 Live from New York, it's the queue. Covering AWS Global Summit 2019. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. Hi, and welcome to New York City, the Big Apple. I'm Stu Miniman, my co-host for today is Corey Quinn, and this is AWS Summit, New York City. It is one of the regional events that they have, but these regional events are actually tend to be bigger and more exciting than many companies, you know, big events. Not to say that companies don't do good shows, but if you look, we've got 11,500 people in attendance, over 120 sessions, over 125 sponsoring partners here in the ecosystem. Just had Warner Vogels up on stage, a number of the customers, such as FINRA and DoorDash, who we will have on the program, and Good Energy, a local show, it is free to attend. Corey, before we get into the technology though, there's a little bit of a protest going on here. It's actually the second Amazon show in a row that this was, it was at Amazon Remars, where a protester talking about, I believe it was, something around about chickens in Whole Foods, basically. She got really close to the richest man in the world, but the protest here, it's outside, it's going, and it's about ice and border control. It was actually a very well-organized protest. Security had to take many of them out for the first at least half hour of the keynote. Warner stopped a few times, and he said, look, I'll be happy to talk to you after, but please let me finish. I thought he handled it respectively, but what was your take? Very much so, and I think it's an issue where there aren't too many people you'd want to associate with on the other side of it. Kids in cages is not something anyone sensible wants to endorse. The challenge that I continually have, I think, is that it's easy to have these conversations, oh, now is not the time. Well, okay, great. Typically, it's difficult to get big companies to say, and now is the time for us to address this in anything outside of very carefully worded statements. So I empathize, I really do. I mean, as a speaker myself, it's terrifying to me. The idea that I could go up and have to have that level of conversation, and, hey, suddenly interrupted by people yelling at me, it's got to be nerve-wracking. Speaking to 10,000 people on its own is not easy. And having to carry that forward with something that effectively comes down to a morality question is, it's got to be tough. I have sympathy for people going through this and working at Amazon, and it's, I don't know that there's a great answer right now. So Corey, I know you are not deep in the government space, but you are at the public sector show there, and there's always this discussion as, well, you're supplying the technology, while Amazon might not be providing bombers and guns, they are providing the technology underneath. Facial recognition causes a lot of concern, rightfully so, that make sure we understand this thing. Security products and the like, so when you have the Department of Defense and Border Control as your clients, they do open themselves up for some criticism. Right, at some point you have to wonder who do you do business with versus who don't you do business with? And the historical approach, if well, as long as there aren't sanctions or laws preventing us from doing business with someone will be open to all comers. I mean, at some level, I find that incredibly compelling. In practice, the world is messy. If things were that black and white, we wouldn't have the social media content moderation issues. It would be a very different story with a very different narrative. Yeah, definitely Amazon as a whole has a platform and they have relationships. Jeff Bezos has met with the highest levels of power in this country. They've got Jay Carney, was part of the Obama administration, helping with policy, so absolutely great to see Amazon take a strong public statement and the tech for good is something that we are hugely a part of and therefore we want to see all the suppliers having a dialogue and helping to move this forward. Yeah, and I think the lesson that we take from it too is that there are multiple ways to agitate for change and protest. One is to disrupt the keynote and I understand that, it gets attention and it's valuable, but you can do that or you can have a seat at the table and start lobbying for change either internally or with the stakeholders, but there's a bunch of different paths to get there and I think that I don't blame anyone who's protesting today and I don't blame anyone who chose not to. All right, so let's talk now about some of the content. Corey, there's in the Amazon ecosystem, every day we wake up and there are multiple new announcements. As a matter of fact, we're always saying, oh my gosh, how do I keep up with all of the things happening there? Well, one of the ways we keep up with it is reading last week in AWS, which is your newsletter. I'll do the shameless plug for one of your pieces there. You're much appreciated. I get tired telling my own story. Corey, but Amazon CloudWatch Container Insights, Amazon EventBridge, new developer kits, fluent bit, talking about the momentum of the company, security, databases, and the general adoption overall. Quick take for me is I love to hear Werner up there talking about applications. It's not purely, oh, everything's going to live in the cloud and it'll be sunshines and unicorns and rainbows, but we understand that there's challenges here. Your data and how we manage that requires a broader ecosystem. With the EventBridge is something I would definitely want to drill in on, because from a serverless environment, not just one thing, it's lots of different things and how do we play between all of them? But since you do sort through and sift through all of these announcements, give us a take. Was there anything new here? Did you already know all of this because it's in your RSS feeds and newsletters, or what did it grab you? Surprisingly, it turns out in the weeks where you have the obviously reinvent is just a fire hose torrent that no human being can wind up consuming. And you see a few releases in Santa Clara and a few at New York, but I thought I knew most of the things that were coming out and I did, I missed one that I just noticed about two minutes when we went on the air called CloudWatch Anomaly Detection. The idea is that it uses machine learning, so someone check that author business card, or the Bingo card, but at that point you take all the CloudWatch logs and start running machine learning and look for anomalies, discrepancies and the rest. It uses machine learning, but rather than go figure out what it's for, it's applied to a very specific problem. And those are the AIML products I like the best where it's, we're solving a problem with your data for you, but providing guardrails as opposed to step one, a higher $2 million worth of data scientists. Step two, we're still working on that. All right, so Corey, CloudWatch, actually I saw the event bridge that I mentioned, which is that event ecosystem around Lambda. Deepak who we're going to have on the program now said that it was the learnings from CloudWatch that helped them to build it. So maybe for audience, just give us CloudWatch, there's a lot of different products under that. Give us what you hear from your customers, where CloudWatch fits, and maybe talk about that bridge. Let's start at the beginning. For those who are fortunate enough never to have used it, CloudWatch is AWS's internal monitoring solution. It gathers metrics, it gathers logs, it presents them in different ways, and it has interesting bill impacts. As a cloud economist I see it an awful lot where every time you have a monitoring company walk around the expo hall you'll trip over 40 of those. They're all gathering their data on the infrastructure from CloudWatch and interpreting that. Now you're paying for the monitoring company and you're paying for the API charges against it and CloudWatch was sort of frozen in amber more or less for a good five years or so. I wrote a bit of a hit piece late last year and had some fascinating conversations afterwards and it hasn't aged well. They're really coming to the fore with a lot of enhancements that are valuable on it. The problem is there's a tremendous amount of data. How do you get signal from it? How do you look at actionable things? If you're running 10,000 instances you're not looking at individual metrics or individual instances. You care about aggregates but you also care about observability. You care about drilling down into things. Werner talked about x-ray, the distributed tracing framework today. And I think we're rapidly seeing across the board that it all ties back to events. CloudWatch events is what's driving a lot of things like EventBridge and the idea of an event-centric architecture. It's really what we're trying to see software is evolving into. Yeah, it's one of those things. When you talk to that serverless term out there, events are at the center of them and how do I get some standardization across the industry? There's some open source groups that are trying to insert themselves and give some flexibility here. What I want to understand from EventBridge is it says, okay, it's Lambda and their ecosystem but is this going to be a Lambda-only ecosystem or will this lay the groundwork so that, yes, there are other clouds out there and look at what Azure has and other environments, will this eventually be able to extend beyond this or is this a Amazon proprietary ecosystem there? Do you have any insight there? It's a great question. I would argue that I guess one of the, taking a step back for a second, it would have to be almost irrelevant in some cases. When you start looking at serverless lock-in, it's not the fact that, ooh, there's this magic system only in one provider that will take my crappy code and run it for me. It's tied into the entire event ecosystem. It's tied into a bunch of primitives that do not translate very well. Now, inherently, by looking at what EventBridge is and the fact that anyone who wants to get integrated into their applications, you absolutely could wind up with a deep native integration coming from another large hyperscale cloud provider. The only question is, will that? Yeah, great point. I know when I've talked to some of the serverless ecosystem, it's that skill and understanding each environment because today, doing AWS versus doing Azure, there's still a lot of differences there. Sure, I can learn it, but. Yeah, and one of the things that I think is fascinating too is we've seen a couple of attempts at this before from other startups that are doing very similar things in open source or trying to do something themselves, but one of the things that changed this tremendously here is that this is AWS doing that. It doesn't matter what they do, what ridiculous name they give it. When they launch something, the world generally tends to sit up and notice just by sheer virtue of its scale and the fact that it's already built out and you don't have to build the infrastructure yourself to run these things. If anything has the chance to start driving a cohesive standard around this, it's something coming from someone like Amazon. Yeah, absolutely. All right, Corey, databases is always a hot topic. Latest stat from Werner is, I believe it was 150,000 databases that migrated. You called out and said, hey, why is Amazon.com on there? So Jeff Bari's like, well, they have a choice. And of course, Amazon would point out they were using a traditional database for a long time and now have completely unplugged the last instance. Oh yeah, it took them a long time but they finally got off of a database that was produced by a law firm. And I understand the reasons behind that, but I was talking with people afterwards, Amazon does have a choice, do they use? And if AWS wants to win them over to use their services, they have to sell them just like any other customer. And that's why it's on that slide as a customer. Now, if you're not in the ecosystem like some of us are, it looks a little disjointed of, wait, so you successfully sold yourself and put yourself on the slide? Okay, it doesn't quite work that way. It was actually, so the biggest thing I learned at the Amazon remarch show, when you talk about all the fulfillment centers and the robotics and machine learning, almost everything underneath there, it's got AWS services underneath it. So absolutely, it is one company, but yes, Amazon is the biggest customer of AWS, but that doesn't mean that there isn't somewhere, you know, I still haven't gotten the word that they are absolutely 100% on AWS, because we expect that there's some AS 400 sitting in the background, running one of those financial services things, maybe they finally migrated that one piece off. And that's why they're building an AWS 400. All right, Corey, what else, you know, either from the keynote or from your general observations about Amazon that you want to share? I want to say that it's very clear that Amazon is getting an awful lot of practice at putting these events on, and just tracking it year to year, not just the venue logistics, which, okay, great, get a bunch of people in the conference room, have a conversation, do a keynote, throw them out at the end, but the way they're pacing the keynotes, the way they're doing narratives, the customer stories that are getting up on stage are a lot less challenging than they were in years past, where people get on stage, they seem more comfortable. It's very clear that a number of Amazon execs, not just here, but at other summits, have been paying serious attention to how to speak publicly to 10,000 people at once. It's its own unique skill. Yeah, and you got to like that, you know, the two first customers that they put on, which we'll have on, you know, financial services, of course, big presence here in New York City, DoorDash has their headquarters, you know, just a few blocks uptown for years. Oh, yes. And good, deep stories. This isn't, you know, there is that mix that they did a good job, I thought, of kind of the Cloud 101, because still, many customers are very early on that journey. We are not all Cloud native, you know, run by the developers and everything there, but, you know, good mix of the technology and the new pieces for those people that have been in it a while, but still, you know, welcoming and embracing for how to get started. Yeah, and the stories are moving up the stack too. It's not, we had a bunch of VMs and we put them in a different place, yay! Which is great, everyone starts there, but now the stories are moving into running serious regulated workloads with higher level services. And that's great, because it's also not the far extreme Twitter for pets. We built this toy project last week when someone else fell through and now we have to give this talk. It's very clearly something large enterprises are serious about. Yeah, so Corey, last thing I want to ask you is, you know, remember in the early days, you know, that public cloud, oh, it was cheap and easy to use. Today, they have 200 instance types up there. You know, what does that mean for customers? You know, you are a cloud economist, so need your official opinion and diagnosis here. I think it reduces the question to, before you buy a bunch of reserved instances, are you on the right instance types? And the answer is, oh, almost certainly not, just based on statistics alone. So now it's a constant state of indecision. It's rooted in an epic game of battleship between two Amazon SVPs, and I really hope one of them wins already so we can stop getting additional instance types every couple of months. But so far, no luck. So in your perfect world, what's the announcement it reinvented fixes the problem? That's a really good question. I think that fundamentally I don't, and I don't think I have any customers who care what type of instance they're running on. They want certain resource levels, they want certain performance characteristics, but whatever you call that does not matter to them. And having to commit to what you picked for one to three years, that's a problem. You don't have to, you can go on demand, but you're leaving 30% of the table. Yeah, and I love that point. It's actually, I take a note to FINRA, I want to talk to them because they say they've done three major re-architectors in four years, so therefore, how do they make sure that they can get the latest price performance but still get good economics on the out there without having to pull them in? Well, for their regulatory authority, I just assume they get there with audit threats when it comes time for renegotiating. All right, you are Corey Quinn. I am Stu Miniman. We have a full day here of wall-to-wall coverage from AWS Summit, New York City. Thank you so much for watching theCUBE.