Mai Lan Tomsen Bukovec | AWS Storage Day 2021
thank you jenna it's great to see you guys and thank you for watching thecube's continuous coverage of aws storage day we're here at the spheres it's amazing venue my name is dave vellante i'm here with mylon thompson bucavec who's vice president of of block and object storage my line always a pleasure to see you thanks for coming on nice to see you dave it's pretty crazy you know this is kind of a hybrid event it's we were in barcelona a while ago big hybrid event and now it's you know it's hard to tell it's almost like day to day what's happening with with covid and some things are permanent i think a lot of things are becoming permanent you what are you seeing out there in terms of when you talk to customers how are they thinking about their business building resiliency and agility into their business in the context of covert and beyond well dave i think what we've learned today is that this is the new normal these fluctuations that companies are having and supply and demand in all industries all over the world that's the new normal and that is what is what has driven so much more adoption of cloud in the last 12 to 18 months and we're going to continue to see that rapid migration to the cloud because companies now know that in the course of days and months your the whole world of your expectations of where your business is going and where what your customers are going to do that can change and that can change not just for a year but maybe longer than that that's a new normal and i think companies are realizing it our aws customers are seeing how important it is to accelerate moving everything to the cloud to continue to adapt to this new normal so storage historically has been i'm going to drop a box off at the loading dock and you know have a nice day and then you know maybe the services team is involved in a more intimate way but you're involved every day so i'm curious as to what that permanence that new normal some people call it the new abnormal but it's the new normal now what does that mean for storage dave in the course of us sitting here over the next few minutes we're going to have dozens of deployments go out all across our aws storage services that means our customers that are using our file services our transfer services block and object services they're all getting improvements as we sit here and talk that is such a fundamentally different model than the one that you talked about which is the appliance gets dropped off at the loading dock it takes a couple months for it to get scheduled for setup and then you have to do data migration to get the data on the new appliance meanwhile we're sitting here and customers storage is just improving under the hood and in major announcements like what we're doing today so take us through this sort of let's go back because i remember vividly when when s3 was announced it launched this cloud era and people would you know they would do a lot of experimentation uh we were storing you know maybe gigabytes maybe even some terabytes back then um and and that's evolved what are you seeing in terms of how people are using data what are the patterns that you're seeing today how is that different than maybe 10 years ago i think what's really unique about aws is that we are the only provider that has been operating at scale for 15 years and what that means is that we have customers of all sizes terabytes petabytes exabytes that are running their storage on aws and running their applications using that storage and so we have this really unique position of being able to observe and work with customers to develop what they need for storage and it really breaks down to three main patterns the first one is what i call the crown jewels the crown jewels in the cloud and that pattern is adopted by customers who are looking at the core mission of their business and they're saying to themselves i actually can't scale this core mission on on premises and they're choosing to go to the cloud on the most important thing that their business does because they must they have to and so a great example of that is finra the regulatory body of the u.s stock exchanges where you know a number of years ago they took a look at all the data silos that were popping up across our data centers they're looking at the rate of stock transactions going up and they're saying we just can't keep up not if we want to follow the mission of being the watchdog for consumers for transactions for um stock transactions and so they moved that crown jewel of their application to aws and what's really interesting dave is as you know because you talked to many different companies it's not technology that stops people from moving to the cloud as quick as they want to it's culture it's people it's processes it's how businesses work and when you move the cloud jewels into the cloud you are accelerating that cultural change and that's certainly what finra saw second thing we see is where a company will pick a few cloud pilots we'll take a couple of applications maybe one or several across the organization and they'll move that as sort of a reference implementation to the cloud and then the goal is to try to get the people who did that to generalize all the learning across the company that is actually a really slow way to change culture because as many of us know in large organizations you know you have um you have some resistance to other organizations changing culture and so that cloud pilot while it seems like it would work it seems logical it's actually counterproductive to a lot of companies that want to move quickly to the cloud the third example is what i think of as new applications or cloud first net new and that pattern is where a company or startup says all new technology initiatives are on the cloud and we see that for companies like mcdonald's which has transformed their drive up experience by dynamically looking at location orders and providing recommendations and we see it for the digital athlete which is what the nfl has put together to dynamically take data sources and build these models that help them programmatically simulate risks to player health and put in place some ways to predict and prevent that but those are the three patterns that we see so many customers falling into depending on what their business wants i like that term digital athlete my business partner john furrier coined the term tech athlete you know years ago in the cube that third pattern seems to me you're right you almost have to shock the system if you just put your toe in the water it's going to take too long but it seems like that third pattern really actually de-risks it in a lot of cases it's so exciting people who's going to argue oh the new stuff should be in the cloud and so that seems to me to be a very sensible way to approach that that blocker if you will what are your thoughts on that i think you're right dave i think what it does is it allows a company to be able to see the ideas and the technology and the cultural change of cloud in different parts of the organization and so rather than having a one group that's supposed to generalize it across an organization you get it uh decentralized and adopted by different groups and the culture change just goes faster so you bring up decentralization and there's a there's an emerging trend referred to as a data mesh it was it was coined the term coined by jamaicani a very thought-provoking uh individual and the concept is basically that you know data is decentralized and yet we have this tendency to sort of shove it all into you know one box or one container or you could say one cloud well the cloud is expanding it's the cloud is decentralizing in many ways so how do you see data mesh fitting in to those patterns we have customers today that are taking the data mesh architectures and implementing them with aws services and dave i want to go back to the start of amazon when amazon first began we grew because the amazon technologies were built in microservices fundamentally a data match is about separation or abstraction of what individual components do and so if i look at data mesh really you're talking about two things you're talking about separating the data storage and the characteristics of data from the data services that interact and operate on that storage and with data mesh it's all about making sure that the businesses the decentralized business model can work with that data now our aws customers are putting their storage in a centralized place because it's easier to track it's easier to view compliance and it's easier to predict growth and control costs but we started with building blocks and we deliberately built our storage services separate from our data services so we have data services like lake formation and glue we have a number of these data services that our customers are using to build that customized data mesh on top of that centralized storage so really it's about at the end of the day speed it's about innovation it's about making sure that you can decentralize and separate your data services from your storage so businesses can go faster but that centralized storage is logically centralized it might not be physically centralized i mean we put storage all over the world that's correct right and but but we it to to a developer it looks like it's in one place that's right and so so that's not antithetical to the concept of a data mesh in fact it fits in perfectly to the point you were making i wonder if we could talk a little bit about aws's storage strategy it started of course with with ss3 and that was the focus for years and of course ebs as well but now we're seeing we heard from wayne this morning the portfolio is expanding uh the innovation is is accelerating that flywheel that we always talk about how would you characterize and how do you think about aws's storage strategy per se we are dynamically and constantly evolving our aws storage services based on what the application and the customer want that is fundamentally what we do every day we talked a little bit about those deployments that are happening right now dave that is something that idea of constant dynamic evolution just can't be replicated by on-premises where you buy a box and it sits in your data center for three or more years and what's unique about us among the cloud services is again that perspective of the 15 years where we are building applications in ways that are unique because we have more customers and we have more customers doing more things so you know i i've said this before it's all about speed of innovation dave time and change wait for no one and if you're a business and you're trying to transform your business and base it on a set of technologies that change rapidly you have to use aws services i mean if you look at some of the launches that we talk about today and you think about s3's multi-region access points that's a fundamental change for customers that want to store copies of their data in any number of different regions and get a 60 performance improvement by leveraging the technology that we built up over time leveraging the the ability for us to route to intelligently router request across our network that and fsx for netapp ontap nobody else has these capabilities today and it's because we are at the forefront of talking to different customers and that dynamic evolution of storage that's the core of our strategy so andy jess used to say oftentimes aws is misunderstood and you you're comfortable with that and that so help me square this circle because you talked about things you couldn't do on on-prem and yet you mentioned the relationship with netapp uh if you you think look at things like outposts and local zones so you're actually moving the cloud out to the edge including on-prem data centers um so so how do you think about hybrid in that context for us dave it always comes back to what the customer is asking for and we were talking to customers and they were talking about their edge and what they wanted to do with it we said how are we going to help and so if i just take s3 for outposts as an example or ebs and outposts you know we have customers like morningstar and morningstar wants outposts because they are using it as a step in their journey to being on the cloud if you take a customer like first abu dhabi bank they're using outposts because they need date of residency for their compliance requirements and then we have other customers that are using outposts to help uh like dish networks as an example to place the storage as close as account to the applications for low latency all of those are customer customer-driven requirements for their architecture for us dave we think in the fullness of time every customer and all applications are going to be on the cloud because it makes sense and those businesses need that speed of innovation but when we build things like our announcement today of fxs for netapp ontap we build them because customers asked us to help them with their journey to the cloud just like we built s3 and evs for outposts for the same reason but when you say over time you're you believe that all workloads will be on the cloud but the cloud is it's like the universe i mean it's expanding what's not cloud in the in the future when you say on the cloud you mean wherever you meet customers with that cloud that includes outputs just the programming it's the programmability of that model is that correct that's what you're talking about in fact our s3 and ebs outpost customers the way that they look at how they use outposts it's either as part of developing applications where they'll eventually go to the cloud or taking applications that are in the cloud today in aws regions and running them locally and so as you say this definition of the cloud you know it it's going to evolve over time but the one thing that we know for sure is that aws storage in aws in general is going to be there one or two steps ahead of where customers are and deliver them what they need i want to talk about block storage for a moment if i can you know you guys are making some moves in that space we heard some announcements earlier today some of the hardest stuff to move whether it's cultural or maybe it's just hardened tops maybe it's you know governance edicts are those really hardcore mission critical uh apps and workloads whether it's sap stuff oracle microsoft etc you're clearly seeing that as an opportunity for your customers and in storage in some respects was a blocker previously because of whatever latency etc and there's still some some considerations there how do you see those workloads eventually moving to the cloud well they can move now with io2 block express we have the performance that those high-end applications need and it's available today we have customers using them and they're very excited about that technology and you know again it goes back to what i just said dave we had customers saying i would like to move my highest performing applications to the cloud and this is what i need from the from the uh the uh the storage underneath it and that's why we built io2 block express and that's how we'll continue to evolve iot block express it is the first san technology in the cloud but it's built on those core principles that we talked about a few minutes ago which is dynamically evolving and capabilities that we can add on the fly and customers just get the benefit of it without the cost of migration i want to ask you something about just the storage how you think about storage in general because typically it's been a bucket you know it's a container but it seems i always say the next 10 years aren't going to be like the last it seems like you're really in the data business and you're bringing in machine intelligence you're bringing in other database technology and this rich set of other services to apply to the data that's now there's a lot of data in the cloud and so we can now whether it's build data products build data services so how do you think about the business in that sense it's no longer just a place to store stuff it's actually a place to accelerate innovation and build and monetize for your customers how do you think about that our customers use the word foundational every time they talk about storage they say for us it's foundational and dave that's because every business is a data business every business is making decisions now on this changing landscape in a world where the new normal means you cannot predict what's going to happen in six months in a year and the way that they're making those smart decisions is through data and so they're taking the data that they have in our storage services and they're using sagemaker to build models they're uh they're using all kinds of different applications like lake formation and glue to build some of the services that you're talking about around authorization and data discovery to sit on top of the data and they're able to leverage the data in a way that they have never been able to do before because they have to that's what the business world demands today and that's what we need in the new normal we need the flexibility and the dynamic foundational storage that we provide in aws and you think about the great data companies those are the you know trillions in the market cap their their data companies they put data at their core but that doesn't mean they shove all the data into a centralized location it means they have the identity access capabilities the governance capabilities to to to enable data to be used wherever it needs to be used and and build that future exciting times we're entering here milan we're just at the start dave we're just at the start what inning do you think we have so how do you think about amazon it was it's not a it's not a baby anymore it's not even an adolescent right you guys are obviously a major player early adulthood day one day zero wait dave we don't age ours i think if i look at where we're going for aws we are just at the start so many companies are moving to the cloud but we're really just at the start and what's really exciting for us who work on aws storage is that when we build these storage services and these data services we are seeing customers do things that they never thought they could do before and it's just the beginning i think the potential is unlimited you mentioned dish before i mean i see what they're doing in in the cloud for telco i mean charcoal transformation that's an industry every industry there's a transformation scenario a disruption scenario healthcare has been so reluctant for years and that's happening so quickly i mean covert certainly accelerating that obviously financial services have been super tech savvy but they're looking at the fintech saying okay how do we play i mean there isn't manufacturing with e.v there isn't a single industry that's not a digital industry that's right and there's implications for everyone and it's not just bits and atoms anymore the old negroponte although nicholas i think was prescient because he saw this coming it really is fundamental data is fundamental to every business and i think you want for all of those in different industries you want to pick the provider where innovation and invention is in our dna and that is true not just for storage but aws and that is driving a lot of the changes you have today but really what's coming in the future it did you're right it's the combinatorial factors it's not just this the storage or the data it's the ability to apply other technologies that map into your business process that map into your organizational skill sets that drive innovation in whatever industry you're in yeah that's um it's great mylon awesome to see you thanks so much for coming on thecube great seeing you dave take care all right you too and keep it right there for more action we're going to now toss it back to jenna canal and darko in the studio guys over to you [Music] you
2021-09-06 20:54
