much smaller disk drives is going to run out of steam because, even though the capacities are getting bigger and bigger, the speed with which you can get data on and off of a hard drive isn't really changing all that much. And Jeff foresaw a day when the architectures sort of legacy storage like Amazon S3 and so forth was going to become very inefficient and slow. And so he came up with a new, highly parallelized architecture, and he said, I want to go off and see if I can make this work. So I said, you know, good luck go to it and they went off and spent about a year and a half in the lab, designing and testing this new storage architecture and when they got it working, I looked at the economics of this and I said, holy cow, we can sell cloud storage for a fraction of the price of Amazon, still make very good gross margins and it will be faster. So this is a whole new generation of object storage that you guys have invented. So I recruited a new CEO for Carbonite and left to found Wasabi because the market for cloud storage is almost infinite. You know, when you look at all the world's data, you know, IDC has these crazy numbers, 120 zetabytes or something like that and if you look at that as you know, the potential market size during that data, we're talking trillions of dollars, not billions and so I said, look, this is a great opportunity, if you look back 10 years, all the world's data was on-prem, if you look forward 10 years, most people agree that most of the world's data is going to live in the cloud, we're at the beginning of this migration, we've got an opportunity here to build an enormous company. >> That's very exciting. I mean, you've always been a trend spotter, and I want to get your perspectives on data protection and how it's changed. It's obviously on people's minds with all the ransomware attacks and security breaches, but thinking about your experiences and past observations, what's changed in data protection and what's driving the current very high interest in the topic? >> Well, I think, you know, from a data protection standpoint, immutability, the equivalent of the old worm tapes, but applied to cloud storage is, you know, become core to the backup strategies and disaster recovery strategies for most companies. And if you look at our partners who make backup software like Veeam, Convo, Veritas, Arcserve, and so forth, most of them are really taking advantage of mutable cloud storage as a way to protect customer data, customers backups from ransomware. So the ransomware guys are pretty clever and they, you know, they discovered early on that if someone could do a full restore from their backups, they're never going to pay a ransom. So, once they penetrate your system, they get pretty good at sort of watching how you do your backups and before they encrypt your primary data, they figure out some way to destroy or encrypt your backups as well, so that you can't do a full restore from your backups. And that's where immutability comes in. You know, in the old days you, you wrote what was called a worm tape, you know, write once read many, and those could not be overwritten or modified once they were written. And so we said, let's come up with an equivalent of that for the cloud, and it's very tricky software, you know, it involves all kinds of encryption algorithms and blockchain and this kind of stuff but, you know, the net result is if you store your backups in immutable buckets, in a product like Wasabi, you can't alter it or delete it for some period of time, so you could put a timer on it, say a year or six months or something like that, once that data is written, you know, there's no way you can go in and change it, modify it, or anything like that, including even Wasabi's engineers. >> So, David, I want to ask you about data sovereignty. It's obviously a big deal, I mean, especially for companies with the presence overseas, but what's really is any digital business these days, how should companies think about approaching data sovereignty? Is it just large firms that should be worried about this? Or should everybody be concerned? What's your point of view? >> Well, all around the world countries are imposing data sovereignty laws and if you're in the storage business, like we are, if you don't have physical data storage in-country, you're probably not going to get most of the business. You know, since Christmas we've built data centers in Toronto, London, Frankfurt, Paris, Sydney, Singapore, and I've probably forgotten one or two, but the reason we do that is twofold; one is, you know, if you're closer to the customer, you're going to get better response time, lower latency, and that's just a speed of light issue. But the bigger issue is, if you've got financial data, if you have healthcare data, if you have data relating to security, like surveillance videos, and things of that sort, most countries are saying that data has to be stored in-country, so, you can't send it across borders to some other place. And if your business operates in multiple countries, you know, dealing with data sovereignty is going to become an increasingly important problem. >> So in May of 2018, that's when the fines associated with violating GDPR went into effect and GDPR was like this main spring of privacy and data protection laws and we've seen it spawn other public policy things like the CCPA and think it continues to evolve, we see judgments in Europe against big tech and this tech lash that's in the news in the U.S. and the elimination of third party cookies, what does this all mean for data protection in the 2020s? >> Well, you know, every region and every country, you know, has their own idea about privacy, about security, about the use of even the use of metadata surrounding, you know, customer data and things of this sort. So, you know, it's getting to be increasingly complicated because GDPR, for example, imposes different standards from the kind of privacy standards that we have here in the U.S., Canada has a somewhat different set of data sovereignty issues and privacy issues so it's getting to be an increasingly complex, you know, mosaic of rules and regulations around the world and this makes it even more difficult for enterprises to run their own, you know, infrastructure because companies like Wasabi, where we have physical data centers in all kinds of different markets around the world and we've already dealt with the business of how to meet the requirements of GDPR and how to meet the requirements of some of the countries in Asia and so forth, you know, rather than an enterprise doing that just for themselves, if you running your applications or keeping your data in the cloud, you know, now a company like Wasabi with, you know, 34,000 customers, we can go to all the trouble of meeting these local requirements on behalf of our entire customer base and that's a lot more efficient and a lot more cost effective than if each individual country has to go deal with the local regulatory authorities. >> Yeah, it's compliance by design, not by chance. Okay, let's zoom out for the final question, David, thinking about the discussion that we've had around ransomware and data protection and regulations, what does it mean for a business's operational strategy and how do you think organizations will need to adapt in the coming years? >> Well, you know, I think there are a lot of forces driving companies to the cloud and, you know, and I do believe that if you come back five or 10 years from now, you're going to see majority of the world's data is going to be living in the cloud and I think storage, data storage is going to be a commodity much like electricity or bandwidth, and it's going to be done right, it will comply with the local regulations, it'll be fast, it'll be local, and there will be no strategic advantage that I can think of for somebody to stand up and run their own storage, especially considering the cost differential, you know, the most analysts think that the full, all in costs of running your own storage is in the 20 to 40 terabytes per month range, whereas, you know, if you migrate your data to the cloud, like Wasabi, you're talking probably $6 a month and so I think people are learning how to deal with the idea of an architecture that involves storing your data in the cloud, as opposed to, you know, storing your data locally. >> Wow, that's like a six X more expensive in the clouds, more than six X, all right, thank you, David,-- >> In addition to which, you know, just finding the people to babysit this kind of equipment has become nearly impossible today. >> Well, and with a focus on digital business, you don't want to be wasting your time with that kind of heavy lifting. David, thanks so much for coming in theCUBE, a great Boston entrepreneur, we've followed your career for a long time and looking forward to the future. >> Thank you. >> Okay, in a moment, Drew Schlussel will join me and we're going to dig more into product, you're watching theCUBE, the leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage, keep it right there. ♪ Whoa ♪ ♪ Brenda in sales got an email ♪ ♪ Click here for a trip to Bombay ♪ ♪ It's not even called Bombay anymore ♪ ♪ But you clicked it anyway ♪ ♪ And now our data's been held hostage ♪ ♪ And now we're on sinking ship ♪ ♪ And a hacker's in our system ♪ ♪ Just 'cause Brenda wanted a trip ♪ ♪ She clicked on something stupid ♪ ♪ And our data's out of our control ♪ ♪ Into the hands of a hacker's ♪ ♪ And he's a giant asshole. ♪ ♪ He encrypted it in his basement ♪ ♪ He wants a million bucks for the key ♪ ♪ And I'm pretty sure he's 15 ♪ ♪ And still going through puberty ♪ ♪ I know you didn't mean to do us wrong ♪ ♪ But now I'm dealing with this all week long ♪ ♪ To make you all aware ♪ ♪ Of all this ransomware ♪ ♪ That is why I'm singing you this song ♪ ♪ C'mon ♪ ♪ Take it from me ♪ ♪ The director of IT ♪ ♪ Don't click on that email from a prince Nairobi ♪ ♪ 'Cuz he's not really a prince ♪ ♪ Now our data's locked up on our screen ♪ ♪ Controlled by a kid who's just fifteen ♪ ♪ And he's using our money to buy a Ferrari ♪ (gentle music) >> Joining me now is Drew Schlussel, who is the Senior Director of Product Marketing at Wasabi, hey Drew, good to see you again, thanks for coming back in theCUBE. >> Dave, great to be here, great to see you. >> All right, let's get into it. You know, Drew, prior to the pandemic, Zero Trust, just like kind of like digital transformation was sort of a buzzword and now it's become a real thing, almost a mandate, what's Wasabi's take on Zero Trust. >> So, absolutely right, it's been around a while and now people are paying attention, Wasabi's take is Zero Trust is a good thing. You know, there are too many places, right, where the bad guys are getting in. And, you know, I think of Zero Trust as kind of smashing laziness, right? It takes a little work, it takes some planning, but you know, done properly and using the right technologies, using the right vendors, the rewards are, of course tremendous, right? You can put to rest the fears of ransomware and having your systems compromised. >> Well, and we're going to talk about this, but there's a lot of process and thinking involved and, you know, design and your Zero Trust and you don't want to be wasting time messing with infrastructure, so we're going to talk about that, there's a lot of discussion in the industry, Drew, about immutability and air gaps, I'd like you to share Wasabi's point of view on these topics, how do you approach it and what makes Wasabi different? >> So, in terms of air gap and immutability, right, the beautiful thing about object storage, which is what we do all the time is that it makes it that much easier, right, to have a secure immutable copy of your data someplace that's easy to access and doesn't cost you an arm and a leg to get your data back. You know, we're working with some of the best, you know, partners in the industry, you know, we're working with folks like, you know, Veeam, Commvault, Arc, Marquee, MSP360, all folks who understand that you need to have multiple copies of your data, you need to have a copy stored offsite, and that copy needs to be immutable and we can talk a little bit about what immutability is and what it really means. >> You know, I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about Wasabi's solution because, sometimes people don't understand, you actually are a cloud, you're not building on other people's public clouds and this storage is the one use case where it actually makes sense to do that, tell us a little bit more about Wasabi's approach and your solution. >> Yeah, I appreciate that, so there's definitely some misconception, we are our own cloud storage service, we don't run on top of anybody else, right, it's our systems, it's our software deployed globally and we interoperate because we adhere to the S3 standard, we interoperate with practically hundreds of applications, primarily in this case, right, we're talking about backup and recovery applications and it's such a simple process, right? I mean, just about everybody who's anybody in this business protecting data has the ability now to access cloud storage and so we've made it really simple, in many cases, you'll see Wasabi as you know, listed in the primary set of available vendors and, you know, put in your private keys, make sure that your account is locked down properly using, let's say multifactor authentication, and you've got a great place to store copies of your data securely. >> I mean, we just heard from David Friend, if I did my math right, he was talking about, you know, 1/6 the cost per terabyte per month, maybe even a little better than that, how are you able to achieve such attractive economics? >> Yeah, so, you know, I can't remember how to translate my fractions into percentages, but I think we talk a lot about being 80%, right, less expensive than the hyperscalers. And you know, we talked about this at Vermont, right? There's some secret sauce there and you know, we take a different approach to how we utilize the raw capacity to the effective capacity and the fact is we're also not having to run, you know, a few hundred other services, right? We do storage, plain and simple, all day, all the time, so we don't have to worry about overhead to support, you know, up and coming other services that are perhaps, you know, going to be a loss leader, right? Customers love it, right, they see the fact that their data is growing 40, 80% year over year, they know they need to have some place to keep it secure, and, you know, folks are flocking to us in droves, in fact, we're seeing a tremendous amount of migration actually right now, multiple petabytes being brought to Wasabi because folks have figured out that they can't afford to keep going with their current hyperscaler vendor. >> And immutability is a feature of your product, right? What the feature called? Can you double-click on that a little bit? >> Yeah, absolutely. So, the term in S3 is Object Lock and what that means is your application will write an object to cloud storage, and it will define a retention period, let's say a week. And for that period, that object is immutable, untouchable, cannot be altered in any way, shape, or form, the application can't change it, the system administration can't change it, Wasabi can't change it, okay, it is truly carved in stone. And this is something that it's been around for a while, but you're seeing a huge uptick, right, in adoption and support for that feature by all the major vendors and I named off a few earlier and the best part is that with immutability comes some sense of, well, it comes with not just a sense of security, it is security. Right, when you have data that cannot be altered by anybody, even if the bad guys compromise your account, they steal your credentials, right, they can't take away the data and that's a beautiful thing, a beautiful, beautiful thing. >> And you look like an S3 bucket, is that right? >> Yeah, I mean, we're fully compatible with the S3 API, so if you're using S3 API based applications today, it's a very simple matter of just kind of redirecting where you want to store your data, beautiful thing about backup and recovery, right, that's probably the simplest application, simple being a relative term, as far as lift and shift, right? Because that just means for your next full, right, point that at Wasabi, retain your other fulls, you know, for whatever 30, 60, 90 days, and then once you've kind of made that transition from vine to vine, you know, you're often running with Wasabi. >> I talked to my open about the allure of object storage historically, you know, the simplicity of the get put syntax, but what about performance? Are you able to deliver performance that's comparable to other storage formats? >> Oh yeah, absolutely, and we've got the performance numbers on the site to back that up, but I forgot to answer something earlier, right, you said that immutability is a feature and I want to make it very clear that it is a feature but it's an API request. Okay, so when you're talking about gets and puts and so forth, you know, the comment you made earlier about being 80% more cost effective or 80% less expensive, you know, that API call, right, is typically something that the other folks charge for, right, and I think we used the metaphor earlier about the refrigerator, but I'll use a different metaphor today, right? You can think of cloud storage as a magical coffee cup, right? It gets as big as you want to store as much coffee as you want and the coffee's always warm, right? And when you want to take a sip, there's no charge, you want to, you know, pop the lid and see how much coffee is in there, no charge, and that's an important thing, because when you're talking about millions or billions of objects, and you want to get a list of those objects, or you want to get the status of the immutable settings for those objects, anywhere else it's going to cost you money to look at your data, with Wasabi, no additional charge and that's part of the thing that sets us apart. >> Excellent, so thank you for that. So, you mentioned some partners before, how do partners fit into the Wasabi story? Where do you stop? Where do they pick up? You know, what do they bring? Can you give us maybe, a paint a picture for us example, or two? >> Sure, so, again, we just do storage, right, that is our sole purpose in life is to, you know, to safely and securely store our customer's data. And so they're working with their application vendors, whether it's, you know, active archive, backup and recovery, IOT, surveillance, media and entertainment workflows, right, those systems already know how to manage the data, manage the metadata, they just need some place to keep the data that is being worked on, being stored and so forth. Right, so just like, you know, plugging in a flash drive on your laptop, right, you literally can plug in Wasabi as long as your applications support the API, getting started is incredibly easy, right, we offer a 30-day trial, one terabyte, and most folks find that within, you know, probably a few hours of their POC, right, it's giving them everything they need in terms of performance, in terms of accessibility, in terms of sovereignty, I'm guessing you talked to, you know, Dave Friend earlier about data sovereignty, right? We're global company, right, so there's got to be probably, you know, wherever you are in the world some place that will satisfy your sovereignty requirements, as well as your compliance requirements. >> Yeah, we did talk about sovereignty, Drew, this is really, what's interesting to me, I'm a bit of a industry historian, when I look back to the early days of cloud, I remember the large storage companies, you know, their CEOs would say, we're going to have an answer for the cloud and they would go out, and for instance, I know one bought competitor of Carbonite, and then couldn't figure out what to do with it, they couldn't figure out how to compete with the cloud in part, because they were afraid it was going to cannibalize their existing business, I think another part is because they just didn't have that imagination to develop an architecture that in a business model that could scale to see that you guys have done that is I love it because it brings competition, it brings innovation and it helps lower clients cost and solve really nagging problems. Like, you know, ransomware, of mutability and recovery, I'll give you the last word, Drew. >> Yeah, you're absolutely right. You know, the on-prem vendors, they're not going to go away anytime soon, right, there's always going to be a need for, you know, incredibly low latency, high bandwidth, you know, but, you know, not all data's hot all the time and by hot, I mean, you know, extremely hot, you know, let's take, you know, real time analytics for, maybe facial recognition, right, that requires sub-millisecond type of processing. But once you've done that work, right, you want to store that data for a long, long time, and you're going to want to also tap back into it later, so, you know, other folks are telling you that, you know, you can go to these like, you know, cold glacial type of tiered storage, yeah, don't believe the hype, you're still going to pay way more for that than you would with just a Wasabi-like hot cloud storage system. And, you know, we don't compete with our partners, right? We compliment, you know, what they're bringing to market in terms of the software vendors, in terms of the hardware vendors, right, we're a beautiful component for that hybrid cloud architecture. And I think folks are gravitating towards that, I think the cloud is kind of hitting a new gear if you will, in terms of adoption and recognition for the security that they can achieve with it. >> All right, Drew, thank you for that, definitely we see the momentum, in a moment, Drew and I will be back to get the customer perspective with Kevin Warenda, who's the Director of Information technology services at The Hotchkiss School, keep it right there. >> Hey, I'm Nate, and we wrote this song about ransomware to educate people, people like Brenda. >> Oh, God, I'm so sorry. We know you are, but Brenda, you're not alone, this hasn't just happened to you. >> No! ♪ Colonial Oil Pipeline had a guy ♪ ♪ who didn't change his password ♪ ♪ That sucks ♪ ♪ His password leaked, the data was breached ♪ ♪ And it cost his company 4 million bucks ♪ ♪ A fake update was sent to people ♪ ♪ Working for the meat company JBS ♪ ♪ That's pretty clever ♪ ♪ Instead of getting new features, they got hacked ♪ ♪ And had to pay the largest crypto ransom ever ♪ ♪ And 20 billion dollars, billion with a b ♪ ♪ Have been paid by companies in healthcare ♪ ♪ If you wonder buy your premium keeps going ♪ ♪ Up, up, up, up, up ♪ ♪ Now you're aware ♪ ♪ And now the hackers they are gettin' cocky ♪ ♪ When they lock your data ♪ ♪ You know, it has gotten so bad ♪ ♪ That they demand all of your money and it gets worse ♪ ♪ They go and the trouble with the Facebook ad ♪ ♪ Next time, something seems too good to be true ♪ ♪ Like a free trip to Asia! ♪ ♪ Just check first and I'll help before you ♪ ♪ Think before you click ♪ ♪ Don't get fooled by this ♪ ♪ Who isn't old enough to drive to school ♪ ♪ Take it from me, the director of IT ♪ ♪ Don't click on that email from a prince in Nairobi ♪ ♪ Because he's not really a prince ♪ ♪ Now our data's locked up on our screen ♪ ♪ Controlled by a kid who's just fifteen ♪ ♪ And he's using our money to buy a Ferrari ♪ >> It's a pretty sweet car. ♪ A kid without facial hair, who lives with his mom ♪ ♪ To learn more about this go to wasabi.com ♪ >> Hey, don't do that. ♪ Cause if we had Wasabi's immutability ♪ >> You going to ruin this for me! ♪ This fifteen-year-old wouldn't have on me ♪ (gentle music) >> Drew and I are pleased to welcome Kevin Warenda, who's the Director of Information Technology Services at The Hotchkiss School, a very prestigious and well respected boarding school in the beautiful Northwest corner of Connecticut, hello, Kevin. >> Hello, it's nice to be here, thanks for having me. >> Yeah, you bet. Hey, tell us a little bit more about The Hotchkiss School and your role. >> Sure, The Hotchkiss School is an independent boarding school, grades nine through 12, as you said, very prestigious and in an absolutely beautiful location on the deepest freshwater lake in Connecticut, we have 500 acre main campus and a 200 acre farm down the street. My role as the Director of Information Technology Services, essentially to oversee all of the technology that supports the school operations, academics, sports, everything we do on campus. >> Yeah, and you've had a very strong history in the educational field, you know, from that lens, what's the unique, you know, or if not unique, but the pressing security challenge that's top of mind for you? >> I think that it's clear that educational institutions are a target these days, especially for ransomware. We have a lot of data that can be used by threat actors and schools are often underfunded in the area of IT security, IT in general sometimes, so, I think threat actors often see us as easy targets or at least worthwhile to try to get into. >> Because specifically you are potentially spread thin, underfunded, you got students, you got teachers, so there really are some, are there any specific data privacy concerns as well around student privacy or regulations that you can speak to? >> Certainly, because of the fact that we're an independent boarding school, we operate things like even a health center, so, data privacy regulations across the board in terms of just student data rights and FERPA, some of our students are under 18, so, data privacy laws such as COPPA apply, HIPAA can apply, we have PCI regulations with many of our financial transactions, whether it be fundraising through alumni development, or even just accepting the revenue for tuition so, it's a unique place to be, again, we operate very much like a college would, right, we have all the trappings of a private college in terms of all the operations we do and that's what I love most about working in education is that it's all the industries combined in many ways. >> Very cool. So let's talk about some of the defense strategies from a practitioner point of view, then I want to bring in Drew to the conversation so what are the best practice and the right strategies from your standpoint of defending your data? >> Well, we take a defense in-depth approach, so we layer multiple technologies on top of each other to make sure that no single failure is a key to getting beyond those defenses, we also keep it simple, you know, I think there's some core things that all organizations need to do these days in including, you know, vulnerability scanning, patching , using multifactor authentication, and having really excellent backups in case something does happen. >> Drew, are you seeing any similar patterns across other industries or customers? I mean, I know we're talking about some uniqueness in the education market, but what can we learn from other adjacent industries? >> Yeah, you know, Kevin is spot on and I love hearing what he's doing, going back to our prior conversation about Zero Trust, right, that defense in-depth approach is beautifully aligned, right, with the Zero Trust approach, especially things like multifactor authentication, always shocked at how few folks are applying that very, very simple technology and across the board, right? I mean, Kevin is referring to, you know, financial industry, healthcare industry, even, you know, the security and police, right, they need to make sure that the data that they're keeping, evidence, right, is secure and immutable, right, because that's evidence. >> Well, Kevin, paint a picture for us, if you would. So, you were primarily on-prem looking at potentially, you know, using more cloud, you were a VMware shop, but tell us, paint a picture of your environment, kind of the applications that you support and the kind of, I want to get to the before and the after Wasabi, but start with kind of where you came from. >> Sure, well, I came to The Hotchkiss School about seven years ago and I had come most recently from public K12 and municipal, so again, not a lot of funding for IT in general, security, or infrastructure in general, so Nutanix was actually a hyperconverged solution that I implemented at my previous position. So when I came to Hotchkiss and found mostly on-prem workloads, everything from the student information system to the card access system that students would use, financial systems, they were almost all on premise, but there were some new SaaS solutions coming in play, we had also taken some time to do some business continuity, planning, you know, in the event of some kind of issue, I don't think we were thinking about the pandemic at the time, but certainly it helped prepare us for that, so, as different workloads were moved off to hosted or cloud-based, we didn't really need as much of the on-premise compute and storage as we had, and it was time to retire that cluster. And so I brought the experience I had with Nutanix with me, and we consolidated all that into a hyper-converged platform, running Nutanix AHV, which allowed us to get rid of all the cost of the VMware licensing as well and it is an easier platform to manage, especially for small IT shops like ours. >> Yeah, AHV is the Acropolis hypervisor and so you migrated off of VMware avoiding the VTax avoidance, that's a common theme among Nutanix customers and now, did you consider moving into AWS? You know, what was the catalyst to consider Wasabi as part of your defense strategy? >> We were looking at cloud storage options and they were just all so expensive, especially in egress fees to get data back out, Wasabi became across our desks and it was such a low barrier to entry to sign up for a trial and get, you know, terabyte for a month and then it was, you know, $6 a month for terabyte. After that, I said, we can try this out in a very low stakes way to see how this works for us. And there was a couple things we were trying to solve at the time, it wasn't just a place to put backup, but we also needed a place to have some files that might serve to some degree as a content delivery network, you know, some of our software applications that are deployed through our mobile device management needed a place that was accessible on the internet that they could be stored as well. So we were testing it for a couple different scenarios and it worked great, you know, performance wise, fast, security wise, it has all the features of S3 compliance that works with Nutanix and anyone who's familiar with S3 permissions can apply them very easily and then there was no egress fees, we can pull data down, put data up at will, and it's not costing as any extra, which is excellent because especially in education, we need fixed costs, we need to know what we're going to spend over a year before we spend it and not be hit with, you know, bills for egress or because our workload or our data storage footprint grew tremendously, we need that, we can't have the variability that the cloud providers would give us. >> So Kevin, you explained you're hypersensitive about security and privacy for obvious reasons that we discussed, were you concerned about doing business with a company with a funny name? Was it the trial that got you through that knothole? How did you address those concerns as an IT practitioner? >> Yeah, anytime we adopt anything, we go through a risk review. So we did our homework and we checked the funny name really means nothing, there's lots of companies with funny names, I think we don't go based on the name necessarily, but we did go based on the history, understanding, you know, who started the company, where it came from, and really looking into the technology and understanding that the value proposition, the ability to provide that lower cost is based specifically on the technology in which it lays down data. So, having a legitimate, reasonable, you know, excuse as to why it's cheap, we weren't thinking, well, you know, you get what you pay for, it may be less expensive than alternatives, but it's not cheap, you know, it's reliable, and that was really our concern. So we did our homework for sure before even starting the trial, but then the trial certainly confirmed everything that we had learned. >> Yeah, thank you for that. Drew, explain the whole egress charge, we hear a lot about that, what do people need to know? >> First of all, it's not a funny name, it's a memorable name, Dave, just like theCUBE, let's be very clear about that, second of all, egress charges, so, you know, other storage providers charge you for every API call, right? Every get, every put, every list, everything, okay, it's part of their process, it's part of how they make money, it's part of how they cover the cost of all their other services, we don't do that. And I think, you know, as Kevin has pointed out, right, that's a huge differentiator because you're talking about a significant amount of money above and beyond what is the list price. In fact, I would tell you that most of the other storage providers, hyperscalers, you know, their list price, first of all, is, you know, far exceeding anything else in the industry, especially what we offer and then, right, their additional cost, the egress costs, the API requests can be two, three, 400% more on top of what you're paying per terabyte. >> So, you used a little coffee analogy earlier in our conversation, so here's what I'm imagining, like I have a lot of stuff, right? And I had to clear up my bar and I put some stuff in storage, you know, right down the street and I pay them monthly, I can't imagine having to pay them to go get my stuff, that's kind of the same thing here. >> Oh, that's a great metaphor, right? That storage locker, right? You know, can you imagine every time you want to open the door to that storage locker and look inside having to pay a fee? >> No, that would be annoying. >> Or, every time you pull into the yard and you want to put something in that storage locker, you have to pay an access fee to get to the yard, you have to pay a door opening fee, right, and then if you want to look and get an inventory of everything in there, you have to pay, and it's ridiculous, it's your data, it's your storage, it's your locker, you've already paid the annual fee, probably, 'cause they gave you a discount on that, so why shouldn't you have unfettered access to your data? That's what Wasabi does and I think as Kevin pointed out, right, that's what sets us completely apart from everybody else. >> Okay, good, that's helpful, it helps us understand how Wasabi's different. Kevin, I'm always interested when I talk to practitioners like yourself in learning what you do, you know, outside of the technology, what are you doing in terms of educating your community and making them more cyber aware? Do you have training for students and faculty to learn about security and ransomware protection, for example? >> Yes, cyber security awareness training is definitely one of the required things everyone should be doing in their organizations. And we do have a program that we use and we try to make it fun and engaging too, right, this is often the checking the box kind of activity, insurance companies require it, but we want to make it something that people want to do and want to engage with so, even last year, I think we did one around the holidays and kind of pointed out the kinds of scams they may expect in their personal life about, you know, shipping of orders and time for the holidays and things like that, so it wasn't just about protecting our school data, it's about the fact that, you know, protecting their information is something do in all aspects of your life, especially now that the folks are working hybrid often working from home with equipment from the school, the stakes are much higher and people have a lot of our data at home and so knowing how to protect that is important, so we definitely run those programs in a way that we want to be engaging and fun and memorable so that when they do encounter those things, especially email threats, they know how to handle them. >> So when you say fun, it's like you come up with an example that we can laugh at until, of course, we click on that bad link, but I'm sure you can come up with a lot of interesting and engaging examples, is that what you're talking about, about having fun? >> Yeah, I mean, sometimes they are kind of choose your own adventure type stories, you know, they stop as they run, so they're telling a story and they stop and you have to answer questions along the way to keep going, so, you're not just watching a video, you're engaged with the story of the topic, yeah, and that's what I think is memorable about it, but it's also, that's what makes it fun, you're not just watching some talking head saying, you know, to avoid shortened URLs or to check, to make sure you know the sender of the email, no, you're engaged in a real life scenario story that you're kind of following and making choices along the way and finding out was that the right choice to make or maybe not? So, that's where I think the learning comes in. >> Excellent. Okay, gentlemen, thanks so much, appreciate your time, Kevin, Drew, awesome having you in theCUBE. >> My pleasure, thank you. >> Yeah, great to be here, thanks. >> Okay, in a moment, I'll give you some closing thoughts on the changing world of data protection and the evolution of cloud object storage, you're watching theCUBE, the leader in high tech enterprise coverage. >> Announcer: Some things just don't make sense, like showing up a little too early for the big game. >> How early are we? >> Couple months. Popcorn? >> Announcer: On and off season, the Red Sox cover their bases with affordable, best in class cloud storage. >> These are pretty good seats. >> Hey, have you guys seen the line from the bathroom? >> Announcer: Wasabi Hot Cloud Storage, it just makes sense. >> You don't think they make these in left hand, do you? >> We learned today how a serial entrepreneur, along with his co-founder saw the opportunity to tap into the virtually limitless scale of the cloud and dramatically reduce the cost of storing data while at the same time, protecting against ransomware attacks and other data exposures with simple, fast storage, immutability, air gaps, and solid operational processes, let's not forget about that, okay? People and processes are critical and if you can point your people at more strategic initiatives and tasks rather than wrestling with infrastructure, you can accelerate your process redesign and support of digital transformations. Now, if you want to learn more about immutability and Object Block, click on the Wasabi resource button on this page, or go to wasabi.com/objectblock. Thanks for watching Secure Storage Hot Takes made possible by Wasabi. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, the leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage, well, see you next time. (gentle upbeat music)

>>Hi, buddy. Welcome back to the keeps coverage of AWS 2021. Re-invent you're watching the cube and I'm really excited. We're going to go outside the storage box. I like to say with my lawn Thompson Bukovac, who's the vice-president of block and object storage and Wayne Duso was a VP of storage edge and data governance guys. Great to see you again, we saw you at storage day, the 15 year anniversary of AWS, of course, the first product service ever. So awesome to be here. Isn't it. Wow. >>So much energy in the room. It's so great to see customers learning from each other, learning from AWS, learning from the things that you're observing as well. >>A lot of companies decided not to do physical events. I think you guys are on the right side of history. We're going to show you, you weren't exactly positive. How many people are going to show up. Everybody showed. I mean, it's packed house here, so >>Number 10. Yeah. >>All right. So let's get right into it. Uh, news of the week. >>So much to say, when you want to kick this off, >>We had a, we had a great set of announcements that Milan, uh, talked about yesterday, uh, in her talk and, and a couple of them in the file space, specifically a new, uh, member of the FSX family. And if you remember that the FSA, Amazon FSX is, uh, for customers who want to run fully managed versions of third party and open source file systems on AWS. And so yesterday we announced a new member it's FSX for open ZFS. >>Okay, cool. And there's more, >>Well, there's more, I mean, one of the great things about the new match file service world and CFS is it's powered by gravity. >>It is taught by Gravatar and all of the capabilities that AWS brings in terms of networking, storage, and compute, uh, to our customers. >>So this is really important. I want the audience to understand this. So I I've talked on the cube about how a large proportion let's call it. 30% of the CPU cycles are kind of wasted really on things like offloads, and we could be much more efficient, so graviton much more efficient, lower power and better price performance, lower cost. Amazon is now on a new curve, uh, cycles are faster for processors, and you can take advantage of that in storage it's storage users, compute >>That's right? In fact, you have that big launch as well for luster, with gravity. >>We did in fact, uh, so with, with, uh, Yasmin of open CFS, we also announced the next gen Lustre offering. And both of these offerings, uh, provide a five X improvement in performance. For example, now with luster, uh, customers can drive up to one terabyte per second of throughput, which is simply amazing. And with open CFS, right out of, right out of the box at GA a million IOPS at sub-millisecond latencies taking advantage of gravitas, taking advantage of our storage and networking capabilities. >>Well, I guess it's for HPC workloads, but what's the difference between these days HPC, big data, data intensive, a lot of AI stuff, >>All right. You to just, there's a lot of intersection between all of those different types of workloads they have, as you said, and you know, it all, it all depends on it all matters. And this is the reason why having the suite of capabilities that the, if you would, the members of the family is so important to our guests. >>We've talked a lot about, it's really can't think about traditional storage as a traditional storage anymore. And certainly your world's not a box. It's really a data platform, but maybe you could give us your point of view on that. >>Yeah, I think, you know, if, if we look, if we take a step back and we think about how does AWS do storage? Uh, we think along multiple dimensions, we have the dimension that Wayne's talking about, where you bring together the power of compute and storage for these managed file services that are so popular. You and I talked about, um, NetApp ONTAP. Uh, we went into some detail on that with you as well, and that's been enormously popular. And so that whole dimension of these managed file services is all about where is the customer today and how can we help them get to the cloud? But then you think about the other things that we're also imagining, and we're, re-imagining how customers want to grow those applications and scale them. And so a great example here at reinvent is let's just take the concept of archive. >>So many people, when they think about archive, they think about taking that piece of data and putting it away on tape, putting it away in a closet somewhere, never pulling it out. We don't think about archive like that archive just happens to be data that you just aren't using at the moment, but when you need it, you need it right away. And that's why we built a new storage class that we launched just yesterday, Dave, and it's called glacier instead of retrieval, it has retrieval and milliseconds, just like an Esri storage class has the same pricing of four tenths of a cent as glacier archive. >>So what's interesting at the analyst event today, Adam got a question about, and somebody was poking at him, you know, analysts can be snarky sometimes about, you know, price, declines and so forth. And he said, you know, one of the, one of the things that's not always shown up and we don't always get credit for lowering prices, but we might lower costs. And there's the archive and deep archive is an example of that. Maybe you could explain that point of view. >>Yeah. The way we look at it is that our customers, when they talk to us about the cost of storage, they talked to us about the total cost of the storage, and it's not just storing the data, it's retrieving it and using it. And so we have done an amazing amount across all the portfolio around reducing costs. We have glacier answer retrieval, which is 68% cheaper than standard infrequent access. That's a big cost reduction. We have EBS snapshots archive, which we introduced yesterday, 75% cheaper to archive a snapshot. And these are the types of that just transform the total cost. And in some cases we just eliminate costs. And so the glacier storage class, all bulk retrievals of data from the glacier storage class five to 12 hours, it's now free of charge. If you don't even have to think about, we didn't even reduce it. We just eliminated the cost of that data retrieval >>And additive to what Milan said around, uh, archiving. If you look at what we've done throughout the entire year, you know, a interesting statistic that was brought up yesterday is over the course of 2021, between our respective teams, we've launched over 105 capabilities for our customers throughout this year. And in some of them, for instance, on the file side for EFS, we launched one zone which reduced, uh, customer costs by 47%. Uh, you can now achieve on EFS, uh, cost of roughly 4.30 cents per gigabyte month on, uh, FSX, we've reduced costs up to 92%, uh, on Lustre and FSX for windows and with the introduction of ONTAP and open CFS, we continue those forward, including customers ability to compress and Dedoose against those costs. So they ended up seeing a considerable savings, even over what our standard low prices are. >>100 plus, what can I call them releases? And how can you categorize those? Are they features of eight? Do they fall into, >>Because they range for major services, like what we've launched with open ZFS to major features and really 95 of those were launched before re-invent. And so really what you have between the different teams that work in storage is you have this relentless drive to improve all the storage platforms. And we do it all across the course of the year, all across the course of the year. And in some cases, the benefit shows up at no cost at all to a customer. >>Uh, how, how did this, it seems like you're on an accelerated pace, a S3 EBS, and then like hundreds of services. I guess the question is how come it took so long and how is it accelerating now? Is it just like, there was so much focus on compute before you had to get that in place, or, but now it's just rapidly accessing, >>I I'll tell you, Dave, we took the time to count this year. And so we came to you with this number of 106, uh, that acceleration has been in place for many years. We just didn't take the time to couch. Correct. So this has been happening for years and years. Wayne and I have been with AWS for, for a long time now for 10 plus years. And really that velocity that we're talking about right now that has been happening every single year, which is where you have storage today. And I got to tell you, innovation is in our DNA and we are not going to stop now >>So 10 years. Okay. So it was really, the first five years was kind of slow. And then >>I think that's true at all. I don't think that try, you know, if you, if you look at, uh, the services that we have, we have the most complete portfolio of any cloud provider when it comes to storage and data. And so over the years, we've added to the foundation, which is S3 and the foundation, which is EBS. We've come out with a number of storage services in the, in the file space. Now you have an entire suite of persistent data stores within AWS and the teams behind those that are able to accelerate that pace. Just to give you an example, when I joined 10 years ago, AWS launched within that year, roughly a hundred and twenty, a hundred and twenty eight services or features our teams together this year have launched almost that many, just in those in, just in this space. So AWS continues to accelerate the storage teams continue to accelerate. And as my line said, we just started counting >>The thing. And if you think about those first five years, that was laying the baseline to launch us three, to launch EBS, to get that foundation in place, get lifecycle policies in place. But really, I think you're just going to see an even faster acceleration that number's going up. >>No, I that's what I'm saying. It does appear that way. And you had to build a team and put teams in place. And so that's, you know, part of the equation. But again, I come back to, it's not even, I don't even think of it as storage anymore. It's it's data. People are data lake is here to stay. You might not like the term. We always use the joke about a data ocean, but data lake is here to say 200,000 data lakes. Now we heard Adam talk about, uh, this morning. I think it was Adam. No, it was Swami. Do you want a thousand data lakes in your customer base now? And people are adding value to that data in new ways, injecting machine intelligence, you know, SageMaker is a big piece of that. Tying it in. I know a lot of customers are using glue as catalogs and which I'm like, wow, is glue a catalog or, I mean, it's just so flexible. So what are you seeing customers do with that base of data now and driving new business value? Because I've said last decade plus has been about it transformation. And now we're seeing business transformation. Maybe you could talk about that a little bit. >>Well, the base of every data lake is going to be as three yesterday has over 200 trillion objects. Now, Dave, and if you think about that, if you took every person on the planet, each of those people would have 26,000 S3 objects. It's gotten that big. And you know, if you think about the base of data with 200 trillion plus objects, really the opportunity for innovation is limitless. And you know, a great example for that is it's not just business value. It's really the new customer experiences that our customers are inventing the NFL. Uh, they, you know, they have that application called digital athlete where, you know, they started off with 10,000 labeled images or up to 20,000 labeled images now. And they're all using it to drive machine learning models that help predict and support the players on the field when they start to see things unfold that might cause injury. That is a brand new experience. And it's only possible with vast amounts of data >>Additive to when my line said, we're, we're in you talk about business transformation. We are in the age of data and we represent storage services. But what we really represent is what our customers hold one of their most valuable assets, which is their data. And that set of data is only growing. And the ability to use that data, to leverage that data for value, whether it's ML training, whether it's analytics, that's only accelerated, this is the feedback we get from our customers. This is where these features and new capabilities come from. So that's, what's really accelerating our pace >>Guys. I wish we had more time. I'd have to have you back because we're on a tight clock here, but, um, so great to see you both especially live. I hope we get to do more of this in 2022. I'm an optimist. Okay. And keep it right there, everybody. This is Dave Volante for the cube you're leader in live tech coverage, right back.

>>mhm mhm >>Hey guys, welcome back to Los Angeles lisa martin. Coming to you live from cuba con and cloud native Con north America 2021. Very excited to be here. This is our third day of back to back coverage on the cube and we've got a couple of guests cube alumni joining me remotely. Please welcome parse our karate senior consultant, product marketing, Dell Technologies and David Noi VP product management at Dell Technologies. Gentlemen welcome back to the program. >>Thanks johnny >>so far so let's go ahead and start with you. Let's talk about what Dell EMC is offering to developers today in terms of unstructured data. >>Absolutely, it's great to be here. So let me start with the container storage interface. This is Q khan and a couple of years ago the container storage interface was still in beta and the storage vendors, we're very enthusiastically kind of building the plug in city of the different storage portfolio to offer enterprise grade features to developers are building applications of the Cuban this platform. And today if you look at the deli in storage portfolio, big block volumes. Nash shares s three object A P I S beyond their virtual volumes. However you're consuming storage, you have the plug ins that are required to run your applications with these enterprise Great feature speech right about snap sharks data replication, all available in the Cuban this layer and just this week at coupon we announced the container storage modules which is kind of the next step of productivity for developers beat you know uh in terms of observe ability of the storage metrics using tools like Prometheus visualizing it ravana authorization capabilities so that you know too bad moments can have better resource management of the storage that is being consumed um that so there are these multiple models were released. And if you look at unstructured data, this term may be a bit new for our kind of not very family for developers but basically the storage. Well there is a distinction that is being made you know, between primary storage and unstructured storage or unstructured data solutions And by unstructured we mean file and object storage. If you look at the cube contact nickel sessions, I was very glad to see that there is an entire stream for um machine learning and data so that speaks to how popular communities deployment models are getting when it comes to machine learning and artificial intelligence. Um even applications like genomics and media and entertainment and with the container storage interface uh and the container storage modules with the object storage portfolio that bill has, we offer the comprehensive unstructured data solutions for developers beat object or file. And the advantage the developers are getting is these you know, if you look at platforms like power scale and these areas, these are like the industry workhorses with the highest performance. And if you think of scale, you know, think of 250 nasnotes, you know with a single name space with NVIDIA gpu direct capabilities. All these capabilities developers can use um for you know, applications like machine learning or any competition intensive for data intensive applications that requires these nass uh scale of mass platforms. So so um that's that's what is new in terms of uh what we are offering, you have the storage heaters >>got a parcel. Thank you. David, let's bring you into the conversation now you've launched objects scale at VM World. Talk to us about that, what some of the key features and capabilities are and some of those big business benefits that customers are going to be able to achieve. >>Sure thing. So I really want to focus on three of the biggest benefits. This would be the fact that the product is actually based on kubernetes country, the scale of the product and then its ability to do global replication. So let me just touch on those in order. Mhm You said that the product is based on kubernetes and here we are cube concept. The perfect time to be talking about that. This product really caters to those who are looking for a flexible way to deploy object storage in containerized fashion, appeals to the devops folks and folks who like to automate things and call the communities a P I. S to make uh the actual deployment of the product. Very simple in turnkey and that's really what people turn to kubernetes for is the ability to spin things up when they need them and spend them down as they don't and make that all on commodity hardware and commodity, you know, the quantity pricing and the idea there is that I'm making it as simple and easy as possible. You're not going to get as much shadow I. T. You won't have people going off and putting things off into a public cloud. And so where security of an organization or control of the data that flows with an organization is important. Having something that's easy for developers to use in the same paradigm that they're used to is critical. Now I talked about scale and you know, if you have come to me two years ago I would have told you, you know, kubernetes, yeah, containers people are kicking it around and they're doing some interesting science experiments, I would say in the last year I started to see a lot of requests from customers um in the dozens, even 200 petabyte range as it relates to capacity for committees and specifically looking for C. S. I and cozy with this. This this is the the object storage implementation of the container storage interfaces. Uh So skin was definitely there and the idea of this product is to provide easy scalability from the terabytes range into the multi petabyte range and again it's that ease of use, ease of deployment because it is kubernetes basically because it's a KPI driven that makes that possible. So we're talking about going from a three night minimum to thousands of nodes. and this allows people to deploy the product either at the edge or in the data center um in the edge because you can get very small deployments in the data center to massive scale. So we want to provide something that covers the gamut. The last thing I talked about was replication. So let me just touch upon what I mean by that uh when people go and build these deployments, if you're building a deployment at the edge of an object scale product, you're probably taking in sensor data or some kind of information that you want to then send back to a data center for processing. So you make it simple to do bucket based replication. An object, sorry object storage based replication to move things to another location. And uh that can be used either for bringing data back for analytics from the edge, it can be used for availability. So making sure that you have data available across multiple data centers in the case that you have an outage. It could be even used for sharing data between developers in one site and another site. So we provide that level of flexibility overall. Um this is the next generation object store leveraging. Dell technologies number one position in object storage. So I'm pretty excited about >>and how David is object scale integrated with VM ware software. Stop give us that slice and dice. >>Yeah, and that's a good question. And so, you know, we're talking about this being a Kubernetes based product, you can deploy it on open shift or we integrate directly with VM ware cloud foundation and with Tansy, which is VM ware's container orchestration and management platform. I've seen the demo of the product myself from my team and they've showed it to be did all of the management of the product was actually done within the V sphere Ui, which is great. So easy to go and just enter the V sphere. You I installed the product very simply have it up and running and then go and do all of your management through that user interface or to automate it using the same api is that you used to through VM ware and the 10 Zoo uh platform. >>Thank you, paris are back to you. Security is a big theme here in kubernetes. It's also been a big theme here. We've been talking about it the last three days here at cop con. How does Dell EMC's unstructured portfolio offer that necessary cyber protection that developers need to have and bake that into what they're doing. So >>surely, you know, they talk about cybersecurity, you know, there are different layers of security right from, you know, smarter firewalls to you know how to manage privileged account access and so on. And what we are trying to do is to provide a layer of cyber defense, right at the asset that you're trying to protect, which is the data and this is where the ransom their defender solution is basically detecting any patterns of the compromise that might have happened and alerting the I. T. Um administration about this um possible um intrusions into their into the data by looking at the data access parents in real time. So that's a pretty big deal. Then we're actually putting all this, you know, observance on the primary data and that's what the power scale platform cybersecurity protection features offers. Now we've also extended this kind of detection mechanism for the object data framework on pcs platforms as well. So this is like an additional layer of security at the um layer of uh you know where the data is actually being read and written. Do that's the area, you know, in case of object here we're looking at the S. Three traffic and trying to find his parents in case of a file data atmosphere, looking at the file's access parents and so on. So and in relation to this we're also providing uh data isolation mechanism that is very critical in many cyber recovery processes with the smart absolution as well. So this is something that the developers are getting for like without having to worry about it because that is something implemented at the infrastructure layer itself. So they don't have to worry about you know trying to court it or develop their application to integrate these kinds of things because it's an it's embedded in the infrastructure at the one of the FBI level at the E C. S A P I level. So that's pretty um pretty differentiating in the industry in the country storage solutions. I'll get. >>Uh huh. Yeah. I mean look if you look at what a lot of the object storage players are doing as it relates to cyber security. They're they're playing off the fact that they've implemented object lock and basically using that to lockdown data. And that's that's good. I mean I'm glad that they're doing that and if the case that you were able to lock something down and someone wasn't able to bypass that in some way, that's fantastic. Or if they didn't already encrypted before I got locked down what parts are is referring to is a little bit more than that. It's actually the ability to look at user behavior and determined that something bad is happening. So this is about actually being able to do, you know, predictive analytics being able to go and figure out that you're under attack. There's anomalous behavior um and we're able to go and actually infer from that that something bad is happening and where we think it's happening and lock it down even even more securely than for example just saying hey we provide object like capabilities which is one of the responses that I've seen out there from object storage vendors >>can you share with us. Parts are a customer example like walk us through how this is actually being used and deployed and what some of those business outcomes are. >>Yes lisa. So in terms of container realization itself, they have a media and entertainment kind of customer story here. Um Swiss TXT um they have a platform as a service where they serve their customer base with a range of uh you know, media production and broadcasting solutions and they have containers this platform and part of this computerization is part of their services is they offer infrastructure as a service to you know, media producers who need a high performance storage, high performance computing and power skill And Iceland have been their local solutions to offer this And now that they have containerized their core platform. Well you see a sign interface for power skills, they are able to continue to deliver the infrastructure, high performance infrastructure and storage services to their customers through the A. P I. And it's great to see how fast they could, you know, re factor their application but yet continue to offer the high performance and degrees enterprise grade uh features of the power scale platform. So Swiss Txt and would love to share more. Keep it on the story. Yeah. Hyperlink. >>And where can folks go to learn more about objects scale and what you guys are announcing? Yes, particular. You are a website that you want to direct folks too. >>I would say that technologies dot com. And uh that's the best place to start. >>Yeah, I would go to the Delta product pages around objects should be publicly built. >>Excellent guys, thank you for joining me on the program today. Walking through what how Dell EMC is helping developers with respect to unstructured data, Talking to us about objects skill that you launched VM world, some of those big customer benefits and of course showing us the validation, the proof in the pudding with that customer story. We appreciate your insights. >>Thank you. Thank you lisa >>For my guests. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube live from Los Angeles. We're coming to you from our coverage of coupon and cloud native on North America 21. Coming back. Stick around. Rather I should say we'll be back after a short break with our next guest.

(upbeat music) >> Welcome everybody to this CUBE Conversation. My name is Dave Vellante, and we're here to talk about Object storage and the momentum in the space. And what Dell Technologies is doing to compete in this market, I'm joined today by Anahad Dhillon, who's the Product Manager for Dell, EMC's ECS, and new ObjectScale products. Anahad, welcome to theCUBE, good to see you. >> Thank you so much Dave. We appreciate you having me and Dell (indistinct), thanks. >> Its always a pleasure to have you guys on, we dig into the products, talk about the trends, talk about what customers are doing. Anahad before the Cloud, Object was this kind of niche we seen. And you had simple get, put, it was a low cost bit bucket essentially, but that's changing. Tell us some of the trends in the Object storage market that you're observing, and how Dell Technology sees this space evolving in the future please. >> Absolutely, and you hit it right on, right? Historically, Object storage was considered this cheap and deep place, right? Customers would use this for their backup data, archive data, so cheap and deep, no longer the case, right? As you pointed out, the ObjectSpace is now maturing. It's a mature market and we're seeing out there customers using Object or their primary data so, for their business critical data. So we're seeing big data analytics that we use cases. So it's no longer just cheap and deep, now your primary workloads and business critical workloads being put on with an object storage now. >> Yeah, I mean. >> And. >> Go ahead please. >> Yeah, I was going to say, there's not only the extend of the workload being put in, we'll also see changes in how Object storage is being deployed. So now we're seeing a tighter integration with new depth models where Object storage or any storage in general is being deployed. Our applications are being (indistinct), right? So customers now want Object storage or storage in general being orchestrated like they would orchestrate their customer applications. Those are the few key trends that we're seeing out there today. >> So I want to dig into this a little bit with you 'cause you're right. It used to be, it was cheap and deep, it was slow and it required sometimes application changes to accommodate. So you mentioned a few of the trends, Devs, everybody's trying to inject AI into their applications, the world has gone software defined. What are you doing to respond to all these changes in these trends? >> Absolutely, yeah. So we've been making tweaks to our object offering, the ECS, Elastic Cloud Storage for a while. We started off tweaking the software itself, optimizing it for performance use cases. In 2020, early 2020, we actually introduced SSDs to our notes. So customers were able to go in, leverage these SSD's for metadata caching improving their performance quite a bit. We use these SSDs for metadata caching. So the impact on the performance improvement was focused on smaller reads and writes. What we did now is a game changer. We actually went ahead later in 2020, introduced an all flash appliance. So now, EXF900 and ECS all flash appliance, it's all NVME based. So it's NVME SSDs and we leveraged NVME over fabric xx for the back end. So we did it the right way did. We didn't just go in and qualified an SSD based server and ran object storage on it, we invested time and effort into supporting NVME fabric. So we could give you that performance at scale, right? Object is known for scale. We're not talking 10, 12 nodes here, we're talking hundreds of nodes. And to provide you that kind of performance, we went to ahead. Now you've got an NVME based offering EXF900 that you can deploy with confidence, run your primary workloads that require high throughput and low latency. We also come November 5th, are releasing our next gen SDS offering, right? This takes the Troven ECS code that our customers are familiar with that provides the resiliency and the security that you guys expect from Dell. We're re platforming it to run on Kubernetes and be orchestrated by Kubernetes. This is what we announced that VMware 2021. If you guys haven't seen that, is going to go on-demand for VMware 2021, search for ObjectScale and you get a quick demo on that. With ObjectScale now, customers can quickly deploy enterprise grade Object storage on their existing environment, their existing infrastructure, things like VMware, infrastructure like VMware and infrastructure like OpenShift. I'll give you an example. So if you were in a VMware shop that you've got vSphere clusters in your data center, with ObjectScale, you'll be able to quickly deploy your Object enterprise grid Object offering from within vSphere. Or if you are an OpenShift customer, right? If you've got OpenShift deployed in your data center and your Red Hat shop, you could easily go in, use that same infrastructure that your applications are running on, deploy ObjectScale on top of your OpenShift infrastructure and make available Object storage to your customers. So you've got the enterprise grade ECS appliance or your high throughput, low latency use cases at scale, and you've got this software defined ObjectScale, which can deploy on your existing infrastructure, whether that's VMware or Red Hat OpenShift. >> Okay, I got a lot of follow up questions, but let me just go back to one of the earlier things you said. So Object was kind of cheap, deep and slow, but scaled. And so, your step one was metadata caching. Now of course, my understanding is with Object, the metadata and the data within the object. So, maybe you separated that and made it high performance, but now you've taken the next step to bring in NVME infrastructure to really blow away all the old sort of scuzzy latency and all that stuff. Maybe you can just educate us a little bit on that if you don't mind. >> Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that was exactly the stepped approach that we took. Even though metadata is tightly integrated in Object world, in order to read the actual data, you still got to get to the metadata first, right? So we would cache the metadata into SSDs reducing that lookup that happens for that metadata, right? And that's why it gave you the performance benefit. But because it was just tied to metadata look-ups, the performance for larger objects stayed the same because the actual data read was still happening from the hard drives, right? With the new EXF900 which is all NVME based, we've optimized the our ECS Object code leveraging VME, data sitting on NVME drives, the internet connectivity, the communication is NVME over fabric, so it's through and through NVME. Now we're talking milliseconds and latency and thousands and thousands of transactions per second. >> Got it, okay. So this is really an inflection point for Objects. So these are pretty interesting times at Dell, you got the cloud expanding on prem, your company is building cloud-like capabilities to connect on-prem to the cloud across cloud, you're going out to the edge. As it pertains to Object storage though, it sounds like you're taking a sort of a two product approach to your strategy. Why is that, and can you talk about the go-to market strategy in that regard? >> Absolutely, and yeah, good observation there. So yes and no, so we continued to invest in ECS. ECS continues to stay a product of choice when customer wants that traditional appliance deployment model. But this is a single hand to shape model where you're everything from your hardware to your software the object solution software is all provided by Dell. ECS continues to be the product where customers are looking for that high performance, fine tune appliance use case. ObjectScale comes into play when the needs are software defined. When you need to deploy the storage solution on top of the same infrastructure that your applications are run, right? So yes, in the short-term, in the interim, it's a two product approach of both products taking a very distinct use case. However, in the long-term, we're merging the two quote streams. So in the long-term, if you're an ECS customer and you're running ECS, you will have an in-place data upgrade to ObjectScale. So we're not talking about no forklift upgrades, we're not talking about you're adding additional servers and do a data migration, it's a code upgrade. And then I'll give you an example, today on ECS, we're at code variation 3.6, right? So if you're a customer running ECS, ECS 3.X in the future, and so we've got a roadmap where 3.7 is coming out later on this year. So from 3.X, customers will upgrade the code data in place. Let's call it 4.0, right? And that brings them up to ObjectScale. So there's no nodes left behind, there's an in-place code upgrade from ECS to the ObjectScale merging the two code streams and the long-term, single code, short-term, two products for both solving the very distinct users. >> Okay, let me follow up, put on my customer hat. And I'm hearing that you can tell us with confidence that irrespective of whether a customer invested ECS or ObjectScale, you're not going to put me into a dead-end. Every customer is going to have a path forward as long as their ECS code is up-to-date, is that correct? >> Absolutely, exactly, and very well put, yes. No nodes left behind, investment protection, whether you've got ECS today, or you want to invest into ECS or ObjectScale in the future, correct. >> Talk a little bit more about ObjectScale. I'm interested in kind of what's new there, what's special about this product, is there unique functionality that you're adding to the product? What differentiates it from other Object stores? >> Absolutely, my pleasure. Yeah, so I'll start by reiterating that ObjectScale it's built on that Troven ECS code, right? It's the enterprise grid, reliability and security that our customers expect from Dell EMC, right? Now we're re platforming ECS who allow ObjectScale to be Kubernetes native, right? So we're leveraging that microservices-based architecture, leveraging that native orchestration capabilities of Kubernetes, things like resource isolation or seamless (indistinct), I'm sorry, load balancing and things like that, right? So the in-built native capabilities of Kubernetes. ObjectScale is also build with scale in mind, right? So it delivers limitless scale. So you could start with terabytes and then go up to petabytes and beyond. So unlike other file system-based Object offerings, ObjectScale software would have a limit on your number of object stores, number of buckets, number of objects you store, it's limitless. As long as you can provide the hardware resources under the covers, the software itself is limitless. It allows our customers to start small, so you could start as small as three node and grow their environment as your business grows, right? Hundreds of notes. With ObjectScale, you can deploy workloads at public clouds like scale, but with the reliability and control of a private cloud data, right? So, it's then your own data center. And ObjectScale is S3 compliant, right? So while delivering the enterprise features like global replication, native multi-tenancy, fueling everything from Dev Test Sandbox to globally distributed data, right? So you've got in-built ObjectScale replication that allows you to place your data anywhere you got ObjectScale (indistinct). From edge to core to data center. >> Okay, so it fits into the Kubernetes world. I call it Kubernetes compatible. The key there is automation, because that's the whole point of containers is, right? It allows you to deploy as many apps as you need to, wherever you need to in as many instances and then do rolling updates, have the same security, same API, all that level of consistency. So that's really important. That's how modern apps are being developed. We're in a new age year. It's no longer about the machines, it's about infrastructure as code. So once ObjectScale is generally available which I think is soon, I think it's this year, What should customers do, what's their next step? >> Absolutely, yeah, it's coming out November 2nd. Reach out to your Dell representatives, right? Get an in-depth demo on ObjectScale. Better yet, you get a POC, right? Get a proof of concept, have it set up in your data center and play with it. You can also download the free full featured community edition. We're going to have a community edition that's free up to 30 terabytes of usage, it's full featured. Download that, play with it. If you like it, you can upgrade that free community edition, will license paid version. >> And you said that's full featured. You're not neutering the community edition? >> Exactly, absolutely, it's full featured. >> Nice, that's a great strategy. >> We're confident, we're confident in what we're delivering, and we want you guys to play with it without having your money tied up. >> Nice, I mean, that's the model today. Gone are the days where you got to get new customers in a headlock to get them to, they want to try before they buy. So that's a great little feature. Anahad, thanks so much for joining us on theCUBE. Sounds like it's been a very busy year and it's going to continue to be so. Look forward to see what's coming out with ECS and ObjectScale and seeing those two worlds come together, thank you. >> Yeah, absolutely, it was a pleasure. Thank you so much. >> All right, and thank you for watching this CUBE Conversation. This is Dave Vellante, we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome everybody to this CUBE Conversation. My name is Dave Vellante, and we're here to talk about Object storage and the momentum in the space. And what Dell Technologies is doing to compete in this market, I'm joined today by Anahad Dhillon, who's the Product Manager for Dell, EMC's ECS, and new ObjectScale products. Anahad, welcome to theCUBE, good to see you. >> Thank you so much Dave. We appreciate you having me and Dell (indistinct), thanks. >> Its always a pleasure to have you guys on, we dig into the products, talk about the trends, talk about what customers are doing. Anahad before the Cloud, Object was this kind of niche we seen. And you had simple get, put, it was a low cost bit bucket essentially, but that's changing. Tell us some of the trends in the Object storage market that you're observing, and how Dell Technology sees this space evolving in the future please. >> Absolutely, and you hit it right on, right? Historically, Object storage was considered this cheap and deep place, right? Customers would use this for their backup data, archive data, so cheap and deep, no longer the case, right? As you pointed out, the ObjectSpace is now maturing. It's a mature market and we're seeing out there customers using Object or their primary data so, for their business critical data. So we're seeing big data analytics that we use cases. So it's no longer just cheap and deep, now your primary workloads and business critical workloads being put on with an object storage now. >> Yeah, I mean. >> And. >> Go ahead please. >> Yeah, I was going to say, there's not only the extend of the workload being put in, we'll also see changes in how Object storage is being deployed. So now we're seeing a tighter integration with new depth models where Object storage or any storage in general is being deployed. Our applications are being (indistinct), right? So customers now want Object storage or storage in general being orchestrated like they would orchestrate their customer applications. Those are the few key trends that we're seeing out there today. >> So I want to dig into this a little bit with you 'cause you're right. It used to be, it was cheap and deep, it was slow and it required sometimes application changes to accommodate. So you mentioned a few of the trends, Devs, everybody's trying to inject AI into their applications, the world has gone software defined. What are you doing to respond to all these changes in these trends? >> Absolutely, yeah. So we've been making tweaks to our object offering, the ECS, Elastic Cloud Storage for a while. We started off tweaking the software itself, optimizing it for performance use cases. In 2020, early 2020, we actually introduced SSDs to our notes. So customers were able to go in, leverage these SSD's for metadata caching improving their performance quite a bit. We use these SSDs for metadata caching. So the impact on the performance improvement was focused on smaller reads and writes. What we did now is a game changer. We actually went ahead later in 2020, introduced an all flash appliance. So now, EXF900 and ECS all flash appliance, it's all NVME based. So it's NVME SSDs and we leveraged NVME over fabric xx for the back end. So we did it the right way did. We didn't just go in and qualified an SSD based server and ran object storage on it, we invested time and effort into supporting NVME fabric. So we could give you that performance at scale, right? Object is known for scale. We're not talking 10, 12 nodes here, we're talking hundreds of nodes. And to provide you that kind of performance, we went to ahead. Now you've got an NVME based offering EXF900 that you can deploy with confidence, run your primary workloads that require high throughput and low latency. We also come November 5th, are releasing our next gen SDS offering, right? This takes the Troven ECS code that our customers are familiar with that provides the resiliency and the security that you guys expect from Dell. We're re platforming it to run on Kubernetes and be orchestrated by Kubernetes. This is what we announced that VMware 2021. If you guys haven't seen that, is going to go on-demand for VMware 2021, search for ObjectScale and you get a quick demo on that. With ObjectScale now, customers can quickly deploy enterprise grade Object storage on their existing environment, their existing it infrastructure, things like VMware, infrastructure like VMware and infrastructure like OpenShift. I'll give you an example. So if you were in a VMware shop that you've got vSphere clusters in your data center, with ObjectScale, you'll be able to quickly deploy your Object enterprise grid Object offering from within vSphere. Or if you are an OpenShift customer, right? If you've got OpenShift deployed in your data center and your Red Hat shop, you could easily go in, use that same infrastructure that your applications are running on, deploy ObjectScale on top of your OpenShift infrastructure and make available Object storage to your customers. So you've got the enterprise grade ECS appliance or your high throughput, low latency use cases at scale, and you've got this software defined ObjectScale, which can deploy on your existing infrastructure, whether that's VMware or Red Hat OpenShift. >> Okay, I got a lot of follow up questions, but let me just go back to one of the earlier things you said. So Object was kind of cheap, deep and slow, but scaled. And so, your step one was metadata caching. Now of course, my understanding is with Object, the metadata and the data within the object. So, maybe you separated that and made it high performance, but now you've taken the next step to bring in NVME infrastructure to really blow away all the old sort of scuzzy latency and all that stuff. Maybe you can just educate us a little bit on that if you don't mind. >> Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that was exactly the stepped approach that we took. Even though metadata is tightly integrated in Object world, in order to read the actual data, you still got to get to the metadata first, right? So we would cache the metadata into SSDs reducing that lookup that happens for that metadata, right? And that's why it gave you the performance benefit. But because it was just tied to metadata look-ups, the performance for larger objects stayed the same because the actual data read was still happening from the hard drives, right? With the new EXF900 which is all NVME based, we've optimized the our ECS Object code leveraging VME, data sitting on NVME drives, the internet connectivity, the communication is NVME over fabric, so it's through and through NVME. Now we're talking milliseconds and latency and thousands and thousands of transactions per second. >> Got it, okay. So this is really an inflection point for Objects. So these are pretty interesting times at Dell, you got the cloud expanding on prem, your company is building cloud-like capabilities to connect on-prem to the cloud across cloud, you're going out to the edge. As it pertains to Object storage though, it sounds like you're taking a sort of a two product approach to your strategy. Why is that, and can you talk about the go-to market strategy in that regard? >> Absolutely, and yeah, good observation there. So yes and no, so we continued to invest in ECS. ECS continues to stay a product of choice when customer wants that traditional appliance deployment model. But this is a single hand to shape model where you're everything from your hardware to your software the object solution software is all provided by Dell. ECS continues to be the product where customers are looking for that high performance, fine tune appliance use case. ObjectScale comes into play when the needs are software defined. When you need to deploy the storage solution on top of the same infrastructure that your applications are run, right? So yes, in the short-term, in the interim, it's a two product approach of both products taking a very distinct use case. However, in the long-term, we're merging the two quote streams. So in the long-term, if you're an ECS customer and you're running ECS, you will have an in-place data upgrade to ObjectScale. So we're not talking about no forklift upgrades, we're not talking about you're adding additional servers and do a data migration, it's a code upgrade. And then I'll give you an example, today on ECS, we're at code variation 3.6, right? So if you're a customer running ECS, ECS 3.X in the future, and so we've got a roadmap where 3.7 is coming out later on this year. So from 3.X, customers will upgrade the code data in place. Let's call it 4.0, right? And that brings them up to ObjectScale. So there's no nodes left behind, there's an in-place code upgrade from ECS to the ObjectScale merging the two code streams and the long-term, single code, short-term, two products for both solving the very distinct users. >> Okay, let me follow up, put on my customer hat. And I'm hearing that you can tell us with confidence that irrespective of whether a customer invested ECS or ObjectScale, you're not going to put me into a dead-end. Every customer is going to have a path forward as long as their ECS code is up-to-date, is that correct? >> Absolutely, exactly, and very well put, yes. No nodes left behind, investment protection, whether you've got ECS today, or you want to invest into ECS or ObjectScale in the future, correct. >> Talk a little bit more about ObjectScale. I'm interested in kind of what's new there, what's special about this product, is there unique functionality that you're adding to the product? What differentiates it from other Object stores? >> Absolutely, my pleasure. Yeah, so I'll start by reiterating that ObjectScale it's built on that Troven ECS code, right? It's the enterprise grid, reliability and security that our customers expect from Dell EMC, right? Now we're re platforming ECS who allow ObjectScale to be Kubernetes native, right? So we're leveraging that microservices-based architecture, leveraging that native orchestration capabilities of Kubernetes, things like resource isolation or seamless (indistinct), I'm sorry, load balancing and things like that, right? So the in-built native capabilities of Kubernetes. ObjectScale is also build with scale in mind, right? So it delivers limitless scale. So you could start with terabytes and then go up to petabytes and beyond. So unlike other file system-based Object offerings, ObjectScale software would have a limit on your number of object stores, number of buckets, number of objects you store, it's limitless. As long as you can provide the hardware resources under the covers, the software itself is limitless. It allows our customers to start small, so you could start as small as three node and grow their environment as your business grows, right? Hundreds of notes. With ObjectScale, you can deploy workloads at public clouds like scale, but with the reliability and control of a private cloud data, right? So, it's then your own data center. And ObjectScale is S3 compliant, right? So while delivering the enterprise features like global replication, native multi-tenancy, fueling everything from Dev Test Sandbox to globally distributed data, right? So you've got in-built ObjectScale replication that allows you to place your data anywhere you got ObjectScale (indistinct). From edge to core to data center. >> Okay, so it fits into the Kubernetes world. I call it Kubernetes compatible. The key there is automation, because that's the whole point of containers is, right? It allows you to deploy as many apps as you need to, wherever you need to in as many instances and then do rolling updates, have the same security, same API, all that level of consistency. So that's really important. That's how modern apps are being developed. We're in a new age year. It's no longer about the machines, it's about infrastructure as code. So once ObjectScale is generally available which I think is soon, I think it's this year, What should customers do, what's their next step? >> Absolutely, yeah, it's coming out November 2nd. Reach out to your Dell representatives, right? Get an in-depth demo on ObjectScale. Better yet, you get a POC, right? Get a proof of concept, have it set up in your data center and play with it. You can also download the free full featured community edition. We're going to have a community edition that's free up to 30 terabytes of usage, it's full featured. Download that, play with it. If you like it, you can upgrade that free community edition, will license paid version. >> And you said that's full featured. You're not neutering the community edition? >> Exactly, absolutely, it's full featured. >> Nice, that's a great strategy. >> We're confident, we're confident in what we're delivering, and we want you guys to play with it without having your money tied up. >> Nice, I mean, that's the model today. Gone are the days where you got to get new customers in a headlock to get them to, they want to try before they buy. So that's a great little feature. Anahad, thanks so much for joining us on theCUBE. Sounds like it's been a very busy year and it's going to continue to be so. Look forward to see what's coming out with ECS and ObjectScale and seeing those two worlds come together, thank you. >> Yeah, absolutely, it was a pleasure. Thank you so much. >> All right, and thank you for watching this CUBE Conversation. This is Dave Vellante, we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

(bright music) >> Welcome to this next session of AWS Storage Day. I'm your host, Dave Vellante of theCUBE. And right now we're going to explore how to simplify and evolve your data lake backup disaster recovery and analytics in the cloud. And we're joined by Kevin Miller who's the general manager of Amazon S3. Kevin, welcome. >> Thanks Dave. Great to see you again. >> Good to see you too. So listen, S3 started as like a small ripple in the pond and over the last 15 years, I mean, it's fundamentally changed the storage market. We used to think about storage as, you know, a box of disc drives that either store data in blocks or file formats and then object storage at the time it was, kind of used in archival storage, it needed specialized application interfaces, S3 changed all that. Why do you think that happened? >> Well, I think first and foremost, it's really just, the customers appreciated the value of S3 and being fully managed where, you know, we manage capacity. Capacity is always available for our customers to bring new data into S3 and really therefore to remove a lot of the constraints around building their applications and deploying new workloads and testing new workloads where they know that if something works great, it can scale up by a 100x or a 1000x. And if it doesn't work, they can remove the data and move on to the next application or next experiment they want to try. And so, you know, really, it's exciting to me. Really exciting when I see businesses across essentially every industry, every geography, you know, innovate and really use data in new and really interesting ways within their business to really drive actual business results. So it's not just about building data, having data to build a report and have a human look at a report, but actually really drive the day-to-day operations of their business. So that can include things like personalization or doing deeper analytics in industrial and manufacturing. A customer like Georgia-Pacific for example, I think is one of the great examples where they use a big data lake and collect a lot of sensor data, IoT sensor data off of their paper manufacturing machines. So they can run them at just the right speed to avoid tearing the paper as it's going through, which really just keeps their machines running more and therefore, you know, just reduce their downtime and costs associated with it. So you know, it's just that transformation again, across many industries, almost every industry that I can think of. That's really what's been exciting to see and continue to see. I think we're still in the really early days of what we're going to see as far as that innovation goes. >> Yeah, I got to agree. I mean, it's been pretty remarkable. Maybe you could talk about the pace of innovation for S3. I mean, if anything, it seems to be accelerating. How Kevin, does AWS, how has it thought about innovation over the past decade plus and where do you see it headed? >> Yeah, that's a great question Dave, really innovation is at our core as part of our core DNA. S3 launched more than 15 years ago, almost 16 years old. We're going to get a learner's permit for it next year. But, you know, as it's grown to exabytes of storage and trillions of objects, we've seen almost every use case you can imagine. I'm sure there's a new one coming that we haven't seen yet, but we've learned a lot from those use cases. And every year we just think about what can we do next to further simplify. And so you've seen that as we've launched over the last few years, things like S3 Intelligent Tiering, which was really the clouds first storage class to automatically optimize and reduce customer's costs for storage, for data that they were storing for a long time. And based on, you know, variable access patterns. We launched S3 Access Points to provide a simpler way to have different applications operating on shared data sets. And we launched earlier this year S3 Object Lambda, which really is, I think, cool technology. We're just starting to see how it can be applied to simplify serverless application development. Really the next wave, I think, of application development that doesn't need, not only is the storage fully managed, but the compute is fully managed as well. Really just simplify that whole end to end application development. >> Okay, so we heard this morning in the keynote, some exciting news. What can you tell us, Kevin? >> Yeah, so this morning we launched S3 Multi-Region Access Points and these are access points that give you a single global endpoint to access data sets that can span multiple S3 buckets in different AWS regions around the world. And so this allows you to build these multi-region applications and multi-region architectures with, you know, with the same approach that you use in a single region and then run these applications anywhere around the world. >> Okay. So if I interpret this correctly, it's a good fit for organizations with clients or operations around the globe. So for instance, gaming, news outlets, think of content delivery types of customers. Should we think about this as multi-region storage and why is that so important in your view? >> Absolutely. Yeah, that is multi-region storage. And what we're hearing is seeing as customers grow and we have multinational customers who have operations all around the world. And so as they've grown and their data needs grow around the world, they need to be using multiple AWS regions to store and access that data. Sometimes it's for low latency so that it can be closer to their end users or their customers, other times it's for regions where they just have a particular need to have data in a particular geography. But this is really a simple way of having one endpoint in front of data, across multiple buckets. So for applications it's quite easy, they just have that one end point and then the data, the requests are automatically routed to the nearest region. >> Now earlier this year, S3 turned 15. What makes S3 different, Kevin in your view? >> Yeah, it turned 15. It'll be 16 soon, you know, S3 really, I think part of the difference is it just operates at really an unprecedented scale with, you know, more than a hundred trillion objects and regularly peaking to tens of millions of requests per second. But it's really about the resiliency and availability and durability that are our responsibility and we focus every single day on protecting those characteristics for customers so that they don't have to. So that they can focus on building the businesses and applications that they need to really run their business and not worry about the details of running highly available storage. And so I think that's really one of the key differences with S3. >> You know, I first heard the term data lake, it was early last decade. I think it was around 2011, 2012 and obviously the phrase has stuck. How are S3 and data lakes simpatico, and how have data lakes on S3 changed or evolved over the years? >> Yeah. You know, the idea of data lakes, obviously, as you say, came around nine or 10 years ago, but I actually still think it's really early days for data lakes. And just from the standpoint of, you know, originally nine or 10 years ago, when we talked about data lakes, we were looking at maybe tens of terabytes, hundreds of terabytes, or a low number of petabytes and for a lot of data lakes, we're still seeing that that's the kind of scale that currently they're operating at, but I'm also seeing a class of data lakes where you're talking about tens or hundreds of petabytes or even more, and really just being used to drive critical aspects of customer's businesses. And so I really think S3, it's been a great place to run data lakes and continues to be. We've added a lot of capability over the last several years, you know, specifically for that data lake use case. And we're going to continue to do that and grow the feature set for data lakes, you know, over the next many years as well. But really, it goes back to the fundamentals of S3 providing that 11 9s of durability, the resiliency of having three independent data centers within regions. So the customers can use that storage knowing their data is protected. And again, just focus on the applications on top of that data lake and also run multiple applications, right? The idea of a data lake is you're not limited to one access pattern or one set of applications. If you want to try out a new machine learning application or something, do some advanced analytics, that's all possible while running the in-flight operational tools that you also have against that data. So it allows for that experimentation and for transforming businesses through new ideas. >> Yeah. I mean, to your point, if you go back to the early days of cloud, we were talking about storing, you know, gigabytes, maybe tens of terabytes that was big. Today, we're talking about hundreds and hundreds of terabytes, petabytes. And so you've got huge amount of information customers that are of that size and that scale, they have to optimize costs. Really that's top of mind, how are you helping customers save on storage costs? >> Absolutely. Dave, I mean, cost optimization is one of the key things we look at every single year to help customers reduce their costs for storage. And so that led to things like the introduction of S3 Intelligent Tiering, 10 years ago. And that's really the only cloud storage class that just delivers the automatic storage cost savings, as data access patterns change. And, you know, we deliver this without performance impact or any kind of operational overhead. It's really intended to be, you know, intelligent where customers put the data in. And then we optimize the storage cost. Or for example, last year we launched S3 Storage Lens, which is really the first and only service in the cloud that provides organization-wide visibility into where customers are storing their data, what the request rates are and so forth against their storage. So when you talk about these data lakes of hundreds of petabytes or even smaller, these tools are just really invaluable to help customers reduce their storage costs year after year. And actually, Dave I'm pleased, you know, today we're also announcing the launch of some improvements to S3 Intelligent Tiering, to actually further automate the cost savings. And what we're doing is we're actually removing the minimum storage duration. Previously, Intelligent Tiering had a 30 day minimum storage duration, and we're also eliminating our monitoring and automation charge for small objects. So previously there was that monitoring and automation charge applied to all objects independent of size. And now any object less than 120 kilobytes is not charged at that charge. So, and I think some pretty critical innovations on Intelligent Tiering that will help customers use that for an even wider set of data lake and other applications. >> That's three, it's ubiquitous. The innovation continues. You can learn more by attending the Storage Day S3 deep dive right after this interview. Thank you, Kevin Miller. Great to have you on the program. >> Yeah, Dave, thanks for having me. Great to see you. >> You're welcome, this is Dave Vellante and you're watching theCUBE's coverage of AWS Storage Day. Keep it right there. (bright music)

(pensive music) >> Thank you, Jenna, it's great to see you guys and thank you for watching theCUBE's continuous coverage of AWS Storage Day. We're here at The Spheres, it's amazing venue. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec who's Vice President of Block and Object Storage. Mai-Lan, always a pleasure to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Nice to see you, Dave. >> It's pretty crazy, you know, this is kind of a hybrid event. We were in Barcelona a while ago, big hybrid event. And now it's, you know, it's hard to tell. It's almost like day-to-day what's happening with COVID and some things are permanent. I think a lot of things are becoming permanent. What are you seeing out there in terms of when you talk to customers, how are they thinking about their business, building resiliency and agility into their business in the context of COVID and beyond? >> Well, Dave, I think what we've learned today is that this is a new normal. These fluctuations that companies are having and supply and demand, in all industries all over the world. That's the new normal. And that has what, is what has driven so much more adoption of cloud in the last 12 to 18 months. And we're going to continue to see that rapid migration to the cloud because companies now know that in the course of days and months, you're, the whole world of your expectations of where your business is going and where, what your customers are going to do, that can change. And that can change not just for a year, but maybe longer than that. That's the new normal. And I think companies are realizing it and our AWS customers are seeing how important it is to accelerate moving everything to the cloud, to continue to adapt to this new normal. >> So storage historically has been, I'm going to drop a box off at the loading dock and, you know, have a nice day. And then maybe the services team is involved in, in a more intimate way, but you're involved every day. So I'm curious as to what that permanence, that new normal, some people call it the new abnormal, but it's the new normal now, what does that mean for storage? >> Dave, in the course of us sitting here over the next few minutes, we're going to have dozens of deployments go out all across our AWS storage services. That means our customers that are using our file services, our transfer services, block and object services, they're all getting improvements as we sit here and talk. That is such a fundamentally different model than the one that you talked about, which is the appliance gets dropped off at the loading dock. It takes a couple months for it to get scheduled for setup and then you have to do data migration to get the data on the new appliance. Meanwhile, we're sitting here and customers storage is just improving, under the hood and in major announcements, like what we're doing today. >> So take us through the sort of, let's go back, 'cause I remember vividly when, when S3 was announced that launched this cloud era and people would, you know, they would do a lot of experimentation of, we were storing, you know, maybe gigabytes, maybe even some terabytes back then. And, and that's evolved. What are you seeing in terms of how people are using data? What are the patterns that you're seeing today? How is that different than maybe 10 years ago? >> I think what's really unique about AWS is that we are the only provider that has been operating at scale for 15 years. And what that means is that we have customers of all sizes, terabytes, petabytes, exabytes, that are running their storage on AWS and running their applications using that storage. And so we have this really unique position of being able to observe and work with customers to develop what they need for storage. And it really breaks down to three main patterns. The first one is what I call the crown jewels, the crown jewels in the cloud. And that pattern is adopted by customers who are looking at the core mission of their business and they're saying to themselves, I actually can't scale this core mission on on-premises. And they're choosing to go to the cloud on the most important thing that their business does because they must, they have to. And so, a great example of that is FINRA, the regulatory body of the US stock exchanges, where, you know, a number of years ago, they took a look at all the data silos that were popping up across their data centers. They were looking at the rate of stock transactions going up and they're saying, we just can't keep up. Not if we want to follow the mission of being the watchdog for consumers, for transactions, for stock transactions. And so they moved that crown jewel of their application to AWS. And what's really interesting Dave, is, as you know, 'cause you've talked to many different companies, it's not technology that stops people from moving to the cloud as quick as they want to, it's culture, it's people, it's processes, it's how businesses work. And when you move the crown jewels into the cloud, you are accelerating that cultural change and that's certainly what FINRA saw. Second thing we see, is where a company will pick a few cloud pilots. We'll take a couple of applications, maybe one or a several across the organization and they'll move that as sort of a reference implementation to the cloud. And then the goal is to try to get the people who did that to generalize all the learning across the company. That is actually a really slow way to change culture. Because, as many of us know, in large organizations, you know, you have, you have some resistance to other organizations changing culture. And so that cloud pilot, while it seems like it would work, it seems logical, it's actually counter-productive to a lot of companies that want to move quickly to the cloud. And the third example is what I think of as new applications or cloud first, net new. And that pattern is where a company or a startup says all new technology initiatives are on the cloud. And we see that for companies like McDonald's, which has transformed their drive up experience by dynamically looking at location orders and providing recommendations. And we see it for the Digital Athlete, which is what the NFL has put together to dynamically take data sources and build these models that help them programmatically simulate risks to player health and put in place some ways to predict and prevent that. But those are the three patterns that we see so many customers falling into depending on what their business wants. >> I like that term, Digital Athlete, my business partner, John Furrier, coined the term tech athlete, you know, years ago on theCUBE. That third pattern seems to me, because you're right, you almost have to shock the system. If you just put your toe in the water, it's going to take too long. But it seems like that third pattern really actually de-risks it in a lot of cases, it's so it's said, people, who's going to argue, oh, the new stuff should be in the cloud. And so, that seems to me to be a very sensible way to approach that, that blocker, if you will, what are your thoughts on that? >> I think you're right, Dave. I think what it does is it allows a company to be able to see the ideas and the technology and the cultural change of cloud in different parts of the organization. And so rather than having a, one group that's supposed to generalize it across an organization, you get it decentralized and adopted by different groups and the culture change just goes faster. >> So you, you bring up decentralization and there's a, there's an emerging trend referred to as a data mesh. It was, it was coined, the term coined by Zhamak Dehghani, a very thought-provoking individual. And the concept is basically the, you know, data is decentralized, and yet we have this tendency to sort of shove it all into, you know, one box or one container, or you could say one cloud, well, the cloud is expanding, it's the cloud is, is decentralizing in many ways. So how do you see data mesh fitting in to those patterns? >> We have customers today that are taking the data mesh architectures and implementing them with AWS services. And Dave, I want to go back to the start of Amazon, when Amazon first began, we grew because the Amazon technologies were built in microservices. Fundamentally, a data mesh is about separation or abstraction of what individual components do. And so if I look at data mesh, really, you're talking about two things, you're talking about separating the data storage and the characteristics of data from the data services that interact and operate on that storage. And with data mesh, it's all about making sure that the businesses, the decentralized business model can work with that data. Now our AWS customers are putting their storage in a centralized place because it's easier to track, it's easier to view compliance and it's easier to predict growth and control costs. But, we started with building blocks and we deliberately built our storage services separate from our data services. So we have data services like Lake Formation and Glue. We have a number of these data services that our customers are using to build that customized data mesh on top of that centralized storage. So really, it's about at the end of the day, speed, it's about innovation. It's about making sure that you can decentralize and separate your data services from your storage so businesses can go faster. >> But that centralized storage is logically centralized. It might not be physically centralized, I mean, we put storage all over the world, >> Mai-Lan: That's correct. >> right? But, but we, to the developer, it looks like it's in one place. >> Mai-Lan: That's right. >> Right? And so, so that's not antithetical to the concept of a data mesh. In fact, it fits in perfectly to the point you were making. I wonder if we could talk a little bit about AWS's storage strategy and it started of course, with, with S3, and that was the focus for years and now of course EBS as well. But now we're seeing, we heard from Wayne this morning, the portfolio is expanding. The innovation is, is accelerating that flywheel that we always talk about. How would you characterize and how do you think about AWS's storage strategy per se? >> We are a dynamically and constantly evolving our AWS storage services based on what the application and the customer want. That is fundamentally what we do every day. We talked a little bit about those deployments that are happening right now, Dave. That is something, that idea of constant dynamic evolution just can't be replicated by on-premises where you buy a box and it sits in your data center for three or more years. And what's unique about us among the cloud services, is again that perspective of the 15 years where we are building applications in ways that are unique because we have more customers and we have more customers doing more things. So, you know, I've said this before. It's all about speed of innovation Dave, time and change wait for no one. And if you're a business and you're trying to transform your business and base it on a set of technologies that change rapidly, you have to use AWS services. Let's, I mean, if you look at some of the launches that we talk about today, and you think about S3's multi-region access points, that's a fundamental change for customers that want to store copies of their data in any number of different regions and get a 60% performance improvement by leveraging the technology that we've built up over, over time, leveraging the, the ability for us to route, to intelligently route a request across our network. That, and FSx for NetApp ONTAP, nobody else has these capabilities today. And it's because we are at the forefront of talking to different customers and that dynamic evolution of storage, that's the core of our strategy. >> So Andy Jassy used to say, oftentimes, AWS is misunderstood and you, you comfortable with that. So help me square this circle 'cause you talked about things you couldn't do on on-prem, and yet you mentioned the relationship with NetApp. You think, look at things like Outposts and Local Zones. So you're actually moving the cloud out to the edge, including on-prem data centers. So, so how do you think about hybrid in that context? >> For us, Dave, it always comes back to what the customer's asking for. And we were talking to customers and they were talking about their edge and what they wanted to do with it. We said, how are we going to help? And so if I just take S3 for Outposts, as an example, or EBS and Outposts, you know, we have customers like Morningstar and Morningstar wants Outposts because they are using it as a step in their journey to being on the cloud. If you take a customer like First Abu Dhabi Bank, they're using Outposts because they need data residency for their compliance requirements. And then we have other customers that are using Outposts to help, like Dish, Dish Networks, as an example, to place the storage as close as account to the applications for low latency. All of those are customer driven requirements for their architecture. For us, Dave, we think in the fullness of time, every customer and all applications are going to be on the cloud, because it makes sense and those businesses need that speed of innovation. But when we build things like our announcement today of FSx for NetApp ONTAP, we build them because customers asked us to help them with their journey to the cloud, just like we built S3 and EBS for Outposts for the same reason. >> Well, when you say over time, you're, you believe that all workloads will be on the cloud, but the cloud is, it's like the universe. I mean, it's expanding. So what's not cloud in the future? When you say on the cloud, you mean wherever you meet customers with that cloud, that includes Outposts, just the programming, it's the programmability of that model, is that correct? That's it, >> That's right. that's what you're talking about? >> In fact, our S3 and EBS Outposts customers, the way that they look at how they use Outposts, it's either as part of developing applications where they'll eventually go the cloud or taking applications that are in the cloud today in AWS regions and running them locally. And so, as you say, this definition of the cloud, you know, it, it's going to evolve over time. But the one thing that we know for sure, is that AWS storage and AWS in general is going to be there one or two steps ahead of where customers are, and deliver on what they need. >> I want to talk about block storage for a moment, if I can, you know, you guys are making some moves in that space. We heard some announcements earlier today. Some of the hardest stuff to move, whether it's cultural or maybe it's just hardened tops, maybe it's, you know, governance edicts, or those really hardcore mission critical apps and workloads, whether it's SAP stuff, Oracle, Microsoft, et cetera. You're clearly seeing that as an opportunity for your customers and in storage in some respects was a blocker previously because of whatever, latency, et cetera, then there's still some, some considerations there. How do you see those workloads eventually moving to the cloud? >> Well, they can move now. With io2 Block Express, we have the performance that those high-end applications need and it's available today. We have customers using them and they're very excited about that technology. And, you know, again, it goes back to what I just said, Dave, we had customers saying, I would like to move my highest performing applications to the cloud and this is what I need from the, from the, the storage underneath them. And that's why we built io2 Block Express and that's how we'll continue to evolve io2 Block Express. It is the first SAN technology in the cloud, but it's built on those core principles that we talked about a few minutes ago, which is dynamically evolving and capabilities that we can add on the fly and customers just get the benefit of it without the cost of migration. >> I want to ask you about, about just the storage, how you think about storage in general, because typically it's been a bucket, you know, it's a container, but it seems, I always say the next 10 years aren't going to be like the last, it seems like, you're really in the data business and you're bringing in machine intelligence, you're bringing in other database technology, this rich set of other services to apply to the data. That's now, there's a lot of data in the cloud and so we can now, whether it's build data products, build data services. So how do you think about the business in that sense? It's no longer just a place to store stuff. It's actually a place to accelerate innovation and build and monetize for your customers. How do you think about that? >> Our customers use the word foundational. Every time they talk about storage, they say for us, it's foundational, and Dave, that's because every business is a data business. Every business is making decisions now on this changing landscape in a world where the new normal means you cannot predict what's going to happen in six months, in a year. And the way that they're making those smart decisions is through data. And so they're taking the data that they have in our storage services and they're using SageMaker to build models. They're, they're using all kinds of different applications like Lake Formation and Glue to build some of the services that you're talking about around authorization and data discovery, to sit on top of the data. And they're able to leverage the data in a way that they have never been able to do before, because they have to. That's what the business world demands today, and that's what we need in the new normal. We need the flexibility and the dynamic foundational storage that we provide in AWS. >> And you think about the great data companies, those were the, you know, trillions in the market cap, their data companies, they put data at their core, but that doesn't mean they shove all the data into a centralized location. It means they have the identity access capabilities, the governance capabilities to, to enable data to be used wherever it needs to be used and, and build that future. That, exciting times we're entering here, Mai-Lan. >> We're just set the start, Dave, we're just at the start. >> Really, what ending do you think we have? So, how do you think about Amazon? It was, it's not a baby anymore. It's not even an adolescent, right? You guys are obviously major player, early adulthood, day one, day zero? (chuckles) >> Dave, we don't age ourself. I think if I look at where we're going for AWS, we are just at the start. So many companies are moving to the cloud, but we're really just at the start. And what's really exciting for us who work on AWS storage, is that when we build these storage services and these data services, we are seeing customers do things that they never thought they could do before. And it's just the beginning. >> I think the potential is unlimited. You mentioned Dish before, I mean, I see what they're doing in the cloud for Telco. I mean, Telco Transformation, that's an industry, every industry, there's a transformation scenario, a disruption scenario. Healthcare has been so reluctant for years and that's happening so quickly, I mean, COVID's certainly accelerating that. Obviously financial services have been super tech savvy, but they're looking at the Fintech saying, okay, how do we play? I mean, there isn't manufacturing with EV. >> Mai-Lan: Government. >> Government, totally. >> It's everywhere, oil and gas. >> There isn't a single industry that's not a digital industry. >> That's right. >> And there's implications for everyone. And it's not just bits and atoms anymore, the old Negroponte, although Nicholas, I think was prescient because he's, he saw this coming, it really is fundamental. Data is fundamental to every business. >> And I think you want, for all of those in different industries, you want to pick the provider where innovation and invention is in our DNA. And that is true, not just for storage, but AWS, and that is driving a lot of the changes you have today, but really what's coming in the future. >> You're right. It's the common editorial factors. It's not just the, the storage of the data. It's the ability to apply other technologies that map into your business process, that map into your organizational skill sets that drive innovation in whatever industry you're in. It's great Mai-Lan, awesome to see you. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Great seeing you Dave, take care. >> All right, you too. And keep it right there for more action. We're going to now toss it back to Jenna, Canal and Darko in the studio. Guys, over to you. (pensive music)

>> We continue with cube on cloud. We here with Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec who's the vice president of block and object storage at AWS which comprises elastic block storage, AWS S3 and Amazon glacier. Mai-Lan Great to see you again. Thanks so much for coming on the program. >> Nice to be here. Thanks for having me, Dave. >> You're very welcome. So here we're unpacking the future of cloud and we'd love to get your perspectives on how customers should think about the future of infrastructure things like applying machine intelligence to their data but just to set the stage, when we look back at the history of storage and the cloud has obviously started with S3 and then a couple of years later AWS introduced EBS for block storage and those are the most well-known services in the portfolio but there's more of this cold storage and new capabilities that you announced recently at reinvent around, you know, super-duper block storage and in tiering is another example. But it looks like AWS is really starting to accelerate and pick up the pace of customer options in storage. So my first question is how should we think about this expanding portfolio? >> Well, I think you have to go all the way back to what customers are trying to do with their data Dave. The path to innovation is paved by data. If you don't have data, you don't have machine learning. You don't have the next generation of analytics applications that helps you chart a path forward into a world that seems to be changing every week. And so in order to have that insight in order to have that predictive forecasting that every company needs, regardless of what industry that you're in today, it all starts from data. And I think the key shift that I've seen is how customers are thinking about that data, about being instantly usable. Whereas in the past, it might've been a backup. Now it's part of a data lake. And if you can bring that data into a data lake you can have not just analytics or machine learning or auditing applications, it's really what does your application do for your business and how can it take advantage of that vast amount of shared data set in your business? >> Awesome, so thank you. So I want to make sure we're hitting on the big trends that you're seeing in the market that kind of are informing your strategy around the portfolio, and what you're seeing with customers. Instant usability, you know, you bring in machine learning into the equation. I think people have really started to understand the benefits of cloud storage as a service and the pay by the drink. and that whole model. Obviously COVID has accelerated that, you know, cloud migration is accelerated. Anything else we're missing there? What are the other big trends that you see? If any. >> Well, Dave, you did a good job of capturing a lot of the drivers. The one thing I would say that just sits underneath all of it is the massive growth of digital data year over year. IDC says digital data is growing at a rate of 40% year over year. And that has been true for a while and it's not going to stop. It's going to keep on growing because the sources of that data acquisition keeps on expanding and whether it's IOT devices whether it is a content created by users, that data is going to grow and everything you're talking about depends on the ability to not just capture it and store it. But as you say, use it. >> Well, you know, and we talk about data growth a lot and sometimes it can, it becomes bromide. But I think the interesting thing that I've observed over the last couple of decades really is that the growth is non-linear and it's really the curve is starting to shape exponentially. You guys always talk about that flywheel effect it's really hard to believe, you know people say trees don't grow to the moon. It seems like data does. >> It does and what's interesting about working in a world of AWS storage Dave is that it's counter-intuitive but our goal with a data growth is to make it cost effective. And so year over year how can we make it cheaper and cheaper? It is have customers store more and more data so they can use it. But it's also to think about the definition of usage and what kind of data is being tapped by businesses for their insights and make that easier than it's ever been before. >> Let me ask you a follow up question on that Mai-Lan. Cause I get asked this a lot, or I hear comments a lot that yes AWS continuously and rigorously reduces pricing but it's just kind of following the natural curve of Moore's law or whatever. How do you respond to that? Are there other factors involved? Obviously labor is another, you know, cost reducing factor, but what's the trend line say? >> Well, cost efficiency is in our DNA, Dave we come to work every day in AWS across all of our services and we ask ourselves, how can we lower our costs and be able to pass that along to customers. As you say, there are many different aspects to costs. There's a cost to the storage itself There's a cost to the data center. And that's really what we've seen impact a lot of customers that were slower or just getting started with a move to the cloud, is they entered 2020 and then they found out exactly how expensive that data center was to maintain because they had to put in safety equipment and they had to do all the things that you have to do in a pandemic, in a data center. And so sometimes that cost is a little bit hidden or it won't show up until you really don't need to have it land. But the costs of managing that explosive growth of data is very real. And when we're thinking about costs, we're thinking about costs in terms of how can I lower it on a per gigabyte per month basis, but we're also building into the product itself, adaptive discounts. Like we have a storage class in S3 that's called intelligent tiering. And in intelligent tiering we have built-in monitoring where if particular objects aren't frequently accessed in a given month, a customer will automatically get a discounted price for that storage or a customer can, you know, as of late last year say that they want to automatically move storage in the storage class that has been stored for example longer than 180 days and saves 95% by moving it into deep archive storage. And so it's not just, you know relentlessly going after and lowering the cost of storage. It's also building into the products these new ways where we can adaptively discount storage based on what a customer's storage is actually doing. >> Right, and I would add to already is the other thing Gatos has done is it's really forced transparency almost the same way that Amazon has done on retail. And now Mai-Lan when we talked last I mentioned that S3 was an object store. And of course that's technically correct but your comment to me was Dave, it's more than that. And you started to talk about SageMaker and AI and bringing in machine learning. And I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the future of how storage is going to be leveraged in the cloud. That's maybe different than what we've been used to in the early days of S3. And how your customers should be thinking about infrastructure, not as bespoke services, but as a suite of capabilities and maybe some of those adjacent services that you see as most leverageable for customers and why? >> Well, to tell this story, Dave, we're going to have to go a little bit back in time, all the way back to the 1990s or before then. When all you had was a set of hardware appliance vendors that sold you appliances that you put in your data center and inherently created a data silo because those hardware appliances were hardwired to your application. And so an individual application that was dealing with auditing as an example wouldn't really be able to access the storage for another application, because you know, the architecture of that legacy world is tied to a data silo and S3 came out launched in 2006 and introduced very low cost storage. That is an object. And I'll tell you, Dave, you know, over the last 10 plus years we have seen all kinds of data coming to S3. Whereas before it might've been backups or it might've been images and videos. Now a pretty substantial data set is our parquet files and work files. These files are there for business analytics for more real-time type of processing. And that has really been the trend of the future, is taking these different files putting them in a shared file layer, so any application today or in the future can tap into that data. And so this idea of the shared file layer is a major trend that has been taking off for the last I would say five or six years. And I expect that to not only keep on going but to really open up the type of services that you can then do on that shared file layer. And whether that's Sage maker or some of the machine learning introduced by our connect service, it's bringing together the data as a starting point and then the applications can evolve very rapidly on top of that. >> I want to ask your opinion about big data architectures. One of our guests Chamakh Tigani, she's amazing data architect. And she's put forth this notion of a distributed global mesh. And picking up on some of the comments, Andy Jassy made it at re-invent how essentially, "Hey we're bringing AWS to the edge. "We see the data center is just another edge node." So you're seeing this massive distributed system evolving. You guys have talked about that for a while and data by its very nature is distributed but we've had this tendency to put it into a monolithic data Lake or a data warehouse and it's sort of antithetical to that distributed nature. So how do you see that playing out? What do you see customers in the future doing in terms of their big data architectures and what does that mean for storage? >> It comes down to the nature of the data and again the usage and Dave that's where I see the biggest difference in these modern data architectures from the legacy of 20 years ago, is the idea that the data need drives the data storage. So let's take an example of the type of data that you always want to have on the edge. We have customers today that need to have storage in the field and whether the field of scientific research or oftentimes it's content creation in the film industry, or if it's for military operations there's a lot of data that needs to be captured and analyzed in the field. And for us, what that means is that, you know we have a suite of products called snow ball and whether it's snow ball or snow cone, take your pick. That whole portfolio of AWS services is targeted at customers that need to do work with storage at the edge. And so, you know, if you think about the need for multiple applications acting on the same data set that's when you keep it in an AWS region. And what we've done in AWS storage is we've recognized that depending on the need of usage where you put your data and how you interact with it may vary. But we've built a whole set of services like data transfer to help make sure that we can connect data from, for example that new snow cone into a region automatically. And so our goal Dave is to make sure that when customers are operating at the edge or they're operating in the region they have the same quality of storage service and they have easy ways to go between them. You shouldn't have to pick, you should be able to do it all. >> So in the spirit of do it all there's this sort of age old dynamic in the tech business where you've got the friction between the best of breed and the integrated suite. And my question is around what you're optimizing for customers. And can you have your cake and eat it too? In other words, why AWS storage? What makes it compelling? Is it because it's kind of a best of breed storage service or is it because it's integrated with AWS? Would you ever sub optimize one in order to get an advantage to the other? Or can you actually, you know have your cake and eat it too? >> The way that we build storage is to focus on being both the breadth of capabilities and the depth of capabilities. And so where we identify a particular need where we think that it takes a whole new service to deliver we'll go build that service. And an example for that as FTP our AWS SFTP service, which, you know, there's a lot of SFTP usage out there and there will be for a while because of the, you know, the legacy B2B type of architectures that still live in the business world today. And so we looked at that problem. We said, how are we going to build that in the best depth way, in the best focus? And we launched a separate service for that. And so our goal is to take the individual building blocks of EBS and glacier and S3 and make the best of class and the most comprehensive in the capabilities of what we can do and where we identify a very specific need. We'll go build a service for it. But Dave, you know as an example for that idea of both depth and breadth, S3 Storage Lens is a great example of that. S3 Storage Lens is a new capability that we launched late last year. And what it does is it lets you look across all your regions and all your accounts and get a summary view of all your S3 storage and whether that's buckets or the most active prefixes that you have and be able to drill down from that. And that is built in to the S3 service and available for any customer that wants to turn it on in the AWS management console. >> Right, and we saw just recently made, I called it super-duper block storage but you can make some improvements in really addressing the highest performance. I want to ask you, so we've all learned about an experience that benefits of cloud over the last several years and especially in the last 10 months during the pandemic but one of the challenges and it's particularly acute with IO is of course latency and moving data around and accessing data remotely. It's a challenge for customers, you know, due to speed of light, et cetera. So my question is how was AWS thinking about all that data that's still resides on premises? I think we heard at reinvent, that's still on 90% of the opportunity is, or the the workloads are still on prem that live inside a customer's data centers. So how do you tap into those and help customers innovate with on-prem data, particularly from a storage angle? >> Well, we always want to provide the best of class solution for those little latency workloads. And that's why we launched Block Express just late last year at reinvent. And Block Express has a new capability in preview on top of our IO to provisioned IOPS volume type. And what's really interesting about block express Dave is that the way that we're able to deliver the performance of Block Express, which is sound performance with cloud elasticity is that we went all the way down to the network layer and we customize the hardware software. And at the network layer we built Block Express on something called SRD which stands for a scalable reliable diagrams. And basically what it's letting us do is offload all of our EBS operations for Block Express on the nitrile card on hardware. And so that type of innovation where we're able to, you know, take advantage of modern cop commodity, multi-tenant data center networks, where we're sending in this new network protocol across a large number of network paths. And that type of innovation all the way down to that protocol level helps us innovate in a way that's hard. In fact, I would say impossible for other sound providers to kind of really catch up and keep up. And so we feel that the amount of innovation that we have for delivering those low latency workloads in our AWS cloud storage is unlimited really because of that ability to customize software hardware and network protocols as we go along without requiring upgrades from a customer it just gets better. And the customer benefits. Now, if you want to stay in your data center that's why we build outposts. And for outposts, we have UVS and we have S3 for outposts and our goal there is that some customers will have workloads where they want to keep them resident in the data center. And for those customers we want to give them that AWS storage opportunities as well. >> So thank you for coming back to Block Express. So you call it, you know, sand in the cloud. So is that essentially it comprises a custom built essentially storage network. Is that right? What you just described SRD? I think you called it. >> Yeah, it's a SRD is used by other AWS services as well but it is a custom network protocol that we designed to deliver the lowest latency experience and we're taking advantage of it with Block Express. >> So sticking with traditional data centers for a moment I'm interested in your thoughts on the importance of the cloud pricing approach, I.e the consumption model to pay by the drink. Obviously it's one of the most attractive features, and I asked that because we're seeing what Andy Jassy refers to as the old guard Institute, flexible pricing models two of the biggest storage companies, HP with GreenLake and Dell has this thing called apex. They've announced such models for on-prem and presumably cross cloud. How do you think this is going to impact your customers leverage of AWS cloud storage? Is it something that you have an opinion on? >> Yeah, I think it all comes down to, again that usage of the storage, and this is where I think there's an inherent advantage for our cloud storage. So there might be an attempt by the old guard to lower prices or add flexibility but at the end of the day it comes down to what the customer actually needs to tune. And if you think about gp3 which is the new EBS volume. The idea with gp3 is we're going to pass a long savings to the customer by making the storage 20% cheaper than gp2. And we're going to make the product better by giving a great, reliable baseline performance. But we're also going to let customers who want to run workloads like Cassandra on EBS tune their throughput separately, for example from their capacity. So if you're running Cassandra sometimes you don't need to change your capacity. Your storage capacity works just fine. But what happens with, for example Cassandra workload is that you may need more throughput. And if you're buying hardware appliance you just have to buy for your peak. You have to buy for the max of what you think your throughput and the max of what your storage is. And this inherent flexibility that we have for AWS storage and being able to tune throughput separate from up separate from capacity like you do for gp3 that is really where the future is for customers having control over costs and control over customer experience without compromising or trading off either one. >> Awesome, thank you for that. So in the time we have remaining Mai-Lan, I want to talk about the topic of diversity social impact, and as a woman leader, women executive, and I really want to get your perspectives on this. And I've shared with the audience previously, one of my breaking analysis segments, your boxing video which is awesome. And so, you've got a lot of unique non-traditional aspects to your life and I love it, but I want to ask you this. So it's obviously, you know, certainly politically and socially correct to talk about diversity, the importance of diversity, there's data that suggests that diversity is good both economically, not just socially, and of course it's the right thing to do. But there are those, you know, Peter teal is probably the most prominent but there are others that say, "You know what? "Forget that, just hire people, just like you'll be able "to go faster, ramp up more quickly, hit escape "velocity it's natural." And that's what you should do. Why is that not the right approach? Why is diversity both, of course, socially, you know responsible, but also, you know, good for business >> For Amazon we think about diversity as something that is essential to how we think about innovation. And so, Dave, as you know, from listening to some of the announcements at reinvent, we launch a lot of new ideas, like new concepts and new services in AWS. And just bringing that lens down to storage. Astri has been reinventing itself every year since we launched in 2006. EBS introduced the first sun on the cloud late last year, and continues to reinvent how customers think about block storage. We would not be able to look at a product in a different way and think to ourselves, not just what is the legacy system do in a data center today but how do we want to build this new distributed system in a way that helps customers achieve not just what they're doing today, but what they want to do in five and 10 years. You can't get that innovative mindset without bringing different perspectives to the table. And so we strongly believe in hiring people who are from under represented groups and whether that's gender or it's related to racial equality or if it's geographic diversity and bringing them in to have the conversation because those diverse viewpoints inform how we can innovate at all levels in AWS. >> Right, and so I really appreciate their perspectives on that. And we've had, as you probably know the cube has been, you know a very big advocate of diversity, you know, generally but women in tech specifically, we participated a lot. And I often ask this question is, you know, as a smaller company, I, and some of my other colleagues in small business, sometimes we struggle. And so my question is how do you go beyond what's your advice for going beyond, you know the good old boys network? I think it's large companies like AWS and, you know, the big players, you've got responsibility too that you can put somebody in charge and make it their full-time job. How should smaller companies that are largely white male dominated, how should they become more diverse? What should they do to increase that diversity? >> I think the place to start is voice. A lot of what we try to do is make sure that the under represented voice is heard. And so Dave, any small business owner of any industry can encourage voice for your under represented or your unheard populations. And honestly, it is as simple as being in a meeting and looking around that table or on your screen, as it were and asking yourself, who hasn't talked? Who hasn't weighed in? Particularly if the debate is contentious or even animated. And you will see, particularly if you note this over time you will see that there may be somebody and whether it's an under represented group or it's a woman who's early career, or it's not it's just a member of your team who happens to be a white male too, who's not being heard. And you can ask that person for their perspective. And that is a step that every one of us can and should do which is ask to have everyone's voice at the table to listen and to weigh in on it. So I think that is something everyone should do. I think if you are a member of an under represented group as for example, I'm Vietnamese American and I'm a female in tech, I think, it's something to think about how you can make sure that you're always taking that bold step forward. And it's one of the topics that we covered at re-invent. We had a great discussion with a group of women CEOs and a lot of it we talked about is being bold taking the challenge of being bold in tough situations. And that is an important thing, I think for anybody to keep in mind, but especially for members of under represented groups, because sometimes Dave that bold step that you kind of think of as like, "Oh I don't know if I should ask for that promotion." or "I don't know if I should volunteer for that project." It's not a big ask, but it's big in your head. And so if you can internalize as a member of some, you know, a group that maybe isn't heard as or seen as much how you can take those bold challenges and step forward and learn, maybe fail also cause that's how you learn. Then that is a way to also have people learn and develop and become leaders in whatever industry it is. >> That's great advice. It reminds me of, I think most of us can relate to that Mai-Lan, because when we started in the industry, we may be timid. You didn't want to necessarily speak up. And I think it's incumbent upon those in a position of power. And by the way power might just be running a meeting agenda to maybe call on those folks that are, maybe it's not diversity of gender or, you know, or race. Maybe it's just the under represented. Maybe that's a good way to start building muscle memory. So that's unique advice that I hadn't heard before. So thank you very much for that. I appreciate it. And Hey, listen. Thanks so much for coming on the Cube On Cloud. We're out of time and really always appreciate your perspectives and you're doing a great job. And thank you. >> Great, thank you Dave. Thanks for having me and have a great day. >> All right, and Keep it right there buddy. You're watching the Cube On Cloud. Right back. (gentle upbeat music)

>>From around the globe. It's the queue with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel, AWS and our community partners. >>Welcome back to the cubes. Live coverage for ADFS reinvent 2020 I'm John Ford with the cube, your host. We are the cube virtual. We're not there in person this year. We're remote with the pandemic and we're here for the keynote analysis for Verner Vogels, and we've got some great analysts on and friends of the cube cube alumni is Rob Hirschfeld is the founder and CEO of Rakin a pioneer in the dev ops space, as well as early on on the bare metal, getting on the whole on-premise he's seen the vision and I can tell you, I've talked to him many times over the years. He's been on the same track. He's on the right wave frog. Great to have you on. I'm going to have to start Veatch, come on. Y'all come on as well, but great to see you. Thanks, pleasure to be here. Um, so the keynote with Verna was, you know, he's like takes you on a journey, you know, and, and virtual is actually a little bit different vibe, but I thought he did an exceptional job of stage layout and some of the virtual stage craft. Um, but what I really enjoyed the most was really this next level, thinking around systems thinking, right, which is my favorite topic, because, you know, we've been saying, going back 10 years, the cloud is just, here's a computer, right. It's operating system. And so, um, this is the big thing. This is, what's your reaction to the keynote. >>Wow. So I think you're right. This is one of the challenges with what Amazon has been building is it's, you know, it is a lock box, it's a service. So you don't, you don't get to see behind the scenes. You don't really get to know how they run these services. And what, what I see happening out of all of those pieces is they've really come back and said, we need to help people operate this platform. And, and that shouldn't be surprising to anyone. Right? Last couple of years, they've been rolling out service, service service, all these new things. This talk was really different for Verner's con normal ones, because he wasn't talking about whizzbang new technologies. Um, he was really talking about operations, um, you know, died in the wool. How do we make the system easier to use? How do we expose things? What assistance can we have in, in building applications? Uh, in some cases it felt like, uh, an application performance monitoring or management APM talk from five or even 10 years ago, um, canaries, um, you know, Canary deployments, chaos engineering, observability, uh, sort of bread and butter, operational things. >>We have Savi Joel, who's a influencer cloud computing Xtrordinair dev ops guru. Uh, we don't need dev ops guru from Amazon. We got Sarpy and prop here. So it'd be great to see you. Um, you guys had a watch party. Um, tell me what the reaction was, um, with, of the influencers in the cloud or ADI out there that were looking at Vernon's announcement, because it does attract a tech crowd. What was your take and what was the conversation like? >>Yeah, we kinda geeked out. Um, we had a watch party and we were commenting back and forth, like when we were watching it. I think that the general consensus is that the complexity of AWS stack itself is, is increasing. Right. And they have been focused on developers a lot, I think a lot longer than they needed to be a little bit. I think, uh, now they need to focus on the operations. Like we, we are, we all love dev ops talks and it's very fancy and it's very modern way of building software. But if you think deep down that, like once we developed software traditionally and, and also going forward, I think we need to have that separation. Once you develop something in production, it's, it's, it's operating right. Once you build a car, you're operating car, you're not building car all the time. Right? >>So same with the software. Once you build a system, it should have some stability where you're running it, operating it for, for a while, at least before you touch it or refactoring all that stuff. So I think like building and operating at the same time, it's very good for companies like Amazon, AWS, especially, uh, and, and Google and, and, and Facebook and all those folks who are building technology because they are purely high-tech companies, but not for GM Ford Chrysler or Kaiser Permanente, which is healthcare or a school district. The, they, they need, need to operate that stuff once it's built. So I think, uh, the operationalization of cloud, uh, well, I think take focus going forward a lot more than it has and absorbable Deanna, on a funny note, I said, observability is one of those things. I, now these days, like, like, you know, and the beauty pageants that every contestant say is like, whatever question you asked, is it Dora and the answer and say at the end world peace, right? >>And that's a world peace term, which is the absorbability. Like you can talk about all the tech stuff and all that stuff. And at the end you say observability and you'll be fine. So, um, what I'm making is like observability is, and was very important. And when I was talking today about like how we can enable the building of absorbability into this new paradigm, which is a microservices, like where you pass a service ID, uh, all across all the functions from beginning to the end. Right. And so, so you can trace stuff. So I think he was talking, uh, at that level. Yeah. >>Let me, let's take an observer Billy real quick. I have a couple of other points. I want to get your opinions on. He said, quote, this three, enabling major enabling technologies, powering observability metrics, logging and tracing here. We know that it would, that is of course, but he didn't take a position. If you look at all the startups out there that are sitting there, the next observability, there's at least six that I know of. I mean, that are saying, and then you got ones that are kind of come in. I think signal effects was one. I liked, like I got bought by Splunk and then is observability, um, a feature, um, or is it a company? I mean, this is something that kind of gets talked about, right? I mean, it's, I mean, is it really something you can build a business on or is it a white space? That's a feature that gets pulled in what'd you guys react to that? >>So this is a platform conversation and, and, you know, one of the things that we've been having conversations around recently is this idea of platforms. And, and, you know, I've been doing a lot of work on infrastructure as code and distributed infrastructure and how people want infrastructure to be more code, like, which is very much what, what Verna was, was saying, right? How do we bring development process capabilities into our infrastructure operations? Um, and these are platform challenges. W what you're asking about from, uh, observability is perspective is if I'm running my code in a platform, if I'm running my infrastructure as a platform, I actually need to understand what that platform is doing and how it's making actions. Um, but today we haven't really built the platforms to be very transparent to the users. And observability becomes this necessary component to fix all the platforms that we have, whether they're Kubernetes or AWS, or, you know, even going back to VMware or bare metal, if you can't see what's going on, then you're operating in the blind. And that is an increasingly big problem. As we get more and more sophisticated infrastructure, right? Amazon's outage was based on systems can being very connected together, and we keep connecting systems together. And so we have to be able to diagnose and troubleshoot when those connections break or for using containers or Lambdas. The code that's running is ephemeral. It's only around for short periods of time. And if something's going wrong in it, it's incredibly hard to fix it, >>You know? And, and also he, you know, he reiterated his whole notion of log everything, right? He kept on banging on the drum on that one, like log everything, which is actually a good practice. You got to log everything. Why wouldn't you, >>I mean, how you do, but they don't make it easy. Right? Amazon has not made it easy to cross, cross, and, uh, connect all the data across all of those platforms. Right? People think of Amazon as one thing, but you know, the people who are using it understand it's actually a collection of services. And some of those are not particularly that tied together. So figuring out something that's going on across, across all of your service bundles, and this isn't an Amazon problem, this is an industry challenge. Especially as we go towards microservices, I have to be able to figure out what happened, even if I used 10 services, >>Horizontal, scalability argument. Sorry. Do you want to get your thoughts on this? So the observability, uh, he also mentioned theory kind of couched it before he went into the talk about systems theory. I'm like, okay. Let's, I mean, I love systems, and I think that's going to be the big wake up call here for the next 10 years. That's a systems mindset. And I think, you know, um, Rob's right. It's a platform conversation. When you're thinking about an operating system or a system, it has consequences when things change, but he talked about controllability versus, uh, observability and kinda T that teed up the, well, you can control systems controls, or you can have observability, uh, what's he getting at in all of this? What's he trying to say, keep, you know, is it a cover story? Is it this, is it a feature? What was the, what was the burner getting at with all this? >>Uh, I, I, I believe they, they understand that, that, uh, that all these services are very sort of micro in nature from Amazon itself. Right. And then they are not tied together as Rob said earlier. And they, he addressed that. He, uh, he, uh, announced that service. I don't know the name of that right now of problem ahead that we will gather all the data from all the different places. And then you can take a look at all the data coming from different services at this at one place where you have the service ID passed on to all the servers services. You have to do that. It's a discipline as a software developer, you have to sort of adhere to even in traditional world, like, like, you know, like how you do logging and monitoring and tracing, um, it's, it's your creativity at play, right? >>So that's what software is like, if you can pass on, I was treating what they gave an example of Citrix, uh, when, when, when you are using like tons of applications with George stream to your desktop, through Citrix, they had app ID concept, right? So you can trace what you're using and all that stuff, and you can trace the usage and all that stuff, and they can, they can map that log to that application, to that user. So you need that. So I think he w he was talking about, I think that's what he's getting too. Like we have to, we have to sort of rethink how we write software in this new Microsoft, uh, sort of a paradigm, which I believe it, it's a beautiful thing. Uh, as long as we can manage it, because Microsoft is, are spread across like, um, small and a smaller piece of software is everywhere, right? So the state, how do we keep the state intact? How do we, um, sort of trace things? Uh, it becomes a huge problem if we don't do it right? So it it's, um, it's a little, this is some learning curve for most of the developers out there. So 60 dash 70% >>Rob was bringing this up, get into this whole crash. And what is it kind of breakdown? Because, you know, there's a point where you don't have the Nirvana of true horizontal scalability, where you might have microservices that need to traverse boundaries or systems, boundaries, where, or silos. So to Rob's point earlier, if you don't see it, you can't measure it or you can't get through it. How do you wire services across boundaries? Is that containers, is that, I mean, how does this all work? How do you guys see that working? I just see a train wreck there. >>It's, it's a really hard problem. And I don't think we should underestimate it because everything we toast talked about sounds great. If you're in a single AWS region, we're talking about distributed infrastructure, right? If you think about what we've been seeing, even more generally about, you know, edge sites, uh, colo on prem, you know, in cloud multi-region cloud, all these things are actually taking this one concept and you're like, Oh, I just want to store all the log data. Now, you're not going to store all your log data in one central location anymore. That in itself, as a distributed infrastructure problem, where I have to be able to troubleshoot what's going on, you know, and know that the logs are going to the right place and capture the data, that's really important. Um, and one of the innovations in this that I think is going to impact the industry over the next couple of years is the addition of more artificial intelligence and machine learning, into understanding operations patterns and practices. >>And I think that that's a really significant industry trend where Amazon has a distinct advantage because it's their systems and it's captive. They can analyze and collect a lot of data across very many customers and learn from those things and program systems that learn from those things. Um, and so the way you're going to keep up with this is not by logging more and more data, but by doing exactly what we're talking through, which was how do I analyze the patterns with machine learning so that I can get predictive analysis so that I can understand something that looks wrong and then put people on checking it before it goes wrong. >>All right, I gotta, I gotta bring up something controversial. I can't hold back any longer. Um, you know, Mark Zuckerberg said many, many years ago, all the old people, they can do startups, they're too old and you gotta be young and hungry. You gotta do that stuff. If we're talking systems theory, uh, automated meta reasoning, evolvable systems, resilience, distributed computing, isn't that us old guys that have actually have systems experience. I mean, if you're under the age of 30, you probably don't even know what a system is. Um, and, or co coded to the level of systems that we use to code. And I'm putting my quote old man kind of theory, only kidding, by the way on the 30. But my point is there is a generation of us that had done computer science in the, in the eighties and seventies, late seventies, maybe eighties and nineties, it's all it was, was systems. It was a systems world. Now, when you have a software world, the aperture is increasing in terms of software, are the younger generation of developers system thinkers, or have we lost that art, uh, or is it doesn't matter? What do you guys think? >>I, I think systems thinking comes with age. I mean, that's, that's sort of how I think, I mean, like I take the systems thinking a greater sort of, >>Um, world, like state as a system country, as a system and everything is a system, your body's a system family system, so it's the same way. And then what impacts the system when you operated internal things, which happened within the system and external, right. And we usually don't talk about the economics and geopolitics. There's a lot of the technology. Sometimes we do, like we have, I think we need to talk more about that, the data sovereignty and all that stuff. But, but even within the system, I think the younger people appreciate it less because they don't have the, they don't see, um, software taught like that in the universities. And, and, and, and by these micro micro universities now online trainings and stuff like sweaty, like, okay, you learn this thing and you're good at it saying, no, no, it's not like that. So you've got to understand the basics and how the systems operate. >>Uh, I'll give you an example. So like we were doing the, the, the client server in early nineties, and then gradually we moved more towards like having ESB enterprise services, bus where you pass a state, uh, from one object to another, and we can bring in the heterogeneous, uh, languages. This thing is written in Java. This is in.net. This is in Python. And then you can pass it through that. Uh, you're gonna make a state for, right. And that, that was contained environment. Like ESBs were contained environment. We were, I, I wrote software for ESPs myself at commerce one. And so like, we, what we need today is the ESP equallant in the cloud. We don't have that. >>Rob, is there a reverse ageism developers? I mean, if you're young, you might not have systems. What do you think? I, I don't agree with that. I actually think that the nature of the systems that we're programming forces people into more distributed infrastructure thinking the platforms we have today are much better than they were, you know, 20 years ago, 30 years ago, um, in the sense that I can do distributed infrastructure programming without thinking about it very much anymore, but you know, people know, they know how to use cloud. They know how to use a big platform. They know how to break things into microservices. I, I think that these are inherent skills that people need to think about that you're you're right. There is a challenge in that, you know, you get very used to the platform doing the work for you, and that you need to break through it, but that's an experiential thing, right? >>The more experienced developers are going to have to understand what the platforms do. Just like, you know, we used to have to understand how registers worked inside of a CPU, something I haven't worried about for a long, long time. So I, I don't think it's that big of a problem. Um, from, from that perspective, I do think that the thing that's really hard is collaboration. And so, you know, it's, it's hard people to people it's hard inside of a platform. It's hard when you're an Amazon size and you've been rolling out services all over the place and now have to figure out how to fit them all together. Um, and that to me is, is a design problem. And it's more about being patient and letting things, uh, mature. If anything might take away from this keynote is, you know, everybody asked Amazon to take a breath and work on usability and, and cross cross services synchronizations rather than, than adding more services into the mix. And that's, >>That's a good point. I mean, again, I bring up the conversation because it's kind of the elephant in the room and I make it being controversial to make a point there. So our view, because, you know, I interviewed Judy Estrin who helped found the internet with Vince Cerf. She's well-known for her contributions for the TCP IP protocol. Andy Besta Stein. Who's the, who's the Rembrandt of motherboards. But as Pat Gelsinger, CEO of VMware, I would say both said to me on the cube that without systems thinking, you don't understand consequences of when things change. And we start thinking about this microservices conversation, you start to hear a little bit of that pattern emerging, where those systems, uh, designs matter. And then you have, on the other hand, you have this modern application framework where serverless takes over. So, you know, Rob back to your infrastructure as code, it really isn't an either, or they're not mutually exclusive. You're going to have a set of nerds and geeks engineering systems to make them better and easier and scalable. And then you're going to have application developers that need to just make it work. So you start to see the formation of kind of the, I won't say swim lanes, but I mean, what do you guys think about that? Because you know, Judy and, um, Andy better sign up. They're kind of right. Uh, >>Th th the enemy here, and we're seeing this over and over again is complexity. And, and the challenge has been, and serverless is like, those people like, Oh, I don't have to worry about servers anymore because I'm dealing with serverless, which is not true. What you're doing is you're not worrying about infrastructure as much, but you, the complexity, especially in a serverless infrastructure where you're pulling, you know, events from all sorts of things, and you have one, one action, one piece of code, you know, triggering a whole bunch of other pieces of code in a decoupled way. We are, we are bringing so much complexity into these systems, um, that they're very hard to conceive of. Um, and AIML is not gonna not gonna address that. Um, I think one of the things that was wonderful about the setting, uh, in the sugar factory and at all of that, you know, sort of very mechanical viewpoint, you know, when you're actually connecting all things together, you can see it. A lot of what we've been building today is almost impossible to observe. And so the complexity price that we're paying in infrastructure is going up exponentially and we can't sustain infrastructures like that. We have to start leveling that in, right? >>Your point on the keynote, by the way, great call out on, on the, on the setting. I thought that was very clever. So what do you think about this? Because as enterprises go through this transformation, one of the big conversations is the solution architecture, the architecture of, um, how you lay all this out. It's complexity involved. Now you've got on premise system, you've got cloud, you've got edge, which you're hearing more and more local processing, disconnected systems, managing it at the edge with visualization. We're going to hear more about that, uh, with Dirk, when he comes on the queue, but you know, just in general as a practitioner out there, what, what's, what's your, what do you see people getting their arms around, around this, this keynote? What do they, what's your thoughts? >>Yeah, I, I think, uh, the, the pattern I see emerging is like, or in the whole industry, regardless, like if you put, when does your sign is that like, we will write less and less software in-house I believe that SAS will emerge. Uh, and it has to, I mean, that is the solution to kill the complexity. I believe, like we always talk about software all the time and we, we try to put this in the one band, like it's, everybody's dining, same kind of software, and they have, I'm going to complexity and they have the end years and all that stuff. That's not true. Right. If you are Facebook, you're writing totally different kind of software that needs to scale differently. You needs a lot of cash and all that stuff, right. Gash like this and cash. Well, I ain't both gases, but when you are a mid size enterprise out there in the middle, like fly over America, what, uh, my friend Wayne says, like, we need to think about those people too. >>Like, how do they drive software? What kind of software do they write? Like how many components they have in there? Like they have three tiers of four tiers. So I think they're a little more simpler software for internal use. We have to distinguish these applications. I always talk about this, like the systems of record systems of differentiation, the system of innovation. And I think cloud will do great. And the newer breed of applications, because you're doing a lot of, a lot of experimentation. You're doing a lot of DevOps. You have two pizza teams and all that stuff, which is good stuff we talk about, well, when you go to systems of record, you need stability. You need, you need some things which is operational. You don't want to touch it again, once it's in production. Right? And so the, in between that, that thing is, I think that's, that's where the complexity lies the systems are, which are in between those systems of record and system or innovation, which are very new Greenfield. That, that's what I think that's where we need to focus, uh, our, um, platform development, um, platform as a service development sort of, uh, dollars, if you will, as an industry, I think Amazon is doing that right. And, and Azura is doing that right to a certain extent too. I, I, I, I worry a little bit about, uh, uh, Google because they're more tilted towards the data science, uh, sort of side of things right now. >>Well, Microsoft has the most visibility into kind of the legacy world, but Rob, you're shaking your head there. Um, on his comment, >>You know, I, I, you know, I, I watched the complexity of all these systems and, and, you know, I'm not sure that sass suffocation of everything that we're doing is leading to less is pushing the complexity behind a curtain so that you, you, you can ignore the man behind the curtain. Um, but at the end of the day, you know what we're really driving towards. And I think Amazon is accelerating this. The cloud is accelerating. This is a new set of standard operating processes and procedures based on automation, based on API APIs, based on platforms, uh, that ultimately, I think people could own and could come back to how we want to operate it. When I look at what we w we were just shown with the keynote, you know, it was an, is things that application performance management and monitoring do. It's, it's not really Amazon specific stuff. There's no magic beans that Amazon is growing operational knowledge, you know, in Amazon, greenhouses that only they know how to consume. This is actually pretty block and tackle stuff. Yeah. And most people don't need to operate it at that type of scale to be successful. >>It's a great point. I mean, let's, let's pick up on that for the last couple of minutes we have left. Cause I think that's a great, great double-down because you're thinking about the mantra, Hey, everything is a service, you know, that's great for business model. You know, you hand it over to the techies. They go, wait a minute. What does that actually mean? It's harder. But when I talk to people out there and you hear people talking about everything is a service or sanctification, I do agree. I think you're putting complexity behind the curtain, but it's kind of the depends answer. So if you're going to have everything as a service, the common thesis is it has to have support automation everywhere. You got to automate things to make things sassiphy specified, which means you need five nines, like factory type environments. They're not true factories, but Rob, to your point, if you're going to make something a SAS, it better be Bulletproof. Because if you're, if you're automating something, it better be automated, right? You can measure things all you want, but if it's not automated, like a, like a, >>And you have no idea what's going on behind the curtains with some of these, these things, right. Especially, you know, I know our business and you know, our customers' businesses, they're, they're reliant on more and more services and you have no idea, you know, the persistence that service, if they're going to break an API, if they're going to change things, a lot of the stuff that Amazon is adding here defensively is because they're constantly changing the wheels on the bus. Um, and that is not bad operational practice. You should be resilient to that. You should have processes that are able to be constantly updated and CICB pipelines and, you know, continuous deployments, you shouldn't expect to, to, you know, fossilize your it environment in Amber, and then hope it doesn't have to change for 10 years. But at the same time, we'll work control your house. >>That's angle about better dev ops hypothetical, like a factory, almost metaphor. Do you care if the cars are being shipped down the assembly line and the output works and the output, if you have self-healing and you have these kinds of mechanisms, you know, you could have do care. The services are being terminated and stood up and reformed as long as the factory works. Right? So again, it's a complexity level of how much it, or you want to bite off and chew or make work. So to me, if it's automated, it's simple, did it work or not? And then the cost of work to be, what's your, what's your angle on this? Yeah. >>I believe if you believe in systems thinking, right. You have to believe in, um, um, the concept of, um, um, Oh gosh, I'm losing over minor. Um, abstraction. Right? So abstraction is your friend in software. Abstraction is your friend anyways, right? That's how we, humans pieces actually make a lot more progress than any other sort of living things here in this world. So that's why we are smart. We can abstract complexity behind the curtains, right? We, we can, we can keep improving, like from the, the, you know, wooden cart to the car, to the, to the plane, to the other, like, we, we, we have this, like when, when we see we are flying these airplanes, like 90% of the time they're on autopilot, like that's >>Hi, hiding my attractions is, is about evolution. Evolvable software term. He said, it's true. All right, guys, we have one minute left. Um, let's close this out real quick. Each of you give a closing statement on what you thought of the keynote and Verner's talk prop, we'll start with you. >>Uh, you know, as always, it's a perf keynote, uh, very different this year because it was so operationally focused and using the platform and, and helping people run their, their, off their applications and software better. And I think it's an interesting turn that we've been waiting for for Amazon, uh, to look at, you know, helping people use their own platform more. Um, so, uh, refreshing change and I think really powerful and well delivered. I really did like the setting >>Great shopping. And when we found, I found out today, that's Teresa Carlson is now running training and certification. So I'm expecting that to be highly awesomely accelerated a success there. Sorry, what's your take real quick on burners talk, walk away. Keynote thoughts. >>I, I, I think it was what I expected it to be like, he focused on the more like a software architecture kind of discussion. And he focused this time a little more on the ops side and the dev side, which I think they, they are pivoting a little bit, um, because they, they want to sell more AWS stuff to us, uh, to the existing enterprises. So I think, um, that was, um, good. Uh, I wish at the end, he said, not only like, go, go build, but also go build and operate. So can, you know, they all say, go build, build, build, but like, who's going to operate this stuff. Right. So I think, um, uh, I will see a little shift, I think, going forward, but we were talking earlier, uh, during or watch party that I think, uh, going forward, uh, AWS will open start open sourcing the commoditized version of their cloud, which have been commoditized by other vendors and gradually they will open source it so they can keep the hold onto the enterprises. I think that's what my take is. That's my prediction is >>Awesome and want, I'll make sure I'm at your watch party next time. Sorry. I missed it. Nobody's taking notes. Try and prepare. Sorry, Rob. Thanks for coming on and sharing awesome insight and expertise to experts in cloud and dev ops. I know them. And can firstly vouch for their awesomeness? Thanks for coming on. I think Verner can verify what I thought already was reporting Amazon everywhere. And if you connect the dots, this idea of reasoning, are we going to have smarter cloud? That's the next conversation? I'm John for your host of the cube here, trying to get smarter with Aus coverage. Thanks to Robin. Sarvi becoming on. Thanks for watching.

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE, with digital coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020. Special coverage sponsored by AWS Worldwide Public Sector. >> Welcome to theCUBE Virtual and our coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020, the specialized programming for Worldwide Public Sector. I'm Lisa Martin. I'm joined by Nick Speece the chief federal technologist for Snowflake. Nick, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, Lisa. It's great to be here. >> Likewise, chief federal technologist, that's the first time I've ever heard of that title. Tell me a little bit about that. >> It's probably the last time you'll hear it. So chief federal technologist is really somebody in the company who is focused on bringing the needs of the federal government back to our corporate headquarters, making sure that the product as it's developed and evolves has the federal requirements in mind. >> Excellent. So the last couple of months for Snowflake big, biggest software IPO and software history your market cap right now is at 66 billion 515 data workloads running on Snowflake's platform every day 250 petabytes of data under management, a lot is going on. Let's talk about Snowflake. You guys operate only in the cloud, why was that decision made and how does that impact businesses analysis of data? >> Yeah, so great question and the answer is actually in the opening that you gave for us and thank you for that reinforcement. Snowflake can't exist anywhere, but the cloud. Technology over the last five to 10 years has really seen a move from what the cloud originally was, which was I have a virtual machine in my data center, I'm going to run it on your stuff not mine, into more comprehensive service offerings like Snowflake. We can't reach the kind of scale that Snowflake operates at every day and that our customers demand without the technology of clouds like AWS. The technology has to be there, the underlying and underpinning architecture has to be there, otherwise our customers get left in the dark and we can't can't have that. >> And especially today as data volumes are massively increasing and we know that that's only going to go up. We know that IT is only going to be more complex but when we talk to businesses in any industry the value of the data is in the insights the ability to extract that data in real time glean insights from it so that businesses can make data-based decisions that pivot their business, especially critical during the year that we have now known as 2020. Talk to me a little bit about though digging into your marketing material, everyone, there's all these terms, right, that everyone uses and you guys use single source of truth. What does it actually mean for single source, for stuff like? >> Yeah, so we talk about cloud, we talk about single source of truth and when you're looking at data problems, the problem and the solution are the same thing. A massive amount of data is a raw resource, that's all it is. And trying to refine that raw resource into something that is insightful or something that is useful to a business process is a challenge that every customer in every market, in every region undergoes. And how you overcome that is critical. And one of the primary focuses of Snowflake is to evolve the data cloud. Snowflake platform is the underlying technology for the data cloud but the data cloud is where we're going. And what I mean by data cloud. If you have a data set, your internal data, that is your truth, but it might not be the truth. So in Snowflake we encourage our customers to collaborate on data sets. For example, if you want to know how many people are living in a certain borough in New York City you could go around with a clicker and count everyone, or you could just ask the Census Bureau. That's the nature of the data cloud and what we're talking about here. Going to the subject matter experts who have the data that you need, using our marketplace, using our private exchanges, using our data sharing to build your own data cloud and become part of the next gen architecture for data sharing and collaboration, to get to the source of the truth, to make better decisions, to gain better insights. It's great to combine your data with enrich data from other sources, especially when it comes to making federal decisions and governance decisions. >> Absolutely that's critical. That the biggest challenge customers have is being able to sort through all that and find. I like how you put this as their single source of truth. Can you give us some examples of some federal agencies maybe even just anonymously that are using the power of Snowflake to do just that? >> Absolutely. We've got customers in the healthcare space and in some of the law enforcement spaces and especially in public education that are trying to increase the awareness of the folks that are subscribing to their services, for example, folks that are looking for healthcare help. If you're filing claims for a certain healthcare providers or certain care facilities, we want to make sure that those claims that are forwarded to those entities are legitimate, first of all, for example, if you're filing a claim for knee surgery in Florida, you probably didn't have one in California, three hours later. So those kinds of enforcement activities, and not just trying to do audits but also to benefit everybody who's receiving care. There's a lot of push now about genetic sequencing, DNA and RNA vaccination is huge with COVID-19, getting access to massive amounts of data to do analysis against and figure out the best approach, that's critical for where we go in the next 10 to 15 years in healthcare. Snowflake is very, very honored and happy to be propelling that move in the healthcare space. >> It is that's going to be absolutely critical but we're also seeing it, you know, everywhere else, such as for universities and education, suddenly this need, the last few months for real-time learning. Talk to me about data analysis. Can Snowflake help companies, you talked about enriching data sets so not just companies sources of data but additional data sets that they can add in and evaluate and analyze to make great decisions, but from a historical real-time perspective, talk to me how Snowflake helps with that data analysis. >> Yeah, sure. Right. So Snowflake in and of itself can do some analysis work. We've got some great visualization tools in our new UI that was released recently on public preview. So there's some analysis tools built into Snowflake but really where the value comes from is in taking your tools that you already use today and connecting it to a data source or platform that can wrangle that data, that can move that data through automated pipelines to give you a model view of that data that's beneficial. For example, data scientists and data engineers spend 80% of their time, and I know a lot of statistics are made up on the spot, that was not a promise, but trying to move this data through and refine it and build features to get to the point where you can ask a question is 80% of these very valuable professionals time. Shortening those timelines is what Snowflake really aims to do in the analysis space. We're not trying to replace the analysis tools that you use today, we work fine with all of them. The big difference is presenting them with enough data volume to give you real insights and eliminate bias as much as we can in data sets. >> What are some of the things that differentiates Snowflake from data warehouses and other folks in the market? >> Yeah. Great question. The big difference is Snowflake was built natively for the cloud. We weren't adapted to the cloud, we didn't adopt the cloud at some point in the future, Snowflake was built from scratch to be in the cloud. And since this is the appropriate show to mention it the primary difference between us is we were built to use object storage foundationally underneath our technology. And I know that sounds really nerdy and it is, but it adds a tremendous amount of value. If you think about how we used to collaborate 10 years ago we'd have a spreadsheet that if I open that spreadsheet for my share drive and you tried to open it at the same time, you'd get locked out. You're told you couldn't have it. And if tradition stays true I would probably be on vacation for two weeks. Contrast that now with the massive Google Doc platform and Office 365, object storage has changed the way that we collaborate on the same kinds of documents. Multiple people interacting with one thing at one time without contention, that's the reason why Snowflake has to operate in the cloud. We bring that same paradigm, multiple actors on a single object and give you that source of truth the truth that you absolutely need to make decisions. >> And that's critical these days as we know. We're in living in uncertain times and one of the things I think we can expect is the uncertainty to continue, but also for many industries people to stay remote or some big percentage for quite a while. So the ability to have those collaboration tools and be able to collaborate in real time is table stakes for so many companies. But when we're talking about some of the things going on this year, security, we can't not talk about security. You know, all these folks from home accessing corporate networks, you know, maybe not through VPNs or behind firewalls, the cloud is paramount to that. How does Snowflake address the security issue? >> Absolutely. So I'll start by saying our security is inherited from the wonderful security platform that AWS has underneath it. So we inherit all the security around data storage the EC Compute, all of the different entities and end points that AWS already secures Snowflake takes the same precautions. More than that, we've also built and rolled this access control to ensure that people are getting access only to the data that they should be getting access to, we recently implemented data masking as well, so certain roles are not able to see unmasked data, but they can still do queries that use the underlying data to filter. So there's a lot of different capabilities built in, encryption at rest, encryption in flight, AES-256 encryption keys used in a hierarchial model. These are phenomenal security architectures that are paramount to the security of the folks that are using our platform. Because we know at the end of the day the first day we have a leak in Snowflake is probably our last day in business. We got to be good at that which is why it's our top priority. >> I didn't, to ever talk about security as an inherited, I must be a dominant trait if we're going to be talking about, you know, genetics and chromosomes and mRNA and things like that. So walk me through last question, a government organization, or say they're an AWS customer or they want to start using Snowflake, what's that process? How do they go about doing that to leverage those inherited security capabilities that you talked about? >> Well, thankfully AWS has helped us put a FedRAMP moderate certified Snowflake region together in AWS, East commercial, so we're very happy to have a FedRAMP moderate region. They can access Snowflake through the AWS Marketplace or from Snowflake.com, you can start a trial in just a couple of minutes. Our security is built into all of our regions although the FedRAMP regions are specialized in some of the encryption technology we use, but we always, always always protect our users' data, regardless of where it is. >> You make it sound easy, I got to say. (laughing) >> That's because it is. (laughing) Thank you cloud. >> That's good. And well, that's good and it should be, especially because there's so much complexity and uncertainty everywhere else in the world right now. Last question for you. As I mentioned in the beginning, the biggest IPO in software history, just a couple of months ago during probably one of the most strangest time of any of us have ever, and our relatives ever witnessed, what can we expect from Snowflake in 2021? Are you going to bring all the good vibes that we all need? (laughing) >> Well, good vibes is our business model. You know, Snowflake is a phenomenal platform. We've had a ton of success driven by the success of our cloud provider partners, driven by the success of our wonderful customers. We have over 4,000 people using Snowflake now to great effect. You can look for more features, you can look for more functions, but really the evolution of the data cloud, our big push is to help our customers get into the data cloud, get the truth out of their data and make better decisions every day. And you'll see more of that from us as time continues. >> One more question I wanted to sneak in, how did you work with those customers to evolve the data cloud? What's that feedback loop like? >> It's, a lot of it comes down to silos that the customers have built up over years and years and years of operation. That's the first step. In Snowflake there isn't such thing really as a data silo there's data put into Snowflake, everything is unified, you can do queries across databases, that's the first thing. The second thing is browsing our data marketplace. It's just like an App Store for your phone but instead it's data sets and the data sets are published by the experts who know that material better than anyone. I mentioned earlier bringing in everything from housing evaluation data to COVID-19 data from California and Boston, bringing World Health Organization data, John Hopkins University data, joining that with the data that you already use today along with weather and population counts, the main thing here, the strategy is almost endless. More and more data sets are being published over every day. We have over a hundred contributors in the marketplace now. >> That's exciting that we have the technology and the power like this to help the world re, you know, recover from such a crazy time. It's nice to know that, that there was the power of that behind that, and the smart folks like you chief federal technologists, helping to fine tune that and really ensure that organizations across the government can maximize the value of data and find their single source of truth. Nick, it's been a blast having you on theCUBE. Thank you for joining me. >> Thank you for having me. >> For next piece, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE Virtual. (upbeat music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel and AWS. Yeah, hello, everyone, and welcome back to the Cubes Walter Wall coverage of AWS reinvent 2020. We've gone virtual along with reinvent and we heard in Andy Jassy is hours long. Keynote a number of new innovations in the area of storage. And with me to talk about that is Milan Thompson Bukovec. She's the vice president of Block and Object Storage and AWS. That's everything. Elastic block storage s three Glacier, the whole portfolio Milon. Thanks for coming on. >>Great to see you. >>Great to see you too. So you heard Andy. We all heard Andy talk a lot about reinventing different parts of the platform, reinventing industries and a really kind of exciting and visionary put talk that he put forth. Let's >>talk >>about storage, though. How is storage reinventing itself? >>Well, as you know, cloud storage was essentially invented by a W s a number of years ago. And whether that's in 2000 and six, when US three was launched, or 2000 and eight when CBS was launched and we first came up with this model of pay as you go for durable, attached storage. Too easy to instances. And so we haven't stopped and we haven't slowed down. If anything, we've picked up the rate of reinvention that we've done across the portfolio for storage. I think, as Andy called out, speed matters. And it matters for how customers air thinking about how do they pivot and move to the cloud as quickly as they can, particularly this year. And it matters a lot in storage as well, because the changing access patterns of what customers air doing with their new cloud applications, you know they're they're transforming their businesses and their applications, and they need a modern storage platform underneath it. And that's what you have with AWS Storage. And he talked about some of the key releases, particularly in block storage. It's actually kind of amazing. What's what's been done with CBS is here. We launched GP three GP two was the previous generation general purpose volume type. We launched that in 2000 and 14 again thief, first type of general purpose volume that had this great combination of simplicity and price, and just about everybody uses it for a boot or often a data volume. And with GP three, which was available yesterday with Andy's announcement, we added four times peak throughput on top of GP two, and it's a 20% lower storage price per gigabyte per month. And we took the feedback. The number one feedback we got on GP to which was how can I separate buying throughput and I ops from storage capacity? And that is really important. That goes back to the promise of the cloud. And it goes back to being able to pick what aspect do you want to scale your storage on? And so, with GP three, you could buy a certain amount of capacity. And if you're good with that capacity, but you need more throughput, more eye ops, you can buy those independently. And that is that fine grained customization for those changing data patterns that I just talked about. And it's available for GP three today. >>Yeah, that was I looked at that, like my life is a knob that you could turn Okay, juice my eye ops. And don't touch my capacity. I'm happy there. I don't wanna pay for more of it. >>And thio add to that it's a knob you could turn if you need it. We have more throughput, more eye ops as a baseline capacity for your storage capacity than we did for GP to. But then you can tune it based on whatever you need, not just now, but in the future. >>So so given the pandemic, I mean, how has that affected E? Everybody is talking about going to the cloud, because where else you gonna go? But But how has that affected what customers are doing this year, and does it change your roadmap at all? Does it change your thinking? >>Well, I have to say, there's two main things that we've seen. One is it's really accelerated customers thinking about getting off of on premises and into the club. It's done that because nobody really wants to manage the data center. And if there's ever a year you don't want to manage the data center, it's 2020 and it's because, particularly with storage appliances, it takes a long time to acquire. Let's just take storage area networks or sense super expensive. You get a fixed amount of capacity you have to acquire. It takes months to come in you gotta rack and stack. Then you gotta change all your networking and maintain it. Ah, lot of customers don't want to do that. And so what it's done for us is it's really, uh, you know, accelerated our thinking and you saw yesterday and Andy's keynote as well. Of how do we build the first san in the cloud? And we launched Io two. In August of this year, we introduced the first nines of durability, again reinventing how people think about durability and their block storage. But just this week we now have a Iot to block Express with 2 56 K ai ops, four K megabytes of throughput in 64 terabytes of capacity, that sand level performance. And it's available for preview because I 02 is going to be your son in the cloud. And that is a direct correlation to what we hear from customers, which is how can I get away from these expensive on premises purchases like Sands and combine the performance with the elasticity that I need? So that's the first thing. How can we accelerate getting off of these very rigid procurement cycles that we have and having to manage a data center. It's not just for EBS, its for S. Trias. Well, the second thing we're hearing from customers is how can I have the agility? So you talk to customers as well. He talked to CEOs and C. T. O s. It's been a crazy year in 2020. It was one thing that a company has to do its pivot. It's really figure out. How are you going to adjust and adjust quickly? And so we have customers like Ontario Telehealth Network up in Canada, where they went from 8000 to 30,000 users because they're doing virtual health for Ontario. And we have other customers who, you know, that's a pivot. That's an increase. And we have other customers, like APS Flyer, where their goal is to just save money without changing their application. And they also did a pivot. They used the intelligence hearing storage class, which is the most popular storage class, as three offers for data lakes, and they were able to make that change save 18% on their storage cost, no change of their application, just using the capabilities of AWS. And so his ability to pivot helped you know really make us think and accelerate what we're building as well. And so one of the things that we launched just recently for intelligent hearing is we added two new archival tears to intelligent hearing. And those are archival tears, you know, just like intelligence hearing automatically watches every object industry storage and your data lake and gives you dynamic pricing based on if it's frequently accessed in a month or inflict infrequently accessed, you can turn on archival tear. And if your object your pork a file, for example, isn't access or your backup isn't access for 90 days, intelligence hearing will automatically move it to glacier characteristics of archival or too deep archive and give you the same price. A dollar, a terabyte per month. If your data is an access to 180 days, it's done automatically, and it means you save up to 90% 95% and cost on that storage. And so, if you if you think about those two trends, how can I get away from getting locked into those on premises Hardware cycles? How can I get away from it faster for sands and other hardware appliances and then the other trend is how can I pivot and use the innovation and the reinvention in our storage services to just save money and be more agile in these changing conditions? >>So I gotta ask you follow up question on staying in the cloud, because when you think of sand, you think of switches. You think of complexity, but I get that you're connecting to the performance of a sand. But you guys are all about simplicity. So how did you What's behind there? Can you take us under the covers? Just you guys build your own little storage network because it's cloud. It's gotta be fast and simple. >>That's right. When we're thinking about performance and cost, we go down to the metal for this stuff. We think about Unicosta a very fine grained level, and when we're building new technology that we know is gonna be the foundation for everything we're doing for that high performance, we went down to the protocol level. We're using something called Us RD. It's all rolled up under the hood for Block Express, and it's the foundation of that super super high performance. As you know, there's a lot of engineering behind the scenes in the cloud and for for what we've done this year, as part of that reinvention we've reinvented all the way down to the protocol way. >>Let me ask you that the two things that come up in our survey when you talk to CEOs, they say two priorities. Security is actually second cloud migration actually popped up to the top. So where does storage fit in that whole notion about cloud migration, >>Storage eyes, usually where a lot of people start, you know, Luckily, with a W s, you don't have to choose between security or cloud of migration. Security is job one for every AWS service. And so when customers air thinking about how do I move an application, they gotta move the data first. And so they start from the from the data. What storage do I use? What is the best fit for the storage and how do I best secure that's storage? And so the innovation that we dio on storage always comes with that. That combination of, you know, migration, the set of tools that we provide for getting data from on premises into the cloud. We have tools like aws data sync which do a great job of this on. Then we also look at things like how do we continue to take the profile of security forward? And one example of that is something we launched just this week called Bucket keys s three bucket keys. And it drops the cost of using kms for service side encryption with us three by over 90%. And the way it does it is that we've integrated those two services super closely together so that you can minimize the amount of costs that you make for very, very frequent request. Because in data lakes you have millions and billions of objects and our goal is to make security so cost effective people don't even think about it. That also goes for other parts of the platform. We have guard duty for us three now, and what that does is security anomaly detection automatically to track your access patterns across as three and flag when something is not quite what it should be. And so this idea of like how do I not only get my data into the cloud? But then how do I take advantage of the breath of the storage portfolio, but also the breath of the AWS services to really maximize that security profile as well as the access patterns that I want from my application. >>Well, my way hit the major announcements and unfortunately, out of time. But I really would love to have you back and go deeper and have you share your vision of what the cloud storage piece looks like going forward. Thanks so much for coming in. The Cube is great to have you. >>Great to be here. Thanks, Dave. CIA. >>See you later and keep it right, everybody. You're watching the cubes. Coverage of aws reinvent 2020 right back.