2026·04·29 · 35:13
Sustainability is Everything Everywhere All at Once (CloudFest 2026)
A CloudFest 2026 panel on what “sustainability” actually means for cloud infrastructure once you stop using the word as a synonym for “environmental”. We covered energy sourcing, talent, regulation, geopolitics, and AI demand — all the pressures that now sit on operators and decision-makers at the same time, with no real map for how to balance them. I joined Oliver Sild (Patchstack), Matt Russell (formerly Namecheap), Rachel Sterling (Identity Digital), and Christian Dawson (i2Coalition).
0:03 How sustainable do our business models feel? How sustainable does our community at Cloudfest feel? So for me, the status quo is not sustainable. Keep in mind is like we can build anything, but for that too is does it matter? Expectations of that output is getting higher and higher to a point of a complete burnout. Yes, we can get to market really quickly, but we have to pump the brakes and ensure that when we do get to market, people are going to appreciate
0:37 First, let me explain what it is we're talking about. It's a sustainability is everything everywhere all at once. Um, so what the heck are we talking about? Uh, when most people think of sustainability, especially in this industry, you are generally talking about data centers, you're talking about cooling, you're talking about power. that that stuff's important and it's especially power important right now in the age of AI but it's not all that we're talking about today. Uh we want to go deeper. We want to look at the
1:08 sustainability of all the things that are part of this ecosystem at CloudFest. All the things that we're here to try to deal with um the sustainability of our business models, the sustainability of the things that we are bringing to our clients. This to me at least feels like the most disruptive time in our industry in the more than two decades that I've been a part of this industry. Almost three decades. Oh my god. Um and so we want to sit down and figure out how
1:40 sustainable do our business models feel? How sustainable does our community at Cloudfest feel? Um all of us are here together to be a part of a community. This community is changing. the tools that are out there, they're amazing, but are they leading us towards a sustainable future? Um, I will say that I think we can get to a pretty positive answer for that. I think that we can get to a place where we can be excited about
2:11 a future that's in front of us. But a lot of it is through some scary times, some probably a lot of questions that a lot of us have about how um about how confident we are that we are going to be able to navigate this uncertain future. Um, if I had a strong recommendation to you that I'm going to give you at the top, it's to couple the things that we're going to learn today with the data that you're going to learn at the session that is you're going to have find later
2:42 today uh with state of the cloud. I had a chance to preview this document um that is coming out that they're going to be talking about. Brook Edge over there is going to be doing state of the cloud later today. I read her report. It's amazing. And it gets to a place where we see in the data that there is confidence in this community and that we are heading towards a strong and sustainable place. But the only way that we can figure out how we can sort of get through the period of uncertainty that we're dealing with is to address some of
3:14 the hard things that we're all dealing with headon. And I've got an incredible panel that's going to come and join me to talk about how to do that. So, I would like to invite up my friends. Um, Welcome you. Matt Russell. Matt. Cool. Oh, here you go. You're here. Matt, here you go. I'm gonna invite you all here. Oliver Silva
3:52 No, just at the end everybody's Oh, you're right. Yeah. Oh my god. I told everybody to sit under the picture and then I just completely messed it up. Do we want to play musical chairs or we just want to roll with it? No, we're going to roll with it. Okay. So, um, thank you all for joining. Uh, you heard a little bit about my opening. We're really trying to figure out how we can navigate these very uncertain times. I want to learn about a little a little bit about each of you and what you're going through and I want to start by finding out. Okay, we're talking about
4:24 sustainability. What is feeling very unsustainable in your life right now and your role right now and what is your role? Hi everyone, I'm Rachel. I'm the chief marketing officer at Identity Digital. If you're unfamiliar with us, we operate the world's largest domain portfolio. Um, what's feeling unsustainable for me, and I think that many of you might hear this as well, is that AI is allowing you to do more with less. Why aren't you moving faster? Why aren't you moving things that less money? Um, and so for
4:57 us, what's feeling unsustainable is how do you manage these maybe unrealistic expectations about what AI is capable of doing today versus what the media is portraying AI to be capable of. And so personally how we've been using AI is through content generation because our job is to make our domains discoverable whether it's online through use or through other registar partners. And what AI tools have allowed us to do is to start not from the blank page anymore. And so we're getting to a place
5:28 where it can generate the first draft but the first draft is not the finished draft. We have to run that through a human lens. And so all of a sudden I have to give my team writing lessons because like I don't know about you guys but when was the last time you took a writing class? I'm assuming it was college. But when you get that AI output you're like looks good and you know what it doesn't look good. It looks like a computer wrote it. And so that's starting to feel really unsustainable right now. I think that's great. Um Matt. Okay. I think we got a lot of agreement
6:00 here. That's great. Matt, tell us about your world and and what's unsustainable in it right now. That is a very hard act to follow, Rachel. Thank you. Um, sorry. Good morning, everybody. So, Matt Russell, former chief cloud officer at NameCheep. And when I think about sustainability, there's two chapters. Sustainability, maybe as recently as 2 years ago, was around the environment, around thinking about being eco-friendly and those kinds of things. But if I think about sustainability now, and I have the privilege of being involved with a few different businesses, it's
6:32 the status quo isn't sustainable. How can you keep doing what you've been doing for 5, 10, 15, 20 years when we are on the cusp of the new industrial revolution that probably is even bigger than the industrial revolution and it's changing every single business model, every single operating model out there. So for me, staying in your lane, doing what you've always done is not sustainable. And I think it's a fascinating and great time to be thinking about doing things differently because all of a sudden you have this resource, this incredible capability at
7:04 your fingertips for for $20 a month, for $200 a month. So for me, and I'm sure we'll talk more about it on the panel, but the status quo is not sustainable. Hello everyone. Um, I'm Oliver. I'm the co-founder of Patchek. Uh we are one of the largest uh security vulnerability coordinators in the world and one of the things that is a big challenge for us right now is the speed of how fast security vulnerabilities are being found
7:36 and not even the necessarily from the from the angle of how they are being found but who is actually going to do all the coordination of making sure that these issues are getting fixed uh making sure that you know the fixes are actually reaching the people who need them. Um it is literally our uh problem right now is where in January alone we are dealing with like 1,500 security vulnerability reports coming into open source software and we are looking at reports where some of them are pointing back to like report
8:07 file in open claw folder which kind of gives you a you know uh giveaway of who actually found that and and so filtering out that and kind of like coordinating all of this is very hard. Um and I think from the security point of view if you think about that then it is always security is always a cat and the mouse game and ultimately it's a human psych psychology thing. So security always boils down to people not caring enough and um you know maybe not taking security too too seriously. Um and that
8:38 ultimately kind of like creates my biggest worry which is not sustainable. Uh is the rapid decline of human cognitive capability. Um, and that is really one of my kind of worries where, you know, the kids can't count money and things like that because, you know, you have the calculators and what that was the problem, you know, for for a while back, but now it's like, you know, we we've we've been on this kind of like cognitive decline and now we're like really steep, you know, drop down. Um,
9:10 so that affects absolutely everything. Uh, so I'm worried of like where we are going from here if uh just people stop thinking. That reminds me a little bit of what Rachel was saying about like just going ahead and inputting some basic stuff and getting an output and just assuming that you've got a a good a well-written statement. If you're doing that in other aspects too, it's sounds very problematic. Yes. What's your world? Um yes. So I have too many different roles as an investor, product builder, other other fun stuff doesn't in when I
9:42 what I see a lot is that we all build with AI now. We build a lot of software. We build a lot of cool stuff and I what we don't talk about enough and has been a pet thing for me for years is the fact that we're all building on open source and open source now gets more security reports gets more stuff coming in but we've never fixed the funding of open source. So on almost every level open source is underfunded underresourced to deal with everything that's coming in
10:13 now. And we're building on top of that. And I think that we have to figure that out if we want to keep building with AI the way we do because all of our AIs are so bloody good at coding because of open source. Yeah. But nobody's paying for that and we need to figure that out and fix it. That's another really tough challenge of So, now that we've gotten to know each of our panelists a little bit and what you're facing, I want to go back to something that you were saying, Matt,
10:44 where you were talking about the status quo for most people being unsustainable. But you've got people out there with business models that they want to maintain. You've got people out here that have employees that want to continue to, you know, chart a path to growth and they've got to figure out how to sustain and grow their businesses in this very like unsure ecosystem. So, why don't I start with you and say like how do you do that as a business who wants
11:16 to sustain their business model? It's a a nice easy question to start if I think about CloudFest, Cloudfest once upon a time was called World Hosting Days. And a lot of us in this space have a connection or are from hosting. And if we think about the hosting world over the last 10, 15, 20 years, we saw technology emerge where you put servers online, you would manage servers, that became a little bit easier
11:49 with technology. And then web 2.0, O this kind of this experience world came where you would abstract the technology and you would make it easier for for people with less technical skills to do things online and whether that was running your CRM, whether that was using Mailchimp for your email newsletter or anything like that. And we saw this experience world abstract complex technology and put it into the background. Lots of businesses, lots of people tackled that and built great businesses around that. But th those workflows,
12:21 those browserbased workflows of web 2.0 where you're doing things, powerful things with point andclick, that is all changing because all of a sudden you don't need to log into a dashboard to build an email campaign. All of a sudden, you don't need to log into Salesforce to manage your sales opportunities because you can talk to your AI using voice. You can type to your AI. If your AI is very smart, it can probably just interdict your your meeting notes and do things for you. So, how do you h to talk and it's a long
12:52 answer to the tough question, but how do you absorb and acknowledge all of that while changing your business? I don't have the silver bullet, but what I do think you have to do is embrace change and the kind of ludite movement that the UK saw at the start of the industrial revolutions where the the mill came along and people burnt down the mill because they thought jobs were going to go. I think you have to embrace change and you have to learn and you have to test and you have to pilot and being privileged enough to be involved with a few different organizations. those that
13:24 are using our using AI in R&D and playing with AI and using it in different roles and in different functions. I think that is how you that's how you protect and defend against a change. You've got to be open to using it across everything because as Yos said and he he and I are friends and we've had many conversations and we've shared notes. It can build good software. It can build decent products. They might not be fully secure yet and Oliver might say a few words about that. But it can do what your engineering team did three years ago in a day less. Just
13:55 spend money on credits. It can play the role of your your CMO. It can build marketing campaigns. It can do everything. So, well, no, no, no, don't go that far. Sorry. Let me redact that statement. I I So, I think being curious is one word of advice I can give. Let let me finish because I'd love to give the mic to somebody else, but my routine up until about 6 months ago was wake up, have a coffee, check my emails. Now it's wake up, make a coffee. What did my AI work on overnight for me? What do I need
14:26 to prioritize? What do I need to do today? And that for me, a dinosaur that's been in this industry for so long to change your entire routine and just do so naturally and organically because it's like prioritizing what you need to do today was was was crazy, right? So I would say be curious, use AI, stay on top of the developments which are happening at a break neck break neck pace. It's it's yeah like it's hard to stay up to date actually with claw peroxy computer new um chat GBT model etc. How do you stay on top of all of that? So be curious and embrace it and
14:58 play with it because what else can you do? So, so others would what what do you have to say to react to that if talking to the people that have business models to sustain throughout the ecosystem is the only way through to be able to sort of have that radical openness to embrace whatever change is available in this technology. Yeah, go for it. Um, I love AI like a lot. Um, okay. I hate to break it to all of you because I'm sure you're attached,
15:30 but Claude is my boyfriend. Um, so you can't have him. Um, but I think that as a business, right, you can use AI tools in order to make the work easier, but on the other end of that is trust and it's the confidence in your product that you have to build with your core audience. So I work at a registry and if you're familiar with how registries operate is I don't necessarily sell anything to an end customer like I don't sell my TLDDS to an end customer I go to
16:01 market through the registar channel and so it's crucial that I use these tools to be more effective but then I remember the people who are using the tools because they have to build the confidence in my products with the channel so that the channel then feels confident to go out and promote my products to their end customers. customers. And so regardless of how many tools you use, it is still a game of confidence. It is still a game of building trust. And so that's really I I think that that's where human jobs are safe because we're not selling computer
16:32 to computer. We're selling human to human. I feel like when I was talking about the different types of sustainability that we need to foster, trust should have been on that list. Yeah. I I think the harsh truth is that we can pretend that everything and every business model is sustainable in this new day and age and it's not. So I think that most of you who are in the hosting or infrastructure industry are quite lucky because it'll do well because all those apps that were all
17:03 coding need to be hosted somewhere. Um but I don't think that all software businesses out there are actually sustainable with with what's happening right now. And we will see what who actually has a moat and who who has a moat that is slightly bigger than I built a piece of software because I built a piece of software is no longer anything because someone else can go and do that in 5 minutes even when I mean we here on the panel at least I think we all use AI on a daily if not hourly basis and the large
17:35 majority of the world probably doesn't yet. So it's not like everyone is doing this for everything, but there are enough builders out there already that can copy any piece of software in in a matter of days. So you need more than that as a moat. Yeah. So I think Oliver has a moat. Yeah. It's a it's a hard thing because like you have to you know you're looking at how AI is moving and then every single day you feel like you're getting like
18:06 three steps behind and then you wake up the next day and it's like okay now I'm like five steps behind and then you're like I didn't even have time to like you know get on with the stuff that was released yesterday and so forth. So it's it's it's it's very demanding mentally as well right to be kind of like okay what is the stuff that I'm going to put my focus on? Um, and what is the stuff that is just noise? Uh, I think there's a lot of noise right now and I think it's very hard to kind of like filter that out. Um, especially in security. It's like the amount of uh what we call
18:37 AI slop reports. You know, this is like what the entire open source ecosystem is really like struggling right now is that suddenly, you know, you get those vulnerability reports coming in there and, you know, someone needs to kind of like put the tension there and so forth. And at the same time I mean being an engineer today is like I I don't I wouldn't want to be an engineer today anymore. uh because it is very difficult like the expectations from the companies is that you know you have to use AI and you have to do 10 times more output that
19:08 you you know you were supposed to do in the past and then when all of it is getting you know when when the AI is getting like better and better the expectations of that output is getting higher and higher to a point to of a complete burnout. Um I don't think that's sustainable. Yeah. and and I suppose if I'm looking at things through your lens um you know dealing with cyber security people are talking about wanting to embrace these tools but each one of them seems to be also a threat vector from your lens.
19:39 Yeah, absolutely. I mean, one of the one of the things that I'm looking at right now, for example, is, you know, we've been we've I've been working on kind of like security from the WordPress perspective for a long time. 76% of all known security vulnerabilities in the WordPress ecosystem have been coordinated by us and reported to us and we've been kind of like uh working on that and now we are like looking into you know what hosting companies what is the next thing that they're going to host and we see so much of you know AI generated code everyone is going after like okay we want to host lovable websites we want to host you know all
20:10 these websites generated by these AI products and I actually personally did a test and I was looking into creating a donut website withstalled single prompt short one it came with 149 dependencies um who is going to maintain that uh and you know we can talk about supply chain issues there is like um you know name like like a package confusion basically where AI is like thinking that it's using a legit package but it's actually
20:42 pulling in something that is malicious um like the the threat landscape or like the attack surface has significantly changed to the point where people are exposing secrets the API keys and ultimately you look into this like new direction of like how people are building websites or now actually they are all building an applications but the people behind that is exactly the same people it's the same people who got into the WordPress bandwagon because it it gave you the extendability and the ease
21:13 of use and now just you know the only only way easier to build a website today than using an AI is for me to ask yours to build it for me. Yeah. Um and ultimately that's you know um if if it's getting very easy and now they're building it on top of like NodeJS which was never meant to be you know non-developer framework uh then the maintenance of it is going to be a huge challenge and talking about the mode here is like what we where we definitely have like an advantage because we've
21:44 been doing all of this coordination for the past 10 years. So, but yeah, it's it's a challenge. I think I think it ties back to what Rachel said in the beginning on writing. You have to have to actually look at it and and be know what it says and and stand for what it does. I I think the biggest lesson we have to learn everyone is that even if you use AI, you're still responsible for its output. Yeah. I I want to zoom out because you wanted I mean I'm just trying to lace together three very interesting points there. So
22:15 you talked about cognitive decline. You talked about being responsible for AI's output. And I'm just thinking through we've lived through the fake news era and everything like that which is generally humanmade fake news etc. But with AI producing and outputting so much secure and secure like how do you discern what is real and what is not real in the world. Great question and in and actually does it matter whether it's AI or human or whether it's what I think I mean that's sort of an existential question but if you're honest about it it doesn't matter it makes me think though because to to
22:47 your point on writing like so so my my son recently turned 10 and he'll probably hate that I'm mentioning his name on stage but he would love for AI to do his homework and for him to not have to think too much about it and you talked about cognitive decline I think that critical thinking piece and being able to understand if it matters or not is absolutely key and just relying on AI which today suffers from confirmation bias etc like that is not sustainable. We do have to interrogate I so yeah I think it does matter. I want to zoom out a little bit because we've spent a lot
23:19 of time talking about AI but but you guys bring up good points that lead me to want to point out that like it is more than just sort of the disruption that this tool is providing to the industry. We are also in a period where you know we started by talking about power which is the traditional way for us to describe issues around sustainability uh and that's a serious issue as well but there's geopolitical stuff and honestly because of all the AI stuff there's lots of new tech policy things that we're dealing with. You
23:50 talked about cyber security. I said when I walked out here on stage the first time that it felt like um the most disrupted time in my almost 30 years in the industry. Uh I think that's true. You I don't know you you've been in this industry a couple of you have been in this industry for almost as long as I have if not more. Um, I want to know if you can tell me some stories about times when there were this many sort of uh
24:21 like a confluence of different pressures that are happening all at once and how we've gotten through them in the past. See, so we can see if we can give people some light at the end of this tunnel. What do you think? Any stories for me, Yoast? Well, I I don't know about the light. Uh I so I think it's wonderful right I think I think we can do fantastic things with it. I think we also have to realize very much that we also need to respect what are human skills that we still
24:52 need. I think the thing that we need to keep in mind is like we can build anything but for that too is does it matter? Do we really need to build it? the craftsmanship of like doing that and at the same time I see things going into production. I so I obviously talked to Oliver quite a bit. Um we we last week I was playing with one of my developers who's sitting here up front with a tool that we we were testing. We found an API key, looked at it. Turns out this app that we were
25:24 testing exposed all of its secrets, including its Stripe API key connected to it, all their Google secrets, all the Mailchimp API keys for all of their customers. I could find everything. I'm like, yeah, it's fun that you can vibe code a thing, but putting it into production is another. And um I I think that we have to be well bit more conscious of that. And at the same time, I I love that we can build so fast. Yeah. But it's hard. It's there there is there
25:57 is a definitely a challenge in in in both directions. And yeah, I think we'll we'll spend the next few days talking about that and and then the next few years talking and working through it. Matt, have you seen is there you No, I wonder like just from the people in the audience like how many of your companies have gone through like a reorg sort of like a restructure within the past year? Can you raise a hand? Yeah. Yeah. I mean I think that's that's that's what's happening. Like I've been
26:30 talking to different um executives within the past two days here in CloudFest and everyone is talking about how they're reorganizing everything. I wonder how many hands would go up next year if we try the same thing. Yeah. So I think it's yeah it's it's it's it's it's definitely a lot of pressures coming from you know expectations from this high output also like you know what we are doing as a company right now is it going to matter in 5 years I think everyone is thinking about that
27:01 um coming back to the m like whether something matters you know what is the definition of when nothing matters anymore it's depression Yeah. Um, so yeah, I mean it's um it's it's a difficult thing to think about because there's like, you know, there's so much of that coming from everywhere and then you're like trying to really figure out like what in the end is going to matter and nobody has a question answer for that. Um, right. But wait, I think we're here in this community this week trying to find
27:34 direction, if not answers, and trying to to to guide us out of depression and to embrace as many opportunities as we can in this environment. And I think that we've been through periods Uh I think we've been through disruptive periods before, haven't we, Matt? We we we have, but it does feel different this time. Yeah. And just for the audience's benefit, like when we putting together a talk like this, we actually have a WhatsApp group with a few of us in and about a week before this was uh was
28:06 confirmed, we we all kind of agreed that it feels different and how do we stay current and the whole theme is different because the world is changing. So we have been through disruption before. I don't think any of us have lived through the level of disruption that we're going to see, which is it can be scary, it can be exciting, it can be everything in between. So, so for me at least, and I think you agree just from the the WhatsApp we were having back and forth on trying to be current for the for the for the community's benefit rather than the the audience benefit. So, it feels different.
28:39 I think being open to the change and questioning is that status quo good enough? could you change is the best thing that you can do right now because I mean to your point Oliver and yours as well two years ago we could have been having a coffee in the VIP lounge or sat on stage and you're talking about your your R&D and your engineering challenges and that's a bottleneck and you can't build technology fast enough etc that isn't that isn't the bottleneck anymore that has changed I would say right now the bottleneck is being able to absorb what
29:10 AI can do and the humanness in the organization how can that actually be ready for a product that you've built in 5 days. How can the the go to marketing um of your business be ready to take that to partners that are also not ready? So, I don't know if this is reassuring or not, but we we we have been through change. This feels like in my 20 years in this industry, this feels like it's the biggest change that we've been through so far. Yeah, I would agree. I would agree. I've only been in this industry for 3 years. I know Christian would say it feels like way longer. people have that
29:44 have that effect on people. Um I did want to share an anecdote if I may from my time before. Um I think we're talking a lot about technology and tooling and perhaps we're not thinking about messaging and narrative. And so in my experience, problems arise. They can happen with the product level, but they also happen with the framing of the product. And again, this is where humans become involved. And so, um, before I worked at Identity Digital, I was at Instagram. And how many of you remember when Instagram got in hot water for
30:15 launching Instagram for kids? Anybody? Nobody. Okay, great. Most. Um, what a terrible product. Instagram for kids. Horrible, right? Except it wasn't Instagram for kids. It was Parental Controls for Instagram and it was leaked as Instagram for kids. and parental control sounds like a really great product that everybody would be in favor of. Eight-year-olds using Instagram, not so much. And so, the reason I'm sharing this anecdote is because it's crucial as we get to market as fast as
30:49 we can is to address the positioning of why we are going to market. What is the narrative? When somebody sees what we're capable of building, why should they care about it? Who is it for? how is it differentiated from your competitor set? And so I think that that's really important for us to remember like yes, we can get to market really quickly, but we have to pump the brakes and ensure that when we do get to market, people are going to appreciate what we built. That's that's fantastic. We are already
31:21 at the end of our time. Um our goal with this initial panel was to try to set the stage for the week ahead. uh when you're going to go out there and you're going to learn about things that will hope hopefully lead you down the path to clarity and down to and and towards towards the light of opportunity um through this very disruptive time. Um really quickly because we need to move on to the next section. I gave my tip at the beginning for what what people should look at uh on the stage in the
31:52 coming week. Um the the um uh state of the cloud report I think gives some great data about what you all think. I want to know if anybody else has any tips heading into the week of what they think people should see. Um the finding the future track has me really excited so I wrote these down. The fourth revolution of website building in the agentic era the 10 web presentation um is today. Um who ownsme marketing stack in the age of AI that's today at 12:40. Nice. How to get your own top level domain 3:35 p.m. today. Uh, and then
32:25 tomorrow, why do critical in 26 and then I have to do a shout out for me. They're letting me talk on the stage for like a full 20 minutes. That's a mistake. Um, the laziest retention strategy that actually works. Be here or be square tomorrow at 12:15. Fantastic. M mine is a little less eloquent than yours, Rachel, and my tip would be spend Um today is something new in CloudFest uh starting at 3 PM in Santa Isabel which is the hacker space. Um so we put together
32:58 some a little bit different type of kind of like you know talks where we do technical deep dives. So people who actually want to kind of you know see into how into the cares basically then I really recommend going there. A part of that uh or like next to this actually we are also hosting a CTF where we have which is capture the flag essentially hacking competition. So you can come there we have roughly nine different challenges where you can just hack WordPress sites hack some of the AI
33:32 generated websites and win 1K. So um hope to see you around there. any tips on? So, there's two things I would I would highly recommend. One, uh we've just come out of the the hackathon, the CloudFest hackathon, and the the results for that are going to be presented and you should be there to see what is now possible in the weekend because the difference between last year and this year is mindblowing. So go look at the results for the hackathon. See that and then I bit self-
34:05 congratulatory but I I get to moderate this guy and four more security guys talking about uh AI and security at 10 to 12 next door. So fantastic and I do have one more last recommendation for you. Uh on the last day in the last panel I get to interview Brewster Kale who is the founder of uh the internet archive way back machine. This is the internet's librarian. He has collected our entire history online and he I think is going to have a lot of
34:37 good insights into he's he's experienced our entire past. He's collected it all and I'm sure that he's going to have really interesting insights about our future. And that's our goal here is to chart our future together. So hopefully we've got a good start on this first panel. I want to thank you all for being