 Okay, welcome back everyone. We're here live in San Francisco for Amazon Web Services Summit, AWS Summit, the hashtag is AWS Summit. Go to crowdchat.net slash AWS Summit. Be part of the conversation. We're having an open line there. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. This is theCUBE, our flagship program we go out to the events, we're considering from the noise. I'm John McCose, Jeff Frick, CUBE General Manager, filling in for Dave Vellante. Always get the great stuff here at Amazon Web Summit, Jeff. And it's a learning event and our next guest is Rochna Golani. She's in charge of the training and certification. Obviously, this is your event in terms of your wheelhouse. Amazon's been doing this for very, very long time where you guys go out. No strings attached. Really about educating people about what's under the hood, what's possible, how to wire stuff together, how to build the building blocks of what Amazon has to offer now, a mega, mega tool chest of stuff. It's not just EC2, it has three anymore. It's mass, little nuanced products, big things like Kinesis Redshift and AppStream. So, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. Give us the update. How much is going on around learning, kicking the tires, playing and tinkering to actually getting certified, learning and getting some accreditation or some sort? Yeah, this is a very, very exciting place to be because we have people, we, in training and certification, we're offering things that allow these individuals to get skills to be able to design these cloud-based solutions, right? Everything from instructor-led training to YouTube videos to things that they would want to do self-paced and we're offering that, carrying that up with certifications so that they can really validate the skillset that they have. And so where are you on the life cycle now and as you build out the certification? Is it a well-groomed business? Is it how many people have been through going to be sharing stats? Is it emerging? Is it seeing more uptake? Certification in this education part of AWS started really last year. I mean, we launched our certification program just after the summit in San Francisco last year. We've trained, working alongside our partners, we've trained tens of thousands of customers and individuals since last year. And we're continuing to see a huge uptake in both not just our learning, but also in certifications. What kind of numbers will you have? So this is a 14 city tour, I believe. We've got 4,000 people here. Is this one of the bigger ones? This is one of the bigger ones. One of the bigger ones. So of those 4,000 people here today, how many are getting trained and how many we're gonna get certified? So yesterday we offered five different boot camps. These were day-long with hands-on labs that we provided in all different kinds of topics. Everything from getting started with AWS technical to big things like how do you operationalize your data center on the AWS cloud or looking into big data? How do you really run your big data analytics on AWS? We had 100 people that attended that and that was a special day, so it was a day before the summit. Today we have hands-on, self-paced hands-on labs that are running and we're also having on-site testing. So again, we have hundreds of people that have gone through and tried out our free labs and people who are quite up there who've been using the technology and have been proving their certification with their certification. So you probably will see them running around with their leather pins which says AWS certified. Oh, those are okay. That's what they're doing. So do you ever wanna grab Andy and just say slow down, slow down, slow down? I mean, when I was watching the keynote this morning and he kept adding to the stack up and down and side to side and definitely each application. You're the one that's gotta keep up with that and get the training material done and get that messaging out to the people. Quite the contrary, because I think it's really exciting to be able to offer what our customers could really, really benefit from and for us to be able to leverage that and train them on it. So it's exciting in so many ways to say that the curricula that we offer to our students is up to date. It's meeting their needs. We're constantly evaluating and figuring out new ways to do the things that we do. So very, very exciting. Very exciting. Yeah, very exciting. So you must be somewhat agile in your own development of your own courseware and keeping ahead of that curve. Yeah, we do have to do that because we're not just like, okay, we built a course and now it's gonna stay like that for the next few months, years, whatever. We have to be constantly iterating and getting feedback from our customers as well as from our own internal teams to say what else do we need to do differently and maintain it. Absolutely. What's interesting about the world today, especially with younger people is they don't like training. They expect just to log in and figure it out and click around and things go. So talk a little bit about some of the different channels of training that you offer and what you see in terms of what are some of the more popular things that people like to use that maybe we wouldn't think, what are some of the more popular formats that people really get a lot of value on and get a lot of uptake on? That's actually, we are seeing a lot of people that are coming in into traditional learning modalities where they're coming in and picking up an instructor-led class, right? So they learn from the class, the community in the class, they learn from the instructors, but you're absolutely right. We are seeing people that are more in, just wanna figure it out, but just hands-on labs and we cater to all of that, right? We do have, recently we've launched what is our intro series, Videos and Labs. These are literally short introduction videos on Amazon services coupled with a hands-on lab. So try it out for free, see how you've just heard about it and now we'll get some hands-on experience with it. And those are really, really popular because that's a modality that people like to learn. That's a form of learning that the people are looking into. So we are offering that, but also offering a lot of self-paced labs. So if you are one of those learners that likes to play around with it, do it on your own and learn, we offer those. Right, what about like meetups and stuff? Cause we see a lot of activity, the San Francisco AWS meetup group is really active, they have events all the time. What role does kind of the community led or kind of activism led education play in your kind of strategy to get the information out? Yeah, I think that this is something that we have to build on more. We have started to think about, how do we build communities around the people that are learning and are getting certified among the different roles, right? So we've targeted three different roles in training today for our customer base, the solutions architect, the SysOps administrators, the developers, and trying to find ways to plug into these communities and bring our learning to them. Great, yeah. Yeah, that's great. And in the developer community, cause that's the one that everybody wants, right? Everybody's after the developer community. So what's some of the secret sauce that you guys are using to get to those people and get them passionate about spending their time developing on Amazon versus spending their time developing in another platform? I think the exciting thing for developers is not getting bogged down by anyone programming model or anyone framework or anyone language even. So our learning, training curriculum courses as well as certification. So we do have a certification tied to the developer too, and it's not tied to that, right? It's giving them the flexibility to pick the language that they want or pick the programming framework that they are interested in and really learning around that. Rocha, now what is the hottest thing out there right now for training? What do you see? I want to say AWS is really hot for when it comes to training and certification. Can you explain what AWS is? What is AWS again? Amazon Web Services. Oh, Amazon Web Services, we're here, it's the cloud. So okay, so people want to know the cloud. People absolutely want to know what the cloud is. So pre-school, then come into pre-school, that's cloud, then K1 is what? EC2, S3? Well, I think what they really want to think about is how do I architect what I have been doing on an on-premise data center and bring it on to the cloud, right? Get the agility, get the innovation back, bring more business value to the customer. How do I do that by leveraging the cloud? And I think our training courses are actually telling them not just to how to architect but then to operationalize your applications in the cloud, your data center in the cloud, and then finally develop the cloud. So you guys have always been good at technical training. So check the box there. Those guys know what AWS is. It sounds like more holistic solutions are being built in the training. Do you see, is that the trend? You want to know what's the bag of tricks can do? Is it more getting more ingratiated deeper? Is it more technical and business now? What's the mix of? We do have business and technical training. So there's a lot, like I said, I was just saying, we do have a lot of introduction stuff that we are doing too. And this is maybe for people who know things really well in their on-premise data center, but maybe need to expand their skill set for what it is going to look like in the cloud. So it is technical in nature because it's targeted at those IT individuals, but really looking at how do we expand the skill set. So I got to ask, what is the most innovative thing that you're doing right now that you can point to? Because Amazon is an innovative company. That's right. So there's always a little twist, a wrinkle in the innovation. They do things, you don't always see it come in a left field, but it's usually good. The news today in for another one. So what are you guys doing that's different? What's the innovative thing about the training? What's the Amazon twist on this thing? I think being able to train them on how to do that on the cloud, right? I mean, so learning itself is not the innovative part. It's the cloud that is the innovative part, right? And we do all of our training live on that cloud, right? So this is not a tested environment. And all of this training is also happening on the cloud. So the platform- It's on the road training. It's on the cloud training. It's on the cloud training, right? So all of our labs are live on there. So these new things that Andy just announced today are live there. And our students get to see that firsthand. Right. So one of the great promises and the values of the cloud, right? There's a whole lot of stuff I don't have to worry about anymore. Absolutely. So what are some of the things you're hearing about from the students that now that their mind is freed up from actually keeping the lights on and everything hooked up and running, where they can start to do some other things? What are you hearing from them? That's exactly it, right? Is not having to worry about that undifferentiated heavy lifting and really thinking about what is it? How can I bring more value as an IT manager or as an IT individual? How can I be a better business value to my customers and to the business, right? I really want to be focused on doing what I do best, right? And the company that I work for doing the best. And I think that training and certification is going to give them those tools to be able to do that. So do they feel it's freeing them up to better deliver operating systems to their clients, to business people in their company? Is it speed? Is it, you know, what are some of the things that when they come out, they're like, wow, this would have been so much harder before and now I can do X that I couldn't before? Right, agility, right? Innovation, I think that is really, really key. When you don't spend all that time that you did in just provisioning boxes to do your projects, now you're using all of that time to actually provide an opportunity in your business to do more innovation, right? Allow that flexibility of, you know, innovating and trying out new projects so that, you know, when the big one becomes successful, it's out there. So I really think that businesses have a better chance of innovating and coming up with how they're going to serve as their customers. And IT really becomes a partner in that, right? IT is not just being considered as someone who is going to help us do that, right? IT is part of that business value that is being provided to the customer. That's great. So talk about some of the backlog issues. Do you have a training program? I can only imagine the stress on the system, you know, clouds, easy to onboard people, but like, you still need people to train people. So like, you have a train-to-trainer program, you must have all this stuff. So what was some of the inside peek about? Do you have a train-to-trainer? What do you get the trainers together? Who trains them? I mean, is it an army of people? What? Yeah, so we start off with, you know, the curriculum development team which is building these products, if you will, these courses, these certification programs that we are putting together. The certification process is obviously very different. We go through, you know, making sure that we have the right items, you know, tremendous psychometric analysis to make sure that, you know, we are differentiating the candidates correctly in their skill set. But from a curriculum point of view, Who does the psychographic analysis? We have psychometricians who do that. You do? Who do that analysis? And you do pursuant calculations on people? Absolutely. Job task analysis really try to understand how what is it that they are going to be doing with the Amazon web services and how they need to use it and what skill set do they really need? And that's internal data that you guys have commissioned or hired or they built for you? Correct. Just proprietary. Yes. You don't share that data? We do not share that data. We share the exam. That is what the people are taking the exams. Jeff knows why I'm asking the question. And we also, from a train-to-trainer perspective, you asked about how do we get our trainers ready? That's exactly it, right? So we have formal train-to-trainer. We have a certified instructor program, so we really want to make sure that when they are in front of the class teaching customers how to do it, that they are qualified to do that. And how many, what's the breakdown of kind of internal folks that are taking the classes for their own company versus kind of service providers that are using this to help their customers? I don't actually have a breakdown of that, but we've seen a mix of everything from our partners, service providers, system integrators to real customers, the actual enterprises, startups, everyone that are coming to training and want to expand their skill sets. Yeah, absolutely. Okay, well, we got a break here, we're getting the hook here, but I definitely want to get you guys on the crouch and I love what you guys are doing. I love the demographic analysis that helps match people with the right contextual courseware and potential curriculum. I think that's kind of, I think that's got a nice Amazon twist to it. That's very Khan Academy life, very, very innovative using data, which we love, we're data driven. Great stuff. So again, the challenge you have is, there's too many people to train. It's like, that's a risk. So, I think get more trainers on board, digress and certification, check out Amazon. Also, you can't go wrong on a career path with cloud. So Jeff, it's a hot area. I've heard this AWS thing is pretty hot. I'd like to get the 101 on what AWS training looks like. So this is theCUBE. We'll be right back getting the on the ground training in the field, getting all the actions here at Moscone Live, AWS Summit. We'll be right back with our next guest.