 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS Public Sector Online. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. Everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's virtual coverage of AWS Public Sector Summit Online. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. Normally we're in-person out on Asia Pacific and all the different events for AWS Public Sector, but this year, we have to do it remote and we're going to do the remote virtual CUBE with it as virtual Public Sector Online Summit. And we have two great guests here talking about Digital Earth Africa Project, Clive Charlton, Head of Solutions Architecture, Sub-Saharan Africa with AWS. Clive, thanks for coming on and Aditya Agarwal, founder of D4D Insights and also an advisor to the Digital Earth Africa Project with AWS. So gentlemen, thank you for coming on. Appreciate you coming on remotely. Thanks for having us. Thank you for having us, John. So Clive, take us through real quickly. Just take a minute to describe what is the Digital Earth Africa Project? What are the problems that you're aiming to solve? Well, we're really aiming to provide actionable data to governments and organizations around Africa by providing a satellite imagery in an easy to use format. And doing that on the cloud that serves countries throughout Africa. And just from a cloud perspective, give us a quick taste of what's going on just with the tech. It's on Amazon, you got a little satellite action. Is there a ground station involved? Give us a little bit more color around, what's the scope of the project? Yep. So historically speaking, you'd have to process satellite imagery, don link it and then do some heavy lifting around the processing of the data. Digital Earth Africa was built from the experiences from Digital Earth Australia, originally developed by Geosciences Australia. And they use container services for Kubernetes called Elastic Kubernetes Service to spin up virtual machines, which are required to process the raw satellite imagery into a format called Cloud Optimized GeoTIF. This format is used to store very large volumes of data in a format that's really easy to query. So organizations can just use an HTTP get range request, just to query a part of the file that they're interested in, which means the results are served much, much quicker from much better overall experience. Under the hood, the data is stored in the Amazon Simple Storage Service, which is S3 and a metadata index in a relational database service that runs the open data cube library, which is allows Digital Earth Africa to store this data in both space and time. It's interesting, I just did some interviews last week on symposium on space and cybersecurity. And we were talking about the impact of satellites and GPS and just the overall infrastructure shift. And it's just another part of the edge of the network. Disha, I want to get your thoughts on this and your reaction to the Digital Earth Project. You're an advisor. Let's zoom out. What's the impact of people's lives? Give us a quick overview of how you see it playing out because explain to someone who doesn't know anything about the project. Like, okay, what's it about? And how does it actually impact people? Sure. So, you know, as Clive mentioned, I mean, there's definitely a digital infrastructure behind Digital Earth Africa in a way that it's going to be able to serve free and open satellite data. And often the issue around satellite data, especially within the context of Africa and other parts of the world, is that there's a level of capacity that's required in order to be able to use that data. But there's also all kinds of access issues because traditionally satellite data is heavy. There's the old model of being able to download the data and then being able to do something with it. And then often about 80% of the time that you spend on satellite data is spent just pre-processing the data before you can actually do any of the fun analysis around it that really sort of impacts the kinds of decisions and actions that you're looking for. And so that's why Digital Earth Africa and that's why this partnership with Amazon is a fantastic partnership because it really allows us to be able to scale the approach across the entire continent, make it easy for that data to be accessed and make it easier for people to be able to use that data. The way that Digital Earth Africa is being operationalized is that we're not just looking at it from the perspective of, let's put another infrastructure into Africa. We want this program and it is a program that we want institutionalized within Africa itself. One that leverages expertise across the continent and one that brings in organizations across the continent to really sort of take the leadership and ownership of this program as it moves forward. The idea of it is that once you're able to have this information, being able to address issues like food security, climate change, coastal resilience, land degradation, where the legal mining is, where is the water? We wanna be able to do that in a way that it's really looking at what are the national development priorities within the countries themselves and how does it also then support regional and global frameworks like Africa's Agenda 2063 and the Sustainable Development Goals? No doubt in my mind, Astley, is the huge benefits to these kinds of technologies. I wanna also just ask you as a follow-up, there's a huge space race going on right now, explosion of availability, satellite data. And again, more satellites are going up, there's more congestion, more contention. Again, we had a big event on that cybersecurity and the congestion issue, but satellite data was powering everyone here in the United States. You want an Uber, you want Google Maps, you're everywhere with GPS, without it we'd be kind of like wondering what's going on, how do we even vote these days? So certainly an impact, but there's a huge surge of availability of the use of satellite data. How do you explain this and what are some of the challenges from the data side that's coming from the Digital Earth Africa project that you guys hope to resolve? Sure, I mean, that's a great question. I mean, I think at one level when you're looking at the space race right now, satellites are becoming cheaper, they're becoming more efficient, there's increased technology now, the types of sensors that you can deploy, there's companies like Planet that are really revolutionizing how even small countries are able to deploy their own satellites and the constellation that they're putting forward in terms of the frequency by which you're able to get data for any given part of the Earth on a daily basis. Coupled with that, and this is really sort of in Clive's purview, but the cloud computing capabilities and overall computing power that you have today than what you had 10 years, 15 years ago is so vastly different. What used to take weeks to do before for any kind of analysis on satellite data, which is heavy data, now takes minutes or hours to do. So when you put all that together, again, I think it really speaks to the power of this partnership with Amazon and really what that means for how this data is gonna be delivered to Africa because it really allows for the scalability for anything that happens through Digital Earth Africa. And so for example, one of the approaches that we're taking as we identify what the priorities and needs are at the country level, let's say that it's land degradation, there's often common issues across countries. And so when we can take one particular issue tested with additional countries and then we can scale it across the whole continent because the infrastructure is there for the whole continent. Yeah, that's a great point. There's so many storylines here we'll get to Clive in a second on sustainability. And I wanna talk about the open data platform, obviously open data, having data is one thing, but now trained data and having more trusted data becomes a huge issue. Again, I wanna dig into that for a second, but Clive, I wanna ask you first, what region are we in? I mean, is this, you guys actually have a great, first of all, we've been covering the region expansion from Bahrain all the way as it moves around the world, probably soon in space, there'll be a region, Amazon Space Station region, probably someday in the future. But what region are you running the project out of? Can you, and why is it important? Can you share the update on the regional piece? Well, we're very pleased that Digital Earth Africa is using the new Africa region in Cape Town in South Africa, which was launched in April of this year. It's one of 24 regions around the world, and we have another three new regions announced. What this means for users of Digital Earth Africa is that they're able to use the region closest to them, which gives them the best user experience. It's the quickest connection for them, but more importantly, we also wanted to use an African solution for African people and using Africa region in Cape Town, really aligned with that thinking. So localization on the data, latency, all that stuff is kind of within the region, within country here, for as long. That's right, yeah. And why is that important? Is there any other benefits? Why should someone care? Obviously there's failover options I mean other countries to go to, but why is having something in that region important for this project? Well, it comes down to latency for the users. So being as close to the data as possible is really important for the user experience, especially when you're looking at large datasets and big queries, you don't want to be waiting a long lag time for that query to go backwards and forwards between the user and the region. So having the data in the Africa region in Cape Town is important. So talk about the region. I love when these new regions roll out from Amazon because obviously it's huge build up, CapEx and the new data center servers and everything. Sustainability is a huge part of the story. How does the sustainability piece fit into the data initiative supported in Africa? Can you share some updates on that? This project is also closely aligned with the Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative, which looks to accelerate sustainability research and innovation really by minimizing the cost and the time required to acquire and analyze large sustainability datasets. So the initiative supports innovators and researchers with the data and tools and technical experience that they need to move sustainability to the next level. These are public datasets and publicly available to anyone. In addition to that, the initiative provides cloud grants to those who are interested in exploring the use of AWS technology and scalable infrastructure to serve sustainability challenges of this nation. Aditya, I want to get your thoughts on this, a comment that Clive made around latency and certainly having a region there is great benefits. No need to harp on that. Everyone knows I'm a big fan of the regional model, but it brings up the issue of what's going on in the country from an infrastructure standpoint, a lot of mobility, a lot of edge computing. I can almost imagine that. So how do you see that evolving from a business standpoint, from a project standpoint, data standpoint? Can you comment and react to that edge angle? Yeah, I mean, I think that the value of an open data infrastructure is that you want to use that infrastructure to create a whole data ecosystem type of an approach. And so from the perspective of being able to make this data readily accessible, making it efficiently accessible and really being able to bring industry into that ecosystem because what we really want as the program matures is for this program to then also instigate the development of new businesses, entrepreneurship, really get the young people across Africa which has the largest proportion of young people anywhere in the world to be engaged around what you can do with satellite data and the types of businesses that can be developed around it. And so by having all of our data reside in Cape Town on the continent, there's obviously technical benefits to that in terms of being able to apply the data and creating businesses. There's also a perception in the fact that the data that Digital Earth Africa is serving is in Africa and residing in Africa which does go a long way. Yeah, and that's a huge value. And I could just imagine the creativity, if you can comment on this open data platform idea because some of the commentary that we've been having on theCUBE here and all around the world is data is great. We all know we're living with a lot of data. You're starting to see that the commoditization and horizontal scalability of data is one thing but to put it into software-defined environments whether it's an entrepreneur coding up an app or doing something to share some transparency around some initiatives going on within the region or in the continent, it's about trusted data. It's about sharing algorithms. AI is also a consumer of data, machines consume data. So it's not just a technology data is part of this new normal. What's this open data platform and how does that translate into value in your opinion? Yeah, and when data is shared on AWS anyone can analyze it and build services on top of it using a broad range of compute and data analytics products. Things like Amazon EC2 or Lambda which is our serverless compute to things like Amazon Elastic MapReduce for complex extract and transformation processes but sharing data in the cloud lets users spend more time on the data analysis rather than the data acquisition and researchers can analyze data shared on AWS without needing to pay to store their own copy which is what the open data platform provides. You only have to pay for the compute that you use and you don't need to purchase storage to start a new project. So the registry of the open data on AWS makes it easy to find those data sets by making them publicly available through AWS services. And when you share your data on AWS you make it available to a large and growing community of developers and startups and enterprises all around the world. And we've been talking particularly around Africa So it's an open source model basically it's free you don't, it doesn't cost you anything probably just start maybe down the road if it gets heavy maybe too charging but the most part easy for scientists to use and then you're leveraging it into the open contributing back, is that right? Yep, that's right, getting researchers and startups and organizations going quickly without having to worry about the data acquisition they can just get going and start building. All right, well I want to get back to Dichon the skill gap issue because he brought up something that I thought was really cool. People are going to start building apps and going to start to see more innovation. What are the needs out there? Because we're seeing a huge onboarding of new talent young talent, people reskilling from existing jobs certainly COVID's accelerated people looking for more different kinds of work. I'm sure there's a lot of demand to some innovative things. The question I always get and want to get your reaction is what are the skills needed to get involved to one contribute but also benefit from it? Whether it's the data satellite data or just how to get involved skill-wise. Sure, sure. Yeah, so most recently we've created a six week training course that's really kind of taken users from understanding the basics of Earth observation data to how to work with Python to how to create their own Jupyter notebooks and their own use cases. And so there's a wide sort of range of skill sets that are required depending on who you are. Because effectively what we want to be able to do is get everyone from kind of the technical user that might have some remote sensing background to the developer, to the policy maker and decision maker to understand the value of this infrastructure. Whether you're the one who's actually analyzing the data if you're the one who's developing new applications or you're taking that information from a managerial or policy level discussion to actually deliver the action and sort of impact that you're looking for. And so in that regard, we're working with ITC in the Netherlands and again with institutions across Africa that already have a mandate and expertise in this particular area to create a holistic capacity development program that will address all of those different factors. So I guess the follow-up question I want to have is how do you ensure the priorities of Africa are addressed as part of this program? Yeah, so we've created a governance model that really is both top down and bottom up. At the bottom up level, we have a technical advisory committee that has over 15 institutions, many of which are based across Africa that really have a good understanding of the needs, the priorities and the mandate for how to work with countries. And at the top down level, we're developing a governing board that will be inclusive of the key continental level institutions that really provide the political buy-in, the sustainability of the program and really provide overall guidance. And within that, we're also creating an operational model such that these institutions that do have the capacity to support the program, they're actually the ones who are also going to be supporting the implementation of the program itself. And there's been some United Nations sustained development projects, all kinds of government involvement around making sure certain things happen within the country. Can you just share some of the highlights of some of the key initiatives that are going on that you're supporting to make it a better world? Yeah, so this program is very closely aligned to sustainable development agenda. And so looking after the developing methods that really addresses sustainable development goals is one facet. In Africa, there's another program looking overall national development priorities and sustainability called Agenda 2063. And really like, I think what it really comes down to, this wouldn't be happening without the country level involvement themselves. So this started with five countries originally, Senegal, Ghana, Kenya, Tanzania. And the government of Kenya itself has really been a kind of a founding partner for how Digital Earth Africa and its predecessor of the Africa Regional Data Cube came to be. And so without high-level support and political buy-in within those governments, I mean, it's really because of that, that's why we're where we are. Aditya, thank you for coming on and sharing that insight. Clive, I'll give you the final word for the folks watching Digital Earth Africa processes of petabytes of data. I mean, the satellite data is well huge. You mentioned it's a new region. You're running Kubernetes, Elastic Kubernetes service, making containers easy to use, pays you go. So you got cutting edge. Take the one minute to share why this region's cutting edge. Does it have the scale of other regions? What should they know about AWS in Cape Town for Africa's new region? Take a minute to put a plug in. Yeah, thank you for that, John. So our regions are built in the same way all around the world. So they're built for redundancy and reliability. They typically have a minimum of three, what we call availability zones, and each one contains a cluster of data centers and all interconnected with fast fiber. So you can survive a failure with no impact to your services. And the Cape Town region is built in exactly the same way. We have most of the services available in the Cape Town region, like most other regions. So as a user of AWS, you can have the confidence that you can deploy your services and workloads into AWS and run it in the same way with the same kind of speed and the same kind of support and infrastructure that's backing any region anywhere else in the world. Well, great, thanks for that plug. Disha, thank you for your insight. And again, innovation follows cloud computing, whether you're building on top of it as a startup, a government or enterprise, or to make society better, in this case, the Digital Earth Africa project. Great story, thank you for sharing, appreciate it. Thank you for having us. Thank you for having us, John. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE Virtual Remote, not in person this year. Hope to see you next time in person. Thanks for watching.