 Hello, and welcome to theCUBE's presentation of the AWS Startup Showcase Open Cloud Innovations. This is season two, episode one of an ongoing series covering exciting startups from the AWS ecosystem. Talking about innovation here, it's open source for this theme. We do this every episode, we pick a theme and have a lot of fun talking to the leaders in the industry and the hottest startups. I'm your host, John Furrier, here with Lisa Martin in our Palo Alto Studios. Lisa, great series, great to see you again. Good to see you too, great series. Always such spirited conversations with very empowered and enlightened individuals. I love the episodic nature of these events. We get more stories out there than ever before. They're the hottest startups in the AWS ecosystem, which is dominating the cloud sector. And there's a lot of them really changing the game on cloud native. And the enablement, the stories that are coming out here are pretty compelling. Not just from startups, they're actually penetrating the enterprise. And the buyers are changing their architectures. And it's just really fun to catch the wave here. They are. And one of the things too about the open source community is these companies embracing that and how that's opening up their entry to your point into the enterprise. I was talking with several customers, companies who were talking about the 70% of their pipeline comes from the open source community that's using the premium version of the technology. So it's really been a very smart strategic way into the enterprise. Yeah, and I love the format too. We got the keynote we're doing now, opening keynote, some great guests. We have Sir John from AWS startup program. He's the global startups lead. We got Swamy coming on. And then closing keynote with Deepak Singh, who's really grown in the Amazon organization from containers now compute services, which now span how modern applications are being built. And I think the big trend that we're seeing that these startups are riding on the big wave is cloud natives driving the modern architecture for software development. Not just startups, but existing large ISVs and software companies are re-architecting and the customers who buy their products as services in the cloud are re-architecting too. So it's a whole new growth wave coming in. The modern era of cloud, some say. And it's exciting. A small startup could be the next big name tomorrow. One of the things that kind of was a theme throughout the conversations that I had with these different guests was from a modern application security perspective is security is key, but it's not just about shifting lap. It's about doing so empowering the developers. They don't have to be security experts. They need to have a developer brain and a security heart and how those two organizations within companies can work better together more collaboratively, but ultimately empowering those developers, which goes a long way. Well, for the folks who are watching, this, the format's very simple. We have a keynote editorial keynote speakers come in and then we're going to have a bunch of companies who are going to present their story and their showcase. We've interviewed them, myself, you, Dave Vellante and Dave Nicholson from the CUBE team. They're going to tell their stories. And between the companies and the AWS heroes, 14 companies are represented and some of them have new business models and Deepak Singh, who leads the AWS team, he's going to have the closing keynote. He talks about the new changing business model in open source, not just the tech, which is a lot of tech, but how companies are being started around the new business models around open source. It's really, really amazing. I bet. And does he see any specific verticals that are taking off? Well, he's seeing the contribution from big companies like AWS and the Facebooks of the world and large companies, Netflix, into it all contributing content to the open source and then startups forming around them. So Netflix does some great work, they donate it to open source and next to you know, small group of people get together, entrepreneurs, they form a company and they create a platform around it with unification and scale. So the cloud is enabling this new super application environment, super clouds as we call them, that's emerging and this new super cloud and super applications are scaling, data driven, machine learning and AI. That's the new formula for success. Then new formula for success also has to have that velocity that developers expect, but also that the consumerization of tech has kind of driven all of us to expect things very quickly. Well, we're going to bring in Surge, Subjinko's AWS Global Startup Program into the program. Surge is our partner, he is the leader at AWS who has been working on this program. Surge, great to see you, thanks for coming on. Yeah, like was John, thank you for having me, very excited to be here. You know, we've been working together on collaborating on this for over a year, again, season two of this new innovative program, which is a combination of CUBE Media Partnership and AWS, getting the stories out and this has been a real success because there's a real hunger to discover content in the marketplace as these new solutions coming from startups are the next big thing coming. So you're starting to see this going on. So I have to ask you, first and foremost, what's the AWS startup showcase about? Can you explain in your terms, your team's vision behind it and why the startup focus? Yeah, absolutely. You know, John, we curated the AWS startup showcase really to bring meaningful and oftentimes educational content to our customers and partners, highlighting innovative solutions within these themes. And ultimately to help customers find the best solutions for their use cases, which is a combination of AWS and our partners. And really from pre-seed to IPO, John, the world's most innovative startups build on AWS. From leadership down, we're very intentional about cultivating vigorous AWS community. And since 2019 at re-invent at the launch of the AWS global startup program, we've helped hundreds of startups accelerate their growth through product development support, go to market and co-sell programs. So Serge, question for you on the theme of today, John mentioned our showcases having themes. Today's theme is gonna cover open source software. Talk to us about how Amazon thinks about open source. Sure, absolutely. And I'll just touch on it briefly, but I'm very excited for the keynote at the end of today. That'll be delivered by Deepak, the VP of compute services at AWS. We here at Amazon believe in open source. In fact, Amazon contributes to open source in multiple ways, whether that's through directly contributing to third-party project, repos or significant code contributions to Kubernetes, Rust and other projects. And all the way down to leadership participation in organizations such as the CNCF. In supporting of dozens of ISVs myself over the years, I've seen explosive growth when it comes to open source adoption. I mean, look at projects like Chekhov. Within 12 months of launching their open source project, they had about a million users. And another great example is Falco. Within under a decade, actually, they've had about 37 million downloads. And that's about a 300% increase since it's become an incubating project in the CNCF. So very exciting things that we're seeing here at AWS. So explosive growth, a lot of content. What do you hope that our viewers and our guests are gonna be able to get out of today? Yeah, great question, Lisa. I really hope that today's event will help customers understand why AWS is the best place for them to run open source, commercial, and which partner solutions will help them along their journey. I think that today, the lineup through the partner solutions and Deepak at the end with the ending keynote is gonna present a very valuable narrative for customers and startups in selecting where and which projects to run on AWS. That's great stuff, Serge. Love to have you on. And again, I want to just say really congratulate your team. And we enjoy working with them. We think this showcase does a great service for the community. It's kind of open source in its own way by co-contributing, working on out there. But you're really getting the voices out at scale. We've got companies like Armory, Cube Costs, Sysdig, Tiedlift, Codefresh. I mean, these are some of the companies that are changing the game. We even had Patreon a customer and one of the partners, Sneak with security. All the big names in the startup scene plus AWS, Deepak Singh, Swami is going to be on. The AWS heroes, I mean, really at scale. And this is really great, Serge. Thank you so much for participating and enabling all of this. No, thank you to theCUBE. You've been a great partner in this whole process. Very excited for today. Thanks, Serge, really appreciate it. Lisa, what a great segment that was kicking off the event. We got a great lineup coming up. We got the keynote, final keynote fireside chat with Deepak Singh, a big name at AWS. But Serge and this startup showcase, really innovative. Very innovative. And in a short time period, he talked about the launch of this at ReInvent 2019. They've helped hundreds of startups. We've had over 50, I think, on the showcase in the last year or so, John. So we really gotten to cover a lot of great customers, a lot of great stories, a lot of great content coming out of theCUBE. I love the openness of it. I love the scale, the storytelling. I love the collaboration. A great model. Lisa, great to work with you. We also have Dave Vellante and Dave Nicholson interview, they're not here. But let's kick off the show. Let's get started. Our next guest, Swami, the leader at AWS. Swami just got promoted to VP of the database, but also he ran machine learning and AI at AWS. He is a leader. He's the author of the original Dynamo DB paper, which is celebrating his 10th year anniversary. Really impacted distributed computing and open source. Swami's introduced many open source aspects of the products within AWS. And he's been a leader in the engineering side for many, many years at AWS from an intern to now an executive lead. Swami, great to see you. Thanks for coming on our AWS startup showcase. Thanks for spending the time with us. My pleasure. Thanks again, John. Thanks for having me. I wanted to just, if you don't mind, asking about the database market over the past 10 to 20 years. Cloud and application development, as you see, has changed a lot. You've been involved in so many product launches over the years. You know, cloud and machine learning are the biggest waves happening to your point to what you're doing now. Software is under the covers. It's powering it all. Infrastructure is code. Open source has been a big part of it and it continues to grow and change. Deepak Singh from AWS talks about the business model transformation of how like Netflix donates to the open source, then a company starts around it and creates more growth. Machine learning is in all the open source conversations around automation. As developers and builders write software as cloud and machine learning become the key pistons in the engine. This is a big wave. What's your view on this? How is cloud scale and data impacting the software market? I mean, that's a broad question. So I'm going to break it down to kind of give some of the vectors on how we are thinking about it. First, I'd say when it comes to the open source, I'll start off by saying first, the longevity and viability of open source is very important to our customers. And that is why we have been a significant contributor and supporter of these communities. I mean, we are several efforts in open source even internally by actually open sourcing some of our key Amazon technologies like Firecracker or Bottle Rocket or CDK to help advance the industry. For example, CDK itself provides a really powerful way to build and configure cloud services as well. And we also contribute to a lot of different open source projects that are existing once, open telemetries and Linux, Java, Redis and Kubernetes, Grafana and Kafka and robotics operating system and Hadoop and Lucene and so forth. So I think I can go on and on, but even outside the database and observability space, say machine learning, we have always started with embracing open source in a big material way. If you see, even in deep learning framework, we championed MX9 and some of the core components and we open sourced our auto ML technology, auto glue on and also we have open sourced and collaborated with partners like Facebook meta on PyTorch running some major components in there and then we have open source edge compiler. So I would say the number one thing is, I mean, we actually are very, very excited to partner with broader community on problems that really matter to the customers and actually ensure that they are able to get amazing benefit of this. And I see that machine learning is a huge thing. If you look at how cloud grew and when you had DynamoDB paper, when you wrote it, that that was the beginning of I call the cloud surge. It was the beginning of not just being a resource versus building a data center. Certainly a great alternative, every startup did it. That's history, phase one, ending in a half, first half ending, then it became a large scale. Machine learning feels like the same way now. You feel like you're seeing a lot of people using it. A lot of people are playing around with it. It's evolving, it's been around as a science but combined with cloud scale, this is a big thing. What should people who are in the enterprise think about how should they think about machine learning? How has some of your top customers thought about machine learning as they refactor their applications? What are some of the things that you can share from your experience and journey here? I mean, one of the key things I'd say, just to set some context on scale and numbers, more than one and a half million customers use our database analytics or ML services end to end. Out of which some machine learning services and capabilities are easily used by more than 100,000 customers at a really good scale. However, I still think if in Amazon, we tend to use the phrase it's day one in the age of internet, even though it's an old phrase now but it's a golden one, but I would say in the world of machine learning, yes, it's day one but I also think we just woke up and we haven't even had a cup of coffee yet. That's really that early. So, but it's interesting you compare it to where cloud was like 10, 12 years ago. This early days when I used to talk to engineering leaders who are running their own data center and then we talk about cloud and various disruptive technologies. I still used to get questions about like why cloud and is it and whatnot at that time. Now with machine learning though, almost every CIO CEO, all of them never asked me why machine learning. Instead, the number one question I get is how do I get started with it? What are the best use cases? Which is great. And this is where I always tell them one of the learnings that we actually learned in Amazon. So again, a few years ago, probably seven or eight years ago and Amazon it's realized as a company the impact of what machine learning could do in terms of changing how we actually run our business and what it means to provide better customer experience, optimize our supply chain and so forth. We realized that we need to help our builders learn machine learning and to help even our business leaders understand the power of machine learning. So we did two things. One, we actually, from a bottom up level we build what I call as machine learning university which is run in my team. It's literally start with professors and teachers who offer curriculum to build this so that they get educated on machine learning. And now from a top-down level, we also in our yearly planning process we call it the operational planning process where we write Amazon style narratives with six pages and then answer FAQs. We asked everyone to answer one question around like how do you plan to leverage machine learning in your business? And typically when someone says I really don't plan to or it does not apply it usually doesn't go well. So we kind of as politely increase them to do better and come back with their answer. This kind of dynamic on top-down and bottom up changed the conversation and we started seeing more and more measurable growth and these are some of the things you're starting to see more and more among our customers too. They see the business benefit but this is fair to address the talent gap. We also made machine learning university curriculum actually now open source and freely available and we launched SageMaker Studio Lab which is a no cost, no set up SageMaker notebook service for educating learner profiles and all the students as well. And we are excited to also announce a scholarship for underrepresented students as well. So much more we can do. Well, congratulations on the DynamoDB paper that's a 10 year anniversary which is a revolutionary product change the game that did change the world and that a huge impact. And now as machine learning goes the next level the next intern out there is at school with machine learning they're going to be writing that next paper your advice to them real quick. My biggest advice is always I encourage all the builders to always dream big and don't be hesitant to speak your mind as long as you have the right conviction saying you're addressing a real customer problem. So when you feel like you have an amazing solution to address a customer problem take the time to articulate your thoughts better and then feel free to speak up and communicate to the folks you're working with. And I'm sure any company that notches good talent and knows how to hire and develop the best they will be willing to listen in and you will be able to have an amazing impact in the industry. Swami great to know you're a CUBE alumni I love our conversations from intern on the paper of DynamoDB to the technical leader at AWS and database analyst machine learning. Congratulations on all your success and continue innovating on behalf of the customers and the industry. Thanks for spending the time here on the CUBE and our program, appreciate it. Thanks again, John, really appreciate it. Okay, now let's kick off our program. That ends the keynote track here on the AWS startup showcase season two, episode one. Enjoy the program and don't miss the closing keynote with Deepak Singh. He goes into great detail on the changing business models all the exciting open source innovation.