 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering AWS re-invent 2017, presented by AWS, Intel, and our ecosystem of partners. Welcome back everyone here in Las Vegas for theCUBE's exclusive coverage of AWS re-invent 2017 Amazon Web Services annual conference, it's a zoo every year, 45,000 people. Just seven years ago, they couldn't get 4,000 people to come now, the business is exploding, 18 billion dollars of infrastructure completely changing the game, I'm John Furrier. Our next two guests is Josh Tell, is the CEO of VUG, and Peter O'Donohue, Vice President of Application Services at Unisys Federal. Guys, welcome to theCUBE, welcome back, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, John. So you guys are in the heart of it. We've talked many times before about the DevOps ethos at the Amazon public sector event. Man, it's a changing of the guard happening in front of our eyes. Absolutely. Seeing a whole new way of reimagining how to deploy services in kind of the old school infrastructure world, but now taking over the applications. This is disruption, share some insight, what's going on? Well, actually, I mean, I think you really, really appreciate your lead in because we're seeing lots of big patterns happening at the same time, particularly with my business that I look after, I look at is the federal sector. And actually, I think in the precursor we were talking about, federal used to be slower and more staid. And that's still true in some cases, but actually the rate of acceleration is really taken off. But I think the big patterns we're seeing is, is the CIO who looks at the cloud as compute network and storage, that CIO is alive and well, and actually we sell and we provide managed services to that type of business. But we're seeing kind of like a greater focus and greater concentration on folks who actually want, they see the cloud as really kind of an inflection point to break with tradition and actually to be able to consume native services so they can actually affect and bring mission outcomes more effectively. In my own experience, I've seen like two mission customers in a space of months to be able to solve like really serious problems and significant problems that they faced, but they wouldn't be able to do it without being able to access RDS or ELB or Lambda. And these are becoming like the essential building blocks, the Lego blocks, if you will, a building modern cloud native application. So you're saying they solved the problem that was unique right there in the spot, which is great, good job, cloud. But the question really is, would that ever have been solved in the old model? They would have been probably in a room arguing over architecture. I mean, a lot of this is about looking at a solution, jumping on it, making it happen, not sitting in a room arguing. That's right. Get RFP out there. Yeah, exactly. Well, I think a lot of this has to do with infrastructure and policy as code, because if you can express these things as code, you can try things in an hour or two. Instead of having to go through the RFP, sit on a whiteboard, waterfall design it, you can experiment without fear of failure because the costs are so low. And that's also bleeding over into public sector as well. So I heard a quote this morning, I'll share it with you. It's a public sector kind of quote. The guy was up on stage really presenting how he transformed his entire, I won't say the name to protect the innocent, but it was pretty massive transformation. He goes, we couldn't use Amazon a few years ago because it was too cool. Meaning it's new. So the government's kind of like, well, it's not yet tested security and security's always been the issue for this one group. He goes, but now it's not cool to use it. So we can use it, meaning it's proven. So it's kind of the opposite. When it's boring, it's cool. And when it's boring, it must be good. Kind of a federal mindset. I won't try to pitch and hold federal too much there, but the reality is tried, proven, tested, certified. There's some serious things that have to go on in both enterprise and now on federal. Amazon is continuing to move the needle while doing the heavy work. I mean, that's hard. So once they break through that, then you got the creativity going on. So take us through where we are in this because the GovCloud is pretty disruptive. How far are we in the cloud game, in you guys opinion, of that getting the job done, checking the boxes of the certifications, I know there's FedRAM, there's much other stuff. Is that mostly done right now? I mean, how much more work is needed before everyone goes, okay, cloud is the standard? Well actually, so let me try to answer and I think Josh will have an opinion on too, is I think the FedRAM certification I think has been, I would say probably if not the single most, one of the most important kind of factors in amplifying or accelerating cloud adoption in the federal government. And actually we've also seen that manifest in the state local markets as well, which is we don't really have an equivalent, but if you're on FedRAM, that's definitely good enough for us, so that has become the de facto standard. But what we find though is, and actually this is where we really appreciate a product like Fugue, is actually folks find that the, I mean actually you asked about major patterns or major trends, like another major trend that we see, and actually I'll kind of come back to your question is, is that there's a significant shortage in talent and knowledge and skills to be able to manage the cloud, and actually it's such a phenomenally different kind of mindset, so like to properly govern and manage the cloud is actually a really difficult thing. So as a tradition, we've got a lot of managed service provider business in our history, and if you look at say Amazon, some folks would look at it as almost an existential threat, but in fact we don't, it just means that you need to move into a different place in the stack to add value, and actually that place for us is that in terms of being able to amplify and accelerate that the planning for, the migrating to, the running workloads in in a scalable way, cost effective way, securely and being able to build cloud natively, our customers are really struggling with that, and they can do it, we've seen them do it one-offs, but to be able to do it scale, so being able to really attack the knowledge gap from a human resource perspective. Great point. But also encapsulating that into templatizing and putting nanny guardrails in are really important. Well that's a great point, there was a conversation I was involved in this morning with the CIA where they basically admit we got a lot of smart people, we can build a cloud, running it and maintaining it are two different things, so this is kind of a false trap that a lot of people could fall into, oh yeah the cloud, it's no problem, but so this is where the issues come in, thoughts on that and what you guys are doing. So I think we've entered the second phase of cloud adoption, the first phase was kind of shadow IT, bottom up, when I was at AWS I'd go into a customer and they'd say we're not on the cloud, and then we found out we had 130 accounts that were swipe credit cards. Don't tell anyone. Don't tell anybody, help us. Secret region. Help us sort this out. I was just a prototype, honest, that's right. But now the market has changed, and so whether it's commercial or federal or other spaces we're now in this phase two, where these are strategic adoption of cloud at an enterprise level. And to do that you need automation, you need repeatability, you need consistency, you need policy enforcement, and so that's where a system like Fugue packages all that together, which accelerates the whole operation of that more, I don't like the term centralize because what Fugue allows you to do is assert some things and then decentralize the innovation aspect. It might be the whole fabric and the whole grid of days, but you bring up a good point. Phase two is about kind of grown up cloud. And so that begs the question, now what are you guys working on? Unices and what's the story between your partnership? Talk about that, because this is where people are relying on you guys as suppliers, so you're going to have to stand alone and be successful. We've talked about your company, but partnering is now important. Who you partner with and why and what's the outcome options for the customers? Well, we're super excited about our relationship with Fugue and actually primarily, as I talked earlier, we do see that big challenges that the market has right now is this huge gap from a knowledge and talent perspective and also the pioneers have gotten into the cloud, but now you need to have the settlers there. So how do we kind of attack those at the same time? So when we're looking for a management platform, we look for three things that really were important to us. The first is what I call expressiveness. So actually I've got a lot of experience implementing kind of like more IT ops, like classical, like cloud broker solutions, and we found that in order to be able to build a solution quickly for customers, you need to be able to express yourself, I mean you can't manage and you can't govern and you can't meter, you can't bill for, you can't apply policy for what Werner or for Dr. Vogels calls the primitives. So if I've only got like three or four primitives, my ability to manage and govern is really limited. It's almost like the metaphor I would use would be maybe somebody gives you a keyboard, you've got a half a dozen keys on there and you're trying to write the great American novel, you can't do that, right? So expressiveness, being able to articulate the right models and to templatize and govern, that's kind of concern number one. Concern number two that we think is really important is, is it kind of goes at that knowledge management piece. So we're making a major investment within Unisys Federal. We're looking at hundreds and hundreds of our associates to be trained and certified, and we're building at a cloud center of an enablement. But we're looking to encapsulate our best practices and templatize those. So to the point, you know, as we mentioned- And Josh fits in there, what, from a software standpoint? Well, he actually provides the way for us to capture that knowledge. So in terms of like what are policies in terms of governing say, you know, load balancers or EC2 instances, or you know, how we're going to manage S3 and going to protect S3. You know, policies and best practices up and down the stack. Like even governance processes around, you know, dev test environments. We're not going to leave dev environments flopping in the wind for months on end where people are running up big bills, right? So Josh's product helps us manage that. And the third thing is what I call like the nanny rails. Now my daughter is just, is just learn how to drive a car. And you know, some of the choices that we made, you know, we took into consideration like lane changing things and like, you know, crash avoidance and so on and so forth. So what we want is, and actually Josh brought this up very elegantly is, is we want, you know, the forward leaning federal agencies to be able to go quick, but we want to put the guardrails behind them and have like that nanny kind of supervision behind them so that if things start drifting out of compliance, we can drag them back. They can notify them, right? So instrumentation and management. Well, it's not just notification with fugue. We don't let you do the wrong thing. And then if somebody goes in later and breaks it, we fix it. So instead of a mean time to response of 15 minutes for your monitoring solution, then however long for somebody to pick up the notification, then to respond to it with fugue. Within 30 seconds, we've seen it, we fixed it. And so that, that is a real game changer in terms of staying. You guys are very impressive dev ops. You, will you connect it? And the theme is the connecting the tech to business. And in this case, it's government, but that's your customer. What's new with you guys? Any announcements here? What's the story? Give us the update quick. Thank you very much. We have two big announcements. So it used to be to use all the great management features of fugue, you had to build things using fugue. So as of today, you can download the new version of the system. You can point it at your existing AWS infrastructure. We auto generate code and diagrams to show you what you're running. You can compare policy against that. So you don't have to write any code. And then when you've got it right, you can just apply fugue to that. You can import that infrastructure into fugue management. So a lot of our customers are telling us, we have years of development on AWS. It was not done using best practices. We allow you to go back and fix that really quickly without recreating your infrastructure. No, go in, do some maintenance without breaking it, tearing it down, building it up. And then you get all the benefits of fugue enforcement every 30 seconds. We examine the environment. If anything breaks, we fix it. And so the ability to just pull that into fugue and do it easily. Well, it's great that you guys are successful. Congratulations on the partnership with Unisys. Big name, brand name. You guys obviously experienced trusted advisors and partners, the federal. Personal question for you, Josh. You know, as you look back at the Amazon mothership. Yes. You got to be like, damn, that was a good ride. As an alumni and as an extender, you bringing that DNA to your company that you founded, what's it like? I mean, you feel good? You got a spring in your step? You kind of wish you were back on the mothership? Oh, no, you know, it's great working with AWS because I love doing what I'm doing now more than anything I've ever done. And they are great partners to us. They are so helpful. So I love coming back and seeing all my friends at Amazon. They're all bosses now. They're managers, everyone's been promoted. But being able to go out and do something that's really your vision, there's nothing like it in the world. I agree. Well, congratulations. Being an entrepreneur, certainly, you can control your own destiny. It's a lot of fun, a lot of passion. Congratulations. Thank you. I have a video here of this partner in Unisys here in theCUBE, live coverage day one. We've got two more live days to be wall to wall. Big parties tonight, a lot of events, a lot of action. 45,000 people here in Las Vegas. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching. We'll be right back.