Now chapter 3 in 2 Corinthians is a very powerful chapter and so we're gonna be looking at chapter 3 verses 6 through 18 actually 7 through 18 today as we continue our verse by verse study through the the book of 2 Corinthians so allow me to begin reading here in 2 Corinthians at chapter 3 verse 7 I'll read the chapter to you and we'll get into our study 2 Corinthians chapter 3 beginning at verse 7 Paul writes if the ministry of death written and engraved on stones was glorious so that the children of Israel could not look steadily at the face of Moses because of the glory of his countenance which glory was passed in a way how will the ministry of the Spirit not be more glorious for if the ministry of condemnation had glory the ministry of righteousness exceeds much more in glory for even what was made glorious had no glory in this respect because of the glory that excels for if what is passed in a way was glorious what remains is much more glorious therefore since we have such hope we use great boldness of speech unlike Moses who put a veil over his face so that the children of Israel could not look steadily at the end of what was passing away but their minds were blinded for until this day the same veil remains unlifted in the reading of the Old Testament because the veil is taken away in Christ but even to this day when Moses is read a veil lies on their heart nevertheless when one turns to the Lord the veil is taken away now the Lord is the Spirit and where the Spirit of the Lord is there's liberty but we all with unveiled face beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory just as by the Spirit of the Lord and so as I've been doing every time we get together here I'll give you a brief review to see you what see what Paul has been saying up to this point and then to pick up at verse seven we know that Paul in second Corinthians when you read this book you'll see this we know that Paul has been responding to gossip gossip that has been spread about him there are false teachers that have entered into the church there in Corinth and they are disseminating gossip intended to divide the church to take their hearts away from the Apostle Paul and when you go through this it's interesting to note that the problems that he deals with and he addresses here in second Corinthians are not all theological in nature many of them fall under the category of simply personal attacks on the Apostle Paul and we've seen that so far many times as we've gone through this epistle from chapter 1 chapter 2 now into chapter 3 we've seen that they have made accusations they've said that he is selfish or that he's insincere that he changes his mind easily we've seen that they have said that he is self-appointed and he's unloving that he's legalistic and greedy they said he was unrecognized by the leaders of the church that he labored in the flesh these are all personal attacks on the Apostle Paul now many times we may look at Paul and others who are solidly mature and faithful and Lord we may look at them and think that they aren't affected by what's said but fact is is the things that were being said about Paul actually had a wounding effect on him we saw him as he wrote and and he shared with them concerning this in second Corinthians we saw it in chapter 2 verse 4 when he said out of much affliction and anguish of heart I wrote to you with many tears not that you should be grieved but that you might know the love which I have so abundantly for you and so these things did affect him and he tells him affliction anguish of heart many tears I'm not saying this will be guilty I just want you to know how much I love you and so Paul had been affected to the point that he's writing a response to the things that are being said you see they're questioning Paul there they're questioning his credentials there they're asking questions like who gave him this authority that he's wielding they're asking questions about the proof of his ministry now he had made it clear that that the fact that there was a church in Corinth actually validated him as a minister he said his letter of recommendation was in fact them and their changed lives in his teaching God's word had been engraved in their hearts it revealed their salvation and the church was in fact his letter of commendation they were the ones who authorized his ministry so in answer to the slur that he labored in the flesh Paul was making it clear he did not remember verse 5 here in chapter 3 now that he said we're not sufficient of ourselves to think anything of being of ourselves our sufficiencies from God so Paul knew that that he was an adequate in and of himself he knew that without Jesus he could not accomplish a single thing that was good he wasn't adequate in and of himself and he knew it and he acknowledged it openly he made it clear that it takes God to make us adequate to serve God and and it takes God to empower us to be able to do so faithfully that's why he wrote our sufficiency is from God so he's given his defense he's saying my abilities are not natural ones they've been spiritually imparted to me in verse 6 he said it's it's God who made us sufficient as ministers of the new covenant Jesus saved him and Jesus is the one who equipped him the way he saved you and he equips you and he equips you to serve in 1st Timothy 1 12 he had said I think I thank Christ Jesus our Lord who has given me strength that he considered me faithful appointing me to his service and that's what Paul would say now who were these people once again who were these who are creeping in and sowing seeds of discord who are trying to undermine the work that he was doing who were these people well they're identified as as Jewish infiltrators in 2nd Corinthians 11 22 because he says there are they Hebrews so am I are the Israelites so am I are they the seat of Abraham so am I and that's why he's speaking about the old covenant it appears that they're bringing in a mixture of Jewish legalism and trying to mix it up with grace and that may be why Paul spoke of the new covenant in contrast to what is called the old covenant the new testament versus the old testament he speaks of the old covenant in this way in verse 7 he says it's a ministry of death in verse 9 he speaks of it as being the ministry of condemnation you see the old covenant was a lifeless code that required perfect obedience and if you didn't keep the law you came under judgment in the Old Testament book of Jeremiah the prophet Jeremiah in chapter 11 verses 3 and 4 writes say to them thus says the Lord God of Israel cursed it is the man who does not obey the words of this covenant which I commanded your fathers in the day I brought them out of the land of Egypt from the iron furnace saying obey my voice and do according to all that I command you so shall you be my people and I will be your God cursed it is the man who does not obey he said obey my voice do all that I command you that means you will be my people and so the Old Testament was a letter of condemnation a ministry of death because nobody could keep all of the law perfectly and that's why in verse 6 Paul made it clear the letter kills but the spirit gives life you see the letter of the law the law of Moses reveals our sinfulness our complete lost and hopeless condition that's what it does but in contrast to the judgment found in the law in Jesus the riches of grace are revealed because God wrote the law on tablets of stone but God brings his grace and writes them on tap writes it on tablets of heart in Jeremiah 31 33 this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days say at the Lord I will put my law in their minds write it on their hearts I will be their God they shall be my people and so we were seeing that last time we together as we went through chapter 3 verses 1 through 6 and Paul is continuing now to build on what he's been saying here in verses 7 following so in verse 7 and 8 he continues by saying if the ministry of death written and engraved on stones was glorious so that the children of Israel could not look steadily at the face of Moses because of the glory of his countenance which glory was passed in a way how will the ministry of the spirit not be more glorious and so we remember that when Moses went to the mountain to receive the law we remember how the Bible tells us that that God's presence there was extremely glorious and in Exodus in chapter 19 verse 16 it says it came to pass on the third day in the morning that there were thunderings and lightnings and a thick cloud on the mountain and the sound of the trumpet was very loud so that all the people who were in the camp trembled and so as they saw this taking place up there and that mountain and they the thunderings and and the lightnings and and all of that the presence of the Lord it caused them to tremble and that's what he's speaking about he's speaking about in the law there was a glory being revealed later in the book of Exodus Moses received the law and the people could not look steadily at him in Exodus 34 29 and 30 it says when Moses came down from Mount Sinai with the two tablets of the testimony in his hands in his hands he was not aware that his face was radiant because he had spoken with the Lord when Aaron and all the Israelites saw Moses his face was radiant and they were afraid to come near him and so that's what he's referring to the ministry of death verse 7 written and engraved on stones the commandments that Moses received he says it was glorious the children of Israel could not look steadily at the face of Moses because of the glory of his countenance which glory he says was passing away notice how he says the glory was passing away in other words the radiance of Moses's countenance faded because it wasn't permanent the law was glorious but it ultimately resulted in death to man and that's because the law of Moses actually brings knowledge of sin in judgment we saw that last time together I would not have known covetousness except that the law said thou shalt not covet and it awakened all manner of covetousness within me is what Paul would say so the law was glorious but it resulted in death because it brings knowledge of sin and ultimately brings knowledge of judgment and so as he's speaking of that he contrasted in verse 8 by saying how will the ministry of the spirit not be more glorious if the law of Moses resulted in death it makes sense that grace is more glorious the spirit giving us life and filling us and teaching us and leading us the spirit of God and that's more glorious you see the law informed us from the inside we would we would hear it in other words and it would speak to us somehow inside but the spirit actually is in us now in a different way and leads us from the inside the law in a sense was actually impacting us but it was not as the spirit's work is because it was only on the outside stirring us from the inside but the Holy Spirit now from the inside stirs us to do that which God has revealed to us through his word so in John's Gospel speaking of this John gives us insight in into how the the spirit works in our lives because notice again in verse 8 he asked the question will the ministry of the spirit not be more glorious so I want to share with you a few things about that the ministry of the spirit I can't give you an entire Bible study on that one subject but I'll give you some things to think about because guess what as Christians it's important for us to know that there are a lot of Christians today that I encounter who are not walking in victory who are not walking in the sense of liberty that God wants to give to us who aren't walking in power many of them are very discouraged and and even fearful about a variety of things and and I think it's important for us to remember what what the work of the Holy Spirit really is guys because you're not a Christian if the Holy Spirit doesn't dwell within you you're just a religious person would you give your heart to Christ and you're born again the Holy Spirit takes up residence within you you become the temple of the Spirit of God and the Spirit of God lives in you the Spirit who raised Christ from the dead gives life to your mortal body God's Holy Spirit has taken residence in you at one time his spirit would meet with men in that temple made with human hands he would meet volitionally he chose to meet in the temple he chose to meet with the children of Israel in the Tabernacle but when Jesus Christ died on the cross was buried resurrected ascended into heaven he sent to us a Holy Spirit this Holy Spirit is not just a concept he's a person and he dwells inside of you and so the law that is on the outside thou shalt not lie thou shalt not steal thou shalt not covet I shall not commit adultery and all of those laws that we know in the commands those laws are written in our hearts in the Holy Spirit now makes it something we prefer doing and so it's not that we're trying to obey things from the outside what we're trying to do is obey the Spirit on the inside and to do those things that are pleasing to him the Spirit is more glorious than the law and that's the point he's making you see John gives us insight concerning this he he helps us to understand the ministry of the Holy Spirit and how the work of the Spirit is more glorious again the law was written on tablets of stone but the Spirit resides within us when you look at John's gospel when you look at chapter 14 chapter 14 of John's gospel records the last night that Jesus spent ministering to his disciples he'd been with them for around three years they were they were dependent on him and on that night he broke bread with them he reminded them that he was about to leave him he told him you will soon be without my physical presence but though they are without his physical presence they still need him they need his help and so with that in mind he made a promise to them in John 14 verses 16 and 17 he said I will pray the Father and he will give you another helper that he may abide with you forever the Spirit of truth whom the world cannot receive because it neither sees him nor knows him but you know him for he dwells with you and will be in you so he said to them in John 14 16 I will pray the Father he will give you what he refers to as another helper those are the words he chooses to use when he speaks about another helper there are two different Greek words that are translated by the single word another another one of those words is the Greek word a loss a l l o s a loss it speaks of another of the same substance essence and quality it speaks of something that is the same kind another is something of the same kind same substance essence and quality there's a different word that can be translated another and that's the word heteros and heteros speaks of a different sort or a different kind well Jesus said that he would give another helper another comforter and the Greek that's allos paracletos and that means another comforter or another helper in other words he's saying the Holy Spirit will be like me he will have my nature the Holy Spirit will provide for you the help that you need from me is what he is saying and so Jesus made a promise that the Holy Spirit another helper the comforter would be within us it would be his presence by the Spirit in our lives and so that gives us insight into why the ministry of the Holy Spirit is more glorious on our own we're consistent failures we cannot walk in a way that consistently pleases him we know what the Lord requires of us we simply don't have the ability to be pleasing to him at all times in Romans 7 18 Paul said it like this he said I know that nothing good lives in me that is in my sinful nature for I have the desire to do what is good but I cannot carry it out I want to do what is good I have the desire that I don't have the ability to perform that which I desire in Matthew 2641 Jesus said it like this he said watch and pray so that you you will not fall into temptation the Spirit is willing but the flesh is weak and it is isn't it our flesh is weak there are things that you do that you wish you didn't do don't want to do necessarily but you end up doing the Spirit is willing I want to do something for the Lord the flesh is weak so I need the power the Holy Spirit in my life and so Paul is speaking about the ministry of the Holy Spirit and he said it's more glorious than that old covenant why is it more glorious well because the Holy Spirit remains with us and he gives us the ability to live for him and to please him remember your Bible remember the Old Testament the Holy Spirit would descend on someone and then would depart that occurs for example in the life of Samson Samson was rebelling against the things of the Lord in the Spirit of God departed from him according to judges 1620 this awareness of the Spirit being removed is found in in the Psalms in Psalm 51 11 the apostle rather the prophet teacher King David said do not cast me away from your presence do not take your Holy Spirit from me so there was an awareness that the Spirit would descend do his work but would also depart and David didn't want the Spirit departing from him so the Bible teaches us now in the New Testament that that the Spirit of God empowers us to live for God and remains with us we saw in John 14 16 Jesus said the Spirit will abide with us forever and so there's the work of the Holy Spirit as he dwells within you it's more glorious than the law because the Spirit is within us he dwells in us when you're going through times of struggle and temptation when you're going through fear I know it's difficult to to do what I'm about to say and I don't always succeed but it doesn't make it not true that's when we that's when we need the most to turn to the Lord and say God help me God help me because sometimes there are your flesh gets in the way and you're gonna respond in a way that you don't want to you're gonna say something you don't want to do we just say you may do something you don't want to do God help me you know I never really realized that driving could be a form of trials I I didn't I never realized that but it is and sometimes I'm sitting there praying Old Testament prayers kill them oh God break their teeth scatter my enemies I'm late you know I I pray and that's when I awaken the fact that I'm a flesh a man and God knows my frame he knows that I'm flesh it's no surprise to him and as I walk closer to the Lord over time I am more and more dependent on him more and more realizing that without him I can do nothing and we need to pray and we need to seek the Lord we need to be aware that that the Holy Spirit is with us and and he's not going to leave us Jesus said the Spirit will abide with us forever and that is greater than the law another thing that makes the ministry of the Spirit more glorious is is that he teaches us he's the one who internally teaches us in John 14 26 and Jesus said but the helper the Holy Spirit whom the Father will send in my name he will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all things that I said to you in John 16 14 he went on to say he will glorify me for he will take of what is mine and declare it to you so Holy Spirit works within us and he teaches us as we read the word of God it's the Holy Spirit who takes these words on this page and imprints them in our heart as we receive these words in faith and it transforms us as we put these things into practice a third thing that makes his work more glorious he guides us he guides us into all truth the Spirit the Holy Spirit gives us discernment he internally guides us to be able to recognize deception in John 16 13 Jesus said when he the Spirit of truth has come he will guide you into all truth he will not speak on his own authority but whatever he hears he will speak and he will tell you things to come you see because spiritual deception is so rampant the Holy Spirit gives us discernment as you're reading your Bible he teaches you can instruct you as it's being taught to you he gives you discernment to know whether these things are so whether these things are true whether these things line up with what you know scripture to have taught it's the Holy Spirit who does that he gives you that insight when I first got saved I've said this before but it comes to mind when I think of the subject when I first got saved I was being taught the Bible I was told read the Bible so I did and I was reading I had a Bible that I would read every night I was reading through the Bible and and as I was reading it I was growing to understand some things of the Lord and I was at a friend of mine's house and as I was at his house he he had hired a guy to come and do some work in the house and so this guy was doing some work and I walked up to him and I'm a brand new Christian and so I was told when you get saved tell somebody about Jesus and I wanted to tell him I didn't know this guy and so I wanted to tell him about the Lord but I didn't know much I just wanted to tell him a couple things so I started a conversation with him and I asked him I do you do you have a faith of any sort just a conversation like that and he says oh yeah I do and I said really really so I'm thinking you know what kind what do you believe in so I asked him I said well what is your faith what do you believe in he says I'm part of and he said this I'd never heard of this before he said I'm part of the self-realization fellowship and I some of you may be familiar with it I wasn't at that time I'd never heard of it self-realization fellowship so I said what is that and he says oh we believe in the teachings of all the great masters like Muhammad and like Buddha and Confucius and and Jesus I said oh you believe in Jesus because he said Jesus now again I'm like two weeks old in Christ so what do I know so I said oh really I said you believe now I'm a brand new believer I'm 20 years old I'm fresh from the drug scene the alcohol scene and everything that went along with that I'm certainly no Bible scholar of any sort I'm just learning to read the Bible but it didn't make sense to me so I said now let me ask you a question if I may he goes of course I said you you believe everything that that Buddha said yeah and you believe everything Confucius said he said yeah and you believe the the Hindu teachings you know and he said yeah I said really I said but but and you believe what Jesus said and it was a real question I wasn't trying to argue I was just confused how can you say that so I said do you believe what Jesus said he says yes I do every every master gave truth I said okay but Jesus said I am the way the truth in the life no man comes to the father but by me I said now if Jesus said no man comes to the father but by me how can you believe what Confucius said and how can you believe what Buddha said and how can you believe what Muhammad said and how can you believe what Krishna said when Jesus said no one comes to me to the father except by me how's that work he thought I was arguing I wasn't I was curious how do you believe something that's obviously illogical how do you believe that explain your faith to me because if Jesus said I'm the way no one comes to the father but by me and Buddha gave claims and all the rest how's that work he thought I was arguing and I wasn't I was too stupid to argue I was just like what how's that work I don't know how that works you see what happens when you come to faith in Christ the Holy Spirit gives you a discernment and awareness that you may not even be aware that you have when you gave your heart to Christ he said I will guide you into truth you said God come into my life Jesus you picked up the Bible you start to read it and the Lord begins to imprint his word on the tablet of your heart and so you speak into somebody who says oh I believe Jesus but I really don't and that's why you'll say why don't you if you say you do it's not because you're fighting it's because that doesn't make sense but how come it doesn't make sense it doesn't make sense because the Holy Spirit is awakening you and saying just letting you know this doesn't make sense and you say thank you Jesus because it doesn't I was confused it may seem simplistic and I'm certain it does to some but it's true Jehovah's Witness knocked on my door I was first saved to start telling me things and I looked at them I'm not two weeks old in Christ I'm still young and I'm saying I don't think I agree with what you're saying I don't think that that's true I don't want to argue with you I'm not here to fight with this is my house you knocked on my door but I don't want you to think I'm arguing with you I just and I smiled I see remember smiling I just don't think you're right I don't agree with you where did I get that from the Holy Spirit see there are things that you'll hear sometimes and you'll just go no wait a minute there's something wrong with that that's the discernment the Spirit gives you Jesus promised that to us he spoke to us and he said that the Holy Spirit would teach us and he would also guide us into truth again when he the Spirit of Truth has come he'll guide you into all truth spiritual deception is rampant so he gives us discernment and he does that primarily by his spirit and his word in 2nd Timothy 3 16 and 17 all scripture is given by inspiration of God and is profitable for doctrine for reproof for correction for instruction in righteousness that the man of God may be complete thoroughly equipped for every good work and then again what makes the work of the Spirit more glorious he leads us into a deeper love for Jesus Christ in Romans 8 15 Paul said it like this you did not receive the spirit of bondage again to fear but you receive the spirit of adoption by whom we cry out Abba father so we are brought into the family of God and we love the Lord Jesus Christ I've met people who have told me even before they're saved they would say oh I love Jesus no you don't know him you're in love with someone you don't even know kind of like romances on Facebook you don't know him how could you be in love with them but when you're introduced to Christ everything about him becomes more glorious you you actually have a love for him that is deep and passionate and it drives you in everything that you do and so the ministry of condemnation that he's speaking about was the was the law the ministry of death was the law and so he says in verse 9 if the ministry of condemnation had glory the ministry of righteousness exceeds so much more in glory the ministry of condemnation revealed the judgment that awaits the lost the judgment on those who sinned served to exalt God's holiness but the gospel message exalts Jesus and reveals grace and that brings greater glory to God the ministry of righteousness is faith in Jesus that results in righteousness he says in verse 10 for even what was more even for even what was made glorious had no glory in this respect because of the glory that excels for if what is passed in a way was glorious what remains is much more glorious the law has lost its glory because it's been overshadowed by the glory of grace that reminds us of of Jesus and his transfiguration remember he went to a high mountain in and the Bible says he was transfigured before Peter James and John according to Matthew 17 to it says his face shown like the sun his clothes became as white as the light and there were two there with him Moses and Elijah and they were speaking to Jesus and Matthew makes it clear that Jesus's glory excelled the glory of of moses and Elijah excelled the glory of the law and the prophets and then he says in verse 11 he says what is passing away was glorious what remains is much more glorious you see the ministry of grace that produces righteousness excels the ministry of condemnation the law was in written on hearts and the spirit was not yet given so this makes God's grace more glorious than the law of moses and as he says that therefore verse 12 since we have such hope we use great boldness of speech unlike moses who put a veil over his face so that the children of israel could not look steadily at the end of what was passing away and so he speaks here in verse 12 and and say we have hope and because we have hope we have great boldness of speech the word hope speaks of a of a confident expectation it speaks of confidence we have confidence and he's saying that our ministry is grounded in the grace of God's gospel we know that we've been equipped by God and because we know that we confidently preach his grace you see when you know what you're saying is true your confidence is greater I got saved and again there was a boldness that I had as a hippie as a hippie I didn't have a confidence and anything hippies you know we we those of you who are younger and don't don't aren't aware of them the hippies we had a philosophy that you know just live and let live you know just it we see it in it's it's it's more mature form now but at that time you know if you want to believe this believe it I don't care I'm not going to argue with you about it you want to do that do it I don't care as long as it doesn't hurt me and that was basically my philosophy of life and so whatever you said was fine with me I never cared about your opinion anyway it didn't matter if you like this fine you like that fine I don't care I won't argue with you it don't doesn't matter and then I got saved and when I got saved I started praying a prayer in my early days of walking with Christ that I still remember I used to say to the Lord give me a spine I would pray that Father give me a spine give me give me boldness give me courage give me confidence give me strength I don't want to be like a willow just blowing with the wind and moving here and moving there with every wind of doctrine I want to be solid I want to have a spine I want to stand up for something I want to be counted for something I I don't want to just kind of float any any dead fish can float down a stream you Lord I want to be a living fish and go against it I want strength and I would pray that I pray that a lot I still do God give me confidence give me strength give me boldness I want to speak truth I want to speak it with love but I want to speak it with authority so God in Jesus name give me something to believe in because coming out of the hippie background that I was I didn't believe in anything now I'm reading the Bible and now I'm saying God fill me with the confidence that this is true and I discovered something that you've discovered too if you haven't you can and that is this this this word is living it is God's sword and God uses it and he he can strengthen you through it and he gives you wisdom by it and he uses you to declare it and God uses you to see people get saved their lives will be transformed when you hold fast to it so you ask God for strength and and guess what I mean it's true I mean I I've said this too many times recently but it's true especially in my early days God I just want to speak it I just want to share it I want to know it and and I don't want to back down or be embarrassed by it it's your word it's your word and I believe with every beat of my heart that you have the ability not only to give it but to use people to give it so I ask you to use me to give out your word and that's what you do and you have a confidence this is God's word and and not everybody you know not everybody's gonna say once you open it there that not everybody's gonna say oh how profound how deep I wish I knew that no people will mock you people will say things to you people don't believe this is God's word I understand that but that doesn't mean it isn't God's word it simply means that people have a lack of faith and don't understand that my my God our God is capable of perceiving preserving his word for us he inspired read and write it for us so we would know his mind and so you preach his word not your opinions or the latest thing but his word and because God writes it on the tablet of your heart and you have a hope you have a great confidence and a boldness of speech and it comes out that way now some people may think that you're arrogant and maybe sometimes we can be but they shouldn't confuse confidence with arrogance this is God's word and I've had my conversations with people and they're not always kind and sometimes they're I was sitting on a train going to London you know woman sits next to me an American she was from Massachusetts and I she just visits she's starting to visit with me Marie was seated with me and all this woman was friendly and I said oh American what do you do in England oh she goes I I sing in bars I said oh you do really she goes yeah she says I sing dirty little songs to men in bars I said oh don't sing one to me but okay and I mean she just very open I've been very open about it and I'm just sitting there I'm not condemning her not judging her I'm just talking to her lots of people do things so she looks at me after sharing these things with me and she says to me and what do you do I said I'm a pastor I hate it when people preach to me she tells me that I hadn't said a word to her I hadn't said a word she goes I hate it when people no not preach I hate it when people shove their religion down my throat is what she said and I looked at her I said really she goes yeah I said but you can shove yours down mine and she says what I haven't shoved my when have I shoved my religion down your throat I said your religion is shoved down my throat 24 hours a day seven days a week she goes she goes when is my I said every time I turn on a television I see your religion every time I see a magazine I see your religion every time I listen to a song on the radio I hear your religion your religion is shoved down my throat 24 hours a day seven days a week 365 days out of the year and you're telling me I shoved my religion down your throat she got quiet but it's true but it's true the world shoves their religion down your throat 24 seven so I I'm not a bully it sounds like I am huh I'm not but when you say something to me don't expect me to sit there going oh that was words from Sinai you're so wise if it's dumb I'll let you know we'll have a talk sometimes we have great conversations after the ice is broken like that you know not with her but there have been others where do you get your confidence from where do you get it from from the Word of God the power of the Holy Spirit his word is true and God has given it to us he's entrusted it to us entrusted it to us to share it with other people why because it's the only message that God ever gave that saves people's souls from hell and that's why we preach the Word of God out of love for people that's why it's not because we're bullies and it's not because we're angry no we have this hope and he says that since we have such hope we use great boldness of speech unlike Moses who put a veil over his face so that the children of Israel could not look steadily at the end of what was passing away so he says unlike Moses it speaks of the glory that was revealed in the face of Moses it was only temporary it faded away but God's glory is not lifted from believers he says in verse 14 their minds were blinded for until this day the same veil remains unlifted in the reading of the Old Testament because a veil is taken away in Christ that even to this day when Moses is read a veil lies on their heart nevertheless when one turns to the Lord the veil is taken away so hardness to Jesus has resulted in spiritual blindness on the part of Israel the veil represents unbelief they didn't grasp the glory because of unbelief and like the Israel in the Old Testament the Jews of his day remained hardened to the gospel but when they come to a saving knowledge of Jesus as Messiah he says the veil is then removed in John 117 it says the law was given through Moses but grace and truth came through Jesus Christ the veil is removed when we go to Israel we don't always get what are called messianic guides we don't always get guides who are believers in Christ we get great guides but many of them aren't believers in Jesus I'm asked that whenever we go to Israel I'm asked by people who are going on the trip is our guide a believer and sometimes they're not they're very respectful we've fallen in love with them we have friends who are our guides in Israel who are not messianic believers but we grow to love them and we work well with them and they're very respectful but from the very beginning when we went to Israel you know back in 1983 the first time we went we would see the guide if he was not a messianic we saw the guide whenever the word was being taught would walk away they will walk away so if you're sharing something your guide is necessarily going to be there he will walk away and speak to the bus driver or maybe speak to other guides while you're at a certain site so we saw that often for a long time every time we would begin to share we'd see the guide walk away they wouldn't listen to us but one day we had a new guide we were in the city of Capernaum and I was teaching a Bible study in the synagogue a synagogue in Capernaum the ruins of a synagogue very early synagogue and as I was sharing I could see off to my side that our guide stayed to listen which is unusual they usually don't they usually walk away and I'm used to that but this particular guide stuck around and listened and you could see that he was listening now as you're sharing there's a thousand and one thoughts that could go in your mind you could be thinking this man here he knows his New Testament I mean this guy would walk up to me and say we're going to be at this site right now you might want to use Luke chapter seven here I mean he knows this New Testament and he can say this is this this passage where they'll do that with you they know it but they don't know the author they don't know Christ so I'm watching this guy and we're just getting to know him and I share some thoughts about Jesus and all and how important it is to follow him and and and all of that and here we are in Capernaum and when I finish he walks up and he steps to my side and he goes I'll never forget this he goes what he just said is true he went like that what he just said is true and and then he started adding to my message and I'm looking at this guy he's a Jewish guy and I turn to Marie and I give her that old husband look with the wife like what's happening here I don't know that kind of look and later on Marie and I were talking and I said did you see that she goes I've never seen that before I said I've never I have never seen that where they will listen he listened and he was so moved by it he wanted to give his second part of the message interesting well he became very dear to us he got to know my kids he got to know us we began asking for him to go with us every year as our guide and over time he became my friend so fast forward to several years and we're now driving and we're on the bus and when you take a trip to Israel you're in an area that is where Jericho is some of you've been to Israel so you're coming from Jericho and you're moving towards is you're going towards Jerusalem and as you're going towards Jerusalem you're gonna get to a tunnel and the bus at that time the bus driver slows the bus down because we're about to enter into Jerusalem for the first time for many people who've never been to Jerusalem this will be their introduction so they slow the bus down for a dramatic effect to give you an opportunity to begin to prepare your heart because you are coming into the the city of the great king it's very moving and your uh your bus driver will put on a song on about Jerusalem and before you know it we're all singing a song we've never heard before but it's oh Jerusalem Jerusalem blah blah blah and where everybody starts singing now they're getting like caught up because we're about to enter into the city and then at that point the guide will begin to speak and he will say this is the city of Jerusalem and he starts giving the history of it now we're still in the tunnel and he starts to give you the history of Jerusalem he gets to King David it is where King David ruled and it is the city of Jesus Christ and when he says that as believers you're going man I'm coming into the city of Jesus that Jesus was in there's something about that people cry the bus there's a lot of people on in the bus crying and and I'll eventually I'll point to the left I'll say look this way because as you come out of the the tunnel the city springs out in front of you and off to your left you see the temple mount you see Jerusalem right so my guide is speaking and the music's played and we're preparing our hearts to see the city when he said something like this this is Jerusalem an ancient city where God's presence has been where the temple was and of the sacrifice and he begins to share then he says it is the it is the city of the great king David it is the city of your Messiah and then he said this and my Messiah we go oh wow so Marie's next to me and I look at her like did I hear that so he had I later on like I said we're friends we're having a cup of coffee together he says you know that there's a man here and that's man has since died but he said I believe he's dead I believe he died he goes you know there's a man who's being presented here as being Messiah I said I've seen that because they have banners up and it says the Messiah has come it was all over Jerusalem by the western wall all over he says you know that he claims to be Messiah and I said yeah I'm aware of that he goes he sends people out door to door they go door to door here in Jerusalem because my friend lives in Jerusalem he said they go door to door and they came to my door the other day I said really we're having a conversation really he goes yeah he says they knocked on the door I opened it up they said Messiah has has come and he said do you know what I told him and I said no what did you tell him he said I told him why would I believe in your Messiah when the true one came 2000 years ago and I go oh so he had crossed over he crossed over he's a follower of Jesus Christ now and our bus driver I have a dear friend his name is Avi we always have Avi drive us Avi's sweet man and Avi came to faith in Christ Jewish man came to faith in Christ because he used to drive Pastor Chuck Smith and he would hear Chuck speak and one day he said this man is speaking the truth and he is a follower of Christ and he's become very very dear to Marie and me he's a dear friend to us and see the veil is taken away before when someone hasn't come to faith in Christ Paul says there's a veil it's hiding Christ from them but when they come to faith in Christ that veil as he says is taken away verse 16 when one turns to the Lord that veil is taken away and we have seen that take place in the life of friends of ours there in Israel and then finally he says verse 17 the Lord is the spirit where the spirit of the Lord is there is liberty but we all with unveiled face beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory just as by the spirit of the Lord and so God by his grace he's saying gives us freedom from the power of and power of and the bondage of sin it breaks the bondage of the yoke of the law in John 832 Jesus said you shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free so this liberty that we have is not so we can continue to sin this liberty is to be free of its ruling our lives in Romans 6 1 and 2 Paul said it like this what shall we say then shall we continue in sin that grace may abound certainly not how shall we who died to sin live any longer in it he didn't give me his grace to continue in sin his grace set me free from it the law never did the law awakened in me bondage the law awakened in me judgment but Jesus Christ came to bring me truth and it's the truth that sets you free and so wherever the spirit lives and works there's liberty not only from Jewish bondage but from the slavery of sin from its power from its guilt and from its pollution we've been giving grace from God and we have freedom that comes with it we didn't receive the spirit of bondage again to fear we receive the spirit of adoption by whom we cry out Abba father the spirit himself bears witness with our spirit we are children of God and so he says in verse 18 we all with unveiled faith beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory just as by the spirit of the Lord we see the promises and privileges of the gospel without turning away we have an unobstructed view like when we see ourselves clearly in a mirror and we're being transformed and his glory doesn't fade from us it's a continual progressive work of transformation we are being conformed into the image of Jesus Christ and in 1st John 3 2 and 3 John said it like this beloved now we are children of God and what we will be has not yet been made known but we know that when he appears we shall be like him for we shall see him as he is everyone who has this hope in him purifies himself just as he is pure the Holy Spirit is working in you he's removing things from you things that that don't belong in heaven things that are not to be there he's removing those things from you your life is being set apart it's being sanctified as you walk in the spirit as you love his word as you put it into practice you're being conformed into the image of Jesus Christ what a beautiful thing to think about how God is taking you from glory to glory your change your friends knew you in one way five years later they look at you and say what happened to you what changed you and you say it's the power of God it's the glory of Christ he changes lives that's what changed me I didn't become religious I didn't become a religious man I just am walking with Jesus Christ he changes your life I'm not in love with a with Calvary Chapel I'm not in love with a system I'm in love with a Savior and that relationship has changed that's how it works the Lord is the Spirit we don't have the law anymore we have God's grace the law still finds a place in our life we still don't covet we still don't commit adultery we still do not kill we still do not steal but these are things that are being done because our character is being transformed and we're becoming more like Jesus Jesus didn't do any of those things and his children his brothers and sisters don't either by his powerful Holy Spirit living within us we're being changed from grace to grace from glory to glory it it does not yet appear what we shall be but but one day we will be conformed into his image one day one day we will be like him complete in him we will see him face to face and we'll enter into this promise of of heaven and we will not regret one moment of this life we will not regret one moment of giving up sin because look at what we've gained look at what we got we get to be in heaven with Jesus Christ oh how I look forward to that the will be due


I think this is the most important thing that needs to happen in our minds. It is something we must nourish. There are simply no two ways about it. It is our source, it is the life there which makes us the way we are. So, land is a finite resource, it's subject to increasing pressure around the world and we've talked about it, urbanization, infrastructure development but also increased food, feed, fiber production, fuel production. So what do you think are some of the big turning points globally to prevent our increased need for land, which is a finite resource? I think the most important thing is that in our consciousness instead of referring to soil and land as resource, we must refer to it as our source. This is very, very important. It's like all of us did were fed on our mother's breast. Do we call her a resource or our source? She's our source. So across the world, in Eastern societies at least, even today we refer to soil as mother.  We say a mothership, a motherboard, even in electronics, all right? Because when something is the source, you refer to that as a mother. I think this is the most important thing that needs to happen in our minds, in our consciousness that it is our source, it is not our resource. It is not something to exploit, it is something we must nourish because the health of the soil will determine the health of life on this planet. There are simply no two ways about it. So referring to it as resource itself has caused this. Because, see, this may look like very, you know, up in the air kind of stuff, but I'm saying the way human beings think is the way they act, isn't it? The way we all think and feel is the way we act and the way we build societies around it, the way we build industry, the way we build everything is based on how we think and feel within ourselves. So how we think and feel has to change that soil is not an inert material for us to use as a resource. It is our source, it is the life there which makes us the way we are.  Only forty percent is your parental genetics. I'm…  I want to do safe soil, my mother is not allowing me. I said just tell her she's only twenty percent. Well, there's definitely a very big need to raise awareness about the meaning of soil because it's definitely a topic which hasn't received enough attention even though we're losing soil at a very rapid pace. So increasing the awareness about the role that soil is playing as a life support system for us as humankind and the rest of the planet is extremely important. So I hope your mission will be very successful in mobilizing millions around the globe to save soil and to create more awareness of what we need to do to protect it for us and for future generations.


We've got a quorum, so we'll go ahead and get started here. My name's Reinhardt Quelly. My Starbucks name is Ryan. So when I order food, but Reinhardt's not so bad. So I'm with the Cisco WebEx group, and this is an update that we proposed. Basically, a number of years ago, we gave our user story about as we just kicked off the OpenStack project. And so we'll talk a little bit about the date of where we are, what we've done, and what we're working on these days. So we'll go through a little bit of history of where we kind of the sequence that went through over the years. I'll talk a little bit about our organization. We actually changed our organization up quite a bit in order to deliver in the manner that I'll be talking about here. And that's actually a theme that I run into a lot as I talk to kind of my peers at this meetup, or at this conference, as well as other meetups. I'll talk about my platform team and what that platform means, how we deliver what we do, and what the components of that are. Talk a little bit, a couple of sides, on our multi-cloud strategy. And you'll see as we go through that we do deploy to multiple clouds, and we'll describe that. Spend a little bit of time on saying how we deploy applications, what our methodology is, and what the tool sets we use are. It'll be necessarily fairly brief and touch the high points. And I'm happy to talk over the next couple of days, if anybody wants to look me up and talk about details of these things. And so let's go ahead and jump right into it. So we actually started our OpenStack Diderney in October of 2011. It was actually the Essex Design Summit back in Boston. My chief architect at the time, we had just acquired another company that has previously been deploying to Amazon. And the task at hand was to get some infrastructure up underneath them in our own WebEx data center so that they could continue delivering the way that they were used to delivering in Amazon.  By July of that year, we had stood up an OpenStack environment underneath them. And we launched a private beta at that time. All this time, we haven't actually worked talking about the product that we were launching and what we were doing on top of that. We were fairly cagey about that, because being a big public company, we don't like to pre-announce what we're doing. That'll come up a little bit later. But in spring of 2013, after an extended beta of that application, we launched two new initiatives within Cisco right about the same time. The first was a brand new, we had made the statement back in July of 12 that we were targeting all future development, kind of all major net new applications to the OpenStack environment. And so come spring, we actually did launch a new application project, and that was, again, as we had promised, delivered and targeted specifically for OpenStack. We also at that time kicked off a Cisco wide OpenStack environment. So a lot of the team that you see here within Cisco is an internal team called Cloud Infrastructure Services. We're on a platform called CCS. And so right about that time, we were launching both of those projects. And then in spring of this year, we actually finally launched the public release of the application that we've been building on OpenStack. So today you can go to that URL and download and run the Cisco Spark, which is a new collaboration application in the WebEx family. It is 100% hosted on OpenStack. So from media bridges to back-end data stores to monitoring a metrics to everything else, runs 100% on OpenStack. So I finally get to talk about what we've actually been working to deploy all this time. So that's fairly exciting. So this project was interesting. One of the challenges as we deployed OpenStack within WebEx, there was a lot of inertia, a lot of existing processes, a lot of muscle memory on how you build applications, how you work with engineering, how you do change control, all this stuff, all of which made it difficult to iterate and move very, very quickly. So the management team, our new CTO and C Group VM at the time basically had us all working together in a room through an architecture session.  OK, you're all rehired. Let's start a new startup inside of Cisco that will be concentrated on building this application. And so that project was launched. We actually moved an operations team, an application development team, a client development team all into one organization and did a true DevOps style startup with those teams jointly deploying and running to that application. This is a huge part of our ability to get this project out and running quickly and building what we'll describe later as this cloud-native application. So after incubation, after we went into beta, we actually have started rejoining the Cisco, the WebEx mothership, and you'll find us combining operations and combining other things as we move forward, as we integrate with the rest of the WebEx properties. So my job in platform engineering, so I run of those groups, the cloud apps engineering, the client engineering, and the platform engineering, I'm responsible for the platform side. And I always joke that this is my job. My job at the platform level is to be invisible. I shouldn't be seen. It's kind of like the kids, better seen but not heard. In general, people just want me to be under the covers and not see what's going on. So I strive to be boring. In fact, one of our top, we do a Kanban style thing. Our top priority is always to what we call quest for boring, try to be boring. So that's a theme here. So my team is responsible for the build release environment. So all of the build test environment is managed by my team, running the deployment targets, where we actually deploy the applications to. I'll talk about that a lot. Coming up in a couple slides, common services, message buses, data services like, well, message buses like RabbitMQ, data services like Cassandra, React, Redis, Postgres, a variety of other things. We're also responsible for the service assurance layer. How do I monitor, manage, make sure all this stuff is still running? And as I mentioned before, we are a joint engineering team. We follow under our engineering organization. And so all of my operations people are, in fact, software engineers building operations as a software project. And so a lot of the stuff that you see will be around this. I don't have a traditional operations team. It's all engineers and the software that the engineers are writing in order to deliver this stuff. So another way of saying this is that if the green stuff is the things that my cloud application teams are providing, and the gray stuff at the bottom, well, I guess there's two grays, the gray stuff at the bottom is what my infrastructure provider delivers to me on that layer in between. So all the things that support the applications that we run. So I mentioned most of those things. In particular, I'll talk a little bit later about a significant number of our applications actually deployed to a PAS. We use Cloud Foundry. And I'll talk about when we deploy to the PAS and when we don't. We do today deploy across five data centers and four data center providers. All of them are open stack. You'll find that we run paired primary data centers, where data is actually replicated across those two data centers. We have particularly high sensitivity things that are running exclusively in Cisco data centers, things like the key management servers that manage the keys for the into and crew encryption that we use in our application. Those run 100% in Cisco data centers. We also have command and control that we put a diode for the electrical engineers in the room. Everything in our environment, command and control, pushes into our cloud providers. We don't really trust our cloud providers. All of our key material, everything that we're doing is pushed into the environment. And that just makes a lot of conversations a lot easier with InfoSec teams, with corporate policy folks, et cetera. But we do run, on the right hand side there, we do run a number of public providers as well as the Cisco operated internal open stack providers. We have primary data centers where we run the full stack. Spark is primarily messaging. There's a rooms metaphor. It's kind of like chat rooms with integrated video conferencing and a number of other things in there, file sharing. All of the data services are distributed across those two primary data centers. But we do have, in addition to the key management servers I talked about, we do have media bridges that consume a lot of bandwidth. We need a lot of them, and those in particular, we split out to additional data centers in addition to the primary data centers. And so those are the ones that spread around the world to get close to customers, effectively. And so you'll find that we have more of those in external data centers than our own, simply for reach. So why OpenStack Cloud? You know, I'm actually not gonna talk about this. We're all here at OpenStack Conference. We kind of understand why we developed for cloud and why OpenStack is a solid choice for doing that. So I'm gonna assume that you guys know why we're targeting cloud and why we're doing OpenStack. It is interesting that we do leverage public cloud, even though we have our own OpenStack providers, our own Cisco managed OpenStack providers. There's a couple reasons for that. One of the reasons was pure timing. When we launched the project, the Cisco wide OpenStack internal OpenStack built for the Cisco SaaS properties was launched at the same time. So it simply wasn't ready for us. If we wanted to start our deployment pipelines and start building the application and doing continuous delivery, which we literally did from within two weeks after launching the project, we started the delivery pipeline and we haven't stopped since. Well, that had to be done in a place while the cloud was there. And so the internal stuff came a little bit later. So that was the first thing was actually to leverage that provider that was already available. The second thing is that we are mobile first. So our application, so Cisco Spark is a mobile first application. And the funny things about these mobile devices is they don't come to us over the corporate network most of the time. They come over our cell provider's networks. And so they actually, their connections that are coming to us, as we're doing development, we don't wanna bring up a VPN every time we wanna connect to that conservers. And so for that reason also, all of our, from day one, all of our developer systems had to be outside of the corporate firewall and accessible from these mobile devices that we're doing that are our primary targets for our application. And the final thing was fast capacity on demand. I don't know of any, well, maybe eBay and Walmart by the numbers now, but none of these guys, none of most of the private open stack environments are actually much smaller than what we can have available and in the public cloud right now. So being able to leverage that capacity without the lead times and the capacity planning and everything is very, very handy to be able to have that. In general, people talk about cloud burstings as a form of cloud bursting, being able to use those resources wherever they are and whoever has them. So we do have, as I mentioned now that we're in, now that we're in production, we continue to leverage public and private. In general, being able to carry our base loads on our own infrastructure makes a lot of sense. We have a number of specific network access requirements. So my build environment, like most DevOps teams, you wanna have your build environment, your dev environments, look as much like production as possible, but I do have things like source code and build systems and secret stores and various other things that's very, very handy to have that within the corporate walls. Yet it's still open stack. It still looks like the rest of our deployments from a deployment management perspective. And so we do have that. The WebEx team continues to have an open stack environment and as we do closer integration between Cisco Spark and WebEx, there's things that I would like to run in the WebEx data center adjacent to the things that it needs to talk to. So we'll continue to use things that have those network access. Clear delineation of access is primarily a religious and political layer, but there's a lot of conversations that we have when deploying to the cloud as a corporate entity, deploying applications to the cloud, it just makes it, to be able to tell my security teams, well, the key material is always in Cisco property or the only thing that's ever in the public cloud is encrypted data. That just makes conversations a whole lot easier. And so just to be able to say, look, I'm gonna run these small footprint things inside the Cisco operating things, just it's like it's a conversation I don't have to have with the InfoSec teams. And so that's very, very convenient. Public cloud does continue to have benefits. Time to market, I mentioned before. Scale, there are, your average public provider has a lot more capacity than your average public or private provider. So being able to leverage that. Geographic reach. Even Cisco, a large global company, doesn't have data centers in every region of the world. But there are open stack providers in nearly every region of the world. And I can get at any of them to put these media bridges or these other things. And that becomes really important when we talk about specific privacy concerns in specific regions of the world. We call it the Snowden effect, right? It's like nobody wants their data transiting through the US for a lot of these applications. So being able to actually ensure that those are always out there is nice. And then diversity. Diversity is really, really interesting and important. There are things that my local providers don't have yet. Metal as a service or ironic, for example. GPU instances, for example. And so these things are available in some of these third parties. So being able to say, okay, what would my media bridge look like if I ran it on metal versus running on virtual and those types of things. So that's a big benefit. Just to touch a little bit more on scale. Being, having availability of machines is one aspect of this. The second one that's really has really been hitting home over the last year is minimizing the impact of failure. You know, if you have a, in an Amazon scale data center where they have tens of thousands or roughly 10,000 nodes per availability zone is what's been reported. Four zones per region. If you have a physical failure in that type of environment, the chances of it actually affecting you are very, very small. And if it does affect you, it's gonna affect one of your machines. Well, if my private provider has hundreds of physicals and I'm running hundreds of VMs on those physicals, a single node failure in this environment is a very high chance of actually affecting multiples of my nodes. And so being able to have, be able to spread my stuff across a max of more hosts is very, very valuable to me. The second thing that's been interesting is that in a private cloud, we tend to have to manage capacity more closely. We don't have infinite resources. We don't have an infinite number of machines, even a company the size of Cisco. And so I do have to give my internal providers an idea of how much capacity I'm going to need in the next end months. And that's actually not an easy conversation to have when I've just released the product and I have no idea what I'm gonna need in a couple months. And so this is having the scale and the ability to use resources elsewhere is a big deal for us as well. So if you get beyond kind of the technical things of using multiple fighters, there are some, or using multiple open stack instances, that kind of the multiple providers is actually very useful. So the first thing here is the policy conversations I've talked about before where we can choose one provider that has a particular set of policies or particular deployment. The German provider who doesn't have data centers outside of Germany so I can ensure that German citizens data never lose Germany or my key management servers that are run by a particular vendor, i.e. Cisco and RSEF. And so that just makes those policy decisions all that much easier. You know, there's been a number of stories, certainly the code spaces going out of business in 2014 when they lost control of their Amazon keys. Now there were ways they could have mitigated that, but the bottom line is when you're, if all of your stuff is in one place and you have a set of powerful keys that control that one place, the blast radius is very, very high if you make a mistake there. Yet if I'm going across multiple providers and multiple data centers, the blast radius for any particular mistake is contained, it's in that little area. So we do like that separation. Changes in commercial terms. I don't know if anybody's got a pager duty bill lately, but pager duty's about to jump our pager duty bills, not open stack provider of course, but we've got a bunch of automation tied into pager duty and renegotiating that contract is going to be painful because I can't easily move somewhere else. And so having multiple providers for commercial reasons is very valuable. This diversity of implementations, I wrote this slide a while back. I don't know if you guys remember the XSA 108 ZIN exploit where we had to go reboot all of our hosts because of the hypervisor exploit in ZIN. That was kind of a non-event for us because our Cisco providers all use KVM and our public providers use ZIN. And so we just failed over to our Cisco data centers and slept through the weekend. Well, that was all fun until this weekend where Venom got both of them. But sometimes it doesn't always work that way, but we have a better chance of weathering through something like that. There are disadvantages of course, as we go across, there's more complexity as we go across providers. Some of the obvious things, instance types are all named differently. They're sized differently having to manage that. The public IP mechanisms differ from open stack provider to open stack provider. Some do provider network, some do floating IPs and having to manage and make our puppet configuration manage multiple providers is a pain, very large pain. Security, security group implementations can be different across providers, sometimes not provided at all, a sore point. And so some of these differences, it does take work today. As we look at the common core stuff and being able to have some rationalization about what an open stack provider does, will be good because it will help minimize these things. It actually is costly in Cisco to onboard a new vendor. Whole process, whole financial, this internal business continuity plans, privacy agreements, all this stuff. It takes time to onboard another vendor. So it's not freed onboard another vendor. Sometimes that gets in our way, always that gets in our way. Actually, this provider process is being different is rather interesting. If you look at the way that our internal provider handled the venom announcement and reboots and everything else, it was quite different than what our external providers did and having to manage two different vendors with two different processes can be challenging. Just because we're building operational processes around these things, right? It's like when I get a notice that says this, I react in this way. And if I'm getting different notices in different ways across different providers, it can be challenging. So some of these things, the Cisco InterCloud, which I won't talk about at all here, but there's other things going on in the sessions that you can see a source for some of these things where the cloud of clouds with Cisco and partners actually kind of smooths some of these things, including them. So you can follow up with the rest of the Cisco folks about that. So let's go back to our deployment for a minute and kind of discuss about kind of out of the, why we do cloud, well, we're all doing cloud today. So I didn't talk about that. Multi provider, that was important to us. But let's talk about what we're actually deploying and where we're deploying and how we're deploying it. So we'll talk about these things in general. So again, I'm responsible for that middle layer and we're deploying these applications on top of that. One thing I will double click in just briefly here, deploying what we call a platform, which is the thing that our software, the applications that we're building runs on, is there's obvious things like the database services and the PAS itself that we're deploying to, but we also have to do the service assurance layer. In general, because we're going from cloud to cloud, we bring all of this stuff with us. We deploy our own logging infrastructure, our own metrics infrastructure, our own alert infrastructure, all of which so we can just pick up and carry and drop into whatever environment. And therefore I have commonality across those. And I don't generally consume those things from my providers in these cases. Now I do, there are a couple of services like DNS, for example, that's a third party external service that I consume. There are some of these things that I knew relic, which most people are probably familiar with, I consume as a third party service. The stuff in the blue are things that I consume from others. But most of the service assurance stack I carry with me. That's about all I'll say about that. I have gory detail slides of how we do service assurance, but I won't bore you with them. Eric, I'll bore with you with them later. But so a big part of deciding what we're gonna deploy, if I look at this thing here, you'll see things that are deploying to the PAS and you'll see things that are deploying straight to the IS. And the question is, how do we make the decision? What do we target where? So the first thing as a platform is I have to be able to support all of these things because I have applications in different parts of their life cycle, different types of applications, things that have data, persistent data, things that don't. And so as a platform, I need to support all of them. But in general, we target everything we possibly can at the PAS.  It deals with deployment. It deals with scaling. It deals with HTTP routing. There's a bunch of things that it will take care of for us if we just let you deploy the application into that environment. However, it's best for HTTP routed, single port, stateless applications. For things that have persistent message stores like my data services, they don't fit very well in the PAS. And so we target those straight at the hardware. The most notable example of this in our world is our media bridges. I can't just turn off a media bridge when I do a scaling event. I have to wait for the messages or the meetings that are on that bridge to bleed off before I can switch it out for another one. So managing the life cycle of that application is different. The media bridges open up 1,000 ports that they're listening on. That doesn't route through a cloud found rerouter, particularly well. So those types of applications, I just deploy straight to the bare metal. And then of course, our IaaS hosted services, our Cassandra's, our Rabbit MQs, anything that has persistent disk, that has long running state, that I'm not spending a new release of Cassandra every 20 minutes like I am with my applications. But so these things that are long running, we target again straight to the IaaS. I don't actually have any metal in my world. Everything is virtual and consumed through my OpenStack provider, with the exception of the metal as a service which we'll be experimenting with for media bridges. So we do choose the right deployment model for the right application. And we support our kind of platform supports all of those. And we pick which one. We steer the user to the one that makes sense for them. Now if I do go in that middle layer, IaaS hosted apps, there's a whole bunch of plumbing that that engineering team has to write for themselves. You know, queuesing applications, start and stop, health check, all of this stuff has to be done by that application team. They can't rely on the paths to provide it for them. So just a brief foray into our application I mentioned that this was a new project, a new application. And we are targeting, we are cooperating with talking about building cloud native applications with our engineering teams. These things are being built to run in the cloud as a cloud application. It is a microservices architecture, a couple of the top bullet points are here, but there's, if you read the 12 factor app thing that was mentioned earlier, there's a lot that goes into building a stateless cloud native application. And we do push everything we can into that direction. But it also is true that it's not just the things that we build and run in our environment that should be cloud native, we try to in every case pick a cloud native version of the data services that we're using. Cassandra is a great example of this where it's a scale out horizontal thing, you run a cluster, set your application value three, I don't really care if one of them goes away, but it does have persistent data and it manages persistence and availability at the application layer and that's what we're doing at our application as well, which kind of brings us into the next slide, which is primarily availability is in every case in our world an application layer concern. I don't expect my infrastructure to provide any particular availability for me, that's an application problem to provide that availability. This is kind of one of the key differences between kind of your traditional enterprise app and your traditional cloud app is that this is delegated to the applications, which means it's a partnership with our application teams that are building these things to build this in this way. We prefer lots of small nodes rather than a few big nodes, lots of good reasons for that, one of which is best generally what's available in cloud infrastructure is more small nodes, but also if you have in the case of my current elastic search cluster in this one application, I've got 30 machines in the cluster, 26 machines in the cluster again. If I lose any one of those, meh, there's a 26th of my capacity and I have three way replication anyway. If that was a postgres pair, master slave pair for example, and I lost one of those nodes, I've just lost all my reason slaves and it's like I'm at 50% capacity like that. That's really evil. So being able to have lots of little things just is a happier place to run, let's say. So how am I doing on time? Wow, I need to talk faster. And you thought I was talking fast already. So we do prefer local storage. For these Cassandra nodes, for example, have local storage on them. We tend to avoid block storage. It's more resilient, it's faster, and the applications take care of it's availability anyway. We are explicitly building our applications multi-data center. When you start up your app, it talks to a discovery service and figures out which data center to talk to when we switch in the app from data center to data center. I don't do any fancy networking to deliver traffic to one data center to the other. That's an application concern. Much like mail or SIP, if you're in the SIP world, it's like these things are built into the applications to understand multiple servers and priority of servers and everything else. We do that to our applications. The final thing I'll say on this building kind of applications is that because we have capacity available, effectively infinite capacity available at any time, it changes the way we approach certain operations. We tend to not upgrade things in place. We tend to side grade. We tend to stand up a new instance and flip traffic to that new instance to expand or to upgrade or replace a Cassandra node. I stand up another node, join it to the cluster, wait for the data to replicate, turn off the old one. So I don't generally upgrade things in place. So how do I deploy all these machines? What do I do? Well, we follow a very kind of flexible, composable steps in our things. We don't say, hey, the VM is always, or the image is always the unit of deployment and everything has to be packaged into a VM and do this, it's like VMs are built in a particular way. We start with a juice image, we apply a puppet config, we configure the application through that config largely, but sometimes the secondary process. I don't really care, there's a sentence fragment there. I don't really care whether it's bare metal or a VM or a vagrant box in dev or whatever else. The process is kind of the same and I use this across my whole fleet, including even building Docker images, which I'll talk about briefly in a minute. We kind of use the same process for all of this. We do follow a masterless puppet module, it really model, I talked about this at length at the PuppetConf two years ago, about why we do masterless, it's all about timing and getting a particular set of configs on a particular machine and maintain that over time because we're constantly churning our environment. So how do I manage the sequence and the life cycle of this stuff? So I won't talk about that more, you can look it up on the web. We do use HIRA for our configuration, pushing data in and out of Git. We're actually starting to push a bunch of that into MongoDB rather than the Git reposer all in right now. Git reposer actually great, carried us two years, but it's hard to manage across many people in a team. Git blame is great, you can always tell who changed what config where. So but getting it into a state that's referenceable by other people at any time by other automation tools is necessary. We do push orchestration. All of this stuff, masterless puppet, standing up these machines, we have to have something that goes out and we take template files and we interpret those template files and push them. Remember we're running, our data centers don't have access back into command and control. Everything command and control is pushing everything into data centers. So we use tools like Fabric and StackStorm to take our configurations and push them onto the existing environments. And so I could talk about that at some link. We do mostly immutable, I talked about side grades, we do mostly immutable infrastructure, but we're not pedantic about it. If I need to delete a user from a machine, I'm sure it's all not gonna rebuild the machine. I'm just gonna say, insure absinthe and puppet and he's gone, so it's much faster, a lot less strain on logging and metrics and other systems to have those machines be a little more stable. So just one note, I added this bullet after watching one of the other presentations yesterday, Cloud Foundry, the standard way of deploying Cloud Foundry is using Bosch, which is their automation system for deploying and managing that thing. Well, Cloud Foundry is one server type or one service of 26 that I run. It has three server types, it's really simple. I just use my standard deployment tooling to deploy Cloud Foundry. It's actually quite simple to deploy and that way it's the same as everything else in my environment that I'm managing. You'll hear me talk a lot about it's the same in every environment. We strive a lot for consistency here. This is what it looks like in general for today. Our infrastructure is all defined as code. We have configuration manifests or puppet manifests which are compiled, actually. They're checked into Jenkins. When you change one of these things, Jenkins picks up the change, builds a new set of puppet modules and checks them into the YUM repose or Debian repose. We use both Debian and Ubuntu. I'm sorry, yeah. We use Ubuntu and CentOS. We have a definition language. It looks a little bit like a heat template. What's different from heat is that it runs across multiple providers in multiple environments. So that's why we're not using heat is that we actually deploy across multiple open stack environments, local vagrant and oh by the way, a large cloud provider in Redmond provides some of our infrastructure as well. Things like DNS for example, Route 53. Cool stuff. We do have, if you take the basics of our configuration, the high-read data that says this is what this thing is supposed to look like, the puppet modules say this is how that's supposed to be applied. We package that all stop, push it on to deploy hosts. We're using fabric primarily for reading these manifest files and saying go instantiate this thing and push that config on to that machine. And it's fabric that talks to the open stack APIs to say go build this thing or this particular instance. This is actually, we're right in the midst if we weren't rebooting machines because of the Venom bug. We would be working on this, which is introducing a product called StackStorm. It's open source. They're actually here this week. You can find them around. But basically StackStorm is an execution environment for a bunch of the automation that we've already built that allows us to take all these tasks and these things that we've been building and running and make it callable from our other automation systems. Make StackStorm watch for a database change and go execute something or react to an alert. And it's largely calling the things that we already have. A machine fails. Well, I already have the tooling to go deploy a new machine. I just need someone to answer the alert and go launch that task for us. And so we're kind of a good way of describing this is closing the loop on our automation and take the things that we used to have humans instantiating. We now are using StackStorm to do that. So it's an iteration. And in fact, it's kind of a theme and a bunch of the stuff we do is kind of iterate on this, right? Just like get something working, expand it, grow it, and then move on to the next thing. And sometimes go back and revisit some of these. So we're really big on iterations. We do chat ops, actually. It's kind of the way that we interact with a bunch of our systems is through a chat bot. This is the top of that line there. This is actually a screen. Hope it doesn't say anything embarrassing in there. The top screen basically is Nate, bang server type blue. He's issuing a command to chat ops to go create a new bastion server in that particular data center. Now it's our Cisco Allen data center. And then chat bot goes and follows that. So anyway, pretty simple stuff. Well, not simple, but not hard either. Just a lot of moving parts. A lot of buzz about containers, this show and elsewhere. Yep, we run containers. In fact, since we're running Cloud Foundry by definition, everything we're deploying is in fact in the container because that's how Cloud Foundry does its work. And we do have, we running Docker as well for right now primarily in our build environment. Some of these applications that we're building have very intricate and detailed environmental things. Specific C libraries on the systems, Python libraries on the systems, all these things that actually need to be managed carefully for a particular build. So the first deployment of Docker for us was in that build environment, running on our Jenkins agents to control our build environment. Well, it's a very short step between that and saying Docker push. And here's this built thing, now go use that. And so you'll see, particularly on the media bridges, starting to use that for part of our deployment. And then of course we're watching Diego and the other things that are happening. So what's next for us? We have a number of other Cisco teams within the collaboration technology group that are also moving to the cloud. Some of them are very like-minded, building similar applications stacks. And we're throwing in together and saying, hey, let's use a common platform rather than building a new one. Other applications are less so. Other applications that have more of an installed base, more of a different application architecture that doesn't lend itself well to the stack and the things that we do. And in many cases, they're picking up pieces of our platform, our logging platform, our metric platform, our alert system and using those, but then not using kind of cloud foundry and Cassandra and all the other things that we use in our platform. So we're pretty pragmatic about what we share and who picks up what. But you'll find us deploying to a lot more data centers as we expand out into the world with the application. Both our own data centers, WebEx data centers, more Cisco data centers. There are, by my count right now, I've got about 30 different OpenStack data centers that are available to me as I need to deploy into different areas. And so you'll find us spreading even more. And then as we bring on these other guys expanding our platform services, upgrading our logging infrastructure to use Kafka, for example, there's a persistent ring buffer in there, for example, adding Kafka as an application layer service.  So that's it. I'm happy to take any questions if we have time for questions. I will ask that you use the mic, however. Well, you're kind of trapped, so I'll repeat for you. So I have a quick question regarding, what's your strategy? I'm sorry, if we can go with her for just a minute. Go ahead. Yeah. Well, heat in this current incarnations is it's executed in the context of a particular provider, right? Your heat template is being interpreted in a particular OpenStack provider. And a lot of our clusters, like our Cassandra clusters, have members in two different providers across two different environments. And so my templates are actually saying, if I look at machine definition, it says, data center one for these three machines, data center two for these three machines, and our orchestration is hitting two machines, two separate API credentials, everything to deploy. So that's the primary reason, so. So I'm just curious, what's your scaling strategy in terms of handling more applications? I'm sorry? So what's your scaling strategy? I'm just, for example, if you're ordering, you're actually offering Cassandra as a service, Kafka as a service.  You have people, you have to have people to understand how each application works. But then if you want to offer service like 100 different services, I mean, do you actually have 100 people, or what's your strategy to kind of scale up? Yeah, great question. Actually, this is... So the first thing is that the platform team, we do not expect ourselves to be expert at every one of these things. We assist with the deployment of the thing, Cassandra, for example, making sure that we're deploying it, monitoring it, the basic operations are covered, but the people who are really expert at running Cassandra are in fact the application users that are consuming that. And I think in general, this is something across, you'll hear me, all these things I mentioned were mostly no SQL style solutions. We don't have a Cassandra team that knows everything about Cassandra. The application teams are a lot more closely tied to running Cassandra, doing the DB reviews for Cassandra, understanding how to use Cassandra. So the short answer is the partnership with the engineering team who's using that. Now we do tend to push people into a particular thing. If I've already got Cassandra running, and someone comes to me and says, hey, I would really like you to deploy React. I'm gonna ask them pretty detailed questions about why the heck they can't use Cassandra, and they really need React as an example. And sometimes the answer is they need both. The question is how do I make React run multi-data center? And yes, the React requires an enterprise license to run multi-data center. And yes, I pay a multi-user, a multi-data enterprise license for the limited application where we use React. That's a bit of a little question. Yes, it's worked. We've run it for a metadata store for a specific application for a number of years. I would say that React is basher in the room. Cassandra, fully open source, has been every bit as reliable, if not more so, for us without the licensing fees. By and large, as an organization, we prefer to use open source, and we're happy to pay a vendor for support. And so if you take a look at Cassandra, I've got third-party support for Cassandra, third-party support for Stackstorm, third-party support for Rabbit, but we're using the open source versions of all of those so that we're not locked in. We don't have to get into a licensing discussion every time I open a new data center, which as you just heard, I open lots of data centers. And so yeah, we'd prefer that and it is a bit of a sore spot, to be honest, so. I would like it too. I'm paid up for another 18 months, so it's not a, my hair's on fire. I don't have much air left anyway. But yeah, we in general are trying to push the people away from that. Now there are things that it does well, and that the vector clock, specifically for managing consistency, is useful for specific applications, and that's why we're using it. So we're not, sometimes you bite the bullet, pay the money and solve the problem and move on. I mean, at the end of the day, we've got to deliver our application, so. Anything else? They were telling me I'm out of time, so thank you for coming, and I will be around. Thank you.