Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…Especially at the scale that people are producing data now. It's actually worth contextualizing this a little bit. There are all these stats all the time, which are something like last year, more data was produced and stored than in the entire decade before and in the entire century before that. That's not the exact stat, but there are 11 different variants of it, which we all intuitively know because we're storing data on our phones. But when you have two things exponentially growing, it's hard to intuit the difference between those two things. We know this about data. We also know this about the Internet. When you talked about dial up back in the day, then when people got their first cable or T1 Line, and meanwhile, I'm here, podcasting, and David, I'm seeing you and gigabit down directly into my computer, it's unbelievable. You think, wow, these two things have the same phenomena, except that they're actually moving at very different rates. The Internet has not gotten faster at the rate that data storage has increased. This is most illustrated in some of the AWS re:Invent talks. They're like, hey, a lot of you want to shift to the cloud, but you have a petabyte of data or some of you have an exabyte of data in your data center. What do we do about that? They first released this thing that was a 100-terabyte super secure thing they would ship to your office called the Snowball. You plug it in, it would automatically get all your data and had a Kindle on it, so it would actually display a custom shipping thing. You could track it all the way back, it would arrive in the Amazon datacenter, and they would audit. It was like tamper proof, bullet proof. It's an amazing thing. They've released a few other generations of them now. There are even some with compute on them for field applications. And then the curves kept going. The Internet kept getting a little bit faster, but our data storage kept getting a lot more significant. There are some stat that Andy gives on stage in a keynote in 2016–2017, somewhere in there, where they announced Amazon Snowmobile. Because all of us are sitting here on computers that have a terabyte, 2 terabytes, or 4-terabyte hard drive, you're like, 100 terabytes is not that meaningful. They're like, we will send a Snowmobile to your data center, which is a semi truck full of Snowballs, effectively, so that you can get the data to us. Even with this solution, never underestimate the bandwidth of a semi truck moving down the highway. This type of solution, it can still take six months to migrate all of your data into the cloud. Whereas it would have taken you years, and years, and years, and years, I don't know the better part of a century, to actually upload it over the wide area network, over the Internet. That, I think, illustrates pretty heavily your point about once you decide to put all of your enterprise data into a database hosted in some specific vendor's cloud, there's pretty meaningful lock in there. I think, illustrates pretty heavily your point about once you decide to put all of your enterprise data into a database hosted in some specific vendor's cloud, there's pretty meaningful lock in there. There are very practical concerns with moving. I can do you one better. Another example. Amazon.com used Oracle databases when it was started. Amazon.com did not finish their migration off of Oracle databases and onto AWS products until 2019.…

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