Latest / Best of LinkedIn: Digital Transformation & Tech / Best of LinkedIn: Cloud Insights CW 13/ 14

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Best of LinkedIn: Cloud Insights CW 13/ 14 · Best of LinkedIn: Digital Transformation & Tech

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: This episode is provided by Thomas Allgaier and Frennus based on the most relevant LinkedIn posts about cloud in calendar weeks, thirteen and fourteen.
• 0:09
  Speaker 1: Frenness has built a sovereign Cloud Market Radar for ICT providers with weekly hot news monthly reports quarterly leadership presentations an AI podcasts for field teams.
• 0:20
  Speaker 1: you can find more info.
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: Welcome to the deep dive everyone.
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  Speaker 0: Yeah, really glad to be here We've got.
• 0:27
  Speaker 0: we've got a lot too unpacked for you
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  Speaker 1: today sovereign cloud strategies, the operationalization of AI agents and finally FinOps industrialization.
• 0:57
  Speaker 0: It's a packed agenda but it all connects really beautifully?
• 1:01
  Speaker 0: It
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  Speaker 1: does!
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  Speaker 1: And I think before we can even talk about the flashy stuff like advanced AI or you know multi-cloud economics... We really have to look at how tech professionals are fundamentally rethinking cloud architecture and security.
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  Speaker 1: Oh,
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  Speaker 0: absolutely!
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  Speaker 0: I mean there is a massive shift happening right now in how we even conceptualize the Cloud.
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  Speaker 1: Right like For years, learning Azure or AWS was basically an exercise in rote memorization.
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  Speaker 0: Yeah just flashcards of proprietary service names?
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  Speaker 1: Exactly.
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  Speaker 1: but we're seeing top architects aggressively pivot away from that like I was looking at an insight for Rajeeb Chanda and he argues that learning shouldn't be about memorizing services at all.
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  Speaker 0: Right it's about the underlying mechanics.
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  Speaker 1: yeah He calls understanding layers responsibility.
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  Speaker 1: you know identity networking compute data Because if you don't grasp the fundamental physics of those layers, memorizing the exact brand name for a specific load balancer is totally useless.
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  Speaker 0: It really is and Lefterskara Giorgio emphasized this same shift.
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  Speaker 0: He had great posts pointing out that engineers struggle when they fixate on a vendor's specific implementation diagram
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  Speaker 1: Instead of actual system behavior
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  Speaker 0: Precisely Like, if you deeply understand a three-tier web architecture where your presentation application and database layers are isolated or how event driven microservices handle queues then the specific cloud services are just interchangeable parts.
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  Speaker 1: Okay let's unpack this bit because it sounds to me like trying to build a house by just memorizing the names of tools at hardware
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  Speaker 0: store.
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  Speaker 0: That is great way.
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  Speaker 0: put it
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  Speaker 1: Right!
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  Speaker 1: You might know what a hammer And maybe you know what it costs, but that doesn't mean you have any clue how the plumbing needs to route through a load bearing wall.
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  Speaker 0: Exactly and honestly if you don't know How The Plumbing Connects To The Framing You Definitely Don't Know How To Secure The House.
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  Speaker 1: Oh Man Yeah.
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  Speaker 0: Which Is Why This Architectural Mindset is Completely Redefining Cloud Security.
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  Speaker 0: Tymer Ejal Made A Brilliant Observation Recently About This.
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  Speaker 1: What Did He Say?
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  Speaker 0: He Pointed Out That Attackers Don'T Break Individual Services.
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  Speaker 0: They Exploit The Pathways Between Them.
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  Speaker 0: So security is really about how services connect and the attack paths those connections create.
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  Speaker 1: Wait, hold on!
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  Speaker 1: If attackers are exploiting pathways rather than individual services doesn't that mean our entire legacy approach to endpoint security kind of misaligned?
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  Speaker 0: It's massively misalign.
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  Speaker 0: I think most modern breaches happen because a series small seemingly okay configuration decisions across different layers
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  Speaker 1: And they just chain together
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  Speaker 0: they connect to create an unintended attack path.
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  Speaker 0: Security isn't just about locking a single door anymore, it's about mapping how trust flows dynamically between you know thousands of microservices
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  Speaker 1: which perfectly brings in this fascinating conceptual model.
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  Speaker 1: I saw from Daniel Spangenberg oh the
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  Speaker 0: time dimensions one yeah
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  Speaker 1: exactly.
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  Speaker 1: he argues that cloud security actually spans three distinct eras.
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  Speaker 1: You have the past, the present and future.
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  Speaker 0: It's such an effective way to diagnose security gaps.
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  Speaker 0: like The Past is governed by CSPM tools Cloud Security Posture Management.
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  Speaker 1: Right because they just scan the infrastructure To tell you what state your already in.
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  Speaker 1: They look backward at misconfigurations that are already happened
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  Speaker 0: Exactly.
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  Speaker 0: And then the Present Is Your Sime Territory.
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  Speaker 0: You know security information and event management.
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  Speaker 1: But I mean, Simon struggles with modern architectures right?
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  Speaker 1: Because in a microservices environment an event stream is basically just fire hose of noise.
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  Speaker 0: Oh it's incredibly difficult!
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  Speaker 0: Simon was trying to catch the thief while they're walking down the hallway which nearly impossible when millions legitimate automated events are happening at that exact same second
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  Speaker 1: Right Which brings us into future.
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  Speaker 0: Yes The Future Is Policy.
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  Speaker 0: As Code You embed the security rules right into the deployment pipeline.
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  Speaker 1: And I think the ultimate challenge for everyone listening right now is unifying those three time dimensions.
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  Speaker 1: Unifying past, present and future.
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  Speaker 1: so your teams aren't constantly switching mental models.
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  Speaker 0: If you want to know just how urgent that unification problem is You'd have to look at market moves.
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  Speaker 1: Oh!
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  Speaker 1: You mean Google & Wiz thing?
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  Speaker 0: Yeah I mean Google's thirty two billion dollar acquisition of wiz Is entirely about solving this architecture problems.
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  Speaker 1: It's a massive number.
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  Speaker 1: And Canna S and Jaco Silva did some great analysis on this.
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  Speaker 1: They noted that Google isn't just buying another security tool, they're buying cut into cloud context
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  Speaker 0: Right!
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  Speaker 0: Their merging whizzes infrastructure mapping with their own AI threat intelligence Exactly...they
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  Speaker 1: are trying to deliver A unified code-to-cloud run time protection layer.
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  Speaker 1: The truly wild part is there aiming across AWS, Azure and GCP simultaneously.
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  Speaker 0: It's a huge play for the Enterprise Foundation.
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  Speaker 0: Yeah But you know IBM is executing a very similar strategy which Michael Morachnick and Catherine Wong pointed out recently.
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  Speaker 0: Oh
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  Speaker 1: with their recent acquisitions?
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  Speaker 1: yeah
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  Speaker 0: over The last eighteen months IBM has heavily integrated Hashi core for infrastructure automation Red Hat for hybrid cloud and Confluent for real-time data streaming.
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  Speaker 0: They're basically assembling an AI-first enterprise stack for highly regulated environments.
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  Speaker 1: But okay, if we are mapping out these attack paths and were securing the flow of data across all this interconnected environment eventually you hit a physical wall?
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  Speaker 0: You do!
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  Speaker 0: Geography
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  Speaker 1: Right...you have to answer where does this data actually live And who legally has authority?
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  Speaker 1: look at
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  Speaker 0: it Which is exactly why Sovereign Cloud has evolved.
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  Speaker 0: I mean its moved from each compliance topic into central strategic pillar for global enterprises.
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  Speaker 1: Dr.
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  Speaker 1: Sun Peterson actually had a great post about this philosophy, he noted that Sovereign Cloud is moving way beyond just checking a data residency box for an auditor.
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  Speaker 1: Oh
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  Speaker 0: especially in Europe.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah!
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  Speaker 1: For Europe it's literally becoming the path to strategic autonomy.
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  Speaker 0: But you know we have to inject a reality check here which Nish Srebhavan provided recently, because organizations are demanding full sovereignty low cost and high speed all at once.
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  Speaker 1: Which is impossible!
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  Speaker 0: Totally impossible.
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  Speaker 0: Sovereign Cloud has fundamentally about making hard choices and accepting trade-offs.
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  Speaker 0: Wait
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  Speaker 1: wait let me push back on that.
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  Speaker 1: Aren't these hyperscalars promising us we can have it all?
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  Speaker 1: Is Soveregn cloud just becoming a marketing buzzword totally ignores the friction of actual deployment.
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  Speaker 0: That's exactly what Ann Leslie highlighted.
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  Speaker 0: Her perspective on this is crucial.
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  Speaker 0: She says Sovereign Cloud isn't a label.
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  Speaker 0: It's an operating reality that only really gets tested when the system is under severe stress.
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  Speaker 1: Under stress, how so?
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  Speaker 0: Like it's not just about where the servers sit... ...it's about who retains decision authority when a geopolitical shift happens or when a massive operational incident occurs.
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  Speaker 1: Oh!
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  Speaker 1: That makes sense and Martin Merce echoed that deeply.
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  Speaker 1: He pointed out that true sovereignty means understanding your dependencies actionable choices rather than just being locked into a proprietary stack.
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  Speaker 0: And we are seeing the hyperscalers and ecosystem actively responding to this demand, like Oracle.
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  Speaker 0: EU Sovereign Cloud hit their three-year milestone.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah, Michele Hustings and Jason Rees shared some wild stats on that.
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  Speaker 1: Their capacity grew by four hundred percent.
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  Speaker 1: They're now supporting NVIDIA GPU shapes for AI directly in those environments
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  Speaker 0: Which is huge for localized inference.
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  Speaker 0: And then you have Microsoft making moves, too.
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  Speaker 0: Douglas Phillips and Lisa Monaco highlighted how Microsoft and Armada are bringing sovereign AI to completely disconnected edge environments
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  Speaker 1: using Azure local right
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  Speaker 0: exactly so You can run a high-end highly regulated mobile settings with zero public internet connectivity.
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  Speaker 1: But we also cannot ignore the European alternatives.
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  Speaker 1: elk Andrew recently celebrated the ten year anniversary of T systems t cloud Public.
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  Speaker 1: That's a true European sovereign alternative.
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  Speaker 0: And Herod Jues mentioned the Neonephas Foundation, which is doing some incredible work building vendor-neutral open source sovereign cloud infrastructure.
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  Speaker 1: Okay so let us take step back and look at what we have built in this conversation.
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  Speaker 1: You've mapped the dependencies, locked down the architecture built a perfectly compliant sovereign fortress.
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  Speaker 0: It's pretty secure right?
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  Speaker 1: and then you deploy A fleet of autonomous AI agents inside it that absolutely break The entire governance model?
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  Speaker 0: It's the ultimate irony isn't it?
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  Speaker 0: we're moving so fast from experimental AI to production grade agentic workflows...the
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  Speaker 1: speed Of deployment is just staggering.
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  Speaker 1: Renato Ramon de Souza posted this incredible example.
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  Speaker 1: He used Claude code to build a fully functional phenops expert agent inside co-pilot studio,
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  Speaker 0: let me guess it didn't take him months?
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  Speaker 1: It took them ten minutes, ten minutes to prove how fast external coding assistants are accelerating deployment.
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  Speaker 0: Wow and you know Riaz Syod added really great point for IT probes here.
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  Speaker 0: You don't need to build neural networks from scratch using complex calculus.
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  Speaker 1: No not at
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  Speaker 0: all.
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  Speaker 0: You just need enough AI knowledge to deploy and secure models.
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  Speaker 0: If you understand how to securely wire up AWS API Gateway, Lambda in bedrock... ...you are incredibly valuable right
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  Speaker 0: now.".
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  Speaker 1: But there's a serious governance crisis brewing here!
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  Speaker 1: Tristan Ingold raised a huge warning flag about operationalizing these agents.
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  Speaker 0: Yeah the IAM problem.
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  Speaker 1: Exactly current identity and access management stacks were fundamentally built for humans in The Loop
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  Speaker 0: Right.
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  Speaker 0: They assume a biological human is typing a password or clicking the token, but AI agents authenticate up to one hundred and forty eight times more frequently than humans do.
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  Speaker 0: One
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  Speaker 1: hundred and fourty-eight times?
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  Speaker 1: And they delegate!
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  Speaker 1: Agent A spins up agent B to do a task.
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  Speaker 1: so Tristan points out this creates a massive confused deputy liability.
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  Speaker 0: Okay here's where it gets really interesting to me because basically what you're saying Is we are giving The corporate credit card To a fleet of hyperactive robot interns.
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  Speaker 1: Yes
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  Speaker 0: But we're still using human ID badges to track them.
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  Speaker 0: How do we keep this from becoming an absolute disaster?
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  Speaker 0: Well,
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  Speaker 1: the ecosystem is starting to scramble for solutions... Per Gustafson shared some critical insights from Google Cloud's Gemini Enterprise events.
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  Speaker 0: What is the strategy they're pushing?
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  Speaker 1: He says, The solution requires an entirely new strategic blueprint.
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  Speaker 1: We need fine ops for agents to manage token consumption.
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  Speaker 1: we open standards prevent shadow agents and crucially agent-to-agent communication protocols.
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  Speaker 0: They aren't just passing around static human centric tokens Exactly!
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  Speaker 1: They need dynamically verify intent in scope
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  Speaker 0: which seamlessly transitions us to our final theme.
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  Speaker 0: Because speaking of phenops for agents and managing all this consumption, operating complex architectures in sovereign clouds with AI agents requires a massive evolution on how we track cloud
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  Speaker 0: spend.".
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  Speaker 1: We really have to industrialize Phenops!
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  Speaker 1: Nicholas Fundrini introduced the brilliant concept that phenops must evolve from cost visibility to consumption intelligence.
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  Speaker 1: I
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  Speaker 0: love that distinction, because cost-visibility just explains the past.
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  Speaker 0: you look at it dashboard and realize You blew your budget three weeks ago
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  Speaker 1: right?
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  Speaker 1: It does nothing to fix the present but consumption intelligence actually governs The present.
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  Speaker 1: it embeds guardrails into the architecture
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  Speaker 0: And Victor Garcia supported this strongly.
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  Speaker 0: he noted that manual tagging is basically a slow death for phenops.
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  Speaker 1: Oh chasing developers four tags via email
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  Speaker 0: the worst.
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  Speaker 0: The absolute worst, the goal has to be making cloud spend a hundred percent searchable and automated by
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  Speaker 0: default.".
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  Speaker 1: And we're seeing technical guardrails being released to solve these exact problems.
• 12:27
  Speaker 1: like Shotenaka shared that Snowflake just released new cost control parameters for Cortex-Can?
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  Speaker 1: They added twenty four hour rolling credit consumption limits specifically to stop unexpected AI bills from bankrupting.
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  Speaker 1: That's
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  Speaker 0: essentially an emergency break for AI agents.
• 12:44
  Speaker 1: Exactly, and on the visibility side Pichimani Rajesh Kumar brought up a highly technical but incredibly impactful update from AWS.
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  Speaker 0: Always saw this one.
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  Speaker 0: S-three access logs right?
• 12:55
  Speaker 0: Yes
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  Speaker 1: AWS S three server access logs now finally include a source region field,
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  Speaker 0: which is huge.
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  Speaker 0: I mean anyone who has dealt with cross-region data transfer costs knows it used to take hours of manual
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  Speaker 1: correlation.
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  Speaker 1: It was the nightmare.
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  Speaker 1: and Now that one field eliminates all of that manual forensics
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  Speaker 0: its pure consumption intelligence Yeah.
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  Speaker 0: And we're seeing this visibility enhancement at the multi cloud level too.
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  Speaker 0: Yuri Picard co announced Fokie S dashboard one point two.
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  Speaker 0: Fokies
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  Speaker 1: is the open billing standard, right?
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  Speaker 0: And this dashboard automates multi cloud cost data consolidation.
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  Speaker 0: so it brings AWS Azure and GCP building into a single pane of glass automatically.
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  Speaker 0: no more manual normalization.
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  Speaker 1: It's So cool how all these pieces fit together.
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  Speaker 1: I mean we've gone from the architecture bedrock to sovereign borders to autonomous agents and finally, the fine ops layer that pays for it all.
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  Speaker 1: It
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  Speaker 0: really is an interconnected puzzle And you know I want to leave everyone listening with a final thought To mull over building on this entire discussion.
• 13:55
  Speaker 1: Lay it honest.
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  Speaker 0: So we talked about cloud security needing to span three time dimensions past present in future.
• 14:02
  Speaker 0: We just discussed how AI agents authenticate hundreds of times faster than humans.
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  Speaker 0: Right!
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  Speaker 0: It raises a very important question For The Industry Are we rapidly approaching a threshold where human governance of the cloud is literally impossible without an AI governing it for us?
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  Speaker 1: Oh, wow.
• 14:18
  Speaker 1: That's slightly terrifying but probably very accurate thought.
• 14:22
  Speaker 1: to end on if you enjoyed this episode new episodes drop every two weeks.
• 14:26
  Speaker 1: Also check out our other editions on ICT and tech digital products & services artificial intelligence sustainability in green ict defense Tech and health.
• 14:35
  Speaker 0: Thanks so much for joining The Conversation today.
• 14:37
  Speaker 1: Thank You!
• 14:37
  Speaker 1: And don't forget to subscribe.
• 14:38
  Speaker 1: Catch ya next time.