 Thank you, Janus. Great to see you guys. And thank you for watching the Cube's continuous coverage of AWS Storage Day. We're here at the Spheres. It's an amazing venue. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with Mylon Thompson Bukovac, who's vice president of Block and Object Storage. Mylon, always a pleasure to see you. Thanks for coming on. Nice to see you, Dave. It's pretty crazy, you know. This is kind of a hybrid event. We were in Barcelona a while ago, big hybrid event. And now it's, you know, it's hard to tell. It's almost like day to day what's happening with COVID. And some things are permanent. I think a lot of things are becoming permanent. You, what are you seeing out there in terms of when you talk to customers, how are they thinking about their business, building resiliency and agility into their business in the context of COVID and beyond? Well, Dave, I think what we've learned today is that this is a new normal. These fluctuations that companies are having and supply and demand in all industries all over the world, that's a new normal. And that is what has driven so much more adoption of cloud in the last 12 to 18 months. And we're going to continue to see that rapid migration to the cloud. Because companies now know that in the course of days and months, the whole world of your expectations of where your business is going and what your customers are going to do, that can change. And that can change not just for a year, but maybe longer than that. That's a new normal. And I think companies are realizing it, our AWS customers are seeing how important it is to accelerate moving everything to the cloud to continue to adapt to this new normal. So storage historically has been, I'm going to drop a box off at the loading dock and have a nice day. And then maybe the services team is involved in a more intimate way, but you're involved every day. So I'm curious as to what that permanence, some people call it the new abnormal, but it's the new normal now. What does that mean for storage? Dave, in the course of us sitting here over the next few minutes, we're going to have dozens of deployments go out all across our AWS storage services. That means our customers that are using our file services or transfer services, block and object services, they're all getting improvements as we sit here and talk. That is such a fundamentally different model than the one that you talked about, which is the appliance gets dropped off at the loading dock. It takes a couple months for it to get scheduled for setup and then you have to do data migration to get the data on the new appliance. Meanwhile, we're sitting here and customers storage is just improving under the hood and in major announcements like what we're doing today. Take us through this sort of, let's go back. I remember vividly when S3 was announced, they launched this cloud era and people would do a lot of experimentation. We were storing maybe gigabytes, maybe even some terabytes back then and that's evolved. What are you seeing in terms of how people are using data? What are the patterns that you're seeing today? How is that different than maybe 10 years ago? I think what's really unique about AWS is that we are the only provider that has been operating at scale for 15 years. And what that means is that we have customers of all sizes, terabytes, petabytes, exabytes, that are running their storage on AWS and running their applications using that storage. And so we have this really unique position of being able to observe and work with customers to develop what they need for storage and it really breaks down to three main patterns. The first one is what I call the crown jewels. The crown jewels in the cloud. And that pattern is adopted by customers who are looking at the core mission of their business and they're saying to themselves, I actually can't scale this core mission on on-premises. And they're choosing to go to the cloud on the most important thing that their business does because they must, they have to. And so a great example of that is FINRA, the regulatory body of the US stock exchanges where a number of years ago, they took a look at all the data silos that were popping up across their data centers. They're looking at the rate of stock transactions going up and they're saying, we just can't keep up. Not if we want to follow the mission of being the watchdog for consumers, for stock transactions. And so they moved that crown jewel of their application to AWS. And what's really interesting, Dave, is as you know, because you've talked to many different companies, it's not technology that stops people from moving to the cloud as quick as they want to. It's culture, it's people, it's processes, it's how businesses work. And when you move the cloud jewels into the cloud, you are accelerating that cultural change and that's certainly what FINRA saw. Second thing we see is where a company will pick a few cloud pilots. It'll take a couple of applications, maybe one or a several across the organization and they'll move that as sort of a reference implementation to the cloud. And then the goal is to try to get the people who did that to generalize all the learning across the company. And that is actually a really slow way to change culture because as many of us know, in large organizations, you have some resistance to other organizations changing culture. And so that cloud pilot, while it seems like it would work, it seems logical, it's actually counterproductive to a lot of companies that want to move quickly to the cloud. And the third example is what I think of as new applications or cloud first, not new. And that pattern is where a company or startup says all new technology initiatives are on the cloud. And we see that for companies like McDonald's, which has transformed their drive-up experience by dynamically looking at location orders and providing recommendations. And we see it for the digital athlete, which is what the NFL has put together to dynamically take data sources and build these models that help them programmatically simulate risks to player health and put in place some ways to predict and prevent that. But those are the three patterns that we see so many customers falling into depending on what their business wants. I like that term digital athlete. My business partner John Furrier coined the term tech athlete years ago in the cube. That third pattern seems to me, you're right, you almost have to shock the system if you just put your toe in the water, it's going to take too long. But it seems like that third pattern really actually de-risks it in a lot of cases. It's so sad, people who's going to argue, oh, the new stuff should be in the cloud. And so that seems to me to be a very sensible way to approach that blocker, if you will. What are your thoughts on that? I think you're right, Dave. I think what it does is it allows a company to be able to seed the ideas and the technology and the cultural change of cloud in different parts of the organization. And so rather than having a one group that's supposed to generalize it across an organization, you get it decentralized and adopted by different groups and the culture change just goes faster. So you bring up decentralization and there's an emerging trend referred to as a data mesh. It was coined, the term coined by Jebac de Gany, a very thought provoking individual. And the concept is basically that data is decentralized and yet we have this tendency to sort of shove it all into one box or one container, you could say one cloud. Oh, the cloud is expanding. The cloud is decentralizing in many ways. So how do you see data mesh fitting in to those patterns? We have customers today that are taking the data mesh architectures and implementing them with AWS services. And Dave, I wanna go back to the start of Amazon. When Amazon first began, we grew because the Amazon technologies were built in microservices. Fundamentally, a data mesh is about separation or abstraction of what individual components do. And so if I look at data mesh, really you're talking about two things. You're talking about separating the data storage and the characteristics of data from the data services that interact and operate on that storage. And with data mesh, it's all about making sure that the businesses, the decentralized business model can work with that data. Now, our AWS customers are putting their storage in a centralized place because it's easier to track, it's easier to view compliance and it's easier to predict growth and control costs. But we started with building blocks and we deliberately built our storage services separate from our data services. So we have data services like lake formation and glue. We have a number of these data services that our customers are using to build that customized data mesh on top of that centralized storage. So really, it's about at the end of the day, speed. It's about innovation. It's about making sure that you can decentralize and separate your data services from your storage so businesses can go faster. But that centralized storage is logically centralized. It might not be physically centralized. I mean, we put storage all over the world. That's correct. But to a developer, it looks like it's in one place. That's right. And so that's not antithetical to the concept of data mesh. In fact, it fits in perfectly to the point you were making. I wonder if we could talk a little bit about AWS's storage strategy. It started, of course, with S3 and that was the focus for years. And of course, EBS as well. But now we're seeing, we heard from Wayne this morning, the portfolio is expanding, the innovation is accelerating, that flywheel that we always talk about. How would you characterize and how do you think about AWS's storage strategy, per se? We are dynamically and constantly evolving our AWS storage services based on what the application and the customer want. That is fundamentally what we do every day. We talked a little bit about those deployments that are happening right now, Dave. That is something that idea of constant dynamic evolution just can't be replicated by on-premises where you buy a box and it sits in your data center for three or more years. And what's unique about us among the cloud services is, again, that perspective of the 15 years where we are building applications in ways that are unique because we have more customers and we have more customers doing more things. So, you know, I've said this before, it's all about speed of innovation, Dave. Time and change, wait for no one. And if you're a business and you're trying to transform your business and base it on a set of technologies that change, rapidly, you have to use AWS services. Let's, I mean, if you look at some of the launches that we talk about today and you think about S3's multi-region access points, that's a fundamental change for customers that want to store copies of their data in any number of different regions and get a 60% performance improvement by leveraging the technology that we've built up over time, leveraging the ability for us to route to intelligently route a request across our network. That and FSX for NetApp on tap, nobody else has these capabilities today and it's because we are at the forefront of talking to different customers and that dynamic evolution of storage, that's the core of our strategy. So, Andy Jazz used to say oftentimes AWS is misunderstood and you're comfortable with that. So, it's helped me square this circle because you talked about things you couldn't do on-prem and yet you mentioned the relationship with NetApp. You think, look at things like outposts and local zones. You're actually moving the cloud out to the edge, including on-prem data centers. So, how do you think about hybrid in that context? For us, David always comes back to what the customer is asking for and we were talking to customers and they were talking about their edge and what they wanted to do with it. We said, how are we going to help? And so, if I just take S3 for outposts as an example or EBS on outposts, you know, we have customers like Morningstar and Morningstar wants outposts because they are using it as a step in their journey to being on the cloud. If you take a customer like first Adu Dhabi Bank, they're using outposts because they need data residency for their compliance requirements. And then we have other customers that are using outposts to help dish networks as an example to place a storage as close as account to the applications for low latency. All of those are customer-driven requirements for their architecture. For us, Dave, we think in the fullness of time, every customer and all applications are going to be on the cloud because it makes sense and those businesses need that speed of innovation. But when we build things like our announcement today of FXX for NetApp on tap, we build them because customers asked us to help them with their journey to the cloud, just like we built S3 and EBS for outposts for the same reason. When you say over time, you believe that all workloads will be on the cloud, but the cloud is, it's like the universe. I mean, it's expanding. What's not cloud in the future? When you say on the cloud, you mean wherever you meet customers with that cloud, that includes outposts. It's the programming. It's the programmability of that model. Is that correct? That's what you're talking about. In fact, our S3 and EBS outpost customers, the way that they look at how they use outposts, it's either as part of developing applications where they're eventually go to the cloud or taking applications that are in the cloud today in AWS regions and running them locally. And so as you say, this definition of the cloud, it's going to evolve over time. But the one thing that we know for sure is that AWS storage and AWS in general is going to be there one or two steps ahead of where customers are and deliver them what they need. I want to talk about block storage for a moment, if I can. You guys are making some moves in that space. We heard some announcements earlier today. Some of the hardest stuff to move, whether it's cultural or maybe it's just hardened tops, maybe it's governance edicts, are those really hardcore mission critical apps and workloads, whether it's SAP stuff, Oracle, Microsoft, et cetera. You're clearly seeing that as an opportunity for your customers. And in storage, in some respects, was a blocker previously because of whatever, latency, et cetera. And there's still some considerations there. How do you see those workloads eventually moving to the cloud? Well, they can move now. With IO2 Block Express, we have the performance that those high-end applications need. And it's available today. We have customers using them and they're very excited about that technology. And again, it goes back to what I just said, Dave. We had customers saying, I would like to move my highest performing applications to the cloud. And this is what I need from the storage underneath it. And that's why we built IO2 Block Express and that's how we'll continue to evolve IO2 Block Express. It is the first SAM technology in the cloud, but it's built on those core principles that we talked about a few minutes ago, which is dynamically evolving and capabilities that we can add on the fly and customers just get the benefit of it without the cost of migration. I want to ask you something about just the storage, how you think about storage in general, because typically it's been a bucket. You know, it's a container, but it seems, I always say, the next 10 years aren't going to be like the last. It seems like you're really in the data business and you're bringing in machine intelligence. You're bringing in other database technology and this rich set of other services to apply to the data. That's now, there's a lot of data in the cloud. And so we can now, whether it's build data products, build data services. So how do you think about the business in that sense? It's no longer just a place to store stuff. It's actually a place to accelerate innovation and build and monetize for your customers. How do you think about that? Our customers use the word foundational. Every time they talk about storage, they say for us, it's foundational. And Dave, that's because every business is a data business. Every business is making decisions now on this changing landscape in a world where the new normal means you cannot predict what's going to happen in six months in a year and the way that they're making those smart decisions is through data. And so they're taking the data that they have in our storage services and they're using SageMaker to build models. They're using all kinds of different applications like lake formation and glue to build some of the services that you're talking about around authorization and data discovery to sit on top of the data and they're able to leverage the data in a way that they have never been able to do before because they have to. That's what the business world demands today. And that's what we need in the new normal. We need the flexibility and the dynamic foundational storage that we provide in AWS. And you think about the great data companies, those were the trillions in the market cap. They're data companies, they put data at the core but that doesn't mean they shove all the data into a centralized location. It means they have the identity access capabilities, the governance capabilities to enable data to be used wherever it needs to be used and build that future. Exciting times we're entering here, Mylon. We're just at the start, Dave, we're just at the start. Really, what do you think we have? So how do you think about Amazon? It's not a baby anymore, it's not even an adolescent, right? You guys are obviously major player. Early adulthood, day one, day zero, wait. Dave, we don't age ourselves. I think if I look at where we're going for AWS, we are just at the start. So many companies are moving to the cloud but we're really just at the start. And what's really exciting for us who work on AWS storage is that when we build these storage services and these data services, we are seeing customers do things that they never thought they could do before and it's just the beginning. Now I think the potential is unlimited. You mentioned Dish before. I mean, I see what they're doing in the cloud for telco, I mean telco transformation, that's an industry, every industry there's a transformation scenario, a disruption scenario. Healthcare has been so reluctant for years and that's happening so quickly. I mean COVID certainly accelerating that. Obviously financial services have been super tech savvy but they're looking at the FinTech saying, okay, how do we play? I mean, there isn't manufacturing with EV. It's just, it's government, totally. Oil and gas, thank you. There isn't a single industry that's not a digital industry and there's implications for everyone. And it's not just bits and atoms anymore. The old Negra Ponte, although Nicholas I think was prescient because he saw this coming. It really is fundamental. Data is fundamental to every business. And I think you want for all of those in different industries you want to pick the provider where innovation and invention is in our DNA. And that is true not just for storage but AWS and that is driving a lot of the changes you have today but really what's coming in the future. You're right, it's the combinatorial factors. It's not just the storage or the data, it's the ability to apply other technologies that map into your business process, that map into your organizational skill sets that drive innovation in whatever industry you're in. It's great, Milan, awesome to see you. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. Great seeing you Dave, take care. All right, you too. And keep it right there for more action. We're going to now toss it back to Jenna, Kanal and Darko in the studio. Guys, over to you.