 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards brought to you by Amazon Web Services. Hi, and welcome back. I'm Stu Miniman. This is theCUBE's coverage of the AWS Public Sector Partner Awards. We're going to be talking about the Customer Obsession Mission Award winner. So happy to welcome for the program. First of all, welcoming back Joel Lipkin. He is the Chief Operating Officer of Four Points Technologies, which is the winner of the aforementioned award. And joining him, one of his customers, Ryan Hillard, who's a Assistant Developer with the United States Small Business Administration and of course, the SBA, an organization that a lot of people in the United States have gotten more familiar with this year. Joel and Ryan, thanks so much for joining us. Hi, Stu. Hey, Stu, thank you. All right, so Ryan, I'm sorry, Joel, as I mentioned, you've been on the program, maybe just give us a sketch, if you would, Four Points, your role, your partnership with AWS. Sure, I'm Joel Lipkin. I'm the Chief Operating Officer at Four Points Technology. Four Points is a value-added technology reseller focused on the federal government. And we've been working with federal customers since 2002. We're a service-disabled, veteran-owned small business, and we've been an Amazon partner since 2012. Wonderful, Ryan, if you could, obviously, as I mentioned, the SBA, a lot of people know for the PPP in 2020. If you could tell us a little bit about your role in the organization and tee up for us, if you would, the project that Four Points was involved with that you worked on. Sure, so I work for the Chief Information Officer, and I don't have this official title, but I am the de facto manager of our Amazon Web Services presence. This year, we've had a very exciting time with what's been happening in the world, the Paycheck Protection Program, and the SBA have been kind of leveraged to help the US economy recover in the face of the pandemic. And a key part of that has been using Amazon Web Services and our partnership with Four Points Technology to launch new applications to address those requirements. Wonderful, Joel, maybe connect for us. How long has Four Points been working with the SBA and start to give us a little bit more about the projects that you're working together, which, my understanding, was predated the COVID-19 incidents? Sure, we've been with SBA for several years now, and SBA was one of the earlier federal agencies that really saw the value in separating their procurement for cloud capacity from the development implementation and managed services that they either did internally or used third-party contractors for. So Four Points came in as a true value-added reseller of cloud to SBA, providing cloud capacity and also Amazon professional services. All right, so Ryan, bring us in a little bit the project that we're talking about here. What was the challenge? What were the goals you were looking to accomplish? Help flesh out a little bit, what you're doing there? Yeah, so most recently, Four Points partnered with us to deliver Lender Gateway. Lender Gateway is an application for small community-oriented lenders to submit paycheck protection loans. So some of these lenders don't have giant established IT departments like Big Banks do, and they needed an easier way to help their customers. We built that application in six days, and I called the Four Points cloud manager on a Saturday, and I said, help, help, I need two accounts by three o'clock, and Four Points was there for us. We got new account setup. We were able to build the application and deploy it literally in a week and meet the requirements set for us. And that system has now moved billions of dollars of loans. I don't know the exact amount, but it's done an incredible amount of work, and it wouldn't have been possible without our partnership with Four Points, so we're really excited about that. Yeah, if I could drill in there for a second. Absolutely, it's been an unprecedented, how fast that amount of money moved through the legislature to out to the end user. Help us understand a little bit, how much were you using AWS technologies and solutions that Four Points had helped you with, and how much of this was kind of a net new, you said you built a new application, you had to activate some things fast, help us understand a little bit more. Yeah, so that's a great question. So we have five major systems in AWS today, and so we're very comfortable with AWS's service offerings. What's interesting about Lender Gateway is that it's the first application we've built from scratch in a totally serverless capacity. So one of the hard technical requirements of the Paycheck Protection Program is that it has huge amounts of demand. So when we're launching a system, we need to know that that system will not go down, no matter how much traffic it receives or how many requests it has to handle. So we leaned on services like AWS Lambda, S3, DynamoDB, all of their serverless offerings to make sure that under no circumstances could this application fail, and it never did. We never even actually saw performance degradation. So a massive success from my perspective is the program manager. Well, that's wonderful. Joel, of course, you talk about scalability, you talk about uptime, those are really the promise that the public cloud has brought. Ryan did a good job of keying out some of the services from AWS, but help us understand architecturally how you help put that together and the various pieces underneath. Yes, Stu, it's interesting. Four points is really focused on delivering capacity. Our delivery model is very much built around giving our customers like Ryan full control over their cloud environments so that they can use it as transparently as though they were working with Amazon directly. They have access to all of the 200 plus services that AWS has. They also have direct access to billing and usage information that let them really optimize things. So this is sort of a perfect example of how well that works because SBA and Ryan knew their requirements better than anyone and they were able to leverage exactly the right AWS tools without having to apply to use them. It was as though they were working directly with AWS and the AWS environment on the technology side. And I will say SBA has been really a leader in using a variety of AWS services beyond standard compute and storage, not just in a tested environment, but in a live, very robust, really large environment. Yeah, Ryan, I was excited to hear about your Lambda usage, how you're building with a serverless architecture there. Could you just bring us through a little bit, how you ramped up on that, any tools or community solutions that you were leveraging to make sure you understood that and any lessons you learned along the way as you were building that application and rolling it out? Yeah, that's a great question. So I think one of the mistakes that I see program managers make all the time is thinking that they can migrate a workload to the cloud and keep it architecturally the same way it was. And what they quickly find out is that their old architecture that ran in their on-premise data center might actually be more expensive in the cloud than it was in their data center. And so when you're thinking about migrating a workload, you really need to come in with the assumption that you will actually be redesigning that workload and building the system in cloud-native technology. The concept of Lambda is so powerful, but it didn't exist for, it didn't exist 20 years ago when some of these systems and applications were being written. And now being able to leverage Lambda to only use exactly the compute you need means you can literally pay pennies on the dollar. One of the interesting things about the PPP program and everything happening in the world is that our main website, SVA.gov, is now serving, I think, 100 or 1,000 times more traffic daily than it was used to doing. But because we lean on serverless technology like Lambda, we have scaled non-linearly in terms of costs. So we're only paying like two or three times more than we used to pay per month, or we're doing 100 or 1,000 times more work, that's a win. That's a huge victory for cloud technology, in my opinion. Yeah, and on that point, I think the other thing that SVA did really amazingly well was take advantage of first reserved instances. But I think it was the day that Amazon announced savings plans as a cost control mechanism. Ryan and SVA were on them. They were our first customer to use savings plans. And I think they were probably the first customer in the federal space to use them. So it's not just using the technology smart, it's using the cost control tools really well. Also. Yeah, so Stu, I wanted to jump in here just because I'm so glad Joel brought that up. I was describing how workloads need to morph and transform as they move from legacy setups into more cloud native ones. Well, we were the first federal agency to buy savings plans. And for folks who don't know, savings plans essentially make your reserved instances fungible across services. So if you had a workload that was running on EC2 before, now instead of buying a reserved instance at a certain, you know, instance size, a certain family, you can instead buy a savings plan. And when your workload is ready to be moved from EC2 to something a little bit more containerized or cloud native like Fargate or Lambda, then you don't actually forego your reserved instance. I see program managers get into this weird spot where they bought reserved instances so they feel like they need to use them for a whole year so they don't upgrade their system until their reserved instances expired. And that's really the tail wagging the dog. We were very excited about savings plans. I think we bought them four days after they came out. And they have enabled us to do things like be very ambitious with how we rethink our systems and how we rebuild them. And I'm so glad you brought that up, Joel, because it's been such a key thing over this last year. Yeah, it's been a really interesting discussion point I've been having the last few years is the role between developers and that finance piece. So, you know, Ryan, you know, who is it that advises you on this? Is there somebody on the finance team from the SBA? Is it four points, you know, being aware of savings plan, it was something that was announced at re-invent, but it takes a while for that to trickle and oftentimes developers don't need to think about or think that they don't need to think about the financial implications of how they're architecting things. So how does that communication and decision-making happen? That's such a great question. I think it goes back to how four points is customer obsessed. One of our favorite things about using a small business reseller like four points, instead of dealing directly with our cloud service provider, is that four points provides us a service where every quarter, they do an independent assessment of our systems, how much we're spending and what that looks like from a service breakdown. And then we get that perspective and that opinion and we enrich it with our conversation with our AWS account manager, with our finance people. But having that third party independent person come in and say, hey, this is what we think has been so powerful because Joel and Dana and team have always had observations that nobody else has had. And those kinds of insights are nice to have when you have people who are suspicious of a vendor telling you to buy more things with them because they're the vendor. Yeah, thanks for that. From the lessons you've learned there, any final advice that you'd give your peers out there and how will you take what you've learned working on this project to other things either in the SBA or in talking with your peers in other organizations? So I have two big things. So one is go use a small business reseller. I would be remiss if I didn't use this opportunity to tell you as a member of the US Small Business Administration that there are some really, really great service providers out there. They are part of our programs like four points and they can help you achieve that balance between trusting your cloud service provider and having that third party entity that can come in and call bull and also call Yachty. So recognize good things and recognize bad things. So that would be number one. And then number two is moving to the cloud is so often sold as a technology project and it's like 20% technology and 80% culture and workforce change. And so be honest with yourselves and your executive teams that this isn't a technology project. This is a, we're going to change how we do business project and we're going to change the culture of this organization kind of project. All right, and Joel, I'll let you have the final word on lessons learned here and also about four points and congratulations again for the customer obsession mission award winner. Great, thanks Stu. We're so appreciative to Amazon for their recognition and to Ryan and SBA for giving us the opportunity to support such an important program. We are a small business, we are very much focused on delivering what our customers need in the cloud and it's just such a tremendous feeling to be able to work on a program like this that has such payoff for the whole country. All right, well, Joel and Ryan, thank you so much for sharing your updates. Such an important project this year. Thanks so much. Thank you, Stu. Thanks. Take care, Ryan. Stay with us for more coverage from the AWS Public Sector Partner Awards. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE.