- Hello everybody at re:Invent.
Today we're coming to you from sunny Singapore
and we're really excited to have James and Sashi
both here with us from Goldman Sachs.
They're both executive directors of technology
and they've been working very closely with us
on building out a managed file transfer service.
James?
- Yeah.
- Goldman Sachs is a really well-respected
financial services firm.
Can you tell me a little bit more
about your role at the bank
and what you've been doing on the project?
- Sure, so I look after two tech teams there.
So first of all, I look after
the grid compute technology team.
So that's the grid compute
that's used for a lot of the risk
and pricing throughout the bank
using quite a lot of cloud technology in there as well.
So, also I look after the MFT team.
So we have our own internal MFT solution called SFX
and that's basically the file transfers solution.
- Okay, thanks.
- And Sashi?
- Yeah, sure.
I'm Cloud Enablement Team lead.
The Cloud Enablement Team is responsible to bring in
or enable public cloud technologies within the firm
using industry best practices in the agile fashion.
My other role is to work
with different business departments,
advise them on a cloud migration, cloud design.
Like one of the team I'm working with is SFX with James.
- Okay, great.
And Sashi, could you just tell us
a little bit more about
the importance of cloud at Goldman Sachs?
- Sure.
So, I think this question had been answered
by our leadership in many public forums,
like re:Invent and Investor's Forum.
I'll summarize quickly for you, right?
So really two things.
One is accelerate the innovation, right?
And second is delightful developer experience, right?
Like, you know, make your developer more productive
using bleeding edge,
cutting edge technologies within the firm
and accelerate the innovation.
What we really want to do is become a vertical bank, right?
Using cloud technologies,
do all the heavy lifting for our client,
provide differentiated service
and digital platform which basically meets
all the regulatory and compliance requirements.
- Okay, thanks, thanks Sashi.
And James, could you just tell me a little bit more
about the importance of managed file transfer
for Goldman Sachs?
- Yeah, of course.
So, if you think about it,
data is really the lifeblood of a bank.
We're nothing, we can't operate
without data being interchanged
between us and our regulators,
us and our vendors and our clients.
So, we need to do that reliably every single day.
So, it's absolutely critical for our operation.
- All right, got it.
All right thanks, thanks James.
And when I think of managed file transfer
and I think of the financial services industry,
obviously you guys are heavily regulated.
You're working with trading partners,
you've got a number of other partners
that you have to inter-operate with and exchange data with.
Can you James, give us an idea of the size
and the scale of what you have to deal with
on a daily basis?
- Sure.
So, if you look at how many people in organizations
that we have to interact with,
this is means that we literally have
to transfer millions of files every single day.
So we're delivering files to people,
we're collecting files from people,
we're making files available to people.
And this all has to be done, like say, very reliably
and we have to manage this very sort of bursty nature
of this delivery because people need to access files
at the right time,
they need files delivered at the right time.
- Yeah.
So the timeliness is incredibly important I'm sure.
And to you James, again Goldman Sachs is,
as I mentioned before, it's regulated.
You guys have a lot of constraints on you
and also you've got a technology plan
that's been in place for a long time
and I'm sure you've got constraints
on how you integrate, et cetera, et cetera.
Could you just sort of explain maybe
some of the complexities and some of the things
that you've had to deal with
to actually implement a new managed file transfer service?
- Sure, yeah.
So, if you think about FTP, SFTP as a protocol,
they're pretty old protocols, right?
So, why is this even a hard problem?
It's a hard problem because
there are so many different implementations
of these protocols.
There are so many different remote system behaviors
that we have to interact with
and we don't necessarily have any control
over those implementations.
So, the problem is in the number of edge cases
that we have to work around,
we have to provide a solution for our clients
to interact with these highly heterogeneous systems.
- All right, got it.
And Sashi, just coming to you,
are there any other features
or key requirements you need to meet?
- I would pick up from where James left.
So, James highlighted the scalability, availability,
resiliency requirement, right?
To have a highly available file transfer solution, right?
The other bit which I would mention is,
think about like you're gonna be sending files
to your clients or regulators or receiving file
and sending within the firm, right?
How do you ensure that the file is scanned, right?
File is safe to be distributed around, right?
So, definitely that I would count as a critical feature.
- And James, could you sort of maybe explain
to the audience at re:Invent some of the complexities
and challenges that you've had
in implementing a managed file transfer service?
- So, going back to the heterogeneous nature
of what we're dealing with,
there is so much complexity in that
and that combined with the number of clients
that we have to deal with,
the number of internal business units
that we have to deal with,
these all compounds to the complexity,
but all of this has to meet SLAs, right?
People want files delivered on time.
They send us a file that needs to be delivered
to a regulator within x amount of minutes,
that needs to go there on time
and they need to be confident that that can happen.
- Right.
So what sounds like
a very simple service-- - Yes.
- is actually quite complex,
especially when you're dealing with this kind of scale
that Goldman Sachs deals with.
- Yes, underneath this quite simple concept,
there's an ocean of edge cases and spikes in demand,
that is bursty nature that I was talking about,
that really, really does add to the complexity
of the solution. - Right.
And Sashi, just coming to you,
could you sort of explain
why Goldman Sachs didn't choose to carry on
building their own service?
Why did they choose to partner with us,
AWS on building out a managed file transfer service?
- Yeah.
Think about it, right?
What we are trying to achieve,
like with all the scale and complexity aside, right?
We are trying to send a file and receive a file.
And it's an old protocol, right?
Like why it is just not a commodity, right?
Why we can't just...
It's there and then we can deliver file
and receive file, right?
Why do we need to maintain such a large piece
of infrastructure code and deal with all these complexities?
And we got a question also from our leadership,
why it is not a Black Box, right?
And that's when we started thinking about what to do
and precisely two years ago I was at re:Invent
and I was discussing with your AWS Transfer Service
about like, this is something we are thinking
and I think AWS Transfer Service
recognized the industry-wide applicability
and they approached us that we can collaborate
and we shared our IP,
like, you know what we have learned over the years
and we're looking forward to what comes out of this.
- Yeah.
- And it's been a great partnership working with you guys,
we've had the AWS Transfer Family team,
we've had ProServ, we've had Amazon Managed Services
all coming together and working very closely
with Goldman Sachs to meet your requirements
and it's been fun.
And James, I just wanna come on
to something which is more to do
with the heart of the solution
and really talk about the heart,
you've got SFTP and you've got S3.
And we mentioned a little bit earlier about workflows.
Can you, kind of zoom in and sort of talk about
the features and what you see is the things
that really act as a bit of a game changer for you.
- So, for me the important part here
is the ability to have these workflows, like you mentioned.
So, having workflows
as part of this sort of file transfer workflow,
it really gives the users a lot of power
in terms of the routing
and what happens to their file in transit
and that kind of really makes this
a platform for innovation,
if you look at it that way.
- Yeah.
- He used the right word,
like platform of innovation, right?
And I'll expand on that how it is,
platform for innovation, right?
Think about it, right?
You receive the file
and you still need,
like people need to process that file, right?
And you have all the sorts of data pipeline,
data analytics, building rolling out
your best book solution.
Now, having that in the cloud
and delivering that to an AWS S3 bucket,
really opens the door for us, right?
Like you can build all your data pipeline,
data analytics, AI, ML, what sort what not.
And it also further our cloud strategy.
- Yeah, thanks.
Now, I really wanna thank you both today
for your time and sharing your story with everybody
on stage at re:Invent
and just to sort of summarize,
Goldman Sachs have been very pivotal
in helping and inputting into the development
for the AWS Transfer Family.
And I'm sure the guys on stage will talk to you more
about some of the future capabilities
that are now being released.
And I just wanna thank James and Sashi again,
really fantastic.
And back to you on stage at re:Invent,
Thank you very much.