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Best of LinkedIn: Cloud Insights CW 51 - 02 · Best of LinkedIn: Digital Transformation & Tech

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: This episode is provided by Thomas Allgaier and Frennis based on the most relevant LinkedIn posts about cloud in calendar weeks, fifty one to two.
• 0:08
  Speaker 1: Frennis enables enterprises with market technology and competitive intelligence for portfolio and strategy development.
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: Welcome to the deep dive.
• 0:17
  Speaker 1: Our focus today is cutting straight through that, you know, end of year rush and the early year planning frenzy.
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: We're looking at the top cloud trends that really dominated conversations on LinkedIn.
• 0:27
  Speaker 0: Yeah, we have a heavy stack of sources from late twenty twenty five early twenty twenty six and The message, I think, is pretty clear.
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: Which is?
• 0:35
  Speaker 0: The whole philosophy of cloud adoption has fundamentally shifted.
• 0:38
  Speaker 0: It's just not about technology adoption anymore.
• 0:40
  Speaker 0: It's a strategic portfolio design challenge.
• 0:43
  Speaker 0: Oh,
• 0:43
  Speaker 1: portfolio challenge.
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: Exactly.
• 0:45
  Speaker 0: If you look across all the posts we analyzed, you see three dominant and often contradictory axes driving every major decision right now.
• 0:52
  Speaker 0: You've got cost, you have control or data sovereignty, and then the massive architectural rewrite being forced by Applied AI.
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: That tension right there, control.
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: cost, complexity.
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: That feels like the story of this period.
• 1:06
  Speaker 1: So let's unpack that.
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: Maybe starting with control.
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  Speaker 0: Let's do it.
• 1:09
  Speaker 1: We're seeing sovereignty and compliance move from being, I guess, abstract regulatory concerns to really hard, non-negotiable architectural constraints.
• 1:19
  Speaker 0: Precisely.
• 1:20
  Speaker 0: And Lars Newman, he really hit the nail on the head here.
• 1:24
  Speaker 0: He emphasized that cloud is now infrastructure.
• 1:27
  Speaker 0: It's not just IT anymore.
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: And if it's infrastructure.
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  Speaker 0: Then the legal frameworks around it, like the US Cloud Act, they become strategic geopolitical risk factors.
• 1:35
  Speaker 0: This is forcing global enterprises to completely rethink who has ultimate authority over their most sensitive data.
• 1:42
  Speaker 0: And
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  Speaker 1: nothing demonstrates that shift better than the Airbus case study.
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: I saw that highlighted by Marine Marcus and Scott Newton.
• 1:48
  Speaker 1: Yes.
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: This isn't theoretical.
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: Airbus is actively looking for a truly sovereign EU cloud to move its most critical systems.
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  Speaker 0: And the sheer scope of what they're moving is the real point.
• 1:58
  Speaker 0: They're looking to shift ERP systems, manufacturing execution systems, PLM, product
• 2:03
  Speaker 1: lifecycle management.
• 2:05
  Speaker 0: Right.
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  Speaker 0: And their core aircraft designs.
• 2:07
  Speaker 0: I mean, Catherine Justin, their EVP digital was very clear.
• 2:10
  Speaker 0: They need a sovereign cloud to guarantee that information stays entirely under European control.
• 2:15
  Speaker 1: Wait, moving ERP and PLM, that is not a casual migration.
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  Speaker 1: Those are foundational systems.
• 2:21
  Speaker 1: Doesn't that just introduce massive complexity?
• 2:24
  Speaker 1: I mean, doesn't it undermine the whole cost efficiency goal just for political risk mitigation?
• 2:29
  Speaker 0: That's the core tension right there.
• 2:31
  Speaker 0: Suddenly, the cost of risk is higher than the cost of complexity.
• 2:35
  Speaker 0: But the sources also gave us a fantastic counter narrative.
• 2:39
  Speaker 0: Benjamin Herman, he effectively corrected the public framing.
• 2:43
  Speaker 0: He argued Airbus' real genius is focusing on cryptographic control, not geographic theater.
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: I love that phrase.
• 2:49
  Speaker 1: What does that mean in practice?
• 2:50
  Speaker 0: Well, Herman noted that Airbus has been using Google Workspace for years for some sensitive workloads, but, and this is the key, they use external Thiele's key management.
• 2:59
  Speaker 1: Ah, so they hold the keys themselves.
• 3:01
  Speaker 0: Exactly.
• 3:02
  Speaker 0: The architecture ensures that Airbus maintains exclusive ownership of the encryption keys.
• 3:07
  Speaker 0: The keys never touch the hyperscalers infrastructure.
• 3:10
  Speaker 0: So in this view, sovereignty is secured through zero trust and key management, not just by drawing lines on a map.
• 3:16
  Speaker 1: But the physical location debate isn't entirely dead, is it?
• 3:20
  Speaker 1: The US Cloud Act still looms over everything.
• 3:22
  Speaker 0: It absolutely does.
• 3:23
  Speaker 0: I mean, Daniel Popescu and Thomas Worth both confirmed that just hosting data in, say, Germany That doesn't provide reliable legal protection.
• 3:32
  Speaker 0: US authorities can still compel a US based provider to release data regardless of where the server
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: is.
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: And Thomas Worth mentioned something else, something that shifts the risk from legal compliance to hard security exposure.
• 3:45
  Speaker 0: The BMI legal opinion on executive order.
• 3:48
  Speaker 0: one, two, three, three, three.
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  Speaker 0: That's
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  Speaker 1: the one.
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  Speaker 0: Yeah.
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  Speaker 0: That allegedly authorizes US intelligence agencies to exploit vulnerabilities in foreign infrastructure without the cloud provider even knowing.
• 3:58
  Speaker 0: That's a fun.
• 3:59
  Speaker 0: different risk.
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  Speaker 0: You're not worried about a subpoena.
• 4:01
  Speaker 0: You're worried about a technical intrusion.
• 4:03
  Speaker 1: So if we can't rely purely on geography, how do architects even deal with this?
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  Speaker 0: Derek Dobson actually synthesized this into three practical models.
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  Speaker 0: You've got the full national stack, highest sovereignty, but it's the slowest and most expensive.
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  Speaker 0: Then you have a middle layer, foreign derived, but sovereign controlled.
• 4:20
  Speaker 0: And finally, the foreign hyperscaler with local controls like that cryptographic approach, fastest but lowest inherent sovereignty.
• 4:28
  Speaker 0: The market isn't choosing one.
• 4:30
  Speaker 0: It's adopting a mixed model based on the workload.
• 4:33
  Speaker 1: That makes perfect sense.
• 4:34
  Speaker 1: So for critical infrastructure, they have to pay that premium for control, which brings us, I think, perfectly to the second axis.
• 4:41
  Speaker 1: cost.
• 4:42
  Speaker 1: If sovereignty is driving up complexity, Phenops has to be the answer.
• 4:45
  Speaker 1: It's
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  Speaker 0: mandatory, especially when you see the waste.
• 4:48
  Speaker 0: A post from Tier Mahara quantified it.
• 4:51
  Speaker 0: Eighty-four percent of organizations say optimizing cloud costs is their biggest challenge.
• 4:55
  Speaker 0: Eighty-four
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  Speaker 1: percent.
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  Speaker 0: And the result is that up to thirty percent of their cloud spend is pure waste.
• 4:59
  Speaker 0: Just gone.
• 5:00
  Speaker 0: Without proper governance, that's an astronomical amount of money.
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  Speaker 1: And you can't just fix that with a new tool.
• 5:07
  Speaker 1: Mohammed C. really underscored that fine-ups has to be a cultural foundation.
• 5:10
  Speaker 1: He defined it through three disciplines.
• 5:12
  Speaker 1: Visibility, optimization, and governance.
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  Speaker 0: And you can't optimize what you can't see.
• 5:17
  Speaker 1: Exactly.
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  Speaker 1: If you don't have visibility and clear accountability, you can't even start.
• 5:22
  Speaker 0: And so much of that waste comes down to... shockingly basic oversights.
• 5:27
  Speaker 0: Isaiah Michael highlighted that cost overruns are fundamentally an ownership problem.
• 5:32
  Speaker 0: Meaning forgotten EC two instances, dev databases left running all night underutilized NAT gateways billing you twenty four seven.
• 5:40
  Speaker 0: It's the simple stuff.
• 5:41
  Speaker 1: But focusing on things like NAT gateways, that implies engineers are just using platform defaults, right?
• 5:47
  Speaker 1: Is that just an ownership problem, or is it also a failure of the platform tooling to enforce smarter defaults?
• 5:53
  Speaker 0: It's a bit of both, but the ownership mindset is critical.
• 5:55
  Speaker 0: But we also saw great posts on granular engineering optimization.
• 5:59
  Speaker 0: Rajesh Khan and Rajendraan showed huge wins just by tuning SQL queries.
• 6:04
  Speaker 0: Things like filter early, join late, using union all instead of union, and strictly avoiding select and production code.
• 6:11
  Speaker 0: He showed these simple tweaks can cut runtime by fifty percent.
• 6:15
  Speaker 0: That's a direct cut to your cloud bill.
• 6:17
  Speaker 1: Fifty percent.
• 6:18
  Speaker 1: That's significant.
• 6:18
  Speaker 0: It's a powerful lesson.
• 6:20
  Speaker 0: And Thomas Staszleski cited the Netflix example.
• 6:23
  Speaker 0: They migrated self-managed Postgres to Amazon Aurora.
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  Speaker 0: The result.
• 6:27
  Speaker 0: Seventy-five percent faster performance and a twenty-eight percent cost reduction.
• 6:31
  Speaker 0: The operational overhead of managing your own database often kills any perceived savings.
• 6:36
  Speaker 1: So once you've got the quick wins, the next phase has to be automation.
• 6:40
  Speaker 1: getting away from manual spreadsheets.
• 6:41
  Speaker 0: Exactly.
• 6:43
  Speaker 0: Myth and Pandit stressed that future governance has to be policy as code.
• 6:46
  Speaker 0: AI-powered guardrails embedded right in the CICD pipeline.
• 6:50
  Speaker 0: Humans shift from policing resources to managing exceptions.
• 6:54
  Speaker 0: And
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  Speaker 1: the hyperscalers are making this easier.
• 6:56
  Speaker 1: Peter Kim highlighted a big AWS feature for executives.
• 6:59
  Speaker 1: the new AWS cost efficiency metric.
• 7:01
  Speaker 0: Right, a standardized automated score.
• 7:03
  Speaker 0: It tracks right sizing, idle cleanup, commitment savings.
• 7:06
  Speaker 1: It's a real KPI.
• 7:08
  Speaker 1: It moves all those granular decisions out of the weeds and onto an executive dashboard.
• 7:13
  Speaker 1: A single trackable number.
• 7:15
  Speaker 0: That's the value.
• 7:16
  Speaker 0: And for the teams in the trenches, Loic Fournier detailed the new AWS account tag support.
• 7:22
  Speaker 0: That's a huge simplification for multi-account visibility.
• 7:26
  Speaker 0: It tags untaggable costs like credits and refunds and streamlined savings plans attribution.
• 7:31
  Speaker 1: Simple things like cagging can make or break a Phenops
• 7:33
  Speaker 0: program.
• 7:34
  Speaker 0: Without those details, visibility is just perpetually broken.
• 7:37
  Speaker 1: Okay, so we've talked about Phenops, but the sheer complexity of AI workloads is rewriting the optimization rules completely.
• 7:44
  Speaker 1: Let's pivot to AI, the third axis.
• 7:46
  Speaker 1: The
• 7:47
  Speaker 0: structural force.
• 7:48
  Speaker 1: Yes, we're seeing flagship programs emerge, like the German industrial AI cloud, a massive effort noted by Irwin Shetty and make bomb guard.
• 7:55
  Speaker 0: And Dr.
• 7:55
  Speaker 0: Ferry Abelhausen is pushing this as a secure sovereign ecosystem specifically for industrial AI.
• 8:02
  Speaker 0: This whole AI shift is transforming the cost discussion into what Nicholas Fundrini called inference economics.
• 8:08
  Speaker 1: Inference economics, I like that.
• 8:10
  Speaker 0: The idea is that cost control shifts away from infrastructure capacity, you know, VMs, and moves toward real-time decision costs.
• 8:17
  Speaker 0: The price of tokens, the volume of prompts, the latency, optimization becomes an architectural problem, not just a server-right-sizing problem.
• 8:24
  Speaker 1: It's a completely new economic model.
• 8:26
  Speaker 1: Totally.
• 8:27
  Speaker 1: And generative AI is even changing how we interact with the spend data.
• 8:31
  Speaker 1: Dibba Jody Monopatra noted that tools like AWS Q and Azure AI agents are enabling conversational fine ops.
• 8:37
  Speaker 0: So instead of digging through reports,
• 8:39
  Speaker 1: you just ask the tool, why did our S three spend spike?
• 8:42
  Speaker 1: Fifteen percent last Tuesday and get an immediate contextual answer.
• 8:46
  Speaker 0: And if the AI answers the why, then the fine ops professional can shift from data digging to policy enforcement and strategic review.
• 8:53
  Speaker 0: The machine reports, the human enforces the rules, which
• 8:57
  Speaker 1: leads to the strategic view on scaling AI.
• 8:59
  Speaker 1: Dr.
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  Speaker 1: Ferry Abelhausen stated that agentic AI is the key to scaling AI beyond the ninety-five percent of pilot projects that fail.
• 9:06
  Speaker 0: Yes.
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  Speaker 0: Agentic AI uses orchestrated agents to find, connect, and securely act on data across different systems.
• 9:13
  Speaker 0: It's how you move AI from an isolated experiment into productive enterprise IT.
• 9:19
  Speaker 0: Agents give AI the ability to
• 9:21
  Speaker 1: act.
• 9:21
  Speaker 1: And this massive new demand for high-speed AI inference is changing the architectural blueprint.
• 9:27
  Speaker 1: Obena Icedenso summarized it really neatly.
• 9:29
  Speaker 1: Sovereign cloud for control.
• 9:31
  Speaker 1: edge for speed, and central regions for scale.
• 9:34
  Speaker 0: And AI inference for robotics and things like that, it absolutely demands that low latency performance.
• 9:40
  Speaker 0: you only get at the edge.
• 9:41
  Speaker 1: We've covered these three, access control, cost, AI, but they all intersect at the core issue of operational maturity.
• 9:47
  Speaker 1: Right,
• 9:47
  Speaker 0: and UiClose's principle is the necessary reminder here.
• 9:51
  Speaker 0: Clever in the cloud isn't about moving VMs, it's about designing for business outcomes from the start, avoiding that lift and shift
• 9:57
  Speaker 1: trap.
• 9:57
  Speaker 1: And the fastest path to that clever outcome is standardized deployment.
• 10:01
  Speaker 1: Jonathan Vell highlighted using Azure Landing Zones with Bicep.
• 10:05
  Speaker 1: It acts as an accelerator, giving you a secure, governed foundation using infrastructure as code from day one.
• 10:10
  Speaker 0: Which leads right to security maturity.
• 10:13
  Speaker 1: Tamer
• 10:14
  Speaker 0: Ejlal insisted that visibility is the absolute non-negotiable foundation.
• 10:19
  Speaker 0: Before you worry about alerts or scores, you have to inventory all your resources, find shadow accounts, and define ownership.
• 10:26
  Speaker 0: You
• 10:26
  Speaker 1: cannot secure what you cannot inventory.
• 10:28
  Speaker 0: That's it.
• 10:29
  Speaker 0: It's a powerful point.
• 10:30
  Speaker 1: And that inventory is enabled by the foundational platform tooling.
• 10:34
  Speaker 1: Rami Alcafaje listed the key AWS tools for this.
• 10:38
  Speaker 0: Security Hub, which is your central dashboard, GuardDuty for threat detection on API calls, and Config, which records resource settings and checks compliance.
• 10:47
  Speaker 0: Together they give you that necessary inventory and early detection system.
• 10:51
  Speaker 1: So bringing this all full circle to the engineering team who has to build all this.
• 10:55
  Speaker 1: What's the required mindset for twenty-twenty-six?
• 10:58
  Speaker 0: Lefteris Krijorje had some really excellent advice.
• 11:01
  Speaker 0: He said aspiring cloud engineers need to stop overthinking and just start building.
• 11:04
  Speaker 1: Learn by doing.
• 11:05
  Speaker 1: Yes.
• 11:06
  Speaker 0: Deploy a static website on S-three, then add CloudFront, then add IAC.
• 11:10
  Speaker 0: Failure in the build process teaches more than any certification ever will.
• 11:14
  Speaker 1: And he also laid out five essential traits separating good engineers from the exceptional ones.
• 11:19
  Speaker 0: Yeah, they were relentless curiosity, always asking why.
• 11:22
  Speaker 0: systems thinking, understanding how the pieces fit, clarity and communication, which is essential, true ownership, you know, caring about production at three AM.
• 11:31
  Speaker 1: And the last one?
• 11:32
  Speaker 0: Polymathie, the ability to bridge across security, networking, and the core business strategy.
• 11:39
  Speaker 0: That last one is crucial for navigating these three complex axes.
• 11:44
  Speaker 1: So to synthesize everything, the cloud market right now is defined by this massive tension, the pursuit of geopolitical control through sovereignty.
• 11:53
  Speaker 1: battling against the insatiable demand for algorithmic efficiency from AI fine ops.
• 11:57
  Speaker 0: And they constantly pull cost and complexity in opposite directions.
• 12:01
  Speaker 1: So as you map out your architecture for the next few years, maybe consider the concept of optionality.
• 12:06
  Speaker 1: Guy Bartram suggested that the best roadmaps are designing for twenty twenty eight.
• 12:09
  Speaker 1: They're prioritizing optionality through data portability and even quantum readiness.
• 12:13
  Speaker 0: Building that flexibility in now reduces friction and builds leverage later.
• 12:17
  Speaker 1: So the question for you to mull over is, how much does optionality factor into your current architecture decisions?
• 12:23
  Speaker 1: If you enjoyed this episode, new episodes drop every two weeks.
• 12:27
  Speaker 1: Also check out our other editions on ICT and tech, digital products and services, artificial intelligence, sustainability and green ICT, defense tech
• 12:36
  Speaker 0: and health.
• 12:36
  Speaker 0: Thank you for diving deep with us.
• 12:38
  Speaker 0: Be sure to subscribe so you don't miss our next analysis.