AWS Summit DC 2026 | Sharad Kumar, FluidCloud

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More from AWS Summit DC 2026

Sharad Kumar

Co-Founder & CEO

FluidCloud

play_circle_outline Live from AWS Summit DC 2026: Multi-hour Outages, VMware Price Shock, Sovereign Cloud Surge — FluidCloud CEO Interview

play_circle_outline FluidCloud: Scan, Clone, Deploy and Auto‑Terraform — End‑to‑End Cloud Migrations from Months to Days

play_circle_outline FluidCloud Raises $8M, Prepares New Round as Enterprises, System Integrator Partnerships Drive Resilience Adoption

play_circle_outline Funding update: $8M raised; preparing next round; SI partnerships

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Sharad Kumar, FluidCloud

Sharad Kumar

Co-Founder & CEO FluidCloud

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Gemma Allen

>> Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage here on the ground at the AWS Summit in Washington, D.C. 2026. We have had a vast array of conversations today talking all things AWS and the future of this ecosystem. Joining me now for a conversation on what happens when we start treating cloud infrastructure as something more than a pile of YAML and something that agents can actually reconfigure, reconcile and optimize in real time is Sharad Kumar, co-founder and CEO of FluidCloud. Welcome, Sharad.

Sharad Kumar

>> Thank you, Gemma, for inviting me. Thank you.

Gemma Allen

>> So great few days here coming to the end. I know everyone's getting ready to go home and celebrate 250 years of America.

Sharad Kumar

>> Yes.

Gemma Allen

>> But before we do, let's talk about cloud.

Sharad Kumar

>> Yes.

Gemma Allen

>> This is an interesting space. Talk about, first of all, your progress since you were last on theCUBE at the NYSE with John Furrier, I think almost a year ago.

Sharad Kumar

>> It's almost a year back. Yeah.

Gemma Allen

>> A year suddenly feels like a decade, doesn't it?

Sharad Kumar

>> Yes. But for me, almost feels like yesterday because things are moving so fast. Excellent. Yeah.

Gemma Allen

>> So what's happened in this year? Talk about, there's a lot changing very, very fast in this space.

Sharad Kumar

>> Yeah. No, absolutely. So after we spoke last year, what happened was we saw a lot of outages happening and those outages did not happen in region sites. So we are seeing the outages, we are seeing the price rise, we are seeing the geopatriation, repatriation. So just to double click on all of those, all three cloud providers last year went down one after another and the outages were not like an hour or so. They were like in the range of 10 plus hours, which is like from a global industry perspective, costed a lot of dollars. Then VMware kept on increasing their prices. It's almost 800% to 1500%. And then as we are moving forward, we are seeing a lot of companies, specifically in Europe, Middle East, in Southern Asia, they're moving towards the sovereign cloud or what we call is geopatriation now. So those are the trends which we are seeing, which is evolving the whole new paradigm of multi-cloud. And unfortunately, there are no tools to do that till now.

Gemma Allen

>> Okay. Well, I mean in a world where AI has become a national infrastructure for a lot of governments and federal state entities, it makes a lot of sense that you own the place in which it sits.

Sharad Kumar

>> Absolutely.

Gemma Allen

>> Talk about the relationship with AWS, how you guys kind of partner together, bridge together from the perspective of building a future solution.

Sharad Kumar

>> Excellent. So, yeah, AWS has been super supportive. They have introduced us to multiple programs, including box programs, sovereign programs and a few others. The thing is they have a great co-sell motion. So if they see a great tool in the market, they attach it to the program and then they also fund that. So that definitely has helped us a lot. And not only that, they also help us give some cool customers who we can try work on. What benefits this to AWS, like how it helps them is cloud providers in general. They have huge backlogs. Just AWS backlog is in couple of billions of dollars. Similarly, you have Azure and GCP. It's running in billions of dollars. We can help them in clearing that backlog smoothly and because we take the migration all the way from seven to nine months to a couple of days, maybe week.

Gemma Allen

>> Talk about what makes that possible though, right? In a world where we know vendor lock and environments have remained somewhat stoic for a very long time because it was very difficult to migrate from a cloud, a line of business application even that sits on a cloud. I mean, it's interesting how you think about this, but what has truly changed to make this possible all of a sudden, which is sometimes how it seems.

Sharad Kumar

>> Yeah. No, what we did was we created a mapping across the cloud APIs. So as what we say is a scan, clone, deploy. When we scan it, it doesn't matter how you have provisioned your infrastructure, you could have used Terraform, Chef, Puppet, Ansible, ClickOps, or anything else, a CLI tool, but we scan it, we generate a Terraform for it or any other ISE if you want. And we have created one is to one mapping across the cloud APIs. And what we give is a ready Terraform file and then we also take care of it. Then we also move the data part of it. So it's not just creating the landing zone, we also then move the data. So we take care of the volumes, storage files and S3 bucket databases, all of it. Now, that's what is making us more ... The value of the whole offering as a platform has increased because all of this, just to do like, for example, people can do a ChatGPT, how much time it will take to move 5,000 resources from Azure to AWS, that will be like around 12 to 18 weeks or maybe more, three to four months. We do that in maybe less than a week.

Gemma Allen

>> Wow. I mean, that's impressive. And there's certainly a lot of appetite, I'm sure, for this space, right? Because people need utility, they need control. Everyone wants to be their own control center for the future.

Sharad Kumar

>> Absolutely.

Gemma Allen

>> Entities at all levels. So Sharad, talk about the commercials for this. Where are you guys at from a funding perspective? Fill me in.

Sharad Kumar

>> Absolutely. So we have signed multiple partnerships. There are a lot of SIs we are working with at this time. Multiple customers on the enterprise side we have closed. What we are seeing more from the enterprise side is the resilience as a use case is coming up big time because once all the cloud outages happen, people have realized that they just cannot rely on one single cloud. So our narrow down use case, what we call is primarily on resilience. So migration is just the entry point and what you need is a steady state where you never feel locked in again. It's the freedom you want to experience and that's what we believe in and that's where we are heading towards from the ... And as we are looking forward to it, we are also now helping at a state level to build the sovereign cloud for one of the regions.

Gemma Allen

>> And FluidCloud itself in terms of your own funding rounds, what state are you at? Are you raising money? I'm sure this is like a CapEx heavy enough business from the perspective of what you're building. It's not cheap anyway, that's for sure.

Sharad Kumar

>> Absolutely.

Gemma Allen

>> Where are you guys at?

Sharad Kumar

>> So we raised eight million initially. And now, yes, we are going to head towards another round pretty soon. So, yes, there are things which are going in the background. We have our markers, like once we are at a very close stage of the product market fit where this could be scaled to multiple SIs as you're doing with POCs with few SIs. And as we move forward, you will hear some news very soon.

Gemma Allen

>> Well, Sharad Kumar, we certainly look forward to following the news and great to see you again here in Washington, D.C.

Sharad Kumar

>> Such a pleasure.

Gemma Allen

>> Hopefully no doubt we'll see you in San Francisco in not distant future.

Sharad Kumar

>> Yes. Yes.

Gemma Allen

>> Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE.

Sharad Kumar

>> Thank you so much. Really appreciate it.

Gemma Allen

>> I'm Gemma Allen here with theCUBE at the AWS Summit in Washington, D.C. We have a great lineup of conversations coming up still. Don't go anywhere.

Sharad Kumar, FluidCloud

search

Gemma Allen

>> Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage here on the ground at the AWS Summit in Washington, D.C. 2026. We have had a vast array of conversations today talking all things AWS and the future of this ecosystem. Joining me now for a conversation on what happens when we start treating cloud infrastructure as something more than a pile of YAML and something that agents can actually reconfigure, reconcile and optimize in real time is Sharad Kumar, co-founder and CEO of FluidCloud. Welcome, Sharad.

Sharad Kumar

>> Thank you, Gemma, for inviting me. Thank you.

Gemma Allen

>> So great few days here coming to the end. I know everyone's getting ready to go home and celebrate 250 years of America.

Sharad Kumar

>> Yes.

Gemma Allen

>> But before we do, let's talk about cloud.

Sharad Kumar

>> Yes.

Gemma Allen

>> This is an interesting space. Talk about, first of all, your progress since you were last on theCUBE at the NYSE with John Furrier, I think almost a year ago.

Sharad Kumar

>> It's almost a year back. Yeah.

Gemma Allen

>> A year suddenly feels like a decade, doesn't it?

Sharad Kumar

>> Yes. But for me, almost feels like yesterday because things are moving so fast. Excellent. Yeah.

Gemma Allen

>> So what's happened in this year? Talk about, there's a lot changing very, very fast in this space.

Sharad Kumar

>> Yeah. No, absolutely. So after we spoke last year, what happened was we saw a lot of outages happening and those outages did not happen in region sites. So we are seeing the outages, we are seeing the price rise, we are seeing the geopatriation, repatriation. So just to double click on all of those, all three cloud providers last year went down one after another and the outages were not like an hour or so. They were like in the range of 10 plus hours, which is like from a global industry perspective, costed a lot of dollars. Then VMware kept on increasing their prices. It's almost 800% to 1500%. And then as we are moving forward, we are seeing a lot of companies, specifically in Europe, Middle East, in Southern Asia, they're moving towards the sovereign cloud or what we call is geopatriation now. So those are the trends which we are seeing, which is evolving the whole new paradigm of multi-cloud. And unfortunately, there are no tools to do that till now.

Gemma Allen

>> Okay. Well, I mean in a world where AI has become a national infrastructure for a lot of governments and federal state entities, it makes a lot of sense that you own the place in which it sits.

Sharad Kumar

>> Absolutely.

Gemma Allen

>> Talk about the relationship with AWS, how you guys kind of partner together, bridge together from the perspective of building a future solution.

Sharad Kumar

>> Excellent. So, yeah, AWS has been super supportive. They have introduced us to multiple programs, including box programs, sovereign programs and a few others. The thing is they have a great co-sell motion. So if they see a great tool in the market, they attach it to the program and then they also fund that. So that definitely has helped us a lot. And not only that, they also help us give some cool customers who we can try work on. What benefits this to AWS, like how it helps them is cloud providers in general. They have huge backlogs. Just AWS backlog is in couple of billions of dollars. Similarly, you have Azure and GCP. It's running in billions of dollars. We can help them in clearing that backlog smoothly and because we take the migration all the way from seven to nine months to a couple of days, maybe week.

Gemma Allen

>> Talk about what makes that possible though, right? In a world where we know vendor lock and environments have remained somewhat stoic for a very long time because it was very difficult to migrate from a cloud, a line of business application even that sits on a cloud. I mean, it's interesting how you think about this, but what has truly changed to make this possible all of a sudden, which is sometimes how it seems.

Sharad Kumar

>> Yeah. No, what we did was we created a mapping across the cloud APIs. So as what we say is a scan, clone, deploy. When we scan it, it doesn't matter how you have provisioned your infrastructure, you could have used Terraform, Chef, Puppet, Ansible, ClickOps, or anything else, a CLI tool, but we scan it, we generate a Terraform for it or any other ISE if you want. And we have created one is to one mapping across the cloud APIs. And what we give is a ready Terraform file and then we also take care of it. Then we also move the data part of it. So it's not just creating the landing zone, we also then move the data. So we take care of the volumes, storage files and S3 bucket databases, all of it. Now, that's what is making us more ... The value of the whole offering as a platform has increased because all of this, just to do like, for example, people can do a ChatGPT, how much time it will take to move 5,000 resources from Azure to AWS, that will be like around 12 to 18 weeks or maybe more, three to four months. We do that in maybe less than a week.

Gemma Allen

>> Wow. I mean, that's impressive. And there's certainly a lot of appetite, I'm sure, for this space, right? Because people need utility, they need control. Everyone wants to be their own control center for the future.

Sharad Kumar

>> Absolutely.

Gemma Allen

>> Entities at all levels. So Sharad, talk about the commercials for this. Where are you guys at from a funding perspective? Fill me in.

Sharad Kumar

>> Absolutely. So we have signed multiple partnerships. There are a lot of SIs we are working with at this time. Multiple customers on the enterprise side we have closed. What we are seeing more from the enterprise side is the resilience as a use case is coming up big time because once all the cloud outages happen, people have realized that they just cannot rely on one single cloud. So our narrow down use case, what we call is primarily on resilience. So migration is just the entry point and what you need is a steady state where you never feel locked in again. It's the freedom you want to experience and that's what we believe in and that's where we are heading towards from the ... And as we are looking forward to it, we are also now helping at a state level to build the sovereign cloud for one of the regions.

Gemma Allen

>> And FluidCloud itself in terms of your own funding rounds, what state are you at? Are you raising money? I'm sure this is like a CapEx heavy enough business from the perspective of what you're building. It's not cheap anyway, that's for sure.

Sharad Kumar

>> Absolutely.

Gemma Allen

>> Where are you guys at?

Sharad Kumar

>> So we raised eight million initially. And now, yes, we are going to head towards another round pretty soon. So, yes, there are things which are going in the background. We have our markers, like once we are at a very close stage of the product market fit where this could be scaled to multiple SIs as you're doing with POCs with few SIs. And as we move forward, you will hear some news very soon.

Gemma Allen

>> Well, Sharad Kumar, we certainly look forward to following the news and great to see you again here in Washington, D.C.

Sharad Kumar

>> Such a pleasure.

Gemma Allen

>> Hopefully no doubt we'll see you in San Francisco in not distant future.

Sharad Kumar

>> Yes. Yes.

Gemma Allen

>> Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE.

Sharad Kumar

>> Thank you so much. Really appreciate it.

Gemma Allen

>> I'm Gemma Allen here with theCUBE at the AWS Summit in Washington, D.C. We have a great lineup of conversations coming up still. Don't go anywhere.