>> Welcome back everyone.
CUBE live coverage here in Las Vegas for AWS
Amazon Web Services, reinvent 2021.
In person event on the floor, back in business, theCUBE.
Two live sets pumping out content left and right.
Three and a half days of wall to wall overage,
over 120 interviews, stream 28 hours
literally on the main site as well as on the CUBE zone.
Go to CUBEreinvent.com to get all the action,
all the videos will be there.
Of course theCUBE.net.
I'm John Furrier, your host,
with Dave Nicholson my cohost this week
and Sarbjeet Johal cloud strategist, influencer,
all around great guy, CUBE alumni, here to break down
reinvent in context to the cloud industry.
Sarbjeet, great to see you, thanks for coming on.
>> Good to see you guys in person finally.
>> I'm so excited.
I did all these interviews the past two years in person
and I've been remote, now were in person,
great to do it, everyone's excited.
27,000 people here at reinvent.
Stand in line for classes.
By the way, they're not offering these classes online,
only the leadership classes and the keynote.
If you're not here, you're not getting the classes.
>> I like the vibe actually.
I thought it would be more subdued but it is better
than what I thought and energy is here.
It's not like 2019, it's not.
>> That's 60,000 people, you couldn't even
get through the hallway.
Any company would love to have 27,000 people
but I got to say, this year we were just talking earlier
on the segment this morning,
I wanted to get your thoughts on this,
you go back 15 years ago when AWS rolled out,
you have EC2, S3, SQS, you had to roll your own.
Basically your alternative was better than building
a data center or hosting on a colo.
So great, check, you don't have to buy the technology tax.
I think you had to fill in the glue layers,
you had to kind of roll your own and build it up.
Now everyone is scaling up
and next gen cloud is a completely different architecture.
You got serverless, you got all the glue layers
pretty much there, and you can still add stuff on it,
so a completely different mindset.
Changing the startup speed game.
Changing the enterprise.
Looking pretty good.
What's your reaction to the new architecture in cloud
vis a vis where it came from?
>> My reaction to the new architecture is that number one
it's just new.
We change stuff all the time in software stacks
and what I was grasping within myself sitting in my hotel
in the morning listening to Warner's keynote was that
we have started to accumulate the technology debt
even in cloud.
We cooked up some some stuff with the scripts
and we automated stuff with programing,
language of your choice, or CLIs.
Then became the cloud formation automation, orchestration
of your cloud stack, if you will.
Then Hashicorp are like,
so Hashicorp are sitting on the side there.
But now there's another abstraction layer on top of that
which was announced during Warner's keynote today.
I think the new abstraction layers leave the pervious
architectures a little stale.
It's always like, what should you do?
Should you refactor your existing stacks
or should you not touch that?
Just go from now on on the new architecture?
I think it's getting busy, complicated,
a lot of number of services.
>> What do you think other people are saying?
I saw you did a little snippet with Dion Hinchcliffe online,
nice Tweet there, you got a big video coming out.
As you talk to other folks and influencers
and people in the front lines, what are they saying
about Amazon Reinvent this year?
>> I think almost everybody's saying that number of services
is expanding exponentially.
I was thinking that 200 plus number of services
or whatever that number is today, it's mind boggling.
I totally understand that when you have two teams
that they want to take the credit for creating
a new service and they want to publish it.
They want to do a press release and all that.
But my request to all cloud providers, mainly three,
is to not call everything a new service.
Call that feature of a service.
So number of services has to be reduced,
collapsed if you will.
We need umbrella services and then under that
there should be features of services, that's one thing.
Another feedback I got from some second tier partners
is that they have the competency program for partners.
They announced that.
They had that earlier but new competencies.
It leaves the second or third tier partners in the cold.
Only the first tier partners can get those competencies
because for that they have to send a lot of money,
train people, then they get that check box,
oh, you can do this.
>> This whole services thing and what you call a service,
if you called everything a service a new feature of DNS
or a new thing here and there, serverless,
there's be thousands of features, services.
I think Amazon, I think they culled it down to like, 200,
is the number we hear.
>> But isn't that part of the role of the partner,
the services provider, the consultancy,
to act as a bridge between all of those services
and features, whatever you want to call them
and figuring out exactly what
the end user customer actually needs?
The idea that AWS is messaging here is targeted directly
towards end user customers.
There's a lot to be desired there
because how do you translate that?
I'm thinking, compare and contrast that with
the Steve Jobs approach of there shall be three.
There will be a large, a medium and a small.
I know that this is more complex, but when you come out
and you say, 475 different kinds of instances,
you're leaving that to your partners to translate.
To your point, if you're segregating those partners into
categories where only a top tier has access to everything,
interesting place to be.
>> A couple of discussions I had with partners was that
I actually suggested them to create a bank of
reference architectures, we call that in Amazon terms.
But it's not only technical side of things,
but business as well.
They need to create some principle based architectures
and have a bank of that and then prescribe that
to their customers base.
I think that's the only way to simplify these things
because as you said, if you have 200 different types
of instances, for instance, (laughs), it is hard.
It is really hard.
>> I want to get your thoughts, we talk about this on Twitter
all the time so the folks watching, if you want to follow our
rants and raves on Twitter, follow us on Twitter
you'll get all the action, all the influencers are there.
Competition.
I've been ranting all week
and been saying it for a long time,
Microsoft's not even close to Amazon.
I'm a bit over the top but I'll just say that
if Amazon goes unchecked,
Microsoft's ecosystem's going to get decimated.
Why would I want to run software, my software,
on a suboptimal performance infrastructure?
Microsoft had Windows back in the day
and had the system software and the application suite
but they encouraged developers to build on top of Windows.
Their "dot net" or ecosystem.
That game's over.
I guess Window's runs on Amazon too, whatever.
But now the cloud is the Windows.
The cloud is the system software.
So developers are running on top of the cloud.
>> Yes.
>> So who wins?
>> I think Open wins.
Not Open-source.
Open-source and Open are different things,
we always discuss that.
I think Open wins, the close systems have this problem of
protectionism which doesn't work,
with our little kids at home or your economy as whole.
When you protect your local industry, the economy goes down.
I've seen that, I'm an economist by education
as you guys know.
>> Yes.
>> I think it's the same, when you protect too much
of whatever you have, I think it's has a worse effect.
But there's one narrative,
Satya sort of narrates if you will,
he says that, hey, when you use Windows,
you keep everything, 100%.
We are not taking a cut.
When you're sitting in a cloud marketplace,
somebody's getting a cut.
That's the argument.
>> Terry Chen said, because he puked on what I said,
he said better could win.
>> Yes.
>> That's one thing.
Okay, I buy that.
Azure could be better in some use cases.
But I think over all Amazon wins hands down currently.
Certainly with the custom processors.
>> You haven't mentioned GCP.
>> Actually GCP.
>> What can you say about it?
>> What you could say is that AWS right now
has either constructed or is benefiting from the highest
barrier to entry to any business
in the history of our planet.
You can look at the investment that GCP is making
to the tune of six billion dollars a year
to go after market share.
Are they going after current market share
which is arguably the 20% of IT that's in cloud now?
Or are they going for future market share which is
a piece of the larger pie?
When you talk about who wins,
I think it's still possible for-
>> Hold on, hold on.
>> You left Oracle out.
I think it's still possible. >> Hold on, hold on, hold on.
>> I can tell you about Oracle.
>> Hold on, hold on.
This is a thought exercise,
I'm going to ask you guys this question.
It may be rhetorical, you don't need to answer it.
If you went to all the people out there
buying Azure and GCP, no offense guys,
and you said, "Put aside all your credits you've been given,
how much are you actually using?"
If you take the incentives away, why are you on those clouds
from a performance perspective?
>> Sorry to cut you off.
We know that Oracle uses incentives, X codes,
leads for sale, and all that stuff, we know that.
A lot of people know that.
So cloud became shelfware there, we know the story.
I'm leaving Oracle to the side.
But I think Google has legs.
Google's cloud has legs.
They are a very enduring focus company.
They are more open-source friendly
and data science friendly as well.
I think they are actually a number two,
personally I believe.
I'm a developer by heart,
so they are number two developer cloud after Amazon.
>> I think it's well know, I agree with you by the way.
I think people may not know this but it's well known
in the industry that Amazon has been mostly afraid of Google
more than Microsoft.
I think now because of this market share, the ecosystem war
that's going to happen in a very short period of time,
Microsoft's more of a threat on paper.
But Google's got more threat to sling shot back and front
technically because if you look at Graviton,
the stack that they're building for ISVs and developers,
Amazon's clearly winning.
Google can pull that off.
If they get it, they got to have their own way.
>> Let me tell you, the one thing actually,
if we want to know what was the fumble this time?
I have some, actually I will talk about it in my radio,
if you have enough time here.
I think Google will do better because they're open
and Amazon is complex.
I was thinking during the keynotes, what are the clues
to Amazon, AWS, leaving which is helping Google and Azure,
mainly Google.
Google is simple actually, a lot simpler to use,
but again having said that, there's one thing actually,
the new term I'm trying to define is the feature proximity.
Amazon has feature proximity, like the best.
When you are doing one thing and you want to do another thing,
they have that all right there.
They're ahead of the game.
They have their 5G, private 5G on all their stuff,
it's very futuristic.
>> By the way, I got Amazon to agree to get me some private
5G for when we go back home.
We're going to setup an outdoor area for some open CUBE action
with some 5G.
>> Actually we could put that on a nice van with the logos
and all that.
We could move around.
>> We'll park it right there on El Camino,
right next to Stanford University.
Maybe we could live in one of those things too.
>> Make it a taco truck and I'll join you guys.
>> (laughs) Taco truck for free food.
>> Yeah, let's do that.
>> All seriousness guys, I want to get your thoughts
as we wrap up this segment on the analysis of
the cloud industry.
What do you guys think, your opinion, it's going to take,
I'll start by saying I think Amazon, if not contested
for their leadership in the performance of silicon
and the stack for software developers and owners
to run the fastest they can run away with this.
I think Microsoft and Google better be cranking right now
to make it easy and have silicon advantage as well.
I think clearly if the ecosystem's going to be at play,
because the shift is happening to modernize software
development, low code, no code, every shift everyone
will go to the best performance, independent of cost
and incentives.
Amazon's got lower cost too so they got the fly wheel going.
>> I can make mine short.
I think GCP can also be successful.
But I think already the amount of momentum that AWS has,
the wind behind it's sails, I was at EMC for many years
and we used to joke about our arch nemesis
Hitachi Data Systems and saying that they were quite
discouraged every morning as they woke up
learning that they were a year further behind.
Every night they went to sleep. They woke up the next day
and they were a year further behind.
Watching the announcements coming out
of this event this week,
I think there are some people at GCP
and Microsoft and others who have that sense.
But having said that, we're at the dawn of at era of cloud.
There's plenty of room for a lot of players.
When you give us your thoughts,
I'd like your answer to the question,
how much are consumers in the driver's seat today?
Will the customers be able to demand multi sourcing?
>> I think customers, you work with your money.
Customers can demand that but at the same time
customers can get stuck in a platform
and they can't get out.
We usually talk about when to lock in.
There's one thing that Amazon keeps saying that
we are open, we are open and the other vendors are like,
these brands.
I think that kind of narrative can come bite back to them.
It's not a good thing to say.
You don't want to be cocky about your features
or you are the best and all that stuff.
I think you want to stay humble
and respect the other guys as well
because they are coming right behind you.
I think the key is developers.
I have the bias towards developers
because I was a developers but I totally believe deep down,
actually I have tried to put my developer hat off
and still think that way about these constructs.
Developers are the people who call the shots.
If you are not developer friendly you can't do much.
>> That's a good point.
>> That's my warning to Amazon.
Don't go away from developers.
You are number one developer cloud, stay there.
This refocus is good, but put that to the side,
not make that front center.
Google has made that front center, I think that's a mistake.
>> Yeah, you have the features, the right features,
but again, speed, performance.
Developers, capture the opportunity.
Developers want to move fast.
That's the entrepreneurship.
Sarbjeet, great to have you on theCUBE, great to see you.
>> Thanks for having me here, I enjoyed it.
Great set here.
>> All right, Dave Nicholson's here.
Dave Nicholson, CUBE host.
I'm John Furrier.
You're watching theCUBE,
the world leader in technology coverage.
We'll be back with more live coverage from Reinvent
after this short break.
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