CloudFest 2023 reactions

CloudFest, the major industry event for the cloud computing and internet presence industries, was once again held last week in Rust, Germany. For Zone, this was an opportunity to reconnect with existing partners, vendors and friends while forging new relationships.

This year’s theme for the event was “Resilient Cloud”, which encapsulated many subthemes such as future-proofing, security and sustainability of the internet and cloud-related business models.

In line with the popular discourse everywhere, one narrative kept creeping into future-proofing related presentations and discussions on and around the exhibition grounds: how will the large language model-based AI systems (LLMs) affect the industry, specifically the omnipresent OpenAI ChatGPT platform?

Certainly, OpenAI has almost single-handedly brought on the most spectacular “AI spring” ever. It will bring about a lot of innovation that takes advantage of their model’s exceptional natural language processing capabilities.

Some of those innovations were already put on display by the exhibitors.

Most of the initial use cases centred around content generation:

• texts for blog posts, social media and other web-based content
• texts for newsletters and other e-mail-based communication;
• product descriptions and other texts for e-commerce;
• search engine optimisation etc.

I do not particularly look forward to the AI-generated unsolicited marketing materials that humans will be bombarded by soon. But hey, AI-based spam filtering will be ‘a-boomin’!

The European Union is currently working on the Artificial Intelligence Act (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_Intelligence_Act), which will hopefully establish a robust framework for entities trying to take advantage of this ongoing AI spring. The subsequent CloudFests might get interesting in this aspect.

As always, information security – a subject near and dear to my heart – was also on everybody’s mind. Many exhibitors were touting their solutions to manage confidentiality, availability and integrity-related risks.

I must admit that I do not agree with all of the presented viewpoints. The hosting industry should adopt a more mature and user-friendly attitude towards cyber security. Security cannot be sold as a WordPress plug-in or a control panel add-on.

Also, some service providers should take a long hard look in the mirror before shaming their customers for security lapses. We should strive towards providing a reasonably secure service by default rather than acting smug when humans do what humans do best – make human mistakes.

Oh, and e-mail is still alive. Exhibitors offering solutions around the e-mail ecosystem were very much present and more ambitious than ever. This is excellent news for us because offering great e-mail functionality as part of our hosting services is kind of our thing.

Our thanks and greetings to everyone we met at CloudFest 2023, and see you next year!