 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering AWS re-invent 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services, Intel, and their ecosystem partners. And welcome to Las Vegas. We're in the sands now for AWS re-invent, day one here for all three days. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, exclusive CUBE coverage here. I'm John Walls with Justin Warren and John Furrier. Gentlemen, good to see you. It's been a while since we've had the band together, so it's good to be back next year, John. We can re-invent. Everyone's going to run the marathon. It's a hard-hitting show. It's wall-to-wall coverage, started with what they call midnight madness, kind of a playoff, March Madness. Sunday at midnight kicks off the show. They have a party that goes well in the evenings to get the launches out there. It's Louis Vuitton. I don't want to ask where you were at that time. I was actually in coming home from Phoenix on a family trip, but I didn't think it was here. But this event, wall-to-wall coverage here at theCUBE, three days of live broadcast, it really kicked off yesterday. This evening events, 52,000 people. It is packed. It feels like you're walking through Disneyland on its busiest day. It really is crazy. Ton of networking, a lot of customers. This is Amazon's biggest show. It's really awesome. And it's a great way to see the formation of the industry. So it really is the industry Super Bowl event, as Dave Vellante says, and watching how people form, how their posture is, what their messaging is. And our job, we're going to squint through that this week. We're going to extract from the messaging and the conversations, get the story, get to the truth, shortcut to the data, and it should be fun. Well, let's talk about the head coach here at AWS. All right, you've had a chance to sit down with him recently. We're here at the keynote tomorrow morning, but just give me a little sneak peek of what you think is coming from Mr. Jassy and what you think the message is that he wants to deliver. Well, we've been covering the Amazon since its founding, our founding, eight years ago. In seven years, they started re-invent. Eight years ago, we were seven years, our seventh year at re-invent. And so we get to know Jassy. So he invites me every year for a one-on-one, this year, as in his house, he's got a sports bar in his basement, trick-thousand sports bar. The great football game was on, bike chiefs against the charges, we watched that. Two and a half hours I spent with him, really kind of getting a feel for it. What's on his mind? How he's thinking about the business, because a lot of, he's having a lot of pinch-me moments where certainly they're winning, they're blowing away the field, in my opinion, in cloud computing. I think there's really not even a close second place, I've got the Microsofts, I've got the Chops, they're doing their gaining, Google's got the tech and they're nearly pre-positioning. You know, how's he feel? He is humble as they come and he's got the management discipline, but he was really kind of saying to me, hey, you know, great leaders are listening to customers and he was walking back his position on hybrid cloud, because clearly they're going to make some big announcements here around hybrid cloud. But I got insight into his mind that he's not done and these guys are not celebrating in the end zone. They're not high-fiving each other. They got a lot of work to do and still people are not using the cloud like they really are in their mind. I think things like Lambda and the announcements we'll be expecting to see here today is going to set the stage for a new set of apps. And I think there's going to be a renaissance of software development. They recognize it. They recognize that the competition's hotter. They recognize that they got to get better and raise the bar and that's what they're doing. And you know, they have a cadence to their management style that I think is historic in this era of leadership in the likes of all the Uber scandals, Facebook, you know, the scandal management team at Facebook. No one trusts corporate America. Amazon's got this execution style that kind of reminds me of back in the old days, Intel had or an HP back in the day. They actually kick ass as a management team. They're focused, they're not celebrating and they're clearly guns blaring. So they're doing the work. I still think that they see the world that's still competitive. There are things out there that I think scares them, although he didn't say CNCF directly, but you know, there's things out there forming that could disintermediate the greatness of AWS. And that's just natural competition. And his philosophy, Justin, is bring it on. Yeah. Well, I was just in China, funnily enough, for CNCF, CNCF, cloud native, cloud and KubeCon, the first one that they held in China. And it was amazing to see what the Chinese are actually doing. So we hear a lot over here in Europe and over here in the Western world. There's a lot of conversation about Amazon and Google and Microsoft, but you never hear the words Tencent or Alibaba. They don't come up a lot. And yet what Alibaba and Tencent are doing over there is amazing. So I think if we're thinking about the competition in a global sense, then certainly Amazon needs to be right on top of their game because yeah, we might have some stumbles from Google as we've seen and Microsoft still a little bit behind the plan. But if you look at globally and see what's happening over there in China, there's a lot that they should be worried about. Well, give me a such ass. Can you talk about Alibaba doing things that maybe aren't happening here for an example? There was some amazing stuff around AI and machine learning that they were doing around grid management of renewable energy and distribution around the entire country of China. So there are things that are possible in China that are not quite as easy to do over here in the West. It's a lot easier when you have one person in charge of all of the things and they can say, we're going to go and do that. It's a little bit more, there's a lot more negotiation required over this side. And the thing too about China is that the mobile penetration is high there and they're very data-centric. If you look at the United States, even in the IT world, Dell, HPs, Oracle's of the world, the old IT guard essentially had that data, but now you got data on phones with this processing, you got edge of the network. The data is going to live in a lot of places. And in our legacy infrastructure at IT in North America, Dell does anything to do with my phone or HP, that's just servers. So the old way of storing data and where data lives and how data is being used is radically changing. There's a lot of stuff happening at the edge, but we had some presentations on wind farms. So you have compute lives in wind farms and they're actually sampling the air and finding out what the weather patterns are like, feeding that back into central systems. And they're having to design systems that are able to be deployed, the same thing, cookie cutter, all over the country, distributed around the place where you've got latency and communications issues, where you've got power distribution issues. So you have to think about the way you're deploying this infrastructure completely differently than if you centralize in one cloud or even in a data center or you're running it yourself. So they're actually thinking about things in a layered sense. So it's not just one size fits all, it's actually we need multiple different sizes to fit lots of different things. And what, I mean, John, you brought up the phone. With 5G on the horizon, I can only imagine the exponential explosion that we're going to see in data. Right, coming in from sensors in the IoT and you talk about Edge and faster, more. I mean, where's all that going? So I got my little reporter's notebook here from my meeting with Jassy and also connecting the dots, what's going to be announced. There's going to be announcement today around 11 o'clock this morning around Andy Jassy announcing a new connectivity option. And what you're seeing is, is that Amazon recognizing that IoT at the Edge, Internet of Things, is sensors that's wind farms. So this IoT is about power and connectivity. Without power and connectivity, IoT doesn't really exist. So these new kinds of Internet infrastructure, data, devices that need compute, you got to have power, you got to have connectivity and they might not have the worst power on a safe phone, although there's plenty of power on there. You want to take advantage of bigger data sets, you got to go back to the cloud. So the cloud is becoming the brains. And that's what Andy Jassy said to me, he says the cloud is going to be the brains and the Edge can be, you know, do some processing. We're going to send compute there if we need it. We don't want to move data around because latency will kill. So, you know, we're expecting Amazon to announce new services around connectivity where you can stand up things like satellites as a service. And that's what's going to be announced at 11 o'clock. I just got that out there. So we'll see if that's confirmed or not. Two hours early, if you're watching, don't tweet this. I'm getting trouble. Is that cat out of the bag? I think, yeah, go ahead. Well, the analyst got briefed yesterday from, I heard some rumbles in the hallway, but we'll see what the details are. But this is a new kind of progressive thinking. And this is what I love about AWS and Jassy. They're not afraid to use their scale and power to push new capabilities, not just extract rent from customers. And by standing up connectivity, this is a weak link in the equation of IoT. There's a lot of things that need power and connectivity. And if you have good processing power and compute at the Edge, that's going to happen. So Andy's philosophy, Amazon's philosophy is consistent with Wikibon research. And most analysts have discussed this trend is you want to move compute to the Edge, not move data back to the cloud. This is fundamentally the shift that's going on with services like Lambda. You can power up things in hundreds of milliseconds versus an instance of 10 seconds. This is changing the software development paradigm. This is a tailwind. This is going to power new workloads. So you see Amazon's recognizing this, increasing power, compute to the Edge, offering connectivity ops where there isn't any, making things faster with compute, and then moving up the stack. This is going to be a big part of this show. What we expect to see is, Amazon is going to move up the stack. Aurora, SageMaker and levels of services that are going to allow developers, new kind of software development, where truly the dream of DevOps of not knowing anything about the infrastructure could be realized. That is a pretty big shift for Amazon because they've always been talking about themselves as undifferentiated heavy lifting, as one of their analysts told me about it some years ago. That was their idea, was that we are just going to be the utility service that is the one true way that you should use it, and it will be ubiquitous in the same way that you have power, is a utility, you rent it and you just use it, and you build other things on top of that. So it's interesting that we're now starting to see that Amazon themselves are building things on top of what they've already created, in the same way that they built S3 was built on top of EC2. So now we're seeing this layering effect of, we've built the underlying technologies and now we're going to start putting extra value technologies on top of that, and that's where we start to see things as a service, serverless lambda, being built on top of all of this underlying stuff, we're going to start seeing some really interesting stuff coming from Amazon. Yeah, I'd like to hear from you guys. You've talked about what you think AWS is going to talk about, what do you want them to talk about? What do you want to hear from them this week, whether it's a challenge they have to take on, or whether it's about the competitive landscape, or just what is it between the two of you you think that you'd like to hear from them? I would like to hear their position on the software development paradigm around moving between clouds. I know they don't like the word multi-cloud, hybrid clouds, the word that they choose, they don't actually use the word multi-cloud, hybrid clouds, their word. They see the world in a very specific way, which I don't disagree with, on-premises with cloud operations and seamless consistency around both, how that works and what it means for the customers, what I want to know, what's the switching cost involved, what's the benefit to customers, it's going to be a lock-in spec. I want to hear about some of the migration stories. I want to hear them talk about migrations. I don't think the migration to the cloud has been as successful for Amazon as it had hoped. I think when you look at what's going on in the enterprise, workloads, legacy workloads, that run payroll or on mainframes, they're going to stay there. And no one's moving that to the cloud because why would I want to rewrite that? So this is the interesting thing. So I want to hear them talk about how they're going to handle a workload that's on-premises, that's legacy, that's part of a production mission critical application, and how that's going to work with the new services via APIs, with data, things of that nature. I want to hear how they're going to handle containers and Kubernetes, because this is going to be the key linchpin between moving data and services via APIs and web services. This is the holy grail. They can address that in a clear way. I would be happy and I expect them to see them do things like put a VM container around containers. A lot of competitive strategy going on. So I'm trying to look for the chess moves on the board. Kubernetes and containers is a big one. Yeah, for customers, in terms of helping customers, I would actually like to see, I think similarly, see Amazon relax the we are the one true way message that they've been hammering pretty hard for a long, long time. So if you do cloud, it has to be us and we're really the only cloud that exists. That's caused a lot of issues inside particularly enterprise customers who have, as you say, they've got legacy applications or we like to call them heritage applications. They work, they've been debugged. They're solid applications. Rewriting those adds a lot of risk and a lot of IT projects fail, more than 50% of them fail. So if you are going to say, or you have to completely rewrite everything and take it all to serverless if you're going to do anything cloud, that adds a huge amount of risk onto the IT portfolio. So for an enterprise or anyone who's actually been a successful company already, not the new startup, so it's like, yes, brand new, you can start Greenfield, it's awesome. But if you have any kind of successful company already, you need to have a migration path. You need to understand it is appropriate to put these things, you should start new, net new, you should start in cloud. Great. What about the stuff that we've already got this debug? How do I get that to talk to cloud and how do I not end up with a bifurcated organization where I've got this legacy stuff that sits in the cupboard which no one wants to touch and play with and I have everyone doing all the new shiny stuff over here and then I end up killing my business because I have no migration path. And one final thing, I know we got to go wrap up and get started for the day but I want to see more on these net new workloads because I think that is going to be a key part because the application developers are going to be the power sources. A new breed of developer, classic IT experts emerging, changing to DevOps and kind of a new community, open source community persona is evolving. So environment changing with developer persona, IT experts are changing to DevOps and the role of open source communities, I want to see more of that. At the end of the day, I want to see how Amazon thinks and how their customers are working with their data because if they have that heritage app or legacy or on edge or wherever, the data is going to be a critical design component for the next generation. So that's what I'm looking for, what's going on in the data and trying to survive the slew of announcements. Big data, big topics and we have 40,000 of our best friends here to share their knowledge with you. Well, we're not going to have all of them but we're going to have a lot. Wall to wall coverage here, AWS re-invent, kicks off in just a few moments. You are watching theCUBE live from Las Vegas.