 Hello everyone, welcome to this breaking silicon angle news segment. I'm John Furrier reporting for Silicon Angle and host of theCUBE. This breaking news powered by theCUBE is going to talk about Amazon's recent announcement today, a new offerings to help telcos jumpstart their innovation. That's the headline on siliconangle.com. Of course, the release from AWS announces AWS telco network builder, among other things next week. We'll be at Mobile World Congress from Monday through Thursday the 27th of the 30th for live coverage from Barcelona. theCUBE will be there. My guest here to break down the news from AWS is Jan Hoffmeyer, vice president of Amazon's EC2 edge. Jan of industry veteran, heading up the edge for EC2 for AWS the telco edge. The network builder, welcome to the breaking news segment. Thank you, John. Great to be here with you today. In your background, you've seen this movie on network buildouts over the years. You know how important the network has been. It's been one of the areas of innovation. I won't say the last area of innovation, but the cloud started at the low hanging fruit, compute services, but the network is so strategic. AWS has done a great job. We've covered deep stories on from the silicon to all the advances in the data center with James Hamilton, Desanthos, the whole team. Now, when you talk about edge, you're talking about telcos, you're talking about new network edge points that are providing innovation with data. And this is the next frontier in cloud computing. You guys today announced a service called AWS telco network builder, a fully managed service that helps telcos deploy, run and scale their networks using AWS cloud. Can you share with us what the services are? Take a minute to explain the news and then we'll get into the conversation. Absolutely, John. So first of all, you know, I think it's important to define this edge. You call the next frontier. So the edge for us, you know, we have our 31 regions across the world. And what we do here is we take the AWS infrastructure that runs in our regions and we bring it closer to our customers. And we bring it close to our customers through local zones that runs in our metro areas. And then even running on-prem in our customer data centers through a service called Outpost that brings that same infrastructure run on the regions all the way into our customer data centers. And one of the exciting things for us was when 5G came out, you know, it was the first wireless technology that was designed for the cloud. And what I mean with that is they took the design itself and they broke it down into microservices. They call them network functions. And for the first time you can now deploy the network down to its granular functions and deploy that in the cloud. So that was the exciting shift in the networking world when it comes to wireless is the first cloud native wireless design of wireless architecture. And we've been working very closely with our customers as they deploy this new 5G network within the AWS cloud. You know, I love that network function. I'm glad you brought that up a little bit earlier that I was going to get into it, but I'll get into it. Andy Jassy said to me on theCUBE at re-invent when asked if he would rebuild AWS today with the technology available, how he would build AWS, and he said he would use serverless. And in a way you're kind of getting at this next network function is kind of like the serverless for networks. Talk about the importance of this is a really big deal. It's a very nuanced point, but this is where the innovation is. Can you share your vision on why the network function, this innovation area is so important and what's the impact going to be for the customers? No, it's a great question. So the first thing with the innovation here is for the first time, you know, in the past when you deploy a network whether it's a wireless network in this particular case, you have these very large components that contains all of the functions, which means deploying changes and changing that system took a very long time. Being able to test all the components that's part of this one big release just made it very slow to innovate, very slow to introduce new changes, new functionality for customers. With network functions, you can deploy and update a single function within the network. You enable a specific functionality for a customer or for how you operate the network and you can do it independently. So it really unlocks the innovation and the speed to market for our customers, for our customers by being able to have that granular control over the network. So you're saying then that the telcos who are known as being like move as fast as glaciers in the industry now can move faster with the network function. And more agile, is that the benefit? I would never say that. But what I would say is, I do think that this allows them to really take advantage of cloud and what we've seen, what cloud did to compute and to storage and that innovation it unlocks, it really puts the telcos in a position where they can unlock that same velocity that we've seen cloud do for all the other industries. All joking aside, I love to always take a shot at the telcos because they are slow, but they make a lot of money. It's okay for them, but all kidding aside, though there's a lot of legacy that's been built up over the telcos over the years and it's become, and one of the reasons why they're slow is like any other, any environment that's a lot of legacy and scale, it's hard to make a change. So the question I have for you is can you talk about what this network builder means for the customers and to explain how it works? Is it software? Is it a managed service? Do telcos have to change how they do things? Their terminology? What's the operational change, if any? Because again, this is similar we've seen in the enterprise, legacy slows things down. What's your take on that? How would you explain the service, how it's consumed, and what's the impact? So the service we introduced, or we launched, it's called the AWS Telco Neighbor Builder, and it is a fully managed service that AWS manages on behalf of our customers. And you should think of it, if I have to give it one word, it really does all of the automation for how you both deploy and operate a network. So let me break that down a little bit. So in its most basic form, it is the automation layer that runs the deployment, they call it a CICD pipeline, but the deployment of these network functions, so it allows the Telco to deploy their network functions in AWS Cloud. The second thing it does is it allows them to apply the configurations and the lifecycle management. So once these functions are deployed, the ongoing operations of deploying new configuration to it, it facilitates all of that. And then it also gives them the visibility, the operational monitoring and visibility of their network that runs there. Now, why is that important is, one, it gives them that capability, but also it exposes all of this new cloud to them in a very standard way, that is the same APIs and language they use today to operate their networks. So the systems now, think of their business systems that interfaces with the network itself, it can still continue to speak the same language, the same APIs. So Telco-Network Boulder exposes on the top side the same APIs and language for how they interact with it. And then underneath the cover, we deal with the cloud native components how do they deploy and operate these functions. Okay, so managed service, you've tracked away some of that layer there for integration purposes. So there's not a lot of lingua franca translations on their part, operationally, they can get into it. I get that on the other service that you announced that you kind of, I think you might've mentioned it, there was a second service, the integrated private wireless on AWS. What is that about? Can you explain that? Is that related to the Telco builder? Or is that a component of it? Is it a service? Is that the network function? What is that second service about? So that's a completely separate service from the Telco-Network Boulder referring to the integrated private wireless on AWS. That is a program. And it's a program where today we have so many of our Telco customers have private wireless solutions that was built and developed on top of AWS, running in AWS. And this program will enable our customers, AWS customers to find the right wireless solution offered by our Telco customers and bring those two together. So the Telco customers, where they develop these private wireless solutions on AWS, they bring tremendous value with that service, with their own services. Be it that they bring their own spectrum for licensed spectrum that can be used. They have the ability to offer fully managed services where they have people that can do the RF planning for you, they can do the onsite management of the systems for you, of the network itself. So it's really connecting our customers with the right solution to solve their private wireless needs. And can you give an example, because what you're saying is the business have their own private spectrum that they want to then scale with the cloud. Is that kind of right? Or what is the given example of who uses private spectrum or private wireless? So in many countries in the world, there is no shared spectrum. So in the US we have, as an example, we have the CBRS spectrum, which is a spectrum given that can be used without having a specific license that is issued to a Telco or to a Telco. And so in the US, we can leverage that shared spectrum to create a private wireless solution. In many countries, you don't have shared spectrum. And so, as part of our launch, Telco partners like Deutsche Telecom, KDI in Japan, Orange and Telefonica Spain and even T-Mobile here in the US can now bring their own network on-premise for private use running in the AWS cloud. So it's almost like a VPN for wireless, if you think about it in a weird way. They're bringing spectrum into the scale for private use for the company. So that, I guess that what enables more services at scale for either people on the go. Is that the benefit? You can really think of it as a private network. So if you think about your phone connects to a public network with all the other phones and all the other consumers out there, here you can create a private network that only you as a company have access to and you can control who have access to that network. Got it. Okay, one little caveat. I want to get on the record here before we get in the next set of questions because you guys use the word CSP. First thing that jumps in my mind is cloud service products I'm so used to covering cloud service, but also it means communication service. In your context, this is communications service providers. That is great. That's a great question. And they are include, they include who? So that those are how we refer to the telco industry as communication service providers. So think of the of the T-mobiles of the world and the Deutsche Telecom. These are the telcos that prefer to them as communication service providers. Okay, good. Making sure we're getting that out there. I kind of wanted to get that form. Cloud service providers are great and the communicator has all the scale and all the edge access. Okay, so Amazon has been no stranger to the edge. It's been talked about almost in the past three re-invents. The beginning was you start to see outposts that was years ago. You got wavelength, you got satellites, a lot more equipment being deployed for edge type use cases. The telcos going cloud native is a pretty big deal. We think this is going to be the beginning of Mobile World Congress or MWC, they're rebranding, because they haven't taken the word mobile out of it, MWC will probably be moving to being a cloud show for communication service providers meets business and application development. So I have to ask you, how do you guys see the conversations going with respect to one, deploying the infrastructure to get cloud native? You mentioned the service builder. Now you got the private wireless, you can see the business tying in. What are some of the progressions you're seeing from uptake? Is it infrastructure, then apps? What do you see as the vision of this announcement going? Obviously you got EC2 instances, EKS clusters, VPC resources, operational network services, I get that. But what's the, take me through the storyboard here and the progression of the execution. You know, I think there's two elements to it. I think the first one is just, well, you know, the very core, the core business of modernizing the networks, giving them that agility and an ability to bring to market new solutions and new services much faster. So that is just the modernization and cloudification of their existing infrastructure. It also sets them up to bring new services that are much more cloud native services to their customers. And so I think you will see, you'll see that as a big focus when we go into Mobile World Conference. Last year was all about private. That was the big story last year. I think this year is going to be about platforms and how they develop platforms running in the cloud and offer those services for their customers. Yeah, and I think this has been kind of happening for a while. I think there's been, we've been waiting for that tipping point. I think it's finally here. And congratulations. I got to ask you, obviously, I know Amazon been covering all the news for over a decade now, 12 years. You guys always customer centric and customer focused. What was the customer challenge here? What were the CSPs facing when building out these tech, telco networks in the cloud? And how did you guys build the telco network and build it to address them? Can you talk specifically about what was the bullseye of this? Because there was a customer need, what were their challenges? What was the big problem that you solved or the enabler for the CSPs? Well, that's a great question. And then you are so right. We almost never just build something and hope they would come. It's always based on a customer need that we saw. And as we were engaging with our customers on bringing their 5G networks onto the cloud, onto AWS, we recognized two key things. The first one was that the skill set of understanding how to develop in the cloud and the pointer cloud, from a network perspective, that was just not there. So there was a fairly big step for them to understand how to do that. And telco network builder addresses directly that need. It makes it much easier. It will also allow them to onboard and become much more cloud native centric and to be able to have that skill set. But it really accelerates them onboard onto the cloud. So I think that's the very first one that it does. The second one is, it really accelerates the visibility that cloud gives them because we make the data available to them that they can then use in terms of the monitoring and observability, make that data available to them. So I think it greatly accelerates their ability to then also see the performance of the network. And having that information, I think will allow them to innovate much faster. Okay, you mentioned earlier at the top of the interview, Amazon is pretty complex in its regions. Again, there's many of them out there more coming on every day. They first hit the continents and they hit regions. Now you got locales going up. What is the impact to the availability inside AWS's network? I mean, because what is the current availability? Is it just America, North Virginia, the US, East, West, what's the topology look like from a support standpoint? Is it global at launch and is it available now? So when we launched, where we launched the service today, the service is available in five regions and we plan to take it to all of our regions. Again, based on our customers footprint and where they are using the service. So today in five regions, our goal will be that this will roll out to the other regions as well. Okay, I got to ask the question on customers. Who's up and running? Can you name names? You mentioned some of the CSPs. What's the adoption look like? What's the pipeline for customers look like? You know, there's two kinds of customers here. There's one is the customer, the telco that will actually use the, that will use telco network Boulder as a service. For that, we've got Telefonica, O2 Telefonica as one of the telco customers. The next layer are the, you know, at a telco, you have this automation layer that talks to some bigger orchestration layer on top. And for that, we have two of our partners with Cloudify and Infosys that will be, that's already integrated with telco network Boulder. And then underneath, we spoke about those network functions. We've also already announced with Mavineer as being one of those network function technology partners that is supported in telco network. Big fan of the network functions, by the way. I want to just say that personal bias there. I think that's innovative. Love the management orchestration concepts. You guys thinking large scales what telcos are used to. John, you've been in networks for a long time. You know, you know, networks are everything. But as you know, there's the easy way. There's the hard way. There's the cheap way, the expensive way. And so there's all kinds of different ways to slice and dice the network, right? So now you got that challenge in terms of latency, big discussion point and two, security. The two conversations that are coming up more and more on my cube interviews with customers and practitioners. They want latency to be as low as possible. You can't change the laws of physics. However, security, the bad guys are better than the good guys right now. So what do you say to that? What's your take on this? So let me take the two. I think on the latency, I totally agree with you. I think we've already seen big use cases that drives the need for better latency. The ability for the talk on it, one of the big advantages there is that once you deploy, let's say in a region, it is literally you can specify a local zone and deploy the exact same function in a local zone. And it makes the ability to deploy in, you know, in the different AWS locations much, much faster and easier for the talk. So if they need to get closer to a customer they can deploy into a local zone or they can even deploy onsite onto an outpost. So it really allows that ability to deploy closer much, much easier. From a security, I think it goes back to that earlier point I made around the visibility. Having the data and access to the data that they can then feed into their security systems. You know, I think that'll be a key source of information into their systems. With Telconever Builder, we also use the security services of AWS that specify who has permissions to make changes, can view the data. So they have fine grain control using the AWS security services to control exactly who can access the network. Well, John, I really appreciate you taking the time to unpack the announcement, you know, an offering that you got, that you got Cloud, a network, Telconever Builder and then you got the private wireless service, great stuff, integrated private wireless for AWS. Great stuff. Final couple of questions. Okay, zoom back. What's the impact of the industry? How do you see this evolving? What will this enable as you look out? I know you really can't make any forward-looking statements, but just from a technical industry perspective, put your practitioner hat on, knowing what's out there, what's going to enable this? Because cloud native in Telco is coming, that brings open source, that brings a whole nother paradigm, network functions, serverless, all the goodness of cloud coming into the communication server. What's the impact? No. You know, I think, let me start with the highest level. I think the first one is, you know, recently, you know, in February this year, Omnia reported, in Omnia report, they found that the Telcos can reduce the OPEX versus revenue ratio by more than 10% by simply migrating their workloads to the cloud. That is a huge savings. You know, they're looking at just network operations to drop from about 18% to 13%. They're expecting that the IT operations will drop from 6%, 6.2% to 3.5%. So just from a cost savings perspective, which is really important to imagine, just if you just, within the current macroeconomic climate, we are all in at the moment, there are huge optimizations, cost optimization that they can do by moving to the cloud. I think the second one is just all of these new use cases. I do think that the private use case we spoke about last year at Mobile World, that will continue to open up new opportunities, a new revenue opportunities for the Telcos. So I think that in itself, and then 5G, there's a lot of capabilities that still needs to be enabled in the 5G that is available there that is in the specification and as the networks build out, they will have the technology, the ability to then deploy that very fast and get that into their systems. With something like Telco Network Boulder that really accelerates and helps them to get that functionality out there as soon as it's ready. So I think that on all those fronts, you will see a big impact. Final question for you, obviously cloud had this progression, IaaS infrastructure as a service, platform as a service, powering SaaS apps, AWS dominated the IaaS, developed the PaaS layer, and really the ecosystem was software as a service. Here in Telco, it's kind of similar, but I mean it's not as organically growing as cloud computing was born with AWS. It's almost turning that IaaS PaaS SaaS in real time. I mean it's converting it over. What are some of those PaaS layer platform and SaaS services you guys see enabling? Is it cloud native applications at the edge? Is it the use of data and security at the edge? How do you see this progression? Is there any civilized between IaaS PaaS and SaaS on cloud and the state of the edge right now? Because compute and storage, networking, I mean that's good, goodness, that's what it's going to happen. How is that going to build out? You know, I think two things. One is just for the Telcos and what's happening here with this, with we're coming to the cloud. The network fabric is truly becoming cloud and part of the cloud. And you think about the Telco network builder, it really exposes it as an API. It exposes the network as an API and now suddenly you can interface with it no different than you interface with compute and storage. So I do think that this brings the network truly into a cloud native construct that can be used the same way we use compute and storage. So I think that's the first one. I think the second one is just there are so many use cases where we still have compute and storage and network running on-prem that's not in the cloud. And I do see an acceleration of how those workloads can participate in the cloud. And it's not necessary that they always come to the region. Bringing the cloud to the edge, I think it's as important. And that's why it's so important for us to focus on how we bring local zones and help us close to the edge so that those applications that once at the edge it needs to be at the edge can run in the same and benefit from the same cloud economics and cloud capabilities at the edge. Awesome, great news. It's the beginning we think of a major shift that's continuing to accelerate. We think what the pandemic did for work, this is going to accelerate distributed computing and cloud computing to the edge. Jan Hoffmeyer, vice president of Amazon's EC2 edge on theCUBE here, breaking down the innovations that telcos are getting to jumpstart their profit, their capabilities, ADOS announcing, ADOS telco network builder. John, thank you for coming on. Thank you very much John. Okay, you're watching breaking SiliconANGLE news. I'm John Hoffmeyer reporting the ADOS news and also CUBE host here, powered by theCUBE. Thanks for watching.