 Live from Washington, D.C., it's theCUBE, covering AWS Public Sector Summit. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. Welcome back everyone, you are watching theCUBE and we are kicking off our day two of our live coverage, AWS Public Sector Summit here in our nation's capital. I'm Rebecca Knight, co-hosting with John Furrier. John, it's great to be here, 18,000 people having important conversations around the governments and cloud computing. Let's extract the signal from the noise, let's do what theCUBE does best. Yeah, I mean, this is to me a really exciting event because it's got the confluence of what we love, tech and cloud computing and all the awesomeness that enables, but even in Washington, D.C., with the backdrop against the tech lash and this narrative around tech for ill or tech for bad, bad tech, whatever you want to call it. The anti-trust is a lot of narratives around that. There's a huge story around tech for good, so I think there's an interesting balance there around the conversations, but this is where all the heavy hitters are this week. You've got senior people at the government level here, you have senior tech people here, all kind of mending and trying to figure out how to let the tailwinds of cloud computing drive change within government against this backdrop of tech for ill, as Jay Carney, who's the global marketing policy guy for Amazon and reports to Jeff Bezos, former Obama Press Secretary, he's super savvy on policy, super savvy on tech, but this is a really big point in time where the future is going to be determined by some key people and some key decisions around the role of technology for society, for the citizens of the United States, for nation-states as people start to figure out the role of data and all the impact of this, so super exciting at that level, but also dangerous and people are tiptoeing a little bit, but also want to run hard, that's pretty much the big story here. So let's get into this tech backlash because you're absolutely right, the public sentiment about technology and the tech behemoth has really soured, the regulators are sharpening their blades and really paying much more attention, particularly because so many people say, hey, wait a minute, how does Google and Facebook know all this stuff about me? But what do you think, what are we hearing on the ground in terms of where regulation is going? Before the cameras were rolling, you were talking about this idea of regulators working closely with the innovators, observing, but not meddling. I mean, do you think that that's, is that the direction we're going in? Well, not really, I think that that's where people want it to go. I mean, I think right now the surprise attack of tech taking over, if you will, in the minds of people and or whether that's real or not, it's happened, right? So I was talking yesterday around how the internet, when Bill Clinton was president, really grew, was a little bit slower than the pace it is today, but they did a good job of managing that. They had private sectors take over, the domain name system, we saw that grow, that created the open web and the web was open. Today it's different, it's faster in terms of technology innovation and it's not as open. You have Facebook, LinkedIn, and these companies that have silos of data and they're not sharing it. Cyber security, General Keith Alexander, former head of the NSA and the first commander of Cyber Command in the United States under Obama, he pointed out that the visibility into the cyber attacks aren't there because there's no sharing of data. We heard about open data initiatives from a think tank. The role of data and information is going to be a critical conversation and I don't think the government officials are smart enough and educated enough yet to understand that. So the regulatory groups want to regulate, they don't know how to, they're reaching out to Amazon's, Google's and the Facebook's to try to figure out what's going on and then from there they might get a path but they're still in the early stages. Amazon feels like they're not harming anyone. They're lower prices faster, delivering more options. They're creating an enablement environment for tons of startups. So they feel like they're not harming anyone via the antitrust. But if they're going to be monopolizing the marketplace, that's another issue. But I still think Amazon's still in enablement mode and I think, you know, they're just running so hard. It's going so fast. I think it's going to be a big challenge and if industry doesn't step up and partner with government, it's going to be a real mess. And I think it's just moving too fast. It's very complicated. Digital is nuanced now. You get the role of data. All this plays into effect there. Well, you're absolutely right that it's going fast. We had Teresa Carlson on the other day talking about AWS growth 41% year over year and she said, the cloud is the new normal. The cloud is here. More and more governments and state and local really recognize and obviously international countries too recognize that they're adopting these cloud first approaches. Yeah, I mean, I think some cloud first approach is validated 100%. There's no debate. I think it's not an aha moment. Cloud is real. Amazon has absolutely proven since the CIA deal in 2013 that this is a viable strategy for government to get to value fast. And that is the whole speed of cloud game. It's all about time to value with agility, et cetera, et cetera. We've been talking about that with DevOps for a long, long time. The real thing that I think's happening that's going on, that's kind of, you know, to read the tea leaves and we'll hear from Corey Quinn, our host at large who will come on later, is there's a new generation of talent coming on board and this new generation, it feels like a counterculture mindset. These are DevOps mindset people, not necessarily DevOps like in the cloud computing way. They're younger, they're thinking differently and they think like Amazon, right? Not because they love Amazon because that's their nature. They're getting content in a digital way. They're digital natives. They're born into that kind of cultural mindset of, what is all this nonsense? Red tape, what's the bottleneck to solving these problems? There's really not a good answer anymore because with cloud computing and machine learning and AI you can solve things faster. So if you expose the data, smart people go, well, that's a problem that can be solved. Let's solve it. So I think there's going to be a resurgence, there's going to be a renaissance of younger people kind of in a counterculture way that's going to move fast and impact society and I think it's going to happen pretty quickly over the next 10 years. Well, that's one of the things that's so inspiring about being at a conference like this one, AWS Public Sector Summit because we are hearing, getting back to what you just said, we're solving problems and these are problems about not just selling more widgets. This is actually about saving lives, helping people, the delivery of healthcare, finding missing persons in POWs who are missing in action. I mean, the problems that could be solved with technology now for good, I think we'll outweigh the technology for ill as Jay Carney calls it. So right now unfortunately everyone's talking about Facebook and all this nonsense that happened with the elections and I think that's pretty visible and that's painful for people to kind of deal with but in the reality is that never should have happened. I think you're going to see a resurgence of people that are going to solve problems and if you look at the software developer persona over the past 10 to 15 years, it went from hire some developers, build a product, ship it, market it, make some money to developers being the front lines power players in software companies. They're on the front lines, they're making changes, they're moving fast, creating value. I see that kind of paradigm hitting normal people where they can impact change like a developer would for an application in society. I think you're going to have younger people solving all kinds of crisis around whether it's opioid crisis, healthcare, these problems will be solved. I think cloud computing with AI and machine learning and the role of data will be a big catalyst. But the money, the money's a thing. We're going to have Corey Quinn on later talking about this talent gap because there are people who are, as you said, there are young people who are motivated to solve these problems and they want to work for mission-driven institutions. What better mission than helping the United States government? Just heard in the hallway and I've heard this multiple times here at the show, I've just heard someone saying, yeah, but that person's great, I can't keep them. What's happening is, what the talent is, the people that they need for cloud computing can get a job that pays three times more or more at the private sector. So the government doesn't have stock options. Right, right, right. If you're a machine learning co-owner. And probably not ping-pong tables in the lounge. Yeah, so all kinds of different dynamics, but I think this mission-driven culture of working for society for good might be that currency that will be the equivalent of stock option. That, I think, is something that we're watching. Not, haven't seen anything yet, but maybe that will happen. Paid in good feelings. We've got a lot of great guests. As we've already teed up, we've got Corey Quinn, Bill Britton from Cal Poly to talk more about Ground Station. We have Aileen Jemez-Smith of Vizalytics and Jamil Jaffer. That's coming up today. I think Ground Station, but the biggest surprise for me in this show so far has been Ground Station. That product has got so much traction. It's ridiculous. I thought it would be kind of cool, spacey. I like it, but it's turning into a critical need for IoT. I mean, I was just talking with you when we came on about the airplane having Wi-Fi on the plane. We all go like, wow, we expect it now, but you go back years ago, it's like, oh my God, I got Wi-Fi on the plane. That's a Ground Station-like dynamic. People go on, oh my God, I can provision satellite and get data back all for IoT anywhere in the world. So that is pretty killer. Excellent. I'm looking forward to digging in with you with many guests today. Good. I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier. Stay tuned. You are watching theCUBE.