← T-Minus: Space-Cyber Briefing
T-Minus: Space-Cyber Briefing
AWS in Orbit: Transforming Maritime Intelligence: Where Cloud Meets the Sea.
00:34:17
Find out how AWS for Aerospace and Satellite is helping to transform maritime intelligence with Pole Star Defense.
Loading summary
Transcript44 lines
- [00:02]
A
You're listening to the Cyberwire Network powered by N2K. Welcome to AWS in Orbit. I'm Maria Varmazes. We're working with AWS to bring you an in depth look at the transformative intersection of cloud computing, space technologies and generative AI. On AWS in Orbit, we're exploring not just what's possible, but what's meaningful in the realm of space and cloud innovation. We grapple with the complex challenges and unparalleled opportunities that arise when we use space to address pressing issues right here on Earth. This is AWS in Orbit scaling innovation and intelligence with Polestar Global. In today's episode, polestar Global shares how its partnership with Amazon Web Services enabled it to modernize legacy systems, scale globally and accelerate delivery. We will explore in this conversation how cloud patterns, security frameworks and rapid deployment capabilities support high stakes maritime tracking, compliance and government missions. Here's our conversation.
- [01:35]
B
I'm Rebecca Meads. I'm a solutions architect at aws. Been working with AWS around about nearly five years now. Started off in cybersecurity and then moved across to aerospace and satellite, focusing on geospatial customers.
- [01:49]
C
Yeah, hi, I'm Tim Dermesh, Director DevOps here at Polestar. Joined the company in its founding year. Done everything during that time and I find myself dealing with AWS on a daily basis and I'm loving it.
- [02:06]
D
My name is Chris Dowin. I'm the Vice President of Engineering over here for Polestar Defense, which is the public sector focused business unit of Polestar. I focus primarily on the United States Coast Guard, but also building out new intelligence products across our sector and even touching a bit of commercial. I come from computer science background. I've been doing software engineering for over 20 years with a pretty heavy focus on geospatial data at scale. That's kind of been my bread and butter. And my big thing in life is really just connecting people to each other, connecting people to business and mission.
- [02:41]
A
Well, that's wonderful, Chris. Thank you. And thank you all three for the wonderful introductions. It's nice to meet you and speak with you all. So, yeah, today we're gonna talk about Polestar's story and also how Polestar decided to work with AWS and what that partnership looks like. So first I'm wondering if we could get a sense of what Polestar Global does and who it serves.
- [03:02]
C
The idea for Polestar started because one of the founders was selling telephone boxes to the US and he put it on a shipping container and it never arrived, even though it said it had been shipped. And he could not believe that we can't track, this is in 1998, that you can't track a vessel to find out where your shipments have gone. And that was basically the germ of the idea that became Polestar Global. And from that we built the website, all the systems associated with running a website. In the late 90s, it took a while to convince the maritime industry to that this newfangled Internet idea was going to work for them.
- [03:49]
A
The rest is history, surely.
- [03:50]
C
And the rest is history. Exactly. Which I could go on about for hours. But it's been an interesting journey so far with the industry. As laws and compliance have changed over the years, we've grown and developed and created products specific to the maritime industry that really helps fix their problems. So it goes back to the early noughties. There was a product we created that eventually became part of solas, which stands for Safety of Life at Sea. So basically we've all seen the film Captain Phillips and piracy at sea is real. It's not Johnny Depp and Pirates of the Caribbean. It is a serious business. So we created a device that's SOLAS compliant, one of the first to market. They are being installed on countless ships and they're part of a company security plan. So if there is an incident, they can hit panic buttons, messages go out. The device is self powered. That's one solution. As well as that, there's something called long range identification and tracking. This is primarily governments sharing position data between themselves. So the legislation there is any vessel that is within a thousand nautical miles of your coastal waters, you as a government have the right to those positions. So you can see where the vessel's been. So if it's been somewhere it shouldn't have, then you can flag that up as a vessel of interest. Other solutions are just straightforward tracking. Sending messages to vessels, receiving messages from them. We don't just track vessels. Previously we've tracked an elephant. We've done battery generation on a vessel or just out in the Serengeti side. I'm still under NDA so I can't talk about the other thing that we tracked then. We track racing cars, planes, helicopters, all sorts of things. But primarily 99.99% of our focus is purely maritime.
- [06:07]
A
That's fascinating.
- [06:08]
D
Yeah.
- [06:09]
C
And then final, final sales pitch is our fintech product, Purple Track, which is a maritime's risk and compliance solution. So the way that maritime works is you have to fund a transit so the banks get involved, lots of money sloshes around when you're Arranging shipments of product from one part of the planet to another. And again, much with the idea of where the vessel has been. You need to know where the vessel's been if you're funding a transit, who has been on board the vessel, whether or not you're inadvertently funding terrorism or you're dealing with a company or an organization or an individual who is on what I call the naughty list, someone who's been sanctioned basically. If you inadvertently fund that trade, you as the bank, the charterer, the owner, the insurer are liable to really substantial fines. So that's a rather serious solution that we provide. And today from that startup idea of lost telephone boxes, we're now producing applications that use AI technology, which for me, as someone who's been in the business for nearly 30 years, is a fantastic growth path that now lives on Amazon Web Services.
- [07:35]
A
Yeah, everything you were describing, Tim, very high stakes work. I mean this is what keeps the world running. And I mean, not to exaggerate too much, but extremely high stakes stuff. So I'm already putting a few pieces together in my mind about how I can imagine AWS enabling a lot of this. But I'm getting ahead of myself. I want to know a little bit more about before AWS came into the scene, what the friction points were at Polestar that you all were looking to address.
- [08:05]
C
Okay. Actually it was growth that was the problem. So as a startup, the purple no, it was called Freight Finder back then was running on a PC under the CTO's desk. Then we started to land customers. We had to buy a bigger server, we had to go into a data center, we had to buy bigger servers. We're spending so much money. Then virtualization came along so you could do more with the same kit you've got. But the scaling problem was the issue. You can't keep buying horribly expensive servers and paying for the rack space and the maintenance. So once a web based solution came along. Fantastic.
- [08:52]
A
Chris, is there anything that you wanted to add to what, what Tim was mentioning about the business case for bringing AWS in. That makes sense from, from your perspective on the business?
- [09:03]
D
Sure, yeah. Let's, let's touch on the heavy stuff comment you made, Maria, the. Yeah, right. So there's the commercial world. Yeah. Heavy piracy, trafficking. You got to make sure you're, you're all in the up and up and it's the governments that are, are watching all of that. And that's where the defense unit sort of comes in. And what you need from a defense unit is you need. It's sort of like a. A strike team. I'll say that I'm. I'm really proud of. We have a lot of really, everybody is, of course, but a lot of really intelligent, really focused, dedicated people. And when the government comes in and they want solutions from you, they demand like a different set of requirements where they need a different kind of scrutiny around the solution that you're providing. And they want to operate in their world, they don't want to operate in the commercial world. Right. So all the things Tim was saying, governments do use, they use them all the time and they love them. And then they want to put their own spin on them or they might have their own sets of data that they're working on. All right. And so to draw the line with Amazon, a lot of governments, a lot of public sector entities have gone all in on the cloud and many of them, including our primary customer, the Coast Guard, have chosen AWS as the primary. The really cool thing about that is we can essentially build in one place with one set of patterns and then apply that pattern to many different customer missions and in their environments where they need the data to operate, to be operated on. So that's kind of what we do. We're like in the business of bringing together this rapid, cost effective delivery unit of really esoteric solutions. And so one example, right. Tim mentioned lrt, Long Range Identification and Tracking. It's this type of vessel data that's currently flowing through these systems. The Coast Guard needs that sitting next to other intelligence data that they might have access to, and that's where we come in. So we build these small point solutions, prove them out, show them, and get them validated with our customer, and then we bring them over sort of behind the firewall. In another Amazon account, we're able to do these very rapid instantiations of solutions that we never would have been able to do before.
- [11:33]
A
Excellent. And Rebecca, this feels like a perfect opportunity to have you walk us through from the AWS point of view about what it's like to be supporting these kinds of missions, this kind of critical business from the AWS side.
- [11:49]
B
Yeah. I mean, from a personal perspective, like, what motivates me is to work with customers that are truly making a difference in the world, even indirectly, like keeping our ship safe so that we can and get our, you know, our products back to where we live is so important. And to be able to kind of put meaning behind that and work on projects that are kind of good in nature is like, very rewarding. But also like Polestar represented a Technical challenge for us, like, in the sense that, you know, it's something that we want to get behind. They have, you know, achievable outcomes that they. That they want to achieve as a business, and that's as a solutions architect. That's what we kind of strive to do. So one of the first things that we always do and one of the things that we did when we met Tim and Chris almost two years ago now is focus on what outcomes do you want to achieve? And Tim kind of touched on this already in terms of growth. Right. So how do we enable growth is by freeing up developer time so they can focus on features so we can decrease the time it takes to deploy new features to their customers and then also reduce that technical debt. Right. So these were kind of the first two things that we worked with Polestar on, so they can kind of get on with delivering the cool features that Tim's already mentioned.
- [13:05]
A
Yeah. And I would imagine also touching on some of what Chris was talking about. Given the customers for Polestar, security is a massive priority. So that also must have been a very interesting opportunity for AWS to come in there.
- [13:20]
B
Absolutely. So my background, cybersecurity. I love cybersecurity. It's the one thing that I can really get my teeth into. And AWS provides those patterns and standardizations. It just makes this really easy. So for a lot of organizations, this can be the thing they do later on. And it's like, oh, we just don't have the time or money. And this is the thing we want to hear, because AWS can just accelerate the delivery of these security and compliance frameworks that you need across an enterprise estate like polestars. Yeah, that's kind of it.
- [13:53]
A
It's brilliant. Thank you. And my natural question is sort of what happens next? So once the two, the Pol, Polestar and aws, you know, shook hands, said, yeah, we're gonna work together. And obviously there's a lot of challenges ahead, but it's gonna be a great business opportunity. What did that look like? You said this started about two years ago. So what did the process look like when you guys came together?
- [14:15]
B
So I'll start from an AWS perspective. So we, back in the day, started our discussions on a solution called the landing zone. So the landing zone is typically where we start with customers because it's the foundation of an enterprise environment. It's the thing that the whole system running, it's the thing that allows you to scale, it's the thing that allows you to be secure across your entire environment. And it's the thing that allows you to rapidly deploy features into your new applications and reduce that technical depth. Then we went on to, we could talk about this at length. So I'm not quite sure exactly which ones to go into, but we have an extensive partner network at AWS and this is one of our main mechanisms to actually accelerate delivery of these things. So when organizations maybe don't have the resource or the time, everyone's focused on doing mission critical work, we often bring in some of our very trusted partners to deliver on some of these solutions that accelerate delivery. So I don't know Tim, whether you want to comment on some of the partners that we worked with together, some of the partners that we brought in and how that accelerated your delivery.
- [15:24]
C
Yeah, absolutely. Thanks, Rebecca. So the landing zone I played with back into 2023, build my own and realize that I don't really have the time to do this justice. And then Rebecca put me in touch with a company called cloudscaler who built the landing zone for us and turned it around I think within three weeks. What was taking me months. They just backed, you know, out the park. It's amazing. And the other thing about that is the level of consultancy that you get. You, you, we involved the infosec team, the networking team, the developers said, okay, this is opportunity. It's a greenfield site. We want to be AWS well architected. So it's a proper enterprise grade solution. The AWS partner in this case just designed the system for us, deployed it and we were up and running. We've also worked with another AWS partner called Steamhouse and everyone builds kubernetes stacks and it's ready relatively easy. But I don't have DevOps or developers that I can say, okay, you're dedicated to make a production grade system that will work in a landing zone. Go Steam House, have that capability. And they just worked again side by side with our engineers, delivered the solution and that is now a foundation piece for all of our applications that we are slowly but surely. Well, not slowly, we're progressing quite aggressively migrating old legacy stuff and it is stuff I'm not going to. Yeah, into. There's a lot.
- [17:11]
B
That's right.
- [17:12]
C
I believe that, you know, I mean what we haven't touched on is we've had an Amazon estate active since 2011 and that is a lot of cloud computer. So businesses grow organically, don't they? You have to deliver product to generate revenue. So you know, and the networking ideals change. What used to be known as a trusted network is no longer secure. You have to keep on top of all the updates and the upgrades and the horrible term technical debt. So we're migrating everything to the landing zone. And just a little note about my future vision. Once it's all migrated the way I what the next step for me is, okay, I now have a foundation for a truly chaos engineered solution. When the revenues increase, hopefully for Polestar, I can justify going active, active in production. That to me is the dream.
- [18:15]
A
And so Tim, you've brought us in thinking about legacy requirements there and dealing with technical debt unfortunately is a thing. And I'm wondering also, Chris, you're focused a lot on sort of new business models and to me it's really interesting that Polestar can balance and manage these two different areas very well while also still working with AWS and managing it all. It just seems fascinating to me. Chris, can you speak to that at all?
- [18:48]
D
Yeah, you've got the tale of two worlds and again it's the power of the cloud, the power of Amazon. Like Tim said, we've got a point reference that we can all migrate to, but at the same time we've got this really nice dynamic segregation where if we need to run smaller projects, smaller products, things that make use of the new models, right? Something that's sort of detached from the primary flywheel of value and use for our customers. It's as easy as just having another VPC or maybe another account. And there are even tools to bridge all of the accounts under one umbrella. So you get unified billing and all that, which matters quite a lot. But so the point is when you look at something like a defense unit, and a lot of our work is GREENFIELD because our customers have sort of weird esoteric requirements, right? One of the primary things that kicked off this unit was the nationw AIs system. So AIs is vessel position tracking. That is global. Every, almost every vessel on the planet has one of these transponders, just a little radio beacon and there are detectors everywhere. There's detectors in space, satellite, some ships have detectors on them, but there's also land based ones. And that's what the nationwide AIs system is. It's something that's run by the US Army Corps of Engineers. There's these radio towers everywhere, intercoastal waterways all along the oceans and they're always listening for AIs. And so it's a program that our government here in the US relies on to scoop up all the AIs radio signals for themselves. Right? So there's a national version of this that's not Relying on other commercial stuff. The classic defense case, Right. So they want to own it, but they're going through a modernization just like Tim talked about, Right. They've got all these old racks of hardware that are basically on fire and about to fall apart. And so that's where we come in. They say, hey, can you guys take all of this and modernize it? And so we have this kind of greenfield Runway and we're able to just peel off a segment of Polestar resources, take all those modern ideas, get moving, see what we can do, build out this entire ecosystem again with the idea that it's going to be portable and it's going to be able to migrate into our customers environments and not tip the other parts of the business, not strain, you know, the group that's trying to keep legacy security concerns, Legacy access controls. How do you, how do you separate U.S. based personnel that have to work on a U.S. based contract from non U. S based personnel.
- [21:28]
A
Right.
- [21:29]
D
That are part of that legacy? Right. All those questions just become really obvious, really obviously answered. And so, you know, at the end of the day, right now we're operating the entire new greenfielded nationwide AIs system for the Coast Guard in our test bed and we're currently deploying it over to our government's higher security boundary. It's called impact level four environment where they can actually have their operators with their credentials logging in. We're doing some testing and validation on that right now. There's no way that would have been as fast or as smooth without access to resources like we've had.
- [22:07]
A
Yeah, that is a great point, Chris. And that actually makes me want to ask a question to Rebecca also that it reminded me of something about given the nature of Polestar's customers that are global and working so closely with many national governments, I imagine data sovereignty and data residency concerns are something that you all have to navigate. And I know AWS is a great enabler of this and I'm wondering, Rebecca, if you can talk us through that?
- [22:37]
B
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, so sovereignty is something that comes up nearly with every, every customer interaction. So I'm primarily based in Europe and so this is like a hot topic at the moment with the world the way it is. And you know, we're speaking about this with customers all the time and we have so many solutions that enable this. We have facilities that enable you to set guardrails around this. So you know, when you're coming in you're thinking, is my solution really sovereign? You can set up the controls that the customer is in complete control of that in the sense that they can define the boundary that they want. Because sovereignty means something different to everyone. Every time we speak, you have to define it for yourself as an organization, what it means to you, and then use the broad range and flexibility and the controls that we have and the way that we enable that for Polestar is we have the separation through our GovCloud which Chris mentioned, which is a fully US person operated environment which you can deploy us only resources to, and then that is completely segregated from any other country or region that you decide to deploy your resources in. So with the kind of commercial and government customer base that polestar have, they can have their commercial entities in a completely separate instance, but also. But not having separation in the sense that they have to have different patterns in each environment. Right. So they can still have a standardization across both, but be confident that their data is segregated in the way that they choose to do so.
- [24:07]
A
What have your customers been experiencing as a result of working with aws? And Tim, I feel like I should start with you on this one.
- [24:15]
C
I've spoken at length about migration. We don't just migrate, we modernize as well. So we're doing some long overdue work on some of our critical systems. That isn't stuff that customers will see, but it makes our estate more secure and easier to deploy to. So we'll be able to work on features and releases a lot quicker. Our release cadence has started shooting up as well. We were missing a particular style of development environment that's going live next month that's going to speed up one of our products again release cycles. We're aiming, we're working on a brand new pipeline that hopefully will allow us to release almost on a daily basis. To give you some perspective, we used to do it every month. Initially it was once every six months. Then we went to monthly releases and now we're on a two weekly cadence, but we're heading towards daily and that's really where we're going right now.
- [25:29]
D
Because I think where that really leads is in this world of virtual product delivery, this software world, aws, what it did is they decided to make a hardware problem a software problem, which is an absolute innovation, right? So now there's an abstraction layer between you and the things that you require and everybody starts building on that. And then because of that, as Tim said, rightly like, your speed of delivery goes up and your question was like, what do you do with the speed of delivery in this software world? One of the biggest things that we've been Taught and have learned is rapid delivery and innovation and measuring, monitoring and validating. And following that loop over and over leads to new things. So not only are we delivering faster, but we're able to experiment faster so we can see what works for our customers and what doesn't work for our customers in a way that would have been impossible before. So what are they getting now? Right. Like Tim said, they're getting these products that allow them to make decisions about whether or not they should underwrite a specific voyage on a vessel. They're putting money on the line. They're saying, yeah, I'm going to insure this vessel based on data Polestar is giving me. And because we can improve faster, we can give them better data which allows them to make better decisions that even trickles down into the government space. Right. Because we can innovate with our government customers. A lot of people have this perception that the government is really slow, and there are some parts of that that are true. But when they got their hands on a mission, they want mission delivered as fast as possible. Right? So, like, what have we been able to do for our government customers? A big one here. When the Baltimore Bridge was hit a couple of years ago, the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, that was a really big deal, obviously. And our primary customer on the federal side, the Coast Guard, they had to run situational command and control over that entire area. And one of the problems they had was that they couldn't easily get access. This is one of those funny things about government. But they couldn't easily get access to their own data in an unclassified, totally in the open environment that also worked with other unclassified data streams. Like, basically they had two computers, right? They've got the one that's connected to their network, and they've got the one that's connected to, like, everybody else's network. And that's where we come in. That's that sort of rapid innovation. Get to it. Get our customers. You know, we're the bridge between them, pun intended, I guess. You know, they call us up and they say, can you help? Right? You've got that, as I mentioned earlier, you've got that nationwide data sitting in your test bed. It is unclassified data. Like, what can we do with it? And within two days of the event, we had them a command and control system that the commander on the ground was able to get situational awareness of everything going on in the port. And really, it was just to get on the radio and tell all the squatters to get Out. Right. Like you have all these little boats coming in, trying to see what's going on. And for safety, it's really just, hey, everybody clear. We gotta clear the wreckage, the bridge is unstable, that kind of stuff.
- [28:48]
A
Yeah.
- [28:49]
D
So that's really what we do for our customers. Right. Like we're delivering this tracking, set of tracking and derived intelligence products that let our customers make decisions that really impact the world.
- [29:03]
B
So I think the area that I want to highlight that was a major success for this particular interaction is the team that we created together. So sometimes I think that you can think of AWS and the customer as different entities, but for this particular engagement, I really felt like we were one team. So the partners, cloud, Scalar, Steam House, aws, ourselves, we all work together, like to achieve these customer outcomes. So as soon as you align on those outcomes and you know, the boundaries between who works for organization just sort of melt away. And I think that was kind of key to the success of like, what we managed to do here.
- [29:37]
C
Well said, Rebecca. Absolutely. The way the teams all work together helped us achieve the goals and that's how a professional engagement should be. For me, it's all about protecting, protecting the business and enabling growth. And as I said earlier, I do want a chaos engineered system just because I'm selfish. But long may this relationship continue. It's going well so far.
- [30:05]
A
Indeed. Absolutely. Yeah. And Chris, over to you for the last word.
- [30:08]
D
Oh, thank you, Tim. Yeah, I think two things to kind of touch on. Rebecca earlier talked about patterns and I talked to the teams about patterns all the time. Right. If you find and lock into good patterns that get good results and then you build on them and you learn how those patterns work, that's really where you're going to find some success. And that's what we've been able to get with like Amazon in the cloud. And I think that's really key. If there's like one takeaway, it's find those patterns and really get those institutionalized in a way that you can have everything sort of melt away. You don't have to focus so much anymore. Again, as Tim said before, before you had to care about new network topologies are coming out all the time. You don't have to care so much. Right. So the patterns are really critical. And then when you do that, and I think I'm touching on what they both said, but you can start really doing something that matters and when you do that, everything just feel, you feel, you can feel it and then you can start having fun. And that's the most important part. Right. And I think we all have a lot of fun together, and I would. I wouldn't trade that for anything.
- [31:26]
A
That's really wonderful. Well, Rebecca, Tim and Chris, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. This is a really fascinating conversation, and I really appreciate you walking me through your story. So thanks so much, Maria.
- [31:37]
D
Thank you.
- [31:38]
C
Yeah, thanks.
- [31:39]
B
Thank you.
- [31:50]
A
And that's it for AWS in Orbit, Scaling innovation and intelligence with Polestar Global. A special thanks to Tim Dermesh and Chris Dowen from Polestar Global for joining us today. For additional resources from this episode and and for more episodes in the AWS in Orbit series, check out our show notes@space.n2k.com AWS this episode was produced by Alice Carruth and Jennifer Iban and powered by aws. Our lead producer is Liz Stokes. We are mixed by Elliot Peltzman and Trey Hester with original music by Elliot Peltzman. Peter Kielpe is our publisher and I am your host, Maria Varmazes. Thank you for listening. We'll see you next time.