Latest / Best of LinkedIn: Digital Transformation & Tech / Best of LinkedIn: Cloud Insights CW 49/ 50

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Best of LinkedIn: Cloud Insights CW 49/ 50 · Best of LinkedIn: Digital Transformation & Tech

• 0:00
  Speaker 0: This episode is provided by Thomas Allgeier and Frenus based on the most relevant LinkedIn posts about cloud in calendar weeks, forty nine and fifty.
• 0:08
  Speaker 0: Frenus enables enterprises with market technology and competitive intelligence for portfolio and strategy development.
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: Welcome to the deep dive.
• 0:18
  Speaker 1: Looking at the sources from the last couple of weeks, it's pretty clear we're at a major inflection point.
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: We're seeing three huge collisions happening all at once that are, I think, completely rewriting the cloud playbook.
• 0:30
  Speaker 0: And these aren't small tweaks, are they?
• 0:32
  Speaker 0: We're talking about sovereignty moving from a talking point to an actual engineering challenge.
• 0:36
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 0:36
  Speaker 1: And then there's the AI infrastructure demand, which is just exploding and stressing everything from budgets to power grids.
• 0:42
  Speaker 0: And finally, that forces a maturity and cost control.
• 0:46
  Speaker 0: Finops is shifting from a tech checklist to really a company-wide mandate.
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: Exactly.
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: So our mission today is to cut through that noise.
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: We want to give you the strategic shifts you need to understand right now.
• 0:57
  Speaker 1: This is basically the blueprint for cloud strategy for twenty twenty six and beyond.
• 1:01
  Speaker 0: OK, let's dive right in then, starting with what feels like the biggest headache for everyone.
• 1:07
  Speaker 0: Sovereignty.
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  Speaker 0: For years it was just a concept, but now it dictates architecture.
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  Speaker 0: The whole conversation has gotten very technical,
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: very fast.
• 1:14
  Speaker 1: That's the key.
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  Speaker 1: All about the engineering now.
• 1:16
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
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  Speaker 1: We saw... AWS that reinvent, for instance, lay out two totally different models to achieve sovereignty.
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: This was something people like Jevon George and Renato P were really focused on two
• 1:27
  Speaker 0: different paths to the same goal, which is what control
• 1:30
  Speaker 1: control and localization.
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: The first one is the EU sovereign cloud.
• 1:34
  Speaker 1: This is like the gold standard isolation model.
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: Okay, we're building a whole new separate region in Germany.
• 1:40
  Speaker 1: Full data localization, independent governance.
• 1:43
  Speaker 1: And this is critical run only by EU based staff.
• 1:47
  Speaker 1: The gold is maximum separation from US jurisdiction.
• 1:50
  Speaker 0: But the second model, the one for the UAE, sounds completely different, more like a patch than a rebuild.
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: Precisely.
• 1:55
  Speaker 1: The UAE Sovereign Launchpad layers sovereign controls onto existing AWS regions.
• 2:01
  Speaker 1: It's done through a local partnership with EN Enterprise, so it's a legal and management wrapper over the top of existing infrastructure.
• 2:08
  Speaker 0: So sovereign T through partnership, not isolation.
• 2:12
  Speaker 1: It's a much faster way to get there for sure.
• 2:14
  Speaker 1: But
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  Speaker 0: here's where it gets complicated, and where the online discussion got pretty heated.
• 2:18
  Speaker 0: The architecture is one thing, but the legal reality is another.
• 2:22
  Speaker 1: Absolutely.
• 2:23
  Speaker 1: The law often trumps the physical location.
• 2:26
  Speaker 1: Marcus Ducey made this point really well.
• 2:28
  Speaker 1: He basically said, jurisdiction beats location.
• 2:31
  Speaker 0: Meaning, even if my data is sitting in a server in Frankfurt.
• 2:34
  Speaker 1: If the provider is US controlled.
• 2:36
  Speaker 1: U.S.
• 2:36
  Speaker 1: authorities could still potentially access it.
• 2:39
  Speaker 1: And
• 2:39
  Speaker 0: what legal tools are we talking about here, just to be clear for everyone listening?
• 2:42
  Speaker 0: We're mainly
• 2:42
  Speaker 1: talking about the Cloud Act and FISA's Seven-O-Two.
• 2:45
  Speaker 1: These are what give U.S.
• 2:46
  Speaker 1: authorities that extraterritorial reach.
• 2:49
  Speaker 1: And that's exactly why someone like Moritz Ott pointed out that AWS's new setup, while a good step, still has to prove its EU fit under really strict EU rules.
• 3:00
  Speaker 0: Which explains why European companies aren't just waiting around, they're building their own path.
• 3:04
  Speaker 1: They're building their own path, anchored in open source and collaboration.
• 3:09
  Speaker 1: You see the strong partnerships like SUSC and Evrock, which Mithias Ulstrom and Dirk Peter Van Luen were talking about.
• 3:16
  Speaker 0: Right, trying to create an independent stack.
• 3:17
  Speaker 1: Yeah, a stack built on Linux and Kubernetes so they control their own destiny and can move workloads easily.
• 3:23
  Speaker 0: And this is already spilling over into the hottest area, which is AI.
• 3:27
  Speaker 0: We saw SAP launch its own EU AI cloud.
• 3:30
  Speaker 1: Yes, Martin Mers and Andreas J. Wagner were discussing that.
• 3:34
  Speaker 1: It's all about providing a trusted, sovereign environment for AI, even bringing in partners like Cohere.
• 3:41
  Speaker 1: for their models.
• 3:41
  Speaker 0: And it's not just them.
• 3:43
  Speaker 0: Dissault systems and Mistral AI are doubling down on running their models on the outscale sovereign cloud.
• 3:49
  Speaker 0: Tobias Wagner was highlighting that collaboration.
• 3:51
  Speaker 1: I mean, when you're dealing with sensitive industrial data, you have to.
• 3:55
  Speaker 1: There's no other way.
• 3:56
  Speaker 0: The ultimate proof point here has to be the defense sector, right?
• 3:59
  Speaker 0: Fabian Keenley and Luca Caligari reported NATO is building completely air-gapped, isolated cloud systems with Google.
• 4:06
  Speaker 1: That says everything.
• 4:07
  Speaker 1: Zero tolerance for external access.
• 4:10
  Speaker 1: It's not a surprise when you see that sixty one percent of European CIOs are planning to use more local cloud services precisely because of this geopolitical uncertainty.
• 4:20
  Speaker 1: It's just smart risk management now.
• 4:22
  Speaker 1: OK,
• 4:22
  Speaker 0: so that's where the data lives.
• 4:23
  Speaker 0: Let's shift to how it's all being powered.
• 4:26
  Speaker 0: This brings us to the second collision, AI infrastructure.
• 4:30
  Speaker 0: The demand is just off the charts.
• 4:32
  Speaker 1: It really is.
• 4:33
  Speaker 1: Steve D made a great point.
• 4:34
  Speaker 1: The demand is outstripping capacity.
• 4:36
  Speaker 1: which increases the risk of major outages, like we've seen recently.
• 4:40
  Speaker 1: It's
• 4:40
  Speaker 0: a huge economic problem.
• 4:41
  Speaker 1: It is.
• 4:42
  Speaker 1: And Dr.
• 4:42
  Speaker 1: Monica McTaryon offered this really crucial insight for AI founders.
• 4:46
  Speaker 1: She said, the core problem isn't just the cost of compute, it's power.
• 4:51
  Speaker 1: and the long-term lock-in that comes with it.
• 4:53
  Speaker 0: Hang on, why is power the bigger headache than the immediate cost?
• 4:56
  Speaker 1: Because running AI at scale, especially for training, doesn't look like the flexible cloud we know.
• 5:02
  Speaker 1: It looks like old-school high-performance computing, HPC.
• 5:05
  Speaker 1: So think less paper-drink utility and more like renting a dedicated power plant for three years.
• 5:11
  Speaker 1: You've got high fixed costs and you need long-term commitments.
• 5:14
  Speaker 1: That completely goes against the variable on-demand cloud model.
• 5:18
  Speaker 0: That's a huge distinction.
• 5:20
  Speaker 0: The whole promise of cloud was elasticity.
• 5:22
  Speaker 0: But if my GPU usage is constant for months, an on-prem contract suddenly starts to look a lot cheaper.
• 5:29
  Speaker 1: Exactly.
• 5:29
  Speaker 1: And that economic reality is what's pushing everyone toward hybrid architectures.
• 5:35
  Speaker 1: Monica McIterian actually projects, seventy five percent of enterprise AI will be hybrid by twenty twenty eight.
• 5:41
  Speaker 0: So what does that winning hybrid playbook actually look like in practice?
• 5:46
  Speaker 1: It's a tiered approach.
• 5:47
  Speaker 1: You prototype on the public cloud to move fast, but then you move your core steady-state workloads to custom or sovereign infrastructure for cost control.
• 5:55
  Speaker 1: The public cloud becomes a tactical tool for bursting or spikes.
• 5:58
  Speaker 0: And the key to making that all work.
• 6:00
  Speaker 1: Workload portability.
• 6:01
  Speaker 1: Fred Azar stressed this.
• 6:03
  Speaker 1: If you can't move your workload, you're trapped.
• 6:04
  Speaker 1: It's non-negotiable.
• 6:06
  Speaker 0: which brings us to a really interesting technical point that make Weasmiller flagged.
• 6:10
  Speaker 0: The hyperscalers are actually making this hybrid world easier to live in.
• 6:13
  Speaker 1: They have to.
• 6:15
  Speaker 1: To stay relevant, we're now seeing AWS and Google Cloud connect their platforms with private, dedicated links.
• 6:21
  Speaker 1: Using things like Direct Connect and CrossCloud Interconnect.
• 6:24
  Speaker 1: Wait, so
• 6:25
  Speaker 0: this isn't just running things over the public internet anymore.
• 6:27
  Speaker 0: This is like a proper engineered.
• 6:31
  Speaker 1: It's a massive step up.
• 6:33
  Speaker 1: It lowers the penalty for running distributed systems.
• 6:36
  Speaker 1: Suddenly running a query in BigQuery against data in S-three isn't a fragile experiment.
• 6:41
  Speaker 1: It's a reliable low latency pattern.
• 6:44
  Speaker 1: Multi-cloud is becoming an intentional choice.
• 6:46
  Speaker 1: Which,
• 6:46
  Speaker 0: again, reinforces that sovereignty point.
• 6:48
  Speaker 0: The real power is the ability to switch.
• 6:51
  Speaker 1: Exactly.
• 6:52
  Speaker 0: OK.
• 6:52
  Speaker 0: That leads us perfectly to the third theme.
• 6:55
  Speaker 0: You have these massive AI bills, complex sovereignty rules, but you still have to master the basics.
• 7:00
  Speaker 0: Cost control.
• 7:01
  Speaker 0: Guy Bartram cited a flexor report that cloud waste is still around twenty-seven percent.
• 7:06
  Speaker 0: Twenty-seven
• 7:06
  Speaker 1: percent.
• 7:07
  Speaker 1: That's just unsustainable.
• 7:08
  Speaker 1: And Richard Vester made the critical point here.
• 7:10
  Speaker 1: Cloud spend isn't an IT problem.
• 7:12
  Speaker 1: It's a business problem.
• 7:13
  Speaker 0: Right.
• 7:14
  Speaker 0: If you treat it as just a tech issue, costs will always spiral out of control.
• 7:18
  Speaker 1: And that's the shift.
• 7:20
  Speaker 1: FineOps isn't a tool.
• 7:21
  Speaker 1: It's a culture.
• 7:22
  Speaker 1: It's a cadence that involves finance, engineering, everyone, sharing responsibility.
• 7:27
  Speaker 0: But the culture needs tools to work.
• 7:30
  Speaker 0: And Nicholas Fundrini pointed out that Reinvent delivered a lot of new granular cost controls to help with that.
• 7:35
  Speaker 1: They did.
• 7:36
  Speaker 1: They're trying to make things more predictable.
• 7:38
  Speaker 1: We saw new commitment options, like database savings plans.
• 7:41
  Speaker 1: That's a huge deal because databases are often a source of wild spending swings.
• 7:46
  Speaker 1: This lets you budget them like you budget compute.
• 7:49
  Speaker 0: What about storage?
• 7:50
  Speaker 0: All that cold data just sitting there costing money.
• 7:53
  Speaker 0: Yep,
• 7:53
  Speaker 1: they address that too.
• 7:55
  Speaker 1: S-three has new things like intelligent table tiering and better metadata tools to help you automatically find and move that cold data to cheaper storage.
• 8:04
  Speaker 1: Stop paying premium prices for data nobody's touched in a year.
• 8:08
  Speaker 0: And they're even trying to bring that predictability to AI costs.
• 8:11
  Speaker 1: They are.
• 8:12
  Speaker 1: Bedrock Reserve capacity is designed to stabilize your unit costs for AI.
• 8:16
  Speaker 1: When you're dealing with those HPC style fixed costs, having a stable baseline is everything.
• 8:21
  Speaker 0: But ultimately the best tools in the world don't matter if the discipline isn't there.
• 8:25
  Speaker 0: That's
• 8:25
  Speaker 1: the bottom line.
• 8:27
  Speaker 1: Wu Ming Zhang had a great reflection on this pulling in insights from people like Eric Mark who's focused on just implementing those savings plans.
• 8:34
  Speaker 1: And William Cooper, who used a great phrase, stop the bleed.
• 8:38
  Speaker 0: Stop the bleed.
• 8:38
  Speaker 0: I like that.
• 8:39
  Speaker 1: It's about hygiene, rigorous forecasting, right sizing, turning off dev environments.
• 8:45
  Speaker 1: You have to master the basics before you can optimize the complex stuff.
• 8:48
  Speaker 0: So we've covered three massive shifts, sovereignty, AI infrastructure, and financial discipline.
• 8:55
  Speaker 0: If you pull it all together, what's the one strategic takeaway for a leader planning for the next few years?
• 9:00
  Speaker 1: To sum it up.
• 9:01
  Speaker 1: First, sovereignty is forcing real architectural splits that are legally sound, not just marketing.
• 9:08
  Speaker 1: Second, AI's power demands are pushing us into a hybrid world for pure economic survival.
• 9:13
  Speaker 1: And third, FinOps is now the essential business culture.
• 9:16
  Speaker 1: you need to afford the first two.
• 9:18
  Speaker 1: It
• 9:18
  Speaker 0: sounds like a complete break from the lift and shift cloud-first mantra of the last decade.
• 9:23
  Speaker 1: It is.
• 9:24
  Speaker 1: I think Guy Bartram's long-term forecast really captures it.
• 9:27
  Speaker 1: The reality is, Cloud is maturing into a regulated utility and AI is entering its capital intensive industrial phase.
• 9:35
  Speaker 1: So for the next three to seven years, the winners will be those who prioritize architectural flexibility, economic discipline, and crucially energy aware planning.
• 9:45
  Speaker 1: It's a decouple your AI and cloud strategies.
• 9:47
  Speaker 1: They're related, but they're not the same economic problem.
• 9:50
  Speaker 0: That is the perfect thought to end on.
• 9:53
  Speaker 0: The focus is shifting from speed to resilience, efficiency and control.
• 9:57
  Speaker 0: If you enjoyed this episode, new episodes drop every two weeks.
• 10:00
  Speaker 0: Also check out our other editions on ICT and tech, digital products and services, artificial intelligence, sustainability and green ICT, defense tech and health.
• 10:08
  Speaker 1: Thank you for diving deep with us.
• 10:10
  Speaker 1: We'll see you next time.
• 10:11
  Speaker 1: And don't forget to subscribe.