 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering AWS re-invent 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services, Intel, and their ecosystem partners. Hey, welcome back everyone. Live here in Las Vegas for AWS Amazon Web Services, re-invent 2018's CUBE coverage. Two sets, wall-to-wall coverage here on the ground floor. I'm here with Dave Vellante. Dave, six years we've been coming to re-invent. Every year, except for the first year, what a progression, great news. Always raising the bar, as they say at Amazon. This year, big announcements, one of them is blockchain, really kind of laying out early formation of how they're going to roll out and think about blockchain. We're here to talk about here with Raul Pathak, who's the G.R.M. of analytics and data lakes and blockchain managing that, and Sean Bice, who's the vice-president of non-relational databases. Guys, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. It's great to be here. I wish my voice was a little bit stronger. I love this segment. You know, we've been doing blockchain, we've been following, a lot of the big events in the industry. You separate out the whole token ICO scam situation. Token economics is actually a great business model opportunity. Blockchain is an infrastructure, decentralized infrastructure. That's great, but it's early. Day one, really, for you guys in a literal sense. How are you guys doing blockchain? Take a minute to explain the announcement, because there are use cases, low-hanging use cases that look a lot like IoT in supply chain that are, people are interested in. Yeah. So, take a minute to explain the announcements and what it means. Absolutely. So, when we began looking at blockchain and blockchain use cases, we really realized there are two things that customers are trying to do. One case is really an immutable record of transactions where, and they're in a scenario where centralized trust is okay. And for that, we have Amazon QLDB, which is an immutable, cryptographically verifiable ledger. And then in scenarios where customers really wanted the decentralized trust and the smart contracts, that's where blockchain frameworks like Hyperledger Fabric and Ethereum play a role, but they're just super complicated to use. And that's why we built Amazon Blockchain, managed Blockchain to make it easy to stand up scale and monitor these networks so customers can focus on building applications. And in terms of use cases on the decentralized side, it's really quite diverse. I mean, we've got a customer, Guardian Life Insurance, so they're looking at managed Blockchain because they have this distributed network of partners, providers, patients, and customers, and they want to provide decentralized, verifiable records of what's taking place. And it's just a broad set of use cases for work. And then we saw in the video this morning, I think it was Indonesian farmers, right? Wasn't that before the keynote? Did you see that? It was good. Yeah, so they don't have bank accounts. Oh, got it. And they got a reward system. So they're using the blockchain to reward farmers to participate. A lot of people ask the question is, why do I need Blockchain? Why don't I just put it in a database? So there are unique, which is true, by the way, because you don't need the late, latency is an issue. You know, that certainly might want to avoid Blockchain in the short term until that gets fixed. Assume that it will get fixed over time. But what are some of the use cases where Blockchain actually is relevant? Can you be specific? Because that's where people start to make their selection criteria on, okay, I still use a database. I'm going to have all kinds of token in models around you put in a database. Where is the Blockchain specifically resonating right now? You know, I think we can take, I'll take a shot at this, we can do it together. But when you think of QLDB, it's not that customers were asking us for a ledger database. What they were really saying is, hey, you know, we'd like to have this complete, immutable, cryptographically verifiable trail of data. And it wasn't necessarily a Blockchain conversation, wasn't necessarily a database conversation. It was like, I really would like to have this complete cryptographic verifiable trail of data. And it turns out, you know, as you sort of look at the use cases, in particular with a centralized trust scenario, QLDB does exactly that. It's not about decentralized trust. It's really about simply being able to have a database that when you write to that database, you write a transaction to the database, you can't change it. And once, and that's, you know, typical database, people are like, well, hey, wait a second, what does immutable really mean? And once you get people to understand that once that transaction is written to a journal, it cannot be changed at all. And attached, then all of a sudden there's that breakthrough moment of it being immutable and having that cryptographic trail. And the advantage relative to a distributed Blockchain performance scale and all the challenges that people always have. Yeah, often, yeah, exactly. Like with QLDB, you can find, you know, it's going to be two to three times faster because you're not doing that distributed consensus. How about data lakes? Let's talk about data lakes. What problem were you guys trying to solve with the data lakes? There's a lot of them, but... Yes, no, that's a great question. So, you know, essentially it's been hard for customers to set up data lakes because you have to figure out where to get data from. You have to land it in S3. You've got to secure it. You've then got to secure every analytic service that you've got. You might have to clean your data. And so with LakeFormation, what we're trying to do is make it super easy to set up data lakes. So we have blueprints for common databases and data sources. We bring that data into an S3 data lake and we've created a central catalog for that data where customers can define granular access policies at the table and the column and the row level. We've also got ML-based data cleansing and data deduplication. And so now customers can just use LakeFormation, set up data lakes, curate their data, protect it in a single place, and have those policies then enforced across all of the analytic services that they might use. So does it help solve the data swamp problem, get more value out of the data lake? And if so, how? Absolutely. So the way it does that is by automatically cataloging all data as it comes in. So we can recognize what the data is and then we allow customers to add business metadata to that so they can tag this as customer data or PII data or this is my table of sales history and that then becomes searchable. So we automatically generate a catalog as data comes in and that addresses the, what do I have in my data lake problem? Okay, so go ahead. So Roy, you're the general manager. Sean, what's your job? What do you do? So our team builds all the non-relational databases at Amazon. So DynamoDB, Neptune, Elasticash, Timestream, what you're here about today, Keel to be et cetera. So all those things- Beanstalk too? Elastic Beanstalk? No, we do not build Beanstalk. Okay, we're a customer of DynamoDB by the way. Great. So happy customer. That's great. And we use Elasticash, right? Yep. There you go. Elasticash, Serious Elastic. So- You use Neptune yet, but- What's the biggest channel problem statement that you guys are trying to raise the bar on? What's the key focus? As you get this new worlds and use cases coming together, these are new use cases. What are you, how are you guys evaluating it? How are you guys raising the bar? You know, that's a really good question you asked. You know, what I found in my experience is developers that have been building apps for a long time, most people are familiar with relational databases. For years, we've been building apps in that context. But you know, when you kind of look at how people are building apps today, it's very different than how they did in the past. Today, developers do what they do best. They take an application, a big application, break it down into smaller parts, and they pick the right tool for the right job. I think the game developer market's going to be canary in the coal mine for developers, because that's a good spot for data formation and these kind of unstructured, non-relational scenarios. Okay, I got all this engagement data. It could be first person shooter or whatever it is. Just throw it in, I need to throw it somewhere, and I'll get to it and let it be ready to be worked on by analytics. Well, yeah, I mean, if you think about that gamer scenario, think about like, if you and I are building a game, who knows if there's going to be one user, 10 players, or 10 million, or 100 million, and if we had 100 million, it's all about the performance being steady at 100 million or 10, so it's- You need a fleet of servers. A fleet of servers. Have you guys played Fortnite, or do you have kids that play Fortnite? I look over my kid's shoulder. I've played. They've got about 14 petabytes in S3, using S3 as our data lake with EMR and Athena for analytics. We've got a season six. I mean, think about the F1 example and keynotes today. Great example of insights. You apply that kind of concept to Fortnite. By the way, Fortnite has the cube in there. It's always a popular term. We noticed that the hashtag, where's the cube today? Good resist. But the analytics, it could get out of all that data. Every interaction, all that gesture data. I mean, what are some of the things they're doing? Can you share how they're using the new tech to scale up and get these insights? Yeah, absolutely. So they're doing a bunch of things. I mean, one is just the health of the system. So when you've got hundreds of millions of players, you need to know if you're up and it's working. The second is around engagement. What games, what collection of people work well together? And then it's what incentives they create in the game, what power-ups people buy that lead to continued engagement because that defines success over the long term. What gets people coming back? And then they have an offline analytics process where they're looking at reporting and history and telemetry. So it's very comprehensive. So you're exactly right about gaming and analytics being a huge consumer of databases. Sean, didn't you guys have hard news today on DynamoDB? Yeah, today we announced DynamoDB on demand. So customers that basically have workloads that could spike up and then all of a sudden drop off. A lot of these customers basically don't even want to think about capacity planning. They don't want to guess. They just want to basically pay only for what they're using. So we announced DynamoDB on demand and the developer experience is simply you create a table and you put your read-write capacity in the on-demand mode and you literally only pay for the requests that your workload puts through the system. It's a great service actually. Again, making life easier for customers. Lower the bill, manage capacity, make things go better, faster, enable some value. It's all about improving the customer experience. All right guys, really appreciate you coming in. I'm really interested in following what you guys do in the future. I'm sure a lot of people watching will be as well as analytics and AI become real part of as you guys move the stack and create that API model for what you did for infrastructure, for apps, the total game changer, we believe. We're interested in following you guys. I'm sure others are. Where are you going to be this year? What's your focus? Where can people find out more besides going to the Amazon site? Is there a certain event you're going to be at? What's the, how do people get more information and what's the plans? So there'll be, there's actually some sessions on late formation and blockchain that we're doing here. We'll have a continuous stream of summits. So as the AWS Summit Calendar for 2019 gets published, that's a great place to go for more information and then just engage with us either on social media or through the web and we'll be happy to follow up. All right, well, we'll do a good job of amplifying. A lot of people are interested, certainly blockchain, super hot, but people want better, stronger, more stable, but they want the decentralized, immutable, database model. Cryptographically verifiable. And as soon as everyone knows. Scalable. Anyone who watches the Cube knows they talk about Cubecoin, but I haven't said Cubecoin once on this episode. Wait for those tokens to be released soon. More coverage after this short break. Stay with us. I'm John Furrier and Dave Vellante. We'll be right back.