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>> We're here on theCube covering AWS Storage Day 2022.
Kevin Miller joins us.
He's the vice president and general manager of Amazon S3.
Hello, Kevin, good to see you again.
>> Hey Dave, it's great to see you as always.
>> It seems like just yesterday we were celebrating
the 15th anniversary of S3, and of course the launch
of the modern public cloud, which started there.
You know, when you think back Kevin, over the past year,
what are some of the trends that you're seeing
and hearing from customers?
What do they want to see AWS focus more on?
What's the direction that you're setting?
>> Yeah, well Dave, really I think there's probably
three trends that we're seeing really pop this year.
I think one just given the kind of macroeconomic situation
right now is cost optimization.
That's not a surprise.
Everyone's just taking a closer look at what they're using,
and where they might be able to pair back.
And you know, I think that's a place that obviously S3
has a long history of helping customers save money.
Whether it's through our new storage classes,
things like our Glacier Instant Retrieval, storage class
that we launched to reinvent last year.
Or things like our S3 storage lens capability
to really dig in and help customers identify
where their costs are are being spent.
But so certainly every, you know, a lot of customers
are focused on that right now, and for obvious reasons.
I think the second thing that we're seeing is,
just a real focus on simplicity.
And it kind of goes hand in hand with cost optimization,
because what a lot of customers are looking for is,
how do I take the staff that I have,
and do more this year.
Right, continue to innovate, continue to bring
new applications or top line generating revenue applications
to the market, but not have to add a lot of extra headcount
to do that.
And so, what they're looking for is management
and simplicity.
How do I have all of this IT infrastructure,
and not have to have people spending a lot
of their time going into kind of routine maintenance
and operations.
And so that's an area that we're spending a lot of time.
We think we have a lot of capability today, but looking
at ways that we can continue to simplify,
make it easier for customers to manage their infrastructure.
Things like our S3 intelligent tiering storage class,
which just automatically gives cost savings for data
that's not routinely accessed.
And so that's a big focus for us this year as well.
And then I think the last and probably third thing
I would highlight is an emerging theme
or it's been a theme, but really continuing to increase
in volume, is all around sustainability.
And you know, our customers are looking for us to give them
the data and the assurances for them, for their own reports
and their own understanding of how sustainable
is my infrastructure.
And so within AWS, of course, you know we're on a path
towards operating with 100% renewable energy by 2025.
As well as helping the overall Amazon goal of achieving
net zero carbon by 2040.
So those are some big lofty goals.
We've been giving customers greater insights
with our carbon footprint tool.
And we think that, you know the cloud continues to be
just a great place to run and reduce customer's
carbon footprint for the similar you know,
storage capacity or similar compute capacity.
But that's just going to continue to be a trend
and a theme that we're looking at ways
that we can continue to help customers do more
to aggressively drive down their carbon footprint.
>> I mean, it makes sense.
It's like you're partnering up with the cloud,
you know, you did same thing on security, you know,
there's that shared responsibility model,
same thing now with ESG.
And on the macro it's interesting Kevin,
this is the first time I can remember where, you know
it used to be, if there's a downturn
it's cost optimization, you go to simplicity.
But at the same time with digital, you know, the rush
to digital, people still are thinking about,
okay how do I invest in the future?
So but let's focus on cost for a moment
then we'll come back to sort of the data value.
Can you tell us how AWS helps customers save on storage,
you know, beyond just the price per terabyte actions
that you could take.
I mean I love that, you guys should keep doing that.
>> Absolutely.
>> But what other knobs are you turning?
>> Yeah, right and we've had obviously something like
15 cost reductions or price reductions over the years,
and we're just going to continue to use that lever
where we can, but it's things like the launch
of our Glacier Instant Retrieval storage class
that we did last year at Reinvent, where that's now
you know, 4/10 of a cent per gigabyte month.
For data that customers access pretty infrequently
maybe a few times a year, but they can now access
that data immediately and just pay a small retrieval fee
when they access that data.
And so that's an example of a new capability that
reduces customer's total cost of ownership,
but is not just a straight up price reduction.
I mentioned S3 Intelligent-Tiering,
that's another case where, you know, when we launch
Glacier Instant Retrieval, we integrated that
with Intelligent-Tiering as well.
So we have the archive instant access tier
within Intelligent-Tiering.
And so now data that's not accessed for 90 days
is just automatically put into AIA and and then results
in a reduced storage cost to customers.
So again, leaning into this idea that customers
are telling us, "Just do, you know what should be done
"for my data to help me reduce cost, can you just do it,
"and sort of give me the right defaults."
And that's what we're trying to do with things
like Intelligent-Tiering.
We've also, you know, outside of the S3 part
of our portfolio, we've been adding similar kinds
of capabilities within some of our file services.
So things like our, you know elastic file service
launched a one zone storage class as well
as an intelligent tiering capability to just automatically
help customers save money.
I think in some cases up to 92% on their their
EFS storage costs with this automatic
intelligent tiering capability.
And then the last thing I would say is
that we also are just continuing to help customers
in other ways, like I said, our storage lens
is a great way for customers to really dig in
and figure out.
'Cause you know, often customers will find
that they may have, you know, certain data sets
that someone's forgotten about or,
they're capturing more data than they expected perhaps
in a logging application or something that ends
up generating a lot more data than they expected.
And so storage lens helps them really zoom in very quickly
on, you know this is the data, here's how frequently
it's being accessed and then they can make decisions
about use that data I keep, how long do I keep it?
Maybe that's good candidates to move down into
one of our very cold storage classes
like Glacier Deep Archive, where they they still
have the data, but they don't expect to need
to actively retrieve it on a regular basis.
>> SDL bromide, if you can measure it, you can manage it.
So if I can see it, visualize it, that I can take actions.
When you think about S3- >> That's right.
it's always been great for archival workloads
but you made some updates to Glacier that changed the way
that we maybe think about archive data.
Can you talk about those changes specifically,
what it means for how customers should leverage
AWS services going forward?
>> Yeah, and actually, you know, Glacier's coming
up on its 10 year anniversary in August,
so we're pretty excited about that.
And you know, but there's just been a real increase
in the pace of innovation, I think over the last
three or four years there.
So we launched the Glacier Deep Archive capability in 2019,
2018, I guess it was.
And then we launched Glacier Instant Retrieval
of course last year.
So really what we're seeing is we now have
three storage classes that cover are part
of the Glacier family.
So everything from millisecond retrieval for that data,
that needs to be accessed quickly when it is accessed,
but isn't being accessed, you know, regularly.
So maybe a few times a year.
And there's a lot of use cases that we're seeing
really quickly emerge for that.
Everything from, you know, user generated content
like photos and videos, to big broadcaster archives
and particularly in media and entertainment segment.
Seeing a lot of interest in Glaciers Instant Retrieval
because that data is pretty cold on a regular basis.
But when they want to access it, they want
a huge amount of data, petabytes of data potentially back
within seconds, and that's the capability we can provide
with Glacier Instant Retrieval.
And then on the other end of the spectrum,
with Glacier Deep Archive, again we have customers
that have huge archives of data that they be
looking to have that 3-AZ durability
that we provide with Glacier,
and make sure that data is protected.
But really, you know expect to access
it once a year if ever.
Now it could be a backup copy of data
or secondary or tertiary copy of data,
could be data that they just don't have
an active use for it.
And I think that's one of the things we're starting to see
grow a lot, is customers that have shared data sets
where they may not need that data right now
but they do want to keep it because as they think about,
again these like new applications that can drive
top line growth, they're finding that they may go back
to that data six months or nine months from now
and start to really actively use it.
So if they want that option value to keep that data
so they can use it down the road, Glacier Deep Archive,
or Glacier Flexible Retrieval, which is kind of
our storage class right in the middle of the road.
Those are great options for customers to keep the data,
keep it safe and secure, but then have it,
you know pretty accessible when they're ready
to get it back.
>> Got it, thank you for that.
So, okay, so customers have choices.
I want to get into some of the competitive differentiators.
And of course we were talking earlier
about cost optimization, which is obviously
an important topic given the macro environment
you know, but there's more.
And so help us understand what's different about AWS
in terms of helping customers get value from their data,
cost reduction as a component of value,
part of the TCO, for sure.
But just beyond being a cloud bit bucket, you know
just a storage container in the cloud, what are some
of the differentiators that you can talk to?
>> Yeah, well Dave, I mean, I think that when it comes
to value, I think there's tremendous benefits in AWS,
well beyond just cost reduction.
I think, you know, part of it is S3 now has built,
I think, an earned reputation for being resilient,
for storing, you know, at massive scale giving customers
that confidence that they will be able to scale up.
You know, we store more than 200 trillion objects.
We regularly peak at over 100 million requests per second.
So customers can build on S3 and Glacier
with the confidence that we're going to be there
to help their applications grow and scale over time.
And then I think that in all of the applications
both first party and third party, the customers can use,
and services that they can use to build modern applications
is an incredible benefit.
So whether it's all of our serverless offerings,
things like Lambda or containers and everything
we have to manage that.
Or whether it's the deep analytics and machine
learning capabilities we have to help really extract,
you know value and insight from data in near real time.
You know, we're just seeing an incredible number
of customers build those kinds of applications
where they're processing data and feeding their results
right back into their business right away.
So I'm just going to briefly mention a couple, like,
you know one example is ADP that really helps
their customers measure, compare and sort of analyze
their workforce.
They have a couple petabytes of data,
something like 25 billion individual data points
and they're just processing that data continuously
through their analytics and machine learning applications
to then again, give those insights back to their customers.
Another good example is AstraZeneca.
You know, they are processing petabytes
and petabytes of genomic sequencing data.
And they have a goal to analyze 2 million genomes
over the next four years.
And so they're just really scaling up on AWS,
both from a pure storage point of view,
but more importantly, from all of the compute
and analytics capability on top that is really critical
to achieving that goal.
And then, you know, beyond the first party services we have
as I mentioned, it's really our third party, right?
The AWS partner network provides customers
an incredible range of choice in off the shelf applications
that they can quickly provision and make use of the data
to drive those business insights.
And I think today the APN has something like 100,000
partners over in 150 countries.
And we specifically have a storage competency partner
where customers can go to get those applications
that directly work, you know, on top of their data.
And really, like I said, drive some of that insight.
So, you know, I think it's that overall benefit
of being able to really do a lot more with their data
than just have it sit idle.
You know, that's where I think we see a lot of customers
interested in driving additional value.
>> I'm glad you mentioned the ecosystem,
and I'm glad you mentioned the storage competency as well.
So there are other storage partners that you have,
even though you're a head of a big storage division.
And then I think there's some other
under the cover things too.
I've recently wrote, actually have written about this a lot.
Things like nitro and rethinking virtualization
and how to do, you know offloads.
The security that comes, you know fundamentally
as part of the platform is, I think architecturally
is something that leads the way in the industry for sure.
So there's a lot we could unpack, but you've fundamentally
changed the storage market over the last 16 years.
And again, I've written about this extensively.
We used to think about storage in blocks or you got,
you know, somebody who's really good in files,
there were companies that dominated each space
with legacy on-prem storage.
You know, when you think about object storage Kevin,
it was a niche, right?
It was something used for archival, it was known
for its simple, get put syntax, great for cheap
and deep storage, and S3 changed that.
Why do you think that's happened and S3 has evolved,
the object has evolved the way it has,
and what's the future hold for S3?
>> Yeah I mean, you know, Dave, I think that probably
the biggest overall trend there is that customers
are looking to build cloud native applications.
Where as much of that application is managed
as they can have.
They don't want to have to spend time managing
the underlying infrastructure, the compute and storage
and everything that goes around it.
And so a fully managed service like S3, where there's no
provisioning storage capacity, there's, you know
we provide the resiliency and the durability
that just really resonates with customers.
And I think that increasingly,
customers are seeing that they want to innovate
across the entire range of business.
So it's not about a central IT team anymore,
it's about engineers that are embedded within
lines of business, innovating around what is critical
to achieve their business results.
So, you know, if they're in a manufacturing segment,
how can we pull data from sensors and other instrumentation
off of our equipment and then make better decisions
about when we need to do predictive maintenance,
how quickly we can run our manufacturing line,
looking for inefficiencies.
And so we've developed around our managed offerings
like S3, we've just developed, you know, customers
who are investing and executing on plans
and you know transformations.
That really give them, you know put digital technology
directly into the line of business that they're looking for.
And I think that trend is just going to continue.
People sometimes ask me, well
"I mean, 16 years, you know, isn't S3 done?"
And I would say, "By no stretcher are we done."
We have plenty of feedback from customers on ways
that we can continue to simplify, reduce the kinds of things
they need to do, when they're looking for example
and rolling out new security policies and parameters
across their entire organization.
So raising the bar there, finding, you know,
raising the bar on how they can efficiently
manage their storage and reduce costs.
So I think we have plenty of innovation ahead of us
to continue to help customers provide
that fully managed capability.
>> Yeah I often say Kevin, the next 10 years
ain't going to be like the last in cloud.
So I really thank you for coming on theCube
and sharing your insights, really appreciate it.
>> Absolutely Dave, thanks for having me.
>> You're welcome.
Okay keep it right there for more coverage
of AWS Storage Day 2022 in theCube.
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