 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS re-invent 2020. Special coverage sponsored by AWS Global Partner Network. Welcome everyone to theCUBE Live covering AWS re-invent 2020. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. Today we are joined by Joshua Bergen. He is the general manager at AWS Outpost. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE, Joshua. Thank you for having me. It's great to be here. Well, it's great to have you. So tell our viewers a little bit about AWS Outposts. Oh, sure. It's one of my favorite subjects, obviously. So Outposts is a service from AWS that allows you to use the same tools, technology, APIs, you know, programming interfaces that you do in the cloud, but install this and run it on your own premises or in a co-location facility. So it really extends the reach of AWS to far more locations than you could otherwise use it. So what are some of the advancements this year? It's been an amazingly busy year even under unprecedented kind of circumstances where we've tried to turn the crank really hard and deliver value for our customers. We increased the number of countries you could order Outposts in up to 51 countries. You can now connect Outposts to all 22 AWS regions and our GovCloud regions. Everything outside of China. And we delivered 15 new services or incremental features including S3 on Outposts, which was the top thing that customers asked for. But also our application load balancer, elastic cache, our relational database service, RDS. You know, there's probably more that I'm missing here, but you know, and we're definitely not slowing down in that regard. 2021 will probably be an even bigger year. So tell us a little bit about the response from customers since the launch of AWS Outposts last year. What are you hearing? Yeah, I mean, we're hearing a lot. I think we've been pleasantly surprised by the breadth and the depth of the customer use cases. One of the biggest things we heard from people was, you know, the Outposts are great, but it's a full rack of compute or many racks of compute in some cases and storage. You know, there are locations that people wanted to put it in that were smaller where there's space constrained. Maybe a restaurant or a factory floor or a small medical facility, you know, a telco, like a cell site. And so what we did based on that is something that we actually just announced in Andy's keynote just a few days ago here, which is the new small form factor Outposts that are 1U and 2U size servers. It's about the size of one or two pizza boxes stacked on top of each other. So that's even gonna make Outposts available to even more use cases. You know, early on, we kind of said to ourselves that it's important to kind of give people that consistent experience wherever they might need the compute and the storage and the other services. And so I've been really pleasantly surprised, as I mentioned earlier, by how many people have talked to us. We have customers like Phillips Healthcare. They're bringing their medical imaging solution to Outposts and it allows them to kind of modernize the way they deliver services to hospitals and medical research centers around the world. Something that really wouldn't be possible without having AWS everywhere. And that is much, much needed today. So tell us a little bit about more about this year in particular. You said it yourself at the beginning of our conversation, this is an unprecedented year for so many different reasons. How has the COVID-19 pandemic affected AWS Outposts and how your team interacts with customers and gets your job done? Yeah, I think we have some unique challenges in that regard. Obviously, as I mentioned earlier, AWS Outposts are installed in a co-location facility or on a customer's own premises in a data center or other things like that. So obviously we have to get our technicians out there to roll them in and hook them up to your network and to get them powered up. So that means that we are complying with COVID restrictions in, as I mentioned, 51 different countries. So there was even an install earlier this year at a mining location far outside the US where we had to get technicians working with local technicians from the customer following COVID guidelines, wearing protective gear, and actually installing the Outposts, using satellite connectivity and phones to phone home and talk to us during the installation, of course, as it's not hooked up yet. So those are just kind of examples of the lengths to which we'll go to make sure that, of course, we're safe, the customers are safe, but that they can kind of continue to modernize their application portfolio and get benefits from the Outposts. And what are you hearing from clients and customers in terms of how they're thinking about their technology needs now and in the coming year? Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, it really varies by market segment. So you have customers like Ericsson and Telefonica, they're gonna be using Outposts to kind of run their 5G packet core technology. It's gotta be run at the edge, right? They're telcos, they need to minimize latency, single digit milliseconds. Or you might have a customer like Lockheed Martin and what they've told us is they have projects that are subject to government contracts and regulations. And not only do they have, of course, compliance regimes like FedRAMP that they need to be aware of, but there's data residency requirements. So whether they're deploying in the United States or with our allies all around the world, the compute and the storage, they need to run in specific locations. So now Outposts are gonna be a key advancement and kind of a key differentiator for them in how they deliver services to their customers and still meet those data residency or compliance requirements. Joshua, tell our viewers more about AWS Outposts ready. Oh, that's another thing I'm really glad you mentioned. So the Outposts ready program, these are solutions from our APN, our Amazon AWS partner network that are validated in following our best practices on AWS Outposts. They're certified to work and they're generally available to customers. And so it's a program where ISVs and SaaS providers can ensure that the technology that they provide, this third party technology is going to work in the Outposts environment. And there's something about Outposts that I think makes this a differentiator and uniquely valuable. When I mentioned kind of that consistent hybrid experience, when you think about how Outposts are deployed in a customer's data center, maybe alongside other technology they're already using. And so customers say, look, these AWS services are great, but I already use a variety of third party technology, maybe from Veritas or Trend Micro, Palo Alto Networks, Commvault, SciSense, PagerDuty, Pure Storage, NetApp. The list is actually pretty extensive of what people are already using. And so they've said, I do plan on using AWS services, but I also don't wanna give up what my team is already familiar with. So can you make sure that's gonna work for me, whether I'm using it in the region or on the AWS Outposts? And so the interest and kind of demand for this, both from customers and the enthusiasm from the partners, has been off the charts. We started the program in just September, which is not that long ago and we had 32 partners. And as of today, we have an additional 25 partners, right? It's 57 partners total, 64 certified solutions. So that's a lot of momentum and just kind of a short amount of time. And I'm really happy that we can deliver that to the customers. So it's already showing tremendous momentum. How do you think about it in terms of the primary benefits that it gives to customers and how it helps customers and partners? Yeah, I think in order to qualify, the solution has to be tested and validated against a bunch of criteria that we have, very specific technical criteria, security requirements, operational. And they're supported for customers with clear deployment guidelines. So the customers can kind of think of this as a guarantee that we're not just saying maybe this could work, but this will work. If you're already using it, it's going to continue to work in a way that's familiar to you. And again, that's important, that consistent hybrid experience, whether you're using a solution from a third party or from AWS, whether you're using it in the region or on a local zone or in a wavelength zone, some of our other kind of innovative infrastructure deployments or using it on an outpost, no matter where you're using it, it has to work the same way. And so this is something that customers have said, I want to be able to get up and running quickly. We had a customer Riot Games, they're the maker of League of Legends, but also when they were launching their new game Valorant in June of 2020, they deployed outposts in four different locations to kind of ensure a level playing field in terms of latency. And what they told us, very much like the Service Ready program is they were able to get up and running in just a matter of days once the outpost was deployed. And it's because we gave them those same APIs, that same tooling. So I think that's really important for people and I hope we can continue to deliver on that promise. So to close this out here, I want you to look into your crystal ball and think ahead 12 and 24 months when fingers crossed, things are back to somewhat more normal. What's in store for AWS outposts? Yeah, I mean, we're going to deliver on what we announced here at Reinvent, which is the new small form factor outposts. And I think what we're going to continue to do is listen to customers. We developed outposts from the very beginning because customers said, could you deploy outposts in our data center? Sorry, can you deploy AWS in our data center? Didn't have a name back then. And so that's really the hallmark of AWS. Somewhere around 90% of our roadmaps are based on what customers tell us they want. Then the other 10% is when we kind of look around the corner and hopefully delight people with something they didn't even know they needed. And I really hope for my team and that that's what 2021 and 2022 brings is more countries, more services, more value, more compliance certifications, all the things that people tell us they want, we're going to keep turning the crank as hard as we can and delivering that as quickly as possible. With the trademark Amazon customer delight. Yes, absolutely. Excellent. So, Virgin, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. It was a pleasure having you. It was a pleasure talking to you. Thank you very much. I'm Rebecca Knight for more of theCUBE's coverage of AWS re-invent 2020. Stay tuned.