 We're here on theCUBE covering AWS Storage Day 2022. Kevin Miller joins us. He's the vice president and general manager of Amazon S3. Hello Kevin, good to see you again. Hey Dave, it's great to see you as always. It seems like just yesterday we were celebrating the 15th anniversary of S3 and of course the launch of the modern public cloud, which started there. When you think back Kevin over the past year, what are some of the trends that you're seeing and hearing from customers? What do they want to see AWS focused more on? What's the direction that you're setting? Yeah, well Dave, really, I think there's probably three trends that we're seeing really pop this year. I think one, just given the kind of macroeconomic situation right now is cost optimization. That's not a surprise. Everyone's just taking a closer look at what they're using and where they might be able to pair back. And I think that's a place that obviously S3 has a long history of helping customers save money, whether it's through our new storage classes, things like our Glacier instant retrieval storage class that we launched to reinvent last year, or things like our S3 storage lens capability to really dig in and help customers identify where their costs are being spent. But so certainly a lot of customers are focused on that right now and for obvious reasons. I think the second thing that we're seeing is just a real focus on simplicity. And it kind of goes hand in hand with cost optimization because what a lot of customers are looking for is how do I take the staff that I have and do more this year, right? Continue to innovate, continue to bring new applications or top line generating revenue applications to the market but not have to add a lot of extra headcount to do that. And so what they're looking for is management and simplicity. How do I have all of this IT infrastructure and not have to have people spending a lot of their time going into kind of routine maintenance and operations? And so that's an area that we're spending a lot of time. We think we have a lot of capability today but looking at ways that we can continue to simplify, make it easier for customers to manage their infrastructure, things like our S3 intelligent tiering storage class which just automatically gives cost savings for data that's not routinely accessed. And so that's a big focus for us this year as well. But then I think the last and probably third thing I would highlight is an emerging theme or it's been a theme but really continuing to increase in volume is all around sustainability. And our customers are looking for us to give them the data and the assurances for them for their own reports and their own understanding of how sustainable is my infrastructure. And so within AWS, of course, we're on a path towards operating with 100% renewable energy by 2025 as well as helping the overall Amazon goal of achieving net zero carbon by 2040. So those are some big lofty goals. We've been giving customers greater insights with our carbon footprint tool. And we think that the cloud continues to be just a great place to run and reduce customers carbon footprint for the similar storage capacity or similar compute capacity. But that's just going to continue to be a trend in the theme that we're looking at ways that we can continue to help customers do more to aggressively drive down their carbon footprint. I mean, it makes sense. It's like partnering up with the cloud, same thing on security. There's that shared responsibility model, same thing now with ESG. And on the macro, it's interesting, Kevin. This is the first time I can remember where it used to be if there's a downturn, it's cost optimization. You go to simplicity, but at the same time with digital, the rush to digital, people still are thinking about, okay, how do I invest in the future? So, but let's focus on cost for a moment and we'll come back to sort of the data value. Can you tell us how AWS helps customers save on storage beyond just the price per terabyte actions that you could take? I mean, I love that. You guys should keep doing that. But what other knobs are you turning? Yeah, right. And we've had obviously something like 15 cost reductions or price reductions over the years. And we're just going to continue to use that lever where we can, but it's things like the launch of our Glacier Instant Retrieval Storage class that we did last year at re-invent, where that's now four tenths of a cent per gigabyte month for data that customers access pretty infrequently, maybe a few times a year, but they can now access that data immediately and just pay a small retrieval fee when they access that data. And so that's an example of a new capability that reduces customers' total cost of ownership, but is not just a straight up price reduction. I mentioned S3 intelligent tiering. That's another case where, you know, when we launched Glacier Instant Retrieval, we integrated that with intelligent tiering as well. So we have the archive instant access tier within intelligent tiering. And so now data that's not accessed for 90 days is just automatically put into AIA and then results in a reduced storage cost to customers. So again, leaning into this idea that customers are telling us, just do, you know, you know what should be done for my data to help me reduce costs. Can you just do it and sort of give me the right defaults? And that's kind of, that's what we're trying to do with things like intelligent tiering. We've also, you know, outside of the S3 part of our portfolio, we've been adding similar kinds of capabilities within some of our file services. So things like our, you know, Elastic File Service launched a one zone storage class as well as an intelligent tiering capability to just automatically help customers save money. I think in some cases up to 92% on their EFS storage costs with this automatic intelligent tiering capability. And then the last thing I would say is that we also are just continuing to help customers in other ways, like I said, our storage lens is a great way for customers to really dig in and figure out, because, you know, often customers will find that they may have, you know, certain data sets that someone's forgotten about or they're capturing more data than they expected perhaps in a logging application or something that ends up generating a lot more data than they expected. And so storage lens helps them really zoom in very quickly on, you know, this is the data, here's how frequently it's being accessed and then they can make decisions about is that data I keep? How long do I keep it? Maybe that's good candidate to move down into one of our very cold storage classes like Glacier Deep Archive where they still have the data, but they don't expect a need to actively retrieve it on a regular basis. That's the old bromide, if you can measure it, you can manage it, so if I can see it, visualize it, then I can take actions. When you think about S3, it's always been great for archival workloads, but you made some updates to Glacier that changed the way that we maybe think about archived data. Can you talk about those changes specifically? What it means for how customers should leverage AWS services going forward? Yeah, and actually, you know, Glacier is coming up on its 10th, 10 year anniversary and all I guess, so we're pretty excited about that. And, you know, but there's just been a real increase in the pace of innovation, I think over the last three or four years there. So we launched the Glacier Deep Archive capability in 2019, 2018, I guess it was, and then we launched Glacier Instant Retrieval of course last year. So really what we're seeing is, we now have three storage classes that cover, that are part of the Glacier family. So everything from millisecond retrieval for that data that needs to be accessed quickly when it is accessed, but isn't for being accessed regularly. So maybe a few times a year. And there's a lot of use cases that we're seeing really quickly emerge for that. Everything from user generated content like photos and videos to big broadcaster archives and particularly in media and entertainment segment, seeing a lot of interest in Glacier Instant Retrieval because that data is pretty cold on a regular basis, but when they wanna access it, they want a huge amount of data, petabytes of data potentially back within seconds. And that's the capability we can provide with Glacier Instant Retrieval. And then, you know, on the other end of the spectrum with Glacier Deep Archive, again, we have customers that have huge archives of data that they'd be looking to, you know, have that three AZ durability that we provide with Glacier to make sure that data is protected, but really, you know, expect to access it once a year, if ever, now it could be a backup copy of data or secondary or tertiary copy of data. That could be data that they just don't have an active use for. And I think that's one of the things we're starting to see grow in a lot is customers that have shared data sets where they may not need that data right now, but they do wanna keep it because as they think about, again, these like new applications that can drive top line growth, they're finding that they may go back to that data six months or nine months from now and start to really actively use it. So if they want that option value to keep that data so they can use it down the road, Glacier Deep Archive or Glacier Flexible Retrieval, which is kind of our storage class right in the middle of the road, those are great options for customers to keep the data, keep it safe and secure, but then have it pretty accessible when they're ready to get it back. Got it, thank you for that. So, okay, so customers have choices. I want to get into some of the competitive differentiators. And of course, we were talking earlier about cost optimization, which is obviously an important topic given the macro environment, you know, but there's more. And so help us understand what's different about AWS in terms of helping customers get value from their data. Cost reduction is a component of value, part of the TCO for sure, but just beyond being a cloud bit bucket, you know, just a storage container in the cloud. What are some of the differentiators that you can talk to? Yeah, well, Dave, I mean, I think that when it comes to value, I think there's a tremendous benefits in AWS well beyond just cost reduction. I think, you know, part of it is S3 now has built, I think an earned reputation for being resilient, for storing, you know, at massive scale, giving customers that confidence that they will be able to scale up. You know, we store more than 200 trillion objects. We regularly peak it over 100 million requests per second. So customers can build on S3 and Glacier with the confidence that we're going to be there to help their applications grow and scale over time. And then I think that the, in all of the applications, both first party and third party, the customers can use and services that they can use to build modern applications is an incredible benefit. So whether it's all of our serverless offerings, things like Lambda or containers and everything we have to manage that, or whether it's the deep analytics and machine learning capabilities we have to help really extract, you know, value insight from data in near real time. You know, we're just seeing an incredible number of customers build those kinds of applications where they're processing data and feeding the results right back into their business right away. So I'm just going to briefly mention a couple, like, you know, one example is ADP that really helps their customers measure, compare and sort of analyze their workforce. They have, you know, a couple of petabytes of data, something like 25 billion individual data points. And they're just processing that data continuously through their analytics and machine learning applications to then again, give those insights back to their customers. Another good example is AstraZeneca, you know, they are processing petabytes and petabytes of genomic sequencing data and they have a goal to analyze 2 million genomes over the next four years. And so they're just really scaling up on AWS both from a pure storage point of view, but more importantly from all of the compute and analytics capability on top that is really critical to achieving that goal. And then, you know, beyond the first party services we have, as I mentioned, it's really our third party, right? The AWS Partner Network provides customers an incredible range of choice in off-the-shelf applications that they can quickly provision and make use of the data to drive those business insights. And I think today the APN has something like 100,000 partners over in 150 countries and we specifically have a storage competency partner where customers can go to get those applications that directly work, you know, on top of their data and really, like I said, drive some of that insight. So, you know, I think it's that overall benefit of being able to really do a lot more with their data than just have it sit, idle, you know, that's where I think we see a lot of customers interested in driving additional value. I'm glad you mentioned the ecosystem and I'm glad you mentioned the storage competency as well. So there are other storage partners that you have even though you're ahead of a big storage division. And then I think there's some other under the cover things too. I've recently wrote, actually have written about this a lot, things like nitro and rethinking virtualization and how to do, you know, offloads. The security that comes, you know, fundamentally as part of the platform is, I think, you know, architecturally is something that leads the way in the industry for sure. So, you know, there's a lot we could unpack. But you've fundamentally changed the storage market over the last 16 years. And again, I've written about this extensively. We used to think about storage in blocks or you got, you know, somebody who's really good in files. There were companies that dominated each space with legacy on-prem storage. You know, we think about object storage, Kevin. It was a niche, right? It was something used for archival. It was known for its simple get put syntax, great for cheap and deep storage. And S3 changed that. Why do you think that's happened and S3 has evolved, the object has evolved the way it has. And what's the future hold for S3? Yeah, I mean, I, you know, Dave, I think that probably the biggest overall trend there is that customers are looking to build cloud native applications where as much of that application is managed as they can have. They don't wanna have to spend time managing the underlying infrastructure, the compute and storage and everything that goes around it. And so a fully managed service like S3 where there's no provisioning storage capacity, there's, you know, we provide the resiliency and the durability that just really resonates with customers. And I think that increasingly customers are seeing that they wanna innovate across the entire range of business. So it's not about a central IT team anymore. It's about engineers that are embedded within lines of business, innovating around what is critical to achieve their business results. So, you know, if they're in a manufacturing segment, how can we pull data from sensors and other instrumentation off of our equipment and then make better decisions about when we need to do predictive maintenance, how quickly we can run our manufacturing line looking for inefficiencies. And so it's, we've developed around our managed offerings like S3. We've just developed, you know, customers who are investing and executing on plans and, you know, transformations that really give them, you know, put digital technology directly into the line of business that they're looking for. And I think that trend is just gonna continue. I mean, I, you know, people sometimes ask me, well, I mean, 16 years, you know, isn't S3 done? And I would say by no stretch are we done. We have plenty of feedback from customers on ways that we can continue to simplify, reduce the kinds of things they need to do when they're looking, for example, at rolling out new security policies and parameters across their entire organization. So raising the bar there, finding, you know, raising the bar on how they can efficiently manage their storage and reduce costs. So I think we have plenty of innovation ahead of us to continue to help customers provide that fully managed capability. Yeah, I often say, Kevin, the next 10 years ain't going to be like the last in cloud. So really thank you for coming on theCUBE and sharing your insights. Really appreciate it. Absolutely, Dave. Thanks for having me. You're welcome. Okay, keep it right there for more coverage of AWS Storage Day 2022 in theCUBE.