"Does Trump have a red button from AWS?" Maksym Ageev on data "refugees", the trap of free clouds and the end of the era of IT outsourcers

About data «refugees», the trap of free clouds and the case of two banks

— Maxim, most of our data is currently abroad. There are thoughts that it’s time to return to Ukraine, because it’s both cheaper and safer. Will these servers and data return home?

— This is a very complicated question. I have an analogy: we have a lot of people leaving, and everyone is asking how to get them back. The same story with data. Data left like people. They arrive at new sites, are processed, the owners understand the new economic and technological model. If it works, they are happy with it.

Big data is like a pyramid of crystal glasses that you hold in your hand. It’s very delicate, you can’t make any sudden movements. If you bring it in and hand it over to Amazon, they’re like, «Okay, I’ll keep it. But don’t blow on it, please.» It’s very difficult to just transfer the data back. The first question is: who will pay for it? Who needs it?

— But are there any reasons for returning already? Are there already cases of companies saying: «We love it, we’re coming back»?

— Yes, of course. There are fewer of them than I would like, but they are there. Because many decisions to migrate were irrational. It was panic, fear. 4 years have passed, and according to statistics, there are no facts that prove that keeping data in Ukraine is more dangerous than there.

Then there is an economic motivation. For example, not everyone understands the cost of traffic. If you process online video streams, traffic can be 70-80% of the cost of the check! That is, the cost of the virtual machines themselves is no longer so important. In other situations, it can be 10-20%. This is the so-called «unexpected check», when you find out about additional costs after the fact.

— What about the free credits from Microsoft and AWS that were given to Ukrainians at the beginning of the war?

— Amazon was more pragmatic — it provided packages mainly for government agencies and the Defense Forces (what the Alliance and the so-called «digital Ramstein» finance). Microsoft generally gave everything to everyone, declaring some crazy aid figures. This is a paradise for an engineer: you come in like in a huge mall, take whatever you want, no restrictions, and your uncle pays for it.

But at some point they tell you: «Stop, now you have to pay something.» And then it turns out that the check is simply cosmic. The company was put on the so-called vendor lock-in — technologies without which you can no longer work. It’s like a fly that landed in honey: it’s sweet, fragrant, but you can’t get out of it. Many companies saw this check and said «Wow.» Because free is always expensive.

On the myth of Western security, evacuation from Crimea and the Data-centric approach

— We recently saw data centers being hit during the conflict in the Middle East (Iranian strike). Maybe being an AWS customer isn’t so safe right now?

— This situation highlighted the breakdown of the usual world. Western mega-data centers of 100-200 MW were built with an eye on economics and scalability. No one ever thought that there could be a war. And now it turned out that such a data center can be destroyed with one drone. Like that crystal pyramid — it will fall from one touch.

Therefore, now the question should be posed differently: what security concept do you propose? If we are talking about a Data Center-centric approach, then it all depends on the physical building. If we take away the word «center» and say Data-centric, then the basis is the data itself. If you have a distributed architecture and rapid recovery mechanisms, you can destroy one or two data centers, and the system will continue to work. A great example is our «Diya». It is spread across three data centers, has a complex backup system, and is working successfully.

— Aren’t telecommunications and cables themselves a weak point?

— Of course. If the Russians want to attack our digital infrastructure, they can attack Internet nodes.

— A telecom manager told me a story: when the Russians seized Crimea, they started hitting communication nodes. But they were hitting old nodes that were 30 years old! That’s why the connection didn’t go through right away.

— By the way, I remember this story. We evacuated the data of one of the largest Ukrainian banks from Simferopol. We dragged the data through fiber optic channels for two weeks. The Russians were already running around there, everything was captured, and at that time we were downloading the data from the servers and uploading it to our cloud storage in Kyiv, because there was simply no other alternative at that time.

On the geopolitics of data, Trump’s red button, and the Israeli experience

— How risky is it to depend on the «Big Three» (AWS, Google, Microsoft)?

— Data has long been geopolitics. That’s why Iran says it won’t hit dairies, but NVIDIA or large data centers. They understand these pain points that hold the digital economy back.

If you fantasize about an apocalyptic scenario… Here comes to power a person with Trump’s approaches. He has a crazy leverage to put pressure on the world, because everyone depends on these companies. All he needs to do is call three CEOs to the Oval Office — and that’s it. Does Trump have a red button from AWS? According to US laws (US Cloud Act), if you are an American company, their laws apply to you everywhere. They can delete or block any information by court order.

Three companies have rolled up this world and are holding it. The temptation to use it is growing. Have you heard the story about the Dutch Microsoft data center? Because of some pro-Palestinian protests in Amsterdam, Microsoft blocked access to the data of a division of the Israeli Ministry of Defense! They blocked access to the state institutions of an ally. As far as I know, this led to heated conversations in our law enforcement agencies as well. Because this is a case: money does not solve everything, and you can be blocked from accessing it for political reasons.

— And what are other countries doing? For example, Russia or Europe?

— Europe is cumbersome, bureaucratic, but it has realized that it smells like sulfur. They are a quarter of a century behind, but now they are trying to find alternative technological solutions.

If you look at our enemy, they have been denied access to everything. And what did they do? In three years, they invested resources and created their own hypervisors. Yes, they are not as cool as the American ones, but they work autonomously. And we don’t have that. Who do we depend on? Whether Ramstein pays or not.

About $2 million in AI servers and the threat to Ukrainian IT professionals

— You invested about $2 million in servers for artificial intelligence. What are companies buying now?

— The AI ​​market today is like the Earth at the beginning of its existence. Everything is bubbling, a lot of conferences and lectures, but in fact the business solutions look more than modest. Today I can’t even say approximately when we will return these investments in AI.

Public and private companies come to us, do Proof of Concept. We provide resources. They test: «Oh, great, it works!» We ask: «What next?» They answer: «There is no money.»

— Recently, the state (Ministry of Digital Affairs) purchased AI servers worth UAH 200 million. Is this a state toy or the right concept?

— I always believed that everyone should do their own work. It’s as if the state decided to build its own network of mobile stations. Providers should invest in resources. But what the then Minister Mykhailo Fedorov declared as a strategy («we are building an agent state») is interesting, if only because it is clearly formulated. Could private investors’ money have been used? Yes. But they found their 200 million — okay. The main question: can we answer the question «where is the benefit?» with these cards.

— What will happen to the Ukrainian IT worker in the world of victorious AI?

— The history of outsourcing is very finite, especially for Ukraine. In economics, there is a concept of a high or low level of raw material processing. Outsourcing is a low level. We can exist as long as we have a cheap programmer. As soon as this advantage ends, that’s it. You become uncompetitive.

The threat is fierce. Programming, like accounting, is a highly algorithmic profession. AI is showing what it can replace. The challenge for Ukraine is that we may simply be unnecessary in this new world. When a $20 subscription to ChatGPT closes all business questions — where are we then? Where are all these tech companies?

— There’s also a huge cybersecurity threat. Have you heard about the model from Anthropic that they didn’t release because it’s really good at finding holes and writing exploits itself?

— I’m a big fan of Viktor Pelevin’s work, he wrote fantastically predictive texts. You simply stop feeling the boundaries of your control. What does this intellect know about you? What databases does it have access to? You simply become transparent.

On the future of clouds in Ukraine: «anarchy», 35% market growth and a new strategy

— How is the Ukrainian cloud market doing overall now? Are we growing?

— From 2021 to 2025, the domestic Ukrainian market grew 5 times! This is fantastic. This reflects the trend towards data rescue, migration, blackouts, the inability to buy equipment and the lack of engineers (recently, one large client complained to me that he no longer has engineers who know how to work with servers). This year I expect another 30–35% growth. There is money there, there is fierce competition there.

— What does Ukraine need to do to gain true digital sovereignty?

— Sovereignty is the ability to work autonomously when everything is blocked for you. We (together with other Ukrainian providers) created the Ukrainian Digital Sovereignty Alliance (DSUA). Our goal is to develop a concept for cloud federalization. We need decentralization: to spread data to different corners.

We are currently developing the concept of «Vulnerability Zone» (instead of the standard Availability Zone). This is when, through a load balancer, the client will be able to distribute the load between different data centers. We think that our level of reliability will be similar to Amazon, because it will be a multi-domain system of control over distributed resources.

But this requires the will of the state. Today we have a Tatar-Mongolian camp — anarchy. Everyone does what they want: someone in the cloud, someone in their own. The Ministry of Digital Affairs should introduce a single framework — Cloud Agnostic Application. Because if you have old applications, you are chained like a wheelchair and cannot freely migrate between clouds.

— But are there people ready to invest in building new powerful data centers here in Ukraine?

— Once, during the time of Yanukovych, an official came to me and said: «Listen, I have a billion dollars, what can I do with a billion dollars? They say you don’t have data centers.» I answered him: «You can do anything you want for a billion dollars in Ukraine.»

Now there are no such people. And the problem is not so much in the building of the data center, but in the high-level architecture. But I see that almost none of the Ukrainian providers are leaving here. This is very pleasing. We are ready to invest money, ready to build new data centers, just show us where and give us clear rules of the game.

— What about super-secure facilities? For example, does it make sense for the state to build its own secure data center somewhere high in the mountains or deep underground to hide it from missiles? Have you heard that something like this is being built underground in our country?

— Well, I don’t know that anything like that is being built here right now. I don’t think so. But here’s something more interesting: is there any point in building something so super-secure, underground or hidden in the mountains?

You see, this is not a technological issue, but more of a worldview. It’s like the story of Kharkiv. Someone might ask: is it worth giving Kharkiv light and resources if it is under constant shelling? Yes, it is worth it! Because as long as people live there, you hold the line of defense. If you throw them out and everyone leaves, then the next line of defense will be somewhere in Brovary or pass through Kyiv.

Four years ago, I singled out two concepts for myself: «refugee strategy» and «resilience strategy.» If we choose a refugee strategy and, relatively speaking, export the same tax or other data to Poland, what will we do if Poland is attacked? A year ago, no one believed in this, but today I can believe in anything. Where will we run next? To Germany? To Britain? To Mallorca?

This is a strategy of constant retreat when you don’t have the strength to hold the defense. Look at Israel — a small country the size of the Kyiv region, but they don’t run away anywhere, they stay and stand. Therefore, we should not look for which mountains or dungeons to hide in, but prepare to live, build and hold the blow right here.

Watch the full interview in our video .