>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas,
it's theCUBE.
Covering AWS re:Invent 2019.
Brought to you by Amazon Web Services and Intel,
along with its ecosystem partners.
>> Hey welcome back everyone
as theCUBE live covers
Las Vegas day three,
we're wrapping up the show
for AWS re:Invent.
I'm John Furrier, extracting the signal from the noise.
I want to thank Intel for sponsoring this
amazing set, two sets here.
We had double barrel,
cube action all week.
Thanks to Intel,
we wouldn't be able to
do it and bring the
great content to viewers today.
Thank them for supporting our mission.
We're going to wrap up the show with
Stu Miniman, Corey Quinn,
two experts who are scouring the floor.
Doing interviews,
talking to everybody,
and myself.
Cory, good to see you.
>> It is great to see me,
John, thank you.
>> You're awesome,
got quite a following
these days on
your work, your business
is growing, congratulations.
>> Corey: Thank you
>> But, I saw you running around at the win,
you definitely work hard.
So, what have you learning,
what are you seeing,
what's the-
what's your analysis
of the show holistically?
>> I think that Amazon,
specifically AWS's product strategy,
remains what it has been,
and that is simply "yes."
There is remarkably little that seems that it is beyond
something that AWS would take an interest in.
If you'd asked me to predict what they would have
released at midnight madness,
I would have had several guesses,
none of which would have been
"Well it's a piano keyboard thing that also does
Machine Learning."
And my follow up would be,
well of course it is
"Does it also make fries?"
And at this point, well sure, it makes
it makes a certain twisted sort of sense.
Maybe it's too many days of re:Invent in a row,
maybe it's just at this point a certain
level of cynicism that I can no longer escape.
But, at this point, very little surprises me.
But it seemed to be a very AWS event through and through.
>> The volume and velocity of announcements was
at the same level as last year.
No real change there.
>> Yes, I am saddened to report that the re:Invent house band
is still there and has not yet been put to sleep
to spare them and ourselves for their misery but,
we'll see.
>> You didn't like the band?
>> I think the band is slightly hokey.
I would change the lyrics of some of the things
that their singing to at least be humorous.
If you're going to go corny,
go all in.
>> The guy did nail the Queen notes.
>> Oh, they're terrific performers
it has nothing to do with that.
But it is 8 O'clock
in the morning.
So, one has questions.
>> I think the keynote could have been a sleeper,
without the band, don't you think?
>> I do maintain that I want an Alexa skill
That is just Andy Jassy reading rock lyrics.
I would pay serious money for that.
>> Well you did put some thought in.
Stu, your thoughts on the show,
wrap it up man, what's going on?
>> Look I mean,
the show as Dave Vallente says
"Amazon always delivers with the shock and awe."
You know, broadest and deepest, so many pieces here.
I took a selfie with many people
and the biggest celebrity of the show,
AWS Outpost.
The rack, it's over in the corner there,
and people asking me about all the gear inside.
I said "You should stop asking about that because
you will never touch it,
only AWS will."
So put a curtain around it,
it's managed as a service.
And that's what I think people
are still trying to understand.
We've been talking about cloud for what,
fifteen years now?
But Amazon's positioning on cloud is still
different than everyone else's.
When I think back to some of the waves,
there's that buzz word.
And there's one or two that really architecturally
are different and deliver,
and Amazon laid out
their strategy even more,
and, through the GE pieces,
and transformation was the theme.
Hey Corey, talking transformation
I met you at this show a few years ago,
and your special skill back then was wearing
a three piece suit.
>> Indeed.
The problem is is when you start talking about cloud billing
and cloud accounting
and that sort of thing,
in a three piece suit,
you look like you're a CPA that got lost somewhere.
So, my brand and personal sartorial preferences
have continued to evolve.
When you're talking about Outpost though, you're right.
It's the clear star of the show,
and I love that product so much.
Not because of what they say about it,
but because of the subtext that comes along with
that product.
Namely that "Look, you're going to run
things on PREM,
and the problem of course is that you suck
at managing hardware.
Now, this is going to take a lot of that away.
You're still going to suck at providing
connectivity and power,
and AWS does not have anything
to announce around those at this time,
but we're slowly, delicately,
prying your grubby little hands off of the hands on hardware
server hugger mentality and dragging you,
lovingly, kickingly,
and screamingly,
into the best technology,
lets say 2012 has to offer at least."
It's modern-ish.
>> So, are cloud buyers naive,
if they are just going to be buying
these solutions from other
clouds or prepackaged solutions.
Is that really cloud or do they care?
I mean, what's the difference between cloud native
and cloud naive?
What's your perspective?
Besides the letter T.
>> Of course.
I think that there's a definite spectrum on
how cloudy something can be.
If you want to just take everything running in your
existing data center,
virtualize it,
and then just put that into an AWS region,
okay great.
There are ways to do that
and most of them have a VM-ware price tag tied to them,
but okay, is that cloud?
Ish.
Is it the best approach?
Maybe.
I think it's hard to bucket all customers into one.
Everyone's in a different place on their journey.
And I guess architecture shaming,
it's "Oh, what are you going to
do with that piece of crap?"
Like about eight billion dollars of revenue a year,
why do you ask?"
There are valid reasons to do a lot of different things
and be at different points on your journey.
I like seeing Twitter for pets evolve
and do the latest and greatest thing.
I don't like seeing for example,
my bank doing the exact same thing.
>> Yeah, I mean,
Stu, it's beauty of the cloud is in the eye of the beholder.
I mean what he's saying is and what Jassy's saying is
"Look up, you can't just take,
you know everyone and put them into a bucket,
it's what you do with it."
>> Yeah.
It really comes back to what you want to do.
>> I mean, John, I go back
to, you know,
things Warner said on the Keynote stage,
everything fails all the time.
The difference between the old architecture,
which was "I'm going to do everything I can
and I'm going to throw money
and hardware at things to make it enterprise."
Well, the new enterprise needs to look like
what the Hyperscalers have been doing,
which is, you build for software.
Which means that everything fails all the time.
That, our friendly chaos monkey will come in here
and it doesn't matter what piece goes down,
the application needs to stay up running.
It's about the application,
you know,
application developers at the center of what's
going on here,
and you know, that modernization.
I really liked Andy Jassy's answer,
to what I asked him about,
is if we go through this cloud Adoption,
we talk about simplification
and people want to buy over solutions
but the successful company of the future will be builders.
>> I got to ask you guys this question.
I talked to a friend,
and yes I have friends.
So, he's in IT for a big company.
I said "Hey, what do you think, AWS or Azure?"
And I won't give away the names but he says look
"We don't know what we're doing, like we're old school IT.
We're running eight billion dollar business
and we have network security.
We're classic IT,
we know we've got to get there,
the boss is saying get to the cloud
and, frankly, if we move to Amazon,
half my team would either get fired
or they wouldn't get it to work.
So, we're just going to go with Microsoft
because they've been selling us gear
and stuff for decades."
So, there we go, that's Azure.
That has nothing to do with capability,
that's a real-life scenario that we're hearing.
Stu?
Corey? >> It's incredibly important
because once upon a time,
I was a grumpy Unix admin because there's
no other kind of Unix admin.
And I was very anti-cloud for a long time.
The reason was, I could come up with a whole list
of flimsy justifications why the cloud was crap
but the honest answer was I had built my sense
of identity around the thing that I knew how to do
and the cloud felt like it was taking it away
from what I was.
It wasn't true.
There is a growth path,
it's not as long as people often think it is
but you can't fight the tide forever.
And that world is slowly but surely
eroding out from under you.
Do you go Azure?
Do you go AWS?
That's going to depend on you,
where you are, what your constraints are,
what your business concerns are
but I also think it's a miss-step
to view the migration process
solely as one of technology.
>> Hold on, I need to chime in here,
John, because I think >> You can slack in here too
because people use that instead of chime.
>> It is Goldilocks syndrome here.
There is one cloud out there that you need to be a PHD
and the smartest people out here to do it.
There's one cloud out there that we're going to
meet you where you are
and you don't need to make any changes.
What Amazon's trying to do is that balance between,
we want to make it uncomfortable enough
to make the change so that you can be
successful in the future.
Whether or not they've struck the right balance,
I think, is up for debate
and, this is a journey,
>> Well, Hyperscale there are varies out there but
I think, that's where I see the
>> We'll there's two things,
psychology of, just the change, right?
Your Unix admin example
and my friend,
which is true, it's legit.
Now, the question is what's the indifference of
getting the path?
But, if you look at the Hyperscalers
Dave Vellante pauses that all the time
They would spend engineering time to save money,
so they'd engineer a solution, save time.
Enterprise would spend money to save time.
That's the general purpose computing market
that used to be.
>> Corey: Yeah >> It's not like that anymore.
It's not general purpose.
>> The entire theme of this show seems to be
aimed much more at Big E enterprise than
the leading edge type of story.
There was a lot more Goldman-Sachs than Netflix,
for example.
And that's a good thing,
and that's okay. >> I think it's a great thing.
>> There's still room to grow, I mean,
they did not announce an AWS 400.
There's no mainframe story in the cloud as such yet.
>> That's actually a mini computer, technically,
okay >> Oh, I'm sure.
>> But proprietary mini computer.
>> You don't want to know what the billing model looks like.
>> If you know what AS400 is,
you're old like us.
>> They call them I series now but,
yeah, that's right, a U series.
Done.
>> All right guys, wrapping it up,
this is the big point.
Final word, Corey,
Amazon, long game, still in play,
no real impact from competition yet
but they're in the rear view mirror.
They're seeing stuff.
Did Amazon successfully move the distance
between them and the competition at this event?
At least from a narrative
and/or announcement stand point?
>> Well, I will say that no other cloud
has a Machine Learning piano.
So, I think that that definitely is a differentiating factor
and it adds another item to a checkbox list somewhere,
that someone cares about.
But as far as the core competency,
I think, Outpost absolutely opens up a
world of opportunity for folks who
otherwise would not take that step.
I think that they're demonstrating
a rapid execution story around what it takes to get
Big E enterprise workloads migrated
and giving an on-ramp that doesn't require
everyone being re-tooled, re-skilled
and, oh, everything you're doing is great.
But it's awful, throw it away
and start over.
>> And Stu, there's trillions of Dollars
of spend coming in to the sector.
Certainly, there's clear visibility the
operating model's there,
there's IT spend trillions around
be on the table up for grabs.
>> You know what's interesting?
Was watching a Netflix documentary about
Bill Gates on the way in,
talking about what Microsoft went through
after the anti-trust piece.
It is looming right in front of us, for AWS.
The market power they have,
it's till a relatively small piece of the
overall IT market,
absolutely Amazon has the potential to take
a big chunk out of that,
you know, trillions of dollars there.
It is always day one here,
they are always impressive as to the feedback loops,
the way they are listening
and they're growing,
so, that was, we said, a year ago,
it was the Oval office, the Executive Office,
was the biggest threat to Amazon,
it still is the biggest threat I see.
>> I think the big story here from this re:Invent is
Amazon recognizes two things,
big enterprises need to transform their way to
be successful to take advantage of the capabilities
not take a transitional, incremental improvement
and, two, they got competition.
And they see it.
And the pressure's definitely on,
they won't admit it,
but Microsoft, through their sales machinery,
is taking down spend,
and if that trend continues
and will Microsoft have that ability to keep that going
and not have dis-economies of scale for taking short-cuts.
Can Amazon keep the pressure on?
Because that, to me, is the big story
and then it's clear, the narrative is keep pushing hard
and try to extend the lead out past everybody.
>> The answer is customers win.
>> John, Amazon still doesn't use the word multi-cloud,
they're architectural design is not to solve
multi-cloud as it is to extend AWS
and, it's interesting, we will see which design
architecture wins out in the future.
But, you know.
>> Yeah. It's a three horse race,
are the going to be number one?
I think they recognize multi-cloud,
they won't admit it but, why would you?
If you were building a PC,
why would you promote the Mac?
And again, if they're commercial,
who's the Mac guy and who's the PC guy, Corey?
I mean, who's cooler?
Microsoft or Amazon?
>> These days?
That's starts to become a bit of an open question.
There's been fantastic transformational stories,
as they say, it's not your grandfather's Microsoft.
But, then again, Amazon has made some interesting choices
as we go too.
>> Stu, the Mac guy was cooler than the PC guy
in those famous commercials,
>> Absolutely he was. >> Who's cooler?
Amazon or Apple?
>> Corey, when you look at some of the cultural pieces,
absolutely Microsoft has gone through some transformations.
But Amazon was, for talking about AWS,
they are cloud native.
They are cloud.
>> So they're cooler as far as Stu stands.
Okay, depends how you look at it.
This is a wrap up, guys,
thanks for coming in, Corey, good to see you.
>> Thank you for having me.
>> I know you're working hard.
>> Corey Quinn, one of the hardest working
guys in the business,
along with Stu Miniman, Dave Vellante,
I'm John Furrier for John Walls,
Jeff Frick, Glenn and the whole team,
thanks for watching.
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That's a wrap for AWS re:Invent 2019.
Thanks for watching.
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