>> From the SiliconAngle Media office
in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE.
Now here's your host, Dave Vellante.
(upbeat music)
>> Hi, everybody, welcome to this CUBE conversation.
I'm Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman is here with me,
and we're going to break down AWS,
kind of give you a midyear what's happened
so far this year with all the events
that we've been covering and what to look forward to.
The NYC Summit is coming up, Stu.
It's been a big year, obviously we came off of re:Invent,
Amazon's got a $30 billion run rate business
growing at 40%-plus per year.
Stu, that means they're putting nine billion
of incremental revenue every year into
the cloud business, the marketplace, that growth.
That's roughly as large as the entire
Microsoft cloud business, which is
astounding when you think about it.
>> Yeah, Dave, that's, that's the point Amazon
definitely has been making for a couple years,
and you're absolutely right.
Microsoft is definitely growing
at a faster pace than Amazon,
and they're running, what, 75%, 80%?
>> Yeah, 70-plus, yeah.
>> But off a much smaller number,
so the incremental add that Amazon has been throwing off
the last couple years, every year they're adding
more than in Azure every year,
so absolutely Amazon, you know, is the lead horse out there,
and while, you know, the horses on the track
behind them are trying fast to catch up,
Amazon, if you talk about infrastructure as a service,
AWS is still the lead horse out there.
>> Well, the big question is will that attenuate,
and we were at the, remember the
Nutanix inaugural Nutanix .NEXT,
Dheeraj Pandey, who's you know a very smart guy,
somebody we respect a lot,
one of the fundamental assumptions they were making
is eventually the law of large numbers will catch up
to them, and now it very well may, but it hasn't yet.
I asked John Lovelock can a company the size of Amazon,
$30 billion dollar, you know, company,
grow at 42% a year, is that sustainable?
And he said, "Absolutely, there's nothing to stop them."
Now, you know, who knows, who has the crystal ball.
What are your thoughts on that?
>> Yeah, so Dave, what we saw is Amazon's not sitting still.
You know, they always like to say it's always day one,
and if you look at where they're growing,
the products that they keep throwing off,
the innovation that they keep moving on,
and the flywheel that they've had first
of customer acquisition with all of the innovations
that they're putting out there,
and the flywheel that I've been talking about
the last couple of years, the flywheel of data,
which is something we want to be a little concerned about
how much data Amazon actually does have,
both Amazon AWS and Amazon with all those
intelligent devices that are in our homes
and connecting everything together.
Some people are a little concerned about that.
The government's a little bit concerned about that,
but absolutely Amazon is growing everywhere.
We've seen Amazon going into subsegments of the market,
going into verticals, and going just really broad
and really deep, so absolutely,
I don't see anything slowing Amazon down.
It is a company that, you know, continues to impress.
>> One of the challenges I think, though, Stu,
that Amazon does have, and this came out of
the re:Inforce conference a couple weeks ago in Boston,
which was a conference for security practitioners,
a lot of CISOs, chief information security officers,
the number one challenge that came out of that,
when you talk to practitioners,
was their ability to keep up with
the innovations that Amazon is putting forth,
so you know, I wonder, we're going to talk
to some, some commercial customers.
You'll see them down in the Summit,
probe to see if in fact that's part of their challenge,
just the pace at which Amazon brings out new features,
but we've done, gosh, we've covered eight events,
or will have covered eight events this year,
eight productions.
You know, it started in the UK
where we covered public sector healthcare,
and then we did the AWS Summit London.
Really all about both public sector in the UK,
as well as the Summit in the UK,
innovations in the UK around cloud, et cetera,
cloud adoption, 12,000 people at the AWS London Summit.
Now, you covered re:MARS, which was not,
theCUBE wasn't there, but you were there.
What was that show all about?
>> Yeah, so first of all, it's an Amazon show,
not an AWS show, but absolutely showed underneath
where AWS fits into the fulfillment centers of Amazon,
and it was about re:MARS, so MARS,
a play of course on space, but it was machine learning,
automation, robotics, and space,
so you had the cool Blue Origin stuff.
They actually brought in Robert Downey, Jr.
Talked about how he's going to save the planet
with, you know, robotics and intelligence out there
to help clean up pollution in the globe and the like,
but it was a phenomenal show,
but what I said is actually it's going to
show a little bit underneath the covers of Amazon,
similar to what we've seen from AWS
at the re:Invent shows over the years,
because you know, we all know how many boxes
are coming to our, you know, our place of home every day,
and how fast that's going, and so this is
what's happening underneath the robotics,
the machine learning, a lot of those are AWS services
that are powering that, so it was a fascinating show,
Dave, and absolutely showed the relationship between,
you know, Amazon the parent company and AWS,
all of those cloud services
that help feed the bigger business.
>> Now, June theCUBE covered the DC Public Sector Summit.
This is Teresa Carlson's gig, she's the host.
Actually, Andy Jassy was there this time.
He wasn't there last year when you and I were covering it,
and of course that's all about bringing cloud
to public sector, not just federal but all public sector.
It includes nonprofit and education,
which we'll talk about in a minute.
The big story there is of course is JEDI.
We're talking about tens of billions of dollars,
you know, going to a contract.
Oracle, of course, is fighting it.
It's going into the courts, I guess.
There have been a number of reviews,
Oracle won't give up, you know, it's Oracle.
Amazon clearly is the front runner.
Last I read it was down to AWS and Microsoft,
with AWS being the lead contender there.
We'll see what happens, I think the decision
is coming down this month, July of 2019,
but it's really, again, about bringing
cloud innovations to public sector.
Public sector tends to take things
a little bit later than the commercial,
like for instance last year they announced
the VMware on AWS was available.
>> Yeah. >> So, you'll see those
kinds of things come maybe a year later,
but it's another, again, another big show.
There were, you know, 12, 13,000 people
there at the DC Convention Center.
>> Yeah, and Dave, when you talked about the critique
of what's happening at Amazon,
as Amazon goes deeper into all of these verticals
how do they help get that information, you know,
to the user in a way that they need to run their businesses,
so my cohost for New York City is Corey Quinn,
was listening to his podcast this morning
and he said that's where, you know,
Amazon's got, you know, dozens of blogs,
they've got so many announcements.
They haven't done a really good job,
something we've seen many companies do,
how do I get to, you know, that business role
and put it in, you know, verbiage that they understand,
as opposed to just, "Hey, we had 1000 new features
"come out this year and they're awesome
"and you should use everything."
So, you know, that's something that, you know,
the industry as a whole needs to do better at,
and Amazon just in the nature of how fast
they're moving is something that they
should be able to do a better job of.
>> And John Furrier's also going to be in New York City,
and one of the things he was stressing at re:Inforce
was the marketplace, we had Dave McCann on.
The just rocketing, I think it was
100,000 security subscriptions.
I think it was a million (chuckles) subscriptions in total,
so just an amazing momentum in the marketplace,
but re:Inforce was all about security,
deep dives on security,
chief information security officers.
What came out of that show, the big takeaway was,
was the head of AWS's security,
the chief information security officer Schmidt,
said this narrative in the industry
that the sky is falling doesn't do anybody any good.
We, it's not productive, we should be more positive.
The state of the cloud union is, is good,
like the President of the United States,
"The state of the union is strong."
Having said that, Amazon talks about
the shared security model.
The practitioners that we talked to
said, "Yeah, shared model.
"Amazon's going to secure the infrastructure
"of the storage, the compute, the database.
"We are responsible for our end,
"and it really is on us to make sure that we are secure,"
so again, back to that point about the pace of innovation
that Amazon is putting forth is a challenge for people.
AWS IMAGINE is also going down.
I think this week. >> Yeah.
>> What's that show all about? >> Yeah, so it's in Seattle,
and it's if, you mentioned the public sector one in DC,
which is government agencies, nonprofits, and education,
so IMAGINE is a subset of that.
My understanding is the education
and nonprofit piece of that,
from when you and I were in DC last year
for the Public Sector Summit, it's,
it is impressive how deep Amazon is going into these spaces,
the affinity they have, and really, you know,
how happy the customers are to be able to move fast,
so you know, when you think about nonprofits
and you think about education,
innovation is not the first thing that usually comes to mind
because budgets are tight and "I don't have enough people,"
and usually you've got, you know, whatever's left over,
but IMAGINE is them, you know, how do we move these forward.
How do we, you know, we know we need
to help transform education.
It's, you know, so important to train the next generation,
so you know, IMAGINE, there are some
great stories that come out that.
You know, Jeff Frick loves getting those stories,
helping us tell those stories through theCUBE platform,
and so it's the second year we're doing that show.
>> Yeah, so we'll be covering that,
and then of course re:Invent, we'll have two
sets again at re:Invent this year, so--
>> Yeah, the Superbowl of our industry as it is.
>> Right, for sure.
Couple things going on, so unfortunate incidents
in southern California, big earthquakes,
well actually multiple earthquakes, right?
You had the, the physical earthquake
and then you had Kawhi Leonard
going to the, to the Clippers.
(chuckles) It's kind of an earthquake,
but so I'm interested in sort of poking
at this notion of ground stations,
so at re:Invent last year Amazon
announced Amazon Ground Station,
which essentially was ground station as a service,
so if I understand it, one of the challenges,
okay, you launch these satellites
but you still need a ground station to collect the data
and then upload it and analyze it,
that's what AWS is partnering to put in infrastructure
that allows you to essentially rent
ground station infrastructure
so you don't have to worry about building it
and securing it yourself because you think about it,
it's a, it's got to be a secure location,
you got to have fencing, you got to have physical security,
you've got to get the data in,
you've got to upload to the, to wherever
you're going to upload it, so Amazon is basically
building this service out saying,
"Don't worry about the ground station piece.
"Rent that from us."
You know, "Swipe your credit card
"and you'll have ground station as a service,
"and then we'll ingest that data, upload it the cloud,
and then apply all of the tooling that we have
"to allow you to analyze that data,"
so if you think about the earthquake devastation,
if you don't have a ground station there you can, in theory,
go to AWS and actually spin up a ground station,
ingest, you know, on the ground, you know,
the ground truth as we like to sometimes talk about,
and actually get satellite imaging
and telemetry in that region.
You know, this comes into play with things like
forest fires and all kind of, of natural disasters.
>> Yeah, Dave, even at the re:MARS show
I attended a session where one of Amazon's partners
was talking about not only just
getting the satellite data down,
but just as they have the Snowball edge today,
which is, you know, for, you know, IoT or some remote sites,
but some of these satellites are going to have the compute
and the storage at, in the satellites themselves,
so if you think about I'm going to
have these geosynchronous satellites,
I'm going to have all this connectivity,
and if I can get a gigabit of ethernet, you know,
traffic, you know, going to the satellites,
and I can do the processing at the edge,
which is now up in space, I can process that,
and you know, that edge that we talk about
gets a whole nother dimension, you know, off the,
(chuckles) off the terra firma
to be able to do those kind of analysis,
as you said, earthquakes, you know,
all of the climate discussion that's going on.
We should be able to have, tap into even more resources,
and we'll have to rename cloud if it
even goes beyond the earth, I think.
So... (chuckles) (chuckles)
>> And then Outpost is the other story
that we've been tracking.
We're tracking a lot of stories,
but Outpost is starting to ship in data form.
We've seen instances of it out there.
We've-- >> Yeah, so, so--
>> We've seen it, we just did a little
quick writeup about it.
>> Right, I mean, Dave, you know,
just a ripple went through the industry
when they showed, "Hey, here's a rack,"
and what's, they were like, "This is the exact same rack
"that we have in the Amazon data centers,"
and why it's a little surprising because we're not allowed
to see inside the Amazon Data Center,
so it's like, "Oh, okay, this is what their compute is.
"Oh, wait, it's a 24-inch rack
"as opposed to a 19-inch rack,"
but that line between the public cloud
and my on-premises environment absolutely is blurring,
so everybody wants to see where Amazon's going.
They have the big partnership with VMware.
VMware is already shipping the solution
that is the same software for that
VMware on AWS in my data center,
so you know, I can have, you know,
the Dell hardware with the VMware code,
or I can have the Amazon hardware with the VMware code
coming later this year with Outpost.
So, that line between public
and private is absolutely blurring,
and where do my applications live,
you know, that future of how fast does AWS continue to grow.
Absolutely there are applications and data
and things that will stay in my own,
you know, data center and under my control,
but that line is definitely blurring,
and there's going to be some rearchitectures.
It's definitely still going to take a couple of years
to sort some of these things out,
but we are at some of those inflection points
where we'll see some of the massive change.
>> Yeah, so I wrote a post, it's up on Wikibon,
kind of analyzing that video,
and there's some interesting things that are unique.
There's certainly a lot of goodness in there,
not, some of the things they talk about
aren't completely unique to AWS, but you know,
things like Nitro, and their special
virtualization engine, and their special chip,
and you want to get a look at that,
you know, take a look at that video,
and then Stu, New York City Summit this week.
We mentioned some of the innovations
that we've seen up to date this year,
a lot of talk, I'm sure, about the Marketplace.
>> Yeah, I'm wondering if there'll be any ripples, Dave,
because the one-half of HQ2 was supposed
to be in New York City and now it's not.
Doesn't mean they don't have a strong
presence in New York City.
Like London I believe it's somewhere
around 12 to 15,000 people.
When I went to the New York City
two years ago it was quite impressive.
It is a "free show," which means if you're
a customer you get in for free,
if you're a partner, of course you're still
paying for everything that goes there,
but the regional summits are quite impressive,
and a great way to get in touch with Amazon
and all that they're doing if you don't want
to go to the Superbowl itself, which is, you know,
50,000-plus now in Las Vegas towards the end of the year.
>> Yeah, these are like mini re:Invents,
and they're actually quite good.
A lot of, a lot of practitioner focus
and you're going to, you're going to see that in New York City.
>> Yeah, I mean, Dave, what I always love
about every Amazon show I go to,
there are customers that are interested
in learning new things.
How can I do better with what I'm doing,
but also how can I, you know, change what I'm doing,
how can I move forward, so even if it's not
adopting the latest and greatest from AWS,
the entire ecosystem is going there to meet
with those customers and talk about digital transformation,
you know, modern workforce,
all of these hot trends definitely play out.
Ground zero is the AWS Marketplace.
>> Yeah, and this is by design, as I said before.
The pace of innovation is a challenge for people.
It's an adoption-blocker, and so Amazon wants to educate,
and you know, share the knowledge
so that they can get more adoption.
Okay, Stu, thanks very much, good luck this week.
Check out siliconangle.com for all the news.
Thecube.net is where the videos will live,
and watch Stu, and John Furrier, and Corey Quinn live,
and check out wikibon.com for all the research.
Thanks for watching, everybody.
Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman.
We'll see you next time.
(upbeat music)