Ep.148-AWS Reinvent 2024 Recap: What You Need to Know with Aman Arora and Koby Phillips
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Welcome to the podcast designed to fuel your technology sales. I’m your host, Josh, Lupresto SVP of sales engineering at Telarus and this is next level biz tech.
Everybody welcome back today. We have a very special episode. Today’s title coming hot off the event is AWS re-invent 2024 recap, what you need to know. But I had an ask. I’ve been hosting 150 some episodes so far. And I thought, you know what? I would love to be a guest because I got a lot to talk about because Koby and I’m on and I went to AWS re-invent. So we’re actually going to turn it over first to run the whole show. Mr. Koby Phillips, VP of cloud at Telarus Koby. Take it away, man. It’s all yours.
150 episodes plus no guests host, no pressure. And you’re still on the show. So it’s not like you can’t take it back over if you mess up, right? But as you mentioned, we also have Aman here who is our cloud solutions architect and we all three went to Las Vegas. I’m going to save everybody the hangover reference quotes because we were there. And I think we all took away different pieces of this conversation.
But to set the stage, you know, I’m on this isn’t this isn’t your first rodeo out there. You’ve been out there giving your background and understanding. So if you don’t mind, like Sharon with everybody a little bit about your background before you came to Telarus really quick and then really this whole show, like how many people show up, how many sessions are there, things like that. So we can set the stage of how grand this thing really is.
Yeah, sure. So first and foremost, I came over from one of our suppliers, uh, effectual, where I spent the last couple of years focusing on everything from AWS migrations, um, into the cloud. And then once you’re in the cloud, you know, optimization of that environment, um, management monitoring legacy application modernization, um, you know, transforming some of those legacy workloads into microservices, et cetera, et cetera, right? So that start to finish cloud journey for our customers. Um, that’s kind of what I’ve been focused on over the past couple of years. I tell Eric specifically, it’s nice to zoom out of that AWS only bucket and start to approach these cloud best practices from a Azure and a GCP as well as a VMware perspective as well. Um, so it’s been a great ride here at Telarus so far, but, you know, circling back to the AWS stuff, this conference was, was awesome. It’s really cool to see how AWS has established those best practices and those six pillars, you know, performance, um, reliability, security, et cetera, and truly evolved those over time. Right. Those are still the same AWS core principles, but in the way that they’ve evolved, um, leveraging AI and ML to distribute some of those services and those new building blocks for their end customers has been really cool to see. Yeah.
And I mean, how big is this thing? Like how many people do we, do they know I’ve heard before there’s been hundred thousand and things like that. I mean, there’s no way there’s that many people there. How many do we get an account on what they thought the attendance was this time?
Yeah. So I think this time we were competing with the rodeo in town. Um, I think it was a level.
Yeah. It was a pretty level set of attendance right over the week. I think there was about a hundred thousand people there present from both parties.
And you know, for advisors that go to channel partners or been to channel partners to kind of give you guys an idea how big this is, that takes the entire Venetian conviction, uh, convention floor, which we’re all accustomed to, but also Mandalay Bay, Caesars hosted sessions. Josh, I mean, I think I saw somewhere there was 1900 plus education breakouts and sessions. Is that about right?
Yeah. Nineteen hundred sessions. I think they said overall, they had people, they only had three or four hotels participating. I should say only, these are massive hotels. Uh, but I think they put, they put people up in about eight, eight or nine different hotels. So not only what was fascinating, this thing is so big. If you couldn’t, uh, reserve an event in time, what I thought was unique that they did was if, if this one was at capacity that was upstairs, you know, in one of the Murano rooms or whatever it was, you could pop downstairs into this giant hall where you had five, you know, multi hundred inch size TVs on the wall. Pop a headset on different color headset corresponds to a different TV where those events from upstairs or simulcast. So you don’t have to get caught in the lines and all this crazy stuff. So unique things that they’ve done over time to evolve this event, to just make sure that you can quickly and easily get to all the sessions that you want. And I did not get to all 1900. Uh, but I think we did get to some good ones.
Well, and we’ll get into those in just a minute. The other thing I really, if I’m an advisor, I’m going, why are you guys talking about this? Like we don’t have, we’re not working directly with AWS and things like that. But we, as I’m on, I mentioned one of our suppliers, effectual has a big presence out there, rapid scale has a big presence out there. We saw 11 11 and tier point and then into like mother, I’m sure we’re missing people as if this thing was so massive. So operating central there, I saw zoom there. We saw, I believe Genesis or five nine. Like it’s a lot of different players and our supplier ecosystem are taking this. That’s a customer facing event for a lot of them. It’s, um, it’s a lot of stuff going on with just industry, uh, alignment, anybody that’s on the AWS marketplace, which is something that’s going to become more and more and more relevant on, um, getting ahead of an understanding how that affects your customers buying patterns as well. So there’s a lot of stuff that goes into this. That is what I’d call, you know, our modern distribution channel adjacent, um, but not necessarily like one to one. And that’s going to continue to evolve like our channel and where AWS is and things like that. And we got a lot of plans on that, but just to kind of level set on what, why, why we were there and what’s going on. What are some of the biggest takeaways? You know, we’ll start Josh, just maybe give one or two and we’ll kick it over to Mon for his as well.
Yeah. I just think, you know, the channel used to look so different years ago and there were all these parallel paths, right? Some would intersect once in a weird while. If I knew, uh, AWS is in this account and I ran into a rep and I was trying to sell a private cloud deal or whatever it might be, but now you just have, you have multiple advanced solutions vendors in our portfolio, all kind of cross pollinating, uh, across the board. And so no longer can you live in these separate distribution silos. These distributions are, are, are crossing over every which way. And so I think that’s, that’s what’s cool to finally see is that we don’t have to live in these apart worlds. And so why do we care? Why do a mononite care? Why does the broader to Laris care? Uh, you know, kind of like I’ve said before, we have to say one step ahead of whatever it is opportunity wise that comes thrown at us, whether that’s, uh, Hey, what’s my customer doing? Or Hey, I need your help on a discovery call. Get on and talk about this. We don’t care whether they have a Nutanix on prem environment, whether they have an AWS or Azure environment, whether they have this product, that product, we got to know about it all. So as much as we need to know where this supplier and that supplier is going and where their products are, we need to know what the hyperscalers have from a productization perspective as well, because the great thing for the partners that you couldn’t do five, 10 years ago is you can monetize this stuff. So all the things that we’re going to talk about here, you can monetize whether that’s pro serve, manage migration, OEMs. There’s so many opportunities that I think we’ll get into a Mona. If you had any, any additional thoughts on that?
Yeah. I like everything you’re saying. And the only thing I would add would be that thematically, it’s nice to see that again, going back to those, you know, six pillars and that, that core of best practices that AWS established, it’s nice to see that the idea of what they’re doing is still the same, right? We’re going to build the best in-class tools possible for our end customers to focus on exactly what they were hired to do, solve the problem. Right. And as we see AI and ML sort of emerge in the marketplace and then again, specifically with AWS, it’s not, Hey, let’s just go sell gen AI now. It’s what is the problem we’re looking to solve and are there tools within our tools and within our tool belt that let us solve that problem, right? For instance, Amazon releasing within their bedrock suite, they just released intelligent routing, which lets you pick a handful of different LLMs.
Right. And a handful of different use cases and the intelligent routing, depending on the chatbot request will route it to the appropriate LLM from both the performant and a cost optimized perspective. Right. So really you as a customer, you just go back to focusing on the problem that you’re looking to solve as the TA. Again, you’re more sticky with the problem and more sticky with the customer now than you are with the infrastructure and how it’s being done.
And not to nitpick something, and this isn’t anything we’re going to solve on this podcast, but the fact that they, and just to clarify for advisors out there, when one references a chatbot going back into an LN, we’re not going to get technical on this, I promise guys. Think of it more of a data bot. It’s not the chatbot in the sense of its customer facing and it’s doing all this stuff, it’s retrieving data, bringing it back over and analyzing it and putting it into use with the customer’s private data as well.
These are things that are going to be competitive. We know Google, right? Josh, we just talked about this and they’re on the Tuesday call with rapid scale, talking about the, you know, the AI LLMs in each vertical. They have a healthcare, they have this, they have that. AWS obviously has their answers. There’s a reason why these hyperscalers are leading, you know, innovation in AI as a service for customers. Now, if I’m sitting there, I’m an advisor and I’m like, okay, so all these guys that we, we don’t have direct access to, we have to go through a vendor. Guys, I will tell you the, the impetus that AWS is putting on their partner program is really where the value a lot of this, that’s what they, it continues to grow and be eyeopening the relationships with a factual with rapid scale, well, to your point and others that invest in the AWS ecosystem. And again, if I’m leaving anybody out, I’m sure my phone will, will give me a text or a call later and you guys will remind me some of my apologies in advance. But those are, those partnerships are, are growing like crazy. Um, and if, as we talk through this, we’re going to give you guys some nuggets that can be talk tracks and some of the stuff is going to be more on that cutting edge of technology and things like that. A lot of customers are going to be ready for this, but that’s the, that’s the great part about it. If you can bring it up and know that all the resources that, that are there for you, your suppliers, your, your, your resources here in Tilaris. So we stay on top of it. So we’re aware of it in case it comes up with your customer, or if you want to bring it up, just to set an inception point to change that perception of what you’re able to bring to the table. That’s what I really hope you pay attention to as we get into some of these other highlights from the sessions.
And you can say, Hey, you know, I was listening to a podcast about AWS re-invent, and they mentioned this, this, and this, is that something that you guys are dealing with and things like that. So, you know, let’s give some of those golden nuggets here, Josh, what are, what are some of the sessions that you attended and what are some of the highlights that, that Amana definitely want to hear your take on that as well.
Yeah. So I’m going to come back to, uh, I’m going to come back to, uh, one of the things that Aman was talking about as we get into kind of building AI models. And some of these, the SageMaker was this thing that kept coming up over and over and over again. But before we go to that, I want to, I want to add one thought because one of the sessions that I did lead that wasn’t a technical session or anything, it was their AWS partner track keynote. Uh, and one of the things that was very, very, very prominent in that, and this is really important for partners is map funding. Our suppliers have access to map funding map stands for migration assistance. Program shortly, you know, more concisely put, AWS is incentivized to help fund the build of projects to migrate customers over to AWS. Then of course, all your traditional residual consumption management model, you know, billing comes on the, on the hook after that, but they want to make it easy, which means they will help fund some of these projects. Now disclaimer, um, not all projects are approved. And so we’re reliant on this network of suppliers, like Koby mentioned, rapid scale and others to say, Hey, I’ve got an opportunity. I think it’s a good fit for AWS. Is this eligible for map funding? And so we heard the word map funding a lot, um, in this talk track. And so what I would encourage is what we’re going to get into in some of these sessions, we’ve heard things are getting easier to build. This is not just a developer world anymore. Um, they’re making productization easier. And we’ll talk about that. But I want you to keep this idea of underscoring, um, funding is available to help get some of these projects moved along. That was in the partner keynote that was set over and over and over again.
Yeah. And I mean, again, the there’s an approval and the suppliers that we have access to have that level, it’s going to be critical in as your customers are continuing to look into AI or cloud modernization, these things cost money. And a lot of these guys don’t have the skillset and resources, which are why our suppliers are involved. Um, it just is another lever to pull for everything to get moved over. And I always like to explain why AWS, they’ll, they’ll front in the money. And the getting them into AWS isn’t where they make their money. It’s that consumption piece on the backend and that continued growth within that, that they make their money. And that comes with a cost to them too. AWS, think about it. You’re going and you’re leasing their engine to drive your business, right? And a lot of these products and things that they were doing. I’m on one of the things that I’d love to hear from you is there’s a couple of big announcements under what powers that engine that’s coming out from AWS. Can you highlight the chips as we like to call them and, uh, what that means like holistically?
Yeah, sure. Um, so AWS also released their next gen of, uh, compute chips called grab it on. Um, and what that means to us specifically, right? It’s not like we’re going out and buying chips or helping our partners source chips directly, but what it does mean is a next generation of very high, very intense, um, easy to instances, right? For customers to be able to power some of their AI workloads. Um, just backtracking real quick. EC2 instances is a, is what we call virtual machines in the Amazon world. Right. So elastic cloud compute. Um, you click a button, you select what OS you want, what instance type, um, some of the compute and memory resources and within 15 minutes are up and running.
You might, you might study in the competitive landscape, both on graviton and then also on EC2, like who are some of the known competitors and both just to let everybody know.
Yeah, I would say that graviton specifically, right? It seems like AWS is looking to compete with Nvidia, um, and maybe, maybe, uh, rely on themselves versus a third party for some of that, uh, that chip use. Um, and then from an EC2 perspective, right? That’s, that’s just the nomenclature for virtual machines, whether we’re talking, um, Azure virtual machine, Amazon, EC2 instances or VMware VMS. So as long as it’s a, let’s call it a virtualized, um,
virtualized server, that’s basically what a virtual machine is.
And it seems like, it seems like when you get to the size of scale to, I mean, Tesla themselves for the cars went through this original autonomous driving was dependent on Nvidia. That was great. It worked. And they went, no, this just doesn’t quite work well enough, fast enough, cost effectively enough for us. We’re not going to be able to sell these things at an affordable price. And so why not? You just build your own chip. Sure. Seems easy, right? But they’ve iterated, they’ve iterated. They’re faster. Um, they can handle more. They’re more cost effective, uh, and they’re making better use of them. And then what you’re, what are you, you’re less dependent on other things in the procurement chain. So it’s an interesting concept.
That’s a great point, Josh, right? We, I think we often forget or maybe we don’t, but sometimes we look at Amazon and say, Hey, they’ve built the best practices. Let’s look at them to understand how we should operate. Amazon does a great job of testing the validity of their own best practices in their business. Everything that we talk about as outcome selling or what is the outcome that this move makes for your business. Amazon is doing internally, similar to the way that you describe Tesla to be doing. If the outcome of this move benefits our business in a way that allows us to make more money or save more money down the longterm, then that’s what we’re going to do, right? Um, it’s very similar to the solar panel conversation. I like to say, right? You got to make the very initial uplift CapEx investment now. But if you’re looking to keep this infrastructure or this building with the lights on for the next 20, 30 years, that might be the better strategic play to do now versus throughout the next 20, 30 years.
So if I’m, if I’m reading this the way that I like to look at things, which is,
we’ll see how you guys like it, but it’s, it’s like AWS said, all right, Nvidia, you’re not going to body us around. We were not going to be dependent on you. We know the relationship between broad common and video. It’s very tight. And as soon as all of that started to happen with VMware in the acquisition, all of a sudden the VMware on AWS alignment started to falter a little bit. So this looks like it’s, you know, again, just, Hey, we’re not going to be beholden to anybody else when we can create and do these things ourselves and power potentially a product that’s not only going to be competitive, but depending on the workloads and the situation, it’s going to be better for the client. Now the cool part is, um, it just gives another really relevant option, right? I mean, it’s going to create a whole nother, um, level, um, and you know, backup, I would say, you know, Nvidia graviton just for advisors, you hear the, you hear the acronym GPU that’s going to be associated with what this is like helping to power quite a bit. Amond, do you mind just giving like a 30 second and what, what, what all of this means to the products of AI and all of the other things that are going and why this matters so much out of these EC2 instances?
Yeah, that’s a good question, actually. So, I mean, from a, from a compute perspective, obviously, right. There’s the, the resources that AI requires, um, from a compute perspective is, is out there. It’s the biggest challenge to solving any AI problems right now. You see all these companies starting to invest in building their own data centers even, um, to solve some of that compute power, right? So for companies that are a little bit smaller than Tesla or have, you know, some of some different requirements than Tesla, where they’re looking to solve more of an immediate problem versus develop an infrastructure, you know, to build out their company over time, they can use higher compute resources. They can access certain resources to solve their immediate AI problem while leveraging some of these other Amazon services to increase the AI and ML proficiency of their business over time, right? So we’re setting up an AI workflow for our customer problem, but within this workflow, it necessitates that we’re taking in a lot of data. How are we using that data from an AI ML perspective to while we’re solving that customer problem, developer, deeper business insights of our business and of our customers themselves?
So I think it’s an incorrect approach that’s really turning into something powerful, again, going back to the business outcome, being our business as well as the customer’s business.
Yeah. This thing just continues to, what I always get excited about it, it is all the announcements and the education, the learning, all the things that we’re hitting on, but then when I get excited, when I leave, it’s going, what’s Microsoft going to do? What’s Google going to do? What’s Nvidia going to do? What’s like all of these guys are playing an endless game of can you top this or watch the maps of this and take it this direction? And it’s dizzy and to try to keep up with, but again, as an advisor, what I think you can, as you go through all of these things, take away some talk tracks and remember you have the resources that understand the landscape and are keeping up with things and in your broader ecosystem, all these great suppliers that are doing the same. So, um, you know, Josh kind of want to kick something back to you. All right. I didn’t mean to shortcut what we learned in the sessions. I get excited. We bounce around too much. What, you know, one of the things that I saw in one of the key notes was, and correct me if I butcher this, was it, uh, some simplicity or
simplicity, simplicity, each complexity, new word for, for 2025.
Yeah. And we, you know, uh, we all three said in that, that particular session, one or, you know, I’d love to, from just a design kind of more business structure, right? Problem solving. But when it comes to clients and what are some of the things you took away? And that was led by one of the, one of the gentlemen that you follow quite.
Yeah. We’re in vocals, a long time CTO, Amazon.com. I think kind of a lot of the brains behind AWS. I think while this guy is, is part of what built a lot of this infrastructure and behind the scenes on all of these products, um, over the last 15 plus years, you know, you get to a spot where you build so many things and it becomes so inherently complex. Some of the themes is some of the themes are, how do we just make this easier? And this year the phrase was, you know, simplicity meets complexity, right? Let’s not have complexity for the sake of complexity. Let’s just keep it simple. Right. And so I think the way that some of the things that we took out of that were, uh, some of the themes that they mentioned were from them hearing from their customers, Hey, you have a lot of stuff. You have a lot of products. We love that you keep releasing products, but how do you make it a little bit simpler for us? And so, you know, one of those releases that he talked about was, okay, I’ve got, you know, I’m just going to throw around some products here for a second. I’ve got Amazon bedrock, which is bedrock is the family of foundational large language models. So you go to bedrock and you say, okay, maybe I want to use, um, anthropic from, you know, Claude from anthropic. Maybe I want to use, um, chat GPT from open AI, or maybe I want to use Amazon’s own large language model, right? You start, you have this family of products. Well, then I, I swivel chair over here and I use this tool called SageMaker for, uh, you know, to build my AI and ML flows. Well, then, okay, I got to store that data in a storage bucket in S3. And so this over time, this just became really complex. And so things come out that they make it simpler. Things like I mentioned earlier, SageMaker AI studio, which just unifies all of that in one place. So you’re not having to go from tool to tool to tool to tool. So you, you have a way to bring all of this building together, grab your model, train it, feed it, QA it, use a little bit of Amazon queue, which I’m just going to drop that we’re going to talk about that later to make the code writing more automated, where you don’t have to be a, you know, 10 year developer, write in code to be an expert in this. That is gone. Look, there’s a lot of value in writing code and, and, and I’m, I’m not a code writer by any means, but it just got dramatically easier. And so seeing SageMaker, right? I would walk away with that being a product that is a family of things that makes it significantly easier to build and train a large language model against a customer’s seemingly unique set of data and set of problems.
Josh, that was a great point, right? I think, I think you did a good job of explaining it’s going to be easier to solve the problem, right? I think a lot of what we’ve seen from a partner and customer perspective, especially when we talk about managed services over the last couple of years is it’s hard to learn AWS to then go,
Oh, it’s hard to now learn the solve the problem, right? It almost feels like a timeline of approach. New language for a lot of you language altogether, but with what we’ve seen being released in the suite and the tools then in and of themselves is that they’re not that hard to learn, right? Josh, you can, you can probably vouch for this, but after the session, you said, I went, I went back to the hotel and started playing with the tools that I learned about earlier today. Being a, not being a developer and playing with developer tools, having fun with it, a B working towards solving a problem. It reminds me a lot of the Canva and the Photoshop life, right? Like there’s, there’s a use case for both. There’s an audience and a customer base for why you would use Canva and why you would use Photoshop. But again, if you’re looking to just come up with a flyer for your Thanksgiving party this weekend, you might not need to go through the ins and outs of Photoshop and cloning and vectorizing your graphics. When you can just go to Canva, pull out the basic template, put in the info. Again, what’s the outcome of this flyer is to get all your friends to the party, right? Not to make the coolest, uh, AB tested flyer out there. So again, going back to the outcome and the desired use case, I think a lot of what we’re seeing is not only the ease of ability to solve the problem, but the ease and ability removing that barrier to entry of actually learning the AWS language and the systems and the tools that come with that suite. Yeah.
So, I mean, every customer is going to be able to figure this out, right? It’s that easy. No. And if you’re, if you’re an advisor, that’s what you heard. You got two guys that are very well versed in AWS talking in Josh Inamont and it easier for them means more accessibility, easier to access and pulling more things together. For a customer who’s looking to get into this, it’s still going to be daunting. There’s still going to be major opportunity and they’re still going to need a guide because what really doesn’t happen within AWS is they don’t put their guardrails on their own products, right? They have certain guardrails that protect their infrastructure and products, but there’s there’s still a lot of inherent, uh, over-development, risk, sprawl, et cetera, and really navigating the, to how to optimize what you’re going to spend in there. Or you’re, that’s really still going to be the most relevant point. Cloud hasn’t changed. I mean, AWS is 20, 20 plus years old now. I think this is the, I can’t remember, it was 13th or 16th, um, um, you know, episode of re-invent, but the, the whole thing here is the big takeaway is there is continued development, there’s new products. They’re going to flood the market with new, no instances. They are making things less complex, more simple, but there’s still a major opportunity for managing it and getting it right. And so for clients that are in AWS, the conversation is, Hey, AWS just went through a lot of stuff. How’s your staff or, you know, are you guys in sourcing all of that? Meaning you’re running it all. Do you co-source it with an MSP or CSP or do you outsource it all? Regardless, let’s have a conversation because I want to bring in my team that has a really good depth here and see if there’s a better way to optimize what you’re already doing or, or expand what you’re doing to then give you better back, better back, better bottom line back, uh, in your investment. So those are, those are really continually the conversations that happen here. And I just always want to double click on that for, for the advisors that are listening. Like that’s your opportunity. And that’s a little bit of a talk track that you can utilize. Um, you know, back to some of these nuggets guys. So we hit on the chips. We hit on, you know, what, what that means to EC2. Josh, you talked about Seesemaker and making AI and all the different LLMs that are outside the AWS ecosystem, easy to access and bring in. Um, what are, what are some of the other major, Iman, what are, you know, what are some other things that you took away from sessions, conversations, things like that?
Yeah. So AWS is obviously proving, you know, their, their innovative capabilities, but they’re also proving how close they have their ear to the ground in terms of the marketplace and what other people are really interested in pursuing. Right. Um, and this world of blockchain, right? Crypto is a very, very small sliver of blockchain, but it seems to be the most apparent and desirable use case within the marketplace and pop culture today. Right. Pop culture, for lack of a better word. Um, my point being, it sounds like Amazon has responded well to these sorts of things. Um, rather than just saying, yeah, we like it or we don’t like it. They’re going to, they’re going to do their best to distribute and build, sorry, build and distribute the tools to support that. Right. So while Amazon does have Amazon managed blockchain and released, um, Amazon query to sort of index and search these large blockchains, um, what they’re really doing is showing their support for the developer community and the web three community, right? They’re saying web three has nothing to do with crypto, although again, crypto is a very small use case of it. What we really want to do is enable our developer community to start feeling supported in building web three applications. Again, whether or not Amazon has a personal or financial vested interest in any of those applications never comes across our, our radar, right? It, what really stands out is that they are here to build the tools to enable our, their customers to go solve and problems, um, in which I think it puts our advisors in a very interesting bucket, which is something that we might have always talked about in an ideal perspective, you know, being on the teller side, instead of selling the what let’s go sell the how or the why. Right. And I think from a tooling perspective,
Amazon is enabling us and our advisors to say, okay, cool, we understand what you’re using, but how are you using it? Is it affecting your business and the way that you’re, you know, you defined your desired outcome, or is it holding you back from a time perspective, a management perspective, a resource and financial perspective, right? So I think it’s, it’s not changing the entirety of our talk track, but it’s getting us into the talk track and points where we actually have influence versus just having a small impact.
Yeah, I love that. Um, and I’m not going to lie. Every time I hear what web three blockchain.
Hi, Piper definitely pops in my head. If any of you guys know that reference for Silicon Valley, bonus points. If not, it’s one of the most underrated comedy shows of all time. That is industry adjacent to us. It would make sense if you watched it, but essentially, you know, web three, the new internet potentially, um, it is, it is interesting kind of AWS historically gave, in my opinion, gave kind of leeway to GCP or Google be in the place that developers went and that’s, that was their sandbox of choice. Um, with some of these tools and what you just laid out of mine, I’d say AWS is like you said, you know, listen to that, try to make a pivot and say, Hey, come over here. Like, you know, we’ll, we’ll support that just as much and, and get more flexibility.
Um, and it’s, it’s not even just listening to their customers, right? We heard in countless sessions, how companies like Goldman Sachs, BMW, right? Too good to go. Obviously are benefiting from AWS services, but are also working directly with AWS as product teams to inform them on what their industry specific challenges are and how some of those challenges can be maybe automated or included as features in these over, over arching services.
Well, we always say feedback’s a gift, right? And AWS is definitely solicited from, you know, multiple sources in their products. Uh, continue to evolve to try to match that. I think that was the overwhelming message I took away as well is just, you know, two years ago when I went, it was, it was really interesting. I think I mentioned this to you guys. Every session had a cybersecurity element to it. Now, a lot of them still do, but I would say over out of the 1950 plus percent all had an AI component too. So, you know, Josh, what does that mean to our advisors? You know, we at Tellaris have been hitting, you know, we had the AI tech summits. We have AI roadmaps. We have AI, you know, workshops, all of these things, you know, what, what are you seeing after, you know, walking away from that big of a show and that’s the main theme. You know, what advice would you give to advisors, you know, coming out of that and just hearing what EWS had to say about it and others.
Um, man, my advice, we’re talking about this here, had some people over last night. We were having a pretty deep conversation about this. My advice is the same. My advice is regardless of whatever, however you think this might apply, lean in, just understand it,
poke in and watch this video, that video, just learn a little bit, listen to things like this, listen to a little video. What is this? Just five, 10 minute things because the productization is happening so rapidly and it’s actually really good. It’s surprisingly good. And so it’s, it’s kind of has this undertone of, well, if you use it right, it’s it’s an efficiency gainer, right? As people are trying to gain efficiency financially, build better products, build faster products, all of your customers at any given point, nobody’s going to turn down the conversation to say, Hey, I want to help you make your product more efficient, or I want to help you make it more cost effective, or I want you to get to market faster. I’ve got a network of providers and architects that can help do that. Is that anything that’s on your roadmap? Because what we, what we hear in a lot of these products, um, you know, whether it was SageMaker leveraging generative AI to build AI models faster, makes sense. Whether it was Amazon Connect, the Amazon contact center offering, they made great enhancements in that using generative AI to drive insights for contact center manager, spot trends, enhanced trainings. Um, and they even use Amazon queue, which again, dangle the care we’re going to get to at the end. Uh, so we’re going to make sure you stay listening, uh, hearing how that embeds into it, uh, bedrock, just all these it’s, it’s, there’s no way to avoid the intertwinement of this level of productization. It has to, this is the market that everybody is going to have to chase, uh, these products that everybody wants.
One big Lego kit. Is that technology now?
It’s a giant Lego kit that everybody has on their wish list. We have to help them figure out what they want to build with it and which Lego kit they want.
Um, all right.
So Amazon queue, who wants to take it and kind of break into what the impact of that thing’s going to be.
I’m impressed though. I saw you.
Yeah. Hey, Hey, it’s me, Josh. Long time. Uh, first time, long time hosts, uh, first time guests. I love this. I love this. I love that you had to prepare more than I did. This is awesome. Uh, so Amazon queue, um, you know, Amazon has been a developer. AWS has been a developer central thing. So there’s been this preconceived notion of, ah, man, I, I don’t know that I can use those tools because those are for developers. I don’t, I don’t write JavaScript. I don’t write this code. I don’t write that code. Not for me. Uh, what Amazon queue has done is it’s taken this beautiful thing that I think people understood that generative AI can do is I can go into chat GP and I can say chat to be team, I can say, Hey, write me some code that does this thing. And I was like, Oh, cool. All right. There’s code, but then it’s, well, what do I do with that code? And so just to set, um, to set a little bit of foundation, there’s a platform out there that is probably the number one used platform by all the developers, a program called VSCode and that’s really what a lot of developers, whatever language, whatever you write your code in VSCode, however complex the, the, the application or the product is that you’re trying to build. And then you push that up to whatever your, your pipeline is, your platform, your hyperscaler, however you build, wherever your applications sit, live and breathe, that’s what you use. So Amazon says AWS says, Hey, I’m going to bring up this product called Amazon Q I’m going to embed it into VSCode. And so rather than me just having to write all of my code from scratch, I can at tag Amazon Q in my little code build session, and I can say, you know what? Uh, Koby and I want to write an application that, uh, allows the user to input their favorite football teams, uh, you know, their favorite players. And I want you to take that information, store it into an S three bucket, publish it to my website, and then, you know what? Uh, why don’t you store it into a SQL database too? And by the way, uh, spin up that SQL database, give me the code to spin up that SQL database and all of the rules and things around it enter and you just sit and you watch and like something out of the matrix with all the magical numbers and letters falling down.
This crap builds and it works. And I was like, Hmm, can’t be that easy. Nope. Sure is wrote an application over the weekend. So the Q developer component, right? There’s lots of AI productization, but the Q developer very specific to Amazon, to AWS to build and work with their products. So it’s not, it’s a trained model to help a developer who’s not super deep. Be super deep. Fascinating. One of the most beneficial product releases, I think that helps people build the next generation of great things.
So just something else, AWS is making things easier. And again, the iteration of technology stacking and you know, we, you, you look at how this thing started. Hey, we had AWS, right? We had extra space in our infrastructure. Why don’t we just start selling it and leasing it to other people? I mean, it seemed like a pretty simple comp design and idea and look at the industry that it, that it’s spun out. It’s crazy. And then just the iteration of like, here’s more stuff that we can do and ways to improve and it’s just, it’s incremental improvements over something that’s already there and just making things easier. Um, it’s like the idea of taking what used to be a handheld screwdriver. And now you can put a power drill to it, right? And like how much easier that is to operate and utilize. That’s essentially what we just did. You went and took the idea of having to know how to write code in script and do all these things and basically eliminated it for a prompt and you get to set back. And we’re talking hours, if not days of time saved, right? And errors made and things like that. Um, also I didn’t want to apologize to our guests. Josh, he’s a little bit of spicy language there. Um, he doesn’t respect the platform apparently as a guest as he, as much as he does as a host, but Hey, the guy deserves it. So we’ll let it, we’ll let him get away with it. And if you guys know us at all, the irony of me calling that out, like give you guys the biggest laugh of your day. Um, I’m on anything else that you want to just throw on here as we kind of start to wrap up this session here.
Yeah, I do. I do just want to throw a little, a little nugget out there and say that a lot of what we saw and a lot of the excitement by which we’re sharing it can be inspirational for our TAs, but it can also be pretty daunting, especially if you haven’t sold into the cloud or infrastructure vertical already. Um, I do want to kind of double click on the fact that yes, we do have an engineering team that, you know, stays very close to what this cutting edge tech looks like, but also stays very close to what those business impacts are. Right. So again, going back to the chips, the EC2, the bedrock, the blockchain, it’s all really cool. I would love to nerd out nerd out about it for the next two, three hours, but I’ve got three more TA calls coming up, right? I’ve got more, Hey, this VMware con conversation is throwing my business for a loop. So in the way that all these things affect our TAs and, and, you know, their customers, I really want to emphasize the fact that our value comes from identifying the customer problem, right? Helping to identify what that problem actually is. All customers are either going to want to make more money or save more money. How that gets done is by solving a series of smaller problems, right? So we’re going to work very closely with our TAs to stay sticky to that problem, but also address some of these cutting edge solutions to remove that drag and increase that efficiency in solving those problems. And that’s really where we shift this, this tonality from it being daunting to truly being exciting. There’s, it’s not just, Hey, where do we fit in here? It’s, Oh, we definitely fit in here and let’s, let’s double down on those efforts.
Josh.
Look, I, that was great. And I, I don’t want to just shift over to Josh without, without coming back. So again, as an advisor, the fact that you’re hearing that from our solutions architect about business impact and not just the technology piece of it. I hope you guys walk away with like how impactful that is as a resource for you guys to understand the landscape within your customers accounts or your customer accounts and, and how relevant that is to not always solving that one project and in that, but then building out a roadmap. And that’s why we see such success in our cloud practice of 35, four to 45% growth within the account is it’s not just, you know, one deal. It’s usually six, seven, eight products that get sold and combined and things like that. So, uh, thanks for, for teeing that up. I’m on Josh. Sorry. I didn’t mean to ask you then get you back off there. No, no, it’s good. It’s the hosting thing.
Hey, first time, first time. Well, um, look, I hope what you hear, obviously by Aman, right? Aman’s an incredible, incredible resource. Um, we’ve got a team of incredible resources. And I think what you should learn out of this is that we are afraid of nothing. We love and are passionate about technologies, but we also understand that businesses have to make money. So, um, we love staying in front of these things. We love understanding what all these tech things are and just getting into the weeds just enough to play with them, understand how they work and figure out what that means for you. So just, it was exciting to kind of go to this and see all the great new exciting things that are, that are coming out and then figure out how we translate that, uh, how we help our TAs and, you know, uh, already excited to go to the next one. I’ve already blocked out the calendar for next year.
Well, I think it was impactful. Um, I think we all got a lot of value out of it. I hope that our listeners got a lot of value out of this. Josh, I’m going to hand it back over to you to do your traditional wrap up of your podcast here and thanks for letting me set the hosting seat for one episode.
Love it. Awesome. Good stuff. Thanks guys. Koby, I’m going to say, uh, you crushed it and, uh, we may have to have you back on to host cause that was kind of nice. So good work, man. Really appreciate it.
All right, everybody that wraps us up for this week. Koby Phillips, VP of cloud Aman cloud architect at Telarus. I’m your host, Josh, Lupresto SVP of sales engineering. This has been the AWS reinvent recap. What you need to know until next time.
Next level BizTech has been a production of Telarus studio 19. Please visit Telarus.com for more information.