Think Tech Tech Tech Tech Tech Tech Tech Tech Tech. Think Tech Tech Talks. That's one PM, one o'clock rock here on Think Tech on a given Tuesday. And we have a special guest, Bill Hosey of Verizon Wireless. He's a managing partner of business sales there. And he's got this great program we want to know more about. Welcome to the show, Bill. Thank you, Jay. Great to have you here. Great to Verizon, you know? Verizon, woo! Right, thank you. Yeah, fantastic, yeah. I better turn it off, though you did. Yeah, turn the ringer off. That's a fair enough. Right. I swear by Verizon, okay. Thank you, Jay. I appreciate that, absolutely. So anyway, and it's not because I haven't been around. I've been around and I swear by Verizon anyway. Right, good, good. Yeah, we pride ourselves on that. So you have this program. Yes. And it's a national program. Right. And it's an apps challenge. Yes. So what's going on? What is this program? How did it get started? Okay, so back in 2012, Verizon, as being an innovations leader, we were constantly looking for opportunities to involve, in particular, young people in the development of what's happening today and in our future. And so, we developed what's called the Innovate App Challenge and it encourages middle school and high school students to participate in developing an app. Why? What we're seeing is young people are really driving what's happening in innovation. And so, we wanted to make sure that we encouraged them to participate. There's rewards and we'll talk about our awards. And also, we're seeing some innovative things happen by the young people. They're thinking how they approach things is so much different than how you and I approach them. Sure, more and more. Yeah, absolutely. That's because we're getting older. That's right. Inevitably. But they're getting younger. That's right, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. Well, you know, I was talking to you before the show about what happened when the iPhone came out. Yes. It was visibly disruptive because they put all those components together and now you can have a computer in your hand. That was quite remarkable. And I was waiting for that for a long time that the iPhone should come out. That was 2008 or 2009. Yeah, right. But what I didn't realize, I think a lot of us did not realize that the apps thing was sneaking up from the side with the developer kit and all of a sudden there was gonna be an industry building apps. And for a while there was only a handful of them, but then you looked again and there were thousands and then hundreds of thousands and then millions. Correct. And it kept getting better and better. You know, the ones that started out way back when have evolved, you know. Absolutely. To a tremendous effect. Yeah. And there's so many new ones coming out every day, every day. Yes. Doing things that change our society. So it's interesting, if you look at it back down the road, that, you know, the real, you know, the real amazing disruptive phenomenon here is not so much the iPhone that can be copied, but the notion of having apps. Absolutely. Yeah, and I think we saw the opportunity to really help drive that. And as you said, millions and millions of people are doing it now. And it's more and more younger generation that's driving what's happening. It went from calendar apps now to astronomy apps. You get, you look at the sky and see exactly where the planets are and the stars are.  And just you name it. There are apps out there to accomplish it now. You know, it's funny.  It works so quickly.  The website becomes almost irrelevant because it's now all on a smartphone. And the smartphone's become smarter all the time. And so, you know, you can never assume that what works today is gonna continue to work tomorrow. That's correct. I'd say that smartphones are gonna be around for a while. And I think they'll be smarter, but they'll be around. And Verizon is counting on that, isn't it? Absolutely. Verizon is doing this program, this challenge, because it feels, one, it wants to do the right thing in the community, but two is it wants to sell a lot of phones and more apps we have, the more phones will be sold. Absolutely. And even more than that, then beyond the phones, it's what can technology do for you as an individual or as a business, as a corporation and encouraging that forward thinking, you know, what's next, what isn't being done now? And what we've seen in Innovations App Challenge is we've seen young people thinking differently about how they can impact their space, the environment and the world for that matter. And they're developing apps that, for example, there were some that were talking about how can I get information on advancement in my education? And they solve challenges with being able to access data. What tests do I need to prepare for? What grants are out there? What school's the best? And they started developing apps around that. And now a student can take an application and really kind of script where they want to go as far as their education's concerned. So that's just a small example of some of the things that we're seeing from these young people. And you mentioned global, and there's a global implication here because other countries can develop apps, too. And other countries have smartphones. Other countries can do very elegant things, you know, simplicity is all. And I remember seeing a thing about China, how you can buy a newspaper by taking a picture on your phone of, what do you call it, key design? The QR code. QR code on the newsstand, right? And then you hold it up to the news vendor and he sees on your phone that he just got credited for a dollar. He sees that, that's enough of him. And so that's it, now you get your paper. All this transaction takes about five seconds. Yes. And it works well and millions and hundreds of millions of people use that. How simple could that be? I mean, really, it's a matter of figuring out the human condition, the human daily experience and what can fit right in there and make it better for us. I think anywhere in the world works. Absolutely, and I think you touched on it. It's convenience. It's can I do something in a simpler way or an easier way or more convenient? And if you think of the generational changes that we're kind of going through as a country and as a world, younger people do everything remote from purchasing, you know, Amazon and you buy, you know, you buy things online and you, you know, online banking and we're hearing things about the largest bank in the world's an online bank. And then, you know, even into cable and things like that can be done remotely. And so it's, you know, developing something of convenience that people want. And so their thought process, their lives are just really fundamentally different than, again, like I said, like when I came up and it was on paper and in a book and now it's on a device, electronic device. You are really a think tech kind of person, Bill. Thank you. You get stars. Awesome, good. That's good to hear. Well, let's talk about, take a minute and talk about the actual challenge. Yes. How does that work? Okay, so each school has to enroll first. That's the most important thing and the deadline is November 18th. They can go online and I'm gonna look at it to make sure I say it correctly but there's a website, appchallenge.tsaweb.org. And you can go to that website and I'll say it again next to me. Appchallenge.tsaweb.org. And they can go to that site, it tells you all about the program, it tells you the awards, the processes, how you register, you know, there's requirements for students to get a parental approval and those kind of things. But it goes through the entire process of it. And what's really nice is that each state has winners go into this challenge. So we focus on the middle and high school students. It's really kind of enforcing the STEM which is really important to rise in science, technology, engineering, mathematics. And we're constantly looking for areas that we can impact that with our young people. And so they can go online, they register, they go out and develop whatever happens. With teams, with teams. With teams, that's right. I come and I register myself with my buddies and we have a team for that school. That's right. And so you have a team for each school or you can have multiple teams for the school and however that works. But then there's a state winner for both middle and high school. And those winners receive a $5,000 grant to the school that could be used for development, for travel, to support the faculty traveling with the students if need be. But each student then will go to the national level, I mean excuse the regional level and there's a national level as well in Orlando. You'll pay their way? Yes, yes. So it's expense paid for the student and for one adult to go to national conference in Orlando. That's right. They're very interesting. Yeah, and then they, just the power of it, they actually get to code with MIT innovation type. Well, you make your whole day. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. You're splitting headache like that. Yeah, that's right, yeah. It's beyond me but they're going, yeah, I understand that completely, so. Yes. Okay, so do you give them parameters about what kind of app you like or they should be focusing on?  Do you give them something you believe that Verizon believes would be a successful, useful app? Or do you let them go unharnessed? It's kind of unharnessed. And the reason is we want to see what they come up with. And as I said, we're seeing things from how a student can better utilize the resources to get into the college level courses or into a college. And you name it, we've seen numerous, numerous types. But ultimately it's to allow those young people to develop what they feel is a game changer, so to speak. Yeah, well, this is really all about game changing. You can hardly, you know, I went out and bought an Amazon Fire Stick. Yes. And I got something in the mail about that and it was so seductive. You know, it was $39 I had to buy it and it came in yesterday. It's amazing. Yeah. You know, I won't go into detail, we're not talking about that today, but just to say that things move so fast, new technologies, new apps all the time, you can hardly not, you know, keep track of all this. Absolutely. And we're, you know, we're educating, in my space I work in the business channel for Verizon, for Hawaii and Alaska. And one of the things that we try to, not only our customers, but just people in general is, is what's happening. We're going through a technological revolution, really. Things that were just had to be hardwired, had to be plugged into a wall. That's just not the case anymore. And you can do so many things from a remote location, from a wireless device, that the applications that are, that can be developed now are just exploding. And so it's a great place to be. I love it because it's, we're seeing these changes rapidly. Things that were years and years and years in the past now are happening in days. So it's just a, it's a phenomenal place to be. Yesterday, the Kano, Hawaii, which is a public policy organization, was sitting in that chair and they, and they rolled out their most election game program. Yeah. Which, unless you see whether your sensibilities are more like one candidate or another. And instead of myself, gee whiz, you know, you could actually put your own column of opinion down. Maybe you're better than the other guys. Maybe you should run for office. Yeah. Well, you know, how far are we from electing national candidates or for that matter, local candidates on our cell phones? It's coming. It is probably happening in some places already. Yeah. And insecurity on the wireless devices is just improving beyond, you know, beyond measure. And it's, so I do see things like that. And I was just on a board a judging panel with the governor a few weeks ago and we were doing the Hawaii code challenge. Oh, the HACC, the Hawaii annual code challenge. Yeah, we covered that. That's right. And so I was fortunate to be able to participate on the board, judging board. And we saw apps specifically, you know, geared at that, you know, how do I get political information? How do I, you know, those kind of things? And again, several other different types, but you're right, things are evolving so quickly and it's all kind of focusing on what I can do wirelessly. And again, it gets to that convenience and I never have to leave my house to do something.  They could think of something that would be catching like wildfire that could change our society, be disruptive all in itself, you know, another step of disruption. And this is all possible when you have an apps challenge this way. Absolutely. And one other thing I wanna point out is, and it's been a challenge that we've tried to address and make sure that we're on top of is getting more females involved in the technological world and science world and those type things. And so we've, proud to say that almost half of the winners and we're talking 3,500 teams nationally and 24,000 individuals, nearly half of those are females. And so, you know, it's encouraging everyone to get involved in it, not just, you know, what would be a typical type person involved in the past. I wanna talk more about that after this break. That's Bill Hosea of Verizon Wireless. He's managing partner of business sales and we are learning so much about him. I mean, from him. And about him. Yeah. I'll be right back. Hello, I'm Marianne Sasaki. Welcome to Think Tech, Hawaii where some of the most interesting conversations in Honolulu go on. I have a show on Wednesdays from one to two called Life in the Law, where we discuss legal issues, politics, governmental topics, and a whole host of issues. I hope you'll join me. Aloha, I am Reg Baker and I am the host of Business in Hawaii with Reg Baker. We broadcast live every Thursday from two to 2.30 in the Think Tech studios in downtown Honolulu. We highlight successful stories about businesses and individuals and learn their secrets to success. I hope you can join us on our next show on Thursday at two o'clock. Until then, Aloha. Bingo, me and Bill Hosea of Verizon, managing partner of business sales, talking about the Verizon Innovative App Challenge. The national program, but also happening in Hawaii, encouraging middle schoolers and high schoolers to develop apps. And really, in our world today, we have to encourage them to do that. You know, there was a time when we said, oh, well, in the U.S., we're the innovative guys, we're the creative guys, wrong. The whole world is creative now and it's competition and we have to get these kids incentivized to do it. This is an incentive. Absolutely, yeah, and you're right, Jay. It's something that the world's changing and technology, and particularly wires technologies, the loud areas and countries that really weren't that involved have become hugely involved. And so now it's opening up that competitive level to a new world, a new world, really. And so like you said, yes, we used to pride ourselves in being technologically advanced and so forth. Now we're really on par with everybody else and so it's kind of a level playing field. And so now how do you continue to stay at the forefront? And that's what Verizon's trying to do. And we have some innovation labs as well that we have two in the U.S. What is the main innovation lab? It's a lab that Verizon has that we'll allow customers to come into and this is kind of getting past the innovations app challenge, but a little bit background, yeah, absolutely. And so it allows customers that have applications that they would like to test in a wireless environment. It's kind of a sandbox. And so you can actually come to our labs, it's free of charge, we'll help you develop it, we'll help you test it, we do it in the sandbox. So it's on a live network, but not one that's ever public exposed. And you go from A to Z all the way, suit the nuts and developing, enhancing, testing and that type of thing, any type of application that works on a wireless device. Well, this takes me to what I was gonna ask you about here in the second part of our show. And that is make me a kid, make me a kid 12 years old, 13 years old, middle school kid. And I say, gee, I saw that thing with Bill Hosey, I wanna do that, I wanna get involved, I'm gonna file an application, get my buddies, I'm gonna have a school, support me to participate and I'm gonna make a nap. So where does he start? Where does his team start? How do they shape the idea? They talk to their teachers? Yes, they have an advisor in a school that's paired with the team that kind of, they can give them guidance, but again, it's really being driven by the young people. And I was talking with the Waipahu High School that had won it in 2015. They got some really good science teachers. Absolutely. And I was talking with the teacher about it and we were talking about how she allowed them to just kind of go and do and it was really being driven and that's what we're trying to foster is them driving this, nurturing it, developing it. And so it kind of encourages one leadership in these young people because you have to sign responsibilities, okay, I need you to do this piece of a bill and you're responsible for that. Absolutely. And so, and then there's enthusiasm, because they're getting to express themselves and in many instances, they had not been able to. And one thing that really struck me as probably most important was its encouraging students that sometimes sit on the sidelines that let other people kind of go and do, it was encouraging them to get involved and do something, come up with that idea. Change their lives. Absolutely. Give them a confidence they never had before. Absolutely. Yes, it is. So you were a part of the judging committee on Vi annual code challenge. They say annual, but it was the first year. They wanted to be annual. That's right, yeah. That's the goal. How does that differ from the Verizon challenge? We actually had high school students involved in that code challenge as well, absolutely. So, and I have to say we're absolutely some of my most impactful, I saw some of the most impactful designs from those young people. And it's similar in many ways, but indifferent. Certainly the group is middle school and high school students. We're in the code challenge. It was adults and from all ages, all age groups. And but the ideas and the development and the processes were very, very similar. And so one of the things that we did in this case are in previous cases is that they vet a lot of it and they actually help them kind of streamline. Counseling. Yeah, counseling. Yeah, right. And mentoring maybe, it might be a good term too. But it's helping them to kind of see flaws. Presentation skills is important. Always. Yeah, it is. And so those kind of things get enhanced by the process in both cases. Well, when we covered the Hawaii annual code challenge which was a government program, a state government program organized by, I guess the information, the chief information officer. Right. There were challenges, actual challenges. For example, the one stick to my brain was the two women came down from the prison system. And they said, we have a problem organizing visits by families who want to see their relatives in prison. And we're not well organized and so if somebody could please, you know, I thought it was a great challenge. Really an important thing. And it could solve the, you know, the problem. Absolutely. Yeah, and I remember those. There were, I believe, two groups that had really powerful solutions for that. And one of them, if I'm not mistaken, don't quote me, but if I'm not mistaken, one of them actually went to one, the governor selection comedians and they're, you know, narrowed it down and so forth. And actually with prize winners and there was a tie for first in that. But I remember the application they had developed was using a database, you know, type solution. And you would actually register online when you wanted to come in and it would immediately update the database. It would tell you if there was windows of time available, if they had an event that occurred, you know, water line rupture was an example. I think one of them used, then they could reshuffle people and you were notified automatically.  So it was, it was a really powerful app. And I remember the governor talking about how phenomenal some of these solutions were to problems that they have faced for years and years and years and how easily and quickly solutions and come once you focus on it. Absolutely, absolutely.  Well, it's not the same thing as the prison app. Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. I hope not. I hope I'm not coming from the wrong reason. I'm coming from the right reason. So, but in the Verizon challenge, you're not actually throwing out challenges. You're just saying it's a general challenge. Yeah. You just figure out what you need to do and then you do it. And we'll counsel with you, provide mentoring, I guess. And then at the end of whatever period it is, we'll look at your app and we will have judges, am I right? Yes. And the judges will decide which apps win. Yes. Who are the judge? Are you a judge?  I can tell you the website that I gave you earlier has all of that information. It enhances the rules, the process, how to register, all the step-by-step information, when the awards are given, you know, the process and all of that type of information for your access. You know, I've never designed an app. I've always wanted to design an app. I mean, an app on a smartphone, that kind of app rather than a program.  And I guess there's another kit for the brand new Pixel phone. Yes. Are you selling that, by the way? We are, yeah. It's solely from Ryzen. You're right on it. It's a Ryzen, solely from Ryzen device. Absolutely. Oh, no kidding, yeah. They chose the best network. So, it's available right now? I can go down and buy one? Yeah, absolutely. We're gonna talk. There you go. Yeah, we'll get you set up. Yeah, we give numerous stores in Oahu that we could take care of you. So, I could do an app for any one of those phones. Yes. Android, Pixel, or iPhone. Correct. Yes. And so, I need a Programmer's Kit, an API, whatever it is.  Don't quote me on it. Again, I'd have to get to the site but we provide the majority of that or guidance on where to get those type of things, how to get access to it and so forth. But there is no coding knowledge needed to participate. Well, you know, I was gonna guess to say that, you know, if you have all these people, millions of people trying to do apps because it's the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Yes. Not that every app makes money, but some make a lot of money and some of them are a career, if you will. I mean, a business that goes on and on that flowers into other things. But if, you know, if you're gonna do that, then there, you want tools. Yes. And there are people out there who would like to build the tools for you, maybe sell them at some modest price. Absolutely. You can build your app faster. And as you said, without actually having to code. Yeah. You're right. And one thing I want to point out is that this application, once it's fully developed and is, you can sell the app. And so we can go on the apps to the correct. That's a big point. We didn't make that clear earlier. Absolutely. It's still your app. Absolutely. You could make a million, billion. Nobody's gonna stand in the way. Absolutely. Even though you did it under the auspices of this code chat. Absolutely. And in our innovations labs are the same way. It's all, the information, all the data, the application, everything belongs to the developers. It does not belong to Verizon Wireless. We just encourage the development. We encourage it because we know that data is where the world is going to. And we want to be at the forefront of impacting how that's done. Yeah. While you said that, Bill, I'd like to ask you a small question that flows out of it. Where is the world going? Where is the world going in apps? Where is the world going in smartphones? We need to know and you can help us. Okay, this is my, this is my idea on it. Everything is going wireless. It is going wireless for convenience, for the ability to do things remotely. During your travel, you know, we've all experienced it.  Well, you don't know. I just got into San Francisco. I don't know San Francisco. I've never lived there. So I need to find out where I want to eat. And immediately there's an app that can help me do that. There are apps that can help, you know, people do tracking vehicles and love ones. You know, there are car apps. Sure, sure. You name it. Know where your family is at any moment in time. Absolutely. And so I see the world evolving into a more of a wireless position where you can do things remotely. You can work remote. You can, you know, that type of thing. So I believe that's where I see it going. We see it in the business space. We see it in the private sector as well where it's all going to that wireless environment. Yeah, and that's the first year. The first year, absolutely. Absolutely. You know, at the same time, and this is the second question, man, at the same time the smartphone itself as a smart device can't change.  It's got to change. And it's going to change fast because the stakes are high. There are so many millions and millions of phones being sold every day around the world. It's not just Verizon. Absolutely. Correct. And so the stakes are high to find the technology, to make it a better battery, better processor, better everything. Where do you think it's going to go? Where are the improvements going to be revealed? I think hardware, I think it's kind of a, maybe the short answer. People want the battery to last longer. We all have, you know, the battery's going dead and now I've got to find- Without smoking. Yeah, or exploding. And I do want to say that as you try new things, as you push the envelope, things happen. It happens with our cars. It happens in everything we're involved in on a day-to-day lives. And so I applaud people pushing the envelope. And so battery technology is pushing the envelope. Can we do it? Can we have it last longer and can we charge it faster? That's two questions almost every phone user wants to know.  Can I get it charged faster? And so we're pushing the envelope on that. All the developers are. And all the hardware developers are. And so that's one thing, I think. The capability of the device, if you think about what a smartphone can do today versus what a computer could do just 10 years ago. It's like- Unbelievable. Absolutely. And so I see, I think you said it, I see everything consolidating, getting smaller and smaller, but more and more powerful so that I can do more and more things with my wireless device. So the platform is better and therefore the opportunities for apps are better. Absolutely. And probably the app languages, the app functionality is better all the time and you can do more better and using the cloud, you can keep huge amounts of data out there even though a little tiny phone is where it's working for. Absolutely. So I give you a minute now. Can you face camera one and tell the kids and their parents and the schools what they should know what they should do about getting involved in the Verizon Apps Challenge? Absolutely, it's really simple. You wanna go to the website and I'm gonna read it again.  It has a registration. How do you go online and do that is all there for you. It tells you all the stipulations, the forms that need to be filled out. There is a video that you have to create a three minute video explaining your app and it kind of gives you an idea of what you wanna do and again, make sure that you hit that deadline. Jay, that's the most important thing but we wanna encourage everyone to participate. That's the goal of this is to get as many schools in Hawaii involved in this. Middle and high school, we encourage you to come out. And again, I wanna share a story if I can, Jay, real quick if I have a moment. I was in high school. I was, you remember the paper football? No. Okay. Used to fold up a piece of paper and you'd make a little triangular paper football and we'd play that on the desk and I came up with the idea in high school and this was back in early 80s to make that a game. And I didn't. I never brought it to fruition. And just a few years ago, I was given a plastic paper football from a company that manufactures now for colleges, for pro teams and everything and it's making million dollars on my idea that I never pushed it. And so I'm saying that to encourage people, this is a great opportunity to take that idea that you've kind of been just chewing on, been sitting there and really do something with it. Yeah. Carpe diem. Carpe diem. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you, Jay. Great to have you here.


Hi, everyone. My name is Kendall Rodin, and I am so excited to be here today for Dapper Day 2024 to talk all things Dapper integration. So I hope you've enjoyed so far the Dapper Day experience. You've heard a lot about how Dapper is being used by end users to power amazing experiences within their applications. And I'm really, really excited. I feel like putting this together was an adventure for me, just diving into all of the progress Dappers made and all of the really cool innovations that are happening within the Dapper space, both on the product side and also within the open source ecosystem. So for a little bit of context, as I mentioned, I am a product manager at a company called Diagrid. Diagrid is founded by the co-founders of the Dapper project, so Mark Fussell and Yaron Schneider, who I believe kicked off Dapper Day today. Before that, I was working at Microsoft and worked a little bit on the Azure Container Ops platform as a product manager, so super excited to shed some light on the great work being done both at Microsoft and Diagrid and across the broader Dapper community. So let's go ahead and dive in. I think a really good place for us to start today is just to acknowledge the insane Dapper growth over the past several years. So Dapper created in 2019, contributed to the CNCF a couple of years later, has now become the 10th largest CNCF project with over 3,000 contributors. I think this just continues to reiterate that the Dapper value proposition is extremely clear and that Dapper continues to solidify itself as an API standard for building distributed applications. In addition to the Dapper value proposition continuing to strengthen and the user base growing, existing users are also using Dapper for more intensive workloads. So for example, if we take a look at some of the CNCF case studies, we can see that HDFC Bank has over 750 million transactions that they're executing monthly and that system is dependent on Dapper. Same with DeFacto, right? 27.5 million events being published every 100 hours and they're using Dapper to do this. So they're obviously running Dapper at extremely high scale. And so there are new considerations that come into play when operating Dapper at that level. And then also another consideration is that with the growth, there's also new products, new technologies that are coming out to make it easier for Dapper to be used, enabling technologies. So there are new deployment models not just on Kubernetes, but also outside of Kubernetes that are helping bring Dapper to a broader developer audience so that they can get this very clear benefit that existing Dapper users are getting today. I also wanted to just highlight, if you haven't already checked it out, check out the state of Dapper report from 2023. As a quick summary, this data just really lends well to the points that I was just making. Over 150 individuals were surveyed who used Dapper on a daily basis. And it was very clear, Dapper users see a lot of value in this API abstraction. If you take a closer look at the survey, you'll see things like swappability of components and the vendor neutrality were obviously highlighted as major benefits. And then there was also some things that users disliked. And a lot of that was around troubleshooting and then running on Kubernetes, which can be challenging to manage, but also deploying to non-Kubernetes environments. So you can see that evidenced here in the data, really troubleshooting being 50% of respondents, finding that to be their top dislike, but then also a few finding it hard to deploy to both Kubernetes and on Kubernetes environments. And I do love the 13 people who said they don't dislike anything, right? I've never really seen someone who loves a product that much, but clearly that just goes to re-emphasize how great Dapper is and how much progress the project has made. And then I think evidenced in the previous point is that Dapper users did also indicate the need for more operational support. So things like better observability was indicated by 74% of people. They think that'd be valuable features around visualization, best practice recommendations, and then even automatic certificate rotation. Managing and rotating certificates within Dapper can prove challenging. The Dapper certificates are self-signed and essentially expire after a year. And so that can be a point of outage for users if they don't put it in to place a system for rotating those certificates at expiration time. Now I think it's a good time to start diving into some of the nitty gritty. So traditionally when Dapper is installed into a Kubernetes cluster, the Dapper control plane is going to be in charge of injecting the Dapper D sidecar into applications based on if the Dapper annotation is available on the deployment, which is what we're mostly familiar with. And while this is still the default strategy, there are some use cases that do require a different approach. So that can actually be enabled by Dapper shared, which is something the open source community is currently working on. You can find this in the Dapper Sandbox project on GitHub. It was initially called Dapper Ambient. But essentially the goal here is that you can deploy Dapper applications with the Dapper D running as a daemon set or a deployment on top of Kubernetes instead of being injected into the application pod. So here's kind of the two deployment models that are supported for Dapper shared. A daemon set, meaning you can basically deploy a single Dapper sidecar instance per app ID on each node or the deployment model where you basically just have a single instance of that deployment. And keep in mind, obviously, if you're running on a large cluster, that deployment could potentially be placed on a different node than the application workload itself, which can introduce some level of latency. So there are some trade-offs to the Dapper shared model, as well as a sidecar model that you can look at the blog post. I just referenced more detail for some of the trade-offs. A good example of when you might want to use Dapper shared is in the case you want to decouple the lifecycle of the application workload from the Dapper APIs. And this really lends itself well to kind of function models like Knative and Open Function, where you might want to keep the Dapper sidecar available because it's waiting to respond to, for example, events that are coming off a PubSub broker, where the workload itself is idle. So you don't necessarily want to scale the two together, but instead want to keep the Dapper sidecar asynchronous capabilities available while the application workload itself is idle and scaled to zero. So now I just want to briefly cover these two serverless open-source projects, one being Open Function and one being Knative, and just highlight a little bit about how Dapper integrates with and works with these platforms. So Open Function really provides an end-to-end solution for building a functions-as-a-service platform on top of Kubernetes. Everything from actually building the function, containerizing it, serving the function and scaling it on top of Kubernetes, and then also the eventing aspect of the functions themselves. If you see here, it actually supports an asynchronous runtime aspect using Dapper and Kata for scaling based on events, things like that, and then also synchronous runtimes, one of them being the HTTP add-on from Kata and another one being Knative. And what's interesting here is that because Open Function was basically built on Dapper from day one, it eliminated the need for the Open Function team to basically reimplement the connectivity to the various infrastructure services for each and every language that was supported within their functions. So for example, if you think about just Java alone, if Java needs to publish or subscribe to messages on a given message broker, they would have to implement a ton of SDKs in order to ensure that Java can talk to Kafka, Nats, Service Bus, so on and so forth. So instead, that entire process was built on top of Dapper, which is pretty awesome. And then that basically abstracts away the backends from the functions themselves as we can see here. So Dapper is supported in Open Function and Dapper powers their bindings, PubSub, and state management. Now, another really interesting thing here is that within Open Function, they did identify that the sidecar injection model for each function wasn't necessarily working super well. It wasn't necessarily optimized for a kind of scale to zero scenario. And so what they basically did is created this proxy service. And this is several versions ago. So this has been around for a while. But what it would do is it would create essentially a single Dapper service per function. And then each time the function scaled and a new instance was created, it would use the same sidecar. So what that allowed them to do is really reduce the cold start and the function startup time by creating this proxy. And so a good example of how Dapper shared basically already has a specific use case because obviously Open Function had already solved this problem. And then when it comes to Knative, it's a little bit less of an opinionated platform. So if you need more flexibility, some people tend to gravitate towards Knative. Knative supports using kind of the native Dapper model where you can annotate a particular function. That function is running on Kubernetes and then ultimately if Dapper is enabled, it can make use of the Dapper APIs from the application code. But a good example of a product that could benefit from or a project that can benefit from Dapper shared would be Knative because now they can focus on kind of a combination of Dapper shared plus the Knative runtime and then KDA for scaling. And you can kind of build your own platform using these primitives. So now that we've talked about some of the open source function related projects and how they integrate with Dapper, I wanna talk a little bit about some hosting options that also provide Dapper capabilities but also abstract way even more of the infrastructure and operations overhead. So a good example of this is Azure Container Apps. Azure Container Apps allows you to create containers that scale all the way down to zero and also completely manages and abstracts away Dapper but still allows you to use the Dapper APIs. So if you've never used Container Apps before, instead of deploying to a Kubernetes environment, you instead get this abstracted concept called a Container Apps environment. There is no access to the Kubernetes API. So it's really providing a developer experience on top of Kubernetes. You create the concept of what's called a Container App which is kind of akin to like a pod or a deployment in Kubernetes. And then you essentially provide Dapper configuration on like the ARM or Bicep deployment template to enable Dapper. So when you enable Dapper on a Container App, the Container Apps platform completely handles the sidecar injection, it handles the Dapper control plane deployment, the upgrades, you name it, the application rollouts, everything from an operations perspective around Dapper is completely managed for you. And a lot of the concepts are very similar to open source concepts. So for example, there's the concept of components that you can deploy at the environment level that are shared by multiple Container Apps. And all of the APIs are accessible via the existing Dapper SDKs. And then another really nice thing is that Kata is also integrated into the Container Apps platform. So it allows you to scale both your application in the Dapper sidecar based on events. And similar to Open Function, the Container Apps platform also has a proxy that's built in to ensure that the Dapper sidecar can scale when new events arrive, even if your workload has scaled down to zero. Another really cool update that I happened after I left the team a year ago is that the Container Apps environment now hosts not only Container Apps and job objects, but it can also host Azure Functions. So if you're familiar with Azure, the Azure Functions primitive, you can now deploy that into an existing Container Apps environment. So you can have a Container App, which is just a traditional application hosted in a Docker container, talking to a containerized Azure function that has that opinionated functions programming model. And you can use the Dapper extension for Azure Functions to basically allow functions and Container Apps to integrate with each other using these managed Dapper sidecars. So if you haven't tried that out yet, highly recommend, but pretty cool stuff happening over on the Azure side. Another thing I want to highlight within the hosted services space is something that's very near and dear to my heart because it is the product that I'm in PM for. But recently we launched the Diagrid Catalyst product at here at Diagrid. And it's essentially a set of unified APIs for messaging data and workflow that are powered by the Dapper open source project. So just to kind of draw a parallel as to how this compares to the traditional Dapper deployment model, right? Traditionally, your code is hosted on Kubernetes, you're accessing the sidecar APIs over HTTP and GRPC, and then you're using components to connect to backing resources. So for looking at Catalyst, you can now host your code absolutely anywhere. I know that's at first being like, what do you mean anywhere? And I mean anywhere, right? Azure Container Apps has created a hosted Dapper experience specifically within a Container Apps environment, but this is really abstracting away Dapper management for users that are calling from any platform. So this could be AWS AppRunner, GCP Cloud Run, ContainerOps, Container instances, you name it. Your code can be hosted anywhere because the sidecar is now hosted in Diagrid Catalyst. So within our product, we have this concept called an app ID, which is very true to the open source Dapper project. And for each application running externally, you create a remote hosted app ID. And this app ID, you can connect to the Dapper APIs through it, still over HTTP and GRPC, using the existing Dapper SDKs, getting a lot of the same cross-cutting concerns handled for you. Today, we provide five of the 10 APIs that are available in Dapper open source. And then on top of that, in addition to having a connection experience, which is basically our version of Dapper components, we also provide the ability for you to connect and use Diagrid infrastructure. So for people who are really looking for a serverless experience, not just on the sidecar side, but also on the infrastructure side, we provide these serverless scalable infrastructure solutions that require very little overhead and very little operations to deploy and manage. So let's take a look at a Diagrid Catalyst demo to get you all excited about what we've been working on. I'll show you how to convert the simple PubSub example from the Quick Starts to use Catalyst. Here we can see the checkout service publishes a message using the PubSub component. Then we'll have a declarative subscription, which ensures all messages that are delivered to the topic orders on the PubSub broker are then delivered to the order processor on the route orders. When we're using Dapper, what we'll traditionally do is use a multi-app run file to launch both the applications and the Dapper sidecars locally. We can see here the expected output, the orders are being published and also being received. Now let's see Catalyst in action. First, we'll create a Catalyst project and deploy a managed Catalyst PubSub broker. This will ensure that we can easily use the PubSub API for this application. Next, we'll get the project where we can actually see the HTTP and GRPC endpoints, which will be used to connect the Dapper SDK to the remotely hosted sidecars. In Catalyst, the sidecars are called app IDs, so we'll create one app ID for the checkout service and one app ID for the order processor. Catalyst makes it easy for Dapper developers to get up and running by allowing them to import existing Dapper manifests like subscriptions and components into Catalyst subscriptions and connections. Here we can see we used the existing Dapper subscription and created a Catalyst subscription. If we take a look at the project and all of the resources that we've deployed, we'll see we have two application IDs, a PubSub connection representing a component and a PubSub broker, which is managed infrastructure. Last but not least, we have a declarative subscription, which makes sure that the order processor will receive messages sent to the broker. With the Catalyst resources in place, we can scaffold a dev config file, which will ensure that the Dapper SDK has all of the environment variables set to connect to the Catalyst project and the remote sidecars we deployed. We can also set the application port for the order processor to ensure any messages that are sent to the app ID order processor are forwarded to the local machine on port 70.06 from the remote hosted sidecar. Lastly, we can set the application run commands to ensure both of our applications are launched at the same time and the application ID connections are established. Lastly, we can run our diagram dev config file using the dev start command, launching both of our applications and connecting the order processor app ID to our local machine. We can see that without Dapper in play, we were still able to use the exact same code to connect to the remote hosted sidecars, unlocking a new deployment model as both of these services could be running virtually anywhere. We'll take a quick peek at the Catalyst portal where we can see all of the resources we deployed to our project, both of our application IDs, our PubSub broker, our managed connection, and our PubSub subscription. If you wanted to make use of an existing service instead of a diagram managed service, you could create a connection. The connections are very similar to Dapper components and you can make the selection of your choice to connect to the backing broker in this case for PubSub API. There's also capabilities like the API Explorer, which allows you to see both the requests from the checkout service to the sidecar that's hosted in Catalyst and the outgoing event which is sending that message through to the local orders route. We can also use the call graph. The call graph provides insight into all of the applications that we currently have a Catalyst app ID for and the connections that they make use of. You can explore these Catalyst features and many others by signing up for our early access program. I would love for you to check it out and see some of what we've been working on including managed workflows, which is pretty exciting. So now that we've talked a little bit about hosting options, I want to focus in on developer tooling. So one of the really neat tools that has come out of Microsoft recently is .NET Aspire. I personally was really impressed when I tried out .NET Aspire. It makes it super, super easy for you to get up and running quickly, building microservices based in .NET. So essentially what this allows you to do is create multiple projects that you coordinate and orchestrate across. You can inject dependencies that are used and shared across these different services. You can also create and or consume a variety of NuGet packages, which are best practice wrappers around a variety of infrastructure services. So very similar to kind of what Dapper has provided in terms of like the Dapper component model and then additional tooling for VS Code and the .NET CLI that help you get up and running and scaffold sample projects with .NET Aspire. So there was recently a really great Dapper presentation on the Dapper community call and they showed how you can integrate Dapper with .NET Aspire. I thought I'd throw together a quick demo so that you can see this for yourself, but I want to encourage you to watch the Dapper community call that was recently hosted on, I believe February 6th or 7th of 2024 and see what it's all about. We're now in In Aspire with Dapper sample where we can see a web application which is going to make a Dapper service invocation request to a backend API. The backend API will return a weather forecast to the front end, which we can then check on the user interface. The service defaults project is going to be used for those shared dependencies across both of these .NET projects and then the app host is gonna be used with any Aspire solution and will essentially add both of these projects to the launch criteria, along with two Dapper sidecars, one for each application, and then we're gonna do a .NET run and start that app host project. As you can see in the output, we're able to navigate to an Aspire dashboard. This should look somewhat familiar if you ever played around with Project Tie, but we can see both of the Dapper sidecar executables along with both of the projects that we launched. We can also navigate to the endpoint and see that the service invocation request is successful. In addition, we can also see things like logs for both the Dapper sidecar alongside of the application workload, and then we can see things like metrics for particular resources and even trace logs, which is quite impressive, if you ask me. So now you got a quick look into .NET Aspire. I believe there was also a Dapper Day 2024 session on .NET Aspire, so I recommend that you check that out for a deeper dive into this awesome innovation. So another project that I think is worth checking out is the Radius project. This is an open-source project that came out of the Microsoft Incubations team, which is the team that Dapper was initially created by, so it's pretty cool to see additional innovation happening in the cloud native space from this team. And I actually think that they have some pretty good slides that I'm gonna show you now, and then we're just gonna dive into a demo to make it a little bit more real. So if we take a look at this Radius example, we can see that there's two pretty basic services, a front-end container, a back-end container, and both of them are using some sort of state store or database. If you're using Radius, you'll have this concept of a Radius environment, so let's say that environment is local development, for example. The compute that our applications are running on is just a generic Kubernetes distribution, and the recipes we have for local development will be running Redis and SQL as Docker containers. Well, let's say we swap that environment out. We don't have to change our application code, but instead can focus on using a managed Kubernetes platform on Azure for our compute, and then ultimately we can have access to recipes which will provision Redis in Azure or SQL DB managed in Azure. And then if we wanted to swap over and use an AWS provider or environment, for example, our application code will run on Kubernetes along with the Radius control plane, and then we essentially will have access to a new set of recipes to provision AWS native resources. A final thing I want to add here before the demo is that Dapper is built into Radius, which is why it's in this presentation today, and it makes it easy for developers to easily add state stores, pub subbrokers, and more to their applications, especially if you're already a Dapper user. So let's dive into the demo and see what this looks like. So to start, I'm going to initialize Radius on a Kubernetes cluster. In this case, it's a local kind cluster running on my machine, and I'm creating a new Radius environment, which is a default environment, and it's going to include that local dev recipe pack. So next up, we can confirm that the control plane was deployed to the Radius system namespace, and now we can look at the resources that we'll be deploying via infrastructure as code. So now we're taking a quick look at the bicep template, which will create the resources on the cluster. We can see we have an application called Dapper Radius. It's composed of two resources, this backend resource, which has extensions, which will inject a Dapper sidecar with an app ID of backend, and then there's also this connection section, which will specify a connection called orders, which references a state store, which will be deployed by Radius. If we take a look at that state store resource, it's actually going to create a Dapper state store for us, and it's going to use that default local dev recipe, which is Radius running in a container. We have a second resource, which is part of the application. It's called frontend, and it's also going to be using an app ID through Dapper to find that backend application, and it will also have a Dapper sidecar injected with an app ID of frontend. Lastly here, we are going to do a Rad run on that bicep file, and we'll see that it went out and created both the frontend, the backend, and that state store. So if we go to our frontend, we can put in a few orders, which are being submitted, and we should see that based on that Kubernetes port forward, we're actually able to see the logs of that backend service, and we can see that the order was persisted in that state store. Another thing we can do is run some Radius commands to actually look at the application Dapper Radius and see all of the connections being used, and we actually see that state store connection and the resources that are backing it, the Dapper component and the Redis deployment. So I think now would be a good time for us to segue into Dapper at scale and talking a little bit more about operations for Kubernetes-based Dapper applications. Learnings have been found from users who are running Dapper at high scale, and there's been consistent challenges that they've had to overcome, like certificate rotation, keeping up with the latest version of Dapper, managing this across multiple Kubernetes clusters, getting to the bottom of potential issues from a metrics and logs perspective. And so Conductor is a product that was created by Diagrid to essentially operate these cloud-native applications that are Dapper-enabled and running across multiple Kubernetes clusters. So for the sake of time, we're going to keep moving. I do want to call out that there is a free trial of Conductor 30 days where you can essentially onboard a cluster for free and get all of the Conductor insights that help you understand your Dapper installation. So if you want to try that out, definitely do. But now I'm going to show you a quick Conductor demo using the Radius application that we deployed on our cluster in the previous demo. We're now dropped into the Conductor cluster where we can onboard a new cluster connection. We provide a unique name for the cluster connection and also the Kubernetes distribution of the target cluster, which in this case is kind, which falls under other. In this case, I'm using the non-production cluster type. I also want to install Dapper. Now, while Dapper already exists in my cluster, I can choose the latest version and have Conductor take over the management and upgrade to the latest version. I'm also choosing to have the Conductor agent roll out all of my applications once the upgrade has happened so that the sidecars receive the latest version. While certificate management is provided, because it's a non-production scenario, I'm going to skip over it and just have the automatic upgrade of the agent selected. A command will then be generated that we can copy and deploy on our target cluster, which should deploy the Conductor agent and establish connectivity from the cluster to Conductor. I'm going to hit the Radius application that we deployed with a bit of load to generate some metrics, some logs and some movement within the cluster that we can then visualize in Conductor. We are now back in Conductor and can see that the cluster was successfully onboarded. We can get a quick glance at the Dapper control plane status, the agent status for Conductor, some deeper insights, and then we see the Dapper version was successfully upgraded. We can also see configuration information about the desired Dapper settings that we want enforced on the connected cluster. And we can click in on the cluster to get more insights via the cluster dashboard. The cluster dashboard provides not only cluster insights, but also application insights and component insights. This means bubbling up things like high advisories based on best practices that are recommended. It also means surfacing up any logs or metrics issues that may be used within the cluster. There's also an app visualization included where you can see Dapper-enabled apps the way they interact and the Dapper components that they make use of. If you're running Dapper in production, I highly recommend you check out the 30-day free trial of Conductor Enterprise to see additional insights at the application and component levels. Well, that's about it. We're almost out of time. I hope that you learned a lot. I hope you enjoyed this. I hope you enjoyed this. I did want to call out and highlight just a few more projects and technologies that I recommend keeping on your radar. One of those is the CNCF project crossplane. It works really well with Dapper. It allows you to create, provision, configure cloud-based resources using the Kubernetes API. And it's really simple to integrate Dapper into that model. So I highly recommend checking it out. Also wanted to say if you haven't heard of these projects, these are other areas of investment from a Dapper perspective. So Dagger, which is really in the DevOps space, and then Test Containers, which is really for Java developers and Salaboy, who works within the Dapper community and also is one of my colleagues at Diagrid has done a lot of really great work around Dapper integration with Test Containers. So last but not least, there's a ton more out there, new opportunities, new areas for Dapper to continue innovating, integrating, and so I hope that you feel more confident in understanding the broader Dapper landscape. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to reach out. It's at Kindle Rodin on X, or you can email me at kindleadiagrid.io. Definitely reach out. If you have any interest in Catalyst or Conductor, we would be happy to help.


Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of Splunk.conf 2021. My name is Dave Vellante and theCUBE has been covering.conf events since 2012 and I've personally hosted many of them. And since that time, we've seen the evolution of Splunk as a company and also the maturation in the way customers analyze, protect and secure their organization's data and applications. But the forced march to digital over the past 19 months has brought more rapid changes to SecOps teams than we've ever seen before. The adversary is capable, they're motivated and they're deploying very sophisticated techniques that have pressured security pros like never before. And with me to talk about these challenges and how Splunk is helping customers respond is Jane Wong who's the vice president of security products at Splunk. Jane, great to have you on theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. Ah, very nice to meet you. Thank you for having me. You're very welcome. So how can you think about or how do you think about the fact that the imperative to accelerate digital transformation has impacted security teams? How has it impacted SecOps teams in your view? Yeah, well, just going back to our customers and what I've learned from all the customer conversations I have every week, many of our customers are under a massive digital transformation. They're moving to the cloud and the cloud opens up more attack surface, more attack work surface. There's more threats that come over cloud, new workspaces, new attack surfaces, new APIs to manage, secure and protect. And our customers are really struggling to gain the visibility they need to really manage and secure across all that infrastructure. Yeah, and we've also seen the whole, I mean, obviously the work from home trend, the hybrid work movement. You know, people aren't set up for that. I mean, you remember people were ripping out, literally ripping out desktops and bringing them home and the home network had to be upgraded. So lots of changes there. And we've talked a lot on theCUBE, Jane, about the fragmentation of tooling and the lack of qualified talent. When we talk to CISOs, you ask them the number one problem to say, I can't get it, I can't hire enough talent in the field of cybersecurity. So I wonder if you can address how this has made it more difficult for security teams to maintain end-to-end visibility across their environments. What's the fundamental challenge there? Yeah, well, you're really nailing this. The fundamental challenge is that many security products are not built to integrate seamlessly with one another. When I'm talking to customers, their frontline security operations teams often have 30 different consoles open on their monitor at one time and they're really manual, disjointed processes, they're copying and pasting hash names and IP addresses from one console to the other. It slows them down. It really slows them down in protecting those threats. So because those products aren't assigned to integrate together and all that data from each of those security tools isn't brought into one place, it just exacerbates the challenge for security operations teams. Makes their job really, really hard to do, which takes time. It takes time. It makes it harder to detect and respond to threats quickly. And today, more than ever, we need to be able to detect and respond to threats quickly. Yeah, I do a weekly program called Breaking Analysis and once a quarter I look at the cyberspace and I use a chart to emphasize this complexity. It's from a company called Optive. I don't know if you've ever seen it, but it's this eye chart. It's this taxonomy of the security landscape and it's mind-blowing how much complexity there is. So how does Splunk help organizations address these challenges? Yeah, so I think bringing, we have one security operations platform, cloud-native, cloud-delivered. There are many parts to be able to streamline workloads for when your first detector threat or a potential threat, right through to when teams close and remediate that threat and make changes there in their environment to ensure they're protected. So the whole thing is helping security teams detect faster, investigate faster and respond faster to threats. So there are four parts to that in our security operations platform, Splunk Security Cloud. The first one is advanced security analytics. So the nature of threats is evolving. They're becoming more sophisticated. We have very smart, well-funded attackers whose day job, who spend all their time trying to break into organizations. So you need really advanced security analytics to detect those threats. Then we need to automate security operations so that it's not so manual so that you don't have poor folks sitting in front of multiple consoles doing manual tasks to respond to those threats and make sure their organizations are protected. One key thing is that this year, Splunk acquired TrueStar so that we can bring in dedupe, rationalize multiple sources of threat intelligence and apply that threat intelligence, both to our analytics and our operations so that you have broader insights from the security community outside Splunk and that intelligence can really help and speed both detection and response. And the last thing that's been true about Splunk since Splunk became Splunk many, many years ago is that we are committed to partners and we deeply integrate with many other security tools in a very seamless way. So whatever investments customers have made within their security operation center, we will integrate and bring together those tools in one workspace.  That's a nice little description and having followed Splunk for so many years, it sort of attracts the progression of your ascendancy. You started, we used to have log analytics that were just impossible. You sort of made that much easier, took that to advanced kind of use big data techniques even though Splunk really never used that term but you were like the leader in big data in terms of being able to analyze data to help remediate issues. The automation key is pieces key. The acquisitions you've made are very interesting. You mentioned around D-Duped Threat Intelligence but also you've done some cool stuff in the cloud and we always used to say, Jane, watch for the ecosystem. In the early last decade, we saw you as a really hot company. We said, one of the keys to your growth is going to be the ecosystem and you've clearly made some progress there. I wonder if you could tell us more about the announcements that you're making here at .conf21. Yeah, well, we're going back, everything that we do on the security team, every line of code, every engineer rights is all around helping detect, investigate and respond faster to really secure organizations. So if I look at those in turn, I start with faster time to detect, what have we done? So bringing in the threat intelligence that I mentioned, again, that's really going to help detect new threats and to take them really, really quickly. You don't have to spend time going and looking manually at external sources of threat intelligence. It'll be brought right in to enterprise security at your fingertips. So that's pretty huge. We're bringing in other more advanced content right into our STEM enterprise security. So that will help detect threats that our research team sees as emerging. Again, this is going to just bring that intelligence right to customers where they work every day. Faster time to investigate. So this is really exciting. Back in November, we reduced, we released something called risk-based alerting. That is an amazing new capability that we've iterated on ever since and we have more iterations that we're announcing tomorrow, actually. So risk-based alerting pulls together what may have been single atomic alerts that can often be overwhelming to a sock, brings those together into one overarching alert that helps you see the whole pattern of an attack. So the whole series of things that happened over time that might be an attack on your organization. One customer told us that that reduced the time it took for them to do an investigation from eight hours down to 10 minutes. So really helping faster time to investigate. And then the next one is faster time to respond. So we have a new visual playbook editor for our SOAR, security orchestration and response tool, which is in the cloud, but also available on-prem. But that new visual playbook editor really reduces the need for custom code, makes playbooks more modular so it can help anyone in the security operations team respond to threats really, really quickly. So faster time to detect, investigate and respond. Those are really cool for us. And then there's some exciting partnerships that I wanna talk about just to really focus on reducing the burden of all those disparate tools and consoles and bringing them down and integrating them together. So we'll have some announcements there on new integrations that we're releasing with Mandiant, Aziz Scaler and DTEX. I'm personally very excited about a fireside chat that Kevin Mandia, the CEO and president of Mandiant will be having tomorrow with our CEO, Dag Merritt. So those are some of the things we're announcing. It's a big year for security, very excited. That's, I'll tell you, that's key. I wanna just kind of go through and follow up on some of that. So faster time to detect with the threat intelligence. That's so important because we read about how long it takes sometimes for organizations to even find out that somebody has infiltrated their environment. This risk-based alerting, it sounds like, and you're so right, it's like paper cuts. Having a bottoms-up analysis, it's almost overwhelming. You don't have a sense as to really where the focus should be. So if you can have more of a top-down, hey, start here and sort of bucketize things, it's gonna accelerate. And then the faster response time, the thing that strikes me, Jane, with your visual playbook editor is as you well know, the way in which bad guys get in now, they're very stealthy. You almost have to be stealthy in your response. So if you have to write custom code, that's going to alert the bad guys that they're seeing now, seeing code that they've never seen before, or they must have detected us, and then they escalate. They get you in a harder, tighter headlock. And I love the partnerships. We've followed the trend toward remote security, cloud security, where Zscaler's a big player, Amanda, you mentioned. So that's great too.   I really think so, Dave. I mean, it's been a great 12 months as Blanc. We have done so much over the past year leading up to this.com. I'm very excited to talk to folks about it. I think one thing I didn't really mention that I kind of touched on earlier in the talk that we're having was around cloud security monitoring. So holistic cloud security monitoring. We've got some updates there as well with deeper integrations into GCP, AWS, Azure, OneDrive, SharePoint, BoxNet, GDrive. Like customers are using many, many cloud services today and they don't have a holistic view across all those services. I speak to CISOs every week that tell me they just really need one view not to go into each of those cloud service providers or cloud services one at a time to look at the security posture. They need that all in a central location. So we normalize, we ingest and normalize data from each of those cloud services. So you can see threats consistently across each of them. I think that's really, really something different that Splunk is doing that other security offerings are not doing. I think that's a super important point. And I do hear that a lot from CISOs where they say, look, we have so many different environments, so many different tools and they each have their own little framework. So we have to go in and investigate and then come back out. And then our teams have to go into a new sort of view and come back out and they just run out of time. They just don't, again, lack of skills to actually do this, can't hire fast enough, can't train fast enough. So that higher level view, but still the ability to drill down and understand what those root causes, that it's a top-down, bottoms-up type of approach. And so as opposed to just throwing grains of sand at the SecOps teams and then hoping they find the pearls. So, Jane, I'll give you the last word, maybe some final thoughts. Ah, no, I just wanted to thank everyone for listening. I want to thank everyone for joining.com. 21, we're very excited to hear from you and speak with you, so thank you very much. Excellent, Jane, great having you on theCUBE. Keep it right there, everybody, for more coverage of theCUBE on splunks.com, 21. We'll be right back.


Hello everybody! In this video, I'm going to show you how to become a participant of the Windows Insider Program for Windows 10. You will learn how to quickly register a Microsoft account with the Windows Insider Program, how to receive new builds of Windows, install and test them, and how to submit your reviews and reports on the new developments introduced by Microsoft. Such feedback helps the developers to assess if certain things need to be introduced and how convenient the new functions and developments are for those using this operating system. If you need to recover deleted data, view or restore removed browse in history – Hetman software products will help you. Follow the link in the description, download the necessary program for free, install it and analyze the disk. The utility will show you the data you can recover, so you will be able to view it or get it back. In our channel and blog, you will find solutions to any problem, from installing an operating system or configuring it to fixing possible bugs and errors or optimizing mobile gadgets. Our specialists will answer any questions you ask in your comments under the videos or articles. Initially, getting inside this program was quite difficult and almost impossible for an average Windows user. This option was available only to some major software developers. However, after Windows 10 was released officially, Microsoft decided to open this opportunity for everyone willing so that to get more feedback coverage for the planned changes in this operating system. So, what is Windows inside the program? This preview program was specially developed and implemented in Windows 10 to ensure that numerous standard software and SDK developers are well informed of their future changes in the operating system, new features and all kinds of enhancement introduced to the existing functions and system libraries. The main idea behind this program is to establish a proper feedback channel between third-party software developers and the Microsoft team. This opportunity is equally useful for programmers, average users and the operating system itself. It includes three levels of access, known as rings – the early access ring, fast, late access ring, slow and the release preview ring. The names refer directly to how often you can download special test builds of the operating system – Windows 10 insider preview. And the level of access also defines additional aspects in stability of such builds. Every ring has a certain audience, the fast ring having a very limited circle of participants and on the contrary the release preview actually includes all the subscribers of this program. Every new pre-release build has to undergo all stages of automatic testing for operability as in Microsoft Labs. It may contain new SDK apps, updated DLL libraries, additional functions and all kinds of enhancements. If the new build passes the laboratory tests, it becomes immediately available to the early access members, that is, the fast ring. The fast ring community will test it, submit feedback with Microsoft implementing some improvements if necessary, and if things get better, the new build becomes available to the slow ring members. Once again, Microsoft receives community feedback, collects user experience, introduces certain improvements and if the build becomes quite stable, it is now available for the release preview ring. This cycle continues until an official operating system update is rolled out. The early access ring, fast. Its primary advantage is the earliest access to new builds. The fast ring members are the first category within the Windows Insider program to download them. Which means they will be the first people to see and test new apps, check out the changes in the operating system interface, analyze the new functions, submit feedback and so on. At the same time, they should be prepared to face all kinds of bugs and glitches. Pre-release builds may contain lots of errors, have serious stability issues and suffer from critical failures or even crashes. After you download and install such a build, your operating system may work incorrectly or even refuse to boot at all. So if you're going to join the early access level, be ready for whatever comes. If things get from bad to worse, it's better to try rolling the operating system back or running Windows automatic recovery and of course report this problem in your review. If nothing helps, well, there is always the last resort, just reinstall your Windows. The late access ring, slow. In this ring, your benefit from pre-release builds being considerably more stable and you still get them ahead of the major part of the insider community. While the new builds were being tested in the fast ring, Microsoft engineers have collected enough feedback to analyze it and improve the builds, which means that the majority of critical errors have been fixed and the most painful bugs have been removed. Therefore, these builds are much safer to use, though the minor risk of having to reinstall the system still remains. The release preview ring. The most prominent advantage of this ring is that you get absolutely safe builds you can use. That is, they come with the latest system updates, properly working SDK apps and drivers and all of that before an official Windows 10 update is announced. Generally, pre-release builds in this ring are available just several days before the official update is presented. Moving from one ring to another is very easy. You can find this option here – Settings, Updating Security, Windows Insider Program. Alright, let's see how to join this program. In the end, I will also show you how to get out of it, if necessary. Windows 10 user account. The first thing you need is a Microsoft account. In fact, any account will do as long as you have it registered with Microsoft service such as Outlook, Skype, OneDrive, Xbox Live or Bing and MSN search engines. If you don't have such an account yet, it's time to create one. You need to visit the Microsoft website and you can find the link in the description. Click to sign in your Microsoft account. In the Sign In page, click on the link Create one, then enter your email address or phone number. Enter the password and click Next. A message containing a confirmation code will be sent to the email address that you have given. Enter the code and click Next. Fill in all required fills. Here is an important thing to remember. It is recommended to type your name and surname in English. Otherwise, the system may not allow you to download official insider bills from the Microsoft website. Sometimes it happens, so it is better to be on the safe side. If you have an account already, you can change its name and surname anytime. After you have installed your first test build on your PC, there is no way to reset your operating system. To remove the pre-release updates, you will have to reinstall it as the only measure. As soon as you join the insider program, be prepared to see updates coming quite often, sometimes even daily. Link in the Microsoft account to the operating system. Now let's link your Microsoft account to the Windows operating system your computer is running. Open Start. Settings. Accounts. In the tab your info, click on the link Sign In with the Microsoft account instead. Enter your login password and click Sign In. If necessary, create a special pin to quickly sign in to Windows 10. Your account will be checked and then linked to the operating system. So now, after you are starting, you will need to sign in with your Microsoft account instead of the local account you use every day. Joining the Windows 10 Insider Program. Let's join the Windows Insider Program now. Click Start. Settings. Update and security. Then go to the tab Windows Insider Program and click on Get Started. The dialog to link your Microsoft account to the program will appear. Choose your account and click Continue. At the next tab, choose what kind of content you would like to receive. With the development of Windows, recommend it. It means you will get preview builds regularly depending on the ring you choose, fast or slow. Just fix this, apps and drivers. This option is similar to the release preview ring. You will get insider builds as soon as the new version is considered complete. Choose the one that suits you best and confirm your choice. At the next stage, what pace do you want to receive preview builds? Choose the drop-down menu to select Fast or Slow. Slow. You will get preview builds with the latest features, apps and operating system changes with minimal risks of coming across bugs and significant problems. Fast, which is recommended, you will get preview builds with the latest features, apps and operating system changes, but these updates have not been tested yet. In other words, after their installation you are likely to face errors, features may not work properly and there may be other issues, even as bad as your Windows not working at all. After that, we then confirm the Microsoft Insider privacy statement. Now the last step. Restart your computer. Once you've completed all these steps, your device will be enrolled in the Windows Insider program, and within the next 24 hours it will start receiving preview builds depending on the settings you have selected. By joining the program, new builds will download and install automatically. To force the download, you can always open Settings, Update & Security, Windows Update, and click on the Check for Updates button. How to get out of the Windows Insider program? If you no longer want to participate in the Windows Insider program, you can opt out of it. If that's your choice, go to Settings, Update & Security, click on the tab Windows Insider program and choose Stop Insider Preview Bills. Scroll down to select the option that you want to use to leave this program. Stop Insider builds completely. You will no longer receive any future builds. It is also recommended to open Settings and enable recovery options so that you can roll back the operating system automatically. When you go through these steps, you'll no longer be able to test upcoming features, but your device will be back to the most stable release of Windows it had. After you get out of the Windows Insider program, I strongly recommend starting fresh with a clean installation of the operating system, as your computer may still have certain issues after leaving the Insider program. And that is all for now. I hope you find this video useful. Hit the Like button and subscribe to our channel. Leave comments to ask questions. Thank you for watching. Good luck.


Sssst-. Yes, Jerk! I was super late getting on the Kirby Bandwagon. I always kinda ignored the franchise until it was time to crank through the Game Boy NES and SNES games for this channel all the way back in August of 2015. And I was stunned by how much I liked Kirby Superstar and Kirby's adventure in particular. They are great freakin' playthroughs. So I'm happy to say, if you're a fan of those games, or the Game Boy games for that matter, then you'll love Kirby and the amazing Mirror for Game Boy Advance. The story here is that Mirror World, which exists high above Dreamland, is in trouble because of a mysterious dark force, and meanwhile Kirby's just hanging out doing Kirby things until he's ambushed by Meta Knight. Or is it? He somehow splits Kirby into four different Kirby's, each a different color. The real Meta Knight tries to stop this dark Meta Knight, but he's defeated and gets thrown into a mirror which is shattered into eight pieces, and yep you guessed it, Kirby's gotta get the mirror fragments back and enter the mirror world and save the day. After all that's been introduced, you can uh, well, you can do pretty much whatever you want, because this is open world Kirby. Okay, it's pretty linear at the beginning, but after that you can play through this game in just about any order you feel like, since many levels have multiple entrances and exits. So yeah, this is one of those games structured to appeal to all sorts of different players.  If you're a speedrunner, there's a couple paths you can discover that allow you to finish the game in something like 45 minutes, although I think the world record is around 28 minutes these days. For example, you can easily skip from the middle of world 4 all the way to world 7. But look at these maps though, there is a lot of content here, probably around 4 or 5 hours worth, so if you want to really dig into this one, there's a lot of substance here.  The gameplay overall is like you'd expect from a Kirby game, in fact it uses the same engine as Kirby, Nightmare, and Dreamland, a Game Boy Advance remake of the NES game Kirby's Adventure. But if you've played Kirby Superstar, it's pretty similar to that too. I also want to note quickly that this one was not developed by the usual Kirby dev team at Hal Labs, but mostly by a Capcom subsidiary Flagship, who also had a hand in everything from the Onimusha series, the Resident Evil series, and the Zelda Game Boy Color games, as well as the Minish Cap. But make no mistake, this definitely has that definitive Kirby look, sound, and feel to it. There's some new stuff here and there though, like mini Kirby, who, uh, makes you really small, and missile Kirby, who just destroys everything it touches, as if Kirby's not powerful enough already. There's also a Smash ability you can find which gives Kirby his Super Smash Brothers move set, now that is cool. What's weird here is the multiplayer aspect, you have three other Kirby's hanging out in the same level as you, all in different colors, and their computer AI controlled, but they are capable of being controlled by a second, third, and even a fourth player. So if you actually know someone in 2019 that wants to play this via link cable, then there you go. If you're playing by yourself though, these guys are just kind of there, I guess. They do help solve a puzzle here and there, and you can summon them by pressing the R button up to three times, as indicated by the battery meter up top. But to be honest, they just kind of get in the way most of the time. Still, kind of a cool idea, and definitely a neat way to do multiplayer at the time. What's really cool here is that if you've played Super Star a lot like I have, you'll recognize a lot of Kirby's abilities from that game, and you'll notice that they've gotten a bit of an upgrade. Nothing major, just smarter and more player-friendly adjustments that help wipe out enemies, which brings me to the difficulty. I know nobody's really playing Kirby for any kind of Dark Souls-like challenge, but still, this game is pretty dang easy. That's definitely not a bad thing though, I just thought I'd point that out. So yeah, there is a lot of substance to Kirby and the amazing mirror. It's like if a Kirby game ate Super Metroid and absorbed its gameplay structure. There's hours of exploration available to you, or you can just sprint through. This is a very speedrun-friendly game. There's also three mini-games which are accessible through the main menu. They're all very similar to past mini-games, but still, it's nice that they're there. But yeah, this is definitely one of the ten best, or maybe even one of the five best Game Boy Advance games ever. It may not represent much of a challenge, but still, it's such a fun playthrough, and it's well worth checking out today. And I want to thank you for watching, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.


Charges have been filed against two city council members who were involved in a knockdown chair swinging brawl during a discussion about a children's splash pad. The Pennington County attorney has charged Joshua Hagen with fifth degree assault and Gerald Brown with disorderly conduct stemming from a fight at the Thief River Falls City Council committee meeting more than a week ago. Brown said a heated discussion over swimming pool money and a splash park escalated. Charging documents say the men were shoving each other and ended up on the floor. Brown suffered injuries to his face and Hagen sustained abrasions to his back and chest. Brown says he does not plan to contest the charges. Hagen resigned his council seat earlier this week citing medical reasons. If you enjoyed this segment of Lakeland News, please consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Lakeland PBS.