 Welcome to theCUBE where we're celebrating the EC2 15th birthday anniversary. My name is Dave Vellante and we're joined right now by Sandy Carter, vice president of AWS. Welcome Sandy, it's great to see you again. Dave, it's so great to see you too. Thanks for having me on the show today. You're very welcome. We were last physically together. I think it was re-invent 2019. Hopefully I'll see you before 2022. But first, happy birthday to EC2. I mean, it's hard to imagine back in 2006, the degree to which EC2 would impact our industry Sandy. I totally agree. You know, I joined AWS about four and a half years ago in EC2 and it's even amazing to see what's just happened in the last four and a half years. So I'm with you. Nobody really expected the momentum, but EC2 has really shown brightly in value to our customers. You know, we've done the public sector summit, many times it's a great event. Things are a little different in public sector, as you all know. So talk about the public sector momentum with EC2 and that journey. What have you seen? Yeah, so it's a great question Dave. So I had to go back in the time ball. You know, public sector was founded in 2010. And we were actually founded by the Amazon process, writing a paper, setting up a two pizza team, which happened to be six people. And that journey really started with a lot of our public sector customers, thinking that we don't know about the cloud. So we might want to do a pilot or just look at non-mission critical workloads. Now public sector, and I know you know this Dave, but public sector is more than just government. It has education, not-for-profit healthcare and now space, but everybody at that time was very skeptical. So we had to really work hard to migrate some workloads over. And one of our very first non-mission critical workloads was the US Navy. And what they did was the Navy media services actually moved images over to EC2. Now today that seems like, oh, that's pretty easy, but back then that was a big monumental reference. And we had to spend a lot of time on training and education to win the hearts and souls of our customers. So back then we had half of a floor in Herndon, Washington. We just had a few people and that room really became a training room. We trained our reps. We trained our customers. Research drove a lot of our early adopters accounts like NASA and JPL. And then when cloud first came out and governments, it started with the USA and we announced the GovCloud, you know, things really picked up. We had migration of significant workloads. So if you think back to that SAP and just moving media over with the Navy, the Navy and SAP migrated their largest SAP ERP solution to the cloud in that time as well. Then we started international. Our journey continued with the UK. International was UK and US was US. Then we added APJ and Latin America and Canada. And then of course the partner team, which you know is very close to my heart. Partners today are about 73% of our overall public sector business. And it started out with some interesting small program, ISVs being very crucial to that accelerating adoption. And then of course now the journey has continued with COVID that has really accelerated that movement to the cloud. And we're seeing, you know, use of EC2 to really help us drive the cute power needed for AI and ML and taking all that data in from IoT and computing that data and our AR. And we're really seeing that journey just continue. And we see no end in sight. So if we could stay in the infancy and sort of the adolescent years of public sector, I mean, I remember, I mean, as analysts, we were really excited about, you know, the introduction of EC2. But there was a lot of skepticism in whatever industry, financial services, healthcare concerns about security. I presume it was similar in public sector, but I'm interested in how you dealt with those challenges, how you listened to folks, you know, how did you drive that leadership to where it is today? Yeah, you're right, the first questions were, what is the cloud? Doesn't Amazon sell books? What is this cloud thing? What is EC2? What is EC2 stand for? And then what the heck is an instance? You know, way back when there was one instance, it didn't even have a name. And today, of course, we have over 400 instant types with different names for each one. And the big challenges, you asked about challenges, the big challenges that we had to face, Dave, were first and foremost, how do we educate? We had to educate our employees and then we had to educate our customers. So we created these really innovative hands-on training programs, whiteboarding sessions that we needed, and they were wildly popular. So we really had to do that and then also prove security, as you know. So you asked how we listened to our customers and of course we followed the Amazon way. We worked backwards from where we were. So at that time, customers needed education and so we started there. Data was really important. We needed to make customer or data from government more available as well. So for instance, we first started hosting the Census Bureau, for instance, and that was all on EC2. So we had lots of early adopters and I think the early adopters around EC2 really helped us too. Remember I said that the UK was our international office for a while, so we had NIH, we had a genomes project and the UK Ministry of Justice as well. And we had to prove security out. We had to prove how this drove a structured GovCloud and then we had to also prove it out with our partners with things like helping them get fed ramped or other certifications, aisle four, that sort of thing as well. And so we really led in those early days through that education and training, we led with pilots to show the potential of the possible and we led with that security, setting those security standards and those compliance certifications, always listening to the customer, always listening to the partner, knowing how important the partners were gonna be. So for example, recovery.gov was the first government-wide system that moved to the cloud. The Recovery Transparency Board was first overseeing that recovery act spending, which included stimulus tracking website, I don't know if you remember that, but they hosted the recovery.gov on amazon.com using EC2 and that site quickly made information available to a million visitors per hour. And at that time, that was amazing and the cost savings were significant. We also launched a GovCloud, you had asked about GovCloud earlier and that federal cloud computing strategy when the US government came out with cloud first and they had to consider what is really gonna compel these federal agencies to consider cloud. They had, public sector customers had so many requirements for security and safety of the data that we came out with GovCloud to open up all those great opportunities. And I think, Dave, we continue to lead because we are customer obsessed, still supporting more security standards and compliance cert than any other provider. Now we lead with data, not just data for census or images for the US Navy, but we've got now data in space and ground station and data at scale with customers like FINRA, who's now doing 100 billion financial transactions, not just that one million from the early days. So it has been a heck of a ride for public sector. And I love the way that the public sector team really used and leveraged the leadership principles, reinvent and simplify, dive deep, be obsessed with the customer, start where they are and make sure that you're always, always, always listening to what they need. You know, it's interesting, just observing public sector, it's not uncommon, especially because of the certifications that some of the services come out after they come out for the commercial sector. And I remember years ago when I was at IDC, I was kind of the steward of the public sector business. And that was a time when everybody was trying to focus in public sector on commercial off the shelf software. That was the big thing and they wanted to understand, they wanted to look at commercial use cases and how they could apply them to government. And when I dug in a little bit and met with generals and like different agencies, I was struck by how many really smart people and the things that they were doing. And I said at the time, you know, a lot of my commercial clients could learn a lot from you. And so the reason I bring that up is because I saw the same thing with GovCloud because there was a lot of skepticism in various industries, particularly the regulated industries, financial services, healthcare. And then when GovCloud hit and the CIA deal hit, people said, whoa, CIA? They're like the most security conscious industry or organization in the world. And so I feel as though in a way public sector led that breakthrough. So I'm wondering, when you think about EC2 today and the momentum that it has in the government, are there similar things that you see? Where's the momentum today in public sector? Yeah, you are right on target Dave. I mean, that CIA was a monumental moment and that momentum with ever increasing adoption to the cloud has continued in public sector. In fact, today, public sector is one of our fastest growing areas. So we've got, you know, thousands of startups or multiple countries that we're helping out today to really ignite that innovation. We have over 4,000 government agencies, 9,000 education agencies, 2,000 public sector partners from all of the globe, 24,000 not-for-profit organizations. And what I see is the way that they're using EC2 is leading the pack now, especially after COVID. You know, many of these folks accelerated their journey because of COVID, they got to the cloud faster. And now they are doing some really things that no one else is doing, like sending an outpost box into space or leveraging robots and healthcare for sure. So that momentum continues today. And I love that you were the champion of that, you know, way back when, even when you were with IDC. So I want to ask you, you sort of touched on some interesting use cases. What are some of the more unusual ones and maybe breakthrough use cases that you see? Oh, so yeah, we have a couple. So one is, I mentioned it earlier, but there is a robot now that is powered by IoT and EC2. And the robot helps to take temperature and readings for folks that are entering the hospital in Latin America, really helped during COVID. One of my favorites, it actually blew the socks off of Werner too, and you know, that's hard to do, is a space startup called Lunar Outpost. And they are synthesizing oxygen on Mars. Now that's driven by EC2, that's crazy, right? We see state governments like New York, they've got this vision zero traffic and they're leveraging that to prevent accidents all through New York City. I used to live in New York City, so this is really needed. And it continues like with education. We see University of Illinois and Splunk, one of our partners, they created a boarding pass for students to get back to school. So I have a daughter in college and you know, it's really hard for her to prove that she's had the vaccine or that she's tested negative on the COVID test. They came out with this little boarding pass, just like you used to get on an airplane to get into different classes and labs. And then a couple of my favorites and you guys actually filmed the Cherokee Nation. So the Cherokee Nation, the chief of the Cherokee Nation was on our Silicon show and Silicon Angle show and the cube featured them. And the chief talked about how he preserves the Cherokee language. And if you remember, the Cherokee language has been used to help out the US in many different ways. And Presidio, one of our partners, helped to create a game, a super cool game that links them with Unity to help teach that next generation the language while they're playing a game. And then last but not least, Axel 3D out of the UK. They're using EC2 to save lives. They've created a 3D imaging process for people getting ready to get kidney transplants and they have just enhanced that, taking the timeframe down from months now to days that they can actually articulate whether the kidney transplant will work. And when I talk to Roger, their CEO, they're doing ROL, return on life, not return on investment. So those are just some of the unusual and breakthrough use cases that we see powered by EC2. Sandy, I'll give you the last word, maybe your final closing comments. Well, my final closing comments are happy birthday to EC2, celebrating 15 years. What a game changer and value added it has been. The early days of EC2, of course, were about education, like what is the cloud? Why is a bookseller doing it? But EC2 really helped to create a new hub of value. Now we've got customers moving so fast with modernization using AIM and ML containers, serverless. And all of these things are really changing the game and leveling it up as we increase that business connection. So I think the future is really bright. We've only just begun. We've only just begun with EC2 and we've only just begun with public sector. You know, our next great moments are still left to come. Well, Sandy, thanks so much. Always great to see you. Really appreciate your time. Thank you so much, Dave. I really appreciate it. And happy birthday again to EC2. Yeah, keep it right there. We're celebrating EC2's 15th birthday right back.