 Hello, welcome to theCUBE's presentation of the AWS Showcase Season 1 Episode 2 with the ISV Startups Partners. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. We're joined by Morgan McClain, Director of Product Management at Splunk and Danielle Greshok, who is the Director of ISV Solution Architects at AWS. Welcome to the show, thanks for coming on. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Great to see both of you, both CUBE alumni, but the Splunk AWS relationship has been doing very, very well. You guys are doing great business, enabling this app revolution and cloud scale has been going extremely well. So let's get into it. You guys are involved in a lot of action around application revolution, around open telemetry and open source. So let's get into it. What's the latest? Well, I'll just jump in first, obviously last year, not last year, but in 2020, we launched the AWS Distro for Open Telemetry. The idea being essentially, we're able to bring in data from partners, from infrastructure running on AWS, from apps running on AWS to really be able to increase observability across all cloud assets at your entire cloud platform. So, Morgan, if you want to chime in on how Splunk has worked on it. Yeah, I mean, open telemetry is super exciting. Obviously, there's a lot of partnership points between Amazon and Splunk, but open telemetry is probably one of them that's the most visible to people who aren't already, maybe using these two products together. And so as Daniel mentioned, Amazon has their own distribution of open telemetry, Splunk has their own as well. And of course, there's the main open source distribution that everybody knows and loves. Just for our viewers, just for clarity's sake, the separate distributions are fundamentally very similar to almost identical to what's offered in the open source space, but they come pre-configured and they come with support guarantees from each company, meaning that you can actually get full support for an open source project, which is really fantastic for customers. And as Daniel mentioned, it's a great demonstration of the alliance between Splunk and Amazon web services. For example, the AWS distro, when you use it, can export data to Amazon CloudWatch, various Amazon backed open source initiatives like Prometheus and others, and to Splunk Observability Cloud and to Splunk Enterprise. So it's a place that we've worked very closely together and it's something that we're very excited about. So Morgan, I want to get your take on the product management side and also how products are built these days. One of the big things we're seeing in cloud is that open source has been the big enabler for a lot of refactoring. And you got multiple distributions, but the innovation's on top of that. Can you talk about how you see the productization of new innovations with open source as you guys go into this market? Because this is the new dynamic with cloud. We're seeing examples all over the place. I see Amazon's going the next level with what they're doing and that open source. It's not a one game for all of it. You can have mix and match. Take us through the product angle. And in many ways, this is just another wave of the same thing, right? Like, if you think back in time, we all use, it's still used in many cases, virtual machines, most of those are based on Linux, right? Another large open source project. And so open source software has been accelerating innovation in the cloud space and in the computing space generally for a very long time, which is fantastic. Our excitement with something like open telemetry comes from both the project's capabilities but also what we can do with it. So for those who aren't already familiar with open telemetry, open telemetry allows you to extract really critical system telemetry application signals and everything else you need from your own applications, from your services, from your infrastructure, from everything that you're running in a cloud environment. You can then send that data to another location for processing. And so John, you asked like, how does this accelerate innovation? What does it unlock? Well, the insight you can gain from this data means you can become so much more efficient as a development organization. You can make your applications so much more effective because when you send that data to something like Splunk Observability Cloud, to something like Amazon CloudWatch, do various other solutions on the market, they can give you deep, deep insight into your application's performance, to its structure. They can help you reduce outages. And so it's very, very powerful because it allows organization to use tools like Splunk, like Amazon, like other things to innovate so much more effectively. Danielle, can you comment on the AWS side because this is again, another big point. You guys are going next level and you're starting to see patterns in the ISV world, certainly on the architecture side of partners doing things differently now on top of what they've already done. Could you share how AWS is helping customers accelerate? Well, just as Morgan was talking about what open telemetry provides, you can see how from a partnership perspective, this is so valuable, right? But what the partner team here at AWS is in the business of doing is really enabling customer choice, right? And having that ability to plug in and pull data from different sources, post it to different sources, make it available for visibility across all of your resources is very powerful. And it's something from the partner community that we really value because we want customers to be able to select best of breed solutions, what works for their business, which businesses are different and they may have different needs. And that also fosters that true innovation. A small company is going to develop and release software a lot differently than a large enterprise. And so being able to support something like open telemetry just enables that for all different kinds of customers. Morgan, add to that because the velocity of releases, certainly operational, stability is key. Every time security, uptime, these are top concerns. And there's data too, you got the data in here. So you got a lot of data moving around, a lot of value, what's your take? Yeah, so I'll speak with some specifics. So a challenge that developers have had for years, when you're developing large services, which you can now do with platforms like AWS, it's very easy to go develop huge deployments. But a challenge they have is you go and build a mess. And I've worked earlier in my career on web services and I remember in one of the first orgs I was in, I was one of the five people who really understood our e-commerce stack. And so I would get dragged into all these meetings and I'd have to go draw the 50 services we had and how they interacted and the changes that were made in the last week. And without observability tools, like Splunk Observability Cloud, like the ones offered by Amazon, like the ones that are backed by the data that comes with open telemetry, organizations basically rely on people like this to go draw out their deployments so they understand what it is they've built. Well, as you can imagine, this crimps your development velocity because most of your engineers, most of your tech leads, most of everyone else don't actually understand what it is they've built, what it is they're running because they need that global context. You get something like open telemetry and the solutions that consume the data from it and suddenly now all your developers have that context, all of them when they're adding functionality to a service or they're updating their infrastructure can actually understand how it interacts with the rest of the broader application. This lets you speed up your time to development. This lets you ship more safely, more securely. And finally, when things do go wrong, which will be less frequent, but when they do go wrong, you can fix them super rapidly. If I'm a customer, let me ask a question. If I'm a customer and I say, okay, I love AWS, I love Splunk. I love open telemetry. I got to have open source as technology innovation is happening. What's the integration? What are some of the standards? Can you take us through how that's working together with you guys as a shared platform? Yeah, so let's take the Amazon distribution of open telemetry or even the Splunk one. One of the first things they do is they include all of the receivers, all of the sort of data capture components that you need out of the box for platforms like AWS, right? And so right away, you get that power and flexibility where you're getting all access to all of these data sources, right? And so that's part of that partnership. And additionally, once the data comes into open telemetry, you can now send that to various different data sources, including as Danielle mentioned to multiple at the same time. So you can use whatever tools you want. And so when you talk about like what the partnership is actually providing to you as a customer, and still this is just within the context of open telemetry. Obviously there's a much broader partnership between these two companies than just that. But within the context of open telemetry, it means you can download one of these distributions. It's fully supported, it works with both solutions and everything is just great, right? You don't need to go fiddle with that out of the box. To be clear, open telemetry is a batteries included project, right? This means that even the standard distributions of open telemetry include the components you need. You have to go directly reference them and ensure that they're packaged in there, but they exist, right? But the nice thing about these distributions is that it's done, it's out of the box. You don't even have to worry about is something missing or do I need to include new exporters or new receivers? It's all there, it's pre-configured, it just works. And if something goes wrong, you have a support contract, you pick up the phone, you talk to someone, you get it fixed. Tanya, what's the Amazon side? Because agility and scale is one of the highlights you guys are seeing. How does this tie into that? And how are you guys working backwards from the customers to support the partners? Well, I think just to add on essentially to what Morgan said, I think that AWS is a cloud platform, has always really had a focus on developers. And we talk a lot about how AWS and Amazon as a whole really embraces this continuous integration and continuous deployment methods inside of our organization. And we talk about services and observability is a huge part of that. The only way that you're actually able to release hundreds, thousands of times a day like Amazon does is by having an observability platform to be able to measure metrics, see changes in the environment, to be able to roll back if you need to, and to be able to quickly mitigate any challenges or anything that goes wrong at any part in the process. And so when we preach that to our customers, I think it's something that we do that because we live it and breathe it. And so things such as open telemetry and such as the products that Splunk builds, those are also ways in which we believe our customers can achieve that. Yeah, and we can, I mean, as I mentioned before, this partnership goes well beyond open telemetry, right? And so if you go use like Splunk Enterprise, Enterprise Cloud, Splunk Observability Cloud and you're running on AWS, you have excellent support and excellent visibility into your Amazon infrastructure, into the services and applications you've deployed on top of that infrastructure. We try and give you, and I think we do succeed in this, we give you the best possible experience, the deepest possible visibility into what it is you've deployed on AWS so that you can be even more successful as a business and so that you can be even more successful on AWS as a platform. Yes, this is a great conversation, Morgan. You mentioned the early days of web services, AWS stands for Amazon web services, built on web services. So interesting throwback there, but made me think about the days of the early days of web services. If you look at data, what's going on now that the top partners in AWS, you're seeing a lot of people thinking about data differently, they're refactoring, a lot of machine learning, a lot of AI going on at scale. So then you got cloud native, things like Kubernetes and these new services being stood up and teared down with automation. A whole new operating model's coming. And so when you think about observability, the importance of it. I mean, can you share your perspective on this whole nother level? I mean, this, I always say the whole nother level sounds cliche, but it is next level. I mean, this is like completely different. What's your reaction to that? There's a ton of factors here, right? So as you point out, companies are totally shifting how they use their cloud infrastructure. And part of this you see during their cloud migrations, the part of it you see after, and they're shifting from their sort of stateful VMs that they may have had in the past to infrastructure that they tear down and put up like regularly. And there's a lot more automation. With this comes, as I mentioned before, complexity, right? And also with this comes more and more businesses becoming even more reliant on their digital infrastructure. And so not having observability into your applications, into your services, into your infrastructure, to me is akin to running a business, say running a large warehousing or distribution company, but not having any idea where you're shipping products or where things are. Or not having any accounting or CFO, right? Like businesses become so digital. Business is so reliant on technology. And that's unlocked a ton of new things. It's great. But not having visibility into how that technology works or what it is that's deployed or how to fix it is akin to having no visibility to anything else in your business. It's nuts. And so observability is super, super critical, particularly for customers who are adopting this new wave of cloud technologies on platforms like AWS. Daniel, on your side too, you're enabling this new capability so that businesses can do it. The part is to, we're calling it a super cloud. We've been calling it a super cloud kind of dynamic where new things are happening with the data and you guys are evolving with that. Can you share what you're seeing on your side as your partners start to go to the next level? What are you guys doing? Can you, how does it all come together? Well, we always talk about, you know, what has happened with data in the last couple of years, which the cloud is really enabled around, you know, variety and velocity. And there's one other view that's escaping me right now. But essentially, you know, all of this data is coming in and providing the ability for us to make better decisions, to build better products, to provide better experiences for customers. And so I just think, you know, the open telemetry project, as well as what Splunk is doing is just another example of how we're taking this massive amount of data and being able to provide better experiences and outcomes for customers. And you guys have been working long together for a long time, Splunk. And it's been a great partners for going back here. I've been covering it on theCUBE and SiliconANGLE. So we know that. It changes key observability. Can you imagine a company without a CFO? Morgan, I mean, that just boggles your mind. But that's kind of what it's like right now. So, and the people who take advantage of that are winning, right? So it's like, that's the key. Yeah. Yeah, no, I mean, even in my own career, right? I've moved between different companies. And I remember when I joined Google in particular, which is where I worked at previously, I was very impressed with their internal observability tools. And I'm certain, you know, I haven't worked at Amazon. I'm certainly, I assume inside of Amazon, they're excellent as well as a lot of the large, large cloud firms these days. But it was so refreshing going from an organization where if we had some kind of outage or something went wrong, there were like a very small set of people who could actually understand what was going on. And then you would just have to manually dive through logs and correlate requests manually between services. It's very challenging. And so when things went wrong, they went wrong for a long, long time. And so the companies that understood this even in the past are already very successful as a result. I think now the rest of the industry is really in the midst of adopting these observability practices and the tools that are required to implement them. Because you're right, otherwise your development velocity slows down. Now you're getting out competed by your competition. And then when you have a problem, it blows up for ages. And once again, your competition can take advantage of it. And can you just summarize the observability piece relative to the open telemetry? Where is that going to go? Where do you see that evolving? Obviously open source is growing like crazy. We all know that. But open telemetry in particular and open source, because this is a big hot area. Yes, so to set the stage for people, open telemetry unlocks observability in many ways. As I mentioned earlier, open telemetry is how you capture data out of your application. It doesn't process it. It's not a replacement for something like Amazon CloudWatch or any of Splunk's products. But it's how we get the data out of your system, which is a remarkably difficult problem. I won't dive into it today. But those who work in this space are very aware that's why this project exists and it's so big that actually extracting information, metrics, logs, distributed traces, profiles, everything else from your applications and from your infrastructure is very, very difficult. So for open telemetry, where it's going is just continually getting better at extracting more types of data from more sources and doing that more effectively for people in a more standardized way. That will unlock firms like Splunk, firms like Amazon and others to better process this data. In terms of where that's going, the sky's the limit, right? Like everyone's familiar with APM, people are familiar with infrastructure monitoring. But there's a lot more capabilities coming there for security analytics, for network performance monitoring, for getting down all the way to single lines of code in your application, how they impact everything. There's just so much power that's coming to the industry right now. And I'm really excited to see where things go in the next few years. And Danielle, you're in the middle of all the action as the solution architects really set the stage for their companies and the ISVs. And this is a big hot area. What are the patterns you're seeing and what are some of the best practices that you're doing to help companies? Right, so I think summarizing our entire conversation, the big things that we're seeing in the market is essentially more and more companies are looking to move to a continuous deployment and a continuous integration environment. And they're looking to innovate faster and spend less time hot-patching or hot-fixing their environments. And they want to spend more time innovating. And so, the patterns that we're seeing is what I see and what I actually experience firsthand at Reinvent when I talk to probably over 40 or 50 ISVs is customers want to know in their environment where are their changes, where are their security vulnerabilities, where are their data changes and what are customers really experiencing, whether it's latency, poor experience throughout their products, those types of things. So security data and observability are just key to all of that experience. And that's what we're definitely seeing as patterns, what we're seeing with our customers and also what value our ISVs are providing in that space. That's awesome. And the other thing I would observe is that there's more of an integration story going on around joint projects, whether it's open source. Absolutely. Because this is where we want to get that services connected. And it's mutual beneficial. I mean, this is really another new kind of interoperable cloud scale. And if I could say one thing else there, I think that a lot of the customers who are trying to move into the cloud now are maybe not technology-forward companies and they really need that solution. And that's very important. I think COVID has pushed a lot of companies into the cloud, maybe very quickly. And that has been something else we've observed in the market. So solutions and full solutions between ISVs and ISVs or ISVs and AWS is just becoming more and more common thing that we see. And you mentioned, John, in the open source space as well. Like we're certainly from Amazon and Spluck. So we're talking a lot about those. But there's a lot of other firms involved in projects like open telemetry. And I think it's very endearing, very heartening to see how well they cooperate in this community and how when their interests are aligned, how effective they can be. And it's been very exciting to work in the space and very pleasant, honestly, to see everything come together with this huge set of customers and partners. Yeah, the pleasant surprise of the pandemic has been that people come into the cloud and they like it and they say, this works. And then they double down on it. Then they realize there's more there and they refactor. So you're seeing real examples of that. So this is a great discussion, great success story, congratulations. Morgan Danielle, great partnership between Splunk and AWS. We've been following for a long time. And again, this highlights this whole, another level of integrating super cloud kind of experience where people are getting more capabilities and doing more together. So great stuff. And this is just one facet of that, right? Like there's all the other connections of like Splunk Enterprise, Splunk Security Analytics, products and others. It's a deep, deep partnership between these firms. Yeah, and the companies that innovate and get that new capability are going to have an advantage. And you're seeing us, right? And it's awesome. And great stuff. Thank you for coming on and sharing that insight. Thank you. Congratulations, Morgan on over there at Splunk. Great stuff. And Danielle, thanks for coming on and sharing the AWS perspective. Thanks for having me. And you guys are going to the next level and you're moving up the stack as they say, all good stuff for customers. Thanks. Thank you. Okay, this is season one, episode two of the AWS partner showcase. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Thanks for watching.