 Yeah, hi, good morning or whatever. Thanks for the upfront given trust. You're coming to my talk. So I talk about how convincing is killing open standards. It's a little bit more like a political than a technical talk, let's say this way. About me, I'm working for German-based companies named Netways and Isinga. I'm from Nuremberg in Germany. It's a part of Bavaria. We say it's Franconia. So from the outside it's Bavaria, but anyway. This is where we're coming from and my nice colleagues over here. So what is the motivation for the talk? So where I'm coming from, I started, apart from doing some window stuff at home, I started Solaris Admin at the time, came into Oracle DBA business, ended up in an open source company where I'm now and there's a pretty high chance that I retire there, I guess. And if you start your technical career with Solaris, it's also a chance that you're kind of old, right? Because nowadays you typically don't start as a Solaris Admin. And if you are in that industry for a couple of years and I'm in that industry now for 27, 28 years, you have some perspective looking back how things kind of repeat means you're all not from the technical perspective that we reinvent ourself every 10 years and everything we figured out the last 10 years we forget it, reinvent it from scratch. So that's part of our industry, but without some curiosity in it and looking on it, which things have not changed at the time I was starting and still doing, you want to do something great and would like to improve your work, improve your collaboration and everything. So looking back on a time machine, when I started my career or was given in this situation, this was pretty much what we had. And this is not the real picture, so there's a real picture coming later. This is Seattle Airport, so they don't have sun microsystems and HUX. But this is the given situation we had at this time in the company that we have still, we had IBM host environments, we had Windows and we were the hipsters at the time, like the Solaris and HPX guys, we were like the, let's say, the others didn't like us so much for the host, dudes, we were not so welcome. But this was the given set, so we had sun microsystem, we had HPX and of course we want to do a lot of things. I worked for a European retailer at the time, his name was Quelle. I don't know if anyone knows this, usually the older ones, because the company does not exist anymore. So it was really a big retailer in Germany and Europe at the time. And we had a lot of to do and web shops are starting to be a thing and we try to figure out how we can, I don't know, provide web shop, we had inter shop at the time and all that thing, e-commerce. It was around 20,000 or 2,000 years, no, got it, 2,000 years, 20,000, 20,000, 2,000, 99, I don't know, 99,000, somewhere. And there was a lot of things to do and every time we were pretty much vendor driven at the time because we had the vendors where they were very active, especially their sales representatives and every time we wanted to do something to solve a problem, setting up an application server, doing authentication, it was super clear that we had to talk to them which tool can we buy for Solaris or for HPX to solve the problem. And all the time it's super easy, we have something for you. We have a crazy good suite that solves all your problems, you have to buy it, perhaps it's not so cheap, but it will work. And even every time we bought this and we wanted that, we ended up having this. So we bought a product and we bought a suit and we installed it and then it didn't work and then we attached something. And often we improved the tools we bought to a horrible way that the supposed improvement made it really worse. And in Germany, we have a word for this, is verschlimmbesserung, so making things worse, trying to improve it. And this was exactly what happened all the time. We worked on stuff, often we bought something, never used it and did our own stuff. So at the end, the official website ran on a Linux desktop under one's other's table, since we had two crazy expensive Sun Microsystems machine in the data center, but they did not work at all. Or we were too stupid to get it run, I don't know. So at the end, it was really, really frustrating because we were bounded to having these tools. And what came up at the time that we saw some standards, standards were already in Solaris and HPOX. There's like the POSIX standard where you have common sense how we access a file system or tools like SED, AWK and all that stuff. So that was pretty cool because it gave us some chance of interoperability of that way we can use the system. So even like the Solaris folks were able to work on the HPOX system a little bit, except it came really to like configuring or tuning the system. And what came with this, that there was really a change in working together and collaboration. Also at this time, like these new tools started to be more and more popular. So even for the enterprise units, things like for Solaris was something like Sun Freeware. Perhaps somebody still knows it where you could get open source tools and can enrich or pretty much kick out your enterprise. You'd use some open source tool compiled for your Solaris system. And it was just great because you could solve problems. Also Linux started to become a thing. Of course, not officially. So you get like these big boxes, 10 of CDs with TuxRacer or something crazy things which you really don't need. And, pardon? Okay, yeah, we were advanced at the time, of course. So we officially, we did not do anything on Linux, but at the end we ended up that a lot of production systems which went to the outside we did on Linux. So I remember honestly, we had the same position the host dudes had on us. We had the same position to the people in our team who started with Linux because they did kernel compiling the whole day. And we were just looking to them and said, what are you doing? Yeah, I forgot a module. I have to recompile the kernel again. And they went out for a cigarette, came back and said, oh, damn it, I've missed something. I'll do it. So we were really laughing about them at the same time. So we had the totally same percent of this just, this will never succeed, obviously, as we know now it did. And so we ended up to really get in favor with Linux and the tools and the systems and toolings. And then, I don't know, VMware at the time was then coming up where you can have a virtual machine on your desktop and it was like mind-blowing. So a lot of things came with that and means it's changed the IT world. We all knew it then. Also we changed to us at the time that you are, we're way more involved than just walking in your company, you get out to communities. So we worked with others on the internet to figure out why you have a specific bug or why a package does not work. So it was also at the time for me, and I guess also for my colleagues at the time, where you really moved out and had a conversation about your internal technology with other people out there. And this was new because we just were all in our silos. There was like the network team, the storage team, and everyone was just like working. And if we had a question or bug, we asked the vendor. That was how we worked and this changed everything because we asked people outside. We have a problem and people answer an IRC. So use this, this could help you. And it was really, really fast. And it worked really good. So we had a lot of diversity coming up with all this. So because we had a lot of new influence, we learned a new stuff. And it was just great. It made a lot of fun. And through the years, OK, the company got bankrupt. Perhaps it's not Linux fault and also hopefully not my fault. I did other things. I moved on and time flies. And now 23 years later, we are totally somewhere else. So and as an entry for the talk, so where we are now? Perhaps it's not so bad. I think, of course, passion let us hear. So all of you, I see this is really a very active and vibrant community. So everyone involved in some way, open infrastructure, open source, there's really a lot of passion. Way more passion. I remember was at the time when we just bought some tools and used it. There's way more passion in our industry now. Which is still there and I love it. We have way more open source than ever before. So I think it's pretty much talk all the time and I think this is not new. But open source, it's just there. It's everywhere. On the other hand, we see a movement. And perhaps you can say this is not the right conference because we are on the OpenStack train and don't use a public cloud or we use both. But perhaps it gives you some arguments later on in the talk to give you. That we see a movement that we see less and less hybrid in private cloud environments because the trend is all over our industry moving to the hyperscalers, moving to the public cloud. Wherever we have a lot of small service providers, we are an OpenStack, public OpenStack provider. There are many of them. But this is the trend we see as an industry. And I have a little bit of a problem or I see a problem with this. So where is this problem? So first of all, I would say open source. And this is often a mismatch. Open source does not mean by any way this is an open standard because it's open source. Doesn't mean you have really a standard to rely on because the standard is something which is accepted by a consortium like, I don't know, HTML or HTTP is or a JSON or something like this is kind of standards where working groups or people approve that this is the way it should be. And then you have a reliable format. On the other hand, you have something like de facto standards. Like, I don't know, working with S3, right? Amazon created it. Pretty much every tooling has some API to work with. It's kind of a standard because you have to deal with it. Everybody deals with it the same way. So it's kind of a standard created, same like Kubernetes. It's also kind of a standard. But what comes with this, and this is the real picture, is we have a very unbalanced market. And that is one of the points I would like to bring up. So we have that. And this is really like the picture taken at Seattle Airport. So you work for A, you work for B, or you work somewhere else in coach, right? And this is where I see a problem not especially for us to not making revenue for anyone, but in some way, I see a risk for the industry and also for the basic and fundamental ideas of the internet and decentralized systems and all that stuff. So where we are here, perhaps you've seen these numbers, this is a pretty new cloud report. I know there's like 10 of cloud reports, and you can also, I don't know, fake statistics the way you want it to be. But just if you really would look it up, where I have the numbers from, we see a clear turn where we are. So it's pretty much a world in the public, consisting out of these three, perhaps four players. And there's, of course, a long tail in the others, but this is where we see where it's going on. It's really, for me, still crazy how Azure really made their business in the last year. So AWS was far ahead and Azure did really, really good for various reasons, I guess, from the technical perspective, I don't know so much, but I think the big advantage they have that they have a very, very, very good sales infrastructure and pretty much every customer in the world into their CIM system. And that gave them the chance to keep up and they did very well. But we have no standards on this. And even if we had cloud standards, like, I don't know, OCCI, somebody knows OCCI? Okay, some of you know ever somebody cared about it. It's like open cloud computing interface, something like the Open Ebola folks for this. So there are kind of standards or OVF, like the open virtualization format, but even like in our, I would say, peer group, it's not really that we care about it so much. And it ended up that other tools take that spot for us. So tools like Terraform and Ansible, I think one of the reasons why they are popular is because there is no standardization. So there's no standardization to working with our toolings and with our platforms that we use other tools like Terraform and Ansible to, I don't know, provision our infrastructure. And even if it's not standardized, I'm not a Terraform specialist, but it's not the way that you do all the AWS configuration in Terraform and then exactly just run it against Google Cloud, this is not how it works. So it's even like different providers and you have to adjust them that way. But it's the reason because people need kind of a standard interface to interact, except they use the vendor-given tool to interact with another provider. I think there's a big change with it is Kubernetes because it is kind also a de facto standard where you can deploy your workload on let's say any Kubernetes provider out there. So in some way I see a chance in it. I don't know exactly how that steering and that controlling of the project works exactly. I know it's like in the foundation how they do it. I don't see so much work invest into standards of all that this, but it's in some way perhaps a self-driven like baby because everybody's doing the same thing and in some way creating a de facto standard we see with it. But it has a crazy big impact on open source. And why? Because we have different methods, how especially like the big hyperscalers work with open source software. And the thing is how they give back and contribute back to the community. So different cloud providers have different methods to provide solutions. There's things like they provide an elastic search. There was a lot of going on with elastic search and Amazon in the last years. If you followed that topic which ended up like having open distro and all the things. So it has an impact on the industry how open source can be innovative but also has a chance to make revenue especially if the direct contact to the customer is cut off because this is what happened in that market. And this ended up in fear and protection by the providers that they came up with all the different licenses. I don't know if you have about the service side public licenses is the thing you have heard of. Like companies like Redis did it for instance that you can use it open source but if you use it as software as a service provider you cannot use it. So they kind of fear that their revenue stream which is usually okay fine use Redis but you use if you need Redis enterprise whatever give us money. That is pretty much the business model but of course it's not working anymore if like a software as a service provider sits on top take Redis has the power and money to make his own product move it forward then these revenue stream to the creator and developer of the product is just cut off. And this ended up in licenses which are not really open source license by the open license perspective. Redis does it, MongoDB did it. So all these in some way ended up that we have new licenses on the market not really now everyone knows how that works. And the thing is that open stores and standards need support and support is usually money. So we need someone who gives people who are working on this company who are working on this and honestly also open source and all the toolings we work with is mainly done by companies. They pay people to do it. Of course there are people working at night or during the day whatever their work shift is on their free time for open source but the majority of open source development is done by companies paying their people for it. So the idea that everyone is doing it in front of Netflix and doing just some open source is just not true. It's perhaps 3%, 4% but not more the rest is on a payroll. And this movement and this is where my point is if we cut down and if we take that layer out that the open source and open standard communities, companies and people have a way to make in some way also a living out of it it will have a deep, deep impact on how innovation could end up in this business. And this is something you can technically also see that innovation is happening in areas like Postgres where some of the big providers adjust the open source database in a way that it's super easy to go in but it's way, way harder to get your data out because they already use kind of standards or extras in their implementation which are by far not standard anymore and you cannot use all the things you can use in an AWS Postgres in just the open source Postgres because it does not work anymore and that's really a thing. So where do we end up with all things? I have still a couple of time. So we are, I don't know, somewhere platform infrastructure, software function and even if you dig deeper and you are to a function level when you are with your products, with your platform on a function level it's really, really hard to have a multi-cloud strategy. So if you use, I don't know, lambda functions it's really hard to go somewhere else. It's pretty much I would say it's impossible. It could be a decision to do it but you are stuck with it. And there's an argument to say okay perhaps here's like an old man yelling at the cloud this is like it is and in some way it's true an old man yelling at the cloud. Is it all commodity like power and water so is the way it is? So we just, I don't know, think different and give up on that. And I think if you wrap your mind around it this is some truth in it. But on the other hand if you see what other companies doing with things like water and pumping out how South Africa and sell the water for $2.5 a bottle of water because they pretty much bought all the rights on water and even if it should be a commodity right it's not there. Okay, I don't know. So power, it's the same. Like energy, I don't know if gas is the right energy this is perhaps room for another track to talk about energy but also like energy is in some way commodity that you have access to it but the pricing and the right on pricing on a fair price and a price related to the price your provider buys the energy is by far absolutely not fair and it's also not commodity because it's a control market by a couple of companies and this is what I see as a problem with commodity or with the perspective that IT and IT services are commodity service they are in some way but we don't have to forget this is like provided and given and sold by companies you wanna be profitable and make their investors richer than they were before and this is totally fine because this is like, I don't know, capitalism works but it also comes with a downside. Well, I would say perhaps a little bit could be but at the end I hope not. So I totally get it that this convenience thing is absolutely a risk. I use like an iPhone. This is like super convenient. We can discuss it also later on if it's really like open standard, free open source pretty much it's not but I don't know why this is working. I can do my stuff, it just works. I can upgrade it from one version to another without like taking a week off. So it's just convenience I decided to go into it and all that money I put in the app store it's just like a sunken ship somewhere it's in there I will never get it back but as far as I worked with it, it works for me it's a risk I take, right? Walking in that golden cage it's the same like if you invest your money in Android app so pretty much there's no alternative because we just have like Android and iOS okay there's like still Nokia some whatever but this is it, right? So it's a risk we take but lock in is a risk as well. So really going to a way where you give everything you have and all your technology and all your deployments and all your data to someone which is not playing in an open standard field is also a risk and it's not, I'm absolutely not saying that it's not a risk you cannot take or you should not take. I'm concerned that so many in our industry don't see it as a risk. So this is what, I don't know, 15, 20 years ago this was a major topic was always like prevent vendor login, it was really a big issue even if we visited customers if you made a decision for a product like vendor login prevent vendor login was really a strategically topic I would say many, many companies and nowadays it seems to be like just disappeared in some companies. They like so yeah we do it fine everything in there we use it oh damn it it does not work what we do now and I don't get it why even if we make the decision to do so we forgot about the risk in it and of course I get it if you are slow it's also a risk right if you have a fantastic business idea and would like to come up with a new application or I don't know the new social network you will pretty much not hire like 20 engineers by co-location space by 20 servers and do all that from stuff of course you would go in some way using a cloud provider even if it's like an hyperscaler or a small like open stack or whatever shop of course you would do you don't start with engineering because you would like to go on the market really quickly because it's super important otherwise your innovative idea someone else brought it to life or it's just like time flies by so it's also risk to be slow I totally get it but it also is kind of a concern and what wonders me in this scenario is that a lot of companies who absolutely don't have that risk of slowness because they are in the market they exactly know how that works they have a very big like how can I say it like base and base load they go to that and totally risk that vendor lock in even if they don't have a requirement for speed so where we ended up this is like the one product in cloud is cloud cost optimization I was at at KubeCon I was one was it in May in Amsterdam and in this hall like exhibition hall there were like 20 different companies which said I reduce your cloud bill by 50% and which is amazing companies I never heard 10 of them will not exist next year but this is how it is so this is a crazy big issue that people go in there have no clue what it will cost because even you can do the calculator you have no idea I think nobody ever did the calculator by far came close to the invoice you get a month later it's impossible so this is a big topic for people to figure out oh man it's really expensive and the problem with it if we have because an unbalanced market we have a pricing where just a couple of companies share that pricing and that is an economic problem you see everywhere it has nothing to do with IT so if just a couple of players are dominant in the market they control the price and you see this and this is a fantastic example even a hard one is Insulin in 2006 like a dose of Insulin in the United States cost 67 dollars oops yeah and in 2022 it was like 500 dollars because there are only two or three companies in America who produce Insulin and they were able to control the pricing on the market which ended up that so many people were not able to afford the Insulin and there were just like new law come in place I have to write it down that I don't get it wrong and just in November 2021 they brought a law that they drastically reduced the price but there was this situation in the US that in 2020 people died because they cannot afford Insulin which is super cheap the inventor sold the the patent for it for one dollar so it costs pretty much nothing Insulin is like from the amusement cost it's like worthless but if you just have two or three companies you dictate and control the price and this is in many other things like oil, energy, water and all these a lot of these resources we see is commodity controlled by really really less players in that market and means it's really no surprise it's just like in all the other industries we kind of see it coming and also in our industry it's coming right now all the public health providers increased their pricing in the last years in some disciplines because they have all so many products you pretty much it's really hard to figure out how many different products Azure, AWS or Google has nobody knows it I guess perhaps someone internally a lot of them really get way more expensive in the last years no especially at this point they are also their customers like more and more the government is in that position that they are the customer and it's like even hard to fight your provider yeah they become subservient yeah absolutely because there's such a strong dependency and honestly I don't have an answer what to do about it I have a couple of ideas which come in my slides but of course I think one thing is to talk about it like create awareness and tell people and I by far I gave this kind of talk a couple of times and people afterwards come you're totally against AWS or against Azure I'm not I'm just like I'm in favor of diversity of multiple companies of a long tail of smaller providers and not everyone needs like 20,000 regions and being available globally to just have a small shop they can use their local provider in their area but you're absolutely right it's really hard to control absolutely yeah so just coming back to finish that I'm not running out of time so we are in that market and it's also the thing of governance so who controls it who is working with it and to give you a perspective I don't know this is of course you know that this is a sheep from Venezuela there was like a ban in place in 2019 where it was not allowed for US service providers for instance to provide services to Venezuela which ended up that people there using cloud services from one day to another couldn't access the data anymore because the providers were not allowed to do so and this is also what you mentioned I would say I don't know political more unstable world that we have been 20 years ago I even don't know if it's true because somebody else was even more unsecure but in general I would say what's going on right now there's governmental control in it and also all the big hyperscalers on the United States it's a thing I just have to bring up because it's also a reality so they are still under control by I would not say by the government but by the laws of this government so if the United States decides I don't know Amazon you are not allowed to sell your services to Venezuela anymore they will not do it because they cannot and this is something also has an influence on an unbalanced market so what can you do? It's tough so first thing is creating awareness this is why I'm talking here perhaps don't follow every hype this is always a good thing some of you bought anyone bought an NFT so I did so I'm super stupid because it's just I had four more like I really had the fear of missing out if I don't have these like ape and I don't have an ape because I would not stand here if I have one of these crazy NFT apes I bought some I don't know crazy Shiba dude whatever for I don't know 150 euros my wife would kill me if she ever knows that I did it just because they had the feeling I have to do it it's the next thing right you need like a digital whatever an unfungible token which is totally nuts anyway I did it because of the fear I have to do it in some way and we have this in technology of course we have this we have like a resume driven industry we all want to work usually on the new hot stuff and this also tends to be something following a path which perhaps you should like stand up a little bit go back one step look at it from a global perspective and decide where you move so nobody really cares if you don't go to the party so sometimes it's cool to not do all the hot shit and do all the new things and just like blindly following technology, following advertisement and just have a look on an impact so perhaps the monoliths are the future right now this is the statement is from Kelsey Heithauer which is probably very prominent for not this being part of his presentations and there's a movement going on right now there was a couple of weeks ago I guess it was the AWS streaming team or something or Prime team they released a blog post or a technical paper about how they kicked out all the microservices because transferring the data between all their microservices was so expensive that they just went back to a monolith system and it was way way cheaper because they reduced the cost of it it was way easier because they don't had to transfer the data all the time it's an interesting read obviously I forget to put the link in here but you can Google it like AWS Prime monolith if you Google it it's super to read and it's afterwards I'd just like to finish because they kicked me out otherwise and it's just good to read to figure out that every trend we have will get an absolutely anti-movement a couple of years later so we will go back in a lot of systems and a lot of providers and a lot of companies who now have a very distributed like microservices infrastructure and service mesh and what so on they will go back to a more monolithic system this will happen of course it will happen in containers and it will happen in containers and Kubernetes and all that stuff but this will change cost control is the thing so if your cost control makes also sense if you work it in your data center for some reason cost control often starts just when you moved everything out to a cloud provider and then you get the invoice in it then it's way easier to read what it costs then you produce your costs internally but it also makes sense to control your costs in your own stuff to be reasonable means really try to get the pros and cons from all the things we do in that industry and this is an argument for your company or for someone else it means it's a good argument and it's a good advice for life but even like making technical decisions interoperability is super important I mean here I think I would say it's crystal clear but it's something you can demand from your vendor so you can ask your vendor and say this is important for me I want this I demand that even if I use an open source software you provide me a software as a service I demand from you that you use it in an upstream and a compatible way that I have a chance to go out and if you dig deeper you will figure out that a lot of open source software out there provided that software as a service is by far not compatible with the open source software you can download on GitHub or in the repositories because they moved on in their teams because they have the power and they can and they do so ask it figure that out prevent vendor lock in I don't know this is not modern and this is not hip in our industry anymore sometimes they have that feeling that it is not but I think it should be still a criteria in everything buying your IT business buying a car buying energy buying anything you should try to figure out what do I do when my provider now increases the pricing for 200% can I afford it do I want to afford it and what is my exit scenario and I think this should be like a fundamental thing for every decision for every like buying a technology a product or making a business decision what do you do so support variety perhaps use a lot of system that you have the chance to I don't know have a multi cloud it's also decision multi cloud is way more effort makes you slower than just going an all in one strategy but it's a thing you can think about demand contribution so ask your providers ask the companies your suppliers to contribute to make it open make it upstream and keep their ideas open sometimes doubt if this is the right thing and it's up to us so there is no government will help us if we need help it's up to us kind of in time thank you very much for all the time