AWS in Orbit:  Security and Compliance with Gov Cloud.

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>> Maria Varmazis: I'm Maria Varmazis, host of "T-Minus Space Daily", and this is "AWS in Orbit", accelerating innovation with ULA. In this episode, I'm speaking with representatives from United Launch Alliance and AWS Aerospace and Satellite, and we're going to explore how United Launch Alliance maintains lease privilege at scale in regulated cloud environments, while ensuring rigorous security and compliance across AWS GovCloud. Gentlemen, welcome. Let's start with a round of intros. Jeff, could you go first?

>> Jeff McLean: Absolutely. My name is Jeff McLean, and I am the cloud security architect over at ULA. I've been with ULA for about two years now, so it's kind of my - my first kind of foray into the aerospace industry, and it's been - it's been a fun ride ever since.

>> Maria Varmazis: Awesome. Thank you. Over to you, Clint.

>> Clint Crosier: Yeah, hello. I'm Clint Crosier, major general retired, having served 33 years in the U.S. Air Force and the U.S. Space Force, flying satellites and launching rockets my entire career, and today I have the privilege of leading the global space business at Amazon Web Services, helping bring advanced cloud technology to the space-aerospace-geospatial industry, from commercial companies, to government organizations, to academic and space agencies around the globe, and I literally believe I have the best job on the planet.

>> Maria Varmazis: Well, it is a very excited time for ULA right now. Vulcan just receiving its official certification from the U.S. Space Force for national security missions.

>> Clint Crosier: Hurray.

>> Maria Varmazis: That is huge.

>> Clint Crosier: That is huge.

>> Maria Varmazis: There have been already 163 successful missions as of this recording. Jeff, can you tell me a bit about how ULA maintains that high reliability standard while continuing to innovate?

>> Jeff McLean: Yeah, so I mean - I mean, 160 missions is an amazing accomplishment, and we're very proud of that, with 100% success rate, but it really does come from our people, and just the - the amazing talent that we have, and - and the pedigree that they bring. And going back all the way to the early days, the Atlas and Delta series rockets have - have really been a workhorse, and it's - it's something that, you know, NASA and Air Force has - has progressed over the years, and all the way up to the current Atlas 5 and just retired Delta 4 series. And then, you know, we're taking all that and kind of bringing that all together, and trying to kind of up the game on it, and put all that into our Vulcan rocket. As you said, it just certified, so we're - we're very proud of that.

>> Maria Varmazis: Absolutely. Now Clint, I would love to hear a bit about the evolution from what you've seen over your career to where we are today. Can you tell me, like, take me on that journey a bit.

>> Clint Crosier: Well, I mean, so many things. The whole time I was launching rockets, flying satellites, it was one rocket, one satellite, and today we're launching dozens to multi-dozens to more than 100 satellites on a single large launch vehicle, and that's a game changer, just in terms of the cost and capability and everything else. So that's certainly one thing. The other thing that's really interesting to me is having sat in the blockhouse, as we called it. Running the launch countdown, getting ready to launch a rocket, putting a national security satellite in a payload. You know, I can think about a time where somebody would - would say those - those dreaded words on the countdown net. Red range, red range, or red booster, or red satellite, signifying that there's a problem somewhere in the countdown.

>> Maria Varmazis: Mm hmm.

>> Clint Crosier: And we would literally, depending on the problem, have to start flipping through reams of binders and documentation to try to identify what's the condition? Can it be resolved? How do we resolve it? Have we ever seen it before? What was the weather pattern? What's the pedigree of the part? And today, moving that sort of data to the AWS cloud, it's searchable and discoverable within seconds. So what might have taken an hour to resolve a relatively routine issue, now with the power of the advanced technology, you can do a query-able search, identify the specific activity. Have we seen it before? What's the fix action? And you can do that within seconds, in enough time to save the potential launch that day, rather than having to stand down on the launch, and come back in, and reset the pad, and try to launch again the next day. So I mean, those are a couple of really big changes that I've seen.

>> Maria Varmazis: Not just time savings, cost savings, I mean, mission-saving, literally, yeah.

>> Clint Crosier: We used to say it cost about a million dollars a day for every day that we had to push a launch to the right. If you have to delay a launch for any reason, you know, not only is the whole team doing another 24 hours of - of round-the-clock operations, but about a million dollars a day in terms of overall cost. So that's significant. The faster you can identify an issue and get it resolved, and advanced cloud technology allows ULA and other companies to do that, not only you're saving money, but you're saving precious opportunities, because by the way, orbital analysis being what it is, and orbital dynamics being what it is, if I miss my launch window today, that doesn't mean that I might just be able to launch tomorrow. The orbitology might be such that I won't be able to get into my objective orbit slot for another three days, or five days, or seven days, or whatever the case may be. So it is powerful, keeping on track.

>> Maria Varmazis: That's fantastic.

>> Jeff McLean: Yeah, so I - I kind of realized, you know, before we kind of get into it is that, yeah, a lot of times we have an hour or two in a window. I've seen, like, three seconds.

>> Clint Crosier: Oh man, yeah. Yeah.

>> Jeff McLean: And if you miss that three seconds?

>> Clint Crosier: Yeah.

>> Jeff McLean: Then yeah, you may not get another chance for -

>> Maria Varmazis: Three seconds, my goodness.

>> Jeff McLean: Yeah.

>> Maria Varmazis: Precision.

>> Clint Crosier: They can be, yeah.

>> Jeff McLean: Yeah, so, and one thing I really - was emphasized when I first got to ULA is everybody in the company has the ability to stop a launch.

>> Maria Varmazis: Hmm. Mm hmm.

>> Clint Crosier: Yeah. Yeah.

>> Jeff McLean: If we see a problem.

>> Clint Crosier: Yeah.

>> Jeff McLean: In whatever system that we're responsible.

>> Clint Crosier: Red range, red booster, red rocket.

>> Jeff McLean: Then - then we could stop it.

>> Maria Varmazis: Yeah.

>> Clint Crosier: Yeah. It's - that's critical. And that's, by the way, that's how you've gotten to 163 consecutive successful launches, because everybody takes that business so seriously, is so good at what they do, but takes flight safety so seriously.

>> Maria Varmazis: That - that accountability really matters.

>> Jeff McLean: Yeah.

>> Maria Varmazis: I mean, that speaks so much to the - the importance of the mission, and the - what people are taking on, and they understand that. That's incredible.

>> Jeff McLean: Mm hmm. The amount of care we took with human spaceflight -

>> Maria Varmazis: Of course.

>> Jeff McLean: Was the exact same care that we give with any other client's payload, and that's how you get to 100%.

>> Maria Varmazis: Makes a lot of sense. Now, Clint was telling me a bit about evolution. I wanted to hear a little bit, specifically within the ULA context, Jeff, about how ULA's mission has evolved from sort of its earlier days to what it's doing today with commercial and defense applications.

>> Jeff McLean: Yeah, I mean, it's - it's certainly evolved, because it has to.

>> Maria Varmazis: Yeah.

>> Jeff McLean: Going from a lot of military launches, secret spy satellite stuff, that kind of thing, it - you know, it's a space economy. That's a - it's a new word that, you know, wasn't around, what, five years ago.

>> Clint Crosier: The global space industry is launching more commercial payloads than military or intelligence community payloads today. It didn't used to be that way, right? But with the large constellations that are being deployed now into LEO, and finding all the new uses of LEO, right? There are LEO satellites that are doing climate management, and wildlife protection, and maritime safety and security, and so many other things. With those commercial and civil applications, we've seen the literal explosion of LEO, and so that means launching more commercial satellites today than ever before.

>> Maria Varmazis: Yeah.

>> Jeff McLean: Absolutely, and from a business standpoint, it's - it's what you have to do to kind of keep up.

>> Maria Varmazis: Yeah, absolutely.

>> Jeff McLean: Because I mean, sat - satellites are so integrated into every piece of our lives that we don't even realize. So, it's - it's so important.

>> Maria Varmazis: Can you tell me a bit, Jeff, about how AWS GovCloud specifically addresses the challenges that are faced by contractors like ULA?

>> Jeff McLean: The fact that we have a GovCloud that is FedRAMP-certified helps, you know, companies like ULA to, not only just check that compliance box, but it gives us a platform, and an environment to - to work safely with our data, with national security data, and everything that come - kind of comes with that. With a shared responsibility model, that okay, we know this is being taken care of, and we know how it's being taken care of. So we know exactly what we need to do on our end, whether it's through identity management, policies, you know, security services, monitoring, that kind of thing, we know exactly, and - and AWS provides those tools.

>> Clint Crosier: We have the AWS Commercial Cloud that's available all over the world. The AWS recognized some 10 or 12 years ago that due to the special data handling requirements of the U.S. federal government and others, we created a separate enclave within the AWS cloud we call GovCloud, Government Cloud, and it's operated, staffed, controlled, and managed by U.S. citizens only, so that we can manage to the higher level of the U.S. government's data security requirements. And so, almost any company that's wanting to do business with the U.S. federal government, or certainly the Defense Department or the intelligence community, will need to operate on GovCloud, because as Jeff has said, we've pre-certified FedRAMP and - and other government security requirements, so that when you come to GovCloud, rather than having to go out and create your own authority to operate, and your own security management and architectures, that's already built into GovCloud. In fact, we hear from a lot of government agencies, when they tell us a customer submitted a proposal on AWS GovCloud, they say, oh, well we don't even need to worry about your security compliance. If you're on GovCloud, you're good. And so that's why we built that capability, and I'm so glad ULA is able to leverage that for its critical mission capability.

>> Maria Varmazis: Yeah. It sounds like AWS was a sort of natural choice in this case for ULA, for the digital transformation that you all are going through.

>> Jeff McLean: Absolutely.

>> Maria Varmazis: Can you - can you tell me a bit about that?

>> Jeff McLean: Yes. I - I joined ULA about two years ago, and we were very early on in the cloud journey, if you will.

>> Maria Varmazis: Yeah.

>> Jeff McLean: So, on my first day, went and did the orientation, that kind of stuff, and then the CISO came and picked me up, took me to his office, immediately sat down with our CIO, and had a great conversation about, you know, his vision for the - for the cloud, and how ULA's going to kind of get there. But one thing he said was, we're - our 25 in 25 initiative, so we were looking to get 25 rockets in orbit by 2025.

>> Clint Crosier: Wow.

>> Jeff McLean: This is, you know, kind of early 2023.

>> Maria Varmazis: Right, right, yeah.

>> Clint Crosier: Wow.

>> Jeff McLean: At that - that time in that year, we'd launched three rockets, for a company that really does, on average, about 10 to 12 a year over our almost 20-year history. So hearing 25, that was - that was a big number at the time.

>> Clint Crosier: Yeah.

>> Jeff McLean: Especially for us. So -

>> Clint Crosier: So - so can you share, what are some of the AWS tools, capabilities - how are you leveraging AWS that's enabled you to hit that 25-25, right? What are the ways you're leveraging AWS today?

>> Jeff McLean: You know, on the enterprise side, we - we leverage a lot of high-powered computing, HPC, for things like telemetry analysis, and - and what we used to have on-prem, you know, clusters to do that, and it cost tons and tons of money. You know, we moved all that stuff to the cloud. We can do it - where it used to take days to run analysis, now it takes minutes.

>> Maria Varmazis: Hmm.

>> Jeff McLean: And we spin up, you know, 10,000 nodes, 100,000 nodes, or whatever we need, I mean -

>> Clint Crosier: And then hand it back when you're not using them, right?

>> Jeff McLean: Exactly.

>> Clint Crosier: And pay for only what you consume.

>> Jeff McLean: Yeah, that's right.

>> Clint Crosier: Rather than constantly trying to budget for how many servers you need, and then either over-delivering or under-delivering, and then even - either having an unused server sitting around, which is a waste of capital, or not having enough capability, and you're trying to surge to a new launch capability. The other thing I wanted to piggyback on, you made a great statement about, you know, telemetry analysis and processing. And I'll tell you, the other piece of - of running a launch business, and that's the collision avoidance. We call it COLA. If you think about it, we have to make sure that when we take that very expensive rocket and very expensive satellite, and launch it up through the atmosphere, we want to make sure we're not flying right into a debris cluster. And so COLA, you've got thousands and thousands of datapoints that we're monitoring as they're moving through orbit, against the timing of the rocket and everything else. That can take hours to run a COLA analysis, and we run the COLA analysis, historically have run it in the days leading up to a launch.

>> Maria Varmazis: Oh, wow.

>> Clint Crosier: Using AWS, again, and being able to do that in seconds instead of in minutes or hours, and that's a big game-changer to how we used to do it in the old days, as I like to say.

>> Jeff McLean: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we're certainly using - using the technology in its most powerful form, but we also use it because, being a legacy company, and have been doing it for so long, the mentality and the infrastructure really was still on premise.

>> Maria Varmazis: Yeah, yeah.

>> Jeff McLean: And so, one, partly just changing the culture, and -

>> Maria Varmazis: I was going to say, it's a culture shift, of course, yeah.

>> Jeff McLean: And - absolutely, and kind of retraining, and really helping, you know, employees and leadership to understand the - kind of the art of the possible with that. I mean, that's - that's been a huge shift. So we - we kind of started off with, you know, some of these small projects, but also the ability to take what's on-prem and use the cloud for the times when we really need it.

>> Maria Varmazis: Yeah. And the results almost speak for themselves, yeah.

>> Jeff McLean: Or [overtalking] capacity, or like, we - we can offload some of the - the compute, you know, off of these old services, you know, into the cloud. And really kind of, in that hybrid model, having them kind of work together. And then once we started doing that, then we started kind of architecting, you know, differently than - than we used to from the on-prem, to - to take advantage of these cloud technologies and - and what we can really accomplish out of that. And that's really kind of where we are now, is making that final shift to - to getting all that in place.

>> Clint Crosier: And by the way, let me say, I really appreciate how ULA approached this, in terms of the culture, and you talked about, Jeff, that we really - ULA and AWS really ramped up together over the last two years. It was about three years ago that I sat down here at the Space Symposium with your CEO, Tory Bruno, and we talked about the vision of moving ULA to the cloud. And so that - that was sort of the - the crystallizing moment where he, as the CEO, had the vision to start leveraging cloud capabilities, and then started moving ULA in that direction. And we have dozens and dozens, hundreds and thousands of space startups who are, we call born on the cloud. From the day they - they create their initial concept of operations, they build it into the cloud. ULA's been operating for decades. What was really good is, you don't have to go all-in on day one in the cloud. You can move over time, hybrid management of some things on-premise, some things on the cloud. ULA's done a wonderful job sort of managing through that transition, setting the right culture, and helping us come up with a phased implementation approach, which I think has really worked out well.

>> Jeff McLean: Absolutely.

>> Maria Varmazis: Certainly sounds like a best practice, for sure.

>> Jeff McLean: Absolutely.

>> Maria Varmazis: Because as it often happens with these massive projects, it's almost always a culture challenge.

>> Jeff McLean: Mm hmm.

>> Maria Varmazis: But it sounds like this was a fantastic approach, and it's certainly - the results have spoken for themselves.

>> Jeff McLean: Absolutely, and you know, I mean, moving the - the culture from, you know, to more of a cloud mentality, and throwing things like AI on top of that.

>> Maria Varmazis: It's enough, right, right, exactly, [laughter].

>> Jeff McLean: And so, it's been fun.

>> Maria Varmazis: [Laughter].

>> Clint Crosier: Yeah, yeah.

>> Jeff McLean: But no, ULA's really embraced it, and it is because of people like Tory Bruno who -

>> Maria Varmazis: Yeah.

>> Jeff McLean: Understand the value, understand the capabilities, and - and where we need to get.

>> Maria Varmazis: Yeah.

>> Jeff McLean: And to have that - that support, and that - that buy-in from the top has been 100% the reason why we can do what we do.

>> Maria Varmazis: Absolutely. Well gentlemen, as we're sort of getting towards the conclusion of our chat today, I want to look ahead a little bit, and Clint, I wanted to start with you and ask you about what your view is of the relationship between commercial and government space programs as they evolve over the next 5, 10 years, or - where do you think we're headed?

>> Clint Crosier: Yeah, well, I'm really excited to say, I believe we're headed in the right place, and we're headed there for a couple of reasons. When I was growing up in the space industry, right, some 40 years ago, contractors built our satellites, to be sure, but - but we managed our own contract management, we operated our own satellites, we developed our own capabilities, and it was a very tightly-controlled thing by the military, and highly classified. As we've seen over the last couple decades, there is as much or more innovation coming out of the commercial market than happening in the military, and between the Defense Department and the intelligence community and NASA, with budgets being under pressure the way they are, the - the U.S. Air Force, U.S. Space Force, NASA, National Reconnaissance Office have all recognized that they can save a lot of money by leveraging the commercial space market, and then employ that limited resources back into those things that makes the most difference for their mission. You've got commercial contracts with companies going to the moon, and going to Mars, on behalf of NASA. We've got space exploration going on. We've got U.S. Space Force leveraging commercial contracts with ULA and others. And so, I'm really excited, as we look forward, to see the continued government-commercial integration, and I think that will only increase.

>> Maria Varmazis: Fantastic. Your thoughts, Jeff?

>> Jeff McLean: And actually, on that - on that same note, I think, something that Tory Bruno really kind of preaches, and what we're seeing in the space industry, and the competition, and the variety of providers, is a really good thing for the industry. And so we really believe in that. We've talked about, you know, governments using commercial providers to - to do a lot of different things. To have all of these industries kind of come together and work together, it's - it's been amazing to see.

>> Clint Crosier: What's the next thing you see cloud utilization for ULA?

>> Maria Varmazis: Sure.

>> Clint Crosier: I mean, where is the cloud engineer, cloud architect? What would you like to see the cloud provide you next? Is it - can we?

>> Jeff McLean: You know, we're still, you know, looking ahead to what that next thing is, but I think really for - for us, it's - it's going to be really important to, moving toward, you know, more of that HPC use.

>> Clint Crosier: High-performance compute, yep.

>> Jeff McLean: To do - yep, to - to really optimize our - our analytics in a timely fashion. But also we're moving to a lot of microservices.

>> Maria Varmazis: Hmm.

>> Jeff McLean: And to be able to take our applications and just kind of plug in these - these parts using, you know, a service like Lambda.

>> Clint Crosier: Mm hmm.

>> Jeff McLean: To - to really build out these architectures in a - in a very scalable, repeatable way. And then, you know, take that, and then move that into infrastructure as code, and - and put the security around it, and do all the things so it - so it's very repeatable, very scalable. And that's where we - we know we need to be.

>> Maria Varmazis: Excellent, thank you. So Project Kuiper is launching imminently, and I would love to hear your thoughts about this, because this is a mission that we're all just really, really thrilled to hear about. So, your thoughts?

>> Jeff McLean: Absolutely. From ULA's perspective, yeah, we're - we're immensely excited about it, and with the partnership with - with Amazon, we know that Kuiper, as a whole, to - to provide communications to underserved and unserved areas of the world, it's a huge step for - really for mankind. And to, again, provide, you know, options for people.

>> Maria Varmazis: Yeah. How does it represent a new direction, perhaps, for ULA's commercial launch?

>> Jeff McLean: As I said, I mean, traditionally, yeah, we - we've done much more, you know, government missions, so this is a big deal for us, because there are a lot of launches.

>> Clint Crosier: So becoming a big focus area for ULA.

>> Jeff McLean: Absolutely.

>> Clint Crosier: I will say it's a huge vote of confidence from Amazon too, and - and for your listeners that may or may not, Kuiper belongs to Amazon, AWS belongs to Amazon, but Kuiper and AWS are separate legal entities.

>> Maria Varmazis: Hmm. Mm hmm.

>> Clint Crosier: Ahtough, the Kuiper team is actually building and operating on AWS, just like any space organization -

>> Maria Varmazis: Ah, there you go.

>> Clint Crosier: Or launch organization, or satellite organization anywhere in the world, they recognize the value of the cloud and are building on AWS. But - but from Amazon perspective, what a tremendous vote of confidence in trusting ULA, a really big deal for ULA, a really big deal for Amazon Kuiper, and as somebody who supports both of those teams at AWS.

>> Maria Varmazis: You've got to be pumped.

>> Clint Crosier: I can't be more excited for my two partners at Kuiper and ULA for the success of the launch.

>> Jeff McLean: Absolutely. And - and we're also starting Kuiper on Atlas.

>> Clint Crosier: Mm hmm.

>> Jeff McLean: And then once we kind of -

>> Clint Crosier: And then moving to Vulcan - Vulcan.

>> Jeff McLean: And then we're going to move to Vulcan, right? So that's also exciting, but also from - from our perspective, from our, you know, developers and all that, we have a - a single platform. With all the government missions, every mission was a kind of one-off, you know, writing millions of new lines of code every time.

>> Clint Crosier: That's a really good point.

>> Jeff McLean: And with - and with Kuiper, we're going to be able to streamline that process. We're going to be able to - to really dial it in, so whenever they're ready to launch -

>> Clint Crosier: That's a really good point.

>> Jeff McLean: So whenever they're ready to launch, we don't need to say oh, we need two weeks to, you know, do all the telemetry data, and all the testing, and all that stuff. Like, so it - it's really going to just make things a lot easier.

>> Clint Crosier: That's a really good point. All Vulcan, all the time. You know, in the days of Boeing, and Lockheed, and then became ULA, you know, we had Titan 2, Titan 4, Atlas 2, Atlas 3, Atlas 5. You know, all those different configurations, and they all take some specific expertise and nuance. Focusing on a single launch platform in Vulcan, which has so many upgrades, and improvements, and modifications, and capabilities. It's going to be extraordinary. And having that as a dedicated launch platform for Kuiper moving forward, that's really going to be a game changer and allow ULA to put all of its energy and effort into securing those launch capabilities. And we're just proud at AWS, you're trusting us as a partner to do all that, in that critically important mission.

>> Jeff McLean: We're so happy you trust us to do that, so -

>> Maria Varmazis: Awesome. I want to give you both the opportunity to say any sort of closeout final remarks. You have the floor. So why don't, Clint, I'll go to you, and then Jeff, you wrap us up.

>> Clint Crosier: I'm just - thank you, Jeff, and the ULA team, again, for trusting us to be your partner. I'm so excited about what ULA is doing on the cloud, and I just - I - I look forward to seeing what we can do together next, and it's just so exciting to see where it all goes. So thank you.

>> Jeff McLean: And absolutely, from the ULA perspective, I, again, we're - we're so excited to - to be in this next phase of - of our evolution as a - a rocket company, and you know, certainly having, you know, partners like AWS, are - are getting us to where we need to be, and as someone who is new to this industry, it was - quick story. On my, you know, interview for - for ULA, one of the last questions, when they're like, hey, do you have any questions for us? The only question I had was, does it ever get old? Because we've always - we've all been in those jobs where, it sounds amazing or whatever, and then six months in you're like, oh, it's just, you know, the same thing, just over and over. And every single one of their answers, absolutely not.

>> Clint Crosier: Yeah.

>> Jeff McLean: And that-that was the kind of vote of confidence, that - that this is an exciting industry, this is where I want to be.

>> Clint Crosier: Oh, that's great.

>> Jeff McLean: And this is an industry that's moving forward. And every time that, whether it's 3 o'clock in the morning or 3 o'clock in the afternoon, watching that rocket go off, it just - it gives me chills. It's - it's so - so amazing.

>> Clint Crosier: We've kept you so busy, heads down on building out the cloud architecture and cloud security architecture, have you actually been out on the pad, on a launch? Have you gotten to see a few of those yet?

>> Jeff McLean: I have not.

>> Maria Varmazis: Oh, [laughter].

>> Clint Crosier: Okay. So - so again, I know you're relatively new to ULA and the launch business. You're doing important work with cloud security, but I know you'll have an opportunity out there soon, and I will just add to that vote of it never gets old, and I can't wait for you to experience that first one.

>> Maria Varmazis: Yes.

>> Jeff McLean: I mean, as a kid I grew up in the 80s, watched the - the shuttle program. Very influenced by Challenger.

>> Clint Crosier: Yeah.

>> Maria Varmazis: Yeah.

>> Jeff McLean: And what happened there.

>> Clint Crosier: Yeah.

>> Jeff McLean: And understanding, even as a five-year-old, what that really meant.

>> Clint Crosier: Yeah, yeah.

>> Jeff McLean: And just kind of following it, kind of ever since then. It - it's a dream come true to - to be involved in this in any way.

>> Clint Crosier: Well, in the past, in my day, ULA and other launch companies needed a lot of propulsion and rocket engineering expertise. Now they need a lot of cloud engineering and security experts.

>> Maria Varmazis: [Laughter].

>> Clint Crosier: So welcome to the - to the space mission as the cloud security architect.

>> Jeff McLean: Well, thank you.

>> Clint Crosier: Welcome.

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