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Join Viktor, a proud nerd and seasoned entrepreneur, whose academic
journey at Santa Clara University in Silicon Valley sparked a career
marked by innovation and foresight. From his college days, Viktor
embarked on an entrepreneurial path, beginning with YippieMove, a
groundbreaking email migration service, and continuing with a series
of bootstrapped ventures.

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Podcast Host
Listen to podcast on YouTube Listen to podcast on Spotify Listen to
podcast on Apple RSS Feed

Follow Me

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Join Viktor, a proud nerd and seasoned entrepreneur, whose academic
journey at Santa Clara University in Silicon Valley sparked a career
marked by innovation and foresight. From his college days, Viktor
embarked on an entrepreneurial path, beginning with YippieMove, a
groundbreaking email migration service, and continuing with a series
of bootstrapped ventures.

Europe's Battle for Tech Sovereignty: Why OpenStack Matters

Play On Listen to podcast on YouTube Listen to podcast on Spotify 
Listen to podcast on Apple Listen to podcast on Amazon music
28 MAR * 2025 1 hour 12 mins
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In this timely conversation with Johan Christenson, founder of Cleura
and board member of OpenInfra (overseeing Kata Containers and
OpenStack), we dive into Europe's growing urgency around digital
sovereignty and what it will actually take to build a competitive,
homegrown cloud ecosystem. Johan, a long-time advocate for open
source infrastructure, pulls back the curtain on why progress has
been so slow and where things can shift.

We kick off by looking at Europe's deep dependence on U.S. cloud
providers, and the real-world risks that come with it. From pricing
power and data availability to political influence and tech autonomy,
Johan explains how this imbalance affects everything from government
policy to startup growth.

A major part of our conversation breaks down the key blockers that
have kept Europe stuck:

  * Procurement systems that favor incumbents over local innovation
  * Long-standing vendor lock-in across schools, agencies, and
    enterprises
  * A steady brain drain of top talent to non-European tech companies
  * Innovation programs that reward optics over sustainable outcomes
  * The sheer complexity of building a scalable, fully independent
    cloud stack

Johan explains the uphill battle smaller providers face when going up
against hyperscalers -- not just on price, but on the range and depth
of services they offer. He draws a sharp contrast between basic
infrastructure and the fully integrated ecosystems that dominate the
market.

We explore his experience building on OpenStack, including:

  * Why his company committed early to open infrastructure
  * Lessons from over a decade of contributing to and operating at
    scale
  * How complexity, resilience, and governance affect platform
    choices
  * Why internal capability-building matters more than plug-and-play
    simplicity

From there, we expand into bigger-picture ideas: how European vendors
could collaborate more effectively, the role of technical standards
in shaping markets, and how cloud-native tools like Kubernetes, if
used thoughtfully, might help smaller players compete.

The episode wraps with a sharp take on Europe's regulatory landscape.
Johan argues that the problem isn't a lack of rules, but the lack of
enforcement. He walks through how the disconnect between policy
ambitions and operational reality slows down even the most
well-intentioned builders.

If you're thinking seriously about digital independence,
infrastructure sovereignty, or Europe's place in the global tech
stack, this conversation is both a clear-eyed reality check and a
grounded look at where change could come from.

For more on this topic, check out these related articles (in
Swedish):

  * Ge Sverige ett digitalt beredskapslyft
  * Europa behover ett digitalt airbusprojekt

Transcript

Show/Hide Transcript
[00:00] Viktor Petersson
Welcome back to another episode of Nerding out with Viktor.
[00:03] Viktor Petersson
Today I'm joined by Johan Christenson.
[00:05] Viktor Petersson
Welcome, Johan.
[00:06] Johan Christenson
Thank you very much.
[00:08] Viktor Petersson
Johan.
[00:09] Viktor Petersson
You are in the epicenter of this whole new push that we see as of
lately with Europe standing up against America when it comes to tech.
[00:18] Viktor Petersson
And we've known each other for quite a while.
[00:21] Viktor Petersson
And you've been doing a company called.
[00:23] Viktor Petersson
Well, used to be called City Networks and now called Cloud Plura.
[00:26] Viktor Petersson
Is that correct?
[00:27] Viktor Petersson
That's a correct pronunciation of your.
[00:29] Viktor Petersson
Yeah, that's right.
[00:30] Viktor Petersson
Amazing.
[00:31] Viktor Petersson
So maybe recap for the audience.
[00:34] Viktor Petersson
What is this whole push that we're seeing from the European cloud
space in general?
[00:40] Johan Christenson
Well, I think that the push has actually been ongoing for quite some
time, but we have not necessarily succeeded quite well with that.
[00:47] Viktor Petersson
Fair enough.
[00:48] Johan Christenson
But of course, with all the things that are going on in the world
today, I think that people are waking up to a different world that
are actually.
[00:55] Johan Christenson
It's a little bit scary sometimes, right?
[00:57] Johan Christenson
There's a lot of vulnerability in society.
[01:00] Johan Christenson
Our competitiveness is going down and so forth.
[01:02] Johan Christenson
So there is a push, I think, for a lot of different things in that
sort of call for independence or not necessarily push against
anybody, but more to make sure that there's balance in society that,
you know, if things really go bad, we actually can do certain things
that maybe we're too dependent on a few players to actually do today.
[01:24] Viktor Petersson
Absolutely.
[01:25] Viktor Petersson
I mean, yeah, this comes down to like European 70 essentially when it
comes to tech.
[01:30] Viktor Petersson
And if we do look at almost any company in European ecosystem,
they're largely built to your point.
[01:37] Viktor Petersson
You had an article in one of the big Swedish newspapers lately about
this dependency, right.
[01:41] Viktor Petersson
About if these big clouds were to whatever block the European tech
sector or economic sector in general, we would be completely doomed.
[01:52] Viktor Petersson
Right.
[01:52] Viktor Petersson
So maybe speak a bit more like how you see that and how that's what
we do about this really.
[02:00] Johan Christenson
Well, I mean, you know, there is.
[02:02] Johan Christenson
If you.
[02:02] Johan Christenson
If you take that first bullet, right.
[02:04] Johan Christenson
There's a vulnerability that we built in over many years.
[02:08] Johan Christenson
You know, it's been a culture here in Europe that we buy American,
you know, used to be you never been fired for buying IBM, you know,
many years ago.
[02:17] Johan Christenson
And that's kind of changed over to different companies today.
[02:20] Viktor Petersson
Yeah.
[02:21] Johan Christenson
And that has gone so far today that there are true vulnerabilities.
[02:26] Johan Christenson
Some pieces we're building in ourselves.
[02:28] Johan Christenson
Like we have apps in Scandinavia that if an app doesn't work, you
can't access half of your things and it almost takes down a society.
[02:37] Johan Christenson
But then of course, what's maybe more concerning is the underlying
infrastructure of those things.
[02:42] Johan Christenson
It's kind of like easily put.
[02:43] Johan Christenson
You can say Europe needs to be able to build its own railways or its
own roads.
[02:48] Johan Christenson
We take that for granted.
[02:50] Johan Christenson
But for some reason, you know, we're so comfortable, you know, just
outsourcing everything else when it comes to it and as we know it
today is of course, the foundation for pretty much everything we do.
[03:01] Johan Christenson
Whether it's, you know, us doing this thing now or if you build
furniture or stuff that you don't associate with it's still a super
foundational part.
[03:13] Johan Christenson
And then if you don't have that, I think over time we've started to
realize that it's not just the vulnerability aspect in the sense that
if somebody hits the off switch or something just happens to it, you
know, we're super vulnerable as a society.
[03:29] Johan Christenson
Many times we talk about, you know, food, for example.
[03:33] Johan Christenson
We need to make sure that we can, you know, produce all the food.
[03:35] Johan Christenson
But very few people think about the carrots for the carrots actually
get to the table.
[03:40] Johan Christenson
There's so many processes, supply chains, and it is everywhere in
that.
[03:44] Johan Christenson
Right.
[03:44] Johan Christenson
So you have that aspect of the vulnerability, and that is just
immense, I would say.
[03:50] Johan Christenson
And today, of course, in our society, you know, a car, you know, can
you stop the car?
[03:56] Johan Christenson
Can you make the car go fast?
[03:58] Johan Christenson
You know, there's so many of these things that come up once societies
become more like, or I should say rather that we've had war next to
us and we feel more insecure with allies that used to be very
reliable, so to speak, and we might have the feeling that they're not
so reliable and there's so much of that vulnerability that goes
around.
[04:16] Johan Christenson
And you can go on and on about that.
[04:18] Johan Christenson
But then longer term for us, of course, is the competitiveness,
right?
[04:21] Johan Christenson
I mean, if you don't.
[04:24] Johan Christenson
If you don't have people that actually know the underlying
infrastructure and how you build that, but rather just innovate on
top of somebody else's innovation, you become completely dependent on
that as well.
[04:37] Johan Christenson
And of course, you also lose.
[04:39] Johan Christenson
You lose, know, that talent that could actually create that
underlying, you know, infrastructure, whether it's a road, a railway,
or in this case, it, infrastructure, you need those kind of talents
for you to be, you know, competitive in the higher layer, so to
speak, of it.
[04:56] Johan Christenson
So there's various aspects of this that I think we're waking up today
that, you know, it's been ongoing.
[05:02] Johan Christenson
I think there's been a lot of people that have seen it because you
don't build up these kind of dependencies overnight.
[05:07] Johan Christenson
Right.
[05:09] Johan Christenson
And in addition to those dependencies of the actual services
themselves.
[05:13] Johan Christenson
You know, in Sweden we used to have monopolies such as TL Vacate,
where, you know, you can only use one company to call somebody.
[05:21] Johan Christenson
And yeah, I remember back in the late 9, late 80s when I went to the
US the very first time, it cost like a buck fifty or euro fifty to
call anywhere for a minute.
[05:34] Johan Christenson
And then of course that broke down, right.
[05:36] Johan Christenson
And we realized that these monopolies are not so good.
[05:38] Johan Christenson
At least it's not good for the consumer.
[05:41] Johan Christenson
You know, ultimately everybody hates a monopoly until you have one
yourself, right.
[05:47] Johan Christenson
You might like it.
[05:48] Johan Christenson
So there's, you know, those monopolies or legopolies that are being
built up are also huge part of a vulnerable society, you know, and I
can only imagine if you're von de Lay and so to speak, who is
supposed to go in and negotiate with Trump or negotiate with anybody.
[06:08] Johan Christenson
When you have that kind of power against you're not in a great
position of power to negotiate, right?
[06:14] Johan Christenson
So, yeah, I think that's the situation where we're at and I think
that's just being exasperated, so to speak, with Trump potentially
then doing things now that are unexpected, let's just put it that.
[06:27] Viktor Petersson
Way, and let's actually deep dive into it a little bit because this
is far more like modern cloud is far more than spinning up a VM,
right?
[06:38] Viktor Petersson
Yeah, that's how cloud was in the early 2000s.
[06:41] Viktor Petersson
You can spin up a VM on any of these clouds, but they were somewhat
agnostic, right?
[06:45] Viktor Petersson
You spun up a VM there, you spun up a VM there like fine.
[06:49] Viktor Petersson
Today's tech stack is so far more sophisticated than that.
[06:51] Viktor Petersson
Right.
[06:52] Viktor Petersson
And I think that's really where it gets difficult.
[06:55] Viktor Petersson
Like it's not challenged today to spin up VM anywhere on the globe.
[07:00] Viktor Petersson
That's, that's a relatively trivial problem.
[07:02] Viktor Petersson
There are, even abstraction can do this, right?
[07:03] Viktor Petersson
But where it gets difficult is the services that sit on top.
[07:08] Viktor Petersson
Like, I don't even know how many products are in the AWS service
catalog today, but it's in, it's probably in the thousands, right?
[07:15] Viktor Petersson
And comparing that to any small to mid sized company or a mid sized
cloud or a large size cloud in Europe is still like a fraction of the
size of any of the big US Companies, right?
[07:28] Viktor Petersson
So how do you see that kind of shaping?
[07:31] Viktor Petersson
How can Europe become more competitive when it comes to this world
that has kind of climbed up the hierarchy of like abstraction, where
the abstraction is so high that we're far beyond the vm.
[07:44] Viktor Petersson
Even though, of course, under the scene, under the hood, it's
actually still a vm, or a lot of it is.
[07:50] Johan Christenson
Yeah, that's a, It's a broad question.
[07:52] Johan Christenson
Right.
[07:53] Johan Christenson
And I think it's the multi million dollar question type of thing to
solve.
[07:58] Johan Christenson
You know, I used to be naive when the Internet came around, I thought
that, wow, this is the coolest thing since sliced bread.
[08:04] Johan Christenson
And I thought it would democratize everything.
[08:06] Johan Christenson
You know, everybody can do everything.
[08:07] Johan Christenson
So it's going to be, you know, you're going to have so many different
services and so forth, right?
[08:12] Johan Christenson
Now, 20, 30 years later, all of a sudden, I think that some of those
things that I believe would democratize things is actually going the
other way around.
[08:22] Johan Christenson
Once the power is put into one particular, you look at a Facebook,
it's difficult to start another one.
[08:30] Johan Christenson
You look at these infrastructure services and so forth, and
ultimately it's turned the other way around where the power is put
into very small groups.
[08:41] Johan Christenson
And ultimately once you have that kind of power, it becomes very
difficult, I think, for the, I'm a market believer just to have it
said.
[08:49] Johan Christenson
And I love globalization, I love all of these things.
[08:52] Johan Christenson
But I do believe it's very difficult for the market to break that up
because not only do you have great services, like you just mentioned,
the lobbyism is everywhere.
[09:04] Johan Christenson
If you own a dog, you probably have somebody from a big company.
[09:06] Johan Christenson
They're saying what the dog collar should be connected to, right?
[09:10] Johan Christenson
So there's.
[09:12] Johan Christenson
It's just part of every corner of society, so to speak.
[09:16] Johan Christenson
Right.
[09:17] Johan Christenson
So I think, you know, I used to think that, you know, you made laws,
you know, you enforce those laws.
[09:23] Johan Christenson
It's apparent that you'll see some of these vulnerabilities or the
lack of competitiveness.
[09:28] Johan Christenson
I mean, this has been, in my mind, it's been obvious for the last
five, six, seven years, and yet it kind of requires a war for us to
wake up from that perspective.
[09:38] Johan Christenson
Right.
[09:39] Johan Christenson
And maybe it would have been okay to continue like that when
everybody's friends, you know, and so forth.
[09:44] Johan Christenson
But of course, as soon as something happens, you know, we come back
to thinking that, you know, we need certain things ourselves.
[09:50] Johan Christenson
Now solving that is.
[09:53] Johan Christenson
It's a.
[09:54] Johan Christenson
It's going to require extraordinary measures.
[09:58] Johan Christenson
In my mind, I don't think there's going to be European, you know, you
have clua, you have ovh, you have stacked, you have a few players
that first off, do good enough, I would say 90% of the companies
could run with these companies and actually do everything they need.
[10:13] Johan Christenson
I believe there's stats saying that 90% of the revenue from the tech
giants is the five basic services.
[10:22] Johan Christenson
So it's a lot of talk about the 5, 10%, but really what they're
buying are coming back to the things you're talking about.
[10:29] Johan Christenson
A server, kubernetes and containers and a few things on top of that,
of course, but when you glue it together, it still becomes as
attractive as you're saying there.
[10:39] Johan Christenson
So in my mind, in all honesty, I think that it requires extraordinary
measures for any of these things to change.
[10:46] Johan Christenson
And I think it's one thing is the buying aspect from the government.
[10:52] Johan Christenson
As a matter of fact, I hate to say it, but the government who were
fighting to remove monopolies, they're the greatest monopoly creators
at this point.
[10:59] Johan Christenson
I mean, I don't know, mention anybody who in government that does not
use, you know, Microsoft, for example, right?
[11:06] Johan Christenson
So, you know, if that service goes down, at least Sweden stops, You
know, the government can't send an email, you know, and that of
course, if things really, you know, shit hits the fan, that's a
concern, right?
[11:20] Johan Christenson
So I actually believe that the buying aspect is a critical aspect,
like how you have to actually force certain buying, I think sound
buying, right?
[11:30] Johan Christenson
You could put requirements into the buying, like so interoperability,
we talked about that for so long most of the time.
[11:37] Johan Christenson
If you use teams today, nothing against Microsoft or Jitsu or anybody
else, why should they not be able to call each other, right?
[11:45] Johan Christenson
Like, it all becomes like business to shut everybody out instead of
allowing people to actually work together.
[11:52] Johan Christenson
I mean, if you send an SMS today, you sit in the UK and I sit in
Sweden, you just assume that stuff should work.
[11:59] Johan Christenson
I don't care who you use or what phone you're using.
[12:02] Johan Christenson
So if you require certain things like interoperability, maybe you do
like open source because you want certain control, right?
[12:08] Johan Christenson
Maybe if you're under certain laws, like FISA stuff that actually
really goes against certain things, I don't know, you might have
requirements that in this case the.
[12:19] Johan Christenson
That's not okay.
[12:20] Johan Christenson
And I think Europe needs toughen up there quite a bit.
[12:22] Johan Christenson
And dare to say that because most of the time, look at Gaiax, I don't
know, took two months and all of a sudden, you know, the big tech
companies were on stage, you know, and there's not enough drive to
say we need to do this and we kind of need to focus on it alone.
[12:37] Johan Christenson
So I think that there's a bunch of guiding principles that we can use
if we, you know, to drive purchasing and, you know, requirements such
as, you know, government cannot just choose one provider because that
creates that, you know, if you talk to anybody in Europe, like, we
have to have this because word only works with word and therefore
nothing else works.
[12:57] Johan Christenson
Right.
[12:58] Johan Christenson
So you use those guiding principles and then the purchasing.
[13:02] Johan Christenson
I think it was Bert who said, smart purchasing, you know, where you
actually put certain guiding principles in place.
[13:07] Johan Christenson
Right.
[13:08] Johan Christenson
And, you know, that's one aspect of it.
[13:11] Johan Christenson
Another aspect that I think Europe needs to change dramatically is
the whole thing the way we had Horizon 2020, billions of euros just
being divvied out.
[13:22] Viktor Petersson
That was just a free for all, for T systems to just pocket all that
profit, really.
[13:27] Johan Christenson
But it's wrong from everywhere, Victor.
[13:29] Johan Christenson
Right.
[13:30] Johan Christenson
It's wrong from us, the suppliers, too.
[13:32] Johan Christenson
Right.
[13:32] Johan Christenson
Because everybody sees free money and there's everybody coming
together in groups to say, how do we get this money?
[13:38] Johan Christenson
And the key aspect is we don't.
[13:41] Johan Christenson
We don't have enough commercialization in there.
[13:43] Johan Christenson
Right.
[13:44] Johan Christenson
You got to commercialize everything.
[13:45] Johan Christenson
So it cannot be paper that goes into a drawer.
[13:49] Johan Christenson
Europe produces a lot of those pieces of paper for an awful lot of
money, and it doesn't create that value that we're looking for.
[13:55] Johan Christenson
I'm not saying everything's bad, but I do think that we need to dare
to change our society and how we think about those things.
[14:01] Johan Christenson
We kind of conveniently just think that if we put money in there's
going to be innovation there.
[14:07] Johan Christenson
For instance, I see groups of bureaucrats getting that money because
they're the best at filling out forms.
[14:16] Johan Christenson
I myself, as a crazy entrepreneur, so to speak, I'm not even sure I
have the time or feeling that I want to fill this stuff out.
[14:22] Johan Christenson
And I think that maybe those are the peoples that we want to put the
money into the hands of these people where they cannot explain what
they're going to create, but they're going to create something that
we didn't know, but it was something that turned out to be cool.
[14:34] Johan Christenson
So it's fundamental cultural changes from government, for example,
that need to change.
[14:40] Johan Christenson
But the same goes, of course, from a, you know, from a private
perspective.
[14:44] Johan Christenson
Right.
[14:44] Johan Christenson
The suppliers need to do, I think, differently.
[14:47] Johan Christenson
I sat with one customer the other day, said, well, I want this in
ashtray.
[14:50] Johan Christenson
I said, well, okay, but listen, if you put this Norwegian player
together with this Swedish player, you have exactly that.
[14:55] Johan Christenson
And now you're actually regulatory compliant.
[14:58] Johan Christenson
You have certain other aspects, the flexibility that you wanted, all
the other business values kind of came in place.
[15:04] Johan Christenson
But of course, we as people, we think I have to get this in AWS or I
have to get this in Azure.
[15:10] Johan Christenson
But we don't put things together.
[15:12] Johan Christenson
So I think, like me as a supplier, I need to be much more open to
say, how do I work with this German company to make sure that we put
something together in a stack that we make it as easy to consume as.
[15:24] Johan Christenson
I gotta say, the Americans and Chinese have solved much better than
the European and actually the rest of the world when it comes to
infrastructure, at least.
[15:32] Johan Christenson
Right.
[15:33] Johan Christenson
But it's not just infrastructure, it's a lot of IT services.
[15:36] Johan Christenson
Tier 1, Tier 2, Tier 3.
[15:38] Johan Christenson
Right.
[15:38] Johan Christenson
It's usually Chinese or American in many of those senses.
[15:43] Johan Christenson
Right.
[15:44] Johan Christenson
So I think that there are steps that I think.
[15:48] Johan Christenson
I'm not sure Europeans dare to speak the language that needs to be
spoken to be able to make such a dramatic change.
[15:55] Johan Christenson
As you mentioned, I had the article about where I had one suggestion
where I said, like, listen, I think we need an Airbus project, you
know?
[16:02] Viktor Petersson
Right.
[16:03] Johan Christenson
In the 60s, you know, Europe for some reason felt like the dependency
to Boeing and the lack of competitiveness that we're going to have.
[16:11] Johan Christenson
Can hear the same words echoing again.
[16:13] Johan Christenson
Right.
[16:14] Johan Christenson
Shit, that's not good for us.
[16:16] Johan Christenson
We got to create something.
[16:17] Johan Christenson
It took a long time, right.
[16:18] Johan Christenson
We're 50 years into this thing now.
[16:21] Johan Christenson
But I don't think anybody feels that the Airbus project was a bad
thing.
[16:25] Johan Christenson
Right.
[16:25] Johan Christenson
It feels pretty good to have those airplane parts.
[16:27] Viktor Petersson
Yeah.
[16:28] Viktor Petersson
I wonder what the sentiment was at the time.
[16:30] Viktor Petersson
I'm sorry, I'm wondering what the sentiment was at a time, because
that's curious.
[16:34] Viktor Petersson
I'm curious about that, looking back at it.
[16:36] Viktor Petersson
Yeah, it was probably a success story, but what was the sentiment at
that given time in history?
[16:41] Johan Christenson
Usually there's a lot of resistance to that.
[16:43] Johan Christenson
Lots of money, government getting together and all that stuff.
[16:46] Johan Christenson
Right.
[16:46] Johan Christenson
I mean, the largest social program in the world is American.
[16:54] Johan Christenson
So Social Security.
[16:55] Johan Christenson
Right.
[16:56] Johan Christenson
Back in the days when that was created.
[16:58] Johan Christenson
Yeah.
[16:58] Johan Christenson
A lot of Americans don't like that word even.
[17:01] Johan Christenson
Right.
[17:01] Johan Christenson
But we didn't like it so much.
[17:03] Johan Christenson
Right.
[17:04] Johan Christenson
Today I would say that at least most people I know in the us they
would not want to remove Social Security today either.
[17:09] Johan Christenson
Right.
[17:10] Johan Christenson
So many times.
[17:11] Johan Christenson
It's extraordinary things.
[17:13] Johan Christenson
And there is a lot of resistance because it's new.
[17:16] Johan Christenson
I mean, it's a natural.
[17:17] Johan Christenson
It's a human thing.
[17:17] Johan Christenson
Right.
[17:18] Johan Christenson
It's something that you definitely will see with something like that
and of course, I mean I posted something on LinkedIn or whatever and
people like, oh, everybody just wants to tax money in this case.
[17:30] Johan Christenson
I think we just need to look a little bit more open towards, you
know, it's okay that somebody makes money.
[17:36] Johan Christenson
It's commercial, we need to commercialize it.
[17:39] Johan Christenson
We need to do these things right.
[17:41] Johan Christenson
But I'm hoping that maybe Europe can actually find its way by having
all of these countries coming together.
[17:45] Johan Christenson
Because Europe is a.
[17:46] Johan Christenson
Not just a fantastic place.
[17:48] Johan Christenson
Just said, I love Europe in so many ways and I think most people do
because it has a lot to offer, but it's also powerful when we show
that we and when we want to and show that power, so to speak.
[18:01] Johan Christenson
And I think Erebus was a great example of showing that when we put
that together, willpower and some of that money that's actually out
there, then we can do great things.
[18:10] Johan Christenson
And in this case I think we would have to just accelerate that.
[18:13] Johan Christenson
It's not a 30 year thing, but infrastructure is 10, 20, 30 years.
[18:17] Johan Christenson
So you got to start now to be ready in 10 or 15 years.
[18:21] Viktor Petersson
Yeah, there's a lot to unpack there in what you're saying.
[18:24] Viktor Petersson
One of the things that I think you spot on with is the tenders.
[18:27] Viktor Petersson
Right?
[18:27] Viktor Petersson
But the problem is writing tenders and decoding tenders is science by
itself.
[18:33] Viktor Petersson
And I know, at least from ministry, I've been involved oftentimes you
can know who already won the deal by the time you read the tender
because they've codified all the stuff that they can only get by the
time the tender goes out.
[18:45] Viktor Petersson
Right.
[18:45] Viktor Petersson
So that's a big problem.
[18:47] Viktor Petersson
And you mentioned Word, like, yeah, you put a tender out there like,
oh, it needs to be compatible with word.
[18:53] Viktor Petersson
You already won the deal.
[18:56] Viktor Petersson
And that's a big problem in I would imagine this space.
[18:58] Viktor Petersson
But I do think like it is something that could be done on a buying
side to a great degree and making sure that there is at least a
preference for this.
[19:11] Viktor Petersson
And I wonder also to your point about revenue from the big cloud
vendors, there is an 80:20 rule or something alike or 80:20 rule on
the revenue, but it's maybe not the best proxy for what's unlocking
the problems for the customer.
[19:32] Viktor Petersson
Because there might be a small thing, but it might actually unblock a
bigger business need even though it's not measured from revenue and
spend on the cloud.
[19:40] Viktor Petersson
That makes sense, right?
[19:42] Viktor Petersson
Like a Docker registry.
[19:45] Viktor Petersson
I know that's a bad example, but yeah, it makes your life a lot
easier, but it's probably not going to be a big deal in terms of your
spend.
[19:52] Viktor Petersson
Right, no, but I agree.
[19:54] Johan Christenson
I mean, that's the beauty of these services, right.
[19:57] Johan Christenson
And I think that the US is, you know, better at most things, making
it easy to use consumption.
[20:04] Johan Christenson
I mean, you can just go to, you know, ui, you know, I find many of
those, they've spent more time finding the right path and so forth.
[20:13] Johan Christenson
So I agree.
[20:15] Johan Christenson
Listen, this is nothing about, you know, that those services are bad.
[20:19] Johan Christenson
It's more a matter of catching up.
[20:20] Johan Christenson
And just to have it said, I think from a European perspective it's
more about balance, right?
[20:25] Johan Christenson
Like, I don't think anybody wants to kick anybody out, you know.
[20:28] Johan Christenson
Yeah, it's a matter of let's have balance because when there's too
much lack of balance, it creates things that's not great for
consumers and sometimes even nations.
[20:39] Johan Christenson
Right.
[20:39] Johan Christenson
And it's kind of not, you know, oxymoron where in the US I find them
to have a lot more antitrust type of stuff in the US against their
own companies than we do in Europe, you know, and there the
government's not even allowed to use public cloud per se because
they're set up with different alarm.
[20:56] Viktor Petersson
Yeah, yeah, but this is interesting, right?
[20:59] Viktor Petersson
In particular with regards to Microsoft, I would imagine most Swedish
governments, for instance, they use the Microsoft stack, I would
imagine.
[21:07] Viktor Petersson
And that has been, I mean if you look at Asia, they started as a
second or third tier cloud vendor well 10 years ago, but now have
largely caught up and I think they're exceeded Micro Google in span
now.
[21:21] Viktor Petersson
And largely because they came from that angle, everybody was at
Microsoft shops and now like, oh, would you like to move this to.
[21:27] Viktor Petersson
From on prem to our cloud so you can basically like use as a vendor
and what does the environment look like today?
[21:37] Viktor Petersson
Like if you like, because Microsoft, well, Microsoft Stack or the
Windows stack is getting so intertwined with the O365 stack, it's
like that is surely not looking well, good for the interdependency,
so to speak, right?
[21:56] Johan Christenson
No, so number one, you're right.
[21:59] Johan Christenson
I think if you look from a European perspective anyway, Microsoft
kind of owns the enterprise, right, from productivity tools up here.
[22:07] Johan Christenson
And today, like you said, Azure has evolved into something that's a
powerhouse as well on the bottom layer, so to speak.
[22:12] Johan Christenson
So no, I don't think necessarily it's looking good from that
perspective.
[22:16] Johan Christenson
But again, one can choose to go that route, right?
[22:20] Johan Christenson
It's a matter of choice and the choices are out there.
[22:23] Johan Christenson
It's just that, you know, they work Differently and so forth.
[22:26] Johan Christenson
Right.
[22:26] Johan Christenson
And keep in mind that this starts when you start in school, right.
[22:31] Johan Christenson
You know, so you know, you would have either Google used to always be
Microsoft, right?
[22:37] Johan Christenson
So early on in school you start using these tools.
[22:41] Johan Christenson
So you're pretty indoctrinated by the time you get your first job.
[22:45] Johan Christenson
So I don't think a lot of people see that as a problem.
[22:48] Johan Christenson
It's first now that things are wobbling around in the world, we're
starting to think, well, what happens if that happens?
[22:53] Johan Christenson
Or Wanderlane needs to actually go negotiating with this and like,
well this we're not in a good situation because we can't even do this
stuff right.
[23:00] Johan Christenson
But well, that's not good.
[23:01] Johan Christenson
There are options and it's a matter of us to choose to go that route.
[23:05] Johan Christenson
And the question is today there's just so much dragging us into that
side and again, not a bad side on either side, but that will not
allow us to either even spend the time to look at the European
providers as they are.
[23:20] Johan Christenson
Because you're completely right.
[23:22] Johan Christenson
The service is not quite there and not quite as good.
[23:24] Johan Christenson
And you just want, but if you.
[23:27] Viktor Petersson
Look at collaboration tools like Google Drive or, or Office365, like
there isn't really, is there really viable open source alternative or
non us alternative today?
[23:37] Viktor Petersson
Because I, I, I haven't seen any.
[23:38] Johan Christenson
At least on the productivity side you mean?
[23:41] Viktor Petersson
No, I mean on like the document sharing like online editor
collaboration tool like that.
[23:46] Viktor Petersson
Like you have the wikis of the world and the various tools like the
notions of the world and a bunch of open source like that.
[23:51] Viktor Petersson
But if you're talking like straight up word processing, a document
and spreadsheet management, I don't think there's much out there like
Open Office is great or LibreOffice is great, but that's still,
you're still shuffling files around.
[24:02] Viktor Petersson
It's a very different narrative from like working in the web space.
[24:05] Johan Christenson
No, I actually don't agree with you there.
[24:07] Johan Christenson
I think LibreOffice and all of these are doing, as a matter of fact,
I think when it came to sharing or you know, having multiple people
working in a document, I think Microsoft was late to the game and I
think that was probably because they, you know, they had their set of
tools the way they were and probably had to do quite a bit of
recoding to be able to get it all the way there.
[24:26] Johan Christenson
Clearly Google was there early.
[24:28] Johan Christenson
Right.
[24:28] Johan Christenson
But I think LibreOffice and a bunch of these open source and there's
more than Just them.
[24:32] Johan Christenson
Right, that had that since a long time and there's quite a few decent
systems out there.
[24:39] Johan Christenson
I get it.
[24:40] Johan Christenson
If you're 25,000 people and you want all these intricate, this, that,
whatever, right.
[24:45] Johan Christenson
It is difficult, right, because there's a lot of services around, you
might want to manage your mobile devices, you might want to do
something else, you know, so all of a sudden they fall off the wagon
somewhere.
[24:57] Johan Christenson
But as far as doing the regular stuff, whether it's email, you have
Icewarp, for example, from the Czech Republic where they have a full
suite doing just about everything you expect.
[25:11] Johan Christenson
But again they're not looked upon because we don't look outside.
[25:17] Johan Christenson
We normally look.
[25:19] Johan Christenson
There are plenty of people using them, of course.
[25:21] Johan Christenson
Right, but it's hard to break through in these areas where again, if
all government buys a certain product, it even becomes better for us
in the private sector who many times are touching government agencies
to have the same thing.
[25:35] Johan Christenson
Because it works, you know.
[25:38] Viktor Petersson
Yeah, it's an interesting one.
[25:39] Viktor Petersson
Like it's.
[25:40] Viktor Petersson
And I mean you are seeing some initial.
[25:44] Viktor Petersson
I mean, I guess the narrative shifts a little bit.
[25:47] Viktor Petersson
Like even Google Drive is becoming more of a wiki these days with
page less and all those things.
[25:52] Viktor Petersson
So maybe that will nudge people to be more comfortable with a wiki
style document than a traditional document style document, which will
then open up to a whole new plethora of new options.
[26:05] Viktor Petersson
Right?
[26:06] Johan Christenson
Yeah.
[26:06] Johan Christenson
But also the document situation I think works quite well.
[26:10] Johan Christenson
You know, whether it's, you know, spreadsheet type of stuff or
actually writing, I think that it kind of works well today.
[26:16] Johan Christenson
But I do, I think they complement each other.
[26:19] Johan Christenson
I think wiki is great for certain things and I think, you know,
document style is great for some things.
[26:24] Johan Christenson
And as far as collaboration goes, I think that there's tons of
European solutions, there's tons of open source, but again, not
necessarily always put together for the easy consumption where it's
just like I feel as comfortable.
[26:38] Johan Christenson
And again, if I don't know if somebody will change Docx into
something different so it doesn't work with me, then maybe that's a
bigger worry of mine as a business owner or as a government agency.
[26:50] Viktor Petersson
Yeah.
[26:50] Viktor Petersson
And interoperability between open source projects.
[26:54] Viktor Petersson
There have been quite a few projects out there to try to like I'm
blank on the names now because I've seen quite a few over the years.
[26:59] Viktor Petersson
But like these, like, oh, we write a rap, we've written wrapper on
top of these 10 different tools to make them kind of work together,
but they're often very fragile, right?
[27:09] Viktor Petersson
So like if I were the CISO or CTO for a CTO for like a mid size,
large size company, I'd be like, when that breaks, who do I call to
get that fixed right now?
[27:19] Viktor Petersson
Because otherwise my company stands still.
[27:21] Viktor Petersson
Right.
[27:21] Viktor Petersson
I guess that's the big argument for a managed solution.
[27:26] Viktor Petersson
I guess over many of these.
[27:28] Johan Christenson
No, but I think, you know what coming back to the RFPs and like what
kind of requirements you can put, right?
[27:33] Johan Christenson
So you have Element who has a protocol, you know, so all chats work
together.
[27:39] Johan Christenson
So if we just make sure that we set a protocol and let's say you have
to use that protocol, then it works with all the other ones that we
use, right?
[27:48] Johan Christenson
Same thing with extensions.
[27:49] Johan Christenson
I think that Europe could be much more of a standard setting.
[27:52] Johan Christenson
Listen, this is how the standard is.
[27:54] Johan Christenson
You have to follow that one, otherwise you can't sell to us.
[27:58] Johan Christenson
Which means I cannot go off making changes.
[28:00] Johan Christenson
So I ruin it for everybody else to work with me if I'm the monopoly,
right?
[28:05] Johan Christenson
There are actually quite easy things like that.
[28:07] Johan Christenson
Maybe it sounds easy, but it seems to me that there's again those
guiding principles, right?
[28:12] Johan Christenson
If you were to put some serious requirements that you are strong
enough to adhere to, then very quickly you would make, you know, not
only just allowing the field to open up, but you would probably look
at these big players to say, okay, they're going to probably follow.
[28:30] Johan Christenson
Europe is about 30% of the world market for many of these companies.
[28:33] Viktor Petersson
You know, I mean, it's a good point, right?
[28:36] Viktor Petersson
If you make the standards first spec, right?
[28:39] Viktor Petersson
Where you're like, well, if you're going to document management, this
is how the document looks like.
[28:44] Viktor Petersson
And you could probably base that on existing standards.
[28:47] Viktor Petersson
But then that definitely makes it easier to create an ecosystem
around it because I think that's really.
[28:52] Viktor Petersson
It needs to start with a standard almost for that ecosystem to spring
up.
[28:56] Viktor Petersson
Right?
[28:56] Viktor Petersson
And video communication is a good example of that as well.
[28:59] Johan Christenson
And some companies make it a business to make changes to those
standards or changes to those extensions to make sure it doesn't work
right.
[29:07] Johan Christenson
Again, coming back to if you use teams, you use jitsi, or use iSwarp
or Nextcloud, OpenTalk, whatever you use.
[29:13] Johan Christenson
It seems like if I were the government, I would want them to be able
to make calls to each other.
[29:20] Johan Christenson
You know, we have telephones today and it'd be weird if they didn't
work to call, you know, the other operator.
[29:26] Viktor Petersson
I mean, we do have standards for this already, like a 26826.
[29:30] Viktor Petersson
No, yeah, I know, exactly.
[29:33] Johan Christenson
We do have the standards, but the voip standards.
[29:35] Viktor Petersson
Yeah.
[29:36] Johan Christenson
It doesn't mean a company wants you to be able to pick up the phone.
[29:39] Viktor Petersson
That's right.
[29:40] Viktor Petersson
That's right.
[29:41] Johan Christenson
And those are the things again, you know, you as a nation can be very
good at making sure, you know, because I think most consumers,
ideally, they probably think, well, that makes sense.
[29:51] Johan Christenson
Why don't we do that?
[29:52] Viktor Petersson
Yeah, no, absolutely.
[29:55] Viktor Petersson
All right.
[29:55] Viktor Petersson
I want to switch gear a bit into the technical nerdiness because you
guys have done some really interesting stuff back from when I got to
know you, back when you were starting out.
[30:06] Viktor Petersson
You started doing OpenStack really early on, and I know you guys
spent a lot of time on OpenStack.
[30:12] Viktor Petersson
So maybe we start by unpacking your journey into OpenStack, because
obviously that is tying back to what we're talking about with open
standards.
[30:23] Viktor Petersson
That is like the open standard for VMs or managed VMs at scale, I
would say.
[30:28] Viktor Petersson
So maybe we switch gear a bit to OpenStack, how you got into
OpenStack, what your experience with OpenStack has been, and then we
dive in from there.
[30:37] Johan Christenson
All right, well, listen, so I used to be a big buyer of VMs, or big
buyers of servers.
[30:47] Johan Christenson
This is called back then, because you actually hold servers in back
then.
[30:51] Johan Christenson
We're talking 2004, 2005, when I was developing some other games and
so forth, where there was need for a lot of service.
[30:59] Johan Christenson
And then, of course, 2006, you know, AWS started, 2007, the iPhone
came along, Right.
[31:07] Johan Christenson
Hasn't been that long to the big shift.
[31:09] Johan Christenson
Before that, Europe dominated platforms, mobile phones, you know,
Symbian, blah, blah.
[31:16] Johan Christenson
So in 2008, I had learned that this thing with AWS was cool.
[31:21] Johan Christenson
Like you can do VMS like this, right?
[31:22] Johan Christenson
So I actually contacted a Canadian company called Anomaly at the
time, a few cool guys that were building something similar, so to
speak, Right.
[31:32] Johan Christenson
And I think they fell for similar things that we all fall for.
[31:37] Johan Christenson
Many of us have fallen for where they couldn't quite keep up with
innovation.
[31:40] Johan Christenson
Right.
[31:40] Johan Christenson
So we did cool stuff.
[31:42] Johan Christenson
But, you know, somewhere, 201112 kind of realized, shoot, as you
said, Asher was starting to pick up Steam.
[31:50] Johan Christenson
Wasn't that good in the beginning, just as we said.
[31:52] Johan Christenson
But, you know, slowly but surely, there they have the staying power
and they relentlessly continue.
[31:58] Johan Christenson
And that's where a lot of people, other people fall off the
bandwagon, right?
[32:03] Johan Christenson
So 2010 OpenStack starts at that point you have three or four
different, call it whatever, private cloud type solutions, Cloud
Stack being one of them.
[32:17] Johan Christenson
Right.
[32:17] Johan Christenson
And that was probably keeping on for the longest, so to speak.
[32:21] Johan Christenson
And it was kind of like, I don't know how many people are old enough
to know, but it's like VHS and Beta Max on the video side, right?
[32:29] Johan Christenson
VHS had the momentum, market momentum, but wasn't technically as good
as Betamax.
[32:35] Johan Christenson
Right.
[32:36] Johan Christenson
And I think when we made our decision in like 13 or 1213 to go
OpenStack at that point, it was just that choice where Cloud Stack
was more like put in the CD, the stuff just worked, right?
[32:50] Johan Christenson
And went for OpenStack for other reasons, for good and for bad.
[32:55] Johan Christenson
OpenStack is this thing that it's a plethora of things, you can do
whatever you want with it and that's a good thing, but it can also be
a bad thing, right?
[33:01] Johan Christenson
So it becomes more complex.
[33:03] Johan Christenson
So but we made that choice and have stayed with us since then and
been part of that amazing community which is, you know, again,
Jonathan Bryce and Mark Collier has been an institution, so to speak,
to drive that from start, you know, when BRAC Space and NASA came
together to start it, so to speak.
[33:25] Johan Christenson
And I would agree with you today, I think it's like the one standing
and the one where people now truly are going into.
[33:32] Johan Christenson
And I've been fortunate enough to be on the board of the Open
Infrastructure foundation for eight years.
[33:38] Johan Christenson
So I've been very close to the community and the people running it,
which has allowed me to see a few things that it's just quite amazing
both with open source, but OpenStack as a whole and our journey.
[33:51] Johan Christenson
In 2015, we launched our first cloud and in all honesty, it's not
like you know all the details, right?
[33:58] Johan Christenson
So we've learned a lot over that time.
[34:01] Johan Christenson
And I usually tell people today that when it comes to open source and
let's say OpenStack, it's like Open source is not free, it's free to
download, right?
[34:12] Johan Christenson
But you need to be there to learn or potentially contribute, which we
do today to OpenStack.
[34:21] Johan Christenson
But I also say that extra time that you invest in your colleagues to
become good at something, usually that knowledge is something that
drives value within your corporation.
[34:32] Johan Christenson
Somehow, somewhere you can choose to go the other way around, put the
CD in.
[34:36] Johan Christenson
And now I learn how to use somebody else's thing, right?
[34:39] Johan Christenson
So, you know, we've had that mentality at our company the whole time
where we really want to Drive that home to say, let's learn we are
our best Support.
[34:51] Johan Christenson
Whether it's OpenStack, I mean if you look at CLUO today, it's built
out of, I don't know, 22 maybe open source projects where Linux is of
course the largest one.
[35:01] Johan Christenson
And just to have that set from an OpenStack perspective, which is
very impressive, is, you know, it's the third largest open source
project in the world today where, you know, Linux is the first one,
Chrome is the second one and then OpenStack is the third one.
[35:15] Johan Christenson
And it continues to be very, very active, so to speak.
[35:19] Johan Christenson
So that's kind of like a journey.
[35:20] Johan Christenson
And today it's like I usually say, like this OpenStack is, it's like
UPS.
[35:25] Johan Christenson
What can brown do for you?
[35:27] Johan Christenson
You know, brown trucks.
[35:29] Johan Christenson
You got to get from A to B.
[35:30] Johan Christenson
And it just works and continues to evolve today.
[35:34] Johan Christenson
AI, whatever you want to run, you can do all of those pieces there.
[35:38] Johan Christenson
And of course it's going up and down a little bit.
[35:40] Johan Christenson
You know, there was a while there people were calling for the death
of Open Sec and today I think at the latest numbers I saw there's an
expectation of 30 to 35% growth yearly from where we stand today.
[35:53] Johan Christenson
Could have something to do of course with Broadcom doing things and
other things happening in the world.
[35:58] Johan Christenson
Of course.
[35:58] Viktor Petersson
I think that is probably something worth mentioning which is probably
a massive driver and massive win for Opus in general.
[36:04] Viktor Petersson
Like, I mean for those who haven't caught up on the news, anybody
who's been using a certain name vendor has basically been shifting
over and basically seen their bills being tripled or 5x whatever the
number is, are clearly looking at alternatives.
[36:22] Johan Christenson
And yeah, interject there.
[36:27] Johan Christenson
You and I talk about vulnerability in society, right?
[36:30] Johan Christenson
Then you think about big things like wars and like oh wow, you know,
somebody can pull the plug and all that stuff.
[36:37] Johan Christenson
But listen, infrastructure, that is a 20 year play, always.
[36:42] Johan Christenson
What if somebody doubles your prices tomorrow on something so
fundamental, such as your infrastructure, Will you be able to build
your car the same way?
[36:52] Johan Christenson
Will you be able to sell it the same way?
[36:54] Johan Christenson
Is it worse than tariffs?
[36:56] Johan Christenson
The thing is when companies come in and they jolt something that
needs stability, to me it's actually equally scary and equally, I
would say dangerous for a business model, you know, because you know,
cost is a constant that's always going to be there.
[37:15] Johan Christenson
Nobody's going to ask for something more expensive tomorrow.
[37:18] Johan Christenson
And if you need to double your underlying price overnight, that's
usually not a great thing for your Customers.
[37:24] Viktor Petersson
Yeah, I mean, yeah, the whole price shock there, I mean send
shockwaves to the entire tech industry and like much of Enterprise
ran on VMware, right?
[37:33] Viktor Petersson
Or still running on VMware.
[37:35] Viktor Petersson
But is now in serious doubts about what to do Next.
[37:39] Viktor Petersson
And obviously OpenStack stands as a pretty solid option for all those
people looking for options because there aren't that many large,
there aren't that many solutions out there.
[37:52] Viktor Petersson
If you look at the law, run an enterprise grade data center and
manage it in a somewhat seamless way, right?
[38:00] Johan Christenson
No, I mean there are solutions, right?
[38:02] Johan Christenson
You have Proxmox, you have some other things.
[38:03] Johan Christenson
But when you say enterprise.
[38:06] Johan Christenson
Yeah, I mean OpenStack is so much more than running VMs, right.
[38:12] Johan Christenson
I can't even begin to describe it.
[38:14] Johan Christenson
It's huge and it has so many aspects of modern way of having a
foundation of infrastructure as a code, if you may say.
[38:24] Johan Christenson
And on top of that you can of course build whatever you want, whether
it's starting with containers and function as a service or whatever
you want to put on there for your.
[38:32] Johan Christenson
It's your prerogative, so to speak.
[38:34] Johan Christenson
Right.
[38:34] Johan Christenson
But yeah, it's a little scary, right, because we keep talking about
these big things, but ultimately one should also know that when you
trust somebody in the underlying layers, you really need to trust
them because if you have a long term play, they need to be long term
with you.
[38:48] Johan Christenson
And that just goes to show how vulnerable a business can be by.
[38:53] Johan Christenson
By relying too much of anything.
[38:56] Viktor Petersson
Yeah, absolutely.
[38:58] Viktor Petersson
And if you were to get started today with, if you were to set up a
shop today with a.
[39:04] Viktor Petersson
Well, if you were an Enterprise turning from VMware to OpenShift or
OpenStack.
[39:09] Viktor Petersson
Sorry, what does that look like today?
[39:11] Viktor Petersson
How complex is set up?
[39:14] Viktor Petersson
I remember we had conversations many years ago, you have basically
hired an entire team just to manage OpenStack.
[39:21] Viktor Petersson
From the Conversation here, it sounds like it's slightly less complex
today than it was back then.
[39:26] Viktor Petersson
But what's the reality of azurescale spinning this up today?
[39:32] Johan Christenson
Well, listen, it of course depends on who you are and how heavily you
use it and what your requirements are in the sense of for some large
enterprise.
[39:40] Johan Christenson
It really does make sense to set things up.
[39:43] Johan Christenson
Keep in mind, while OpenStack is fantastic and I would recommend it
any day of the week, the requirements around us keep going up.
[39:52] Johan Christenson
So Clearwater just launched this full scale 3 availability zone
compliant cloud, right.
[39:57] Johan Christenson
And that becomes even a little bit more complex, right?
[40:00] Johan Christenson
Just like, you know, we're all used to having three Availability
zones But to build it and to get all of those pieces to work, you
know, over different data centers and so forth, it requires quite a
bit just to set things up.
[40:12] Johan Christenson
You can do that quite easily.
[40:13] Johan Christenson
Right.
[40:14] Johan Christenson
But if you want that, you know, resilience, you want the regulatory
compliance, you want all of the pieces, right.
[40:19] Johan Christenson
All of a sudden you need a team to get all of those pieces together.
[40:23] Johan Christenson
You know, just choosing the cage you need or the data center you need
could be a task.
[40:28] Johan Christenson
Right.
[40:28] Johan Christenson
But I do think that OpenStack is, you know, the prime choice, I think
for anybody in that sense.
[40:34] Johan Christenson
And I think it's easy enough for just about anybody to set up today.
[40:37] Johan Christenson
Again, depending on those requirements, if you want to go all the way
out there, building an Azure is not easy, even though the tools in
themselves might be easy to handle by getting it all together with
the consumption model and so forth is quite complex.
[40:50] Johan Christenson
But, but it's a fantastic piece of software built by hundreds of
thousands of people across the world.
[40:57] Johan Christenson
And that's of course the cool part about open source where it
traverses nations and ideologies and all that stuff to just build
good code.
[41:09] Viktor Petersson
Yeah.
[41:10] Viktor Petersson
You mentioned Proxmox is a good alternative for small shops and I've
been in Proxmox use for many years as well.
[41:17] Viktor Petersson
And that's a great tool if it's obviously not scaled for enterprise
but for your mid to small size business.
[41:23] Viktor Petersson
Not a bad shout really.
[41:25] Viktor Petersson
I think it's a good piece of software as well.
[41:28] Viktor Petersson
The next thing I wanted to cover is kind of related but not which is
the whole move away from cloud which is you see this counter, you see
it every so often but there was a, I guess dhh, the Danish Ruben
Rails, I forgot his actual name, had his big blog post of 37 signals
moving back to on Prem and saving millions a year.
[41:51] Viktor Petersson
I think this is like, this is obviously something that we see every
so often with these moves back and forth people saying oh my sky
cost.
[41:59] Viktor Petersson
My.
[41:59] Viktor Petersson
My cloud costs are skyrocketing.
[42:01] Viktor Petersson
I need to go on prem.
[42:03] Viktor Petersson
I think this discussion warrants so many caveats because there are so
many details.
[42:08] Viktor Petersson
Like there's.
[42:08] Viktor Petersson
I think it's so it's.
[42:10] Viktor Petersson
It's a bit naive narrative to say it's cheap to run on things on
Prem.
[42:14] Viktor Petersson
Much to your conversation earlier about you need a team to actually
run things.
[42:19] Viktor Petersson
So maybe like how do you see this shift?
[42:22] Viktor Petersson
Like these cycles you see like everything goes.
[42:24] Viktor Petersson
Should be on cloud, go to cloud, everything should be on prem.
[42:28] Viktor Petersson
We've seen this is not the first time.
[42:30] Viktor Petersson
How do you kind of see how these shaping up and down like these waves
coming or what's triggering them really?
[42:37] Johan Christenson
Well, I think just like the stock market, right, when we are buy
hungry, we buy and we buy a little too far.
[42:43] Johan Christenson
And same thing, when it goes down, we sell too far and then we
shouldn't have gone that far down.
[42:48] Johan Christenson
I think it's similar to cloud.
[42:49] Johan Christenson
Right.
[42:50] Johan Christenson
I think that the challenge that people have had is that we get so
enamored by something and everybody else around me is doing this
thing.
[42:57] Johan Christenson
I mean, CEO is worried, shit, I'm the only one not in the cloud.
[43:03] Johan Christenson
And the thing is, I don't think it's either one.
[43:06] Johan Christenson
It's going to be both forever.
[43:08] Johan Christenson
It's just that you want to be smart about it, depending on what
business you are, you know.
[43:12] Johan Christenson
But the key aspect is you're going to use a cloud or you should use
it where it drives value for your business.
[43:21] Johan Christenson
Throwing in VMS into a cloud might not drive value.
[43:25] Johan Christenson
And then my question is, why do you do it?
[43:28] Johan Christenson
You know, you talked about the thousands of services.
[43:30] Johan Christenson
Yes.
[43:31] Johan Christenson
So if you go in and use a particular type of service that drives 10x
on something that you could only do 1x yourself, obviously go ahead.
[43:40] Johan Christenson
But then you have this base business.
[43:42] Johan Christenson
You know, I said it before that most of the clouds, 90% is like, you
know, storage, CPUs, RAM and then containers and VMs, you know,
that's 90% of their revenue.
[43:54] Johan Christenson
How come 90% come from that when the 10% is what we really should use
it for?
[44:00] Johan Christenson
I'm not saying you don't need a VM here and there to be able to
support that as well.
[44:04] Johan Christenson
But it's too skewed.
[44:05] Johan Christenson
So now we've realized then that, wow, it's quite costly, you know,
very smart.
[44:12] Johan Christenson
These services, you know, they charge for all kinds of things you
didn't know, so to speak.
[44:15] Johan Christenson
Right.
[44:15] Johan Christenson
So now.
[44:18] Johan Christenson
Yeah, and we didn't, maybe we didn't ask that question before and
frankly, I don't think we understood it.
[44:23] Johan Christenson
I mean, try to figure out if you take a workload today and you're
gonna throw it out in aws, I mean, your guess is as good as mine as
to what that's gonna cost.
[44:31] Johan Christenson
I mean, you could have maybe an idea, but you know, if it becomes
very active, it could cost you twice as much.
[44:36] Johan Christenson
Right?
[44:37] Viktor Petersson
Yeah.
[44:37] Johan Christenson
So we didn't know.
[44:38] Johan Christenson
And I think that too much stuff went out there just for the heck of
it.
[44:42] Johan Christenson
And again, if you run 100% there and it drives value for business in
all the senses.
[44:48] Johan Christenson
Then of course, do so now in this case, where we stand in the world
today from a European perspective, I talk a lot about, I call it the
new hybrid, where ultimately you need a European cloud to drive
certain things.
[45:02] Johan Christenson
You need maybe an American cloud, maybe you need a Chinese cloud, I
don't know.
[45:05] Johan Christenson
But most Europeans choose an American cloud.
[45:08] Johan Christenson
And that hybrid would also be most likely on prem some form.
[45:12] Johan Christenson
Right.
[45:13] Johan Christenson
But that allows you to always think about why do I go here when I
have these two other choices, do I go to, for example, I'll give you,
we all want to do AI today, right?
[45:25] Johan Christenson
So you might have a model like say I use llama, so llama comes, I
deploy that.
[45:30] Johan Christenson
Now I want to do 12 petabyte of after training.
[45:34] Johan Christenson
Now do I want to send that to, you know, some countries somewhere
when I know the world looks like this, where laws can change
tomorrow, Europe can say something tomorrow, maybe not.
[45:45] Johan Christenson
Because If I send 12 petabytes of data somewhere or even generate it
over there for my training, that could cost me 50 million to bring
back.
[45:54] Johan Christenson
It could take me three years when I know the world is going to be,
you know, maybe not so stable as we wish it was.
[46:01] Johan Christenson
Right?
[46:02] Viktor Petersson
Yeah.
[46:03] Johan Christenson
And ultimately that I think then would allow you to have the
flexibility that you need to be able to do both sides.
[46:10] Johan Christenson
But again, key aspect is what drives value you should do.
[46:14] Johan Christenson
And doing an on prem or just in a European cloud where you have some
VMs, then maybe price is the value that you want to have, not
necessarily infrastructure as a code that's going to allow you to
take over the world.
[46:27] Johan Christenson
No, I just need a good price stable for this vm and then maybe that's
not in Azure or something like that.
[46:35] Viktor Petersson
Yeah, I mean you're touching on this concept of hybrid cloud.
[46:38] Viktor Petersson
It's been a buzzword for the last 15 years, if not more.
[46:41] Viktor Petersson
And it has always been a bit of a pipe dream.
[46:45] Viktor Petersson
Like all enterprise were like, yeah, vendor agnostic, hybrid cloud,
all that stuff.
[46:49] Viktor Petersson
And particular hybrid cloud in the sense of not just spanning cloud
vendors, but spanning like on prem as well.
[46:55] Viktor Petersson
All the big cloud vendors, they have some type of option for this.
[46:59] Viktor Petersson
I don't think any of them really work for modern workloads.
[47:02] Viktor Petersson
Like, speak to me more like how you envision that.
[47:05] Viktor Petersson
Like short of sending a box and putting it on dc, how do you see that
working?
[47:11] Viktor Petersson
Well.
[47:14] Johan Christenson
I think we all have to realize that you have tools like Morpheus,
right?
[47:18] Johan Christenson
Like where you can actually have one control panel console, call
whatever you want and you can kind of sort of do a little bit
everywhere, right.
[47:26] Johan Christenson
When I look at the real world, our developers, if they want to use
Azure, if they want to use Clura, they're going to use the tools that
they have in that sense, right.
[47:37] Johan Christenson
So from a user's perspective, many times it doesn't work well around,
right.
[47:42] Johan Christenson
Because we're all using different this or different that.
[47:45] Johan Christenson
And then of course from an IT department, I want to manage this,
which is very challenging.
[47:51] Johan Christenson
Just take governance, right?
[47:53] Johan Christenson
How do I deploy governance rules over to different clouds and so
forth.
[47:58] Johan Christenson
In my mind the best thing is to make sure you have the great
connectivity between the clouds.
[48:02] Johan Christenson
You can actually do things the way you want to, but you treat them
differently.
[48:06] Johan Christenson
There are different rule sets, you know, because ultimately the
reason why you were to go to a cloud, you probably go in there for a
specific reason.
[48:12] Johan Christenson
I want this.
[48:13] Johan Christenson
And then you want to make sure your developers or whatever it is that
they can use that all the way through.
[48:18] Johan Christenson
So not hampering them by oh well, it's got to work with this one.
[48:22] Johan Christenson
So we're not going to let you use that because then you go, you know,
that's not the thing.
[48:25] Johan Christenson
It's better for you to have separated, but you can connect them.
[48:29] Johan Christenson
You might not be able to move IP addresses between the clouds, right.
[48:33] Johan Christenson
But you still connect them properly.
[48:34] Johan Christenson
So different applications can communicate and do their thing.
[48:38] Johan Christenson
But key is that everybody who works with it can use all those value
driving tools and then it becomes make sure that they work great
where they stand type of thing.
[48:49] Johan Christenson
At least that's been my experience.
[48:50] Johan Christenson
To your point that it doesn't just flow like this, everything works
beautifully together with everything.
[48:56] Johan Christenson
This is not the world we live in.
[48:58] Viktor Petersson
Yeah, I think, I mean the one thing that kind of has changed that
equation a little bit more so than anything of the cloud vendors has
been the cloud native stack.
[49:06] Viktor Petersson
Right now, love it or hate it, Kubernetes has kind of become this de
facto stack of running things in the cloud along with containers.
[49:16] Viktor Petersson
Maybe not for work, maybe not for legacy workloads, but for anything
is written.
[49:20] Viktor Petersson
In the last few years Kubernetes has been kind of the go to stack,
right?
[49:24] Viktor Petersson
Which is a good thing for cloud agnostic ness, I guess because now I
could do a deploy to any of the cloud.
[49:32] Viktor Petersson
I don't really.
[49:33] Viktor Petersson
Well short of like cloud specific like routing and whatnot, I don't
really have to care much about the cloud it's running on right and
which is great.
[49:42] Viktor Petersson
Which is great.
[49:43] Viktor Petersson
Now we're close to the world where we can actually deploy the same
workload to five different clouds.
[49:47] Viktor Petersson
And some of them might be on prem and some of the different region
and different vendors entirely.
[49:52] Viktor Petersson
And it actually just works.
[49:53] Viktor Petersson
Right.
[49:54] Viktor Petersson
If you couple that with stuff that's coming out, like zero trust
movement with.
[50:00] Viktor Petersson
I mean, I'm thinking Istio, where you can actually bridge clouds.
[50:04] Viktor Petersson
Now you're getting closer to actually doing these things, which is
great news for anybody who's not one of the big clouds, because now
you can.
[50:11] Viktor Petersson
It levels the playing field in many ways.
[50:13] Viktor Petersson
Right.
[50:14] Viktor Petersson
So I guess how do you see that playing out?
[50:20] Viktor Petersson
We talk about moving up the abstraction layers before, but that is
kind of like the new abstraction layer, I think, as far as I'm aware.
[50:27] Viktor Petersson
As far as I see it, at least.
[50:29] Johan Christenson
No, I think you're right.
[50:30] Johan Christenson
I mean, definitely abstract a lot of things underneath.
[50:33] Johan Christenson
Right.
[50:33] Johan Christenson
But at the same time, Kubernetes has been around for quite some time
at this point.
[50:38] Johan Christenson
And you know, we have.
[50:41] Johan Christenson
Okay, you might get sound from a little guy coming into door here
now.
[50:46] Johan Christenson
You know, it's been around.
[50:48] Johan Christenson
I've seen services that have deployed on all the clouds, but I don't
see them taking off.
[50:54] Johan Christenson
I do think we all love Kubernetes and containers as a whole for
everything that they provide for developers and so forth.
[51:02] Johan Christenson
Right.
[51:02] Johan Christenson
And organizations in general.
[51:04] Johan Christenson
And you do move workloads easier if you do it.
[51:08] Johan Christenson
Right.
[51:08] Johan Christenson
Keep in mind, a lot of these services, again, are manipulated a
little bit.
[51:14] Johan Christenson
Right.
[51:15] Johan Christenson
A lot of time a cloud takes Kubernetes and then it does something.
[51:18] Johan Christenson
We put a layer on top and all of a sudden you don't have exactly
native Kubernetes anymore.
[51:24] Johan Christenson
Right.
[51:25] Johan Christenson
So there's even those challenges as well.
[51:26] Johan Christenson
You cannot guarantee that it works exactly the way it did on the
other one.
[51:31] Johan Christenson
So.
[51:31] Johan Christenson
But.
[51:31] Johan Christenson
But there are certain services that are coming along, which is
deploying across the globe where, you know, it's the same.
[51:37] Johan Christenson
I just haven't seen them take off.
[51:39] Johan Christenson
So I'm a little concerned that there are other drivers underneath
that actually makes this not being as popular as one would think.
[51:47] Johan Christenson
Because I do agree with everything you just said.
[51:49] Johan Christenson
I just don't see it taking off from that perspective.
[51:54] Viktor Petersson
Yeah, I think it's probably like you would probably have better data
than I would on this, but I would imagine Kubernetes is not where the
money lives.
[52:04] Viktor Petersson
The money comes from in terms of where you stand.
[52:07] Johan Christenson
Right.
[52:07] Viktor Petersson
Because the bulk of the money comes from legacy VMs.
[52:12] Viktor Petersson
I would imagine where that's where people deploy.
[52:16] Viktor Petersson
They want to move their on prem to cloud on a one to one basis rather
than re engineer it to a great degree I would imagine that's where
the bulk of the revenue coming in your door is that's the flow.
[52:28] Viktor Petersson
It comes.
[52:28] Johan Christenson
Right, well first off, let me just say that Containers is the shit,
so to speak, right.
[52:34] Johan Christenson
So for us and for everybody else, Kubernetes and Containers are there
right now Keep in mind Docker has this maybe security challenges.
[52:43] Johan Christenson
In Open Infrastructure foundation we have something called KATA
Containers where It's like small VMs from a security perspective.
[52:50] Johan Christenson
And so for.
[52:50] Johan Christenson
Right, I would say 99.8% of all containers live on VMs.
[52:56] Johan Christenson
Right.
[52:57] Johan Christenson
If you look at the big services like AWS and they live on vms, it's
not bare metal type of stuff underneath.
[53:04] Johan Christenson
So yeah, of course the VMS are still like a bread and butter, but the
driving stuff is above the VM today I'd say at least anything that's
developed today.
[53:14] Johan Christenson
I don't think you and I would start our next project saying oh, let's
set this up on a LAMP stacks single vm.
[53:19] Johan Christenson
We're going to say, hey listen, let's use Kubernetes.
[53:22] Johan Christenson
We will have self healing.
[53:23] Johan Christenson
We can do it over multiple data centers.
[53:25] Johan Christenson
We do have some form of abstraction, but maybe it's not directly
movable between AWS and Azure we don't know.
[53:32] Johan Christenson
But there's so many other aspects that we want to do with.
[53:35] Johan Christenson
So I think Containers is definitely the driver and the standard today
for your basic development, so to speak.
[53:42] Johan Christenson
But most of them live on vm.
[53:44] Johan Christenson
So we have something called Gardener, which is an open source project
which SAP started here in Europe and Gartner is awesome by the way,
in the sense that it does everything for you.
[53:54] Johan Christenson
Running Kubernetes is not that easy, so you want to have it fully
managed.
[53:59] Johan Christenson
And so this open source part allows you to run it in a sweet manner
where monitoring health thing, full updating is there, including not
just Kubernetes itself.
[54:09] Johan Christenson
It actually does the operating system for your workers and all of
that stuff.
[54:13] Johan Christenson
So it's really something for that.
[54:17] Johan Christenson
But again it starts vms to run Kubernetes on top, right.
[54:22] Johan Christenson
And it even sends me an email every time I forget to do the full
update saying you gotta update now.
[54:26] Johan Christenson
So you click this button now it's gonna update for you.
[54:29] Viktor Petersson
Yeah, and that's another thing that I think a big push at least I've
seen and I've been A big adopter of is ephemeral workloads, right?
[54:36] Viktor Petersson
Like we at Screenly for instance, we run on Ticluster on ephemeral
VMs, right?
[54:41] Viktor Petersson
Because that's from the security perspective it helps so much for
like persistent threat acts and it helps so much for patch
management.
[54:49] Viktor Petersson
So I think the longest RVM's we have run, it's like 24 hours, right?
[54:53] Viktor Petersson
Doing that is extremely difficult from an engineering perspective if
you were to do it yourself, right, because that's so much more
challenging and obviously you have to rely on kubernetes for
balancing your workloads as you refresh your nodes.
[55:07] Viktor Petersson
But even orchestrating nodes is not a trivial thing.
[55:10] Viktor Petersson
Is that something that.
[55:12] Viktor Petersson
Where's your head around that?
[55:13] Viktor Petersson
Like how have you gotten so far about those regards to those things?
[55:18] Johan Christenson
Not much to be honest with you.
[55:20] Johan Christenson
While I do quite a bit of stuff, I also don't do it all, so to speak.
[55:25] Johan Christenson
So we're not.
[55:26] Johan Christenson
I can't comment too much on that in that sense, to be honest with
you.
[55:31] Viktor Petersson
Okay, yeah, but to your previous point about Stack not being
agnostic, I think a lot of it comes down to the supporting services
around it, right?
[55:41] Viktor Petersson
S3 compatible storage, that's a standard now.
[55:44] Viktor Petersson
Ish, been for quite some time, so that's good.
[55:46] Viktor Petersson
But there are so many other things like load balancing, like you want
database services, some redis all those other things around where how
do you see that going?
[55:56] Viktor Petersson
Like do you think like Postgres obviously being a big database that's
heavily in trend right now and has been for a while.
[56:03] Viktor Petersson
How do you see that as managed services?
[56:05] Viktor Petersson
Because one of the big thing is that you run your kubernetes as your
workload, but then you tag in your corresponding cloud, you tag in
your database, your memory store, your storage.
[56:18] Viktor Petersson
S3 is part of OpenStack already I believe.
[56:22] Viktor Petersson
But the other services, how do you see those shaping up like in the
terms of like making that easier?
[56:28] Johan Christenson
I mean that's where I think like open source will come in again.
[56:32] Johan Christenson
Right?
[56:32] Johan Christenson
So you need, and this is where I think the big cloud services are
great.
[56:36] Johan Christenson
You know, they add certain layers to put things together to make it
consumable.
[56:40] Johan Christenson
And that is the challenge you're talking about in and around there.
[56:42] Johan Christenson
And even your previous question, like how do you actually put that
together in a consumable way where nobody has touch anything and then
you have the management of it, you have the updating, lifecycle
management, all that stuff, you know, I mean I think we can all say
that there's no doubt that it will continue in that direction in the
sense that you will package more and more of those things together to
make it consumable in a way that makes it super easy.
[57:06] Johan Christenson
But ultimately that's also one of the bigger challenges.
[57:09] Johan Christenson
Like Gartner for example, puts a lot of pieces together, but you can
continue that forever.
[57:14] Johan Christenson
Right.
[57:14] Johan Christenson
Because it continues to grow and continues to be evolving, just like
you said.
[57:19] Johan Christenson
Maybe you want a different database to put that together too as well.
[57:22] Johan Christenson
You know, the next customer wants something different.
[57:24] Johan Christenson
So in general, I think it's just going to continue to evolve towards
something that we need to package those things in a proper way to
make it as consumable as possible.
[57:34] Viktor Petersson
Yeah, no, but I think that's the power.
[57:36] Viktor Petersson
Much to your point is the open source side of things having those
packaged in a way that it makes easily consumable so that you can
make them part of that without having to rely on these lock ins, I
guess in a sense.
[57:49] Viktor Petersson
Right?
[57:49] Johan Christenson
Yeah, I would say so.
[57:51] Viktor Petersson
Good stuff.
[57:52] Viktor Petersson
So the last thing I wanted to cover is the legal framework.
[57:56] Viktor Petersson
In Europe in particular, there is a lot of push cra, EU Cyber
Resilience act is a big one that going to impact vendors like
yourself.
[58:07] Viktor Petersson
How do you see this shaping up?
[58:09] Viktor Petersson
And can you, can we turn this into an advantage for European tech by
being compliant to these frameworks, which I guess the big guys will
kind of be dragging their feet.
[58:20] Viktor Petersson
Whereas that could be an upside for a lot of vendors that are Europe
first vendors or European vendors.
[58:27] Johan Christenson
In all honesty, I thought that, you know, like a Swedish company will
be the one that could probably provide services the best in Sweden.
[58:36] Johan Christenson
Right.
[58:36] Johan Christenson
Because sometimes you have to have Swedish citizen Brazilians.
[58:39] Johan Christenson
If you were Brazilian citizen in Brazil you can probably work with
the police or the military, whatever.
[58:44] Johan Christenson
Right.
[58:45] Johan Christenson
But to be open with you, there's been so many laws and regulations
and so forth.
[58:52] Johan Christenson
Right.
[58:52] Johan Christenson
That I'm not sure how we enforce them anymore.
[58:57] Johan Christenson
I don't see some of those advantages anymore.
[59:00] Johan Christenson
I thought that was going to be the case.
[59:02] Johan Christenson
Right.
[59:02] Johan Christenson
If you really wanted to enforce GDPR for real, well, then I'm not
sure anybody's following that to the extent that you'd like.
[59:10] Johan Christenson
Right.
[59:11] Johan Christenson
And in some cases I find it extremely important, of course, that we
have these regulations.
[59:16] Johan Christenson
If you go in and look at your bank account, you're hoping that your
money is going to be there tomorrow as well.
[59:20] Johan Christenson
Right.
[59:21] Johan Christenson
So thankfully there are a lot of regulations as in how we have to
monitor and make that happen.
[59:27] Johan Christenson
And privacy, of course, is something that's even written into the
Constitution of Europe.
[59:31] Johan Christenson
It's that important.
[59:32] Johan Christenson
The US, they're willing to ban TikTok for privacy, which ultimately
turns into national security thing.
[59:38] Johan Christenson
We have the regulations, but we don't enforce them always.
[59:43] Johan Christenson
And frankly, at this point it's become so vague that of course now
the EU is starting to think, okay, maybe we have to roll them back.
[59:51] Johan Christenson
I personally do not think that the regulatory side of Europe has been
the cause for us not innovating.
[59:59] Johan Christenson
No, I don't think that's it.
[01:00:01] Johan Christenson
As a matter of fact, to your point, it could have been an advantage
for all of us.
[01:00:04] Johan Christenson
Right.
[01:00:04] Johan Christenson
Because ultimately your family, me, my family, we all want privacy.
[01:00:09] Johan Christenson
Of course, we expect you to take care of my data.
[01:00:12] Johan Christenson
It can be used against me very harshly.
[01:00:14] Johan Christenson
And for those people that do end up having it used against them,
they're going to be like, I wish they followed the law, you know.
[01:00:22] Johan Christenson
But it hasn't turned out to be that way.
[01:00:24] Johan Christenson
As a matter of fact, you know, unfortunately, it's been because it
cost a little bit extra money to do security, rights to do regulatory
right to do things.
[01:00:33] Johan Christenson
Right, Right.
[01:00:33] Johan Christenson
Which, you know, and for those that now did not have to actually
comply or did not need to worry so much about GDPR because let's say
EMU, the DPAs of Europe, they're not really enforcing things.
[01:00:46] Johan Christenson
Right.
[01:00:46] Johan Christenson
Then some people spent a lot of effort to try to really do that.
[01:00:50] Johan Christenson
Right.
[01:00:50] Johan Christenson
And I think kudos to them.
[01:00:52] Johan Christenson
Right.
[01:00:52] Johan Christenson
Because ultimately you shouldn't have to have somebody enforce
something like that because whether security or privacy, we all want
that.
[01:01:00] Johan Christenson
So you should take care of your customer's data or your children's
data if you are in a city or a government agency or something like
that.
[01:01:08] Johan Christenson
But we don't see it like that.
[01:01:09] Johan Christenson
It's like everybody understands the law that if you rob a bank,
you're in trouble.
[01:01:14] Johan Christenson
Right.
[01:01:15] Johan Christenson
But when it comes to data, it's kind of like, yeah, is there a law?
[01:01:21] Johan Christenson
It's a little bit like Trump.
[01:01:22] Johan Christenson
I'm not sure.
[01:01:23] Johan Christenson
Is Greenland really belonging to Denmark?
[01:01:25] Johan Christenson
I don't know.
[01:01:26] Johan Christenson
It's kind of like that with the regulatory to a large extent, even in
those traditional regulatory strongholds like banking, fintech,
patient data law with healthcare and government secrecy laws, for
example, around Europe, which is very tough, but not sure everybody
is following at this point.
[01:01:45] Johan Christenson
So they're going to continue.
[01:01:48] Johan Christenson
But unless we enforce that, I am not sure it's going to make a huge
difference one way or the other.
[01:01:52] Viktor Petersson
Yeah, I mean, GDPR is a good example Right.
[01:01:55] Viktor Petersson
Because I don't think the only thing that the vast majority of people
know about GDPR is the annoying cookie banner that we have to click
going to every website.
[01:02:05] Viktor Petersson
Beyond that, I don't know if there is much actual implications beyond
that really for users.
[01:02:12] Johan Christenson
I don't think so.
[01:02:13] Johan Christenson
I mean again, it's been used, I think against the tech giants a few
times.
[01:02:16] Johan Christenson
Certain antitrust and certain things there.
[01:02:18] Johan Christenson
Right.
[01:02:18] Johan Christenson
And, but there, even there it's like, you know, slap on the finger.
[01:02:23] Johan Christenson
Now we make the button green instead of red and we continue type
thing.
[01:02:26] Johan Christenson
Right.
[01:02:26] Johan Christenson
So it's, yeah, it's not necessarily doing the good that we all, I
think, would agree that it should be doing.
[01:02:32] Johan Christenson
Right.
[01:02:33] Johan Christenson
And if it doesn't, then I'm not sure we need it.
[01:02:35] Johan Christenson
But you know, you could also choose to enforce it, you know, but we
also have another challenge not to bring that up.
[01:02:42] Johan Christenson
But you know, then you, of course you have Ireland.
[01:02:45] Johan Christenson
Ireland where all the tech giants are.
[01:02:47] Johan Christenson
Right.
[01:02:47] Johan Christenson
So the DPA of Ireland has been protecting those because they're
giving the taxes away.
[01:02:51] Johan Christenson
Right.
[01:02:51] Johan Christenson
So all the American companies come there.
[01:02:53] Johan Christenson
The sad part is that Europe then cannot come together on this DPA
thing even.
[01:02:57] Johan Christenson
Right.
[01:02:58] Johan Christenson
So they are protecting, you know, making sure that all the European
data can go out.
[01:03:02] Johan Christenson
They will never prosecute the U.S.
[01:03:05] Johan Christenson
companies because they are the ones feeding Ireland.
[01:03:07] Johan Christenson
There's a reason why Ireland has the highest GDP per capita and it's
not because they have green grass and good beer.
[01:03:13] Johan Christenson
You know, I, I can guarantee you that.
[01:03:16] Viktor Petersson
Yeah.
[01:03:16] Viktor Petersson
I mean, although they seem to be moving away from Ireland to now, but
maybe that's the one reason they will stay.
[01:03:22] Viktor Petersson
But they, as far as I'm aware, like most of the big companies have
like downsized all their offices there because once those subsidies
ran out, there was absolutely no reason to be there anymore.
[01:03:32] Viktor Petersson
So.
[01:03:34] Johan Christenson
Agreed.
[01:03:35] Johan Christenson
Right.
[01:03:35] Johan Christenson
So, but again we got to come together.
[01:03:37] Johan Christenson
Right.
[01:03:37] Johan Christenson
So yeah, either we do or we do it all the way through.
[01:03:40] Johan Christenson
And then I think it could become a beneficial thing for a European
company.
[01:03:44] Johan Christenson
But as long as it's not done right, then no, it's actually just
creating havoc for both sides.
[01:03:51] Viktor Petersson
Yeah.
[01:03:52] Viktor Petersson
From a game theoretical perspective, it creates a really strange
incentive structure.
[01:03:56] Viktor Petersson
Right.
[01:03:57] Viktor Petersson
Because if you know that you're not going to be prosecuted for not
following these, then you absolutely have no reason, theoretically
you have no reason to do it in the first place.
[01:04:07] Johan Christenson
Right.
[01:04:08] Johan Christenson
Well, again, the reason is of course this.
[01:04:11] Johan Christenson
If I have a customer's data, I want to treat it right.
[01:04:15] Johan Christenson
That should be in everybody's Heart.
[01:04:16] Johan Christenson
Right.
[01:04:17] Johan Christenson
But unfortunately that's not how businesses think.
[01:04:19] Johan Christenson
They think like, okay, if I don't have to do it, if I can save money,
I'm going to go the short route.
[01:04:24] Viktor Petersson
Yeah.
[01:04:25] Viktor Petersson
And obviously with 23 and me folding this week, obviously that's a
big one in terms of data privacy, obviously unrelated to this.
[01:04:33] Viktor Petersson
But just thought about that when you mentioned that, right.
[01:04:38] Johan Christenson
There are things happening, right.
[01:04:40] Johan Christenson
I think to your point, it's going to be interesting to see in the
world that we live in, you know, what will we in Europe do?
[01:04:47] Johan Christenson
Are we going to fold what we think is important, to think that we're
going to catch up or are we going to find other ways to do so?
[01:04:55] Johan Christenson
And again, I don't think that the regulatory has to be.
[01:04:58] Johan Christenson
We probably can change a number of things, don't get me wrong because
it's probably been overdone.
[01:05:03] Johan Christenson
But a lot of the things I see, for example in Nissan, the security,
right, Talking about the vulnerability, we came back to the
vulnerability, you know, it's great that pushes on, right?
[01:05:14] Johan Christenson
Because a lot of us businesses, we don't do the security all the way
through because.
[01:05:18] Johan Christenson
But as soon as something happens, everybody's on the problem, right?
[01:05:22] Johan Christenson
So we kind of need somebody to kick us in the butt a little bit to
say, hey listen, let's do it before it happens, you know, and.
[01:05:28] Viktor Petersson
That'S security is one of those things.
[01:05:30] Viktor Petersson
Like you, it's very difficult to justify security, much to your
point, until something happens because it's usually the first line
item that gets slashed in a lot of companies budget because it's
preventative.
[01:05:46] Viktor Petersson
Doing life cycle management, right?
[01:05:48] Viktor Petersson
Doing patch management, right.
[01:05:50] Viktor Petersson
Doing ongoing management and audits of all these things.
[01:05:53] Viktor Petersson
Not a trivial thing, not revenue generating, that's for sure.
[01:05:58] Viktor Petersson
So when this is why I'm slightly hopeful that CRA will actually have
teeth because there's a lot of good stuff in there, right?
[01:06:08] Viktor Petersson
Like doing sboms properly, for instance, which is key to actually
doing secure supply chain now.
[01:06:16] Viktor Petersson
But again, unless there are any teeth, it will just be another thing
that doesn't really matter.
[01:06:23] Johan Christenson
Yeah.
[01:06:24] Johan Christenson
And that's the whole point, right?
[01:06:25] Johan Christenson
So I do think that security is a good thing that we've been pushed
towards that, you know.
[01:06:30] Johan Christenson
But then the big question, I know we're getting to the, towards the
end here, I'll throw this in.
[01:06:34] Johan Christenson
So we had this thing about vulnerability, then we had this thing
about competitiveness, right?
[01:06:38] Johan Christenson
And I think we're starting to see that it's getting tougher for us to
stand up against Anybody, because you know, you have weaker and
weaker negotiating power everywhere.
[01:06:47] Johan Christenson
Not just wonder Lane, but also our companies and so forth.
[01:06:49] Johan Christenson
Because we need somebody.
[01:06:51] Johan Christenson
Right?
[01:06:51] Viktor Petersson
Yeah.
[01:06:52] Johan Christenson
But what's even more concerning, if one takes a little more
philosophical philosophy type of level, is democracy.
[01:06:59] Johan Christenson
Right?
[01:07:00] Viktor Petersson
Yeah.
[01:07:00] Johan Christenson
You know, where we're ultimately we talk about the laws you
mentioned.
[01:07:04] Johan Christenson
Now take GDPR as maybe a bad example, but for us to be able to create
a law like that in the future, we would have to go to all these other
countries and please do not take our data and please don't create
your laws that allows you to take those data or that data.
[01:07:22] Johan Christenson
Otherwise we cannot create those laws.
[01:07:25] Johan Christenson
And our whole foundation of our society are the laws.
[01:07:28] Johan Christenson
Right.
[01:07:28] Johan Christenson
So it's an interesting way that the world is, and this is not just
Europe, US and China.
[01:07:35] Johan Christenson
This is like the world, you know, the more intertwined we are, the
more dependent you are.
[01:07:41] Johan Christenson
The question is, will those kind of things start popping up as well?
[01:07:45] Johan Christenson
Where.
[01:07:45] Johan Christenson
No, listen, we have FISA here and we're going to use it.
[01:07:49] Johan Christenson
And then the question is, okay, can we have any digital laws or
manage data and say this or that, especially when you have certain
dependencies.
[01:07:56] Johan Christenson
Right.
[01:07:57] Johan Christenson
I, I'm hoping that we'll find a way to work all nicely together.
[01:08:00] Johan Christenson
Right.
[01:08:00] Johan Christenson
Because ultimately that's what the Internet is about and that's what
this lovely world should be about.
[01:08:05] Johan Christenson
Right now we're just going the wrong direction in so many areas.
[01:08:08] Johan Christenson
But ultimately, just so everybody understands, it's not just the
competitiveness, because we, Europe is probably going to do well for
the next 25 years.
[01:08:16] Johan Christenson
You and I might not see the decline, but democracy, that can change
quickly as we've seen in the past.
[01:08:24] Johan Christenson
So one should at least be aware of that.
[01:08:26] Johan Christenson
The things that we're talking about are very significant to us, not
just here in Europe, but to everybody.
[01:08:32] Viktor Petersson
I think there's another element there to cover, which is the
increased demands for backdoors, doors in encryption.
[01:08:40] Viktor Petersson
I know this is a much bigger topic, but what we saw just last few
weeks, the Apple is going up against the UK government on like
saying, hey, no, we're not going to give you access to our cloud
storage.
[01:08:53] Viktor Petersson
But that's hardly the first time we've seen these debates and they,
we only seen the ones that making out in the public.
[01:09:01] Viktor Petersson
So it's probably like this is probably like the coal, the canary in
the coal mine kind of situation.
[01:09:07] Viktor Petersson
But clearly that's another thing because if we don't really trust
that, then if there are backdoors in all These things.
[01:09:14] Viktor Petersson
Well, there's a lot more at stake there.
[01:09:18] Johan Christenson
Yeah.
[01:09:19] Johan Christenson
So it's a tough digital world for everybody.
[01:09:21] Johan Christenson
Right.
[01:09:21] Johan Christenson
So I don't know, we got to find a way to play nice, you know.
[01:09:25] Johan Christenson
But again, that comes down, back down to the regulatory side as well.
[01:09:29] Johan Christenson
Right.
[01:09:30] Johan Christenson
Backdoors could be the government or somebody else wanting that, you
know.
[01:09:33] Johan Christenson
You know, regulatory aspects are usually like defining the playing
rules, you know, and you gotta play by the rules.
[01:09:40] Johan Christenson
And of course, in the world we live in, not everybody do play by the
rules.
[01:09:44] Johan Christenson
And that's where it kind of gets a little scary.
[01:09:46] Johan Christenson
Right.
[01:09:46] Johan Christenson
So yeah, that's a whole long topic to be talked about.
[01:09:51] Johan Christenson
Right.
[01:09:52] Johan Christenson
But it's kind of cool, like the CEO signal.
[01:09:54] Johan Christenson
No, listen, we'll leave your market if you force us to do something
like that.
[01:10:00] Johan Christenson
And that's also notice one little request and the first thing that
comes is a threat.
[01:10:06] Johan Christenson
We will leave your market.
[01:10:08] Johan Christenson
Or like Google and Australia, when Australia wanted something, Google
finally just said, well, then we'll leave.
[01:10:13] Johan Christenson
And then Australia realized, well, shoot, if they leave, our life
will change forever that we don't want.
[01:10:20] Johan Christenson
So there.
[01:10:20] Johan Christenson
These digital things that were so simple for a while ago, they're so
complex today and so potentially devastating if somebody pulls the
carpet.
[01:10:31] Johan Christenson
Right.
[01:10:31] Johan Christenson
If you, if you wake up tomorrow morning, you think about everything
that you go through in your daily life that's so connected in some
shape or form, it gets a little bit like, whoa, how would I do that?
[01:10:41] Johan Christenson
How would I do that?
[01:10:42] Johan Christenson
I can't even get money.
[01:10:43] Johan Christenson
How would I get food?
[01:10:44] Johan Christenson
It just becomes really complex really quickly.
[01:10:47] Johan Christenson
And very few of those are from the uk.
[01:10:50] Viktor Petersson
Yeah, no, absolutely.
[01:10:51] Viktor Petersson
I mean, yeah, much your point, like if Google or Microsoft decided to
pull the plug on the market, like rippling effect of that would be
insane from just a cloud perspective.
[01:11:00] Viktor Petersson
Right.
[01:11:01] Viktor Petersson
So absolutely, there's, there is an argument for, that's very valid
for increased sovereignty around cloud management and cloud in
general.
[01:11:09] Viktor Petersson
So absolutely.
[01:11:10] Viktor Petersson
I, I, I'm, yeah.
[01:11:12] Johan Christenson
Does that work balance?
[01:11:14] Viktor Petersson
Yeah, no, absolutely.
[01:11:15] Viktor Petersson
I mean, it's not either or, it's both.
[01:11:17] Viktor Petersson
Right.
[01:11:18] Viktor Petersson
And that's what we just need to figure out is how do we make
something that works and not another working group on bureaucrats to
write papers about how a European cloud can work, but actually
companies like yourself doing it together with other cloud vendors.
[01:11:34] Viktor Petersson
I think that's the real solution.
[01:11:37] Johan Christenson
Yeah, it's got to start somewhere.
[01:11:39] Johan Christenson
Right.
[01:11:39] Johan Christenson
So we got a few long years ahead of ourselves, but we gotta choose
first that we want to make a change.
[01:11:46] Viktor Petersson
Absolutely.
[01:11:47] Viktor Petersson
Absolutely.
[01:11:47] Viktor Petersson
Do you want this has been a great pleasure and anything you want to
say to the audience before we jump off happy you can do it.
[01:11:54] Viktor Petersson
Shout out to your portfolio of companies and whatnot before we jump
off.
[01:12:00] Johan Christenson
No but as always I've had a number of years with the open source
communities right and there was a big event that came up here with
the Open Infrastructure foundation now joining the LF and just want
to say it's a super big milestone after almost 15 years here now in
developing that and I hope that's going to continue and I hope
everybody is listening in.
[01:12:24] Johan Christenson
You know try out open source if you haven't been playing with it do
get a chance to contribute and see if it could fit your lifestyle and
move parts of your life forward as well.
[01:12:36] Viktor Petersson
Good stuff again thanks so much Johan.
[01:12:40] Johan Christenson
Toxic.
[01:12:41] Viktor Petersson
Cheers.
[01:12:41] Viktor Petersson
Right.

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