The cloud industry is at an inflection point — rising costs, egress fees, and locked-down ecosystems have forced builders to rethink how they architect and scale. In this episode, Gleb Budman (CEO & Co-Founder of Backblaze) joins us for a candid, wide-ranging conversation about what comes next.
About This Episode
The cloud industry is at an inflection point. Rising costs, egress fees, and locked-down ecosystems have forced builders to rethink how they architect and scale. John Kosturos sits down with Gleb Budman, CEO and Co-Founder of Backblaze, for a candid, wide-ranging conversation about what comes next: from cloud repatriation and data mobility to AI pipelines, object storage architecture, and what an open, performance-driven cloud economy actually looks like in practice.
Gleb Budman
LinkedInCEO & Co-Founder, Backblaze
Gleb co-founded Backblaze with a simple but radical premise: cloud storage should be affordable, transparent, and free from lock-in. Over nearly two decades he has built Backblaze into one of the most trusted independent cloud storage companies in the world, known for publishing drive failure stats, sharing hardware designs openly, and pioneering egress-free object storage. Gleb is one of the most thoughtful voices in the industry on what sustainable, founder-friendly cloud infrastructure actually looks like.
The Backblaze Origin Story
How Gleb and his co-founders built a radically open, transparent cloud company, publishing drive failure statistics, hardware designs, and simple pricing long before transparency was fashionable in the industry.
Egress Fees as a Tax on Innovation
Why Gleb calls egress fees a structural tax on builders, how hyperscaler pricing drifted away from delivering customer value, and what founders should understand about infrastructure economics before signing a cloud contract.
The Cracks in the Hyperscaler Model
Where the hyperscaler model is breaking down for modern workloads, which types of companies are most exposed to lock-in risk, and why the momentum behind cloud repatriation and alternative providers is not a fad.
The Hybrid and Multi-Cloud Future
From cloud repatriation to data mobility, Gleb explains why the future of infrastructure is distributed and why interoperability, open APIs, and portability matter more than ever as AI workloads scale.
AI, Data Gravity, and Object Storage
Why moving and feeding data has become the real bottleneck in AI pipelines, how data gravity reshapes infrastructure decisions for training and inference workloads, and where object storage fits in next-generation AI architectures.
Building a Cloud Company With Discipline
Lessons from scaling Backblaze sustainably while competing directly with the largest technology companies in the world, and the guiding principles that kept the team focused through every growth phase.
Predictions for the Next 5 Years of Cloud
Gleb’s view of what an open, global, performance-driven cloud economy could look like by 2030, which structural forces will accelerate the shift away from hyperscaler dominance, and where the real opportunities will emerge.
Transparency as a Competitive Strategy
How Backblaze’s commitment to radical transparency, from publishing hard drive failure rates to open-sourcing hardware designs, became a durable differentiator and a trust-building engine in a market dominated by opaque giants.
CTOs and Cloud Architects Evaluating Hyperscaler Alternatives
Gleb has spent nearly two decades competing with AWS, Azure, and GCP while staying profitable and customer-aligned. His read on where hyperscaler value ends and lock-in begins is one of the most credible you will find anywhere in the industry.
Founders and Operators Managing Cloud Costs
If your cloud bill is growing faster than your revenue and egress fees are a line item you can no longer ignore, this episode gives you a clear, founder-to-founder framework for rethinking how you choose and negotiate infrastructure.
AI Engineers and ML Platform Teams
Data gravity and storage throughput are quietly becoming the dominant constraints in AI training and inference pipelines. Gleb explains where object storage fits in modern AI architectures and why data mobility is the new competitive moat.
Enterprise IT Leaders Considering Cloud Repatriation
Repatriation is no longer a fringe strategy. Gleb maps out when it makes sense, what it actually costs to execute, and how a hybrid or multi-cloud architecture can give you the control of on-prem without sacrificing the flexibility of cloud.
Investors and Founders in the Cloud Infrastructure Space
Backblaze is a rare independent success story in a space dominated by trillion-dollar incumbents. Gleb’s lessons on building with discipline, finding defensible positioning, and staying customer-aligned through every cycle are worth far more than another pitch deck.
About Backblaze
Backblaze is an independent cloud storage and backup provider founded in 2007, offering S3-compatible object storage (B2 Cloud Storage) and personal and business backup products at a fraction of hyperscaler pricing. Known for its radical transparency, including public hard drive reliability reports and openly shared hardware designs, Backblaze has built one of the most trusted and cost-effective alternatives to AWS S3 for developers, media companies, AI teams, and enterprises looking to reduce cloud spend without compromising performance or portability.
