 Live from Washington D.C., it's theCUBE. Covering AWS Public Sector Summit. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of AWS Public Sector Summit here in Washington D.C. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, John Furrier. We are here with Corey Quinn, cloud economist, the Duckbill Group, and a CUBE host at large. Welcome, welcome to our show. Thank you, I'm medium at best most days, but we'll see what happens. Remember expanding, someday I'll be a 10X engineer, but not today. Right, right, exactly. 10X host though. Exactly, there we go. We're all about it. Does cloud stand up on the side? We need to mention that to you. Yes, generally more cloud improv, but no one believes that it's off the cuff. So we smile, we nod, we roll with it. Let's add some hip-hop to it. Yeah, no one wants to hear me sing in any form, I promise. Wrapping. So Corey, you have been here, you are on the ground, having great conversations with people here, 18,000 people at this summit. Give our viewers the lowdown on the vibe, the energy. What are you hearing? It's a very different feeling than the commercial summits. You're seeing people are focusing on different parts of the story, and one thing I find amusing is talking to people who work in the public sector show up, and their first response is, oh, I'm so behind. And then you go to the commercial summit, and you talk to people who are doing bleeding edge things, and their response is, oh, I'm so behind. And everyone thinks that they're falling behind the curve. And I'm not sure how much of that is a part of people just watching technology events outpace them, versus the ever-increasing feature velocity that they show on slide year over year over year, consistent growth, and people feel like they're being left in the dust. It's overwhelming, it's drinking from a fire hose. And I don't think that that gets any easier when you're talking to someone in the public sector, where things generally move in longer planning cycles, because they definitionally have to, and I'd argue you should. But you should help them make them feel better and say, don't worry, the private sector feels the same way. It's not just a... Everyone has these problems. That's the whole challenge of this, is everyone believes that if you go to the one magic company, their environment is going to be wonderful, they're adopting everything, it doesn't exist. I've gone into all of the typical tech companies you would expect and talk to people, and everyone, once you pour three or four drinks into them, gets very honest, and starts crying about what a tire fire their own environment is. It's, there's a lot of conference ware going around of, here's how we built this amazing thing, as a proof of concept, is what the part they don't say, or for this one small constrained application. People are trying to solve business problems, not build perfect architecture. And that's okay. The problem is they're not businesses, they're agencies, as you said, they're like, slow as molasses when it comes to moving speed. And you can even see Andy Jassy during his fireside chat, he's already starting laying the groundwork. Well, once you're in the cloud, here's how you go to the adoption level. So you can see that it's land, not land and expand like the enterprise, which is still slow, it's land, get them adoption and then expand. So the public sector clearly has a lot of red tape. I mean, there's no doubt about it. There's anyone who would argue at that point. Chairman's like 1985. It's like a hot tub time machine nightmare. But Andy Jassy also says, undifferentiated heavy lifting is what they want to automate away. That's the dream, that's the goal. It's hard. This is the real challenge, is getting the public sector adopted, getting the adoption, your thoughts when you're hearing, people are they jumping in, are they putting the toe in the water, kicking the tires, as Andy said. All of the above and more. I think it's a very broad spectrum and they mentioned there, I think there were 28,000 or 12,000 non-profit organizations that they wind up working with as customers. And they all tend to have different velocities across the board as they go down that path. I think that the idea that there's one speed or you can even draw a quick two-line summary of all the public sector is a bit of a fissile explanation. I see customers that are sometimes constrained by planning cycles. There's always the policies and political aspects of things where if you wind up trying to speed things up, you're talking to some people who will not have a job if you remove the undifferentiated heavy lifting because that's been their entire career. We're going to help you cut waste out of your budget. Well, that's a hard sell to someone who is incentivized based upon the size of the budget that they control. You wind up with misaligned incentives and it's a strange environment, but the same thing that I'm seeing across the corporate space is also happening in public sector. We're seeing people who are relatively concerned about where they're going to hire people from, what those people look like, how they're going to transform their own organizations. Digital transformation is a tired term. I mean, it's like if you have rosy color glasses on too much, you're going to miss the big picture. You got to have a little bit of skepticism. I think to me, government's always had that problem where I'm just going to give up. I'm doing different. I'm not, I can't get the outcome I want because why even try, right? I think now with cloud, what I hear Jassy and Amazon saying is, hey, at least you get some clear visibility on the first position of value. So there's some hope there, right? So I think that's why I'm seeing this adoption focus because it's like they're getting the customers. For instance, like I'm a university, I could be a professor, I put my credit card down. I'm a university customer. I got a couple of instances at EC2. So ding, add another one to the 28,000. Hey, exactly, number of customers is always a strange one. A little bit skeptical there, but now for the first time, you can actually go to a team saying, hey, you know all that BS about not getting the job done? You can get it with cloud. So it's gettable now, it's attainable. It's not just aspirational. And those first movers really will make the difference in the end with the university customer. That's the question. Those are the people who are experimenting. Can that swing the tide? Can that be a generational shift, a DevOps mindset in government? That's a big question. Well, they have some advantages. For example, we took a look at all the GovCloud announcements and the keynote yesterday. And that must have been a super easy keynote put together because they're just using the traditional keynotes slides from Reinvent 2014 because it takes time to get things certified as they move through the entire pipeline process. And there's nothing inherently wrong with that. But the services that are going into GovCloud are things that are tried and tested in a lot of other environments. There's an entire community out there. There's an established body of knowledge. So a lot of the path that government is walking down has already been, from a technical perspective, paved for them. I want to riff on an idea. I want to make a proposal with you here in real time. Sure. I think what we should do is make a proposal to the US government that we basically take equity in the agencies and then take them public. That's not a bad idea. That is absolutely not a bad idea. Let's commercialize the entities, create a stock option program, Corey, because listen, if I'm a talent, why would I going to work for an agency when I can make three times more, get public and be rich? And that's the problem with talent. I mean, you walk around the expo floor here, the booths are much smaller. And I didn't understand that at first, and then it clicked for me. If you want to sell services to government, you don't buy a bigger booth. You buy a congressperson. And it turns out those are less expensive. That's how acquisitions tend to work in this space. So folks walking around are not generally going to be the customers that buy things. The people walking around in many cases are the talent and looking for more talent. And it does become extremely compelling to have those people leave public sector and go into private sector in some cases where we'll pay you three times more and added bonus, most days, this is America after all, no one's shooting at you. So that does do that. You're a cloud economist. We were kind of joking about your title, but if you think about it, there are economics involved. It's lower cost, faster time to value. But what we're getting at is an incentive system. So you think fiscal monetary policy of that incentive. So, you know, Rebecca, this is the challenge that the policy guys got to figure out because the mechanisms to get stuff done is to buy the politicians or do this or do that. We're getting at something really to the heart of human beings, that mission of the mission of the agency or objective they're doing for the labor of love or money. Yes. Read, why not create an incentive system that compensates. The challenge is- I even think it's incentive system for taxpayers though too in the sense of- I can save the trillions of dollars on the budget. A lot of what government services do shouldn't necessarily be for sale. I think the idea of citizen versus customer tends to be a very wide divergence. And I generally push back on issues and attempts to, I guess, convince those into the same thing. You wind up with a very striated, almost an aristocratic society. I don't think that tends to lead anywhere good. Well, everyone is getting political today for some reason. Well, I mean- You saw it in the fireside chat too. Digital transformations, people process technology. You can superimpose that onto any environment whether it's public policy or whatever, or national governments. The people, there's issues there. Processes issues, technologies issues, each of one of them have their own challenge. Your thoughts on public sectors challenges and opportunities for people process technology. You have to be mission-driven for starters in order to get the people involved. As far as the processes go, there are inherently going to be limitations, sometimes, and most easily observable in the form of different regulatory regimes that apply to these different workloads. And when we talk about the technology, well, we're already seeing that that is becoming less of a gap over time. What used to be that, oh, only we can secure a data center well enough from a physical security standpoint. There was a quote from the CIA that said on its worst day that cloud security was better than any on-premises environment that they could build. And there's something to be said for that. There are economies of scale at play. Yeah, the tech gap's going away, almost a zero. Yes. So if that, okay, tech's good, check. Training falls onto the people side. Absolutely. Awareness, competency. Process is a red tape automation opportunity. That could be. But this is also not something that the commercial world has on lock either. Where does the next generation come from? You talk to most senior cloud folks these days, and most of us tend to have come up from working help desks, being grumpy Unix sysadmins, or Unix sysadmins, because it's not like there's a second kind of those. And we go up through a certain progression. Well, those jobs aren't there anymore. They've been automated away. The road that we walked is largely closed. Where does the next generation come from? I don't have a great answer for that. The talent question is a huge one. This is going to be the difference, Rebecca. We were riffing on this on our opening. I mean, what's your thoughts? I mean, you've been hearing all this stuff and you've been researching this. What's your thoughts? I think that we need to think more. I think tech companies need to think more broadly about where they're going to get this next generation of people. And they don't need to necessarily be people who have studied CS in school, although, of course, we need those people too. But the people with the bright, the creative, the expansive worldviews who are thinking about these problems, and can learn the tech. I mean, the tough guy, you know. You can probably block chain to it and do an ICO and everyone gets rich. But I think what Andy Jassy was saying today during his fireside, in the sense of we need to make sure that we are building tools that you don't need to be a machine learning expert to deploy. You know, we need to make simpler, more intuitive tools. And that's really important here. Amazon does well in that environment. I thought about incentives. I think that one thing that the public sector offers that you don't often see in the venture startup world or corporate America or corporate anywhere, for that matter, is the ability to move beyond next quarter planning. The ability to look at long term projects. Like, what does it take to wind up causing significant change across the world? What does it take to build international space station? You're not going to be able to ship those things in 180 days, no matter how efficiently you build things. And I think that the incentives, and as you build them, have to start aligning with that. Otherwise, you wind up with government trying to compete on compensation with the private sector. I don't think that works. I think they have an opportunity to structure alignment around incentives in a very different way. It's an open item on the compensation. I totally agree. We'll watch it. We'll see what tracks. But to me, in my opinion, what I think is going to be killer for game one here, of this revolution is, the people that come out of the woodwork, because cloud attracts smart people. And smart people are leaning into the government with cloud. It was the other way around before the cloud. People don't want to get involved in government. And that was a big ding on government attracting qualified people. So I think cloud is going to attract some smart people that want to help for the purpose and mission of whatever the outcome of that political or agency or government initiative, whether it's cybersecurity. There are people who care about this stuff, who want the social equity, not so much compensation. I think that's going to be a wild card. I think we're going to see like a new, in migration of talented people coming into quote, assist government. I'd say work for government. Figure out how to be better at whatever the competition is. And that is going to be, I think the first lever when you start to see new names emerge, this person who just changed the organization over here, they become a hero, a DevOps mindset being applied to new environments. And we've seen that to some extent with the U.S. Digital Service with AT&F where you have industry leaders from the commercial side moving into public sector and working in government for a time and then matriculating back into the public sector, into the private sector. I think that there winds up being a lot of opportunity for more programs like that of scaling this stuff out. And career paths are changing too. And there is this more fluidity as you're saying. I think that money isn't everything. There's a lot of research that shows up to a certain threshold of income. You don't get that much happier. I don't know if Jeff Bezos is that much happier than us. I mean, you might be. If you live in Palo Alto, you got to get a little bit more banked and safe. Well, you see the other side of it too is you build all these things together where you have, okay, what is it that moves people? What do they care about? It's not just money. And I think that the old style, the old, very strict hierarchy within organizations where things are decided by tenure serves as a bit of a problem. If you have someone who works for the EPA who's been doing a deep dive cloud work for 10 years, there's nothing specific to the EPA about what that person has mastered. They should be able to laterally transition into the FDA, for example. And apply that. And Jassy brought that in the fireside chat. That was an interesting point about the fire phone that they talked about. And this is the transferability of skill sets and you're getting at. The other thing that I will notice is that with cloud attracts interdisciplinary skill sets. So you don't have to be just a coder. You can know how code works and be an architect or you can be a change agent somewhere else in an organization. So that's going to be interesting. That's not necessarily how governments have always been siloed, right? So can these silos, can these old ways of doing things? This is the question. This is why it's fun to cover this market. We're already seeing that in the public sector where being able to write code is rapidly transitioning to a very, being very similar to, I can speak French. Great. That's not a career in and of itself. That's a skill set that unlocks a variety of different career paths forward. But it doesn't wind up saving anything. It doesn't wind up reserving its own modern aristocracy path forward. Or use the building an example. I don't have to learn how to pour concrete. I'll write the blueprints. So as we start getting into these systems conversations you're going to start to see these different skill sets involve huge opportunity. If you're in school today and you're studying computer science, great. Learn something else too. Because the intersection between that and other spaces are where the niche opportunities are. That's the skill set of the future. That's where you're going to start seeing opportunities to not just succeed personally, but start to change the world. Well, Corey, great. Thanks for coming on and then making an appearance and sharing what you found out in the hallways. Good to see you. Thank you for tolerating me. I appreciate it. You did a great job posting in KubeCon in Europe. Thanks for holding down the fort there. Of course, I appreciate it. It was an absolute honor. Excellent. Great. Well, thank you so much. Thank you. I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier. Stay tuned. You are watching the Kube.