 Live from New York, it's the Cube. Covering AWS Global Summit 2019. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. Welcome back, we're reaching towards the end of the Cube's coverage of AWS Summit New York City. I'm Stu Miniman. My co-host is Corey Quinn. Behind us they're starting to roll out the beer trucks, but before we get there, we're really excited to have on the program. Dimitri Traitel, who's the CTO of TimeHop. Dimitri, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. All right, so TimeHop, for our audience that's not familiar with it, where I'm familiar with it on social media, is the, oh hey, here's your memory from a year ago, three years ago, five years ago. It's interesting always to know. I know, I go to a lot of events, so it's like Groundhog Day to me. It's like, oh hey, AWS New York City. I remember two years ago where I saw this person, this person, this person. We capture lots of videos and photos. Probably figure out some partnership to, you know, bring some of those memories back when we do it. But it gives a little bit for those of us that might not know TimeHop. Seems like there's more than just kind of the one thing. What's the company do? So TimeHop, the consumer product, the mobile app is essentially a place for you to celebrate your digital memories, right? We are the nostalgic company where you can look back on what you did on this day and the kind of things that you've posted on social media, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, et cetera, and relive those things, share them with your friends, and also look at what's on your phone and your local device stuff you haven't shared. So the thousand photos you took of your kid at year one, you'll see a year later and the year after that, and you get to relive those moments. Okay, very cool. So yeah, it's, you know, boy there must be some good metadata underneath there. We can talk about, you know, the content creation that goes on with both people. It's nice that, you know, in 2019, I don't really think too much about the thousands of photos that I have in my library. Boy I know people that are pretty noisy on social media, and boy you'd think their feed would be overwhelmed looking back on certain days, especially the guy sitting next to me, if it's a keynote day at a conference. Cory would be like, oh boy, did I say those things? So, you know, is there, you know, is it just I get all of it or is there some intelligence behind that? How it gets a little bit inside, you know, what happens? Sure, there's definitely some intelligence behind it. A random link you might have shared out, probably won't make it, but photos and videos certainly do. And any sort of text posts, tweet threads, Facebook statuses that you might have added, particularly those from 10 plus years ago, those are the most interesting ones, because people used Facebook in a very different way back then than they do these days. Some people used it more, some less. And we try to feature those that, especially those that have the most engagement, we try to surface those ahead of everything else. Yeah, I met back the old days of Facebook where it was like, you know, stew is, and then it was like, my thing there, it was like, wow, and like the engagement that you'd have and photos were all very different on all of these platforms before Facebook realized, like, oh hey, photos are a pretty important thing there. So, you're the CTO, bring us a little bit inside, I'm sure, architecture, something you're talking about at a show like this. I have to believe AWS is a piece, if not a major piece of what goes behind the scene. So, bring us inside the technology a little bit. Absolutely, AWS is the bedrock upon which everything is built. We run over 200 instances on EC2. We're probably running about 20 different backend services across around 15 to 20 different AWS services, and we're doing all of this with four backend engineers. We're a very small company. One of those engineers, Mark, he's here, he spoke earlier today about how we were able to leverage AWS to essentially spin up a whole new line of business that's not a consumer product, but a B2B offering for the ad industry. And that's kind of what we're announcing and talking about this week. We launched a new website about it, we have some early partners that we're working with, and this is the sort of thing that saved us as a company and allowed us to become financially independent. Amazon was the bedrock of our ability to do that without increasing staff at all. So, what is the capability story that AWS unlocked as a part of that, or cloud to the larger point, we don't necessarily need to be vendors of the Pacific despite the room we're sitting in. What was it that that empowered for you that unlocked, I guess, the opportunity? There were a few things. Scalability, for one thing, we were able to go from 115, 120 instances, up to 200 very quickly, what our clients needed us to, because a lot of them are larger than time hop is in terms of user base and access. The second one would have been global reach. We expanded from one availability sale, or rather one region, out to seven, because some of them are international, or have an international user base that requires us to be global. And then beyond that, just the breadth of services like Elasticsearch, Kinesis, Firehose, all of those things that let us connect the data from what we import from social media services over to the user themselves when we send push notifications or show the memories. The breadth of services that Amazon as a cloud provider offers means we don't have to write this stuff ourselves. We could just leverage what's already there and we could connect all those dots and deploy quickly. Yeah, the undifferentiated heavy lifting is the phrase that they're in love with to describe that. I always used to frame it slightly differently as far as you're spending time locally solving a global problem where the things that the infrastructure provider can do at massive scale, it just makes sense. There's no competitive value for anyone anymore in being able to go down to the data center in a place of failing hard drive. So why not make that someone who can get economies of scale out of it and focus on the way they're doing things that drive business value. But that said, it said this awhile as well and in the slide deck yet again today for the keynote, in the future the only code you write is business value and then a very tiny font that no one except me could read was probably in JavaScript but that's neither here nor there. How close are we to that future based upon what you're seeing? Close, I know he demonstrated the CDK that the demonstration was in TypeScript so we're one step away from the JavaScript world. Everything that we do, we do in Go obviously other than some of the descriptor files that allow us to spin off that infrastructure. But we're incredibly close to being there and Go is so close to the hardware itself that I'm assuming Amazon will eventually support Go for that kind of CDK as well. I know they already do for Lambda and that's relatively recent. I think it'll take a lot of companies a long time to get there because there's a lot of process in some of the larger enterprise orgs. We are fairly small and we can pivot very quickly as we've proven with the ad server called Nimbus but we're not that far away, at least at Time Hop. So Dimitri, one of the things, we live in the enterprise world a lot and I have to imagine that there's some companies that would be like why am I going to work with this consumer social media company so is being on a public cloud and specifically AWS does that help give credibility behind the new services that you're offering? I think so, I think from a reliability and dependability standpoint when we tell a mobile ad publisher that they can trust us to run their ads for them they know because we're on AWS that that's always going to be there and because we monetize for them we end up having to depend on that reliability in order to promise them four nines of uptime and the fact that they can keep a revenue stream going at all times to keep the lights on and the doors open. And it's funny we're having this conversation today when Twitter was hard down globally for an hour. So it's nothing is going to be impenetrable nothing is going to stay up forever I don't believe in making fun of companies for their downtime but at some point at past a certain point it's okay if there is a region wide outage in AWS for example well on that day the internet's not going to be working super great for an awful lot of people depending on what your business model is and what your use case is maybe that's acceptable maybe in the case of my nonsense the world is better off if it's not on the internet for that hour or two but it is a difference I think in the business modeling between life critical things and versus things that people use as entertainment it feels like the B2B story that you're telling is somewhere in between those two ends of the spectrum it certainly can be one of the reasons we did go global is to prevent that sort of thing from happening so everything has a backup somewhere in a different hemisphere which is awesome but depending on the kind of partner that we're working with some of them are for looking through memories like us some of them are for reading short stories on the internet which you can pause on that for an hour if Amazon goes down for some others they might be more mission critical like hosting portfolios or resumes and the free version might show ads and in that case you might be at a job at review and you don't need that to go down now the ad side can take a minute and I'm sure whoever's depending on it has other fires to fight at the time but for us we have an obligation to all of our partners to make sure that we deliver on what we promise to them and the same way that Amazon has to us. All right, Dmitri, what learnings can you share spinning up this new line of business, moving forward working with Amazon there what would you be talking to your peers about as to is there anything you would have done a little bit differently or now that you've gone through this that you might recommend to them? I would say build in-house what you can if nobody else is doing it better than you can. I kind of wish that we had built Nimbus a lot earlier in our life cycle because as soon as we built it we prototyped it over a weekend and we learned immediately that it was gonna work better than any third party ad tech that we could have tried. At the same time always evaluate what you're doing against your competition run those A-B tests, run them properly measure, measure, instrument, everything and in the end understand where your dependencies are on third parties and eliminate them as much as possible. Again, we're so small that we do leverage as much third party code, the best kind of code is the code you didn't have to write in the first place but in certain cases you end up bringing a lot of value to the table by writing something proprietary and kind of the way Amazon did with AWS when they built Rotor for themselves and started offering it to everybody else we're doing the same with Nimbus where we wrote this cloud-based ad platform and we realized that it could help us we're now realizing that it could help everybody else in our position, okay? So, Dimitri, want to give you the final word here come into an Amazon event like this what's it mean to time hop what do you personally, you and the team get out of it? It means a lot, it meant a lot to my colleague Mark to be able to speak today to share with people some of our journey. Amazon is one of the partners that we work with even on the ad side because that is the line of business Amazon has and we get to announce Nimbus as a service on adsbynimbus.com with a website we just launched this week to share with the world that time hop is not just the consumer time hop product but we are also this ad tech company at this point that is growing very quickly, that is hiring and we want to continue to work with Amazon and all of our other partners in order to scale that business. All right, well Dimitri, congratulations on the launch of the new product, we know a year from now what you'll be looking back at, you know from this event, apologies for that but thank you so much for joining us. Thank you Stu. All right, for Corey Quinn, I'm Stu Miniman we're at the end now of our day of coverage here from AWS New York City Summit for 2019 as always go to thecube.net for all of the content here we're at lots of AWS shows when it mills winning the other cloud infrastructure, big data, AI, IoT you name it, if there's a show out there with great information, great content please contact us. Thank you as always for watching thecube.