 From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. Hello everyone, welcome to this special CUBE virtual coverage of the AWS Summit virtual online. This is an event that Amazon normally has in person in San Francisco, but now it's virtual around the world, Seoul, Korea, in Tokyo, all over the world in Asia Pacific and in North America. I'm John Furrier here with Stu Miniman. We're kicking off AWS virtual with the CUBE virtual. I'm in Palo Alto with the quarantine crew. You're in Massachusetts in Boston with the quarantine crew there. Stu, great to have you on to talk about AWS virtual summit. Yeah, John, it's great to see you. It's been interesting times doing all these remote interviews, as many of us say. I sure don't complain to the hotels, but I do miss the communities. I do miss the hallway conversation, but great to see you. John, love the midnight madness shirt from re-invent last year. Well, we want to thank Amazon for stepping up with some sponsorship for a lot of us to do the virtual CUBE alongside their virtual event because now it's a global community. It's all virtual. There are no boundaries. The CUBE has no boundaries. Stu, we've got a great program. We have Corey Quinn coming up. Expect to hear from him last week in AWS. He's known for, he's a rising star in the community, certainly CUBE guest and also guest host and analyst for the CUBE. We expect to hear all the latest from his big Zoom post controversy to really what's going on in AWS around what services are hot. I know you're going to do a great interview with him. But let's talk about Amazon. We're seeing a ton of activity. Obviously, most recently last week was the Jedi thing, which was an agency protest kind of confidential. Microsoft blew that up big time with a post by their worldwide comms person, Frank Shaw, countered by Drew Herdner, who's the comms global lead for AWS. And so a war of words is ensuing. This is again pointing to the cloud native war that's going on with the Jedi conference. I mean, get Jedi contract for $10 billion, which is a word to Microsoft. This shows that the heat is on, Stu. This is a absolute bloodbath between AWS and Microsoft. We're seeing it play out now virtually with Amazon, AI, large scale cloud. This is huge. This is another level, a DEF CON 1 basically. Your thoughts? Yeah, John, you've covered this really well. It's been really interesting spot. Number one, you talk about the security requirement. When AWS launched the GovCloud, had the CIA as a client early on many years ago, it was the green light for many companies to go from, wait, is the cloud secure enough? Too well, it's good enough for the federal government in the US. It's probably good enough for the enterprise. When Microsoft won Jedi, they didn't have all the certifications to meet what was in the contract. They had a ticking clock to make sure that they could meet those security engagements, as well as one of the pieces on the test board that moved was Oracle made a partnership announcement with Azure. We know the federal government uses Oracle quite a bit, so they can now run that in Azure and not have the penalties from Oracle. So many have said, hey, AWS, why don't you kind of let that one piece of business go? You do a lot of federal business, but those ripple effects we understand from one contract kind of moves things around. Well, my take on this is just to tip us in the teapot. Either Microsoft's got something that we don't know or they're running scared. My prediction, Stu, is that the clock is going to tick out. DoD is going to award the contract again to Microsoft because I don't think the DoD wants to change based upon the data that I'm getting from my reporting and then ultimately Amazon will keep this going in court because Microsoft has been deficient on winning the deal and that is by the judge and in government contracts, as you know, when you're deficient, you're ineligible. So essentially on the tech specs, Microsoft failed to meet the criteria of the contract and they're deficient. They still can't host top secret content even if they wanted to. This is going to be a game changer and if this comes out to be true, it'll be a huge tech scandal. If it's true, then AWS is going to have egg on their face. Okay, so move past Jedi. This speaks to the large scale problems that are having with COVID. You're seeing Amazon, they're all working at home, but they still got to run the servers. They can do it, they got cloud native, you got DevOps. But for their customers, Stu, the people who are trying to do hybrid, what are you hearing in terms of the kinds of situations that people are doing? Are they still going to work with masks on? Are there still data centers that need to be managed? What are you hearing in the tech world, Stu, around COVID-19 and as the cloud becomes more apparent, it's obvious that if you're not cloud native, you're going to be on the wrong side of history here. This is pretty obvious. Yeah, well, absolutely, John, that there is a bit of a tailwind behind cloud with COVID-19, everything from, you mentioned work from home, everybody needs to be on their VPN. They need to access their services where they are. If you've got a global workforce, if you thought that your infrastructure was going to be able to handle that, you might not be in for a good story. AWS is meeting that need. There's been some of the cloud providers that have had performance issues, have had to prioritize which customers can get access to things. AWS is standing strong, they're meeting their customers and they're answering the call of cloud. We know that AWS puts a huge investment into their environment. If you compare an availability zone from AWS, it is very, very sturdy. It's not just a small cluster, and they say, hey, we can run all over the place. To be specific, John Azure has been having some of those performance issues and has been some concerns. Corey actually wrote a really good article talking about that it actually put a bad view on public cloud in general, but we know not all public clouds are the same. So Google has been doing quite well, managing the demand spike, so has AWS. Microsoft has needed to respond a little bit. It's as you mentioned, Microsoft's outages. Microsoft actually got caught on their 8K filing, which I just had to be going through and they noticed that they said they had all this uptime for the cloud. Turns out it wasn't the cloud, it was the team's product. They had to actually put a strike of line through it legally. So a lot of people getting called out, but it doesn't matter, it's a crisis. I think that's not going to be a core issue. This is going to be what technology has been needed the most. And I got to ask you, Stu, what was the last time you and I talked about virtual desktops? Because, hey, if you're working at home and you're not at your desk, you might need some stuff on your desk. This is a real issue. I mean, it's kind of a corner case in tech, but virtual desktops, if you're not at the office, you need to have that at home. This is a huge issue and it's been a surge in demand. Yeah, there were jokes in the community that finally it's the year of VDI, but desktop as a service, John, is an area that took a little while to get going. So, you know, Dave Valdonte and I were just having a conversation about this. You and Dave interviewed me when Amazon released Workspaces and it was like, ah, you know, Citrix is doing so well and VDI, you know, isn't the hotness anymore, but desktop as a service has grown. If you talk about desktop as a service compared to VDI, VDI is still, you know, a bit of a heavy lift. Even if you've got, you know, hyper-converged infrastructure to roll this out, it's a couple of months to put these whole solutions together. Now, if you have some of that infrastructure, can you scale it? Can you build them up much faster? Yes, you can. But if you're starting to enable your workforce a little bit faster, desktop as a service is going to be faster. AWS has a strong solution with Workspaces. It really is that enablement and it's also putting pressure on the SaaS providers. One, they need to scale and two, they need to be responsive that some of their customers need to scale up really fast and some of them need to dial things down. You know, always worry about, you know, some of these contracts that the SaaS providers put you in. So, you know, customers need to make sure they're being loud and clear with their providers. If you need help, if you need to adjust something, you know, push back on them because they should be responsive because we know that there is a broad impact on this, but it will not be a permanent impact. So, you know, these are the times that companies need to work closely with customers because otherwise, you will either make a customer for life or you will have somebody that will not be saying good about you for a long time. Well, Stu, let's just quickly run through some of the highlights so far on the virtual conference, virtual event. Ossie Amazon pre-announced last month, the Windows Migration Service, which has been a big part of their business. They've been doing it for about 11 years. So, we're going to have an interview with an AWS person to talk about that. Also, AppFlow is announced as well. That's part of the virtual kind of private, you know, private connects. So, you know, you're seeing that right here, large-scale data lakes breaking down those silos, moving data from the cloud, from the console into the top applicants like Salesforce is the big one. So, that was kind of pre-announced. The big story here is the Kendra availability and the augmented AI availability among other things. This is this big story. This kind of shows the Amazon track record. They pre-announced it, reinvented it and tried to run as fast as they can to get it shipping. The focus of AI, the focus of large-scale capacity, whether it's building on top of EC2, serverless, Lambda AI, all this is kind of coming together. Data, high-capacity operational throughput, and added value. This seems to be the highlights, your reaction. Yeah, so John, you know, AppFlow is an interesting one. We were just talking about fast providers. An area that we've been spending a lot of time talking with the ecosystem is, you know, my data's all over the place. You know, yes, there's my data centers public cloud, but there's all of these fast providers. So, you know, if I have data in service now, I have it in workday, I have it in sales force, you know, how do I have connectors there? How do I secure that? How do I protect that? So, Amazon, you know, working with a broad ecosystem and helping to pull that together is definitely an interesting one to watch. You know, Kendra definitely been some good buzz in the ecosystem for a while there. You know, the question is on, you know, natural language processing and AI, you know, where are the customers with these deployments? Because some of them, if they're a little bit more long-term strategic, might be the kind of projects that get put on pause rather than the ones that are critical for me to run the business today. And I just did a podcast with the VM where ecosystem last week talking about which projects will be funded, which ones won't. It brings up this new virtual work environment where, you know, some people are going to get paid and some people aren't. If you're not core to the enterprise, you're probably not going to get paid. If you're not getting a phone call to come into work, you're probably going to get fired. So, there will be projects that will be cut and projects that will be funded. Certainly virtual events, which I want to talk to you about in a minute, to applications that are driving revenue and or engagement around the new workforce. So, the virtualization of business is happening. Now, we joke because we know server virtualization actually enabled the cloud, right? So, I think there's going to be a huge Cambrian explosion of applications. So, I want to get your thoughts, the folks you've been talking through the past few months, what are you hearing in terms of those kinds of projects that people are going to be leaning into and funding versus ones they might put on hold? Have you heard anything? Yeah, well, you know, John, it's interesting. When you go back at its core, what is AWS and they want to enable build? So, you know, the last couple of years, we've been talking about all of the new applications that will get built. That's not getting put on hold, John. You know, what I do, not just to run the business, but grow the business, I need to still have applications at the core of what we do. Data and applications really are what driving companies today. So, that piece is still critically important and therefore, AWS is a very strategic partner there. Yeah, I'm seeing the same things too. I think the common trend that I would just add to that would be, I'm seeing companies looking at the COVID crisis as an opportunity and frankly in some cases an excuse to lay people off. And that's kind of you seeing some of that. But at the end of the day, that people are resetting, reinventing and then putting new growth strategies together. That still doesn't change. Business still needs to get done, so great point. All right, Stu, virtual events. We're here with the AWS Summit. Normally we're on the show floor at theCUBE. We're here with the Virtual Cube doing our virtual thing. It's been interesting, Stu. A lot of our events have converted to virtual. Some have been canceled, but most of them have been running on their virtual. We've been plugged in, but theCUBE is evolving. And I want to get your thoughts on how you see theCUBE evolving. I've been getting a lot of questions. This came again on the VMware Community Podcast. How is theCUBE morphed? And I know that we've been working hard with a lot of our customers. How have we evolved? Because we're in the middle of this digital wave. This virtualization wave, theCUBE is in there. We've been successful. There's been different use cases. Some have been embedded into the software. Amazon's got their own run of show. But events are more than just run on the show content. It's a lot more. There's more community behind us, Stu. Your thoughts on how theCUBE has evolved and what are you seeing? I'm glad, John, you just mentioned immunity. So you and I have talked many times on air and just the two of us. theCUBE is as much a network and a community as it is a media company. So first of all, it's been so heartening over the last couple of months that as we've been putting out content, we're still getting some great feedback from the community. One of the things I personally miss is when we step off the stage and you walk the hallway and you bump into people that know and they ask you questions where they share some of the things that they're going through, that data that we always look for is something we still need. So I'm making sure to reach out to friends, diving back into the social channels to make sure that we understand the pulse of what's going on. But John, our community has always been online. So a big piece of theCUBE has relatively unchanged other than we're doing all of the interviews remote. We have to deal with everyone's home systems and home network. Every once in a while, you hear a dog barking in the background or a child running, but it actually humanizes stuff. So there's that opportunity for the communities to rally together. Some of my favorite interviews have been, the open source communities that are gathering together to work on common issues, a lot of them specifically for the global pandemic. And so there are some really good stories out there. I worry when you talk about companies that are saying, hey, this is the opportunity for us. There have been so many job losses in this pandemic that it just is heartbreak. So we love when the tech community is helping to spur new opportunities, create new industries. I had a great interview that I did with our friends from A Cloud Guru and they've seen about a 20 to 30% increase on people taking the online training. And one of the main things that they're taking training on is the 101 courses on AWS, on Google and on Azure. As well as an interesting point, John, they said multi-cloud is something that's come up. So 2020 we've been wondering, is AWS going to admit that multi-cloud is a thing? Or are they going to stick with their hybrid message and ask that their partners not talk about multi-cloud? It's been interesting on the virtual queue because we and Amazon has been a visionary in this and letting the queue be virtual with them. It's become a connective tissue stew between the community. And if you think about how much money the companies are saving by not running the physical events and with the layoffs, as you mentioned, I think there could be an opportunity for theCUBE to be that connective tissue, to bring people together. And I think that's the mission that we hope will unfold. But ultimately, digital investments will probably go up from this. I'm seeing a lot of great conversion around, okay, so the content, what does it mean to me? Is it my friend group? Are my friends involved? How do I learn? How do I discover? How do I connect? And I think the interesting thing about theCUBE is we've seen that upfront. And I think there's a positive sign, a head stew around virtualization of the media and the community. I think it's going to be an economic opportunity. And I hope that we could help people find either jobs or ways to reengage and reconnect. So again, reinvents coming, you got VMworld, all these big shows still, they drop so much cash. Can you imagine if they put all that cash into the community? I think that's a viable scenario. Yeah, no, absolutely, John. There is big money in events. Yes, there are less costs. There are also, almost none of them are charging for people to attend and very few of them are charging their sponsors. So, you know, big shift in and how we have to look at these that needs to be a real focus on content. I mean, from our standpoint, John, from day one, and we've been doing this a decade now in the early days when it was a wing and a prayer on the technology, it was always about the content and the best people help extract that signal from the noise. So, you know, some things have changed. The mission overall stays the same. And you know what, Amazon is being humble. They're saying we're figuring it out. Of course, we're psyched that we're there with the Virtual Cube stew. Thanks for spending the time kicking off this virtual coverage. Wrap up, not as good as face to face. Love to be there on site. But I think it's going to be easier to get guests to stew in the virtual world but we're going to go to a hybrid as soon as it comes back to normal. Sounds like cloud stew, public hybrid virtual. There it is. Stu, thanks so much. Okay, that's the Cube coverage for AWS Summit virtual online. This is the Cube virtual coverage. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman. Thanks for watching. Stay tuned for the next segment.