 because of the pandemic we're doing the remote cube, cube virtual, we are the cube virtual, I'm your host, John Furrier here with Andy Jassy, the CEO of Amazon Web Services in for his annual, at the end of the show, comes on the cube, and this year it's virtual. Andy, good to see you remotely. You're in Seattle, we're in Palo Alto. Dave couldn't make it, he had a personal conflict, but he says hello, great to see you. Great to see you as well, John. It's an annual tradition on the last day of re-invent. I wish we were doing it in person, but I'm glad at least we were able to do it virtually. The good news is, I know you rested last night, normally at re-invent, you just like, we're all both losing our voice at the end of the show, at least me more than you, and we're just at the end of like, okay, relief, it happens. Here it's different, it's been three weeks, it's been virtual. You guys had a unique format this year. It went much better than I expected it would go, and because I was pretty skeptical about these long multiple days or weeks events, you guys did a good job of timing it out and creating these activations and with key news, starting with your keynote on December 1st, now we're at the end of the three weeks. Tell me, are you surprised by the results? Can you give us a feeling for how you think everything went? What's your take so far as we close out re-invent? Well, I think it's gone really well. I mean, we always know more as you get past re-invent and you start collecting all the feedback, but we've been watching all the metrics and there's trade-offs, of course. I think all of us, given our druthers, would be together in Las Vegas, and I think it's hard to replace that feeling of being with people and the excitement of learning about things together and making decisions together after you see different sessions that you're gonna make big changes in your company and for your customer experience. Yeah, and there's a community piece and there's, you know, this from being there, there's a concert at the end. I think people like being with one another, but I think this was the best that any of us could imagine doing a virtual event and we had to really re-invent, re-invent and all the pieces to it. And I think that some of the positive trade-offs are that, you know, you get a lot more engagement than you would normally get in person. So normally last year we had about 65,000 people in Las Vegas. This year we had 530,000 people registered for re-invent and over 300,000 participate in some fashion. You know, all the sessions had a lot more people who are participating just because you remove the constraints of travel and cost. And so there are trade-offs. I think we prefer being together, but I think it's been a really good community event and learning event for our customers and we've been really pleased with it so far. No doubt, I would totally agree with you. I think a lot of people were like, hey, love to just walk the floor and discover how serendipitous moments of finding an exhibit hall or attending a session or going to a party, bumping into friends and seeing, making new friends. But I think one of the things I want to get your reaction to is I think this comes up and we've been doing a lot of Q-Virtual for the past year and everyone pretty much agrees that when we go back it's going to be a hybrid world in the sense of events as well as cloud and you know that. But I think one of the things that I noticed this year with re-invent is it almost was a democratization of re-invent. So you had to re-invent the format. You had 300,000 plus people attend, 500 pending email addresses, but now you've got a different kind of beehive community. So you're a bar-raiser thinker with the culture of Amazon. So I got to ask you, do the economics, does this new kind of extra epiphany impact you and how you raise the bar to keep the best of the face-to-face when it comes back and then keep the virtual? Any thoughts on how to leverage this and kind of maybe get more open? It was free. You guys made it free this year and people did show up. Yeah, it's a really good question and it's probably a question I'll be better equipped to answer in a month or two after we kind of debrief. We always do after re-invent. We spend, actually I really enjoy the meeting because the team, the collective AWS team works so hard in this event for so many months across everything, all the product teams, you know, all the marketing folks, all the event folks, and I think they do a terrific job with it. And we do about a two and a half, three hour debrief on everything we did and the things that we thought went really well and the things that we thought we could do better and all the feedback we get from our community. And so I wouldn't be surprised if we didn't find things from what we tried this year that we incorporate into what we do when we're back to being in person again. You know, of course, none of us really know when we'll be back in person again. It re-invent happens to fall on a time of the year which is early December. And so with a lot of people seemingly able to get vaccinated probably by late spring, early summer, you could kind of imagine that we might be able to do re-invent in person next year. We'll have to see. I think we all hope we will, but I'm sure there are a number of pieces that we will take from this and incorporate into what we do in person and then it's just a matter of how far you go. Fingers crossed and it's a hybrid world for theCUBE too and re-invent and cloud. Let's get into the announcements. I want to get your take as you look back now. I mean, how many announcements did you guys have? I mean, a lot of announcements this year. Which ones did you like? Which ones did you think were jumping off the page? Which ones resonated the most or had impact? Can you share kind of just some stats on, I mean, how many announcements launches you did this year? Well, we had about 150 different new services and features that we announced over the last three weeks in re-invent and the question you're asking, I could easily spend another three hours like my keynote answering you all the ones that I like and thought were important. You know, I think that some of the ones I think that really stood out for people, I think first on the compute side, I just think the excitement around what we're doing with chips is very clear. I think what we've done with Graviton too on generalized compute to give people 40% better price performance than they can find in the latest generation of 86 processors is just, it's a huge deal. If you can save 40% price performance on compute, it's, you can get a lot more done for less. And then, you know, some of the chip work we're doing in machine learning with inference on the inference chips that we built and then when we announced the training on the machine learning training chip, people are very excited about the chip announcements. I think also people on the container side as people are moving to smaller and smaller units of compute, I think people were very taken with the notion of EKS and NCS anywhere so they can run whatever container orchestration framework they're running in AWS also on premises to make it easier to manage their deployments and containers. I think data stores was another space where I think people realized how much more data they're dealing with today. And we gave a couple of statistics in the keynote that I think are kind of astonishing that, you know, every hour today, people are creating more content than there was in an entire year 20 years ago or that people expect more data to be created the next three years and the prior 30 years combined. These are astonishing numbers and it requires a brand new reinvention of data stores. And so I think people are very excited about Block Express, which is the first sand in the cloud and they're really excited about Aurora in general but then Aurora Serverless V2 that allow you to scale up to hundreds of thousands of transactions per second and save about 90% versus provision of Aurora. People are very excited about that. I think machine learning, you know, SageMaker has just been a game changer and the ease with which everyday developers and data scientists can build, train, tune and deploy machine learning models. And so we just keep knocking out things that are hard for people. Last year we launched the first IDE for machine learning in SageMaker Studio. This year, if you look at things that we announced like Data Wrangler, which changes, you know, the process of data prep, which is one of the most time consuming pieces in machine learning or our feature store or the first CICD for machine learning with pipelines or Clarify, which allow you to have explainability in your models. Those are big deals to people who are trying to build machine learning models You know, I'd say probably the last thing that we hear over and over again is really just the excitement around Connect, which is our call center service, which is just growing unbelievably fast and just, you know, the fact that it's so easy to get started and so easy to scale and so much more cost-effective with, you know, built from the ground up on the cloud and with machine learning and AI embedded and then adding some of the capabilities to give agents the right information, the right time to have customers and products and real-time capabilities for supervisors to go when calls are kind of going off the rails and to be able to stop the contact before it becomes something that hurts the brand. Those are all big deals that people have been excited about. I think the Connect thing is, I want to just jump on that for a second because I think when we first met many, many years ago, it's our eighth re-invent, you know, the trends are always the same. You guys do a great job, slew of announcements, you keep raising the bar. But one of the things that you mentioned to me when we talked about the origination of AWS was you were doing some stuff for Amazon proper and you had a bootstrap team and you were solving your own problems, you're getting some scar tissues, the affiliate thing, all these examples. The trend is you guys tend to do stuff for yourself and then refactor it into potentially opportunities for your customers and you're working backwards and all that good stuff. We'll get into that in the next section. But this year, more than ever, I think with the pandemic Connect, you got Chime, you got Workspaces. This acceleration of you guys being pretty nimble on exposing these services. I mean, Connect was a call center. It's an internal thing that you guys had been using. You refactored that for customer consumption. You see that kind of with Chime, but you're not competing with Zoom. You're offering a service to bundle in. Is this more relevant now as you guys get bigger with more of these services because you're still big now. You're still serving yourself. What, that seems to be a big trend now coming out of the pandemic. Can you comment on- It's a good question, John. And we do a bunch of both, frankly. There are some services where our customers are trying to solve certain problems and they tell us about those problems and then we build new services for them. So a good example that was Redshift, which is our data warehousing service. Two or three very large customers of ours when we went spend time with them and asked them what we could do to help them further. They just said, I wish I had a data warehousing service to the cloud that was built in the AWS style way. And they were really fed up with what they were using. Same thing was true with relational databases where people are just fed up with the old guard commercial grade databases of Oracle and SQL server. And they hated the pricing and the proprietary nature of them and the punitive licensing. And they wanted to move to these open engines like MySQL and Postgres, but to get the same performance as the commercial grade databases is hard. So we solved that problem with them with Aurora, which is our fastest growing service and our history continues to be. So there are sometimes when customers articulate a need and we don't have a service that we've been running internally but we listen and we have a very strong and innovative group of builders here where we build it for customers. And then there are other cases where customers say and Connect was a great example of this. Connect was an example where some of our customers like Intuit and Capital One said, you know, we need something for our contact center and customer service. And people weren't very happy with what they were using in that space. And they said, you've had to build something just to manage your retail business the last 15, 20 years. Can't you find a way to generalize that and expose it? And when you have enough customers tell you that there's something that they want to use that you have experienced building, you start to think about it. And it's never as simple as just taking that technology and exposing it because it's often built internally and you do a number of things to optimize it internally. But we have a way of building services at Amazon where we do this working backwards process that you were referring to where we build everything with a press release and quickly ask questions document. And we imagine that we're building it to be externalized even if it's an internal feature or a feature for our retail business that's only gonna be used as part of some other service that you never imagined externalizing to third-party developers. We always try and build it that way. We always try to have well-documented hardened APIs so that other teams can use it without having to coordinate with those teams. And so it makes it easier for us to think about externalizing it because we're a good part of the way they are. And with Connect, that's what we did. We generalized it, we built it from the ground up on top of the cloud, and then we embedded a bunch of AI in it so that people could do a number of things that would have taken them months to do with the big development teams that they can really point and click and do. So we really try to do both. I think that's a great example of some of the scale benefits it's worth calling out because that was a consistent theme this past year of the people we've reported on and interviewed. The Connect really was a lifeline for many during the pandemic and the feedback was pretty. We have 5,000 different customers who started using Connect during the pandemic alone where overnight they had to basically deal with having a call center remotely. And so they picked up Connect and they spun up call center remotely and they did it really quickly. And that along with workspaces, which are virtual desktops in the cloud and things like Chine and some of our partners like Zoom have really been lifelines for people to have business continuity during the pandemic. I think there's going to be a whole set of new services that are going to emerge. You talked about in your keynote, we talked about it prior to the event where if this pandemic hit with five years ago when there wasn't the advancements and say video conferencing, it'd be a whole different world. And I think the whole world can see on full display that having integrated video communications and other cool things is going to have a productivity benefit. And that's kind of big deal. Can you imagine what the world would have been like the last nine months if we didn't have competent video conferencing? I mean, just think about how different it would have been. And I think that all of these capabilities today are kind of the, I'll call it 1.5 capabilities where, and by the way, thank God for them. We've all been able to be productive because of them, but they're so early stage. They're all going to get evolved so significantly. I mean, even just today, I was spending some time with our team thinking about when we start to come back to the office in bigger numbers and we do meetings with our remote partners, how we think about where the center of gravity should be and who should be on video conferencing and whether they should be allowed to kind of videoconference in conference rooms which are really hard to see them or only on their laptops, which are easier and what technology does it mean that you want in the conference rooms on both sides of the table and how do you actually have it so that people who are remote can see which side of the table. I mean, all this stuff is yet to be invented. It'll be very primitive for the next couple of few years even just interrupting one another in video conferencing. People, when you do it, the sound cancels each other out so people don't really cut each other off and rip on one another the same way. Like all that technology is going to get evolved over time. It's a tremendous opportunity. I could just see people fighting for the mute button. You know, that's power on these meetings. You know, Chuck on our team, all kidding aside, he was excited. We talked to Anron Kelly on your team who runs product marketing for your app side as well as compute networking storage. We're going to do a green room app for theCUBE because we're doing so many remote videos. We just did 112 here for re-invent. One of the things that people like is this idea of kind of being ready and kind of prepped. So again, this is a use case we never would have thought of if there wasn't a pandemic. So, and I think these are the kinds of innovation thinking that seems small but works well when you start thinking about how easy it could be to say to integrate a chime through this SDK. So this is the kind of, these are the kind of things. So with that, I want to get into your leadership principles because you know, if you're a startup or a big company trying to re-invent, you're looking at the eight leadership principles you laid out which were don't be afraid to reinvent, acknowledge you can't fight gravity, talent is hungry to re-invent, solving real customer problems, speed, don't complexify, use the platform with the broad set of tools which is more of a plug for you guys and cloud, pull everything together with top-down goals. Okay, great. How do you take those leadership principles and apply them broadly to companies and startups? Because I think the startups in the garage are also going to be there going, I'm going to jump on this wave, I'm inspired by this sea change, I'm going to build something new or I'm an enterprise. I'm going to innovate. How do you see these eight principles translating? Well, I think they're applicable to every company of every size and every industry and organization frankly, also public sector organizations. I think in many ways startups have an advantage in, you know, these were really keys to how to build a re-invention culture and startups have an advantage because just by their very nature, they are inventive. You know, you can't start a company that's a direct copy of somebody else that isn't inventive or you have no chance. So startups already have, you know, a group of people that feel insurgent and they want it, they're passionate about a certain customer experience, they want to invent it and they know that they only have so much time to build something before money runs out and, you know, they have a number of those built-in advantages but I think larger companies are often where you see struggles in building a re-invention and invention culture. And, you know, I've probably had in the last three weeks as part of re-invent probably about 40 different customer meetings with, you know, probably 75 different companies that were encompassed in those or so. And I think that I met with a lot of leaders of companies where I think these re-invention principles really resonated and I think they're battling with them. And, you know, I think that it starts with the leaders if you, you know, when you have big companies that have been doing things a certain way for a long period of time, there's a fair bit of inertia that sets in and a lot of times it's not ill intended, it's just a big group of people in the middle who've been doing things a certain way for a long time and aren't that keen to change? Sometimes because it means ripping up something that they built and they remember how hard they worked on it and sometimes it's because they don't know what it means for themselves and, you know, it takes the leadership team deciding that we are going to change. And usually that means they have to be able to have access to what's really happening in their business, what's really happening in their product, in the market, how what customers really think of it and what they need to change. And then having the courage and the energy, frankly, to pick the company up and push them to change because you're going to have to fight a lot of inertia. So it always starts with the leaders and in addition to having access to that truth and deciding to make the change, you've got to also set an aggressive top-down goal of the force of the organization to move faster than otherwise would. And that also sometimes leaders decide they're going to want to change and they say they're going to change and they don't really set the goal and the word kind of listens and kind of doesn't listen. You know, we have a term in principle we have inside Amazon where we talk about the difference between good intentions and mechanisms and good intentions are saying we need to change and we need to reinvent who we are. And everyone has the right intentions but nothing happens. A mechanism as opposed to a good intention of saying like Capital One did, we're going to reinvent our consumer digital banking platform in the next 18 months. And we're going to meet every couple of weeks to see where we are and to problem solve. Like that's a mechanism. It's much harder to escape getting that done than somebody just saying we're going to reinvent and not checking on it. You know, and so I think that it starts with the leaders and then I think that you got to have the right talent you got to have people who are excited about inventing as opposed to really focusing with the built over a number of years. And yet at the same time you got to make sure you don't hire people who are just building things that they're interested in they went where they think the tech is cool as opposed to what customers want. And then I think you got to really you got to build speed into your culture. And I think in some ways this is the very biggest challenge for a lot of enterprises and I just I speak to so many leaders who kind of resign themselves to moving slowly because they say, you don't understand my company's big and the culture just moves slow. We have regulator there. There are a lot of reasons people will give you on why they have to move slow. But you know, moving with speed is a choice. It's not something that you're preordained with or not. It is absolutely a leadership choice. And it can't happen overnight and you can't flip the switch and make it happen but you can build a bunch of things into your culture first starting with people understand that you are going to move fast and then building an opportunity for people to experiment quickly and to reward people who experiment and to figure out the difference between one-way doors and two-way doors and things that are two-way doors letting people move quick and try things. You have to build that muscle or when it really comes time to reinvent you won't have. That's a great point on the muscle and that's critical. You know, one of the things I want to bring up you brought on your keynote and you talked to me privately about it is you gave a tribute and a way to Clay Critchinson who you called out on your keynote who was a professor at Harvard and you were impressed by him and you quoted him and he was your professor there. You're a competitive person and you know, companies have strategy departments and you know, competitive strategy is not necessarily departments of mindset and you were going to put this out and as an undertone in your talk where you're saying you got to be competitive in the sense of you got to survive and you got to thrive and you're kind of talking about rebuilding and building and you know, Clay Critchinson's innovative dilemma famous book is a model of his teachings around metrics and strategy and prescriptions. If he were alive today and he was with us what would he be talking about because you know, you have kind of stuck in the middle strategy was not say Clay Critchinson thing but you know, companies have to decide who they are, their first principles, face the truth, some of the things you mentioned. What would we be talking with him about if we were talking about the innovators dilemma with respect to say cloud and some of the key decisions that have to be made right now. Well, I mean, Clay Critchinson and it sounds like you read some of his books and I had the fortune of, you know being able to sit in classes that he taught and also I got a chance to meet with him a couple of times after I graduated school, you know kind of as more of a professional in sorts if you can call me that. And he was so thoughtful. He wasn't just thoughtful about innovation. He was thoughtful about how to get product market fit and he was thoughtful about what your priorities in life were and how to build families. And I mean, he really was one of the most thoughtful innovative, you know forward thinking strategists I had the opportunity to encounter and then I've read. And so I'm very appreciative of having the opportunity to learn from him and a lot of, I mean I think that he would probably be continuing to talk about a lot of the principles which I happen to think are evergreen that he taught and as it relates to the cloud I think that one of the things that Clay talked all the time about in all kinds of industries is that disruption always happens at the low end. And it always happens with products that seem like they're not sophisticated enough and don't do enough and people always poo poo them because they say, oh, they won't do these things. And we learn this. I mean, I watched in the beginning of AWS when we launched S3, we had so many people try and compare it to things like EMC. And of course it was very different than EMC. But it was much simpler. But, and it did a certain set of activities incredibly well at one one hundredth of the price. That's disruptive. You know, like one one hundredth of the price you find that builders find a lot of utility for products like that. And so, you know, I think that it always starts with simple needs and products that aren't fully developed that over time continue to move their way up to addressing more and more of the market. And that's what we did with is what we've done with all our services. S3 and EC2 and RDS and Aurora and things like that. And I think that there are lots of lessons to still apply. I think if you look at containers and how that's changing what compute looks like, I think if you look at event-driven serverless compute in Lambda, you know, Lambda is a great example of really a derivative of Clay's teaching, which is we knew when we were building Lambda that as people became excited about that programming model it would cannibalize EC2 in our core compute service. And there are a lot of companies that won't do that. And for us, we're trying to build a business that outlasts all of us and that's, you know, is successful over a long period of time. And the best way I know to do that is to listen to what customers are trying to solve and invent on their behalf. Even if it means in the short term, you may cannibalize yourself. And so that's what we always think about is, you know, wherever we see an opportunity to provide a better customer experience, even if it means in the short term make cannibalize some of our revenue like Lambda with EC2 or Aurora serverless with provision Aurora, we're going to do it because we're going to take the long view and we believe that we serve customers well over a long period of time. We have a chance to go- Better to cannibalize yourself and have someone else do it to you, right? That's the philosophy. All right, final, I know you got tight for time and you got a hard stop, but let's talk about the vaccine because, you know, you brought up in the keynote, carrier was a featured thing and look at the news that's headlines now. You got the shots being administered. You're starting to see hashtag going around. I got my shot. So, you know, there's a real momentum. There's an uplifting vibe here. Amazon's involved in this and you talked about it. Can you share the innovation there? Can you just give us an update and what's come out of that and this supply chain factor, the cold chain? You guys are pretty instrumental in that. Share your thoughts. We've been really excited and privileged to be partnering with companies who are really trying to change what's possible for all of us. And I think, you know, it started with some of the companies producing vaccines. If you look at what we did with Moderna where they built their digital manufacturing suite on top of us and supply chain where they used us for compute and storage and data warehousing and machine learning. And on top of AWS, they built their COVID-19 vaccine candidate in 42 days when it normally takes in 20 months. I mean, that is a total game changer. It's a game changer for all of us in getting the vaccine faster, but also if you just think about what that means for healthcare, moving forward, it's very exciting. And yeah, I love what Carrier is doing. Carrier is building this product on top of AWS called Lynx, which is giving them end-to-end visibility over the transportation and temperature of the cold chain and everything they're delivering. And so it changes what happens not only for food waste and spoilage, but if you think about how much of the vaccine they're gonna actually transport to people and where several of these vaccines need the right temperature control, it's a big deal. And I think they're a great example to what Carrier is where if you think about the theme of this reinvent and I talked about in my keynote, if you wanna survive as an organization over a long period of time, you're gonna have to reinvent yourself and you're gonna have to probably do it multiple times over. And the key to reinventing is first building the right reinvention culture. And we talked about some of those principles earlier, but you also have to be aware of the technology that's available that allows you to do that. And if you look at Carrier, they have built a very strong reinvention culture. And then if you look at how they're leveraging compute and storage and IoT at the edge and machine learning, they know what's available and they're using that technology to reinvent what's possible and we're gonna all benefit because of it. All right, well, Andy, you guys are reinventing the virtual space three weeks, it went off well. Congratulations. Great to go along for the ride with theCUBE Virtual. And again, thank you for keeping the show alive over there at Reinvent. Thanks for your team too, for including theCUBE. We really appreciate theCUBE Virtual being involved. Thank you. And it's my pleasure and thanks for having me, John, and look forward to seeing you soon. All right, take care. And it comes to a hockey game in real life when we get back. Andy Jassy, the CEO of AWS here to really wrap up Reinvent here for CUBE Virtual as well as the show. Today is the last day of the program. It will be online for the rest of the year and then into next month, there's another wave coming. Of course, check out all the coverage. Come back, it's online, it's all free. CUBE, CUBE stuff is there on the CUBE channel, SiliconANGLE.com for all the top stories, CUBE.net. Tons of content on Twitter, hashtag Reinvent. You'll see all the commentary. Thanks for watching theCUBE Virtual. I'm John Furrier.