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TCP Talks | AI, FinOps & Cloud Leadership Interviews

TCP Talks | AI, FinOps & Cloud Leadership Interviews

Written by: ustin Brodley & Jonathan Baker | Cloud Computing FinOps & AI Interviews
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Join Justin Brodley and Jonathan Baker as they sit down with industry leaders, vendors, and technologists for in-depth conversations on Cloud Computing, AI, FinOps, and emerging technology. TCP Talks goes beyond the weekly news to explore the strategies, tools, and innovations shaping the future of cloud infrastructure — from AWS and Azure to Google Cloud and beyond.© 2026 The Cloud Pod Economics Entrepreneurship Management & Leadership Small Business & Entrepreneurship
Episodes
  • TCP-Talks: Keep the Raccoons Out: Service Mesh, MCP, and Securing Agentic Workloads.

    TCP-Talks: Keep the Raccoons Out: Service Mesh, MCP, and Securing Agentic Workloads.
    Jun 4 2026
    Keep the Raccoons Out: Service Mesh, MCP, and Securing Agentic Workloads With William Morgan, CEO of Buoyant and creator of Linkerd Linkerd just turned 10, so we brought on the person who built it and coined the term “service mesh” in the first place. William Morgan joins Jonathan and Justin to talk about where service mesh came from, where it’s going, and the very specific kind of chaos that agentic AI is about to unleash on anyone who owns a Kubernetes cluster. The short version: lock your doors, because the raccoons are coming. “Our job is basically to make Linkerd as boring as possible.” William traces Linkerd’s origins back to Twitter’s infrastructure work between 2010 and 2014, when a Ruby on Rails monolith turned into a sprawling distributed system — the same problems we have today, just a different decade. As the fifth project ever to join the CNCF, Linkerd has had a front-row seat to the ecosystem’s evolution, and William explains why his actual goal these days is to make it as boring as humanly possible: the kind of dependable infrastructure layer you can trust to still be around in another 90 years. That’s also why he’s not adding AI to Linkerd — an infrastructure layer has to be fast, lightweight, and predictable, and generative AI is the opposite of all three. “At some point your agentic workload is going to figure out how to delete the production database. And it’s going to try it.” The heart of the conversation is what the AI wave means for the platform teams who own the clusters. Developers just got an army of AI assistants, and that has real consequences for CI/CD, code quality, and blast radius. William digs into the boundary problem — agentic workloads are untrusted but need access to your most important systems — and why zero trust has suddenly stopped being optional now that the code hitting your database no longer clears peer review and a security committee. Along the way they get into cache-aware routing that can take a 13-second inference call down to one, the still-unsolved mess of agentic identity, and why we keep anthropomorphizing these tools and letting our guard down. “If you don’t use Linkerd, your data system will be overrun by raccoons.” Finally, they turn to MCP — building a catalog of MCP servers, detecting tool calls, and adding DLP-style protection in front of the services an agent never sees. But William’s real point is that MCP is something of a red herring for a much older problem: uncontrolled access to your APIs. Whatever protocol you use, once an unconstrained workload is loose in your environment, you need an immune system to keep it in check. Links and resources: Linkerd: linkerd.ioBuoyant: buoyant.io (free if your company has fewer than 50 employees)CNCF: cncf.ioAI Darwin Awards (worth a doomscroll)Find William on LinkedIn, where he welcomes your nasty-grams The Cloud Pod Visit thecloudpod.net to subscribe, join our Slack, or sign up for the weekly newsletter. Thanks to William for joining us, and thanks for listening.
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    38 mins
  • TCP-Talks: Focus on Value: How FinOps Transformed from Cost Cops to Business Enablers

    TCP-Talks: Focus on Value: How FinOps Transformed from Cost Cops to Business Enablers
    Aug 6 2025
    For this special edition of TCP Talks, Justin Brodley is joined by four distinguished guests from the FinOps Foundation following the recent FinOps X conference in San Diego. Rob Martin, Mike Fuller, Graham Murphy, and the TCP team dive deep into the evolution of FinOps from pure cloud cost management to the broader “Cloud Plus” world, the rapid adoption of Focus 1.2, and how AI is transforming both what we manage and how we manage it. About Our Guests Rob Martin has been with the FinOps Foundation for four years, currently focusing on the AI working group, ITAM initiatives, and the rapidly growing public sector adoption. His experience spans training development and strategic initiatives that have helped shape the foundation’s direction during a period of explosive growth. Mike Fuller is one of the founding members of the FinOps Foundation and co-author of the Cloud FinOps book. As a member of the Focus project steering committee, he’s been instrumental in developing the specification that’s standardizing cloud billing data across the industry. Graham Murphy serves as Director of SaaS P&L for Technology One in Brisbane. With 8-9 years in FinOps and recently nominated as both a FinOps Ambassador and Focus Ambassador, Graham brings a practitioner’s perspective from the APAC region and insights on implementing Focus in a SaaS environment. Conference Growth and Evolution The 2025 FinOps X conference in San Diego marked a significant milestone with approximately 2,000 attendees—a substantial increase from the previous year. Despite the larger venue, the conference maintained its intimate feel, allowing for meaningful connections and knowledge sharing. 2:49 Graham: “AI definitely grew a lot this year. A lot more talk about how you go about managing AI, how FinOps is going to drive better value out of your AI investments. And also just a lot of people trying to understand where to start.” The conference format evolved with more senior leadership participation, including executives from PepsiCo, Ticketmaster, and Nubank sharing their FinOps journeys. The quality of presentations notably improved, with practitioners willing to share deeper insights into their mature FinOps programs. The Cloud Plus Revolution A dominant theme throughout the conference was the expansion beyond traditional cloud cost management into what the foundation calls “Cloud Plus”—encompassing SaaS, data center, licensing, and AI costs. 4:31 Mike: “We saw that sort of echoed quite well across many of the breakout sessions by practitioners exactly how they’re sort of incorporating other costs into the conversation of their practices.” 6:56 Rob: “Ticketmaster said something that I loved, which was that they were ‘happily hybrid’… we understand that we’ve got all these different modalities that we’re going to use to deliver value—SaaS models and data center models and cloud models.” This shift represents a fundamental change in how organizations view FinOps, moving from a cloud-specific practice to a comprehensive IT financial management approach. Focus 1.2: The Game Changer The release of Focus 1.2 at the conference marked a pivotal moment for billing data standardization. The specification now includes support for SaaS costs and virtual currencies like tokens and credits—critical for AI and modern consumption-based pricing models. 16:23 Mike: “The big tagline for Focus 1.2 was sort of keeping up with how FinOps is approaching that Cloud Plus world with the introduction of columns that really help bring in SaaS costs.” Focus Adoption Momentum The adoption curve for Focus has been remarkable: 19:53 Rob: “Last year, people were saying ‘Tell me what is Focus?’ In Barcelona, they asked ‘How do I actually start using it?’ This year, almost every conversation was ‘I’m trying to get my data into Focus, and this is how we’re doing it.'” Major milestones include: AWS and Microsoft announcing Focus 1.2 supportGrafana, Databricks, and Snowflake joining as data generatorsEuropean Union standardizing on Focus for inter-agency billingUK, Japanese, Canadian, and Brazilian governments adopting Focus as their standard AI: From Experimentation to Operation The transformation in AI cost management over the past year has been dramatic. Organizations have moved from wondering if they should worry about AI costs to actively managing significant AI spending. 13:31 Rob: “We’ve got private connections to some customers where we’re serializing 400 gigabits per second line rate to them, so that they can very, very rapidly move libraries of data to tightly schedule back to back with perhaps maybe a GPU farm instance.” The Dual AI Challenge Organizations face two distinct AI-related challenges: FinOps for AI: Managing the costs of AI workloads, including training, inference, and data movementAI for FinOps: Using AI to enhance FinOps practices through automation and intelligent recommendations ...
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    48 mins
  • TCP Talks: The David vs. Goliath of Cloud Storage: Chris Opat from Backblaze on Challenging Hyperscalers

    TCP Talks: The David vs. Goliath of Cloud Storage: Chris Opat from Backblaze on Challenging Hyperscalers
    Jul 22 2025
    For this special edition of TCP Talks, Justin Brodley and Matthew Kohn are joined by Chris Opat, SVP of Cloud Operations at Backblaze, to discuss how the cloud storage innovator is reshaping the industry landscape. From their origins as a consumer backup company to becoming a major player in enterprise cloud storage, Chris shares insights on AI workloads, the true cost of egress fees, and why your data doesn’t have to live in a walled garden. About Backblaze Backblaze started in 2007 with a simple mission: make storage so affordable it’s almost free. The company gained early notoriety for their DIY approach to storage infrastructure, with founders literally bending metal in apartments and conducting “gorilla storage purchasing” raids at Bay Area Best Buys and Fry’s Electronics to build their custom red storage pods. This scrappy, cost-conscious DNA remains central to the company’s identity today. In September 2015, Backblaze made their enterprise pivot with the launch of B2 Cloud Storage, entering the market at one-quarter the cost of Amazon S3. By December of that launch year, they had already attracted over 30,000 users. Today, Backblaze (NASDAQ: BLZE) manages approximately 4.7 exabytes of data across 310,000+ drives, serving over 500,000 customers in 175 countries. What sets Backblaze apart isn’t just their pricing—it’s their philosophy. While hyperscalers have built complex storage tiers with Byzantine billing structures, Backblaze offers one tier of hot storage with transparent, predictable pricing. Their recent push into AI workloads with B2 Overdrive demonstrates their ability to evolve with market demands while maintaining their core value proposition. About Chris Opat Chris Opat joined Backblaze as SVP of Cloud Operations in 2023, bringing over 25 years of experience in building teams and technology at startup and scale-up companies. Before Backblaze, he served as SVP of Platform Engineering and Operations at StackPath, specializing in edge technology and content delivery. His background includes extensive work with private equity portfolio companies, where he honed his skills in rapid transformation and growth. Chris describes himself as someone who thrives in “David vs. Goliath” scenarios, making Backblaze—with its mission to challenge the hyperscaler incumbents—a perfect fit. His passion for building exceptional technical teams and pushing technological boundaries aligns perfectly with Backblaze’s innovative culture. Interview Highlights The David vs. Goliath Mentality 3:15 Chris: “Nothing makes me happier than to watch a customer choose us over the incumbent competitors and have an exceptionally good experience. It’s easy to work for the incumbents and kind of win all the time. It feels so much better when you do it as the upstart that people don’t see coming.” Chris emphasized how Backblaze offers a fundamentally different partner experience compared to hyperscalers. While AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud may provide excellent services, they often lack the personal touch and flexibility that smaller customers need. At Backblaze, customers can directly influence product strategy and speak with decision-makers who shape the company’s direction. Egress Fees: The Hidden Tax of Cloud Storage 7:59 Chris: “Everybody who uses a hyperscaler is very familiar with the taxation of egress fees. It’s not a trivial subject… If you don’t know what you’re doing with a hyperscaler, egress fees can quickly sour your experience. They can drain your budget.” The discussion on egress fees revealed one of Backblaze’s key differentiators: their no egress fee policy through their Bandwidth Alliance partnerships. Chris shared a compelling example of a customer who saved hundreds of thousands of dollars on egress fees in their first year with Backblaze. This transparent pricing model contrasts sharply with hyperscalers, where egress costs can spiral out of control. When asked about recent announcements from Google and Amazon regarding “free” egress, Chris didn’t mince words: 10:07 Chris: “The devil’s in the details… The only way that they honor the free egress for repatriating your data is if you cancel all the services, and the cancellation timeframe… it’s something pretty brisk. It’s like 90 days or something.” AI Workloads: The New Frontier The conversation revealed how dramatically Backblaze’s customer base has evolved, particularly with AI workloads: 13:31 Chris: “We’ve got private connections to some customers where we’re serializing 400 gigabits per second line rate to them, so that they can very, very rapidly move libraries of data to tightly schedule back to back with perhaps maybe a GPU farm instance that they’ve got booked.” This represents a massive shift from their traditional backup use cases. The new B2 Overdrive product specifically addresses these high-bandwidth needs, offering performance levels that Chris claims most ...
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    37 mins
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