Sovereign Cloud

• Sovereignty needs control, not just European hosting
• Five layer control model defines European sovereignty
• US CLOUD Act still exposes Microsoft's sovereign cloud
• Key control delivers sovereignty inside public cloud
• Microsoft launches Sovereign Cloud capabilities in Paris
• Dutch Ministry of Defence and SAP agree sovereign cloud
• Starling trains its own AI model on UK sovereign cloud
• SAP and NTT plan sovereign cloud collaboration
• Tenders named US hyperscalers 47 times, European providers zero
• Google Cloud UK outage highlights lock-in risk

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FinOps and Cloud Cost

• Business teams, not FinOps, should own cloud costs
• Savings are a by-product of FinOps, not its goal
• Mature FinOps shapes technology investment decisions
• FinOps tools stall at recommendations, automation is next
• AWS FinOps agent on Bedrock detects waste
• Automated right sizing cut one client's spend 31%
• Deleted Azure VMs leave billing disks, IPs and snapshots
• Nearly 180 US companies hire for Snowflake cost tuning
• Billing units matter more than list prices across 500 clusters
• Steady Kubernetes workloads run cheaper on dedicated servers

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VMware and Hybrid Infrastructure

• Licensing predictability, not price, drives VMware evaluations
• Nine in ten VMware customers seek an exit
• NTT DOCOMO signs a 10 year VMware deal
• Nutanix evolves into a hybrid multicloud platform
• IBM brings Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization across its platforms
• HPE previews Morpheus Software v9.1
• 44% of AI infrastructure to run hybrid and edge by 2030
• HPE Spaceborne Computer-4 extends hybrid cloud to the lunar edge

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AI and Agents

• Cloud first has shifted to AI first
• Agentic AI repeats migration mistakes, governance is the bottleneck
• Autonomous operations need agents with persistent infrastructure context
• AWS Well-Architected Agent reviews environments and prepares fixes
• Natix launches as an autonomous Kubernetes agent
• OpenAI frontier models arrive on Google Cloud
• CNCF accepts AI conformance for NVIDIA Kubernetes Engine
• AI deployment should match data sensitivity and task
• GPU benchmarking grounds AI placement decisions
• Hyperscaler AI capex differs from the 1999 to 2001 telecom bubble
• Gartner's neocloud consolidation forecast is challenged
• IDC publishes first MarketScape on public cloud AI IaaS

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Cloud Security

• Most cloud incidents stem from identity failures
• Cloud Security Intent Enforcement prevents unsafe states
• 99.9% of fixable AI vulnerabilities remain open
• Hardware boundaries contain compromised agent sandboxes on Google Cloud
• Blocking public access and enabling encryption prevent common S3 mistakes

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Kubernetes and Cloud Operations

• Cloud is a system, and automation reproduces bad architecture faster
• Understanding Kubernetes components simplifies troubleshooting
• Assess, mobilize and modernize avoids costly lift and shift
• Google Cloud spans eleven service categories, with security across all

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Vendor Moves

• Google Cloud quarterly revenue doubled to $30.7B
• AWS could reach trillion dollar revenue within five to ten years
• Unified AWS Marketplace and Amazon Business storefront signals converging distribution
• SAP NS2 wins Defense Logistics Agency contract worth up to $903 million
• Snowflake commits $300 million to Saudi Arabia

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Thanks to Bruno Dzogovic, Harry Mylonas, Aiswarya Venkitesh, Abdessamad R., Marcel Velica, Darshan Shinde, Gayatri Gurav, Monish Ansari, Iris Tam, Namra Muhammad Naeem, Sean Barker, Mark Vigoroso, Francis Odum, Dave Michels, Peter de Lorenzi, Ben Edmond, Diana L., Sudeep Khire, Thomas Vallely, Micheal Cortez, Evan Kirstel, Jon Hunter, Trond Røvang, De Gaulle Fleurance, Jason Young-Jin Chang, Phil DeMarco, Jeff Steadman, Ruben Vander Stockt, Chuck Balog, Nitin Bhadauria, Amit Eyal Govrin, Jay McBain, Jesse Gossett, David Linthicum, Alok Kumar, Andreas Clever, Iuliia Petryshyn Thuen, Fadi Dasus, Stephan Frederik Jensen, Olivier Breton, Michael Stephenson, Baris Özcan, Calvin Zito, Sarshar Imtiaz, Mark Chmarny, Saurin Shah, Rohit Seth, Allan Holmes, Clever Anjos, Bill Sehmel, Satya Nadella, Brad Smith, Bart Van der Biest, Seb Johnson, Stephanie Wing, Fidelma Russo, Manos Raptopoulos, Sarbjeet Johal, John Savill, Karthikeyan J., Ali Arsanjani, Carrington Malin, Konstantinos Evangelakos, Arsham Eslami, Matthias Neumayer, Roman Kirsanov, Jose Castano, Dave McCarthy, Christoph Puppe, Nolan George and everyone else who contributed insights to this edition. Find the full list of posts and voices on LinkedIn: