 Okay, we're back, welcome back. Live in San Francisco, this is Silicon Angles theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events, extracted signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of Silicon Angles. I'm John Michael, it's Jeff Frick, general manager of theCUBE, replacing for Dave Vellante, who couldn't not make it for this trip. Jeff, excited to have our next guest, Paul Duffy from Amazon Web Services, Workspaces, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, good to be here. So we like to jump in and extract some signal out of your head and share that data with the folks. Workspaces we covered pretty extensively at Reinvent, very well received. Again, Amazon, we use football analogies, moving the ball inch by inch down the field, just seems to be just nonstop stuff coming out of Amazon. So let's get the update for us. Since Reinvent, what's the update on Workspaces shared with the folks, what new traction you have, any new features, what you're announcing here, real quick update. Sure, so we're really happy to have, with the momentum we've had since Reinvent. So we announced Workspaces as a limited preview of Reinvent, and he mentioned this morning his speech we had over 10,000 people who signed up for the limited preview. And then earlier this morning, we made Workspaces available to all customers. So anybody can go and sign up for it in the AWS console and start using it now, provision however many number of Workspaces they want. They can integrate with their Active Directory, so the users can keep using the credentials that the user can collect with a choice of devices, whether it's an iPad, Android tablet, or Kindle, or PC, or Mac, or laptop. That's it. So we've had 10,000 people on the limited release. That's the number of people who signed up for it. We were really pleased with that. So how close were you in the product that went out in GA, that you released at Reinvent, compared to what is there today, based on the feedback from the 10,000 users? Well, we definitely learned a lot more about how different customers are going to use the service. So we got a whole range of different feedback from a whole range of different industries, whether it's people who are looking to use it in a retail context, people who are used to using it in a more traditional context, kind of a new, we heard from different customers about how they have kind of diverse sets of users. So some have this kind of seasonal thing that they need to provision a bunch of desktops for relatively short period of time, then shrink them down. So it's the same kind of capabilities that we talked about when we announced it at Reinvent, but bringing those things to make them available to all customers right now, instead of just those who are in the limited release. So you touched on it a little bit, but so are there some use cases where this thing just really knocks it out of the park versus just getting windows live, or office live, excuse me. Well, I think for us, we thought virtual desktops themselves are not necessarily a new thing. And when Andy talked about it, when he introduced the service at Reinvent, it was, we kind of characterised it around the virtual desktop dream, but this thing has been around. The sun ray, I can go back to the sun ray. For a long time, but it's like it was always difficult customers had to buy all this hardware and then provision it, and then once they got to capacity, they didn't have to buy more hardware, more software and do more provisioning. So we heard from lots of large companies, both large and small, who just like the idea of an easy way that they can provision a desktop with software that's integrated with their existing infrastructure that they can manage with their existing tools with a few bits of a mouse. But then these kind of the use cases where potentially you've got workforces where they're distributed. So they might be a lot of people who are actually working at home. So they wouldn't necessarily have the corporate issue device with an asset sticker on. And this gives, I see the ability to give them a desktop as all the familiar applications that they're using, it kind of has the corporate image, but they can still know that they can control that their data isn't going to be stored on end user devices. So Paul, I just shared a link from Jeff Barr's blog post about the availability of workspaces, with some commentary on our crowd chat here. I want to share it with you and get your comments on. One, Shane Gibson says, AWS workspaces are available, registered, and bang, 20 minutes later I have my desktop in the cloud. Woo, he's so happy. So don't comment yet. So the next one is from Oliver, I guess a year. Amazon Web Services workspaces, generally available, but sadly, still not in the EU West. So comments on, obviously they're happy customers. People boom, you're bang, you're in the cloud, boom, bang, whatever they use, 20 minutes up and running with the cloud, that's nice. Availability, talk about what's happening. So today we made, well, earlier this morning, we made workspaces available to all customers. Initially it's in two regions. One of those is US West 2, which is our region in Oregon. The other region is US East 1, which is our region in Northern Virginia. As we said in the announcement communications we sent out, we will be expanding to other regions very soon, as soon as we can do that. So it's rolling out as available, your experience turning them on. Absolutely, yeah. Okay, so it's not like they're being blocked out, just that's the migration plan. Initial plan is in those two regions, and like we said, soon for other regions. Okay, so that's not news, especially that's just the way it is. Absolutely. We want zero to everything right now. The expectations that you said are tremendous. And that was one of the things in the limited previewing, we've been very pleased with customers from all countries that you think of who wrote about it. So honestly, other commentary we've had earlier on was a tweet that I saw and retweeted was, Amazon's new model, price drops as a service. Just continue to print price drops. So is there any price drops in work spaces? Well, we've just announced we've got to announce and then drop the price immediately. Let's get that mojo, okay? Well, we always like to pass on savings we can make to customers, but yesterday, so we just announced that. Okay, so we're going to hold you on that, we're expecting price drops, we're going to get that out of them. There'll be a price drop, I guarantee there'll be a price drop and more functionality. Number 43. So we get that out of the way, okay, but just talk innovation, okay, the Amazon way is about innovation. You're getting it out, okay, rolling it out, okay, agile, all that, blah, blah, blah, stuff, right? What about the benefits? When will customers start seeing benefits when they roll out of workspace? What are the things that you see from your early data coming in on the preview release? As people start using workstations, what's the adoption curve look like? They're like, bang, it's up, and then as they fumble along, do they make a discovery? Is there more tooling? What pattern have you seen emerge in your customer base on the uptake? So it's still relatively early, given that we just made work spaces broadly available today, but one of the things that we've heard that we're very happy about is if you compare the way customers used to have to do this, if you wanted to provision 10 virtual desktops, you had to deploy the physical infrastructure, deploy the software that's going to manage those desktops before you could even provision one. The demonstration that we did this morning showed that you can go from a standing start to provisioning a desktop, the provisioning process taking about 20 minutes. So the ability for customers to experiment with the service and see how it fits in their environment is really, really simple. So then to integrate with their existing Active Directory, which for us is a, we hear from customers is a really big thing because users keep using the credentials they've already got, and I see you can keep using the management tools they have. That integration process itself is really simple. If you've got an, if the customers who use an Amazon VPC, they can choose to have a hardware based VPN connection back to their on-premises network. And then the actual integration process with our Active Directory is really simple. The work spaces that we launched this morning in 20 minutes, we've joined that existing Active Directory. So it's very easy for a customer that I was in a meeting a few weeks ago with a customer who was interested. He had an iPad with him and I provisioned him a sample workspace and by the end of the meeting he connected to it. And that's just something that people haven't been used to in the on-premises environment where they had to build all of this stuff before they could even get started with the first workspace. So tell us about the numbers of, during your limited release, you had what was I think reported 10,000? Yeah, that's what Andy said this morning. We had 10,000 people signed up for the limits of people. How long was that period for? So we announced that at re-invent was when you first... Okay, so that's when you opened it up. So since re-invent 10,000 now the availability in the two weeks. Okay, great. Just want to get the notes on that. Yeah, so Paul, I want to ask you a question. So there's, from the outside looking in, there's like four big companies in Seattle. The Boeing has kind of moved out, right? There's Microsoft and Amazon and Starbucks, of course. I'm just curious, you were at Microsoft for a long time and Amazon is tremendous in this non-stop pace of innovation. If you can kind of speak to, how does that engine work? It must be an exciting place to work. What makes Amazon so different as an innovation company? To just continue to roll. I couldn't keep track of all the things he talked about today in the keynote in terms of breadth and depth of innovation and just pace of constant releases. One of our leadership principles is that we are customer obsessed. And that is one of the greatest things about, for me, about being in the company. You can listen to anybody from Jeff Bezos who talks about innovating on behalf of the customer. And that's what we like to do. And whether it's working on a service like WorkSpaces where we've made the service available to all of our customers today. And already we're thinking about how we can listen to more customer feedback, add capabilities and make it better. And it's things that we see through all of our services. I mean, last year, we released 280 new services and a combination of major features and services. And this is all driven by doing what customers ask us for. And there's nothing more rewarding to work on those kinds of services where we're listening to customers and we're able to build stuff that can make a difference to what's happening in our environment. Yeah, it's interesting. And that's why I asked, I was curious how much the work space has changed since that release. Because I know you guys are so fanatically focused to steal from Brackspace on the customer and customer feedback and integrating that back into the product delivery cycle. Yeah, well, I mean, we've heard, like I say, we've heard a lot of feedback from customers about what they like about WorkSpaces. We've heard even more things they like WorkSpaces to do with different kinds of WorkSpaces, different capabilities. We started out with, we have full bundle of things. Those are the things that we're only going to listen to customers about and then iterate on as we go forward. I said it's great and we love getting that kind of feedback that we've been reacting. So why is it so easy for Amazon to do all this great stuff and hard for everyone else? I mean, VEI has been kicked around the industry for a while, we see VM where we try and do some stuff there. So I mean, you know, virtualization at the edge has been a new phenomenon. But it's just, it's always seemed to be that, the nut that no one can crack, it's just, it just every year is the year of VDI, it seems to me. I mean, oh, so what's the deal there? Why is it, is it inertia, is it the legacy environments, the variables, is it the weather conditions? I mean, what's going on with that? Well, I think for us, I would say it's the same as Andy characterized it when he was talking this morning, that we built WorkSpaces because this is what customers asked us to do. We built it in a way that's, give us those customers what they want, they can provision those WorkSpaces which are virtual machines dedicated to those end users. And that's, I mean, it's the way we think about building things here. We start with the customer and work backwards with the services that we built. And in that sense, it's a simple strategy in listening to customers. What's the number one thing customers tell you right now about WorkSpaces that you guys are beavering away on right now? What, the one thing they would want us to improve is really just adding more capabilities. I mean, they love the fact that they can, they love the fact that they can provision the desktops very easily with a few clicks. They love the experience that users get when they connect into WorkSpaces and the fact that they can use different devices from an IT administrator point of view. They love the fact that these WorkSpaces integrate with their existing infrastructure so they can, they don't have to create another directory for users that they can administer them in the same way. So, lots of different things depending on, we talk about customers with every imaginable use case and that's the thing we've learned from WorkSpaces during the period. Lots of different customers with different scenarios that work. You guys are transforming the marketplace. You're innovating, at the same time you're still commoditizing and disrupting. So really kind of a weird thing to see that happen. We talked about that in our intro segment this morning. Now I got to ask you about transformation. Where is the, in your own personal opinion, not take your Amazon employee hat on for a second. Knowing what you know as an employee and product manager, put your industry hat on. What is the most transformative thing that you're seeing right now? Is it ITs, the business line, is it the developers? What is the major transformation that's the key lever to all this massive sea change of innovations, modern era we're living in? WorkSpaces One, you got Kinesis, you got Redshift, you got Elastic Beansoft, DevOps, process improvement across the board. People are instrumenting their business differently. It's just, the cloud is changing so much. But I think that would be the challenge to answer that question with a single word. If you look at those three, three of the services that we announced that we invented that are now available to all customers. One was WorkSpaces, one was Amazon AppStream, one was Amazon Kinesis. And they're all doing really different things for customers, but enabling new scenarios. So WorkSpaces might be enabling a customer to deal with a seasonal demand for WorkSpaces as well as more traditional desktops. AppStream, in the examples Andy gave this morning, we had Eve Online, which is a massively multiplayer online game, where AppStream means, instead of players abandoning the download of a game, they have a new way of interacting with this. From Chugolf, the golf simulator, that instead of having a smaller market where people have to spend a lot of money to have a golf simulator, people can potentially do that in their own home. Those golfers can now compete in virtual tournaments, or from the point of view of Disti, where they've got an environment where, for them, training can now become something that you do instead of something that you go to with a classroom with all these expensive PCs. And then Kinesis is doing totally different stuff. We talked to one of our customers in the take called Snowplow Analytics, and they're kind of going and building these solutions, so it's much easier for people to make real-time decisions, which it's a phrase sounds general, but one example is that these customers know that if you're browsing to do a test drive on a car from the website, they can predict that you're probably not going to, they kind of know that their data would have shown you that the next day they could have predicted that you were going to leave the website, so in the old world, they'd have to go and try and follow up with you or email or have a dealer call you, and now with some like Kinesis, they know that you're going to get off the website, so they'll do something to engage you before you get off the website so you'll go for a test drive, or in the line of a multiplayer game, they think you're going to quit so they could do something, like give you a thousand credits or whatever it is. And those three services are doing very, very different things but enabling really interesting new scenarios. And people can use them in different ways, how they mix and match is all driven by their needs, not so much some prefabricated syntax that you guys are projecting. Here's the services, stitch them together the way you want. Here is some building blocks, and you're limited by the imagination of our customers, you can build these amazing blocks. I'm being a big believer of composite applications being built and using the building blocks is just the choice of the developer or the environment, so I got to ask you the question now, this is a mind, you are basically living, drinking the cool air around a whole new mindset, you're living in a whole new era, thinking differently, new use cases, beauty's in the eye, to behold, the developer can do whatever they want. What is the bottleneck on the folks that haven't accepted the change yet? Now there's process management change, people change management, people hate change, right? So you're on the good side of change, you're making things happen, so what's your take? You talked about a lot of customer surprise, some of them say, hey, get out, I really want to, I don't want to talk to you. I know, I heard you guys are kicking ass, but you know, we don't want to talk to you right now, we can't handle it, we can't handle the trip. What's the key issue? What are these people, what's holding people back? Well sometimes I think it can be a matter of explaining what, how the cloud can help them achieve things they couldn't have done before, and for people who've spent a lot of time in an on-premises environment and then they, when you look at the cloud, when you look at the generations of people, I mean we've had customers in startups and that kind of concept, there was one customer we had, I think he said something like, I don't know the cost of a server any more than I know the cost of a server because it's not, they haven't grown up in that environment. If you look at someone who's worked in an on-premises environment for 20 years, they've been used to a different way of doing it. So sometimes it's just making sure they understand how these building blocks go together. One very large customer I had, you're their marketing department, they love the fact that they could build these elastic applications for advertising. They love the fact that they can bypass IT. They love the bypass IT. But to be fair to that IT department, that IT department wanted to be able to serve them. They weren't intending to not do a good job. So it's trying to help them, trying to help those people move from what they were doing. We love covering IT. We love IT, but some IT guys are my friends, it's covering your ass time and sometimes compliance can be a killer too, right? I mean, these are issues. But in summary, what do you just say? Process, people, what's the big bottleneck that's holding companies back? I think we see, I mean, I think it would all depend on the company, I think we are finding more and more customers who really understand how all these building blocks come together and it's not just something to start with, it's not just something for enterprise, it's not just something for certain parts of one thing. And that's why we've always said we have hundreds of thousands of customers with every use case you could think of in every possible industry. Okay, so here's the scuttlebutt that I hear about Amazon. We hear, in the queue. Well, Amazon's kicking some butt, they're just so ahead of the game, they do things differently. Yeah, you guys have earned that. You know, I've been following you guys since you started eight years ago. Here in San Francisco, talking to startups, very humble beginning. Still kind of humble, but still just shipping code, shipping product. Yes, you guys are doing really well. How can you continue to keep going? What's the internal drive? What's the speech by Andy? What does he tell the truth? What do you tell your truth? I think one of the things that we are all maniacally focused on at Amazon is, and it sounds in a way sound like a feature, but it isn't, and I think it's all the way the same from Jeff on down, it is focusing on building what customers want. Which sounds like it's such a simple thing, but that's, we didn't build workspaces because of any other reason the customer's saying, we would like, we see what you've done with each of them, we'd love to be able to do something like this. But the challenge there is, you're a product guy, so you saw the customer slide, it's huge. Very diverse, good job, you got all kinds of views. Your customer base is so diverse now, you could please, it really served all your customers. You could have five zillion versions of the product. So the question to you is, how do you stop from boiling the ocean? Is there a methodology, is it discipline, gut feel? You guys scope this out, asset test, throw the dart at the board? I think it's something we're described by, I mean, again, it goes back to working backwards from what customers want and bringing things out and then iterating very rapidly. So it's not like a traditional model where you would wait a long time and bring this kind of monolithic thing out. We're starting today with workspaces with some capabilities that our customers tell us are very useful. And the only thing that we are gonna do with that service is iterate on it and add more and more capabilities based on what customers are taking us in. It sounds like a very simple scenario, but it is the beat that we marched in terms of what our customers who are the most important people to us ask us to do. Yeah, but on the other hand, you guys are delivering, it's the classic Steve Jobs quote, right? Where people don't know what they want. I'm just gonna give them what I think they want. And you guys are delivering innovations, now you're kind of into it. So they're asking for stuff. And you guys are delivering innovations way out in front of what really the customer demand was because you basically flip the model in terms of delivering it as a service. And I think we kind of see two sides of this. I mean, for workspaces, for virtual desktops, this was a very clear, I mean, this was a very clear ask from, this was a very clear asking customers and we have desktops here as we're having this conversation. People know what desktop computing is. Virtual desktops have been this thing that's been coming for a long time. It's the way that it's been done that lets customers take advantage of it easily. But then if you take another service like AppStream, we also learn from our customers. Plus, we built that service. We found scenarios that we thought might be useful, like Eve Online, the game I talked to you about. But then we're also seeing things that, you know, the TrueGolf golf simulator is not a game, the way that the Eve Online application is. Disti doing the maintenance and the training they do, these are different kinds of scenarios that are only limited by the imagination of our customers and what they're telling us to do. And so that's kind of the thing that we will build into AppStream. Or it's the same kind of thing with Kinesis but real-time streaming of data. We start with something where we feel that there is a need that's amazing. In some cases, it's an unmet need that we validate with customer input and then we only continue to iterate on doing the right thing based on what those customers say. And we really learned since we announced WorkSpaces in November, some scenarios in traditional enterprise is exactly what we expected, but then we've also heard all of these others as well. And it's, you know, it couldn't be more fun to come into work and have a stack of things to do on behalf of customers to make services better. That's great. And what's the main way that you hear from customers? What's the main communication vehicle back up the food chain into the product development? I think it's every way that we can get feedback. I mean, here we are as kind of an educational event where we're trying to meet with a lot of customers. I've spoken to quite a lot of customers today. We have people in the field who are evangelizing, we have solutions architects who are in the field who are talking. There's work we do in the community to hear from those customers. The messages that they might send us via social media, surveys that we do with customers. I mean, every way that we can find that, listen to them. And you're listening. And I think that's the key is that you're listening. Yeah, it's great. Okay, we hear live in San Francisco. We were talking about workspaces. Final word I'll give you is what's next for workspaces? Tell us what's around the corner. Give us a little taste of what's coming. Well, we don't intend to tell. Yeah, come on. We don't intend to tell people about it since we said we'd do it first. I was like, hold on, let me phrase the question. I know you really can't talk about what's coming around next. So give us a taste of what's coming around the corner. Well, certainly the thing that we've told, the thing that we've told customers today to renounce workspaces is it's going to be in more regions soon so that more people can go and launch their first virtual desktop with a few clicks in the management console. So, I mean, outside of the normal stuff, ease of use, blah, blah, blah. Just get it up and running globally available, right? That's your number. That's pretty much it. That's going to be a priority to make sure that customers can, we've always said this, go global in minutes. And yes, we want to make sure that customers can use workspaces on their terms in the location that makes sense to them. We're here at Paul Duffy with Amazon Web Services Workspaces. Again, one of the hot products that was released had re-invent. Again, Amazon, moving the ball down the field, more releases, more stuff, more shipping code. Every time you swing a cat, something ships out of Amazon. You guys are doing a great job. So we're big fans, happy customers. We'll be right back with our next guest after this short break. This is theCUBE live in San Francisco covering Amazon Web Services Summit. Right back.