# Enterprise AI Infrastructure, Platform Engineering, and FinOps Trends

**Podcast:** The InfoQ Podcast
**Published:** 2026-08-12

## Transcript

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Hello, and welcome to the InfoQ podcast.
My name is Daniel Bryant, and I'm going to be your host today.
Now, it's that time of the year where we look at the InfoQ cloud and DevOps trends.
There's lots going on in this space, plenty of AI, of course, plenty of non-AI developments.
Now, I've managed to assemble an amazing panel of folks from all walks of life, going to be talking about what they think is their most interesting trends.
challenges we're seeing, and also reporting on their experiences working within enterprises and a bunch of other organizations too.
So without further ado, let's get to the introductions.
Matt, could you introduce yourself, please?
Absolutely.
So my name is Matt Saunders.
I am one of the veteran editors at InfoQ on the DevOpsQ.
In my day job, I'm the VP of DevOps for Adaptivist, which is a big solutions.
services partner, mostly of Atlassian stuff.
So I'm spending most of my time in DevOps and platform engineering and spending lots of tokens.
Well done, Matt.
Thank you very much.
And Mark, over to you.
Hi, I'm Mark Sylvester.
So I'm one of the newer InfoQ editors.
I've actually been involved now for just over a year.
It's gone fast.
I'm also taking part in the DevOpsQ led by Matt.
My day job, I work for Griffithswaite based in Birmingham.
I suppose in the video I'll be able to see behind me.
I work as a...
platform and architecture manager in largely regulated and very enterprise customer base, but it keeps me very busy.
Fantastic.
Thanks, Mark.
Shweta, over to you.
Sure.
Hey, everyone.
I'm Shweta Vohra.
I'm in industry from 24 years in technology and somewhere along the way, I think I started understanding a bit thing or two about technology enough to file a few patents and write two books.
Areas which are closest to my heart are technology transformation, platform engineering, software architecture, and recently designing AI native systems.
And what I love is connecting strategy with hands-on engineering.
So that's the reason I'm really looking forward to our conversation today.
That's it.
Thanks, Reto.
We've already got a mention of AI there and token maxing.
We're on more on brand already, aren't we?
So Renato, over to you.
Hi, I'm Renato.
I've been InfoQ editor since 2021, I think.
I'm in a CloudQ day job, working mostly with cloud technology, mostly AWS stuff, trying to break things, try to put them back together.
I'm based in Berlin, in Germany.
I'm Italian.
I'm looking forward to go back for the summer to Italy tomorrow.
Fantastic.
Stefan, over to you.
Yes, I'm Stefan Wiggis.
Probably getting close to 10 years working for InfoQ.
And the last couple of years, I've been managing the CloudQ.
So writing about stuff, you know, Azure, AWS Cloudflare these days as well, Google.
In my day job, I'm a domain architect, as they call it, on technology.
So I work for the second largest health insurance company in the Netherlands.
Like Sveta, also starting to design some of the more AI-native solutions.
So I also now work with AI.
Next to also working on building up and running an integration platform for a company, I also involved some of the data initiatives in general.
So it's AI data and integration.
Fantastic.
Thanks, Efian.
My name is Daniel Bryant.
I'll be your host today.
I'm the InfoQ News Manager and also a QCon track host.
I'm super excited that Shvetta is actually going to be talking on my track at QCon San Francisco.
So there's already overlap here between the guests and the stuff we're doing at QCon.
And in my day job, I work as a product manager at Stasso and we have a lot of focus on building platforms.
So my focus is very much on building platforms for AI at the moment, just to continue that.
brand.
A lot of our customers are understanding how developers should interact with the platform and their agents are interacting with the platform.
So I'm sure I'll share some thoughts on that too.
But without further ado, let's kick off.
So I know we had a great discussion last year with some of the folks here and some other folks as well, but I'd like to start by saying which cloud and DevOps trends surprised you the most in the last year.
Now I'm going to start with you, Shveta, because I know you had some great opinions on last year as we were wrapping up the previous podcast.
So yeah, what surprised you the most in the last year?
Now, this might be very unexpected for you, Daniel, but what surprised me the most is not AI chips, not the agents, but the AI infrastructure spending is the largest built out in the technology world ever.
I mean, what I know from some of the facts, till 2025, we were around 450 billion-ish dollars.
But this year, some of the deals which have happened are really surprising and sometimes shocking also that the amount of electricity we are burning and on top of that chips we are building up.
That is most surprising because if you have heard about SpaceX plus Enthropic, SpaceX plus Google and various and similarly AWS.
You know, Microsoft and everyone is spending so much amount of money in AI infrastructure.
That's in the AI space surprises me the most.
Yeah, thanks, Shretta.
Stefian, what about yourself?
I know you mentioned, like Shretta, you're in the AI space at the moment.
What's your biggest surprise?
I would say the agent infrastructure arms race basically going on.
So you see a lot of hyperscalers investing in products already.
but then more from an AI perspective.
So I would say agent registry, DevOps agents with AWS.
I think even Microsoft has DevOps agents.
You see Google shipping a GKA agent sandbox, your CloudFlare shipping, a dynamic workload load.
Just some of the examples of some of those high-cost scalers that are really putting the AI infrastructure in their products, I would say.
or even building up frameworks like Microsoft Citadel.
I think that's something with AI Foundry to set a complete governance lane.
So there's a lot of investments there and releases of products, I would say.
So then that's kind of a surprise because before we're just talking about AI elephant in the room and looking at, you know, what we're going to do with AI.
But yeah, that's a completely different story today.
Even what Sweta told about the spend as well.
Yeah, yeah.
We're going to definitely come back to governance and compliance and sovereignty is something I hear a lot about in my day job.
And I know we talked about that last year.
So we'll definitely come back to that.
So great points.
Mark, can I throw it over to you?
What surprised you, do you think, over the last year?
Of course, you were at QCon London early in the year, right?
You got to learn from all these amazing folks there.
What kind of surprised you the most?
I wish I had a surprise that wasn't related to AI.
But unfortunately, it is.
And I think what I've noticed is how fast it's gone from AI being something that teams are encouraged to experiment with.
create something that's more efficient, to it being an absolute must from leadership level and the board.
And I think this is potentially something that exposes teams that aren't quite set up for it.
So QCon in London, I covered Matthew Skelton's talk about team topologies and how that relates to it.
And it does really show how some teams aren't quite set up for it just yet.
So I think it's come as a surprise to a lot of teams and to me.
Yeah, very interesting.
Yeah, that talk from Matthew, and I really enjoyed actually it.
It got me thinking about agents to people and the bounded context and not having one kind of agent to rule them all and these kind of things.
There's lots to break down that talk.
So great, great coverage on that.
Let me throw it over to Renato.
What's your thoughts on surprises from last year?
Well, I think I want to be the negative in the room.
And I don't want to mention AI.
So let's say that what really surprised me is how poor reliability.
of the major cloud services being the last year.
If someone had told me one year ago, we would have had the region of AWS off for six months due to a war or something I could not have forecasted, but as well, you asked Virginia down for quite some time last October with quite some repercussion on behalf of the internet.
And let's go back now to AI and let's talk about GitHub.
If someone had told me one year ago that we see this kind of number due to, of course, the pressure of new servers, new workloads, whatever, I would have not believed.
Yeah, very interesting.
Very interesting indeed.
Yeah, yeah.
Matt, wrapping us up for the surprise, and then we'll probably move on to some more AI chat.
Well, all of the surprises that people have said already have been surprises to me too, which leads me with my fifth best one.
I think I've got a decent one, which is the splits of the naysayers.
around ai and especially in terms of software delivery we've got a lot of people who have who seem to be going going hard on bigger better faster models fable etc let's use all these massive models to solve all of our problems and we can give them ever increasingly big problems but then there's another side of people and again people who are known and trusted from uh in the industry um some present company here now looking at ways where Instead of going bigger and faster, we're going smaller and smaller.
And so like agentic infrastructure, not only agents having like a coding agent and a testing agent and a CI agent, but having agents running agents and getting some real microservices type thinking over there and seeing that there's two paths there has been really interesting.
And whether those two paths will come back together again or not, whether one just turns out to be a whole load of hype and the other one turns out to be how we adopt.
agentic and AI in general into what are generally fairly well thought out human processes, it's going to be really interesting.
Yeah, yeah.
That's great, man.
Super interesting.
Folks, listening to the podcast, we are going to talk about other things in AI as well as the matter of caution there.
But I think it's really interesting again, because it is dominating all the conversations I'm having, right?
It's the elephant in the room we talked about last year, as Stefan mentioned.
And I did want to quickly cover...
sort of deep dive into the agentic space, and then we'll pull back up and have a look at platform engineering and FinOps and all those kind of good things.
But in 2025, we positioned AI agents for cloud engineering in the innovators category of the diffusion of innovation.
We love Jeffrey Moore's classic Crossing the Chasm book.
I want to pitch out to you all now, and I'll pick someone in just a moment, but has enterprise adoption moved forward, or are things like compliance, security, and governance still the primary?
blockers.
Now, Mark, I'm going to throw it your way because you work in a regulated industry, but you mentioned it's now a board level concern, right?
People are pushing on, hey, you've got to be adopting AI, you've got to be moving faster.
But do you bump into any compliance governance type issues?
Oh, hugely.
So we're trying to help our clients to adopt AI, but obviously when you're in an enterprise environment, you have many different teams that all have a piece of the pie and they all have their own involvement.
And what they're accustomed to is receiving tickets to do a particular task.
And what they're also used to is some big project being done.
They'll receive that information really, really late.
And then they'll be put on the critical path to do that.
And I think we've also run the risk a few times of certain teams moving forward with AI without really considering the wider organization.
They're working on their own personal or their own team's needs without actually sharing that knowledge.
So you've got team A who just got live with something.
And then team B are already 50% doing something very similar.
And there's a lot of wasted time.
So, yeah, I think we've largely run into compliance issues with security, and we're trying to build those teams into the systems that we're using from the start so all teams begin with a solid base.
Yeah, a little bit of a, I see a lot of conversation actually at Platform Economist recently of shifting left, shifting down, all these kind of things, which I'm sure will come up later.
But Stefan, any thoughts?
I saw you nodding along as Mark was speaking there.
Yeah, because, you know, as a health insurance, we're quite regulated as well because we're kind of a financial institution because we get a lot of money coming in, but also declaration of people that need, you know, healthcare and such.
Besides heavily regulated, also run into quite some of the compliancy.
things as well with dora and some of the other things that the european union come up so we're facing that so that's kind of a blocker also for ai initiatives there's quite a few of them and like mark there's also ones that are pretty similar or like hey you know do we really need to solve this with ai and also the general overall arching view of architecture and controlling a lot of these initiatives because you know the classic ml people are doing is different than the generative ai solutions that are building or even The ML people are using Databricks saying, hey, but we can also use language models and we don't need any of the other services in this case, Foundry, or if you were in an AWS environment, Bedrock, to get those models from that service because we are hosting our own language models and we're going to use those.
So, yeah, it's a bit of a coordination problem as well, I see, because everyone does its own thing.
It's like, oh, we're doing great stuff with AI.
Well, hey, wait a minute.
If you look overall, they're doing the same thing, or maybe this is already done with input management, so you don't really need to translate foreign declarations or invoices towards the Dutch things we need to do, because that's already placed in input management.
You don't need to use AI for it.
But then again, everyone wants to do AI and they want to move forward, and the business is asking for, hey, you need to do AI, AI.
Yeah, I've got to do my obligatory.
Simon Wardley mentioned at this point in terms of mapping the ecosystem.
There's some fantastic videos if folks want to check it out on Uninfoque.com.
But his stuff is just all...
I mean, he's been prescient on this stuff for years, but his stuff in terms of identifying duplication and balancing the innovation with commoditization is gold.
I recommend that stuff all the time.
Shweta, I know you've very much in this space and you've been writing some books on these kind of topics as well.
Any thoughts in terms of the challenge of things like security in this space?
I'll start with the...
The change.
I mean, for me, it was very evident to see after our, I think we did recording last year at the same time or August.
But the moment we reached November, December, there were so many things happened that January, February, it was evident that we are no more talking about personal productivity.
We are talking about team level productivity as Steph said, right?
So there is huge improvement from AI at individual level to AI at team level.
but we have more problems to solve at enterprise level.
In terms of security and compliance, I think putting the compliance and security around the models, because we have now open models, proprietary models, cloud-provided models, and everybody wants to use everything.
So there is definitely security required in that space, plus security in terms of how much of MCP you would...
exposing the tools through so that was a big check which I've seen where companies put a check that okay we cannot have everything every tool be open to everyone so that is the second place which I saw and of course I saw some synergy coming in in terms of tools that okay while there is a crazy amount of tools still there but some consolidation around the cloud or cursor or codex or these kind of tools which has started happening and most of the companies are leaning toward two or three of combinations of these tools so those are the checks and compliances which i have seen and for me it was like coming out from christmas and new year and suddenly you have like new hackathons new events coming in and of course I don't want to leave saying that Agentic AI Foundation, which also was formed in November, in December.
Yeah, yeah.
It was also a very good initiative, which is in this direction.
I mean, standardization is always a piece of security and compliance, though we are not fully yet, but it's a very good initiative it started.
Yeah, I like that.
The show notes, Shretta, that's a great call out for that foundation.
Several of my buddies, for example, are talking about how they've joined the steering committee there.
So yeah, great stuff.
Renato, any sort of thoughts on the security?
I know you're very much in the AWS space, right?
Yeah, I'm really in the AWS space and I think I'm quite skeptical about platforms like Bedrock and similar.
I really think they have a huge, at the moment, as a first wave where people really need to have, yeah, for compliance, security, whatever, they tick all the boxes.
Of course, it's much easier to get that.
But I wonder if in the long term, people will start to, they will use it just as a very first step.
But then the complexity of managing an extra layers, it doesn't really solve problem as the very first managed service, at least from my side, where you could see the big advantage to use a managed service for, say, a database versus do it yourself.
Here I see it more as a quick way to start.
When you then see your cloud bill, you start to think that maybe there are other ways.
Yes.
I think that's very well said.
I was reading one of Stefan's articles actually on the InfoQ recently saying that you're often trading off cost and security.
And as an architect now, you've got to do that analysis, right?
You've got to be like, hey, this is a great piece of functionality, but it's going to cost me 5x more than if I do my stuff myself.
What's the TCO, total cost of ownership, these kind of things.
Matt, I'd love to get your thoughts on this kind of stuff as well.
Yeah, absolutely.
And I'll try and tie in with some things that have already been said, particularly by my sweater and by Renato.
Yeah, I mean, talking to a decent number of CTOs in enterprises, and we're kind of on this fulcrum point now with the whole governance piece between lots of people doing a whole load of experiments, for example, in Bedrock.
So we've got a massive AWS infrastructure.
Other cloud providers are available.
And so it's natural to just use those for our experiments.
We've got something running in Bedrock, which is helping doing a whole load of jira migrations and using an ai assistant to do that and it's it's brilliant it's fantastic but when you get into the bigger enterprise scenarios then you hear the problems from the momentum of individual developers doing a whole load of things for example developers hooking up an ai through mcp to some internal systems and you see things like well that's using the permissions of the user that set them up which is causing a whole load of governance and compliance strife And so I don't think we're not anywhere near solving that.
I mean, a lot of the people I talk to really want to, and it's changed to the last year.
People are a lot more gung-ho about exploiting AI, hopefully for good, and using it, if nothing else, because everybody else is going to be and you're going to get left behind.
But no one is not lost.
I just put an article on InfoQ quite recently about MCP having centralized auth now.
So there's a plugin.
for centralized auth, which means that you can actually, I mean, I have perception of MCP coming in and just running roughshod over permissions and IAM that you have in your internal organization.
And that inevitably has led to it not being as adopted as much as it might've been.
So yeah, the kind of uncool enterprise level tooling.
There isn't yet another model that's going to send all of your data to a country you don't want it to go to, but it's actually solving some real world enterprise problems.
I think we're seeing more of, and it's going to help us with compliance and governance and take a lot of those issues that we've been seeing with the early adopters in big companies, take them off the table a bit.
Yeah, I love it, Matt.
Definitely, I'm seeing in my day job, a lot of folks now are asking, as we're building platforms, if they're going to expose by MCP, what does the security constraints, what do they apply?
A lot of people are driving it through portals and using the Kubernetes model of RBAC through the portals, but you don't get the same thing with MCP, for example.
And I would just shout out, Jim and Andrea did a fantastic talk at QCon London, where they said, focus on the API layer first, make sure your governance, your compliance, your security, your auth N and auth Z are all baked into that layer.
you can put another layer on top in terms of portals mcp service now jira whatever you whatever you like right but they really made this argument for like strong api governance which is like we've been doing that for years right now i think it's a really good point i definitely saw a lot of yoloing with mcp over the last year but now folks coming to me are like how does the auth model work in this and great shout out matt for some some stuff i'll put in the show notes so like sort of like centralizing some of this stuff too I'd like to move on to something I just mentioned there, platform engineering now.
So in 2025, we moved platform engineering teams to early adopters.
I think Hatip to Team Topologies, Matthew Manuel doing amazing work and many others in the community as well.
I'm kind of curious, are folks seeing product teams?
What's the state of internal developer platforms?
Are folks still building these things out?
Is it now internal agent platforms?
What are people hearing out there in the world?
Who should I first do first?
I'll throw this to Renato.
Are you bumping into anything in this space?
No, and I don't really have an answer.
I mean, what's the future of platform engineering?
I have no idea.
But, well, I'm going to moderate next month InfoQ Live Roundtable about platform engineering in the AI age.
So I hope to find the answer for that.
Amazing.
That's a great answer.
I'll definitely link that in the show notes as well.
Mark, going across to you, are you going to experience sort of the IDPs in terms of platforms and agents and things?
Yeah, I think from what I've seen, it's become probably the main focus of the platform engineering teams with the clients that we're working with to become sort of AI native enablers to ensure that they don't always become a bottleneck.
Because as I mentioned in my earlier answer, it's become important that certain standards are in use for the whole company.
And what you'll find is if the platform isn't good enough, then teams will think they'll want to do it themselves in a completely different way.
So I think there's a lot of pressure and as well to do that in a cost-effective way.
Yeah, well said.
I definitely see people like the shadow platforms effectively, right?
It used to be shadow IT, now shadow platforms.
Bump into that lot on my day job.
Stefan, are you bumping into the IDP space at all?
Well, I have with integration, but that's all set up and then I think done.
I've talked about in previous episodes as well of this trend report, but I also see now that we're trying to set up a platform also for agentic AI.
So that's more for the language models and stuff.
The way they approach it, I'm not so sure either than, you know, in this case, Microsoft, because we are Microsoft House, has put out something like a Microsoft Citadel that enables you to set up a platform.
How is this going to flesh out and how is this going to work?
I'm not sure yet.
It's a hub spoke model where you have your centralized AI gateway.
So that's basically your API management you talked about, but then for your AI.
So I think Apigee has it, Microsoft has its API management, but then you can position this in the AI gateway as well.
And then behind it, you have your centralized model catalog.
So the ones that are allowed to be used.
And then they're going to go to what they call a spoke.
So that will be your team building up on the platform.
because that's focused provision as well, enabling you to build up your AI solution.
But how is that going to work or fan out?
Probably he'll tell you next year.
Yeah.
I'm definitely moving to a lot of folks building out AI platforms, like running sort of stuff in-house for sovereignty reasons or doing model routing in terms of being able to do cost control on easy kind of questions, easy prompts versus the frontier models, these kind of things.
So yeah, I think that's going to be a topic definitely for next year's exploration.
Matt, over to you.
Any thoughts on sort of the agentic space in the IDPs?
Well, I was going to start by saying I think platform engineering as a whole, I think, is in a bit of a holding pattern now.
We've made a whole load of progress.
Like Mark said, we've got used to delivering platforms where if people don't want to use them, they go off and shadow it.
Oh, they skunk work something else.
And that's kind of accepted.
And the reason I say it's a holding pattern is because the world has changed.
Platform engineering teams at Adaptivist, we're not talking about how best to terraform stuff out or where to.
host your wiki pages or if github is up or down anymore it's all about data sovereignty it's about hosting models it's about access control around the frontier models and working out how we best add value from a platform level so that 100 people don't make their own decisions on that i don't think we've figured it out yet i think we're still experimenting with it but the the good thing for me is that yeah we're kind of Not really, really.
I mean, admittedly, this is just my own small segment of the world that I'm looking at.
We're not really doing anything particularly innovative in platform engineering anymore, which isn't AI related.
And the world hasn't fallen apart, which kind of vindicates the approach, I think.
And yes, we've still got people off skunk works and things, especially in the agentic world, where the platform team is finding out about these things at the same time as the developers are.
So they can't possibly be ahead.
But yeah, we were doing the right things in platform engineering.
It's one of those things, I think we said it last year, it's not that exciting anymore.
And I don't mean that as a diss.
It's like, it's good and rubbed in.
But yeah, agentic changes it all.
We're doing a whole load of experiments on that, what that actually looks like, but ultimately struggling to keep up with what the devs are wanting to do, which is very much kind of early days of where we started with.
with platform engineering, I think, and is not necessarily a bad thing.
We've got a whole load of lessons from how we did it well for building out clouds, for example, and we can carry those on.
Yeah, I'll do my obligatory shout out to a lot of what's new is old and old is new and definitely look back.
They're only a shameless plug, but the InfoQ back catalog is there.
And I'm definitely referencing old articles.
Yes, it talks about cloud.
Yes, it talks about DevOps, but same principles kind of apply.
So I think that's, I do like the...
What's old is new, what's new is old.
Shveta, any final thoughts on this topic before we move on to perhaps some FinOps and other things?
I'll tell you two examples.
This year when I went for KubeCon, there were around 1,500 plus people registered and strangely 1,000 people at least were in the room.
And when I asked that, so I had one slide that is platform engineering Kubernetes, is platform engineering DevOps, is platform engineering portal.
So four options I had put.
And to my surprise, at least 70% of hands went up when I said platform engineering is just the rename of DevOps.
At least, you know, 70%.
So if I look at that, I want to say that still platform engineering is maturing.
But if I look at my own experience, I would put it in early majority now.
Because we are no more like Matt said, we are no more talking about like...
There should be one IAC vendor or one IAC type or two.
We are not talking about BKS, this Kubernetes as a service, where Kubernetes everybody is, we have less of options.
Let's put it that way.
If I look at AWS, we have serverless Lambdas.
But when you start using Lambdas, you have a whole lot of things to put together to really make Lambdas to work and achieve what you want to achieve.
Then you fall back to...
You can't go to EC2s, so you have Kubernetes.
So then the Kubernetes service plus the engine has matured.
And with that, quite a few things have matured and we are no more talking about those basic stuff.
So I think I would lean towards stating that early majority.
And when it comes to IDPs, yes, that space also has matured.
Internal development portals I'm talking about where...
People have played around, many have sticked around backstage, somebody have taken the window portals, etc.
But it is required because it is still complex.
The engine is still there and that's where it might, now my next statement might surprise you.
But I've started putting a distinction between and I'm stating it to our teams as well that there has to be a difference between a platform engineer and a developer now.
Developer has to be on the higher abstraction layers and platform engineer can still stay.
grounded with the engines where we are having infrastructure and Kubernetes and whatnot.
So if that distinction comes and we understand that if we are building platforms, we are closer to platform engineering and more of the raw stuff.
If we are closer to the upper layers, we need not be worried about it.
That's how we will give the user experience, which is quite due in this space as well.
And quickly on the agentic developer portals, this is new thing.
Now everybody is playing with skills, plugins, hooks, you name it.
So many things I might not even be doing those old things.
But yeah, I mean, people have started putting it in various forms, which is early days of IDPs like we have all seen.
But this time it will mature faster, I hope, as an overall industry is maturing faster.
Yeah, I love it, Shredder.
I like your concept of the abstractions there.
And I always go back to the classic Martin-Thompson mechanical sympathy.
I, as a developer, always strive to know just sort of one layer down, right?
How the memory is managed, how the CPU works, just so I could build better systems.
But these days, there's so much to it, as in where do you draw the line in abstractions?
And where I want to go with that next is I do think finances are really important here, definitely as with my architect.
And I'm often advising folks of cost is a big consideration on how you build the system, what third-party systems you integrate.
Now, we sort of moved FinOps across last year, I think, into a later category.
And we said that this is a strategic thought.
What's people's thoughts in general?
I mean, AI is costing a lot of money, right, these years.
I don't know if we're bumping into that at all.
Do we have now good tooling in this space for FinOps?
Matt, can I throw it across to you first?
Yeah.
Yeah, this is a bugbear of mine because I'm having a discussion at work right now.
It's just like, once we've used our token budget, should we just go home?
Is our work done?
And I'm like, well, what have you achieved here, troll face?
Can you go home?
Is the tooling there?
No, it's not.
But I don't think all hope is lost because we're starting to bottom out that thing where...
It's almost like a presenteeism thing where I've got people just absolutely token maxing.
They're spending huge amounts of money on this now.
It's almost like we had a free pass for a couple of years where we've got this magic tool.
Some of us used to be kind of a bit, it felt like a guilty secret using these tools where you're spending a little bit of money and getting all this massive amounts of productivity.
And now suddenly it's like the zeitgeist feels like, Tokens are expensive.
You throw stuff at Opus or Fable and it's expensive.
Other LLMs are available.
And so, yeah, we're coming back towards, well, surely if you're spending all these tokens, then you are productive and starting to dismantle these ideas of things like number of lines of code that you've written are good metrics, which, frankly, we left that behind five years ago, but it's made a comeback because we're trying to work out how to measure productivity.
I think there's light at the end of the tunnel because just looking at Shweta, what you were saying about the abstraction and Daniel as well about the abstraction between developers and platform engineers and how we seem to be actually getting that right now.
And that's become more of a thing that people accept.
And what's also becoming more of a thing is it's a bit of a straw man, but you can throw any sort of gnarly problem into AI and it will go and solve it for you.
okay, so where are you as a developer adding the value?
I don't mean that in an accusative way because the people who are making the best at this are leveling up even further with the abstractions.
So we're looking more at outcomes.
And so, sorry, I've meandered to my point, which is the FinOps tools can tell you that Matt Saunders spent XYZ dollars on tokens in Opus, in Fable, in Sonnet, et cetera.
But none of them that I know of can actually relate that back to outcomes.
But then again, outcomes of this weird nebulous concept of you can get back to like Dora primitives.
How quickly are you getting an idea?
Yeah, the lead time on these things and getting these code actually into production and being used by users.
Can the tools keep up with this?
Probably, but we're going to have to look some more at how we actually measure them.
And we've also got that problem we haven't really solved, which is just as soon as you start shining a light on costs, There's just an instinctive pressure to try and reduce those costs without justifying that.
There's food for thought there, Matt.
Food for thought.
Renato, can I throw it over to you?
Any thoughts on this one?
I think I just thought on what Matt just said.
I think, I mean, if I look back one, two years, two years ago, definitely the focus was use some tools that were deterministic to find your costs, try to optimize them, usually try to reduce your storage costs, try to find the best storage class, colder, not colder, whatever.
The same for data transfer, the same for CPU.
Two years on, we have that is still there, but reality is the major new expense is AI.
And all those AI components from models to backdrop to anything else you're using, any agent, managed service you use based on agent, you don't have a full visibility on it.
They go up.
You probably even use now even not any more deterministic tools to cost control them.
So you use a...
FinOps agent to control AI spending, hoping for the best, basically.
That's the direction, I think.
And I don't know, the visibility then is not there as well.
As Matt said as well, most of those costs is a proxy of something else.
So it's pretty hard to optimize on that.
If I have to optimize on data transfer, I have some numbers, I have some figures, I can optimize on token or how much a specific developer or a specific team has used.
It's much harder because it's harder to determine the value of that.
As well, the elephant in the room is as well.
I can try to optimize those costs, but are those costs subsidized right now by the big provider to kind of lock you in?
Or are the real costs that I'm going to sustain long term?
So that area became such a big uncertainty that all the rest almost feels like, not negligible, but the focus has shifted somehow.
Yeah.
Yeah, I tell you.
No, that's great.
Great points for both of you there.
Stefan, you got any thoughts on this one as well?
I must agree what Renato and Matt are saying.
And though I do see that there's ways to control the costs if you would be using something like an AA gateway policy.
So you can set policies on consumption.
You can have some of the metrics policies in place as well.
They can show you what team is using what type of cost.
And then with some of the other policies, you can also direct them to the right model instead of using, let's say, a big model like a Fable to do something simple.
So you're not using a Formula One car to do your groceries, right?
That makes no sense.
So in that way, I do feel that there's ways to control somehow the cost.
But then if you have to tie to a certain value outcome towards the business, then it comes a bit, hmm, I'm not so sure because the tools will not tell you that.
The tools will definitely tell you cost.
I've seen improvements with...
Azure and AWS putting out a console.
So even like the AWS console can do some of the sustainability as well.
So if you look at that aspect on green computing, those tools can definitely tell you a lot.
But in general, generating costs and then tying them to a certain business outcome and then it's valuable.
So your investment just make, you know, create a lot of value.
That's pretty...
I mean, it's subjective and tricky as well, because I don't think there's still out there.
Yeah, maybe you can ask what Renato is saying, some kind of thin-up agent tell you, hey, you know, spend this, and this is the value it's creating.
Is it really, you know, valuable for the business?
Yes or no?
Yeah, yeah.
It will predict, it's not deterministic, so it will predict, well, yes or no, based on the parameters you give or the information it will give you.
Yeah, yeah, super interesting.
Schwetter, you any thoughts on this one?
I think in addition to what all you have said, I'll just put the perspective from the FinOps foundation side of things, because there also we have seen all these problems exist.
And somewhere in their article, I had read that beautifully put, I don't know exact words, but it goes like this, that we have hit already the big rocks of wastage around AI and cloud optimizations.
Now we have smaller opportunities in form of agents.
So many agents.
But effort required to put it together to make use of it is the next set of challenge we all are going through.
So everybody have coding agents to use and producing something.
But instead of those big models, big investments, MLOps, etc., we have now reached to these small lots of pebbles around.
We need to gather them and make sense out of it.
Almost every company is going through the same challenge.
And that's why FinOps Foundation has also forked out the tokenomics or something like that foundation, right?
So hoping that will also accelerate the work in this direction.
But clouds, as usual, are difficult.
If we use Corey Quinn's, he always gives us good analogies, right?
That you have made the...
The whole bill is so complicated.
And now if you give all these FinOps agents, et cetera, why not to solve it in first place?
Indeed.
Yeah, fantastic.
Mark, you got any thoughts on this one?
Yeah, just a quick one.
I think the FinOps tools do exist to get the kind of teams like the engineering teams where you have the information they need.
But what I've seen in enterprises is that they're almost not quite visible to the engineering teams.
It's almost between the finance departments and the asset owners potentially.
But the engineering teams absolutely do care.
And I think there's the added risk now with computing and similar that a small change in a model could 10x your costs, whereas we didn't have that problem before.
And the engineers definitely do care.
I mean, I saw that firsthand on the 1st of June when GitHub changed their model and the propel taken away might be an issue.
But yeah, it'll become more and more important in my opinion.
As a final topic, I'd love to dive into sovereignty.
I'm bumping into this a lot when I was at KubeCon and QCon recently.
This topic came up a lot, particularly in the EU space.
I'd love to pick your brains, folks, on where you think this trend is going and what the difference is perhaps around the world now.
But I know we're probably going to look at this probably from an EU lens.
So, Stefan, can I start with you?
What's your thoughts on the digital sovereignty we're seeing?
It's quite interesting because the company I work for...
Almost all the applications and systems and even hyperscalers, it's all American, right?
So even our policy system is American, so it's based on Oracle and so forth.
Although in the architecture room, you see, you have these talks about sovereignty too.
But if we want to completely be sovereign, then we kind of have to rebuild and re-engineer everything.
So that's kind of hard also because, and I think Renato's done in Munich.
I talked about some of the stuff around sovereignty.
The European cloud providers can provide IS, the storage, and that kind of stuff.
But when it comes to platform services, it's going to be a little bit tricky.
And also when it comes to software as a service, so some of the services we use as well, for instance, Salesforce is a CRM system.
I don't really know the alternative for that one, for instance, and we already heavily invested in that one.
So completely, or being sovereign in some parts.
It's kind of tricky.
So I know it's popping up everywhere and I've written about and seen it.
But yeah, from my perspective in the industry I work for, at least a lot of the health insurance, they're pretty much invested a lot in, I would say, American applications and systems.
So to be sovereign, it's going to be tricky, I would say.
Yeah, yes.
Mark, can I go to you on this?
I know, again, working with regulated companies, I'm sure it's a topic that you bump into quite a bit.
All of our clients are within Europe and they are absolutely adamant on keeping everything within Europe.
And I'll just say quickly about half of our clients are actually gradually migrating back on-prem.
It's absolutely a trend that I've seen.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Fascinating.
I'm about to be exactly the same as well.
Like folks in calls I'm on now are like, do you support sovereign platforms?
Yes, we do.
So yeah, it's definitely a, definitely a thing.
Matt, are you any thoughts on this one?
I mean, I haven't got too much.
More to add to what Stifian and Mark have said, but it feels a lot like that thing where everyone moved to the cloud a few years ago.
It was like, oh, we're a bank.
We can't possibly move to the cloud.
We have to run our stuff in our own data centers.
And the cloud providers eventually managed to do that right.
Taking the example of Salesforce, there's obviously a problem there with people who can't use US companies, but those companies will start to solve these problems.
so that European companies can use them.
The other danger here is, and I'm seeing less of this now, which is where people are like, well, we can't use that service.
It's in the US.
Well, let's just Vibeco when we can run it under my desk.
That seems to be going away again.
Also, the political climate seems a little bit better, unless you're a fan of red card suspensions and all that.
Therefore, yeah, it doesn't seem to be as big an issue.
as it ever was.
A, because the political climate's a bit better, and B, because I think we are solving some of these problems as an industry.
Yeah, I love it, Matt.
Renato, are you going to tell us now?
That's a big topic.
I think, yeah, there's no real, you cannot be 100% EU-based.
I mean, yes, even if you put it in your own data center, you can argue about software, you can argue about hardware, you can argue about many pieces.
some way is a journey, somehow, even the fact that the cloud providers themselves provide now new regions that they call European ones, I saw kind of a different taken on that.
One side, a lot of arguments, if they are really European.
The other one is basically they raise the point to people that didn't think about that before.
So people that used to deploy to, let's call them standard region in Europe from Asia or from AWS, say, so what was wrong with that?
that didn't really realize the challenge before and they see it now.
I don't know where we are going.
I hope there will be more options.
I'm not super skeptical, but I still think that in Europe we are most of the provider that provides an alternative is mostly marketing.
And at least they don't offer the kind of services to the level that they should provide to be a real alternative.
It reminds me a bit of the early day of S3 when everyone was claiming to have S3 backend.
That was basically just one single server running with a S3 API.
I mean, yes, you have the API, but you don't have the scalability, you don't have anything else.
So I think we are still far from being able to be really servering in Europe.
And I find that a bit sad.
Now, that's an interesting point, Renato.
Petra, any final thoughts on this topic?
It is like...
Renato said that it's double-edged sword.
We don't know where it is going.
What is that sovereignty we are trying to create?
Data was always a thing which we secured through GDPR and boundaries and what can be shared across boundaries.
So data intelligence, the only problem which I see is the models because models are trained on internet's data.
Internet's data is about everybody's data, which is already in open, which is already shared.
I'm not too sure, but I know it's a double-edged sword.
One side, I want to say that these efforts, because of political, socio-technical reasons, this needs to be increased.
Effort definitely needs to be increased.
And AWS has already come up with this event cloud in Europe.
I've heard about GCP is also doing that.
And same thing, I think, Azure as well.
They're not there yet.
But ultimately, what is that they're trying to achieve is not clear to me.
So what will they secure boundaries from?
Is it data?
Is it model?
If it is model, it's already at a stage where it is challenging.
How would you secure it?
So if it is only about security across boundaries, would be very difficult to tap it now.
But let's see.
Great.
I think we have more questions than answers there, which is great because this is like a very early stage for all of us, I should say.
I think we all were saying, raising very good questions.
Let's do a quick wrap up, folks.
As we come to the end of this podcast, I'd like to get a quick sort of rapid fire round of the one trend that you think is overrated or that listeners should be cautious in adopting.
over the next year.
And I'm going to go around the room as I see it on the board here.
Matt, I'm afraid you get the least thinking time.
Oh, right.
Think, think, think, think, think.
Overrated.
I think it's the death of either the junior engineer or the senior engineer or whatever roles you think that some magic AI thing is going to replace.
I think that's kind of dying down at the moment.
And I think in the best companies were starting to have great conversations around, not just like, oh yeah, humans have feelings too.
No, or agents have feelings too.
But around how we're actually doing things in this newly empowered world where your feedback loops are almost instant because you're getting an AI to do thinking.
So yeah, overstated is like the predictions of what the world might look like in 5, 10, 15 years and how radically different it's going to be.
Fantastic.
Thanks, Matt.
Good one.
Mark, up to you.
Probably say fully autonomous agents in enterprise environments.
I still think there's a place to keep humans in the loop.
I think it's overrated for now.
The listeners will be so happy.
The agent listeners, maybe not so much, right?
Shweta, what do you think?
I would say stay conscious about the agentic side of things.
People are worried about the fancy stuff on top of it, what we are seeing.
And there is a lot more influencers and things going on.
But there is deeper problems to it because when we are moving from microservices to agentic world, it's like you have a system to manage taxis where, you know, taxi go from A to B stand.
It's predictable.
But here agentic world is more AI native way.
If we handle, that will be more manageable.
agentic harness and agentic meshes and more deeper problems are there.
Whereas stay away from the sophisticated portals and things and fancy stuff on top of that or skills or this or that.
This is, I would ask people to stay conscious about, not fall into that.
Yeah.
Keep it simple was the vibe there.
Renato, over to you.
Well, we haven't talked about developer experience, but I'm thinking as we're looking at what the cloud provider like AWS has done in the last year, killing and renaming their service 10,000 times.
I'm thinking most of them are overrated.
I will bet at least two, three of the major ones will disappear in the next 12 months.
And developer will start to care less about which models is running behind them and more about what they do.
It would be just a normal assistant, the way I see it.
Love it, love it.
Stefian.
Yeah, I think a lot has been said.
I think in general, the agent washing, that agents can do everything and all that stuff.
In a regulated environment like health insurance, we cannot have any autonomous agents.
Certain ways of decision-making always has to be a human or a doctor, so we can't have that.
Probably a lot of products, if it's platform or SaaS from any kind of vendor that has agents in them, you kind of have to wonder what's the added value of all that AI in your platform.
solution i would say because some of the stuff doesn't bring any value some of the stuff that you can do yourself in other ways some of it is just covered in a different service in a better way so that i would be weary of stay you know think about you know where agents can add value or not add value i would say yeah pick that at the right tool or or service or pattern or architectural guidance for it as well i would say Yeah, I'll double down on that.
I think the AI washing, I definitely saw this with the DevOps when I was really into the DevOps brand.
It's like you had to buy all new tools, like basically they were just like the same tools with like a DevOps veneer on top, right?
I think I'm seeing the same already with the AI stuff.
So my caution to folks is fundamentals.
Like that's definitely my InfoQ career.
Very lucky with InfoQ 10 plus years now.
It's reminded constantly of the amazing folks like yourselves talking about fundamentals.
And I'm like, I must not forget fundamentals.
I like the shiny tech.
We all do, right?
But the fundamentals are really core.
So that's my advice.
Thank you so much, everyone, for taking part in this.
I've learned a bunch of stuff.
I'm sure the listeners have as well.
We'll wrap this up.
We'll share this in multiple formats.
Folks can consume it to their hearts and content.
But I'll say a big thank you to all of you for participating.
Thanks so much.
Thanks for making it easy, Daniel, as always.
Thank you, Daniel.