 Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of AWS Public Sector Summit here in Washington, DC. We're live on the ground for two days, face-to-face conferences and expo hall and everything here. But Keith Brooks, who's the director and head of technical business development for AWS, government, GovCloud, selling brains, 10th birthday. Congratulations. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, John. Happy to be here. So EC2 is 15. Yeah. S3 is nine and a half, or no, that may be their 10, because that's the same day as SQS. So GovCloud, 10 years. 10 years. 10 years. Big miles though. So congratulations. A lot of history involved in GovCloud. Yes. Take us through, what's the current situation? Yeah. So let's start with what it is, just for the viewers that may not be familiar. So AWS GovCloud is isolated AWS cloud infrastructure and services that were purposely built for our US government customers that had highly sensitive data or highly regulated data or applications or workloads that they wanted to move to the cloud. So we gave customers the ability to do that with AWS GovCloud. It is subject to the FedRAMP high and DoDSRG IL4, IL5 baselines. It gives customers the ability to address ITAR requirements as well as CGIS, NIST, CMMC, and FIPS requirements, and gives customers a multi-region architecture that allows them to also design for disaster recovery and high availability. In terms of why we built it, it starts with our customers. It was pretty clear from the government that they needed a highly secure and highly compliant cloud infrastructure to innovate ahead of demand, and that's what we delivered. So back in August of 2011, we launched AWS GovCloud, which gave customers the best of breed in terms of high technology, high security, high compliance in the cloud to allow them to innovate for their mission-critical workloads. Who was some of the early customers when you guys launched? Honestly, the CIA deal, that was a community, that was a big one, but what were some of the early customers? So the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Defense were all early users of AWS GovCloud, but one of our earliest lighthouse customers was the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and NASA JPL used AWS GovCloud to procure IT resources ahead of demand, which allowed them to save money and also take advantage of being efficient and only paying for what they needed. But they went beyond just IT operations. They also looked at how do they use the cloud and specifically GovCloud for their mission programs. So if you think back to all the way to 2012 with the Mars Curiosity rover, NASA JPL actually streamed and processed and stored that data from the Curiosity rover on AWS GovCloud. They actually streamed over 150 terabytes of data, responded to over 80,000 requests per second, and took it beyond just imagery. They actually did high performance compute and data analytics on the data as well that led to additional efficiencies for future rover missions. So they were entire kicking. They were actually hardcore, leaning into it. Mission critical workloads. That also adhered to ITAR compliance, which is why they use AWS GovCloud. All these compliance. So there's also these levels. I remember when I was working on the Jedi stories that were out, there was always like level four. There's always different classifications. What does all that mean? And then there's highly available data and highly high availability. All these words mean something in these top secret clouds. Can you take us through kind of meanings of those? Yeah, absolutely. So it starts with the federal compliance program and the two most popular programs are FedRAMP and DoD SRG. FedRAMP is more general for federal government agencies. There are three levels, low, moderate, and high. And the short and skinny of those levels is how they align to the FISMA requirements of the government. So there's FISMA low, FISMA moderate, and FISMA high. And depending on the sensitivity of the government data, you will have to align to those levels of FedRAMP to use workloads and store data in the cloud. Similar story for DoD with SRG. Impact levels two, four, five, and six. Impacts levels two, four, and five are all for unclassified data. Level two is for less sensitive public defense data. Levels four and five cover more sensitive defense data to include mission critical national security systems. And impact level six is for classified information. So those form the basis of security and compliance. Luckily with AWS GovCloud, celebrating our 10th anniversary, we address FedRAMP high for our customers that require that. And DoD impact levels two, four, and five for our sensitive defense customers. And that was a real nuanced point. And a lot of the competition can't do that. Correct. And that's real, people don't understand, you know, this company versus that company, and all the lobbying and all the mudslinging that goes on. We've seen that in the industry, it's unfortunate, but it happens. I do want to ask you about the FedRAMP because what I'm seeing on the commercial side in the cloud ecosystem, a lot of companies that aren't quote, targeting public sector are coming in on the FedRAMP. So there's some good traction there. You guys have done a lot of work that accelerate that. Any new information to share there? Yeah, so we've been committed to supporting the federal government compliance requirements effectively since the launch of GovCloud. And we've demonstrated our commitment to FedRAMP over the last number of years. And GovCloud specifically, we've taken dozens of services through FedRAMP high. And we're 100% committed to it because we have great relationships with the FedRAMP JAV or the Joint Authorization Board. We work with individual government agencies to secure agency ATOs. And in fact, we actually have more agency ATOs with AWS GovCloud than any other cloud provider. And the short and skinny is that represents the baseline for cloud security to address sensitive government workloads and sensitive government data. And what we're seeing from industry and specifically highly regulated industries is the standard that the U.S. government set means that they have the assurance to run controlled and classified information or other levels of highly sensitive data on the cloud as well. So FedRAMP set that standard. Yeah, what I'm interested in with GovCloud, this is an ecosystem within an ecosystem again and within crossover sections. So for instance, the impact of not getting FedRAMP certified is basically money. Right. If you're a supplier, vendor or software developer or whatever, it used to be a miracle. No one went in. Right. FedRAMP, I'm going to have to hire a whole department. Right. Now you guys have a really easy, this is a key value proposition, isn't it? Correct. And you see it with a number of ISVs and softwares and service providers. If you visit the FedRAMP Marketplace website, you'll see dozens of providers that have FedRAMP authorized third-party SaaS products running on GovCloud. Industry-leading SaaS companies like Salesforce.com, Druva Technology, Splunk, SAP NS2, effectively they're bringing their best of breed capabilities, building on top of AWS GovCloud and offering those highly compliant FedRAMP moderate, FedRAMP high capabilities to customers, both in government and private industry that need that level of compliance. Just as an aside, I saw they've got a nice tweet from Teresa Carlson, now it's Splunk on GovCloud yesterday, so that was a nice little positive gesture for you guys at GovCloud. What other areas are you guys moving the needle on? Because architecturally, that's a big deal. What are some areas you're moving the needle on for the GovCloud? Well, when I look back across the last 10 years, there were some pretty important developments that stand out. The first is us launching the second GovCloud infrastructure region in 2018. And that gave customers that use GovCloud, specifically customers that have highly sensitive data and high levels of compliance, the ability to build fault-tolerant, highly available and mission-critical workloads in the cloud, and a region that also gives them an additional three availability zones. So the launch of GovCloud East, which is named AWS GovCloud U.S. East, gave customers two regions, a total of six availability zones, that allowed them to accelerate and build more scalable solutions in the cloud. More recently, there is an emergence of another DOD program called the Cybersecurity Maturity Model, CMMC. And CMMC is something where we looked around the corner and said, we need to innovate to help our customers, particularly our defense customers, and the defense industrial-based customers address CMMC requirements in the cloud. So with GovCloud, back in December of 2020, we actually launched the AWS-compliant framework for federal and defense workloads, which gives customers a turnkey capability in tooling and resources to spin-up environments that are configured to meet CMMC controls and DOD SRG controls. So those things represent some of the evolution. Yeah, Keith, I'm interested also in your thoughts on how you see the progression of GovCloud outside the United States. Tactical edge, you've got wavelength coming on board. How do you guys look at that? Obviously, the U.S. is global. It's not just the Jedi, I think. It's more of, in general, edge deployments. Sovereignty's also going to be world's flat, right? I mean, so how does that work? So it starts back with customer requirements and I tie it back to the first question. Effectively, we built GovCloud to respond to our U.S. government customers and our highly regulated industry customers that had highly sensitive data and a high bar to meet in terms of regulatory compliance. And that's the foundation of it. So as we look to other customers to include those outside of the U.S., it starts with those requirements. You mentioned things like edge and hybrid and a good example of how we marry the two is when we launched AWS Outpost in GovCloud last year. So Outpost brings the power of the AWS Cloud to on-premises environments of our customers, whether it's their data centers or COLO environments by bringing AWS services, APIs, and service endpoints to the customers on-premises facilities. So even outside the United States? Well, for GovCloud, it's focused on our U.S. customers. Outside of the U.S., customers also have availability to use Outposts. It's just for our U.S. customers, it's focused on Outposts available in GovCloud. So you're just a geography right now, U.S. But other governments are going to want their GovCloud, too, right? Right. And what you're getting at? Right, and it starts with the data. So we spend a lot of time working with government agencies across the globe to understand their regulations and their requirements. And we use that to drive our decisions. And again, just like we started with GovCloud 10 years ago, it starts with our customer requirements and we innovate from there. Well, I love the DoD's vision on this. I know Jedi didn't come through and kind of went and scuttled, got thrown under the bus so whatever how I was, you want to call it. But that whole idea of a tactical edge is a pretty brilliant idea. So I'm looking forward to seeing more of that. And that's where Outpost's going to get snowball, snowmobile, a little snow products as well. How are they doing? Because they're all part of the family, too. They are. And they're available in GovCloud and they're also authorized at FedRAMP and DoD SRG levels. And it's really fascinating to see DoD innovate with the cloud, right? So you mentioned tactical edge. So whether it's snowball devices or using Outposts in the future, I think the DoD and our defense customers are going to continue to innovate. And quite frankly for us, it represents our commitment to this space. We want to make sure our defense customers and the defense industrial-based defense contractors have access to the best-of-breed capabilities like those edge devices and edge capabilities. And I think at the impact of certifications, which is good because I was just talking to Clint Crozier, we've got aerospace coming in, now you've got DoD. A little bit of a cross-pollinization, if you will. So nice to have that flexibility. I've got to ask you about just how you view, just in general, the intelligence community. A lot of uptake since the CIA deal with Amazon. Just overall, good health for AWS GovCloud. Absolutely. And again, it starts with our commitment to our customers. We want to make sure that our national security customers, our defense customers, and all of the customers in the federal government that have a responsibility for securing the country have access to the best-of-breed capabilities. So whether it's the intelligence community, the Department of Defense, or other federal agencies, and quite frankly, we see them innovating and driving things forward to include with their sensitive workloads as they run in GovCloud. What's your strategy for partnerships as you work in the ecosystem? You deal a lot with strategy, go to market, partnerships. It's public strategy, pretty much. Do people all know each other? Are new firms popping up, new brands? What's the ecosystem look like? Yeah, it's pretty diverse. So for GovCloud specifically, if you look at partners in the defense community, we work with aerospace companies like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon Technologies to help them build ITAR compliant, ERP applications, software development environments, et cetera. We work with software companies. I mentioned Salesforce.com, Splunk, and SAP, and S2. And then even at the state and local government level, there's a company called Payit that actually worked with the state of Kansas to develop the ICANN app, which is pretty fascinating. It's an app that is the official app of the state of Kansas that allows citizens to interact with citizen services. That's all through a partner. So we continue to work with our partner, broad, the AWS partner network to bring those types of capabilities to the country. You got a lot of MSPs that are doing good work here. I saw someone out here. 10 years, congratulations. What's the coolest thing you've done or seen? Oh wow, it's hard to name anything in particular. I just think for us, it's just seeing the customers and the federal government innovate, right? And tie that innovation to mission critical workloads that are highly important. Again, it reflects our commitment to give these government customers and the government contractors the best-of-breed capabilities and some of the innovation we just see coming from the federal government, leveraging the cloud now is just super cool. So hard to pinpoint one specific thing, but I love the innovation in general. It's hard to pick the favorite child, is that so? We always say, kind of a trick question. I do have to ask you about just in general, just in 10 years, just look at the agility. I mean, if you told me 10 years ago the government would be moving at any agile anything. They were a glacier in terms of change, right? Procurement, you name it, it's just like, it's a racket. It's a racket. But they weren't, they were slow, they had money. Now, pandemic hits this year, last year, everything's up for grabs. The script has been flipped. Exactly, and what's interesting is there were actually a few federal government agencies that really paved the way for what you're seeing today. I'll give you some examples. So the Department of Veterans Affairs, they were an early GovCloud user. And way back in 2015, they launched vets.gov on GovCloud, which is an online platform that gave veterans the ability to apply for, manage, and track their benefits. Those type of initiatives paved the way for what you're seeing today. Even as soon as last year with the US Census, right? They brought the decennial count online for the first time in history last year during 2020, during the pandemic. And the Census Bureau was able to use GovCloud to launch and run 2020census.gov in the cloud at scale to secure that data. So those are examples of federal agencies that really kind of paved the way and leading to what you're seeing today. It's kind of an awakening. It is. And I think one of the things that no one's reporting is kind of a cultural revolution is the talent underneath that wave. The younger people are like, finally, you know, like. And so it's cooler. It is. It's when you go fast and you can make things change, skeptics turn into naysayers, turn into like out of job or they don't transform. So like that whole blocker mentality gets exposed. Right. Just like shelfware software. Right. You don't know what it does until the cloud is not performing. It's not good. Right. Right. And to that point, that's why we spend a lot of time focused on education programs and upskilling the workforce too. Because we want to ensure that as our customers mature and as they innovate, we're providing the right training and resources to help them along their journey. Keith Brooks. Great conversation. Great insight and a historian too. Taking us through the early days of GovCloud. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Thanks John. Thanks for having us. Cube's coverage here at AWS Public Sector Summit. We'll be back with more coverage after this short break.