 from the Sands Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada. Extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE, covering AWS re-invent 2015. Now your host, John Furrier. Hey, welcome back everyone. We are live here in Las Vegas for Amazon AWS, Amazon Web Services, re-invent 2015. This is Silicon Angles theCUBE. This is our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of Silicon Angle. I'm joined by my next guest, Lyn Langit, who's a big data and cloud architect at Lyn Langit Consulting. Welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for having me. Well, I'm excited to chat with you because one, we're both talkers. We're just training and having that educational. But you're also an architect. So you're doing a dual role in your life right now professionally. You're architecting cloud and big data solutions which you must be thrilled by the announcements today. We'll get to that in a second. But also doing a really vital role in filling the skills gap by being a teacher in skills in terms of the big data and cloud. So really rare opportunity. So thanks for joining. So I got to ask you this whole skill gaps thing. How real is it? I mean, give me some like anecdotal data around what you're seeing. Are people really shifting into new careers? Is it net new skill sets? What are some of the gaps you're seeing? So the big area that I'm focusing on is my background is traditional data warehousing and DBAs are conservative and don't like change. And these folks need to get into the cloud and get into the data services. And they also need to consider solutions other than relational databases. That's where I've done a lot of education work. I've done talks, I've done courses on the data really choices that are out there now in the cloud for professionals that are building these solutions. So talk about your status. You're an AWS community hero. I think it's our hero, but it's a distinction like an MVP from Microsoft which you were a previous Microsoft employee. What is a hero? What's the role, the distinction? Share what that means. Yeah, it's a cool program that Amazon launched last November and I was in the first group of community heroes. There's like 30 of us worldwide to date. And it is modeled on some of the partner education programs from some of the other vendors. The reason that I was invited to join the program was because of technical talks I'd done, white papers I published. I published a paper about performance testing on a NoSQL database that was really super technical on how to drive the maximum throughput through the Amazon pipes. It was getting a million TPS on a single box. And I learned a lot. And I share those kinds of learnings. So that's why I'm part of that group. And so are you doing production work for Amazon? Are you doing consulting for them? Are you independent? Are you independent? Yeah, yeah, so I'm completely independent. And in fact, because I really, I have this education gene. So I'll build something and then I want to write about it and share it and talk about it because when I learn, everybody's learning, right? And so I actually have partner designations from Amazon for the community hero, Google, Google Cloud Developer Expert and Microsoft MVP. So I actually, I'm the only person that has all the creep. You could be a regular on theCUBE. We love doing the Google Cloud events. We'll be soon doing the Azure events. Yeah, yeah. So what's your big learning from this? Honestly, you're getting your hands down and dirty, getting in the machines of building solutions and then teaching people, what have you found? What are some of the findings? So here's the deal. When enterprise is moving to the cloud, they like familiarity. So everybody's talking, for example, in data about NoSQL and about Hadoop and all that stuff, but Amazon's out there providing solutions that are just big relational. And guess what? They're winning because it's easier to go big relational. Redshift has been a solid performer for years. And as Aurora came out, more and more customers want Aurora. Now that said, that doesn't mean that there aren't aspects of solutions for which NoSQL databases are going to be a better fit, but the core relational is really what people still want to build on, just in the cloud. Familiarity is comfort too. It's all for job security. But now the roles are changing. You're seeing kind of the breaking down of the silos. With Amazon and certainly Google and Azure now doing the same thing. Certainly Azure now there, Google, been cloud native. There's no silos. You can't have that unique, especially you have to do a little bit of this, a little bit of that. How has that changed some of the psychology of some of the folks you've been working with? Because I want to be an Oracle DBA. I don't want to, or I'm a VMware, or I'm this. How has this new notion of silo busting changed some of the personnel requirements for skills? Well again, there's sort of two customers that I work with, they're startups and they're their own world and they're younger and they'll try anything. And what they do is they go out and try all the new stuff and then they fail. So they call me back because they don't actually understand the transactional consistency on MongoDB, for example, and why their payment system is not working. But then the enterprise people, they want familiarity. And so a lot of times I'll start even more simple. I'll start with file system. I'll start with S3 and Glacier. I actually have a talk here about best practices around file management, which might seem as the most basic thing in the world, but it's that familiarity paradigm. You get people up on the cloud, you get the best practices. An example of this is appropriate users and permissions. Translating the paradigm of on-premise security up to cloud security is tricky. So you want to do that more easily. So you start with files and then relational databases and then you layer on and make that IoT super cool solution. So is there a kindergarten metaphor you kind of grow through the ranks? How does that look? What's the progression look like? Well really, honestly, I usually start with people and I say, how much are you putting up in S3? The question that I really start with is what are you throwing away? And people are still throwing data away, which is crazy to me. Should be keeping all data all the time. And generating more. You know, it's funny, I don't know if you've seen this, but this is an IoT ring. Wow. Yeah, so this is a- It's like a mood ring and then it's got sensors. Yeah. You got a lot of energy coming right now. So it's an IP address ring, right? And so this whole idea of multiple IP addresses- That's my ring nature watch? Yeah, yeah, there we go, there we go. Is generating more data and keeping all the data is really kind of the starting point. Tell me about what you're thinking about this announcement today, because I was pretty impressed. I mean obviously Amazon continues to do what we've been talking about for many years and certainly three years with theCUBE here. The slew of announcements just keep coming and coming. The cadence of new services. But the big data piece is fascinating to me because they're actually doing some cooler things now to make it easier. What is, how does that make you feel? Because if you go back and you were doing work two years ago, three years ago, a lot of cobbling together, a lot of rewiring stuff and this goes in that, maybe some custom code gets built or architectural, or let me be more rigid. Now it just seems to be plug and play. That seems to be an easy button. What's the difference? Seriously, it's a playground. I tweeted this morning that in the war for cloud, it's not compute, it's data. It's data and data services. I mean look at the keynote today. Data service, data service, data service. We weren't talking about EC2 and VMs and we were talking about data visualization, getting all your data up to the cloud. It's a great time to be doing what I do. We have funding. We have a lot of CUBE audience that always jokes with us on Twitter. I mean we always cover storage business. Obviously EMC and everyone else. Obviously Amazon's a pretty big storage. So we should do a show called Storage Wars. Now I want to do a show called Data Hoarders. But that's a mindset. You said don't want to throw away the data but there is a hoarding mentality of getting the data and storing it somewhere. IoT certainly want to store everything. So that's nice with Amazon. But there's also a downside of data hoarding. If data is the new currency, some people might glob onto it and say, no, I'm not going to share. So if you believe that cloud has some good scales, some good ROI, good cost benefit savings, the economics are there, scales. But you have to have a sharing economy mindset. So how do you tell people or talk to people about don't be a hoarder. You got to share a little bit. And what technologies are there for that? So it's interesting as people are sharing all the data, they are really working with being able to properly get meaning out of it. And I really think that the visualization tools are going to drive this because right now what's happening is the first step is save all data. Second step is you got all the data, make use of it. And so the sharing problem is when you don't have tools that people who are consuming the data can use to look at the data. So for example, that visualization tool that Amazon announced today that's native that detects all the services, that's super powerful. Because people will say, well, that's not my data, that's your data, or that data's wrong or whatever because they can't process it and they have to wait currently for some developer to write all the queries and all that good stuff. But if they have a visualization tool, they can then say, oh yeah, that data's cool. That can go out, that can share. So it's not intuitive of I'm just going to hoard it because I'm afraid I'm going to hoard it because I can't understand it. Yeah, and then having it being worked on, wrangling or whatever term you want to call. Okay, so talk about some of the things you're working on. We have the last minute I want to use for you to share some of the work you've done, work you're doing, and what gets you excited? So IoT, it's IoT. I've been doing manufacturing and building end-to-end solutions that are complex, starting with the relational and adding additional components on caching, no SQL databases, adding Hadoop. That's really super interesting. Also I've done some stuff with machine learning and I was on the beta for Amazon machine learning. Great useful service. People should try it out, it's cool. One thing though that I want to talk about that I do in addition to my work around big data is I run a non-profit to help the next generation. And that's called teaching kids programming. So what we do there is we create courseware for our middle school teachers so that they can have something to teach our kids computational thinking. We've got a core library in Java and it's out at teachingkidsprogramming.org but what's really kind of germane to this conversation is we're doing some labs work around data and IoT for kids. Yeah, and certainly we saw that young kid get arrested for bringing a homemade clock to the school with it put in handcuffs. Ignorance, yeah. And so that's a new generation of developers, it's a tinkerers, it's a maker culture now. That's IoT, abstracted away the device complexity they can write software. Right, for sure. So I got to ask you, did you mention Java? I mean are the young kids taking on Java? I mean that's old for us, I'm an old guy, right? So Java we use, Java's fantastic but is it cool enough for the kids? Well see, here's the deal. There's a disconnect between what's being offered in our schools and what's happening in the real world. And what we've done in our offering is we've taken something old and made it new again. We took the logo kind of like implementation and we combined it with agile and XP practices to make it consumable and fun. And what that does is that feeds kids into the AP Java class because they need computational thinking. Now we augment that with cool things like electric imp which uses the squirrel language so we kind of add the two together to make it fun. But the Java helps them because it's the biggest language out there and it is what's taught in school. So it's a base. Yeah and you get some cool stuff around it you know like the Raspberry Pi stuff or you know some DevOps coding like Python or Go. I mean are you using Go at all? You see that with kids? Go for any language? I personally have used Go, yeah and of course I wrote a tutorial on how to get up and going with Go so you can find that on my blog. What's the URL for the blog? Just lindlangit.com. Yeah I'm pretty much, I will try any language. Do you know like languages I'm trying now are Julia so the new scalable data science language and then I'm really trying to understand functional languages because I think they're very important in the future of big data processing. You know that's wonderful. We're big passionate about teaching kids. There's native kids out there they're taking to technology. It's not a nerd door geek thing anymore. It's football players. It's everyone is immersed with technology and they're interested and they're taking to it. So yeah I worry about the old spinach factor. Eat your spinach, you're going to be strong. Got to make it fun. The key is fun and building blocks are cool but fun is the key. For sure. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate your time. Great work, exciting, a lot of energy. Your IOT ring is broadcasting some good signals right now. Of course thanks for sharing it here on theCUBE. Where we ingest all the data, big time. We collect the dots, we connect the dots here on theCUBE. We're watching live in Amazon re-invent. And watch us as we go to Grace Hopper celebration of women in computing. We're going to be down in Houston at our next couple of events. Look for that there. And again keep watching here. We've got a full day of coverage and tomorrow all day here in Vegas for Amazon re-invent. We'll be right back after this short break.