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>> The data lake we see is evolving and Chaos Search
has built some pretty cool tech to enable customers
to get more value out of data that's in lakes
so that it doesn't become stagnant.
Time to dig deeper, dive deeper into the water.
We're here with Kevin Miller, who's the vice president
and general manager of S3 at Amazon Web Services.
We're going to talk about activating S3 for analytics.
Kevin, welcome. Good to see you again.
>> Yeah, thanks, Dave. It's great to be here again.
>> So S3 was the very first service offered by AWS
15 years ago. We covered that out in Seattle.
It was a great event you guys had.
It has become the most prominent and popular example
of object storage in the marketplace.
And for years, customers use S3 as simple, cheap
data storage, but because there's so much data now
stored in S3, customers are looking to do more
with the platform.
So, Kevin, as we look ahead to reinvent this year,
we're super excited about that, what's new?
What's got you excited when it comes to the AWS flagship
storage offering?
>> Yeah, Dave. Well, that's right.
And we're definitely looking forward to reinvent.
We have some fun things that we're planning to
announce there, so stay tuned on those.
But, I'd say that one of the things that's most exciting
for me as customers do more with their data
and look to store more, to capture more of the data
that they're generating every day, is our storage class
that we had an announce a few years ago.
But we actually just announced some improvements to the S3,
intelligent-tiering storage class.
And this is really our storage class,
the only one in the cloud at this point that delivers
automatic storage cost savings for customers
where the data access patterns change.
And that can happen, for example, as customers have
some data that they're collecting and then a team spins up
and decides to try to do something more with that data,
and that data that was very cool and sitting sort of idle
is now being actively used.
And so with intelligent tiering,
we're automatically monitoring data.
And then, for customers there's no retrieval costs
and no tiering charges.
We're automatically moving the data into an access tier
that reduces their costs, though,
when that that data is not being accessed.
So we've announced some improvements to that
just a few months ago.
And I'll just say, I look forward to some more announcements
at reinvent, that will continue to extend what we have
in our intelligent-tiering storage class.
>> That's cool, Kevin.
I mean, you've seen, you know, that technology,
that tiering concept had been around, you know.
But since back in the mainframe days the problem was
it was always inside a box.
So you didn't have the scale of the cloud
and you didn't have that automation.
So, I want to ask you, as the leader of S3, that business,
when you meet with customers, Kevin, what do they tell you
that they're facing as challenges when they want to do more,
get better insights out of all that data
that they've moved into S3?
>> Well, I think that's just it, Dave.
I think that most customers I speak with,
of course they have the things that they want to do
with their storage costs, you know:
reducing storage costs and just making sure they have
capacity available.
But increasingly I think the real emphasis is around
business transformation.
What can I do with this data, that's very unique
and different that unlike, you know, prior optimizations
where it would just reduce the bottom line, they're saying,
what can I do that will actually drive my top line more
by either, you know, generating new product ideas,
allowing for faster closed-loop process
for acquiring customers?
And so it's really that business transformation
and everything around it that I think is really exciting.
And for a lot of customers, that's a pretty long journey.
And helping them get started on that,
including transforming their workforce, and up-skilling,
you know, parts of their workforce to be more agile
and more oriented around software development,
developing new products using software.
>> So when I first met the folks at Chaos Search,
Thomas took me through sort of the architecture
with Ed as well.
They had me at "you don't have to move your data."
That was the grabber for me.
And there are a number of public customers,
Digital River, Blackboard, or Klarna,
we're going to get the customer perspective little later on,
and others, that use both AWS S3 and Chaos Search.
And they're trying to get more out of their S3 data
and execute analytics at scale.
So, wonder if you could share with us, Kevin,
what types of activities and opportunities do you see
for customers like these that are making the move
to put their enterprise data in S3, in terms of capabilities
and outcomes that they are trying to achieve and are able
to achieve beyond using S3 as just a bit bucket?
>> Right. Well, Dave, I think you hit the nail on the head
when you talk about outcomes.
'Cause that, I think, is key here.
Customers want to reduce the time it takes to get
to a tangible result that affects their business,
that improves their business.
And so that's one of the things that excites me about
what Chaos Search is doing here, specifically is
that automatic indexing.
Being able to take the data, as it is, in their bucket,
index it and keep that index fresh and then allow for
the customers to innovate on top of that and to try
to experiment with a new capability, see why it works
and then double down on the things that really do work
to drive that business.
And so, I just think that that capability reduces the amount
of what I might call undifferentiated heavy-lifting
the work to just sort of index and organize
and catalog data.
And instead allow customers to really focus on
here's the idea, let's try to get this into production
or into a test environment as quickly as possible
to see if this can really drive some value for our business.
>> Yeah, so you're seeing that sort of value
that you've mentioned, the non-differentiated heavy-lifting,
moving up the stack, right?
It used to just be provisioning and managing the storage.
Now it's all the layers above that.
And we're going beyond that.
So my question to you, Kevin, is, how do you see
the evolution of all this data at scale?
I'm especially interested as it pertains to data
that's, of course, in S3, which is your swim lane.
When you talk to customers who want to do more
with their data and analytics, and, by the way,
even beyond analytics, you know,
where it's having conversations now in the community
about building data products and creating new value.
But how do you respond and how do you see Chaos Search
fitting in to those outcomes?
>> Well, I think that's it, Dave.
It's about kind of going up the stack and instead of
spending time organizing and cataloging data,
particularly as the data volumes get much larger.
When modern customers and modern data lakes
that we're seeing, quickly go from a few petabytes to tens,
to hundreds of petabytes or more.
And, when you're reaching that kind of scale of data,
a single person can't reasonably kind of wrap their head
around all that data, you need tools.
S3 provides a number of first party tools.
And, you know, we're investing in things like our S3
batch operations to really help give the end users
of that data, the business owners that leverage to manage
their data at scale and apply their new ideas to the data
and generate, you know, pilots and production work
that really drives their business forward.
And so I think that, you know, Chaos Search, again,
I would just say is a good example of, you know,
the kind of software that I think helps go upstack,
automate some of that data management, and just help
customers focus really specifically on the things
that they want to accomplish for their business.
>> So this is really important.
I mean, we've talked for well over a decade,
how to get more value out of data,
and it's been challenging for a lot of organizations.
But we're seeing themes of scale, automation,
fine-grain tooling ecosystem participating
on top of that data and then extracting that data value.
Kevin, I'm really excited to see you face to face
at Reinventing, and learn more about some of the
announcements that you're going to make.
We'll see you there.
>> Yeah. Stay tuned.
Looking forward to seeing you in person. Absolutely.
>> All right. Great to have Kevin on.
Keep it right there because in a moment we're going to get
the customer perspective on how a leading practitioner
is applying Chaos Search on top of S3 to create
business value from data.
You're watching The Cube, your leader
at digital high-tech coverage.
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