 My, what a difference 10 years makes in the tech industry. At the beginning of the last decade, the cloud generally in AWS specifically ushered in the era where leading developers, they tapped into a powerful collection of remote services through programmable interfaces, you know, out there in the cloud. By the end of the decade, this experience would shape the way virtually every IT professional thinks about acquiring, deploying, consuming and managing technology. Today, that remote cloud is becoming ubiquitous, expanding to the edge with connections to on-premises data centers and other local points throughout the globe. One of the most talked about examples of this movement is AWS Outposts, which brings the Amazon experience to the edge wherever that may be. Welcome everyone to this CUBE conversation. My name is Dave Vellante. We're going to explore the ever expanding cloud and how two companies are delivering on customer needs to connect their data center operations to the cloud and the cloud to their on-prem infrastructure and applications. And with me are Joshua Bergen, who's the general manager of AWS Outposts and Michael Sotnick, who's the VP in Global Alliances at Pure Storage. Gents, welcome. Come inside the CUBE. Right on. Well, thrilled to be here, Dave. Great, great to see you guys. Awesome to have this conversation with you. It's really our pleasure. So let's, Joshua, let's start with Outposts. Maybe you could, for the audience, describe what it is, maybe some of the use cases that you're seeing. I heard my narrative upfront. Maybe you could, of course, correct anything I missed. Oh, sure. I mean, I think you got it right on. AWS Outposts is a fully managed service that allows you to use AWS APIs, systems, tools, technology, hardware, software innovation in your own data center or a co-location facility and coming later this year as you put the edge in quotes at almost any edge site as we announced the small form factor, one you and two you Outposts at this last year's re-invent. I was excited when I saw Outposts a couple of years ago, we were doing the CUBE at re-invent. And I said, wow, this is really going to be interesting. And I'm wondering, like, how's Amazon? How are they going to partner? Where does some of the ecosystem get folks fit in? And so, Michael, you're an AWS Outposts ready partner. What is that program all about? What does that mean for customers? Yeah, it's a great question. And like you, Dave, I think we're as a vendor in technology, we're inspired by what AWS has done. And when we look at pure and see the opportunity, we have shared customer obsession, focused on outcomes, focused on NPS, great customer experience, seeing AWS deliver the cloud to the edge, deliver the cloud to the data center, that's just a great fit for us. So we rallied internally across our flash array, our block storage solution, our unified fast file and object block, excuse me, our unified fast file and object flash blade solution, and our container solution portworks. And across the entire portfolio, we're the first to be in our segment, the first to be service ready with AWS Outposts. And to us, it's an opportunity to link arms with AWS and cover some ground that's very familiar to us in the data center and clearly cover some ground that's very familiar to AWS in terms of great customer relationships across the board. Right, and I got to say, I've been a student of Andy Jassy's, I've always listened to all his talks, I go back and read the transcripts. And Joshua, I've learned, I never say never when it comes to AWS. And you see you guys moving into that, whatever you call it, hybrid cloud, the on-premises, really leaning in a big way with Outposts. And I wonder if you could talk about what's behind that expansion strategy. Sure, I mean, the way we looked at it, obviously is always kind of working backwards from our customers. We had people tell us that they had some applications with low latency needs, or where data residency or sovereignty was driven by regulations, or in some cases where they needed to do local data processing, something like an autonomous vehicle workload, or in a factory or a healthcare facility. And they really wanted to say, like, look, we're gonna move all of our applications, the bulk of them to one of your regions in the fullness of time. But what's holding us back is that we want a consistent environment on-prem and in what you called the cloud. So we wanted a continuum of offerings from AWS to be able to serve all those needs. That's really where Outposts came from. And we're seeing a lot of traction across financial services with companies like Morningstar and First Abu Dhabi Bank, the eye gaming space, as you can imagine, highly regulated industry. Every city and municipality around the world wants to get in on that, but they have their own regulations and they really require the infrastructure to be in a specific location and run a certain way. A company like Typico, which is based out of Europe, they don't wanna deliver different solutions depending on whether something's deployed in Minnesota or Germany or Vancouver. So that's where AWS Outposts comes in and it kind of fits that it kind of, that it works the same way as the things do in the region. They can use the same tooling. Yeah, so Michael, I'm gonna ask you this question and maybe Joshua, you can chime in as well. I mean, you've got this, it's sort of a win-win-win, you know, pure AWS, you're bringing that experience on-premises, the customer gets that experience that Joshua just explained. I wonder if you could, I mean, you've been out now for a little bit, testing the market, learning here and there. What are the big takeaways and the learnings you're getting from customers? Yeah, I'll start. And I'm sure Joshua can compliment quite a bit. And like Joshua hit on, right? I mean, I think we take our cues from our customers, Dave. And what the customers are looking for is a commercial relationship. And so in addition to the technological inspiration we've got from AWS, we offer the solution for outposts in a pure as a service model. So it's 100% subscription-based for the customer and they're able to consume it the same way that they would all of their services from AWS including outposts. And it's also available on the AWS Marketplace. So you've got to meet the customer where they want to be met first and foremost. And so they appreciate that and they see that as a great value in the relationship. The growth of object, I think is another one of those macro trends that's happening in our space. And as customers are deploying locations that are putting out petabytes of object storage requirements, there's an increasing need for high-performance object. And that's where we can really compliment an outpost implementation and deliver high-performance and that kind of ubiquitous experience that hybrid experience to allow the customer on a policy-based way to maximize that on-prem performance without post and pure around that object data set. And then also manage the life cycle that data and the economics of that data in the cloud. But Joshua, so you guys have obviously invented that the modern subscription model for infrastructure but it's different. You're actually installing hardware. So you had to sort of rethink how you did that. What have you learned and how is that model? How do you get it as substantially similar as possible to the public cloud? Yeah, I mean, I think you called it a win-win-win earlier. And as much as we like to innovate, we also like to make things feel kind of comfortable and familiar to people because you think about there's both the developer who's using the APIs and the tools and also the CFO and the people in finance or procurement who are looking at the spending. So with outposts, it actually feels very similar to the region. If you're used to purchasing our compute savings plans or what people used to call reserved instances or RIs, the underlying infrastructure on the outpost works a very similar way. You're not gonna be deploying a multi-rack outpost and then ripping it out three weeks later. So on-demand doesn't really make sense there. But for all the services that are deployed on top of outposts, whether it's our application load balancer or elastic cache or elastic map reduce, those have the same kind of on-demand service model, the pricing model that they do in the region. And so very similarly, the Outpost Ready program, which lets you use trusted and certified third-party solutions such as ones from Pure, those are also gonna feel familiar whether you're coming from the on-prem world and you're already using that technology for your storage, your network monitoring, your security, or if you're using that solution from the marketplace in the AWS region, it's gonna be a totally seamless deploy on the outpost. So you're gonna get something that's kind of the best of both worlds, familiar to you economically and from an installation perspective, but also removing all that undifferentiated heavy lifting of having to patch and manage firmware upgrades. And you asked this earlier, what customers really want is that there's this whole world of innovation, things that haven't even been invented yet. A few years ago, we hadn't invented outposts. People wanna know that as those innovations get released to the market, they can take advantage of them without having to redeploy. And so that's what having an AWS Outpost means. As third parties or Amazon innovates, new services can be made available without shipping a DVD or kind of spinning up an entire staff to manage that. Yeah, it's kind of interesting watching this equilibrium take place. And I think it's gonna continue to evolve. Obviously, AWS has a huge impact on how people think about in price, as I said up front. And it seems like culturally, Michael, there's a fit. I mean, you guys have always sort of been into that, your evergreen model, for the first with that subscription sort of mindset. So it's sort of natural for you whereas maybe a legacy company might not be able to lean in as hard as you guys are. I'm gonna make some quick thoughts on that. Yeah, look, I love the way you framed that up and couldn't agree more. I think AWS is famous for a lot of things. Some of the values that they embrace and putting the customer at the center of everything they do couldn't be more shared with Pure. I think we talk about our company as one that runs two fires to give the customer a great experience. And so we know our way around the data center and I think the opportunity to give that customer a consistent experience with AWS as they deliver outposts to the data center is a really powerful combination. I think one thing, but just look at the backdrop of the pandemic, Dave, the every part of a company's organization is going through significant change. And I think the data center is absolutely at the center of some of those changes. And I think every one now as they look at the next generation data center they're asking themselves, what are containers? What does Kubernetes mean to my business? And I think the opportunity that we see jointly with EKS as a partner is really to help customers achieve that goal of the application deployments anywhere and the ability to drive that application, modernize that next generation application cycle. So I love the way you framed it up, giving us credit for being highly differentiated from our legacy competitors. And we take great pride in that and really want to give a cloud-like experience to our customers. And I think what we're able to do with AWS and Outposts is kind of bring that cloud-like experience that they have come to love from AWS into the data center. And at the same time shine a light on what we've always done in terms of a cloud-like experience for the pure customer. I mean, there's a lot of ways to skin a cat but when you've invented the cloud and you don't have a lot of legacy baggage you can kind of move faster. And I think that, you know, we're really excited about what's occurring here because take the term digital transformation. I mean, before the pandemic, it's like, yeah, can't have some meaning, but you really had to squint through it. A lot of people were complacent about it. Well, we know what digital means now. If you're not a digital business, you're out of business. And so, because it's kind of this force march to digital, I call it. And as a result, it really increases the need for things like automation and that cloud experience on-prem. Because I don't have time to be provisioning loans anymore. It's just, you know, what you guys call undifferentiated heavy lifting. That is really a no-no these days. I just absolutely can't afford it. Let's close on what's next. I mean, we got new form factors coming. We're like super excited about when we see things like what Amazon is doing with custom silicon. We see there's innovations coming out with processing power going through the roof. Everybody says Moore's law is dead but processing power is increasing faster than it ever has when you combine all these innovations of GPUs and NPUs and accelerators. It's just, it's amazing and the costs are coming down. So you're going to be able to take advantage of that. Outposts will take advantage of that. Pure will, new designs, but specifically as it relates to outposts. You got one U, you got two U coming, optimizing for the edge. What do customers need to know about these solutions? Why should they consider this combination of pure and AWS maybe Joshua, you can start and Michael, you can bring us home. Yeah, I mean, you hit a lot of the reasons that people should consider it, right? The pace of innovation is not going to slow down here at AWS or of course with pure, whether you have the need for a single server or you're somebody like Dish rolling out a new cloud enabled, you know, cloud native 5G network, you're going to be used that you want to work with somebody who can deploy all the way at the telco edge, right? With hardware innovation, back to a local zone all the way up to a region. You don't want to be working with different providers for that and you don't know what you're going to need in three or five years and frankly, I'm not sure that we know everything yet either, but we're going to continue to listen to our customers. And as you mentioned, deliver things like gravitan and inferentia and tranium, which are innovations in custom silicon. Those are delivering 40% price performance improvements for people who are migrating. That's really an enormous benefit and we're bringing all of those to the outpost as well. So you don't have to choose between moving to the cloud and that being your only modernization option. You can move to the cloud and at the same time still operate on-prem, you know, at a Colo facility or all the way at the edge using all of the same tooling and you can work with best and breed third-party technologies like what's offered by Pure. Well, and Michael, I'm going to cut you off before you get a chance to close, but I'll let you close. The Portworx acquisition was really interesting to us because it brings that portability, new programming model and something that Joshua said struck in my mind is when I think about the edge, to me, what's going to win the edge, obviously the flexibility, the agility, but the programmability and the customization, so many different use cases. We're not just going to take general purpose boxes and throw them over the fence and say, here you go. You know, the general purpose, that's not what's going to win the edge. It's really going to take a lot more thought than that, but so I just wanted to put that in there. Michael, bring us home, please. Right on. Well, look, you two, and no surprise here, right? You two covered so much great ground there. From first principles, you know, what does Pure look at? Like what we did being first in terms of service ready across Portworx, you know, for EKS, for Flash Blade, across Unified Fast File and Object and Flash Ray, you know, for block storage, being first with Outpost, we want to be first for the 1U and 2U solutions. So I think customers can expect, you know, that our partnership is going to continue to deliver that cloud-like experience, that cloud experience in the AWS context, that cloud-like experience in the Pure context, you know, for their on-prem and hybrid workloads. And, you know, I think you hit it up so well. Like if you're not digital business, you're not in business. And so I think one thing that everyone learned over the last year is exactly that. The other thing they learned is, they don't know what they don't know. And so they need to make bets on partners that are modern, that are delivering simple solutions, you know, that solve complex problems that are automated and that, you know, are being delivered with the customer-first mindset. And I think in the combination of, you know, AWS, Outpost and Pure, we're doing exactly that. Great points, a lot of unknowns out there. Hey guys, congratulations on the progress you made. It's a great partnership to super innovative companies and really pleasure to have you on theCUBE. Thank you for coming on. Thank you for having us. Yeah, always a pleasure. Thank you so much. All right, thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante. We'll see you next time.