Original subtitles

[narrator] On Tomorrow's World Today,

we explore the cutting edge advances that are shaping four different worlds.

The World of Inspiration,

where the wonders of the natural world amaze and inspire us.

The World of Creation,

where ideas come to life from traditional arts.

The World of Innovation,

where ideas and inventions move us all forward.

The World of Production,

where innovations are mass produced to improve our lives.

From Inventionland world headquarters,

here's your host, George Davison.

Hey, everybody. I'm George Davison.

Now you might be wondering,

what am I doing with all this old computing technology?

Well, we're sending them out to be scraped and recycled

because we're switching everything to the cloud.

Inventionland and Inventionland education,

they operate on a global level

and this old computing technology,

it just can't keep up with how quickly we're growing.

Today, small businesses, schools and even

multi-million dollar corporations have to think about

how will they expand and grow on a digital level.

And that means thinking about what kind of computing power,

the old or the new, will get them there.

I'm sending Greg to the World of Innovation

to explore how far computing has come

and how it's easier than ever for businesses and builders

to create using the power of the cloud.

[Greg] Each year, more than 14 million new small

and medium-sized businesses are created globally.

And many of them are being built entirely online.

It's easier now than ever for an entrepreneur to develop the business of their dreams.

Well, I'm gonna meet with Gabe Monroy.

He is the chief product officer at Digital Ocean.

We're gonna discuss their role in helping these entrepreneurs

and developers grow their business in the cloud.

Hey Gabe.

-Greg. Welcome. -Thanks.

-Have a seat. -Alright.

Nice office. What a place to work.

Thanks. As a builder, you can build from anywhere now.

[Greg] I guess that's true.

So, what better place to talk about Digital Ocean than on the water.

Tell me about the creation and the inspiration behind it.

Well, Digital Ocean exists to serve developers and small businesses

that are looking to build digital products.

Digital products are things like websites or e-commerce sites

or maybe a mobile application.

They're products that live on the internet

and are delivered to people on the internet.

Well, let's talk about that

because when most people think of the cloud, they think of storage.

But there's a lot more to it than that.

Tell me about cloud computing.

Cloud computing is actually computer networking

and storage altogether, right?

And if you think about what most people associate with the cloud,

things like, you know, photos on your phone being sent to the cloud,

yes, that is very much storage.

But there's also a big amount of processing that happens in the cloud.

Things like data analytics or video encoding.

[Greg] Okay, so how does something like that help a business

go from a small business

to a medium business to a large business?

Well, we like to think of the developer journey

as one that starts with learning.

A lot of folks who are using the cloud,

they start out by trying to experiment with new technologies.

Once they work through that phase,

they'll move on to building a new application,

you know, maybe a website or a mobile app.

And once that app gets some amount of traction,

they'll work on scaling that application

and that's really where they get

the big advantages of the cloud.

Well, I guess that's where Droplets come into play.

-[Gabe] Yes -Okay, explain those to me.

Well, Droplets are essentially a server or a computer, right?

No different than the one that might be running

inside of your house or under your table.

The difference with this computer is it's managed

by Digital Ocean,

so all the power, the cooling, the cabling,

that's something that we take care of

so that you don't have to worry about it.

And I guess as software and hardware both develop,

you handle that and that'll help

-keep a business on the cutting edge. -[Gabe] Absolutely.

With cloud computing, businesses can focus on

adding value for their customers.

And the more time they can spend on delivering that value

and the less time they spend on managing servers, the better.

So let's go to the captain's table.

Alright.

Well, so here we are.

The captain's table. Welcome.

Well, thank you. Thank you.

So, we touched kind of briefly on the benefits to a small and medium-sized business

of you handling the hardware and software end of things.

But what are some specific examples

of how those advantages help those businesses out?

Well, have you ever tried to order clothes online

and then the clothes that you get in the mail don't actually fit?

Oh, yeah.

Well, so one of our customers serves e-commerce sites

and what they have is an AI powered clothing fit platform

that allows you to make sure that through a few simple questions

the clothes you get in the mail do actually fit you.

That's amazing. What else?

Well, another good example is, you know...

Have you ever tried to place an order from a restaurant,

but you keep calling and the phone line's busy?

You just can't get ahold of someone?

Sometimes you just want to interact with the restaurant like a chat system, right?

So, taking out your mobile app,

chat with the restaurant, place your order that way.

Much easier way of interacting with a restaurant.

Now the pandemic hit a lot of different businesses in a lot of different ways.

Some people had to scale their businesses back,

other people had to ramp up tremendously.

Do you have any examples of how you might have

helped out a business during the pandemic?

Indeed. The pandemic, as you said, scale was really

a really important element of the cloud that helped folks through the pandemic.

Some folk's business scaled up,

other folk's business scaled down.

Either way, Digital Ocean and the cloud was able to provide help

to businesses during that time.

Nowhere is that example more clear

than with a customer of ours called BigBlueButton.

They provide education services

to folks who are trying to learn during the pandemic.

And so, I've actually enabled a meeting with the team

over in Ottawa if you'd like to learn more about that story.

I would, absolutely.

So I guess I have to get off the boat and get on a plane.

-Indeed. -Alright, Gabe. Thank you very much.

-This has been great. -Yes.

[inquisitive music playing]

[thoughtful music playing]

In 2020, there was a huge shift in the educational world.

When the pandemic hit, online and remote learning,

which had been an option offered by most schools,

became an absolute necessity.

BigBlueButton is the only virtual

open-sourced teaching platform in the world.

Their virtual classrooms are designed to help teachers

engage and interact with their students remotely.

But they knew when this global pandemic came upon us

that their existing servers would not be able

to rise up and meet that challenge.

That's why we're here at Carleton University in Ottawa.

We're gonna meet with Fred Dixon.

He's the creator of BigBlueButton.

And we're gonna discuss how Digital Ocean helped them

rise up to this new global demand

without sacrificing the integrity

of any of their students' educational experience.

Hey Fred.

It's a good thing your virtual classrooms are packed

'cause this one's empty.

It is, but I've got a ton of people online

watching the lecture right now.

Well, can I steal you away from them

for just a minute or two and have a little talk?

-Sure. Let me just finish up and I'll join you. -[Greg] Great.

So, Fred. BigBlueButton.

Born right here at Carleton University back in about 2007.

Tell me about that development and what BigBlueButton was doing pre-pandemic.

So, BigBlueButton was designed to be a virtual classroom.

And pre-pandemic, think of the world

where you might have a large school district.

There would be like, a small high school,

maybe online virtual class for those students that couldn't make it.

When the pandemic hit, that flipped.

You had very few people in the physical classroom

and almost everybody was learning online.

So that had to present some real scalability issues for you folks.

How did you handle that and how did Digital Ocean help you?

Oh yeah. So February 2020,

we could see that the pandemic was gonna hit North America.

The tsunami was coming. We had 60 physical servers.

And in a short pace of... Space of time,

we had to go from 60 to an unknown number.

So we had already been using Digital Ocean for helping us with testing,

so we were familiar with their API's.

In about two and a half weeks, we transitioned from physical to virtual.

And what we had to do was use Digital Ocean

'cause we were already playing around with them, testing with them.

And the only way we were able to solve the problem we had

was to go completely cloud computing

and to scale it through Digital Ocean.

And fortunately, we were able to do that

in such a short period of time,

that we kept ahead of the pandemic

and we were able to handle all the virtual classes.

Traditionally, how long would it have taken you

to set up one of your own servers?

[Fred] Yeah, that was pretty intense.

So it taking us an average of six hours to set up a physical server.

Using the Digital Ocean API's, we were able to boil that down to about six minutes.

Okay. So, let's talk sheer numbers here.

You started off with 60 physical servers.

Where are you at now?

So at the height of the pandemic,

we actually were running about 2,000 Digital Ocean Droplets.

In parallel, four data centers around the world.

And looking back at the data,

we did over two billion minutes of virtual classes.

Well, I'd really like to see how a virtual class works.

-Can you show me? -Sure. Let's take a look.

So Fred, why BigBlueButton

as opposed to a standard video conferencing system,

which would seem like the obvious choice?

So video is fine when you want to build relationships,

but for purposes of teaching and learning,

there's a lot more that's going on than just video.

If you just did video, it's all on the teacher to figure out

from the student's facial expression.

What you want to do is have a platform

which understands that the teacher's trying to teach content

and the students are trying to learn

and the best way to learn is apply.

You just can't watch an hour of video and walk out and be an expert on something.

So what we did with BigBlueButton was create a space

where the teacher has lots of ways to engage the students.

And that engagement generates analytics,

and the analytics helps guide the teacher to determine which students are struggling

and then help those students out.

From the student's point of view,

if the teacher is aware of them,

cares about them and helps them out,

it means that virtual classroom is really valuable

for the student as well as the teacher.

Okay, so I guess as I look at this classroom, which is huge,

you've got seating here for a couple of hundred students.

I would think there's more opportunity for engagement

this way through your system than in the live setting.

Yeah, there's actually a lot of advantages for a virtual class.

It can happen in real time across the world.

So you can teach students anywhere.

Activity is gonna happen in parallels.

So you can have some students in breakout rooms.

Other people collaborating together in the chat.

You can record the content

so it can be watched afterward.

And the data that you create from interaction

creates analytics that helps guide the teachers

to which students are struggling.

There should be no back of the classroom in a virtual class.

Excellent. Well, can you show me how that works?

[Fred] Yes. So here I've got a question.

Let's say I just talked about Einstein for a little bit.

And I have a question.

"Did Einstein discover the atom? True/false."

BigBlueButton knows you're trying to ask students questions in polls.

So it actually picked up the text here, "True/false."

It already reads it into memory for screen readers,

but instead of having to teach or type in a poll question,

it'll just give you one button.

And when I click this button, I immediately can start polling the students,

I see the results come back live

and again I'm assessing whether students got the answers correct or not.

I'll do one more. I'll give an example.

"What are the rings of Saturn made of?"

Again, one button.

You can see it's very quick for me to go, ask another question,

get responses back and then I publish them.

At some point, the teacher's gonna have three questions.

Who's in my class, who's participating and who's learning?

So what we did was we built out a system

called the Learning Analytics Dashboard.

And this is a live dashboard

that, think of it, sits next to the teacher

and constantly updates them with what's going on in the class.

I can see students, exactly how long they're there.

I can see participation.

And the other one is all the poll results are there.

So as a teacher, I don't have to try to remember it.

I can look at those results and say, "Was there a particular poll question

that people just completely missed?

Or was a particular question hard for the class?"

You can use that to figure out whether you want

to engage students or shore up some knowledge

and then move on to the next section.

Excellent. Well Fred, thank you very much. This has been amazing.

I'm heading back to Pittsburgh.

I've got a couple of really unique individuals

from Digital Ocean to hook up with there.

Sounds good, Greg.

[thoughtful music playing]

[inquisitive music playing]

I'm in Pittsburgh at one of the highest points in the city

on Mount Washington at the Monterey Bay Fish Grotto.

I'm gonna be speaking with Kwasi Asare

about Digital Ocean's global startup program called Hatch.

[bright music playing]

Kwasi.

-Hey. How you doing? -Doing well. Nice to see you.

-You as well. -So...

Digital Ocean's Hatch program. Give me a quick overview.

Yeah, so the Hatch program is Digital Ocean's global startup program

focused on helping entrepreneurs and founders

with technical assistance, access to infrastructure

and a community of like-minded founders

to help them grow their business efficiently.

Well, what are some of the different businesses

that have gone through the program?

Yeah, so Hatch, a lot like Digital Ocean, is platform agnostic.

We've helped everybody from edtech to fintech

health care, e-commerce, artificial intelligence machine learning.

It's really been a hodgepodge of people

focused on a variety of different things,

and trying to solve business problems

is sort of their shared challenge.

And that's where we add value is by being a part of that journey

and helping people and businesses solve hard problems.

Okay, well what brought you into the program?

Yeah, so in 2008, a skinny guy with a funny name won an election

and I wanted to be a part of an unprecedented administration,

an unprecedented economy, tell the grandkids about it.

Found myself working on edtech policy

at the intersection of private equity, venture capital

and the founders and entrepreneurs themselves.

In all of that, I found myself connected very closely

with entrepreneurs and founders.

And if you hang out with them long enough

they believe they can solve any problem and that's contagious.

And I wanted to continue to return that value back to them

by helping them along their way

through the work we do at Digital Ocean.

Well, that's a big part of the ethos behind Digital Ocean

is taking these small and medium-sized businesses

and actually help them along that growth pathway.

[Kwasi] Absolutely.

The sum collective action of any individual one of them

is greater than the whole. And they all believe that.

And I think by continuing to give back as a community,

they're actually able to solve hard problems

for other people as well and realize their dreams.

We're here to help make sure that every one of them realize that collective opportunity

and creates value and solves hard problems for the world.

Excellent. Well Kwasi, thank you very much.

I want to find out more about this,

-so I'm going to go and talk to Thandi. -Absolutely. Thanks.

[light music playing]

-Hi Thandi. -Hi.

-Nice to meet you. -Nice to meet you too.

So, I spoke with Kwasi

-about his role with the Hatch program... -Yes.

...and how he helps small and medium-sized businesses as a startup.

-Mmm-hmm. -Kind of at the very beginning of their journey.

-Mmm-hmm. -You work with the startups as well,

but in a little bit different capacity.

Can you tell me about that?

Sure. So my team, the Customer Success and Solutions Team,

we work with startups

and small and medium-sized businesses,

and we help them achieve their business goals.

Okay, so are you identifying specific products

that Digital Ocean might have that will help them along?

[Thandi] Um, so that's part of it.

We look at their business and technical goals,

but we align that with the resources they have available

in terms of financial resources,

their team, the technical prowess of their team.

And we take those things together

and we leverage the rest of the organization in to help them further along.

So it's really the work of the whole Digital Ocean community?

Exactly. Exactly.

Okay, so what if there's a product

that might come from an outside vendor

that will work better for them? Is that an option as well?

We first try to optimize for, you know, the products that we already have

'cause those are what we know best, right?

Sometimes the solution that they need

isn't within our immediate community.

So we would recommend another provider

for that particular product or service.

Um, whatever it takes to help them.

Because that community aspect, that's a really big part

-of the Digital Ocean ethos... -Exactly.

...is really just anything that we can do to help you along.

And to help the cloud to grow and be better.

Right. And well, speaking of community,

we're actually in my community, my hometown of Pittsburgh.

And Gabe is heading over to Inventionland

-to meet with George. -Awesome.

-So let's get on out of here. -Awesome. Thank you so much. It's beautiful here.

[inquisitive music playing]

[thoughtful music playing]

-Hey, Gabe. -Hey, George. How are ya?

I'm great. Welcome to Inventionland.

Thanks. I'm so happy to be here.

Well, we're thrilled you're here.

We're working on some stuff and I saw this graph

and I thought, "Is this accurate?

We're looking at this kind of growth right now in the cloud?"

The cloud has been growing like crazy.

Actually when you think about it, there's really two trends

-that are driving this phenomenon. -Mmm.

The first is this idea of digital products, right?

Websites, e-commerce sites, mobile applications

and education platforms.

All being delivered on the internet for consumers

who want to access it over the internet. Right?

-And so, that's a big trend going on right now. -Makes sense.

The other thing that's happening is folks are getting kind of tired

of having to manage their own servers and infrastructure, right?

Uh, it's just kind of exhausting, all those cables.

It's, you know, a lot of work, right?

And so, if you take a look at this picture here,

people are really looking to outsource and rent servers and equipment

from a cloud provider like Digital Ocean.

So, you know, we've got five seasons of Tomorrow's World Today.

Many, many terabytes of data.

We have more seasons in the future.

So what we'd like to do is to be able to deliver our shows

to our audience all around the world fast and reliably.

So that's what I'm curious about.

Yeah, so if I'm understanding, you want to build

a video streaming platform for Tomorrow's World Today.

And you want that to be accessible from anywhere in the world

-at great speed and performance. -Yes.

-And you're looking at the cloud to do that. -Exactly.

I think the cloud is exactly what you need.

[George] Alright, good.

That being the case, your people sent me some images

that I thought would need some explanation.

Uh, these Droplets? What's a Droplet?

So a Droplet is a really important product for Digital Ocean customers.

This is the manifestation of a server running in the cloud.

It's just with this server you don't have to worry about maintaining it,

you don't' have to worry about power and cooling, cabling, all that annoying stuff.

We take care of all that for you.

[George] Very nice.

So, if I was to add to that,

and want to really grow it out,

what's the capacity? How big can I get?

Well, we have customers who run hundreds, thousands,

even tens of thousands of Droplets.

The only limiter is how much capacity we have in our data centers

-and we've got a lot of capacity. -[George laughs] Alright.

And then, they sent me this thing called a "Kuper-netee"?

How do you say that word?

-Kubernetes. -Kubernetes.

Yes. And you were just talking about

if you want to run lots of servers in the cloud,

-lots of Droplets in the cloud. -[George] Yes.

You know, how could you make that work?

And really what Kubernetes does is it makes it possible

for you to manage a group of servers as one thing. Right?

So if one of the servers fails

or if you have a big load event

'cause lots of people want to watch Tomorrow's World Today all at once.

-Yes. -You got a new episode out there.

Kubernetes is gonna make that a lot more reliable

and scalable for your customers.

[George] That sounds really good.

So, you know, there's always a better way to do something, Gabe.

So I was just curious about, you know,

where is the future going with cloud computing?

Well, the future is what we call server-less

and ultimately location-less technology.

So today, if you want to use something like Kubernetes,

you have to pick which physical data center you want to run that in.

-Okay. -[Gabe] So you can run that in say Australia.

In the future, you're not going to have to worry about

where in the world your data center is located.

You just say, "I want to run my application in the cloud.

I don't care where."

And the application will magically move

wherever it needs to in the cloud

and provide the best possible performance for your end users.

That sounded really good.

Alright, so I'd like to learn a little more.

How do I get this thing started?

Well, I got a free trial code

that will give you some credits to try Digital Ocean out.

-You interested? -Oh, we like free.

-[laughing] Let me drop it to you. -[George] Sure.

[inquisitive music playing]

-Got it. -Awesome.

-Thanks for coming in, Gabe. -Alright, thanks George.