CloudFest 2025: Honing the Human Edge
After a smooth plane ride and quick car ride via the German autobahn, I arrived in EuropaPark. For four days, the quiet city of Rust was the home of the world’s leading cloud conference, bringing together the industry’s largest players, eager start-ups, and those passionate about how cloud is changing our future.
Bringing together cloud service providers, system integrators, corporate IT, resellers, platform integrators, open source professionals, OEMs and distributors across 90+ countries and with an impressive number of 9,000+ participants, CloudFest 2025 was the place where tech met humanity. Major topics revolved around:
- Human centric AI – How can the integration of human empathetic oversight in the latest AI driven hardware enhance performance and service delivery
- Cybersecurity and networks – How human vigilance and expertise safeguard the digital infrastructures against continuously evolving threats
- Service is everything – Innovations in products and services that deliver delight to customers through human-centered design and empathetic human interactions, making the difference in a cutthroat market
Through advanced AI technologies, 1SP Agency together with MSM.Digital, brought Albert Einstein to life and into CloudFest, for a fireside chat with Soeren von Varchmin, CloudFest’s Chief Evangelist. Einstein delved into his groundbreaking theories, his perspective on modern advancements, posing the troubles arising from conflicts and inequalities, as well as his hopes of a future where reason, compassion and cooperation guide humanity. His invitation to everyone in the audience was to never let their curiosity wane.
Lenovo made a solid case around liquid cooling in data centers. A decade ago, the company brought liquid cooling in data centers to address overall performance and sustainability. John Donovan, Executive Director & GM of MSP, spoke about how today the discussion is around what data centers are capable of, design constraints, total cost of ownership (TCO), sustainability, competitive forces and regulatory actions. And liquid cooling comes as an attractive solution to the high energy spend happening in data centers, who use a significant 3% of global electricity resources. Out of these 3%, 40% is used to cool and by 2030 the numbers quadruple. Reasons are many: CPUs usage increase, memory, smart mix, addition of GPUs, more wattage used, more heat generated, more power used to remove the heat. Lenovo proposes Neptune technologies (DWC + Open) which meet criteria on environmentally friendly, hassle-free maintenance, high quality tubing and hoses, low pump pressure and pre-tested and shipped air pressurized. Using warm water, a single CDU that can manage 400 kW of heat rejection to water only consumes 3.7 kW of power. A CDU can provide 4x heat rejection to liquid for 10X less power than air cooling.
Esther Spanjer, Micron’s director of channel business development, introduced the topic of how AI is stretching the limits of data centers from a performance, capacity and energy efficiency perspective. On memory and storage, the quest for bigger memory and better capacity continues. The current EDSFF (Enterprise and Datacenter Standard Form Factor) E1 is optimized for 1RU servers, supports data and boot use cases and targets mainstream data center use; while E3 is optimized for 2RU servers, maximizes power envelope and supports a broad range of storage, memory and specialized use cases. Micron introduced Micron 6550 ION NVMe SSD, the world’s fastest, most energy efficient 60TB data center SSD. It has best-in-class 60TB performance, uses up to 20% less power and it can store up to 67% more per rack. It comes in 30TB and 60TB capacity, PCI Gen 5, and the form factor E3.S, E1.L and U.2. Data gets pulled faster, which means that expensive GPUs don’t sit idle. And as a side effect, more drives can be squeezed into a server: 40 E3s SSD drives in a U2 server.
CloudFest turned to its members in 2023 and 2024 to learn about the current state and future of the industry and they did the same this year. Brooke Edge, from Open Eye, presented the state of global cloud market report and the trends for 2025. With a sample of over 600 global responses, in-depth expert interviews, and fill in date with ~1 week before CloudFest, the report passed statistical significance. 2025 outlook is not as bright as it was in 2023 and brings additional stressors that factor on the continued dip. AI is not seen as a villain, but is not seen as the hero either, at least not yet. Here are some interesting trends in responses for the past 3 years:
The conclusion is that we didn’t become more pessimistic, but the causes for the industry’s concerns have become more intense. And through the in-depth interviews, Open Eye was able to pinpoint the fact that people feel somehow powerless to the winds of regulations and geopolitics.
I so enjoyed my time and learnings at CloudFest 2025, and look forward to what the event will hold in store for 2026.
After a smooth plane ride and quick car ride via the German autobahn, I arrived in EuropaPark. For four days, the quiet city of Rust was the home of the world’s leading cloud conference, bringing together the industry’s largest players, eager start-ups, and those passionate about how cloud is changing our future.
Bringing together cloud service providers, system integrators, corporate IT, resellers, platform integrators, open source professionals, OEMs and distributors across 90+ countries and with an impressive number of 9,000+ participants, CloudFest 2025 was the place where tech met humanity. Major topics revolved around:
- Human centric AI – How can the integration of human empathetic oversight in the latest AI driven hardware enhance performance and service delivery
- Cybersecurity and networks – How human vigilance and expertise safeguard the digital infrastructures against continuously evolving threats
- Service is everything – Innovations in products and services that deliver delight to customers through human-centered design and empathetic human interactions, making the difference in a cutthroat market
Through advanced AI technologies, 1SP Agency together with MSM.Digital, brought Albert Einstein to life and into CloudFest, for a fireside chat with Soeren von Varchmin, CloudFest’s Chief Evangelist. Einstein delved into his groundbreaking theories, his perspective on modern advancements, posing the troubles arising from conflicts and inequalities, as well as his hopes of a future where reason, compassion and cooperation guide humanity. His invitation to everyone in the audience was to never let their curiosity wane.
Lenovo made a solid case around liquid cooling in data centers. A decade ago, the company brought liquid cooling in data centers to address overall performance and sustainability. John Donovan, Executive Director & GM of MSP, spoke about how today the discussion is around what data centers are capable of, design constraints, total cost of ownership (TCO), sustainability, competitive forces and regulatory actions. And liquid cooling comes as an attractive solution to the high energy spend happening in data centers, who use a significant 3% of global electricity resources. Out of these 3%, 40% is used to cool and by 2030 the numbers quadruple. Reasons are many: CPUs usage increase, memory, smart mix, addition of GPUs, more wattage used, more heat generated, more power used to remove the heat. Lenovo proposes Neptune technologies (DWC + Open) which meet criteria on environmentally friendly, hassle-free maintenance, high quality tubing and hoses, low pump pressure and pre-tested and shipped air pressurized. Using warm water, a single CDU that can manage 400 kW of heat rejection to water only consumes 3.7 kW of power. A CDU can provide 4x heat rejection to liquid for 10X less power than air cooling.
Esther Spanjer, Micron’s director of channel business development, introduced the topic of how AI is stretching the limits of data centers from a performance, capacity and energy efficiency perspective. On memory and storage, the quest for bigger memory and better capacity continues. The current EDSFF (Enterprise and Datacenter Standard Form Factor) E1 is optimized for 1RU servers, supports data and boot use cases and targets mainstream data center use; while E3 is optimized for 2RU servers, maximizes power envelope and supports a broad range of storage, memory and specialized use cases. Micron introduced Micron 6550 ION NVMe SSD, the world’s fastest, most energy efficient 60TB data center SSD. It has best-in-class 60TB performance, uses up to 20% less power and it can store up to 67% more per rack. It comes in 30TB and 60TB capacity, PCI Gen 5, and the form factor E3.S, E1.L and U.2. Data gets pulled faster, which means that expensive GPUs don’t sit idle. And as a side effect, more drives can be squeezed into a server: 40 E3s SSD drives in a U2 server.
CloudFest turned to its members in 2023 and 2024 to learn about the current state and future of the industry and they did the same this year. Brooke Edge, from Open Eye, presented the state of global cloud market report and the trends for 2025. With a sample of over 600 global responses, in-depth expert interviews, and fill in date with ~1 week before CloudFest, the report passed statistical significance. 2025 outlook is not as bright as it was in 2023 and brings additional stressors that factor on the continued dip. AI is not seen as a villain, but is not seen as the hero either, at least not yet. Here are some interesting trends in responses for the past 3 years:
The conclusion is that we didn’t become more pessimistic, but the causes for the industry’s concerns have become more intense. And through the in-depth interviews, Open Eye was able to pinpoint the fact that people feel somehow powerless to the winds of regulations and geopolitics.
I so enjoyed my time and learnings at CloudFest 2025, and look forward to what the event will hold in store for 2026.
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