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>> Okay, welcome back everyone.
This theCUBE's coverage here in San Francisco, California
AWS Summit 2022.
The beginning of the event season as it comes back,
a little bit of smaller footprint,
a lot of hybrid events going on,
but this is actually a physical event.
AWS Summit in New York is coming in the summer.
We'll be there too, with theCUBE on the set.
We're getting back in the groove, psyched to be back.
We were at Reinvent as well,
and we'll see more and more Cube,
but you're can see a lot of virtual Cube out of hybrid Cube.
We want to get all those conversations,
try to get more interviews, more flow going.
But right now I'm excited to have Corey Quinn here
back on theCUBE, Chief Cloud Economists Duckbill Group.
He's the Founder and Chief Content Person,
always, got great angles, fun, comedy but authoritative,
Corey, great to see you.
>> Thank you so much. >> Thanks for coming on.
>> Sure, is a lot of words to describe shitposting
which is how I describe what I tend to do most days.
>> Shitposting is an art form now.
And if you look at Mark Andrew's been doing
a lot of shitposting lately.
All the billionaires are shitposting
but they don't know how to do it.
Like they're not doing it right.
>> There's another consulting opportunity there.
It's like here's how to be even more obnoxious and incisive.
It's honestly the most terrifying scenario for anyone is,
if I have that kind of budget to throw at my endeavors,
it's like, I get excited with a nonsense I can do
with a $20 gift card for an AWS credit compared to,
oh well if I could buy a midsize island
to begin doing this from, oh, then we're having fun.
>> This shitposting trend,
interesting I was watching a thread go on about,
so someone didn't get a job because of their shitposting
and the employer didn't get it.
And then someone on this side, I'll hire the guy
'cause I get that's highly intelligent shitposting.
So for the audience that doesn't know
what shitposting is, what is shitposting?
>> It's more or less talking about
the world of enterprise technology
which even that sentence is hard to finish
without falling asleep and toppling out of my chair
in front of everyone on the livestream.
But it's doing it in such a way that brings it to life.
That says the quiet part a lot of the audience is thinking
but generally doesn't say either because they're polite
or not a jerk ass or more prosaically are worried
about getting fired, for better or worse
I don't have have that particular constraint
>> Which is why people love you.
So let's talk about what you think is worthy
and not worthy in the industry right now,
obviously CubeCon is coming up in Spain
which they're having a physical event.
You see the growth of cloud native.
Amazon's evolving, Adams Celestine, new CEO.
Andy's move on to be the Chief of all Amazon.
Just saw him in the cover of was it Time Magazine,
he's gone under a lot of stress,
Amazon's changed, has changed.
What's working, what's not, what's rising, what's falling?
What's hot what's not?
>> It's easy to sit here
and criticize almost anything these folks do.
They're effectively in a fishbowl
but I have trouble imagining the logistics
it takes to wind up handling the catering
for a relatively downscale event like this one this year
let alone running a 1.7 million employee company
having to balance all the competing challenges
and pressures and the rest.
I just can't fathom what it would be like
to look at all of AWS and it's sprawling immensity
that dominates our entire industry
and say, okay, this is a good start
but I want to focus on something with a broader remit.
What is that?
How do you even get into that position?
And you can't win once you're there.
All you can do is hold on to the tiger
and hope you don't get mauled.
>> Well, there's a lot of force for good conversations.
Seeing a lot of that going on, Amazon's trying to port,
AWS is trying to portray themselves as you know,
the pathfinder, you're the pioneer, force for good.
And I get that, I think that's a good angle
as cloud goes mainstream.
There's still the question of, we had a guy on just earlier
who is a skydiving instructor
and we were joking about the early days of cloud
like that was like skydiving, build the parachute open,
and now it's same kind of thing,
as you move to edge, things are like reliable
in some areas but still new fringe, new areas.
That's crazy.
>> Well, since the last time we've spoken
Steve Schmidt is now the CISO for all of Amazon
and his backfill replacement the AWS CISO is CJ Moses
who as a hobby race as a semi-pro race car driver
to my understanding, which either I don't know
what direction to take that in,
either this is what he does to relax
or ultimately it's, that certainly says something
about risk assessment, I'm not entirely sure what,
but okay, either way it sounds like more exciting.
>> I have a replacement ready
in case something goes wrong on the track.
>> Highly available CISOs.
>> I got to say one of the things I do like
in the recent trend is that the tech companies
are getting into the formula one which I was never a fan of
until I watched that Netflix series.
But when you look at the Formula One it's pretty cool
'cause it's got some tech angles
I get the whole data instrumentation thing
but the most coolest thing about Formula One
is they have these new rigs out.
>> Yeah.
>> Where you can actually race in e-sports
with other people in pure simulation of the race car.
You got to get the latest Nvidia graphics card
but it's basically a tricked out PC with amazing monitors
and you have all the equipment of F1
and you're basically simulating racing.
>> Oh, it's great too and I can see the appeal
of these tech companies getting into it
because these things are basically rocket chips.
When those cars go like they're sitting there
we can instrument in every last part
of what is going on inside that vehicle.
And then AWS crops up and we can bill
on every one of those dimensions too.
And it's like slow down their hasty pudding,
one step at a time but I do see the appeal.
>> So I got to ask you about what's going on in your world.
I know you have a lot of great success.
We've been following you in theCUBE for many, many years.
Got a great newsletter.
Check out Corey Quinn's newsletter streaming
in the cloud program, you're on the cutting edge.
And you've got a great balance
between really being snarky
and really being, delivering content that's exciting
for people with a little bit of an edge.
How's that going, what's the blowback?
Any blowback lately, has there been uptick?
What are some of the things you're hearing
from your audience?
More Corey, more Corey
and then of course the PR team's calling you.
>> The weird thing about having an audience
beyond a certain size is far and away as a landslide.
The most common response I get is silence
where it's, I'm emailing an awful lot of people
at last week in AWS every week and okay,
they must not have heard me, that is not actually true.
People just generally don't respond to email
because who responds to email newsletters.
That sounds like something a lunatic might do,
same story with response to live streams and podcasts.
It's like, I'm going to call into that AM radio show
and give them a piece of my mind.
People generally don't do that.
>> We should do that,
actually, I think we should be able to call in.
>> Oh, I think.
>> I guarantee if we had that right now
people would call in and say,
Cory what do you think about X?
>> Yeah, not everyone understands
the full context of what I do.
And in fact, increasingly few people do and that's fine.
I keep forgetting that sometimes people do not see
what I'm doing in the same light that I do and that's fine.
Blowback has been largely minimal.
Honestly, I am surprised that anything about how little
I have gotten over the last five years of doing this
but it would be easier to dismiss me
if I weren't generally right.
When, okay, so you launch this new service
and it seems pretty crappy to me
'cause when I try and build something
it falls over and begs for help.
And people might not like hearing that
but it's what customers are finding too.
>> Yeah.
>> I really am the voice of the customer.
>> I always joke with Dave Vellante
about how John Ford's always at Reinvent
getting the interview with Jassy Andy we're there,
you're there and so we have these rituals at the events.
It's all cool.
One of the rituals I like about your content is you like
to get on the naming, product names
and kind of goof on that.
Now why I like it
is because I used to work at Hewlett Packard
where they used to name things as like engineers,
HP 1005 or we can't call,
>> We have a new monitor how are we going to name it?
Throw the wireless keyboard down the stairs again.
And then there you go, yeah.
>> And the old joke at HP was if they invented sushi,
they'd say, "We can't call sushi, it's called dead fish.
That's what it is."
And so the joke was called
Dead fish is a better name than sushi.
So you know, it is fun.
So what's the, how's the Amazon doing in there?
Have they changed their naming strategy
on some of their product lines.
>> They're going in different directions,
when they named Amazon Aurora
they decided to explore a new theme
of Disney princesses as they go down those paths.
And some things are more descriptive.
Some people are clearly getting bonused on number of words
They can shove into it.
Like the better a service is the longer it's name.
Like AWS systems manager, session manager is a great one.
I love the service ridiculous name.
They have a systems manager parameter store which is great.
They have secrets manager, which has the same thing.
It's two words less but that one cost in a way
that systems manager parameter store does not, it's fun.
>> What's your favorite combination of acronyms?
>> Combination of acronyms?
>> You got EMR, you got EC2, you got S3 SQS.
Well, RedShift is not an acronym.
>> You got EBS is one of my personal favorites
because it's either Elastic Block Store
or Elastic Beanstalk depending entirely
on the context of the conversation
>> They still got Beanstalk, is that still around?
>> Oh, they never turn anything off.
They're like the Anti-Google
Google turns things off while they're still building it.
Whereas Amazon is like,
well, we built this thing in 2005 and everyone hates it
but well, we certainly can't change it now
it has three customers on it John, three.
Okay, simple DV still haunts our dreams.
>> I actually got an email.
I saw one of my servers all these C2s
were being deprecated and I got an email.
I'm like, I couldn't figure out
why can you just like roll it over?
Why are you telling me, just like give me something else.
All right, okay, so let me talk about the other things
I want to ask you, is that like,
okay, so as Amazon gets better,
some areas where do they need more work in your opinion?
Because obviously interesting new stuff
and they tend to like put it out there
for their end to end customers.
But then they've got ecosystem partners
who actually have the same product.
>> Yes.
>> And this has been well documented.
So it's not controversial,
it's just that Amazon's got a database
Snowflake's got a database service.
So Redshift, Snowflake, Databricks is out there.
So you've got this coopetition.
>> Yes.
>> How's that going and what are you hearing
about the reaction to any of that stuff?
>> Depends on who you ask.
They love to basically trot out a bunch of their partners
who will say nice things about them.
And it very much has heirs of,
let's be honest, a hostage video,
but okay 'cause these companies do partner with Amazon
and they cannot to rock the boat too far.
I'm not partnered with anyone.
I can say what I want.
They're basically restricted to taking away
my birthday at worse so I can live with that.
>> All right, so I got a ask about multicloud
'cause obviously the other cloud shows are coming up.
Amazon hated that word multicloud,
a lot of people are saying,
it's not a real good marketing word.
Like multicloud sounds like root canal, right?
So is there a better description for multicloud
>> Multiple single cloud >> Beside single cloud
Dave Vellante loves that term.
>> Yeah, people like building in multiple single points
of failure, do it for the right reasons
or don't do it as a default.
I believe not doing it is probably the right answer.
However, and if I were Amazon
I wouldn't want to talk about multicloud
either as the history leader, let's talk about other clouds,
bad direction to go in from a market cap perspective.
It doesn't end well for you
but regardless of what they want to talk about
or don't want to talk about,
what they say what they don't say, I tune all of it out.
And I look at what customers are doing
and multicloud exists in a variety of forms.
Some brilliant, some brain dead.
It depends a lot on context.
But my general response is when someone gets on stage
from a company and tells me to do a thing
that directly benefits their company.
I am skeptical at best.
When customers get on stage and say this is what we're doing
because it solves problems.
That's when I shut up and listen.
>> Yeah, Corey, awesome.
Corey, I got to ask you a question
'cause I know we've been fellow journeymen
in the cloud journey, going to all the events
and then the pandemic hit, we're now in the third year
who knows what it's going to end.
Certainly events are going to look different.
They're going to be either changing footprint
with the virtual piece, new group formations.
Communities going to emerge.
You've got a pretty big community growing
and it's growing like crazy.
What's the weirdest or coolest thing or just big changes
you've seen with the pandemic from your perspective.
'Cause you've been in the,
you're in the middle of the white water rafting.
You seeing the event, you circle offline
you saw the online piece come in, you're commentating.
You're calling balls and strikes in the industry.
You got a great team developing over there Duckbill Group.
What's the big aha moment that you saw with the pandemic,
weird, funny, serious, real in the industry
and with customers, what's.
>> Accessibility, Reinvent is a great example.
When in the before times it's open to anyone
who wants to attend, who can pony up two grand
and a week in Las Vegas and get to Las Vegas
and wherever they happen to be,
by moving virtually suddenly it embraces the reality
that talent is evenly distributed opportunity is not.
And that means that suddenly these things are accessible
to a wide swath of audience and potential customer base
and the rest that hadn't been invited
to the table previously,
it's imperative that we not lose that.
It's nice to go out and talk to people
and have people come up and try and smell my hair
from time to time, I smelled delightful, let me assure you.
But it was, but it's also nice to be,
>> I got some product for you if you want, you know?
>> Oh excellent, I look forward to it, what is it?
Pudding? Why not?
>> What else have you seen, so when accessibility for talent,
which by the way is totally home run.
What weird things have happened that you've seen that's
>> It's weird but it's good that an awful lot of people
giving presentations have learned to tighten their message
and get to the damn point
because most people are not going to get up
from a front row seat in a conference hall
midway through your ambling talk and go somewhere else.
But they will change a browser tab
and you won't get them back.
You've got to be on point.
You've got to be compelling
if it's going to be a virtual discussion.
>> Yeah, and also turn off your iMessage too.
>> Oh yes, it's always fun in the meetings
when you're talking to someone and their colleague
is messaging them, should we tell him about this?
And I'm sitting there reading it and it's
>> This guy is really weird like,
>> Yes I am and I bring it into the conversation
and then everyone's uncomfortable.
It goes wow, why not?
>> I love when my wife yells at me over iMessage.
when I'm on a business call,
like do you want to take that about no, I'm good.
>> No, no, it's better off i don't know,
the only encourager, it's fine.
>> Like kids texting you, that's fun.
Again, that's another weird thing.
And then group behavior is weird.
Now people are looking at communities differently.
>> Yes, very much so,
>> Because if you're fatigued on content
people are looking for the personal aspect.
You're starting to see much more of like,
yeah, another virtual event.
They got to get better one and two who's there.
>> Yeah.
>> The person
>> That's a big part of it too, is the human stories
are what are being more and more interesting.
Don't get up here and tell me about your product
and how brilliant you are and how you built it.
That's great if I'm you or if I want to work with you
or I want to compete with you
or I want to put on my engineering hat and build it myself
'cause why would I buy anything that's more than $8.
But instead, tell me about the problem.
Tell me about the painful spot that you specialize in.
Tell me a story there.
>> I think you need.
>> That gets a glimpse in a hook and makes more,
>> I think you nailed it, scaling storytelling.
>> Yes.
>> And access to better people
because they don't have to be there in person.
I just did a thing
we never would've done in theCUBE we did,
Amazon stepped up in sponsors.
Thank you Amazon for sponsoring International Women's Day.
We did 30 interviews,
APAC, we did five regions and I interviewed these women
in Asia-Pacific APJ they called for in this world.
And they're amazing.
I never would've done those interviews
'cause I never would've seen 'em at an event.
I never would've been in Japan or Singapore to access them.
And now they're in the index.
They're in the network.
They're collaborating on LinkedIn.
So threads are developing around connections
that I've never seen before.
>> Yes.
>> Around the content
>> Absolutely
>> Content value
plus the network affecting. >> And the content is shifting
and that is the next big revelation
of this industry is going to realize,
you have different companies.
And in Amazon's case, different service teams,
all competing with each other,
but you have the container group
and you have the database group
and you have the message cuing group.
But customers don't really want to build things
from spare parts.
They want a solution to a problem.
I want to build an app that does Twitter For Pets
or whatever it is I'm trying to do.
I don't want to basically have to pick and choose
and fill my shopping cart with all these different things.
I want something that's going to basically give me
what I'm trying to get as close to turnkey as possible.
Moving up the stack.
That is the future and just how it gets here is going to be.
>> Well, we're here with Corey Quinn,
the master of content here in the AWS ecosystem.
Of course we we've been following up in the beginning.
He's great guy, check out his blog, his site,
his newsletter, screaming podcast.
Corey, final question for you.
What are you hear doing, what's on your agenda this week
in San Francisco and give a plug for the Duckbill Group?
What are you guys doing?
I know you're hiring some people,
what's on the table for the company.
What's your focus this week
and put a plug in for the group?
>> I'm here as a customer
and basically getting out of my cage
'cause I do live here.
It's nice to actually get out
and talk to folks who are doing interesting things,
at the Duckbill Group, we solve one problem.
We fix the horrifying AWS bill
both from engineering and architecture advising
as well as negotiating AWS contracts
because it turns out those things are big and complicated.
And of course my side, media projects last week in aws.com,
we are, it it's more or less a content operation
where I indulge my continual and ongoing love affair
with the sound of my own voice.
>> And it's good content.
It's on point fun, starky and relevant.
So thanks for coming to theCUBE and sharing with us.
Appreciate it.
No thank you, great to see you.
>> Okay, this is theCUBE coverage here
in San Francisco, California
theCUBE is back at going to events.
These are the summits,
Amazon Web Services summits that happen all over the world.
We'll be in New York
and obviously we're here in San Francisco this week.
I'm John furrier, keep it right here.
We'll be back with more coverage after this short break.
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