 Welcome to this session of the Amazon EC2 15th birthday event. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. I'm joined by Elaine Harvey, the director and technical advisor at AWS. Elaine, welcome to the program. It's great to see you. Thank you, Lisa. I'm really glad to be here. So here we are celebrating EC2's 15th birthday, probably back in the day. So many customers in many industries couldn't imagine how they would be using the service. Talk to me about how long you've been involved in EC2 and some of the growth and the maturation of the service that you've seen. Yeah, I mean, I joined EC2 about eight years ago and it was big then, but much smaller than it is now. And it's grown in so many directions, both in the scale, the instances that we offer, as well as the types of instances, the various types of hardware effectively that we offer for customers to support their workload. It's just grown in so many dimensions. It's really exciting. I see here, 80 availability zones, 25 regions, local zones in Boston, Dallas, Denver, Houston, Miami, Philadelphia, and nine new local zones coming just this year. Yeah, yep. Talk to me a little bit about that. Yeah, yeah. So I really, what we are trying to do is get compute where customers need it. So we've already had these presences around the world and with this expansion, we're trying to bring the EC2 offering to customers with much lower latency. And that's why we're doing local zones, regions, availability zones in so many places as so customers can have that compute with low latency to help them interact with their customers. I know since its inception, AWS has always been so customer centric. It's always day one there, but prior to joining AWS, as you said, eight years ago, you were involved in a number of startups. One of the things that we consistently hear is how instrumental EC2 has been in reinventing the startup space. What can you tell me about that involvement that it's had? Yeah, I mean, the great thing was is I was an EC2 customer before I worked at EC2. So I had been in the startup community for almost 25 years before joining Amazon. And I had been through that life cycle of a startup where you begin, you need some capacity, you need some computers to run your stuff on, and eventually you reach a size and you have to go figure out all the hard work. Where am I going to put them? Do I need a data center? What kind of network connectivity do I need? And not only that, you have to invest a lot of money, which startups very rarely have in the early days into buying the equipment you need just so you could run your business, do the thing you're really trying to do for your customer. EC2 was a game changer. So I started using EC2 at one of the startups I was at before coming here. Actually I had two prior startups before coming to EC2. And the ability to just get capacity when you needed it. You didn't have to go buy computers. You didn't have to have data center contracts. You just said, I need a hundred of these. And suddenly you had a hundred of the instance you were asking for completely game changing, especially for a startup where you just don't have that capital to invest. And frankly, you don't want to spend your time dealing with data centers. When that's not your business, your business is to serve your customers. Right, and I can't imagine the last year and a half we've seen such acceleration of digital business transformation. How startups and enterprises alike would have fared without having the ability to quickly turn on services like EC2 in this time? Yeah, it was just amazing. During COVID times, we definitely saw that rush of everybody trying to go online. Companies that had been already starting down that path going online, scaling more. And suddenly it went from zero to a hundred in March. And everybody had to go online. And it was super exciting to be part of EC2 and be able to enable everybody in the world to do that. Well, incredible amount of acceleration, but also maturation and growth in the whole portfolio of AWS. We've talked about that a number of times on theCUBE in the last six or eight months or so. You mentioned nine new availability zones coming in 2021. You've been involved in the regional and the local zone buildouts. Talk to me about how these regional zones, these availability zones are helping enterprises to run their businesses and applications worldwide with the high availability that their customers are demanding. Yeah, yeah. So there's the both the location aspect. So we do need to be worldwide because our customers are worldwide. So we need to be where they need to be. And so that's how we think about the growth of our regions and availability zones and now local zones with lower latency to end customers. There's another aspect to availability zones and regions that is super important for our customers availability. Foundationally, we treat those as fault zones. So they're fault boundaries beyond which customers will not experience faults. So for example, you will not, the fundamental way that we think about designing our services isolates faults between regions and between availability zones and customers can use that in their designs such that they'll have a multi AZ behavior and we contain faults along those boundaries. So they can design with that in mind and their applications can be fault tolerant relying on those foundational fault domains effectively. That's even becoming more and more important as consumers become more and more demanding that services are just available and you can get anything with the click of a link on your phone that high availability is really no longer a nice to have what EC2 is delivering its table stakes for an organization I can imagine in any industry. Absolutely, absolutely. Our customers totally rely on that so that they can serve their customers consistently and reliably. So tremendous amount of growth Elaine in the first 15 years, you said you've been with EC2 on this side now working for it for eight years but had a lot of experience with it before and when it was probably in its infancy as a startup customer, what are some of the things that excite you most about the direction in which EC2 is going? Yeah, I think we are steadily providing more and more flexibility to our customers. So we're providing them with new instance types to suit their particular workloads. So we're getting more into a variety of offerings that customers can use to achieve the outcomes they want. That's exciting. I think probably the thing that excites me the most though is the work we're doing around custom silicone. So our Graviton, Inferentia, Tranium chips where we are building custom silicone for a number of reasons. A big factor of that is we are giving our customers the ability to have a much better ROI on compute to cost for their workloads. So we're trying to make it more and more cost efficient for our customers to do what they want. The thing that really excites me about it though, the secret thing that excites me about it is not very well known but Graviton is not only cost to compute higher efficiency but it also power to compute higher efficiency. So it's a greener option. So if a customer for a given workload wanted to reduce their carbon footprint they can move to Graviton and it consumes substantially less power for the same workload. And that makes me really excited. That is exciting and something that I think everybody can wrap their heads around. I was reading something about EC2 and Graviton paving the way for another important initiative and that's telecommunications. Some of the big news, the dish networks coming out saying we're going to be building our 5G core network on AWS. A lot of work going on there in telecommunications. Yeah, yeah, that's very exciting. And in line with our overall strategy to get much closer to the end customers again, to reduce that latency whether those customers are on a 5G network or on the internet. We want the ability for our customers to be able to provide compute and their applications wherever their customers are. Well, Elaine, thank you so much for joining me on the EC2 15th birthday event. A lot of innovation has gone on in the first 15 years. We know what you're excited about and I'm sure can't even imagine what the next five, 10 or 15 years will hold for EC2, its services and the customers that it delights. We thank you for joining us today. Thanks so much, Lisa. For Elaine Harvey, I'm Lisa Martin. Thanks for watching today's session.