 From around the globe, it's theCUBE, presenting, Cube on Cloud, brought to you by SiliconANGLE. We continue with Cube on Cloud. We're here with Mylon Thompson-Bukovec, who's the Vice President of Block and Object Storage at AWS, which comprises elastic block storage, AWS S3 and Amazon Glacier. Mylon, great to see you again. Thanks so much for coming on the program. Nice to be here. Thanks for having me, Dave. You're very welcome. Here we are, we're unpacking the future of cloud, and we'd love to get your perspectives on how customers should think about the future of infrastructure, things like applying machine intelligence to their data, but just to set the stage, when we look back at the history of storage in the cloud, it obviously started with S3, and then a couple years later, AWS introduced EBS for block storage, and those are the most well-known services in the portfolio, but there's more, there's cold storage and new capabilities that you announced recently at Reinvent around super-duper block storage and tiering is another example, but it looks like AWS is really starting to accelerate and pick up the pace of customer options in storage. So my first question is, how should we think about this expanding portfolio? Well, I think you have to go all the way back to what customers are trying to do with their data, Dave. The path to innovation is paved by data. If you don't have data, you don't have machine learning. You don't have the next generation of analytics applications that helps you chart a path forward into a world that seems to be changing every week. And so in order to have that insight, in order to have that predictive forecasting that every company needs, regardless of what industry that you're in today, it all starts from data. And I think the key shift that I've seen is how customers are thinking about that data about being instantly usable, whereas in the past, it might have been a backup, now it's part of a data lake. And if you can bring that data into a data lake, you can have not just analytics or machine learning or auditing applications, it's really what does your application do for your business? And how can it take advantage of that vast amount of shared data set in your business? Awesome, so thank you. So I want to make sure we're hitting on the big trends that you're seeing in the market that kind of are informing your strategy around the portfolio and what you're seeing with customers. Instant usability, you bring in machine learning into the equation. I think people have really started to understand the benefits of cloud storage as a service and the pay by the drink and that whole model. Obviously COVID has accelerated that, cloud migration has accelerated. Anything else we're missing there? What are the other big trends that you see, if any? Well, Dave, you did a good job of capturing a lot of the drivers. The one thing I would say that just sits underneath all of it is the massive growth of digital data year over year. IDC says digital data is growing at a rate of 40% year over year and that has been true for a while and it's not gonna stop. It's gonna keep on growing because the sources of that data acquisition keeps on expanding and whether it's IoT devices, whether it is content created by users, that data is going to grow and everything you're talking about depends on the ability to not just capture it and store it but as you say, use it. Well, you know, and we talk about data growth a lot and sometimes it becomes bromide but I think the interesting thing that I've observed over the last couple of decades really is that the growth is non-linear and it's really the curve is starting to shape exponentially. You guys always talk about that flywheel effect. It's really hard to believe, you know, people say trees don't grow to the moon, it seems like data does. It does and what's interesting about working in the world at AWS Storage Dave is that it's counterintuitive but our goal without data growth is to make it cost-effective and so year over year, how can we make it cheaper and cheaper to have customers store more and more data so they can use it but it's also to think about the definition of usage and what kind of data is being tapped by businesses for their insights and make that easier than it's ever been before. Let me ask you a follow-up question on that, Maylon. I get asked this a lot or I hear comments a lot that, yes, AWS continuously and rigorously reduces pricing but it's just kind of following the natural curve of Moore's Law or whatever. How do you respond to that? Are there other factors involved? Obviously labor is another cost reducing factor but what's the trend line say? Well, cost efficiency is in our DNA, Dave. We come to work every day in AWS across all of our services and we ask ourselves, how can we lower our costs and be able to pass that along to customers? As you say, there are many different aspects to cost. There's the cost of the storage itself is the cost of the data center and that's really what we've seen impact a lot of customers that were slower or just getting started with a move to the cloud is they entered 2020 and then they found out exactly how expensive that data center was to maintain because they had to put in safety equipment and they had to do all the things that you have to do in a pandemic in a data center. And so sometimes that cost is a little bit hidden or won't show up until you really don't need to have it land but the cost of managing that explosive growth of data is very real and when we're thinking about cost we're thinking about cost in terms of how can I lower it on a per gigabyte per month basis but we're also building into the product itself adaptive discounts like we have a storage class in S3 that's called intelligent tiering and in intelligent tiering we have built in monitoring where if particular objects aren't frequently accessed in a given month a customer will automatically get a discounted price for that storage or a customer can, you know, as of late last year say that they want to automatically move storage in the storage class that has been stored for example, longer than 180 days and saves 95% by moving it into archive storage deep archive storage and so it's not just, you know, relentlessly going after and lowering the cost of storage it's also building into the products these new ways where we can adaptively discount storage based on what a customer's storage is actually doing. And I would add to our audiences the other thing that Ados has done is it's really forced transparency almost the same way that Amazon has done on retail and now my mom, when we talked last I mentioned that S3 was an object store and of course that's technically correct but your comment to me was Dave it's more than that and you started to talk about SageMaker and AI and bringing in machine learning and I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the future of how storage is going to be leveraged in the cloud that's maybe different than what we've been used to in the early days of S3 and how your customers should be thinking about infrastructure not as bespoke services but as a suite of capabilities and maybe some of those adjacent services that you see as most leverageable for customers and why. Well, to tell the story Dave we're going to have to go a little bit back in time all the way back to the 1990s or before then. When all you had was a set of hardware appliance vendors that sold you appliances that you put in your data center and inherently created a data silo because those hardware appliances were hardwired to your application and so an individual application that was dealing with auditing as an example wouldn't really be able to access the storage for another application because the architecture of that legacy world is tied to a data silo and S3 came out launched in 2006 and introduced very low cost storage that is an object and I'll tell you Dave over the last 10 plus years we have seen all kinds of data come into S3 whereas before it might have been backups or it might have been images and videos. Now a pretty substantial data set is our Parquet files and Orc files. These files are there for business analytics for more real-time type of processing and that has really been the trend of the future is taking these different files putting them in a shared file layer so any application today or in the future can tap into that data and so this idea of the shared file layer is a major trend that has been taking off for the last I would say five or six years and I expect that to not only keep on going but to really open up the type of services that you can then do on that shared file layer and whether that's SageMaker or some of the machine learning introduced by our Connect service it's bringing together the data as a starting point and then the applications can evolve very rapidly on top of that. I want to ask your opinion about big data architectures. One of our guests is Jamak Tagani she's an amazing data architect and she's put forth this notion of a distributed global mesh and I'm picking up on some of the comments Andy, Jassy made it at re-invent how essentially hey we're bringing AWS to the edge we see the data center is just another edge node you're seeing this massive distributed system evolving you guys have talked about that for a while and data by its very natures is distributed but we've had this tendency to put it into a monolithic data lake or a data warehouse and it's sort of antithetical to that distributed nature so how do you see that playing out? What do you see customers in the future doing in terms of their big data architectures and what does that mean for storage? It comes down to the nature of the data and again the usage and Dave that's where I see the biggest difference in these modern data architectures from the legacy of 20 years ago is the idea that the data need drives the data storage so let's take an example of the type of data that you always want to have on the edge we have customers today that need to have storage in the field and whether the field is scientific research or oftentimes it's content creation in the film industry or if it's for military operations there's a lot of data that needs to be captured and analyzed in the field and for us what that means is that we have a suite of products called Snowball and whether it's Snowball or Snowcone, take your pick that whole portfolio of AWS services is targeted at customers that need to do work with storage at the edge and so if you think about the need for multiple applications acting on the same data set that's when you keep it in an AWS region and what we've done in AWS storage is we've recognized that depending on the need of usage where you put your data and how you interact it may vary but we've built a whole set of services like data transfer to help make sure that we can connect data from for example that new Snowcone into a region automatically and so our goal Dave is to make sure that when customers are operating at the edge or they're operating in the region they have the same quality of storage service and they have easy ways to go between them you shouldn't have to pick you should be able to do it all. So in the spirit of do it all there's a sort of age old dynamic in the tech business where you've got the friction between the best of breed and the integrated suite and my question is around what you're optimizing for for customers and can you have your cake and eat it too? In other words, why AWS storage? Does it, what makes it compelling? Is it because it's kind of a best of breed storage service or is it because it's integrated with AWS? Would you ever sub-optimize one in order to get an advantage to the other or can you actually have your cake and eat it too? The way that we build storage is to focus on being both the breadth of capabilities and the depth of capabilities. And so where we identify a particular need where we think that it takes a whole new service to deliver, we'll go build that service and an example for that is FTP our AWS SFTP service, which there's a lot of SFTP usage out there and there will be for a while because of the legacy B2B type of architectures that still live in the business world today. And so we looked at that problem, we said, how are we gonna build that in the best depth way and the best focus and we launched a separate service for that. And so our goal is to take the individual building blocks of EBS and Glacier and S3 and make the best of class and the most comprehensive in the capabilities of what we can do and where we identify a very specific need, we'll go build a service for it. But Dave, as an example for that idea of both depth and breadth, S3 Storage Lens is a great example of that. S3 Storage Lens is a new capability that we launched last year. And what it does is it lets you look across all your regions and all your accounts and get a summary view of all your S3 storage and whether that's buckets or the most active prefixes that you have and be able to drill down from that. And that is built in to the S3 service and available for any customer that wants to turn it on in the AWS Management Console. Right, and we saw just recently you made, I called it super duper block storage but you made some improvements in really addressing the highest performance. I want to ask you, so we've all learned about and experienced the benefits of cloud over the last several years and especially in the last 10 months during the pandemic. But one of the challenges and it's particularly acute with IO is, of course, latency and moving data around and accessing data remotely. It's a challenge for customers due to speed of light, et cetera. So my question is, how was AWS thinking about all that data that still resides on premises? I think we heard at Reinvent that still 90% of the opportunities or the workloads are still on-prem that live inside a customer's data center. So how do you tap into those and help customers innovate with on-prem data, particularly from a storage angle? Well, we always want to provide the best-of-class solution for those little latency workloads. And that's why we launched Block Express just late last year at Reinvent. And Block Express is a new capability in preview on top of our I02 provisioned IOPS volume type. And what's really interesting about Block Express, Dave, is that the way that we're able to deliver the performance of Block Express, which is sound performance with cloud elasticity, is that we went all the way down to the network layer. And we customized the hardware, software and at the network layer, we built Block Express and something called SRD, which stands for Scalable Reliable Diagrams. And basically what it's letting us do is offload all of our EBS operations for Block Express on the Nitro Card on hardware. And so that type of innovation where we're able to take advantage of modern commodity, multi-tenant data center networks where we're sending in this new network protocol across a large number of network paths. And that type of innovation all the way down to that protocol level helps us innovate in a way that's hard. In fact, I would say impossible for other sound providers to kind of really catch up and keep up. And so we feel that the amount of innovation that we have for delivering those low latency workloads in our AWS cloud storage is unlimited really because of that ability to customize software, hardware and network protocols as we go along without requiring upgrades from a customer. It just gets better and the customer benefits. Now, if you wanna stay in your data center, that's why we built Outposts. And for Outposts, we have EBS and we have S3 for Outposts. And our goal there is that some customers will have workloads where they want to keep them resident in the data center. And for those customers, we want to give them that AWS storage opportunity as well. So thank you for coming back to Block Express. So you call it in a sand in the cloud. So is that essentially you've, it comprises a custom built essentially storage network. Is that right? What kind of what you just described in SRD, I think you called it. Yeah, it's a SRD is used by other AWS services as well, but it is a custom network protocol that we designed to deliver the lowest latency experience and we're taking advantage of it with Block Express. So sticking with traditional data centers for a moment, I'm interested in your thoughts on the importance of the cloud pricing approach. I either consumption model to pay by the drink. Obviously it's one of the most attractive features, but and I ask that because we're seeing what Andy Jassier first do as the old guard, Institute flexible pricing models two of the biggest storage companies, HPE with GreenLake and Dell has this thing called Apex. They've announced such models for on-prem and presumably cross cloud. How do you think this is going to impact your customer's leverage of AWS cloud storage? Is it something that you have an opinion on? Yeah, I think it all comes down to again, that usage of the storage. And this is where I think there's an inherent advantage for our cloud storage. So there might be an attempt by the old guard to lower prices or add flexibility, but the end of the day, it comes down to what the customer actually needs to tune. And if you think about GP3, which is the new EBS volume, the idea with GP3 is we're going to pass along savings to the customer by making the storage 20% cheaper than GP2. And we're going to make the product better by giving a great reliable baseline performance. But we're also going to let customers who wanna run workloads like Cassandra on EBS tune their throughput separately, for example, from their capacity. So if you're running Cassandra, sometimes you don't need to change your capacity, your storage capacity works just fine. But what happens with, for example, a Cassandra workload is that you may need more throughput. And if you're buying a hardware appliance, you just have to buy for your peak. You have to buy for the max of what you think your throughput and the max of what your storage is. And this inherent flexibility that we have for AWS storage and being able to tune throughput separate from IOAP, separate from capacity like you do for GP3, that is really where the future is for customers having control over costs and control over customer experience without compromising or trading off either one. Awesome, thank you for that. So in the time we have remaining my line, I want to talk about the topic of diversity, social impact and as a woman leader, women executive and I really want to get your perspectives on this and I've shared with the audience previously in one of my breaking analysis segments, your boxing video, which is awesome. And so you've got a lot of unique, non-traditional aspects to your life and I love it. But I want to ask you this. So it's obviously, certainly politically and socially correct to talk about diversity, the importance of diversity. There's data that suggests that diversity is good both economically, not just socially and of course it's the right thing to do, but there are those. Peter Teal is probably the most prominent, but there are others that say, you know what? Forget that. Just hire people just like you'll be able to go faster, ramp up more quickly, hit escape velocity, it's natural and that's what you should do. Why is that not the right approach? Why is diversity both, of course, socially responsible but also good for business? For Amazon, we think about diversity as something that is essential to how we think about innovation. And so Dave, as you know, from listening to some of the announcements I reinvent, we launch a lot of new ideas, like new concepts and new services in AWS and just bringing that lens down to storage. S3 has been reinventing itself every year since we launched in 2006. EBS introduced the first sun on the cloud late last year and continues to reinvent how customers think about block storage. We would not be able to look at a product in a different way and think to ourselves, not just what does the legacy system do in a data center today, but how do we want to build this new distributed system in a way that helps customers achieve not just what they're doing today, but what they wanna do in five and 10 years, you can't get that innovative mindset without bringing different perspectives to the table. And so we strongly believe in hiring people who are from underrepresented groups and whether that's gender or it's related to racial equality or if it's geographic diversity and bringing them in to have the conversation because those diverse viewpoints inform how we can innovate at all levels in AWS. Right, and so I really appreciate the perspectives on that and we've had, as you probably know, theCUBE has been a very big advocate of diversity generally, but women in tech specifically, we've participated a lot. And I often ask this question as a smaller company, I and some of my other colleagues in small business, sometimes we struggle. And so my question is how do you go beyond, what's your advice for going beyond the good old boys network? I think it's large companies like AWS and the big players, you've got responsibility to that. You can put somebody in charge and make it their full-time job. How should smaller companies that are largely white male dominated, how should they become more diverse? What should they do to increase that diversity? Well, I think the place to start is voice. A lot of what we try to do is make sure that the underrepresented voice is heard. And so Dave, any small business owner of any industry can encourage voice for your underrepresented or your unheard populations. And honestly, it is as simple as being in a meeting and looking around that table or on your screen as it were and asking yourself, who hasn't talked? Who hasn't weighed in, particularly if the debate is contentious or even animated? And you will see, particularly if you note this over time, you will see that there may be somebody and whether it's an underrepresented group or it's a woman who's early career or it's not. It's just a member of your team who happens to be a white male too who's not being heard. And you can ask that person for their perspective. And that is a step that every one of us can and should do, which is ask to have everyone's voice at the table to listen and to weigh in on it. So I think that is something everyone should do. I think if you are a member of an underrepresented group, as for example, I'm Vietnamese American and I'm a female in tech, I think it's something to think about how you can make sure that you're always taking that bold step forward. And it's one of the topics that we covered at ReInvent. We had a great discussion with a group of women CEOs. And a lot of it we talked about is being bold, taking the challenge of being bold in tough situations. And that is an important thing, I think for anybody to keep in mind, but especially for members of underrepresented groups, because sometimes Dave, that bold step that you kind of think of is like, oh, I don't know if I should ask for that promotion or I don't know if I should volunteer for that project. It's not a big ask, but it's big in your head. And so if you can internalize as a member of a group that maybe hasn't heard or seen as much, how you can take those bold challenges and step forward and learn, maybe fail also, because that's how you learn, then that is a way to also have people learn and develop and become leaders in whatever industry it is. It's great advice. It reminds me of, I think most of us can relate to that, my lad, because when we started in the industry, we were maybe timid, you didn't want to necessarily speak up, and I think it's incumbent upon those in the position of, and power, and by the way, power might just be running a meeting agenda to maybe call on those folks that are, maybe it's not diversity of gender or race, maybe it's just the underrepresented, maybe that's a good way to start building muscle memory. So that's unique advice that I hadn't heard before. So thank you very much for that. I appreciate it. And hey, listen, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE on cloud. We're out of time and really always appreciate your perspectives and you're doing a great job. And thank you. Great, thank you, Dave. Thanks for having me and have a great day. All right, and keep it right there, buddy. You're watching theCUBE on cloud. Right back.