(gentle upbeat music)
>> Hello, and welcome to theCUBE presentation
of the AWS Startup Showcase Open Cloud Innovations.
This is season two episode one
of an ongoing series covering setting status
from the AWS ecosystem.
Talking about innovation,
here it's open source for this theme.
We do this every episode, we pick a theme
and have a lot of fun talking to the leaders
in the industry and the hottest startups.
I'm your host John Furrier here with Lisa Martin
in our Palo Alto studios.
Lisa great series, great to see you again.
>> Good to see you too. Great series,
always such spirited conversations with very empowered
and enlightened individuals.
>> I love the episodic nature of these events,
we get more stories out there than ever before.
They're the hottest startups in the AWS ecosystem,
which is dominating the cloud sector.
And there's a lot of them really changing the game
on cloud native and the enablement,
the stories that are coming out here are pretty compelling,
not just from startups
they're actually penetrating the enterprise
and the buyers are changing their architectures,
and it's just really fun to catch the wave here.
>> They are,
and one of the things too about the open source community
is these companies embracing that
and how that's opening up
their entry to your point into the enterprise.
I was talking with several customers,
companies who were talking about the 70% of their pipeline
comes from the open source community.
That's using the premium version of the technology.
So, it's really been a very smart,
strategic way into the enterprise.
>> Yeah, and I love the format too.
We get the keynote we're doing now, opening keynote,
some great guests.
We have Sir John on from AWS started program,
he is the global startups lead.
We got Swami coming on
and then closing keynote with Deepak Singh.
Who's really grown in the Amazon organization
from containers now, compute services,
which now span how modern applications are being built.
And I think the big trend that we're seeing
that these startups are riding on that big wave is
cloud natives driving the modern architecture
for software development,
not just startups, but existing,
large ISV and software companies are rearchitecting
and the customers who buy their products
and services in the cloud are rearchitecting too.
So, it's a whole new growth wave coming in,
the modern era of cloud some say,
and it's exciting a small startup
could be the next big name tomorrow.
>> One of the things that kind of was a theme
throughout the conversations that I had
with these different guests was from
a modern application security perspective is,
security is key,
but it's not just about shifting lab.
It's about doing so empowering the developers.
They don't have to be security experts.
They need to have a developer brain
and a security heart,
and how those two organizations within companies
can work better together, more collaboratively,
but ultimately empowering those developers,
which goes a long way.
>> Well, for the folks who are watching this,
the format is very simple.
We have a keynote, editorial keynote speakers come in,
and then we're going to have a bunch of companies
who are going to present their story
and their showcase.
We've interviewed them, myself,
you Dave Vallante and Dave Nicholson from theCUBE team.
They're going to tell their stories
and between the companies and the AWS heroes,
14 companies are represented
and some of them new business models
and Deepak Singh who leads the AWS team,
he's going to have the closing keynote.
He talks about the new changing business model
in open source,
not just the tech, which has a lot of tech,
but how companies are being started around
the new business models around open source.
It's really, really amazing.
>> I bet, and does he see any specific verticals
that are taking off?
>> Well, he's seeing the contribution from big companies
like AWS and the Facebook's of the world
and large companies, Netflix, Intuit,
all contributing content to the open source
and then startups forming around them.
So Netflix does some great work.
They donated to open source
and next thing you know a small group of people get together
entrepreneurs, they form a company
and they create a platform around it
with unification and scale.
So, the cloud is enabling
this new super application environment,
superclouds as we call them, that's emerging
and this new supercloud and super applications
are scaling data-driven machine learning and AI
that's the new formula for success.
>> The new formula for success also has to have that velocity
that developers expect,
but also that the consumerization of tech
has kind of driven all of us to expect things very quickly.
>> Well, we're going to bring in Serge Shevchenko,
AWS Global Startup program into the program.
Serge is our partner.
He is the leader at AWS who has been working on this program
Serge, great to see you.
Thanks for coming on.
>> Yeah, likewise, John,
thank you for having me very excited to be here.
>> We've been working together
on collaborating on this for over a year.
Again, season two of this new innovative program,
which is a combination of CUBE Media partnership,
and AWS getting the stories out.
And this has been a real success
because there's a real hunger to discover content.
And then in the marketplace,
as these new solutions coming from startups
are the next big thing coming.
So, you're starting to see this going on.
So I have to ask you, first and foremost,
what's the AWS startup showcase about.
Can you explain in your terms,
your team's vision behind it,
and why those startup focus?
>> Yeah, absolutely.
You know John,
we curated the AWS Startup Showcase
really to bring meaningful and oftentimes
educational content to our customers and partners
highlighting innovative solutions within these themes
and ultimately to help customers
find the best solutions for their use cases,
which is a combination of AWS and our partners.
And really from pre-seed to IPO, John,
the world's most innovative startups build on AWS.
From leadership downward,
very intentional about cultivating vigorous AWS community
and since 2019 at re:Invent
at the launch of the AWS Global Startup program,
we've helped hundreds of startups
accelerate their growth through product development support,
go to market and co-sell programs.
>> So Serge question for you on the theme of today,
John mentioned our showcases having themes.
Today's theme is going to cover open source software.
Talk to us about how Amazon thinks about opensource.
>> Sure, absolutely.
And I'll just touch on it briefly,
but I'm very excited for the keynote at the end of today,
that will be delivered by Deepak
the VP of compute services at AWS.
We here at Amazon believe in open source.
In fact, Amazon contributes to open source in multiple ways,
whether that's through directly contributing
to third-party project, repos
or significant code contributions to
Kubernetes, Rust and other projects.
And all the way down to leadership participation
in organizations such as the CNCF.
And supporting of dozens of ISV myself over the years,
I've seen explosive growth
when it comes to open source adoption.
I mean, look at projects like Checkov,
within 12 months of launching their open source project,
they had about a million users.
And another great example is Falco within,
under a decade actually they've had about
37 million downloads
and that's about 300% increase
since it's become an incubating project in the CNCF.
So, very exciting things that we're seeing here at AWS.
>> So explosive growth, lot of content.
What do you hope that our viewers and our guests
are going to be able to get out of today?
>> Yeah, great question, Lisa.
I really hope that today's event will help customers
understand why AWS is the best place for them
to run open source, commercial
and which partner solutions will help them
along their journey.
I think that today the lineup through
the partner solutions and Deepak at the end
with the ending keynote is going to present
a very valuable narrative for customers
and startups in selecting where and which projects
to run on AWS.
>> That's great stuff Serge would love to have you on
and again, I want to just say really congratulate your team
and we enjoy working with them.
We think this showcase does a great service
for the community.
It's kind of open source in its own way
if I can co contributing working on out there,
but you're really getting the voices out at scale.
We've got companies like Armory, Kubecost, Sysdig,
Tidelift, Codefresh. I mean, these are some of the companies
that are changing the game.
We even had Patreon a customer
and one of the partners sneak with security,
all the big names in the startup scene.
Plus AWS Deepak saying Swami is going to be on the AWS Heroes.
I mean really at scale
and this is really a great.
So, thank you so much for participating
and enabling all of this.
>> No, thank you to theCUBE.
You've been a great partner in this whole process,
very excited for today.
>> Thanks Serge really appreciate it.
Lisa, what a great segment that was kicking off the event.
We've got a great lineup coming up.
We've got the keynote, final keynote fireside chat
with Deepak Singh a big name at AWS,
but Serge in the startup showcase really innovative.
>> Very innovative
and in a short time period,
he talked about the launch of this at re:Invent 2019.
They've helped hundreds of startups.
We've had over 50 I think on the showcase
in the last year or so John.
So we really gotten to cover a lot of great customers,
a lot of great stories,
a lot of great content coming out of theCUBE.
>> I love the openness of it.
I love the scale,
the storytelling.
I love the collaboration, a great model,
Lisa, great to work with you.
We also Dave Vallante and Dave Nicholson interview.
They're not here, but let's kick off the show.
Let's get started with our next guest Swami.
The leader at AWS Swami just got promoted
to VP of the database,
but also he ran machine learning and AI at AWS.
He is a leader.
He's the author of the original DynamoDB paper,
which is celebrating its 10th year anniversary
really impacted distributed computing and open source.
Swami's introduced many opensource
aspects of products within AWS
and has been a leader in the engineering side
for many, many years at AWS,
from an intern to now an executive.
Swami, great to see you.
Thanks for coming on our AWS startup showcase.
Thanks for spending the time with us.
>> My pleasure, thanks again, John.
Thanks for having me.
>> I wanted to just,
if you don't mind asking about the database market
over the past 10 to 20 years cloud
and application development as you see, has changed a lot.
You've been involved in so many product launches
over the years.
Cloud and machine learning
are the biggest waves happening to your point
to what you're doing now.
Software is under the covers
it's powering it all infrastructure is code.
Open source has been a big part of it
and it continues to grow and change.
Deepak Singh from AWS
talks about the business model transformation
of how like Netflix donates to the open source.
Then a company starts around it
and creates more growth.
Machine learnings and all the open source conversations
around automation as developers and builders, like software
as cloud and machine learning become the key pistons
in the engine.
This is a big wave, what's your view on this?
How how has cloud scale
and data impacting the software market?
>> I mean, that's a broad question.
So I'm going to break it down to kind of
give some of the back data.
So now how we are thinking about it first,
I'd say when it comes to the open source,
I'll start off by saying first the longevity
and by ability of open sources are very important
to our customers
and that is why we have been a significant contributor
and supporter of these communities.
I mean, there are several efforts in open source,
even internally by actually open sourcing
some of our key Amazon technologies
like Firecracker or BottleRocket
or our CDK to help advance the industry.
For example, CDK itself provides some really powerful way
to build and configure cloud services as well.
And we also contribute to a lot of different
open source projects that are existing ones,
open telemetries and Linux,
Java, Redis and Kubernetes, Grafana and Kafka
and Robotics Operating System
and Hadoop, Leucine and so forth.
So, I think, I can go on and on,
but even now I'd say the database
and observability space say machine learning
we have always started with embracing open source
in a big material way.
If you see, even in deep learning framework,
we championed MX Linux and some of the core components
and we open sourced our auto ML technology
auto Glue on,
and also be open sourced and collaborated
with partners like Facebook Meta on Fighter
showing some major components and there,
and then we are open search Edge Compiler.
So, I would say the number one thing is,
I mean, we are actually are very,
very excited to partner with broader community
on problems that really mattered to the customers
and actually ensure that they are able to get
amazing benefit of this.
>> And I see machine learning is a huge thing.
If you look at how cloud group
and when you had DynamoDB paper, when you wrote it,
that that was the beginning of, I call the cloud surge.
It was the beginning of not just being a resource
versus building a data center,
certainly a great alternative.
Every startup did it.
That's history phase one inning and a half,
first half inning.
Then it became a large scale.
Machine learning feels like the same way now.
You feel like you're seeing a lot of people using it.
A lot of people are playing around with it.
It's evolving.
It's been around as a science,
but combined with cloud scale, this is a big thing.
What should people who are in the enterprise
think about how should they think about machine learning?
How has some of your top customers
thought about machine learning
as they refactor their applications?
What are some of the things that you can share
from your experience and journey here?
>> I mean,
one of the key things I'd say just to set some context
on scale and numbers.
More than one and a half million customers
use our database analytics or ML services
end-to-end.
Part of which machine learning services and capabilities
are easily used by more than a hundred thousand customers
at a really good scale.
However, I still think in Amazon,
we tend to use the phrase,
"It's day one in the age of internet,"
even though it's an,
or the phrase, "Now, but it's a golden one,"
but I would say in the world of machine learning,
yes it's day one but I also think we just woke up
and we haven't even had a cup of coffee yet.
That's really that early, so.
And, but when you it's interesting,
you've compared it to where cloud was like 10, 12 years ago.
That's early days when I used to talk to engineering leaders
who are running their own data center
and then we talked about cloud
and various disruptive technologies.
I still used to get a sense about like why cloud
and basic and whatnot at that time,
Whereas now with machine learning though
almost every CIO, CEO, all of them
never asked me why machine learning.
Instead, the number one question, I get is,
how do I get started with it?
What are the best use cases?
which is great,
and this is where I always tell them
one of the learnings that we actually learned in Amazon.
So again, a few years ago,
probably seven or eight years ago,
and Amazon itself realized as a company,
the impact of what machine learning could do
in terms of changing how we actually run our business
and what it means to provide better customer experience
optimize our supply chain
and so far we realized that the we need to help our builders
learn machine learning
and the help even our business leaders
understand the power of machine learning.
So we did two things.
One, we actually,
from a bottom-up level,
we built what I call as machine learning university,
which is run in my team.
It's literally stocked with professors and teachers
who offer curriculum to builders
so that they get educated on machine learning.
And now from a top-down level
we also, in our yearly planning process,
we call it the operational planning process
where we write Amazon style narratives six pages
and then answer FAQ's.
We asked everyone to answer one question around,
like how do you plan to leverage machine learning
in your business?
And typically when someone says,
I really don't play into our, it does not apply.
It's usually it doesn't go well.
So we kind of politely encourage them to do better
and come back with a better answer.
This kind of dynamic on top-down and bottom-up,
changed the conversation
and we started seeing more and more measurable growth.
And these are some of the things you're starting to see
more and more among our customers too.
They see the business benefit,
but this is where to address the talent gap.
We also made machine learning university curriculum
actually now open source and freely available.
And we launched SageMaker Studio Lab, which is a no cost,
no set up SageMaker notebook service
for educating learner profiles
and all the students as well.
And we are excited to also announce AIMLE scholarship
for underrepresented students as well.
So, so much more we can do well.
>> Well, congratulations on the DynamoDB paper.
That's the 10 year anniversary,
which is a revolutionary product,
changed the game that did change the world
and that a huge impact.
And now as machine learning goes to the next level,
the next intern out there is at school
with machine learning.
They're going to be writing that next paper,
your advice to them real quick.
>> My biggest advice is, always,
I encourage all the builders to always dream big,
and don't be hesitant to speak your mind
as long as you have the right conviction saying
you're addressing a real customer problem.
So when you feel like you have an amazing solution
to address a customer problem,
take the time to articulate your thoughts better,
and then feel free to speak up and communicate
to the folks you're working with.
And I'm sure any company that nurtures good talent
and knows how to hire and develop the best
they will be willing to listen
and then you will be able to have an amazing impact
in the industry.
>> Swami, great to know you're CUBE alumni
love our conversations from intern
on the paper of DynamoDB to the technical leader at AWS
and database analyst machine learning,
congratulations on all your success
and continue innovating on behalf of the customers
and the industry.
Thanks for spending the time here on theCUBE
and our program, appreciate it.
>> Thanks again, John.
Really appreciate it.
>> Okay, now let's kick off our program.
That ends the keynote track here
on the AWS startup showcase.
Season two, episode one,
enjoy the program
and don't miss the closing keynote with Deepak Singh.
He goes into great detail on the changing business models,
all the exciting open source innovation.
(gentle bright music)