 Live from Washington, D.C., it's theCUBE, covering AWS Public Sector Summit. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of AWS Public Sector here in our nation's capital, Washington, D.C. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, hosting alongside of John Furrier, always a pleasure being with you. Awesome, good to see you again. And we are joined by a first-time Cube guest, Brett McMillan, he is the GM Ground Station AWS. Thanks so much for coming on. Throwed to be here, thank you. So why don't you start by telling our viewers a little bit about Ground Station, what it is, what it does? Sure, sure. First of all, really excited to be here at this conference. Yesterday we had our second annual Earth and Science Day. Last year was really successful and we're finding a huge amount of interest around space and space primarily to help save the Earth. And so AWS came out with a solution and we made it generally available last month called Ground Station. And if you think back about 15 years ago, before the commercial cloud came out, you had to do for a data center, you either had to buy the data center, you had to do a long-term lease, and then we came out with the commercial cloud. And from that point forward, there was a tremendous number of innovations that came out of that. I don't think any of us back then could have predicted things like Pinterest or Spotify or that Netflix would have gone from shipping you DVDs to be an online streaming company and all those innovations happening. We think that we're at the beginning of that stage of the satellite industry. So what Ground Station is, it's a service that you can use like any other cloud service. Just pay for what you use, on demand, you can scale up, you can scale down. And we think that we're in the early stages of opening up innovations in this industry. And it's satellite specific, so it's a satellite service, so it's a connectivity, how does it work? What's the net impulse of how it works? So what happens is you would have a, you just go into the AWS console and you schedule a contact. And most of these early use cases they are for our low earth orbit satellites or medium earth orbit satellites. And we have deployed these satellite antennas and what's really important about this is we've put them right next to our data centers or our availability zones. So now you're getting the entire power of the cloud. And so what happens is you would schedule a contact and either up link or down link your data during that contact period. And we just charge per minute. So it's like the EC2 was servers and S3 was storage and the use case was it solved the provisioning problem. So you guys are doing it for up link and down link in your satellite usage and data over satellite. Pretty much. Correct, correct. And so, and the other thing that's really nice about it is just like the cloud would enable people to go global in minutes, ground station allows you to go global also. So traditionally what would happen is you would buy a satellite antenna or you'd lease a satellite antenna somewhere in the world and you're only catching so many passes of those satellites. Well, we are deploying these at our data centers throughout the world. And so you're able to, at a very low cost, now catch these passes of these satellites. You know, Brett and I were talking on the intro around the role of technology and how it's causing a lot of change. You mentioned that window of 10 years where before YouTube, after YouTube, all these new services came on. Think about it, those didn't exist around before 2004 timeframe, roughly 2004, 2005, then the mobile revolution hit. The similar wave is coming into government. And seeing it, Amazon Web Services Public Sector Summit is our fourth year. It gets bigger. The inclusion of space is an intel sign of commercialization of some of the tech coming in infiltrating process change within government and use cases. So I would agree with you that's relevant. Yeah, and next level is what? Where's that window? What's going to happen in that 10 year change? It is hard to predict, but we know from our past experience and what we've done in the cloud, we know that when you remove the undifferentiated heavy lifting, like buying servers or doing networks and things like that, it frees people up to do innovations. And when you look at what's happening in the satellite industry, virtually every industry, every person can benefit from a better understanding of this earth and from satellite imagery and satellite sensing. And so if you start moving forward with that and you ask what can happen, we've got governments throughout the world that are very concerned about deforestation. And so for example, today they find out the deforestation after the trees are gone. And what if you could instead, for a very low cost, download pictures of satellite images and get it in more of a real time type basis or get it in that same hour that satellite took the picture. Now what you can do is catch the deforestation when the boulders show up, not after the trees went down. So get in front of it, use the data, it's a data business. Yep. So talk about other use cases because again, early adopters are usually the developers that are hungry for the resource. We saw that with cloud. EC2 and S3 I mentioned now those service, thousands and thousands of new services a year from AWS, Jassy loves to talk about that at re-invent and it's pretty impressive. But the early days it was developers. They were the ones who had the value, they were thirsty for the resource. What are some of the resources, what's the low hanging fruit coming in for ground station that you could share that is a tell sign for where it's going? So we're getting interest, not only for these new developers and these new things, but large established satellite companies are very interested in that because what I was talking about earlier, you can cover areas with our service in ways that were very expensive to do. I can tell you ground station would have been a little hard for us to roll out had we not first done AWS. If you didn't first have things like EC2 and S3 and secure ways of storing your data or our petabytes scale worldwide network. And so when you look at that, you're able to get multiple different organizations doing some really cool things. We're in partnership with Cal Poly and Cal Poly's been in the space industry for a long time. Back in 1999, they were one of the inventors of the original CubeSat. And today what they're doing is they have this SDS, the satellite data solutions service. And it's an initiative that they're doing and they did a hackathon. And when you look at all the areas that could benefit from space and satellite service, all kinds of things pop up. So for example, if you're a cattle rancher and you have a very large area, sometimes cattle get stuck in an area like a canyon or something. You don't find out about it too late. So Cal Poly did this hackathon. And what they came up with is it's very inexpensive now to put a IoT device on the cows. And with the ground station, you can now download that information. You can communicate to a satellite. And now we can find out where those cows are and get them if they're in a dangerous situation. I think the IoT impact is going to be huge, Rebecca. Think about what we talk about around IoT. IoT is the edge of the network, but there's no, the network's not flat, it's in space, the earth is round. So it's kind of like a Christopher Columbus moment where if you have the data, all you need is power and connectivity. So battery power is getting stronger every day, long life batteries, but the connectivity with ground station literally makes a new IoT surface area, the earth. Absolutely. I mean, that's pretty groundbreaking. This is a really exciting time to be in the space industry. A couple of things are driving it. One is that the capabilities that we're able to put up in space for the same amount of weight and the same amount of payload is increasing dramatically. The other thing that's happening is that the cost for lift, the cost to put satellites in orbit is dropping dramatically. And so what's happening with those two things is we're able to get a lot more organizations putting satellites up there. And what's turning out is that there's a tremendous number of images and sensing capabilities that's coming down. Actually more than the humans are able to analyze. And that's where the cloud comes in, is that you take and download this information and then you start using things like machine learning and artificial intelligence. And now you can see anomalies and point them out to the humans and say, for example, these bulls just showed up. Maybe we should go take a look at that. You know, imagery has always been a hot satellite thing. You see Google Earth map, 3D mapping is getting better. How is that playing into it? Is that a use case for you guys? I mean, you can talk about the impact because that's something that we ought to relate to. Yeah, and I would submit that we are in the early stages of that. It's amazing what we can do with earth imaging today and everybody on their phones can get Google Maps and all the other things that are out there. But we're in the early stages of what we can do with that. So some areas that we're looking at very closely. So for example, during the California wildfires last year, NASA worked on some things to help out the people on the ground. You know, with ground station, what you'll be able to do is do more downloads and get more information that a more real-time basis. And you'll actually be able to look at this and say the wildfires are happening in these areas and help the citizens with escape routes and help them understand things that were actually hard to determine from the ground. And so we're looking at this for natural disasters as well as just day-to-day solutions. It's such an exciting time and you're pointing at so many different use cases that have a lot of potential to really be game changers. What keeps you up at night about this though? I mean, I think that there, as we know there's a lot of unintended consequences that comes with these new technologies and particularly explosion of these new technologies. What are your worries? What are the future perils that you see? So we definitely are working with these agencies of the federal government and commercial things on making sure that you can secure the data. But again, that was one of the benefits of starting with AWS. We started with security being a primary part of what we did. And so when you have ground station, you do a satellite uplink or downlink and then you immediately tell it where in the world you want the data to be stored. So for example, it can download, let's say, in another part of the world and then you can bring it back to the United States and store it in what we call a virtual private cloud. It's a way for our customers to be able to control their environment securely. And so we spend a lot of time explaining to people how they can do that and how they can do it securely. And so it doesn't keep me awake at night, but we spend a tremendous amount of time working with these organizations, making sure that they are using best practices when they're using our solution. Brett, talk about the challenges you mentioned storing the securely role of policy. We are living in a world now where the confluence of policy, science, tech, people are all kind of exploding in innovation, but also challenges. What are some of the things that you guys are doing to raise the bar improving? I mean, obviously there's early days so you're seeing areas to improve. What are some of the areas that you're improving on that are being worked on now and impacted? So you mentioned policy side of it. What I'd like to say is anytime there's a new technology that comes out, we have to do some catching up from the policy, the regulator point of view. Right now, because the satellite industry is moving so fast, there's a scale issue. And so governments throughout the world are looking at the number of satellites that are going up and the number of communications that are happening, and they're working with that scale. And I'm very proud to say that they're reacting. They're reacting fairly quickly. And that's one of the areas that I think we're going to see more on, is as this industry evolves, having things like antennas and satellites certified quickly is one of the things that we need to tackle. I mean, there's some base infrastructure challenges. I mean, consider space kind of infrastructure at this point, plenty of room up there currently, but you can envision a day where there's zillion satellites up there at some point, but that has to get set up first. And you're saying the posture of the government is pro-innovation in this area? Oh yeah, we're seeing a lot of interest in that. When we launched Ground Station, governments both here in this country, as well as throughout the world, were very interested in this, and they see the potential on being able to make the satellite imagery and detection available. And it's not just for those largest organizations like the governments, but it's also when you commercialize this, and we've made it so that small, medium-sized businesses now can get into this business and do innovative things. Question I want to ask you, I know we're tight on time, Rebecca, but I want to get this out. In your opinion, what do you think that the modernization of public policy governments means? Because depending on your definition, what modernization is, this seems to be the focus of this conference here at AWS Public Secretary Summit. This is the conversation we're having in other agencies. They want to modernize. What does that mean to you? It takes on many perspectives. What I find a lot is modernization is helping your workers be more productive. And so we do this with a number of different ways. So when you look at ground station, the real benefit of it isn't can I get the image? Can I get the data? But how can I do something with it? And so when you start applying machine learning, artificial intelligence, now you can point to anomalies that are happening and now you can have the people really focus on the anomalies and not look at a lot of pictures that are exactly the same. So when you look at modernization, I think it's so monotonous with how do we make the workforce that's in place more productive? And find those missing cows. It's actually. Fred McMillan, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. Thank you, it was a pleasure. We've got a lot of great, we've got many more guests. We've got Teresa Carlson, Jay Carney. Yeah. General Keith Alexander. General Keith Alexander. Talking about how data is being used for the military. We've got ground station connectivity. I really think this is a great opportunity for IoT way to see how it progresses. Yes. Excellent. Thank you. Rebecca Knight for John Furrier. Stay tuned to theCUBE.