 Thanks guys, hi everybody. Welcome back to the Spheres. My name is Dave Vellante. You're watching theCUBE's continuous coverage of AWS Storage Day. I'm really excited to bring on Wayne Duso. Wayne is the Vice President of AWS Storage Edge and Data Governance Services. Wayne, two Boston boys got to come to Seattle to see each other. Good to see you, man. Good to see you, too. I mean, I'm not really from Boston. The guys from East Boston give me crap for saying that. That's my city, right? You're a city, too. It is my city as well. I'm from Charlestown. I'm right across the ocean. Charlestown is actually legit Boston, you know? I grew up in a town outside, but that's my city, so I'm all the sports fans. So hey, great keynote today. We're going to unpack the keynote and really try to dig into it a little bit. You know, the last 18 months has been pretty bizarre. You know, who could have predicted this? We were just talking to Mylon about some of the permanent changes and even now, it's like day to day. You're trying to figure out, okay, you know, what's next? You know, our business, your business, but clearly, this has been an interesting time, to say the least, and a tailwind for the cloud. Let's face it. How are customers responding? How are they changing their strategies as a result? Yeah, well, first off, let me say, it's good to see you. It's been years since we've been in chairs across from one another. Yeah, a couple of years ago in Boston. A couple of years ago in Boston. Glad to see you're doing well. Yeah, thanks, you too. You look great. You know. You know. I don't know what you do. If we get the socks going, we'll be in better shape. We'll be all set. Dave, you know, the last 18 months have been challenging. There's been a lot of change, but it's also been inspiring. What we've seen is our customers engaging the agility of the cloud and appreciating the cost benefits of the cloud. You know, during this time, we've had to be there for our partners, our clients, our customers, and our people, whether it's work from home, whether it's expanding your capability because it's surging, say a company like Zoom where they're surging and they need more capability. Our cloud capabilities have allowed them to function, grow, and thrive in these challenging times. It's really a privilege that we have the services and we have the capability to enable people, to behave and execute and operate as normally as you possibly can in something that's never happened before in our lifetimes, unprecedented. It's a privilege. Yeah, I mean, I agree. You think about it. There's a lot of negative narrative in the press about big tech and, you know, the reality is is big tech has, and small tech, has stepped up big time. And we really think about it, Wayne, where would we be without tech? And I know it sounds bizarre, but we're kind of lucky this pandemic actually occurred when it did because had it occurred, you know, 10 years ago, it would have been a lot tougher. I mean, who knows, state of vaccines, but certainly from a tech standpoint, the cloud has been a savior and you mentioned Zoom. I mean, you know, productivity continues. So that's been pretty key. I want to ask you, when you keynote, you talked about two paths to move to the cloud. You know, vector one was go, you kind of lift and shift if I got it right. And then vector two was modernize first and then go. First of all, did I get that right? And- Super close, super close. Okay, so help me, of course, correct. And what are those two paths mean for customers? How should we think about that? Yeah, so we want to make sure that customers can appreciate the value of the cloud as quickly as they need to. And so there's two paths. And with launches, we'll talk about them in a minute, like our FSX for NetApp on tap. It allows customers to quickly move from like to like. So they can move from on-prem and what they're using in terms of the storage services, the processes they use to administer the data and manage the data straight onto AWS without any conversion, without any change to their applications, without any change to anything. So storage administrators can be really confident that they can move. Application administrators know it will work as well if not better with the cloud. So moving onto AWS quickly to value, that's one path. Now, once they move onto AWS, some customers will choose to modernize. So they will modernize by containerizing their applications or they will modernize by moving to serverless using Lambda, right? So that gives them the opportunity at the pace they want as quickly or as cautious as they need to modernize their application because they're already executing, they're already operating, already getting value. Now, within that context, then they can continue that modernization process by integrating with even more capabilities, whether it's ML capabilities or IoT capabilities, depending on their needs. So it's really about speed, agility, the ability to innovate, and then the ability to get that flywheel going with cost optimization, feed those savings back into betterment for their customers. So how do the launches that you guys have made today and even previously, do they map into those two paths? Yeah, they do, very well. How so? Help us understand that. So if we let's just run down through some of the launches today, and we can map those to those two paths. So we talked about FSX for NetApp on tap, or we just like to say FSX for on tap because it's so much easier to say. So FSX for on tap is a clear case of move. Right. EBS I02 BlockExpress for SAN, a clear case of move. It allows customers to quickly move their SAN workloads to AWS with the launch of EBS Direct API supporting 64 terabyte volumes. Now you can snapshot your 64 terabyte volumes on-prem to already be in AWS and you can restore them to an EBS I02 BlockExpress volume, allowing you to quickly move an ERP application or an Oracle application, some enterprise application that requires the speed and the durability and the capability of EBS super quickly. So those are good examples of that. In terms of the modernization path, our launch of AWS Transfer Managed Workflows is a good example of that. Managed workflows have been around forever and customers rely on those workflows to run their business, but they really want to be able to take advantage of cloud capabilities. They want to be able to, for instance, apply ML to those workflows because it really kind of makes sense. They're workflows, they're people related. You can apply an artificial intelligence to them. This is an example of a service that allows them to modify those workflows, to modernize them, and to build additional value into them. Well, I like that example. I have a couple of follow-up questions if I may. Sticking on the machine learning and machine intelligence for a minute, that to me is a big one because when I was talking to my land about this, it's not just you sticking storage in a bucket anymore. You're invoking other services, machine intelligence, machine learning might be database services, whatever it is, streaming services, and it's a service. There it is. It's not a real complicated integration, so that to me is big. I want to ask you about the block side of things. You built in your day a lot of boxes. I've built a lot of boxes. And you know the sand space really well, and you know a lot of people, probably more than I do, storage admins are saying, you're not touching my sand, and they just build a brick wall around it. Okay, and now eventually the age is out, and I think that whole cumbersome model it's understood, but nonetheless, their workloads and their apps are running on that. How do you see that movement from those? And they're the toughest ones to move. The Oracle, the SAP, the really mission critical Microsoft apps, the database apps, hard core stuff. How do you see that moving into the cloud? Give us a sense as to what customers are telling you. Storage administrators have a hard job. And in trying to navigate how they move from on-prem to in-cloud is challenging. So we listen to the storage administrators, even when they tell us no, we want to understand why no. And when you look at EBS IoT Block Express, this is in part our initial response to moving their sand into the cloud super easily, right? Because what do they need? They need performance, they need durability, they need availability, they need the services to be able to snap and to be able to replicate their storage. They need to know that they can move their applications without having to redo all they know, to re-plan all they work on each and every day. They want to be able to move quickly and confidently. EBS IoT Block Express is the beginning of that. They can move confidently to sand in the cloud using EBS. So why do they say no? Is it just like the inherent fear, like a lawyer would say, don't do that, you know, or is it just, is it a technical issue? Is it a cultural issue? And what are you seeing there? It's a cultural issue, it's a mindset issue, but it's a responsibility. I mean, these folks are responsible for one of the most important assets that you have. Most important asset for any company, it's people. Second most important asset, it's data. These folks are responsible for a very important asset. And if they don't get it right, if they don't get security right, they don't get performance right, they don't get durability right, they don't get availability right, it's on them. So it's on us to make sure that they're okay. Do you see it similar to the security discussion? Because early on I was just talking to Sandy Carter about this, and we were saying, you remember the CIA deal, right? So I remember talking to the financial services people that will never put any data in the cloud. Okay, that's got to be one of your biggest industries if not your biggest, you know, customer base today. But there was fear, and the CIA deal changed that. They're like, wow, CIA is going to the cloud? Oh, they're really security conscious. And that was an example of maybe public sector informing commercial. Do you see it as similar, and obviously differences, but is it a sort of similar dynamic? I do, I do. You know, all of these illities, right? Whether it's durability, availability, security, we'll put illity at the end of that somehow. All of these are not jargon words. They mean something to each persona, to each customer. So we have to make sure that we address each of them. So like security, and we've been addressing the security concern since the beginning of AWS, because security is job number one, and operational excellence is job number two. So a lot of things we're talking about here is operational excellence. Durability, availability, likeness are all operational concerns, and we have to make sure we deliver against those. I get it. I mean, the storage admin's job is thankless, but at the same time, if your main expertise is managing loans, your growth path is limited. So they want to transform. They want to modernize their own careers. I love that. It's true, right? I mean, it's- Yeah, so if you're a storage administrator today, understanding the storage portfolio that AWS delivers will allow you, and it will enable you, empower you to be a cloud storage administrator. So you have no worry because you're, let's take FSX for on tap. You will take the skills that you've developed and honed over years and directly apply them to the workloads that you will bring to the cloud using the same CLIs, the same APIs, the same consoles, the same capabilities. Plus, you mentioned, you guys announced, or you talked about AWS backup services today, announced some stuff there. I see security governance backup, identity access management and governance. These are all adjacencies. So if you're a cloud storage administrator, you're now going to expand your scope of operations. You're not going to be a security whiz overnight by any means, but you're now part of that rubric. And you're going to participate in that opportunity and learn some things and advance your career. I want to ask you, before we run out of time, you talked about agility and cost optimization and kind of the yin and the yang of cloud, if you will. But how are these seemingly conflicting forces in sync in your view? Like many things in life. Yeah. Right, we're going to get a little spiritual here. We might get a little philosophical here. Cloud announced, we talked about two paths and part of the two paths is enabling you to move quickly and be agile in how you move to the cloud. Once you are on the cloud, we have the ability through this, all of the service integrations that we have and your ability to see exactly what's happening at every moment to then cost optimize, to modernize, to cost optimize, to improve on the applications and workloads and data sets that you've brought. So this becomes a flywheel. Cost optimization allows you to reinvest, reinvest allows you to be more agile, more innovative, which again returns a value to your business and value to your customers. It's a flywheel effect. Yeah, it's kind of that gain sharing. It is. Right, and you know, it's harder to do that in an on-prem world, which everything is kind of, okay, it's working. Now, boom, make it static. Oh, I want to bring in this capability or this, you know, AI and then there's an integration challenge going on. Not that there's differences in APIs, but that to me is the opportunity to build on top of that. Again, talking to my land, I remember Andy Jassy saying, hey, we purposefully have created our services at a really atomic level so that we can get down to the primitives and change as the market changes. To me, that's an opportunity for builders to create abstraction layers on top of that. You know, you've kind of, Amazon has kind of resisted that over the years, but almost on purpose. There's some of that now going on, specialization and maybe certain industry solutions. But in general, your philosophy is to maintain that agility at the really granular level. It is, you know, we go back a long way. And as you said, I've built a lot of boxes and I'm proud of a lot of the boxes I've built, but a box is still a box, right? You have constraints. And when you innovate and build on the cloud, when you move to the cloud, you do not have those constraints, right? You have the agility. You can stand up a file system in three seconds. You can grow it and shrink it whenever you want and you can delete it, get rid of it whenever you want, back it up and then delete it. You don't have to worry about your infrastructure. You don't have to worry about is it going to be there in three months? It will be there in three seconds. So the agility of each of these services, the unique elements of all of these services allow you to capitalize on their value, use what you need and stop using it when you don't. And you don't have the same capabilities when you use more traditional products. So when you're designing a box, how is your mindset different than when you're designing a service? Well, you have physical constraints. You have to worry about the physical resources on that device for the life of that device, which is years. Think about what changes in three or five years. Think about the last two years alone and what's changed. Can you imagine having been constrained by only having boxes available to you during this last two years versus having the cloud and being able to expand or contract based on your business needs? That would be really tough, right? And it has been tough. That's why we've seen customers for every industry accelerate their use of the cloud during these last two years. So I get that. So what's your mindset when you're building storage services and data services? So each of the services that we have, in object, block, file, movement services, data services, each of them provides very specific customer value and each are deeply integrated with the rest of AWS so that when you need object services, you start using them and the integrations come along with you. You're using traditional block. We talked about EBS IoT Block Express. When you're using file, just the example alone today with ONTAP, you get to use what you need when you need it in the way that you're used to using it without any concern. So your mindset is how do I exploit all these other services? You're like the chef and these are ingredients that you can tap and give a path to your customers to exploit over time. Traditionally, for instance, if you were to have a filer, you would run multiple applications on that filer. You're worried about, because you should as a storage administrator, will each of those applications have the right amount of resources to run at peak? When you're on the cloud, each of those applications will just spin up in seconds their own file system and those file systems can grow and shrink at whatever, however they need to do so and you don't have to worry about one application interfering with the other application. It's not your concern anymore and it's not really that fun to do anyway. It's kind of the hard work that nobody really wants to reward you for. So you can take your time and apply it to more business value for your business. That's great, thank you for that. Okay, I'll give you the last word. Give us the bumper sticker on AWS Storage Day. It's an exciting day. The third AWS Storage Day. You guys keep getting bigger, you're grazing the bar. And we're happy to keep doing it with you. Awesome. So thank you for flying out from Boston to see me. Pleasure. As they say. So, you know, this is a great opportunity for us to talk to customers, to thank them. It's a privilege to build what we build for customers. You know, our customers are leaders and their organizations and their businesses for their customers. And what we want to do is help them continue to be leaders and help them to continue to build and deliver. We're here for them. Wayne, it's great to see you again. Thanks so much. Thanks. And maybe see you back at home. All right, go socks. All right, yeah, go socks. All right, thank you for watching everybody. Back to Jenna Canal and Darko in the studios of Dave Vellante. You're watching theCUBE.