Hi everybody, welcome to the latest episode of From the Rock to the Cloud with me, Tom Hall. As you know, I'm the host of this series. We're deeply into season two now, and this being the second episode. And as always, we try and discuss things server, Azure, rock, cloud related. It's in the title. It's obvious when you think about it. And that's what we try and cover. We try and make it as fun, as interesting as possible. Each episode, we have a special guest. We have this guy on the first episode of this season two. We're actually going on the second episode of season two. He's going for like a kind of a record. Wouldn't he make it through to episode three of season two? I don't know.  It might be a red wedding situation where we just, you know, we just, we just get up to Tom Oswira. No, I'm only joking. But, you know, as always, we try and talk about things that are hopefully of interest to you. Please let us know if you have any comments. Let me know if you want to talk about anything in particular, if you have any comments, send them over to us, and we will try and address those for you so that you can get that insight from said expert. So today's session, today's chat. By the way, before, I've just got to say that is a cool t-shirt. I love the Able t-shirt. I think that is brilliant, by the way, Tom Oswira. We're going to talk about, well, we're not going to accept the defaults, as your t-shirt says. We're going to talk about modernizing applications, Windows containers, and Kubernetes. Hopefully you'll explain to me what Kubernetes is later on, but please. And so for the next 30 minutes, we're going to talk with the one, the only Tom Oswira. As always, if you could just tell us a little bit about yourself. As always, even though we only spoke to you last episode, who are you? Absolutely. So first of all, again, thank you for having me again. This is always great to talk to you. Yeah, my name is Tom Oswira. I'm part of the Azure Cloud Advocates. We are part of the Azure engineering team. And what we are actually working on is creating content, delivering content, such as presentations, talking to customers and communities, but also listening to feedback. So we want to know from customers what is working, what is not working, where do we need to improve. So we can actually go out and fix that ourselves or work with our peers in the program management and engineers to make our products better. So yeah, and today I'm here to talk, as you said, about modernizing your applications with Windows containers. Right. Well, let's get to it. Don't forget the Kubernetes. Right. Here we go. Okay. So Tom Oswira, just today's a container, right? Like a container. The only, like, you know, you get containers on ships. We get containers that can, you know, you can put liquid in. But why Windows containers? What's that all about? What is a Windows container? So containers is not necessarily like just something Microsoft came up with, right? It's not something we would have actually like invented or something. Containers exist in the industry for quite a while now. And what you can think is that what we realize is like, if you think back in the time where we actually went from physical servers to virtual servers to basically get the benefit of leveraging more of the CPU and virtualization stuff. Idle servers do not need physical hardware. We get the mobility, all the benefits of we got by doing server virtualization. Now, this is, this is great, but still, like, if you think about it, every server still has a operating system and has obviously some overhead.  Also, that's like, even though virtual machines are a couple of gigabytes in size and we have pretty good connectivity and networks these days, but that's not always the case. It would be great if that they would be way lighter, right? To like have them even more mobile, take them less resources and so on. And that is stuff which we will see containers can provide. And I think, I think that is the, there are a couple of reasons why we would actually benefit of that. There is much, much more. There's a ton of stuff, but think about it as the evolution of virtualization in terms of, hey, I did like what we did with virtualization and server virtualization. The first place is we actually created virtual hardware, right? So it was like we simulated or emulated or virtual hardware, like virtual CPUs and virtual disks. Now, when we do containers, we're actually thinking about simulating the operating system. Like instead of like doing all the hardware stuff, just use the same operating systems for multiple different isolated applications. So it's kind of like the gig economy, right? It's getting that, it's streamlining, getting that bit of the virtual machine to just repeat and be more efficient and basically just do more of the same job at scale. So it creates these kind of like buckets of available performance in the areas you need to be optimized. That's how I understood it from what you just said. Yeah, think about like all the things you think about virtual machines, which are like a lot of the things which are challenging with virtual machines, right? I mean, they have benefits, but there are some challenges. There's still, as I mentioned, big, they have some like uptime you need to take like until their boot time, for example, you cannot just go out and just shut it down and start it. I mean, it's fast, but like it's not like, hey, I just do it like that, right? And so there's a ton of different things out there which help us in terms of dealing with that, but then also making it more mobile. So one of the things which is really important is the problem we had with, oh, it worked on my machine, but it doesn't work in production anymore, right? So I go out, I install the application, for example, here on my machine. I give you the same stuff, the same setup, you install it again because you need to do production, but it suddenly doesn't work anymore. So how can we prevent that from happening? And with using containers, actually, instead of like creating a new virtual machine and setting things up, everything again, I create a container image and we will talk all about what that is and what that looks like. And then I just give you that container image and you can run it and it will run the application in the exact same way as I did it on my computer. And so that is on my server for that matter. So that is one of the problems containers are very good in solving it. Cool. Okay, so I think we understand what a container is now. So that's great. But how do I run a Windows container? Do you show me? Yeah, absolutely. So before I go into that, let me give you some background on that slide here to show you how that can actually look like. So the things we just talked about, I think it's very important. So when we looked at this in the past, this is like we had like physical hardware, we installed operating system on top of it, and then we installed our applications and services on that like operating system. Now, yeah, we did it. We did then that in a virtual environment where we created virtual hardware. And then we basically did the same thing again, right? So we have a user space with the application and we have a kernel space where we have these applications. Now, what we're doing with container... Sorry, Thomas, is the kernel space called a bucket? No. I would say, no, no. Sorry, we probably need to cut this out. You didn't get my joke, because obviously the kernel has a bucket. Oh, okay, okay, okay. Oh, that kernel. Okay, now I got it. Okay, okay. Yeah. Okay. Oh, okay. Sorry. Is that terrible joke? It's a terrible joke. It's a good one, but I was like thinking because like we have buckets in all the technology. I was like, this is not really technology. But yeah, I did not... You can get them from KFC. Makes sense. Makes sense. Bucket of fried chicken. Yeah, yeah. So let me quickly go back there. Sorry. Don't worry. You can get it. You can bring it again. Now I know what it is. So we have here then a user space and then we also have a kernel space, right? Man, I love the kernel. You know what I mean? I love the kernel or I carry on. Okay. So what we're doing now is instead of like building new virtual hardware or even physical hardware, why not just use the same operating system and kernel for multiple applications, right? And that is something we did before is like we installed maybe multiple applications on the same server. But a lot of people told you that's probably not a good idea because there are dependencies and suddenly you like, you cannot run the same application like twice or stuff like that. So that is where the container technology actually isolates these application and services in a container, which makes sense, right? So then I can run like multiple applications on the same operating systems but isolated from each other. So to show you how that can work, let's go to this one. So now let me show you how that, how that can look like how I can actually run the container, right? So here I'm on container host. This is like a Windows server where I installed the container feature and I have Docker to basically manage that. So you can see here I already have a couple of Docker or images like container images. These are the ones from Microsoft, which I downloaded already so we can actually go out and use it. You can see here they have tags depending on the versions and you can also see that there are different sizes. So for example, we have different images like server core and then we have the nano server container, which is a super small container image, especially for dot net core applications. So these are options we can now do and to run the container, I can just type Docker run and then I can do IT for interactive terminal. So then basically what I can do, I can then directly, I directly can boot into the container. So now I take the container image I want to start and I hit enter and you will see I just started a container. You can see here, like you cannot really see, but I will show you a couple of things. If I do now host name, you can see here this is a unique host name for the container itself, auto generated. And then you can also see it has a file system. So I have like because it's a Windows container, obviously it has Windows as users, program files and all that in that container. I can even run because it's a server core container can run PowerShell. So I can do things like for example, get process to like see what processes are running. And you can see the process list is pretty small for a server, right? Because it's not a full server. So let me open up here another window. This is actually the container host itself. Like the one we were before where we started the container. You can see your containers one. If I do now get process here, you can see it is out a ton of processes running on the server itself. Including the ones from the container. And I'm going to show you that in just a bit. So for example, if we have a look at this process ID here from PowerShell. So 6768. If I do now, like do here a, let's have a look here, do a get process here. That is inside the container. So obviously I will be able to see that process. Right. So I can see here, okay, I can, this is my PowerShell running inside the container. And now if I run that on the container host, the great thing here is if I do the same thing, get process and get the idea and can get the same ID of that process. On the container host, I'm actually seeing that process as well. Right. So I see from the containers that can see inside the containers. But that is great. But let's have a look at like what the container can actually see. So let's have a look at another PowerShell process. Let's like the PowerShell running, for example, here on the host itself. So if I look at that process, 2408. So if I go into the container now, so I'm doing that the other way around, around. So if I get process and try to find that process, you can see, I cannot find that. So the container host can actually see the processes inside the container. But the container cannot see the processes from other containers or from the host itself. Right. So that is pretty cool. And that's how it creates that efficiency then, I guess. Yep. Absolutely. Absolutely. So I can then also see, hey, okay, there's the Docker container running. So this is the way like if you do Docker PS, it's running. And if I now close here, because this was an interactive container, if I then do that again, the container will shut down automatically. So like you can see now, no container is running anymore. I just killed the container by exiting it. But depending on what I, if I don't know if it's a server application inside the container, then I will not run it interactively and stuff like that would like run it detached. And then it could actually just run in the background. It would not shut down when I, when I do things like this. But you can see how fast it was, right?  So, so how is it, why is it so fast? Yep. So let me quickly like illustrate that here. Why this is like so fast, right? We talked about it. It's obviously way smaller, but it also needs to do different things. So if we normally boot up a server like a full OS server, we obviously do a power on, then we run the BIOS or UAV post and all that. And then we start loading the kernel and starting this the session and do the logon and then launch the Windows Explorer and then all the, the services which I need. Now, if you look at where container starts to boot because it leverages the kernel and everything from the operating system, which is already running on, consider that this is the only pro, the only that last two things are basically used by the container, right? So that I think is pretty cool. That is, that is one of the reasons why it's so fast. And if you look at the next one, it also has some cool features in there in terms of memory.  I know we have great features like dynamic memory for virtual machines, but still there's always a fixed amount of memory assigned to a VM. And if you look at the host here, so I have here a host. It needs like 2.8 gigabytes of memory at the moment. If I start a container, it then needs like, let's say it's 200 Mac for that container, because again, all the operating system stuff is already like loaded, right? I don't need to load that twice. And then if I do like five containers, you can see here, it's even then like 3.4 gigabytes. The reason why it's not 200 per container, for example, in this case, it's because even like processes within the containers can share the same memory. So if I start a PowerShell like three, four times, that process can be shared. The memory of these processes can be shared in theory, right? Not all the processes do that. Some of them are staying isolated. But think about that, like some like DLLs which are loaded and stuff like that. Why would I load them in the memory? I can have multiple containers consuming that. So this is also very, very good, very, very low overhead if you actually run that. Wow, that's super efficient. So that's why it's fast. Great. So Windows Server 2022 containers. What have we done? How have we made that any better? You know what I mean? What's new with Windows Server 2022 with containers? That's my question. So there's a ton of stuff, by the way, which went into the container improvements we have with Windows Server 2022, right? So first of all, you saw the container image sizes I showed you. These are containers for 2019, like around three gigabytes and like 250 max for the nano server one and so on. It always depending also a little bit on the patch level. But what the team did is they reduced the size by up to 40% again. Like almost half, right? So it's again, that again improves the speed of a container to start as well as like a good shutdown and performance. And that up like usually like they say start up time can be like up to 30% better than before or 30% faster than before. So this is one thing obviously, which is a big improvement. Because again, containers usually cannot be small enough, right? You want them to be as small as possible for their base images because without losing compatibility, right? So that is one thing we have there. The other thing is, which is very important is think about applications who actually do authenticate against Active Directory or others. So because containers are not necessarily domain joined and container hosts in the cloud, like in, I will talk about that later on, are not necessarily domain joined. We now can, for example, have group managed service accounts, which can basically authenticate against Azure Active Directory without having the container host joined to an Active Directory domain. This is super handy again to get that portability. We talked about at the beginning to enable that. And then we have a ton of improvements when it comes, for example, to networking. So for example, like, and again, we're going to talk about Kubernetes in just a bit, but there's improved networking for that. We have IPv6 support and so on, which we have there. And then we have some cool new tools also to actually manage containers on Windows Server, including in Windows Admin Center, for example, as well. Okay, so we've just made it a lot. It's embedded into the latest OS, cool. And in terms of, like you mentioned container images and layers. How does that work? Again, this is, I just, we just talked about this. So we had some echo here. Okay, good. So we just talked about the base OS images, right? And this is an important part to understand when it comes to containers. It's not like where you have a virtual machine and then you like basically set up that virtual machine.  Basically what you do is like with containers, you work kind of like as an infrastructure as code type, right? So you basically write down how your container image looks like. And so if we quickly have a look at that slide, I quickly want to illustrate that a little bit. So when you're building a container image or you want to run a container, you basically build a container image. And so you select an OS like a base base image in that sense. So we could in the Microsoft world, we have the nano server, we have server core. We have also one called Windows. And again, it gets larger and larger depending on what you want. Because if you're just building a .NET core application, you don't need a lot of stuff, which is like for compatibility reasons. So you would take the smallest one, which you take, but again depends on what you take. Then you basically go out and you add dependencies for it, right? So you're going to be like if there is anything like you need a framework or anything like .NET and stuff like that, or you already have IS and stuff like that, you can add that as well. And then you basically add an application layer. This is then when you actually put the application on top of it. And then you put the configuration for that application on top of it. And as I said, these are different layers. So what happens now is what also makes the container host so super efficient is that when I have run multiple containers based on the same base OS image, I can share that image from a disk based perspective, right? They can build like the only thing which changes are the upper layers, but the base image is always staying the same. So I can also save a lot of disk space as well. So there's some pretty cool stuff here when it comes to layering. I think that is something great to understand. And here we need to quickly need to like I need to go forward. We can cut these out. Yeah. Just cut these here. And then so it just goes forward on this slide. Yeah. Okay. So how I actually would do that is like, I would actually write a file, a Docker file, for example, and then I would write it in code and say, Hey, for example, here, it would start with a base image. Like in this one I use server core, then I do the net framework. I add another layer on that. And then I add like the latest patches, for example, to that, like if I want to add patches and then I could do like the application and configuration in addition. And I would write that Docker file down. And with that Docker file, I would then generate the container image, right? So that is how it works. But now the interesting part, I think, and that's what we're going to explore is like. I now want to containerize a application. Doing all that is pretty hard, right? It's like, I need to learn a lot to actually get that all done and understand and how that works and all that. So we want to make it easy for admins to actually containerize existing applications, right? So everyone has like web applications out there. They probably want to migrate this at one point. And then containerizing it sounds like a good idea. So this is something which I will show you in just a bit. Well, I've got two questions, Thomas, right? First of all, Kubernetes, right? So number one, what is a Kubernetes? You know what I mean? So it's written up there. I see it. Everyone talks about it everywhere. What is a Kubernetes? So the thing I just showed you like before when I run like a one Docker container, right? This is okay. Like this is like what I can do on my machine. But think about like applications which. So first of all, like think about applications which probably run multiple containers, right? So like you have one is a web app. The other one is a database. The other one is a mid tier applications. You probably want to have like multiple locations work at the same time. The other thing you want to have is you probably want to scale out your application as well. Right? So we have like multiple web like web servers for redundancy reasons, but also maybe for performance reasons as well. So you need an orchestrator to actually do all that to make sure that you have enough containers that they're all running. That for example, what if a container for some reason crashes that there was a container coming up again. Again, taking, taking like making sure that you have enough scale and managing that. And also at the end, your container is still running in some world, anywhere on a physical machine. There is always something coming down to a physical machine, right? You can even run in a VM, but at the end it's on a physical machine. Yeah. Now to make sure what is what happens if all the containers would run on the same physical machine and that physical machine crashes, your whole application would go down, right? So again, for that, we also need an orchestrator and Kubernetes is an orchestrator developed like in the early stages by Google. They use that heavily for the internal services. But obviously also the industry went and said, hey, well, this is a great, great tool. This is where we, what we need and kind of like became the standard orchestrator more or less for when it comes to managing containers. And we even have a service in Azure called Azure Kubernetes service where you don't need to set up the whole orchestration. You don't need to set up your whole Kubernetes clusters. We do that for you as a service and then you can go out and employ your containers on top of that. Okay. So, so I can run containers in Azure then and I can use the Kubernetes service as a service to help manage that. Sweet. Correct. Correct. So what you can do again, as I said, like to run containers in Azure, there are multiple ways of doing that Kubernetes or our Azure Kubernetes service is just one of them, right? So that that is probably like if you run a lot of containers and you want to take advantage of the Kubernetes orchestrator, this is one way. We also allow you to, for example, containerize your web applications and then run them in Azure web apps, for example. Like there's also container support for that. We also have something called Azure container instances where you just spin up a container instance without like taking care of all the Kubernetes stuff around it and all that good stuff. So we have a couple of different container services depending on where you go and what the customers needs are. Now, what I want to show you though is like for us, interesting is how do I get existing applications, for example, into Azure, right? I said like, okay, if I'm an admin, I would actually need to go out and build these container images. I would need to write these Docker files and so on. But again, we want to make it easy for customers to spin this up. So if you could have a look at this slide, what I want to show you here is this is, for example, what we can do and I will show, I will go show you a demo directly after this. But what we're going to show you is like how you take, for example, an existing .NET application and then you, we built for you the container image. We store it in a container registry. So this is like a central place where you would put all your container images and then from there we can then actually go out and deploying it on Azure Kubernetes search. And again, instead of you setting up all of that, we have a tool to actually, which can actually help you doing that, doing the whole containerization part and so on. So if I switch, if I quickly switch to my demo here, this is my super ASP.NET app. You can see I took all my web design skills basically to get that done. But this is actually running locally on one of my web servers here, right? So this is like on a normal, it's a virtual machine, installed IAS on it. And this is my web app. Thomas, that is not ready for the public domain to be fair. So that's probably the best, that's the best place for this. I don't, I don't agree with that. I want to have that in the public domain.  Again, I put so much effort into it. I want to migrate that to actually to AKS and run it in Azure. So I can actually scale it out because a lot of people definitely want to see that website, right? I mean, people have been asking for this. I mean, they have. They have. Trust me. Trust me. They want to have my Thomas Super ASP.NET web app. That's what they want. And yeah, I want to take advantage of all this stuff we have in Azure. So I want to run obviously and be able to scale it, to have a local answer in front of it, to make sure that all the people are looking at this website or can actually get a piece of that website and it doesn't go down. So let's see how we can actually go out and migrate that. And for that, I already prepared what we call our Azure Migrate App Containerization Tool. And this is currently as we record this in preview, but it's a pretty cool tool. It's kind of like the Azure Migrate Tool for, for virtual machines and databases. So what I did already is it's basically just let me download the script and it sets up this mini appliance here I have here on my screen, right? And from here, I just go through that wizard and I want to show you quickly how easy that is. This is really, really cool stuff because even if you're not familiar with building these containers and stuff like that, this can be super easy. So first of all, currently in this preview, we support ASP.NET web apps and Java web apps on Tomcat. So in my case, as we saw before, this is ASP.NET web app. And then as I mentioned, in our case, we obviously want to deploy this to our Azure Kubernetes service. But as I also said before, we can also do that and deploy it on Azure App Service as well. So if I have, in most cases, I think if I just do a web app, Azure App Service is a great place, but I plan to in the future also deploy other containers on my Azure Kubernetes service. So I'm going to select that one. And then I have a couple of prerequisites. Obviously, I need to accept that this is preview software, the license terms. I obviously read them before just to be sure. It will check that I have internet connectivity to Azure that I have the latest updates. And we're going to use a feature which we have for a long time. So if you are a web administrator or like if you are dealing with IS, you're probably familiar with web deploy. So that is a tool we use in the background. So I can just verify if that's installed. Yes, I already prepared that. Good job. And I also want to see that, okay, PowerShell Remoting is actually enabled. That's good. Done that. And so the next thing I need to do is actually sign in to Azure because I want to obviously move that and do an Azure service. So what I can do here is just click on sign in enter the code and then quickly confirm to sign in. And now we can actually go out and select the tenant and my Azure subscription. I want to use and then continue. Next up, we obviously now need to actually go out and select the application. Now my application that just showed you is running on a web server called Web01. And I'm just using the administrator account to get to this account, to that server. And then I do validation. Click on continue. That works. And now that tool like this, this migration tool goes out and actually discovers the application, the web apps running on IS on that specific server. So you can see here, I deployed two apps to two applications. I obviously in my case, I want like it's currently running in default as default website. And I can then go out and do, for example, some additional application configurations. I will just talk about this in just a bit. But let's call this one Tom's web app. So this is the container name as I showed you before instead of having that long windows container name, it will be just my web app, which will be deployed. And then again, I can do some app configurations. Now think about if you have a web app, which for example has a database in the background, right? You have a connection string. So that we would actually see that. And then we would actually take that configuration string and make sure that that actually then works with the database you're using. So if the database is running in Azure or if it's running somewhere else, we can configure that as well. And now we're going to actually build this. So I have a container registry. This is again, is the central place where I'm going to store my container image. And this is basically the container image I'm going to create from that specific app. I can then have, for example, if I look at the review at the Docker file, this is now the Docker file, which I would have to read to written by myself if I want to do the same thing. But the tool does all of that for me. So I decided, okay, which version of ASP.net do I need? And then, for example, also do copy the application and then also do some other stuff as well and also say, okay, which port, for example, should be exposed for that container. So now let's just build that image. And this image, the great thing about this, and this will take some time, by the way, this will be now built in the Azure container registry, right? So usually you can build a container image directly on your machine, but if you're doing this high performance task, if you have really large container images, for example, at one point, because they're very complex applications, we're doing this in that case. We're uploading all that and to process that in the Azure container registry. So that is where now the container gets built basically. I mean, it's actually very simple. It is, right? That is like, this is what the tool is all about. I mean, you could hear that in my voice, right? You could hear, I was like, oh, you know, it's not actually that complicated. No, no. Yeah, like, you know, and this is, it's simplifying it to a point where actually it's a few clicks. So, you know, that's brilliant. Absolutely, no. And again, it shouldn't be like really complicated, right? It's like, okay, I want to take that app. And maybe I don't even, again, if I'm not a developer or if I don't even know what, like, where is the code for that app? Where is the installer for this app? I don't have that, right? It's probably installed. It's just, everyone knows it's running on that machine. The people who are installed that app, they're long gone. But I want to containerize this and make it like running somewhere else and modernizing it using that, right? I want to like, this means like one server less in my environment. And with that wizard, with that migration tool, I can actually take advantage of this, modernizing it and directly put it into the cloud. And again, you wrote up a point before where you said, hey, the public is not ready to see that website. AKS can also be like deployed in Azure, but I can also just deploy it internally, right? Without having a public IP address and stuff like that. So it can still be used in an enterprise environment where you don't want to have public access. If it's like the expense website, you probably don't want to make that available to everyone outside in some cases. So you can take advantage of that as well. Cool. Excellent. While we are actually waiting for this, just one thing I want to show you more is we can obviously have a look in that build process as well. So we get that information. We can see actually what's going on. And if you have a look here, you can see here, it downloads the container base image and then adds these different layers on top of it. This is actually what the Docker file and we just saw does. And then it runs through and we get all these logs to see what's happening. So we could also see if something breaks or something like that, we could also see why is that. That's pretty cool. Excellent. Okay. So like whilst that's happening, Thomas, where can I go learn about containers? Where's the, you know, you know, how am I going to learn about all of these containers? So obviously, like my number one place is definitely Microsoft Docs, right? There are like, we have documentations for Windows containers. We also have documentations or how you actually then interact with Docker and all the things I showed you before to actually work through this. But then we also have documentation for all the container services we have in Azure, including the Azure Kubernetes service to make sure that you can see how that works. We also have now documentation for that migration tool as well. So you can go and like see all the options you have. And again, as I usually do, I make it look very simple, but obviously you can, like there is obviously all the time when you are in production environments, there are a couple of more things you need to take care of and recover that with the documentation. The other part where I recommend, if you want to learn about containers on Microsoft Learn, which is our free learning platform, we have a lot of different container tools or learning modules available for you. So you can actually go through and learn about containers without having an Azure subscription, without needing to go for credit card or anything. You can just go out and learn there. And even though you're just watching this and you're saying, I don't want to learn about containers, there are also a ton of other learn modules out there to learn about other technologies for Microsoft. So just go out to Microsoft.com slash learn. It's absolutely a great place to get started. I couldn't agree with you more. MS Learn is an amazing resource. So yeah, absolutely big advocate of that. So that's brilliant. Thomas, is it a success? Yep, it is. It is. Absolutely. So what we now have done basically is built that container image and it's now stored on the container registry. So if I hit continue, the next thing I want to do is obviously deploy that. And so again, I could choose my Azure subscription and then I could choose my Azure Kubernetes cluster, which I already run in Azure. If you don't have one, for all the steps, you could just go out and create it directly from here. And then it actually goes through, if again, if I had some secrets and certificates which need to be stored, I could also configure that. Since I made it very simple, I don't have that. I can also have, like if I have containers which need shared storage, it will also automatically configure Azure files for me because again, containers usually are not persistent. So we need to have some shared storage, for example. And then I can actually go out, I can delete the last configuration of the deployment. So if I go ahead to configure, you can see here what should be the prefix of the application, which network ports are done on the web. And then here, interestingly, this one I mentioned is, I could now create multiple replicas. So because this is a very important application, obviously, I hit their 10 replicas and they want to put them behind a external local answer. So this will be a public IP address assigned. I could also do it if it's just the internal application, I can just select internal. We're going to apply that. And then last but not least, I could actually just go and continue. And then it will ask me again, if I want to deploy the application and to deploy that, I could just hit deploy and it goes out and does that all for me. And so that is how easy it is actually, not just migrating the application to the cloud, but also in the same time, going from an application running on a server, which could be physical or a virtual machine to a container. Wow. Okay. Mind blown. Thank you, Thomas. Wow. Thomas, that was amazing. Like learning about containers and Kubernetes, all of that good stuff. Amazing. As always. Thank you, sir. So we're now heading over, is that fun part? The science part is done and we're on the fun part. And so it's a meme review time. So this is as always where I look a little bit silly, generally speaking, my expert looks quite smugly at me and knows what the meme means. And I have no understanding of what the meme means. But if you've got a meme, you want to send it over, share it with us, comment on the memes that we're showing. Please do join the conversation. So, right, meme one. Let's see what the producers have done today to make me look silly. Firewall. It doesn't mean hide inside a server room during a fire. Thomas, what is that saying to you? It makes a lot of sense to me. So yeah, I highly recommend not staying inside if there is a fire. However though, I mean, what I've seen, there's also physical firewalls which actually protects the server room from fire. So, who knows? Yeah. That's very nice. And also great advice. Don't get burned by a fire. So, you know, solid meaning there. Definitely learned something new here. Well, I don't know if that's new, but it's obvious. And if you haven't learned it, then you should have. So, right, okay. So let's have a look at the second meme. Right. And that's Dr. Evil, I think. So, I think, is he taking the mickey? I think he might be. What are you seeing in that one, Thomas? I guess it's like, there are quite some outages caused by power supplies in the world because power supplies fails. And there is usually a lot of, like, Windows who have different classes of power supplies available and they pretend like they cannot fail, they fail safe. And at the end, we all learn they still fail, right? Yeah. Yeah. Everything fails at some point in time. So, you know, right? Thanks, Dr. Evil. And thank you. I think Dr. Evil is possibly one of the producers. So thanks. Thanks, Dr. Evil. Right. Okay. So let's just summarize what we've learned today. And let's, you know, let's talk about kind of all those little things that we've learned. So, you know, as always, you know, I made a few notes. So, number one, containers are the evolution of VMs. They're kind of like, if you were to give, you know, VMs like steroids and beef them up and get them to do everything you need to do, that's kind of what containers are, right? So they're 40% smaller and typically speaking, 30% faster. So this is what, well, just to compare from Windows containers with 2022 versus Windows containers with 2019, right? We're not speaking like in terms of VMs, it's probably like even, even crazier, right? But the thing is just between different versions of Windows Server 2019 containers versus Windows Server 2022 containers. Perfect. Going by Windows Server 2022. And you can be 40% smaller and 30% faster. Love that. And you need to, when you're thinking about using containers, it's smart to build in layers. So, layers will give you that efficiency of containerization so that you get the most out of your environments. Yes, exactly. And you need to definitely think of like, the reason why I brought this up here is like, when we talk about, again, when we come, when we tell people what containers are, we compare it to VMs, right? And the VM, most of the time what we see is actually, okay, you build one image, you build that out. And then maybe you go into the VM and you install software, right? This is not how you do it with the container part. You could, you could do it that way in some cases, but you don't get then all the benefits of having that. And so by creating it as infrastructure as code, basically by writing a Docker file, if you do like, do other things there's even more to do, if you do multiple of these applications together. But yeah, then you get the benefits, get the most out of it. Absolutely. Cool. So, look, Thomas, as always, thank you so, so much for today's episode. Thank you for teaching us things that we didn't know and explaining things that we thought we knew, but actually, you know, it's even better with the latest version of Windows Server. So, but we always appreciate it. Thank you all for listening. Thank you all for watching. This has been from the Rock to the Cloud.  And drop us your thoughts and comments. And as always, keep it classy, San Diego, right? Thanks a lot. Cheers. Bye.


I think whenever it comes to appeal plays most of the confusion comes into play not so much on the batter who is called out on the appeal, but what to do with the other runners who may have been on base at the time. So the rule takes this into account and it has an additional rule to specifically explain what to do with these. This is dealing with other runners during an appeal. And so rule is broken up into three parts and so the first part states that it talks about if there are less than two outs. So this is less two or out. Then the status of a following runner is not affected by a preceding runner's failure to touch a base. So the status of a following or preceding runner's failure to touch or retouch if they have to retrace their steps and go back to a previous base base. So that is the first part there. So basically there is no effect to that runner in that situation. So the second part then says that if the appeal results in a third out then no runners following him are permitted to score. So if on the appeal the preceding runner is the third out, not ending in a no runners following him. So basically it's really just like that the runner was put out at that base during the play and that he would be the third out. And then it goes a step further and further clarifies that if the appeal play then was a force out, then the preceding runners are not permitted to score either. So if the third out was the result of a force play, neither preceding runners may score. So this basically just reiterates the rule about the third out and the ending being forced out. So maybe we have a runner on third and we have our batter here and maybe a couple of fielders. And so if there are two outs in this situation and this batter were to hit a ground ball through the second baseman and he would field it cleanly and throw the batter out at third base. Even if this runner on third base reaches home and steps on home plate before this third out is made, then his run would not count because it is a force out. And so basically this rule here is just stating that the same thing applies on an appeal play. And so this sometimes would come into play then when we have that quote unquote the fourth out in the ending that we looked at in that other video. So hopefully that clears up some of the confusion about what to do with other runners during an appeal play.


Okay, so we'll move on then to the final presentation and it's a community update from Mahayla Stan and Catherine back over to you. Hello Mahayla. Hello, hi. Good evening, everyone. I am Mahayla Stan. I am the Community Development Officer for North Star Phase 1. And I will start my update with the occupation counts. This is as of 25th of February. For Phase 1, we had 1004 dwellings, Phase 2, 4, and this would bring the total for North Star new build to 1006. So overall total including grant on drift would be 1105. Another thing I would like to mention, it's the very exciting North Star Day. Catherine and I are supporting the community groups to prepare the celebration of North Star Day. On May 11th of May, we will be celebrating five years since the first resident moved into North Star. And in anticipation of that, the community are preparing a series of fun and interactive events on Saturday, the 7th of May. And also on the green of fashion exhibition of the secondary college sports events on the Western Park, food vans, and much more. Please get in touch with Catherine and I if you have an idea of a project or if you'd like to support the community groups in preparing for the event. Another exciting project which I would like to mention is the community food pantry, which sustainable North Star have worked very hard to deliver. I have noticed a shelf with food at the community wing, which volunteers are constantly replenishing, and there are also plans for a fridge to be introduced to. I've got an update from Smart Journeys as well. They are, you might have seen shared on Facebook, on a few Facebook pages today, and there will be a link in the chat as well regarding North Star Travel and Transport Survey. This is live and will be closing at midnight on Sunday 27th of March. This is an opportunity to have your say on how you commute for work or for leisure. Smart Journeys would be very grateful if you could take a few minutes of your time to complete a survey online. And there is also a chance to win 50 pound high street voucher. And another update also from Smart Journeys is regarding their North Star Travel plan steering meeting which this is an event that brings residents together to improve sustainable travel choices. It will take place on Tuesday 26th of April from 70 late at North Star. There will be more details will follow very soon. And the last update for me would be regarding a question we received in relation to North Star Phase One community or chart. So the question was what is the current status of the North Star Phase One community or chart. In relation to this, North Star Horticultural Association are looking into sourcing trees for the allotment. Unfortunately they were unsuccessful with their application for the Thatcher's Tree Giveaway. So I'm now looking at alternative options. And then our chart project will be taking orders from June. So the North Star Horticultural Association will be contacting them regarding the bear root trees they can supply. And that's all from me. Thank you very much. Thank you, Mahayla. So is Catherine contributing or is yes. I'm here. Hello, good evening everybody. So just touching on a few other fantastic community stuff that's going on just to update you. A fantastic legacy competition is about to be launched about naming the three lakes. It's a fantastic opportunity for the community to engage, interact in having their say in naming the lakes. There will be three themes. They are all to be confirmed. And this is an idea that's actually come from the community and so on as well. The details of that will be in the North Star News in the next edition and that will be running after Easter. I understand as well the schools will also be involved with that as well from the end of this week. So this is sort of the first official soft launch of that. So please do keep your eyes open on social media and the North Star News in relation to that. And if you're on social media or have any queries, please, that's our email address. Please do contact us. We're also really keen to really follow in the article in the North Star News, the most recent one. Just sort of reiterate and put a shout out really to the community about volunteers. Everyone knows if and if you don't, I'm going to tell you now wonderful benefits of volunteering. It's fantastic for your well-being. You get to meet lots of like-minded people in your own community, make new friends, and it's just generally good for your soul. We've got so many fantastic community groups that will be displaying and showcasing what they do and so on at the North Star Day event on the 7th of May. But we really would like you whilst we've brought your attention just to have a think about whether there's even an hour, few hours you can dedicate to groups to help them support the community in turn. There's some fantastic opportunities that we're looking for volunteers to help run the pioneer calf. There's a new youth activity happening as well. The community groups and societies are hoping to have some help with people with digital skills, websites, general admin, the community larder, the community pantry, they're also looking for volunteers. So if you would like any more information in relation to that, please do drop us an email or pop into the community ring on a Wednesday. So please do get in touch. Last point I will mention in brief is there's a social prescriber and called Pekka, who works with both the GP practices and his role is really to support people, engage, interact and GPs and consign posts to a social prescriber to really, really help out. And we understand from the social prescriber and he's got one person on his books for North Star. He will actually be at the North Star Day event, explaining if you wanted to have a chair you can self prescribe yourself to him, go through the GP, or just contact us and we can put you in touch with him. So that was really just our points for the community update. So thank you chair, I will end my video. Thank you. Okay. Thank you, Catherine. Thank you, Mahayla. I think that there's one question, what time is the North Star Day running from, I don't know if that's being answered directly. I don't know if anybody can just. I'm happy. Yeah. There will be various activities throughout the day we are still discussing with them with all the community groups, when each event will be taking place. So, once we have the program then we will make it public and we will let everybody know. Okay, thank you. Does anyone else have questions for Mahayla or Catherine. Okay, now.


This article was authored by Changshan Wang, Siki Wu, Zhao Qingli, and others.


Well, hello. My name is Sebastian König. I am from a small studio in Leipzig called BlendFX and as the name suggests we started out to do visual effects and exciting stuff and From time to time we do that so we get the chance to work on some interesting projects But most of the time we do this Well, not all of us, but we have a small team here that that works mainly on doors and Whenever someone asked me what what do we do and I say we render doors I get this reaction and I can understand But there is an amazing universe of doors that you would never have dreamed of and this is what I'm going to talk about today the Multiverse of madness a glimpse into the abyss Because it's really deep But I will only be able to touch the surf to scratch the surface so there's there will be more but I cannot talk about anything and Yeah, I want to first talk about how that happened a little bit of the history and disclaimer This is totally subjective. So the timelines maybe don't Are exactly the way it happened but like It feels like it happened that way so in 2015 I got an email from dinature, which means your door which is an online shop for doors and You can you can go there and configure your own door with a texture and the model and whatever you like and then they will order it and ship it to you and They started out as a reseller for Wooden doors or must he falls to an solid wood doors And of course, it's impossible to to build every door With every type of wood and every texture. So they only have had the Schematics of it and then needed someone to to render them for for them So they asked me and I was happy to be able to put my blender skills to good use and build a door But of course, it's not just one door. It's like they have 120 models of doors So that's not even all of them and of course, they have different types of wood. So there's oak and oak in with with oil Waxed oak stuff like that. So It's a lot. So this is just one model in all the different combinations So they they had roughly at the beginning 120 models With 13 textures. So 13 types of wood and nine different materials and If you do the math, that's 14,000 different renderings, which is quite a lot but So this is a Like this is a 24 frame animation and every frame has One two three four, I don't know how many different types of doors So this is just the first job I did with all the different combinations of material and texture, but They wanted to have 360 degree animation on the website so that people can see how the light reacts to the to the wood So to to see it from all sides. So that's a little bit more. That's now 363,000 different combinations or renderings And I didn't want to do that by hand and I'm not a developer. So I just googled for it and Luckily, I found in inside blender The the templates. So it's the the background job Dot py which you can use to render something in the background because you don't want to sit there and render doors all the time by hand so It works like this. So you you run like some kind of batch script from your console And this will open up blender and will at the same time put the background job Inside blender and then we'll do all the things that you need to be done So this is how it looks like this is the I called it the run script which runs blender. So you You have you give it the path to the executable to the blend file to your batch script And then you pass it to the to the system call and then it will run blender and inside blender You have another script, which is the the batch script now It starts with main. So when blender opens and sees there's a script it will run it Will go to the main function call Then pass all the arguments that you can use to configure your door and the run the render function and Eventually that will then render your door So the the good thing is that you can in the run you can have like Lists of models. So it's just a very condensed list. There's more of course, but for This presentation. I made it shorter. So you can go through all the models and for each model There's a texture for each texture. There's a material and then you pass it to the script and the arguments will then go into the Blender with the batch script and then you can do stuff with it like for instance change materials Put the door and the place you want it to be and and so on For me that was like amazing that you can do that and there's just two files for it You need the run and the and the batch And you go to your command line and run the script and it will render 300,000 doors for you. It took a while, but you don't have to stand beside it to wait for it So that was awesome and I thought mission accomplished job is done But then they came and they wanted more for instance They wanted to have like these close up to to better see the how the construction of the door to see the surface better So I used the same script to render like 14,000 versions of that And then of course there's the door frame or as we in Germany say the target So that thing where you put the door inside and again like a couple of thousand combinations so I was copying this batch script all over the place to to render all these things and Then they they told me that they need a naming convention to be able to to upload these doors and their online configurator So they wanted to have product IDs in the in the name. So when I was rendering the doors It looked like that. So I have the the model then the type of texture and material and the material again And inside that folder then is is the image and then you can they want to upload that so I had to write a script Where I can translate the the models and the wood type and the surface to a product key And put that in the in the folder name and that again that like I'm not a developer. So Tried my best to to write a script that will then copy and rename the stuff So that they end up with this So it's just a folder and then you have the product ID and then they can give it to their online system that will upload the the files So the script folder grew and was getting more complicated, but I mean, that's not bad unless There's more doors Like not just a new door, but a new reseller. So this is a door from Dynature and this is Completely different type of door from a different reseller and there's another one and another manufacturer. They built totally different doors But yeah, the the world needs doors apparently and Yeah, and they the each each manufacturer had their own thing So at some point they came up and said look we want to have a cross textures So textures where the wood goes not straight like this But like that way but then we have the the the glass frames and it looks silly if the texture also goes That way so I had to find a way to to have one texture that goes going across and one that goes in in that direction So that it looks a little bit better So yeah, okay, so if the the the cross texture it goes like this And you have you have to copy the image make it a straight line So you can make it go along with the UV's in that direction. I mean, it's all not bad, but it kind of adds up And then the the question is how do you separate that so we use the path index So if the door if the object has a path index one you use the the cross texture and for all the objects that have the path index to you use a different texture and That works unless there's another reseller that will Produce totally different doors Yeah, so at some point they wanted to expand the the online Presence or the what you see on the website Because many or many shops and many door manufacturers, they have like these kinds of images It's just like a flat door slapped onto some environment And ideally in CMYK, of course so Because we have the doors in 3d we can put them in a 3d scene, so I started to to try to find an environment that shows off the door in different Combinations and I have iterated until I had something that looked Like this so it just have two doors one of them is open so you can see the light a little bit better Yeah So yeah, and then another one like for the for the white fancy doors Then you have to find an angle where you see the door where it's not obstructed by something But it still looks good. You see inside or outside So there are a few iterations until you get to the desired result and Now I want to briefly show you how this looks like in blender so this is the One of the environment files Everything is linked from an asset folder. Of course, we make use of the agent 3 2 7 Assets on the the blender assets So yeah, so everything is an empty or a collection linked into into the scene And then you can arrange that with different view layers and scenes. So there's a base scene where everything is like put up to to Configure and then there's another scene where you put the cameras and you You put the actual doors inside and to be able to do that all the empties that will then Get the collection have to follow a certain naming structure a certain parenting type So you have a hinge so you can rotate the door and Yeah, so that way you can configure a scene and then with Python you open up this File in the background you link in the door You configure the texture and the material and then and at some point you will have a Door or an environment with a door now, of course, it would be would take quite a while to render the entire thing 14,000 times so we used a hold out where you just have the door With a little bit of space around so you get the lighting and everything and then render that Put into the compositor where we have like the pre-rendered environment. We can just Put the render door on top of that. So here's the compositor So that's the blank environment and then you have the the two doors rendered and then it will just be combined And then in the end you have your finished render Okay, so I'm gonna skip this come on So in each each of these environments has different views So there's the the main view with we see a several doors then there's the front view Often with the door open. There's another view from the side then a close-up where you can look through the door So in the end you have like collection of images that will represent the door So there's the the environments. There's the front view. There's a close-up of the the handle Thing I don't know the name in German in English Yeah But then there's the variance of the doors. So you have the normal door With a handle, but then there's a wing door Like like that and then there's a door with different hinges and different handle and then there's a door with a Opener and then there's an entrance door and for the entrance door you need of course a different environment again and There's the sliding doors Which is like the end boss of all doors because usually you have the handle and We have the the keyhole like with the bull which is all fine But then if you swap that with the handle, of course, okay now you have to put a bull inside that To cut out the space for the for the sliding door handle I do want to show you how that works in blender because all that is again configured per python so there's the the the base collection with the hinges and the handle and then there's the the the actual door So This is the the object that is selected is the the door and you have a Bull which you can toggle the the the states through python so you can swap the kind of Handle type and if there's a bull or not, but then a sliding door doesn't have this This thing a sliding door at least in Germany I realized that here most doors just have a flat side Sliding doors have that too. So now we have the the main part of the door Which has a different kind of edge so that's why we used The all the cutouts for the glasses are also bull objects that again can be configured per python from from the command line So, yeah, that's That kind of adds up to the complexity of things so The thing is that we developed these workflows also while we were Working for one manufacturer and in the meantime the other manufacturer also came up with sliding doors So we have to put all these different workflows and configurations into the other resellers So it's like you you build up one and then you swap to the next and then they also want cross textures And so on It's going to be a lot of whining today in this talk I'll try to go to the next slide, which is apparently not possible for some reason Hello Okay. All right. So so far so good, but then you want to do that inside of the Environment as well. Well, no problem unless you link in all the files because Then you have like the one is the sliding door the other one is the normal door But lo and behold Because everything is linked and configured through python now the this door has the bull cutout as well Right, so you go back to your file and then you Create Like a small patch that if you if you render a sliding door But if you also are in environment and if this environment also has a normal door, then you will put a Cover up onto that place Yeah Well steel doors should be simpler, right? Well, no because there's all these combinations as well And of course you want to see them in the in an environment too So you have to come up with a script that will also like configure the cutout of the off the wall and put the doors where they belong so scripting and It's getting it's starting to get complex especially because now there is so many different files in my script folder It was I don't know it was time for a team upgrade So we got more people like claimants who's also here. He's like the mean in the meantime He's become the backbone of the of the doors Jonas was was a while with us. He was scripting a lot Zilke who's also here is Together with claimants like core team Micha was briefly with us and now we have like four different people working on doors So we need a project manager. So there's just five people who were employed just for doors Yeah, so well in the beginning you've seen that that I've done all this with little lists in the Python script Well, that's complicated unless you find out that you can use Open pixel because then you can use an Excel file or as we say in Germany an Excel file So you can just have the Excel file the spreadsheet open up that with with your script Import the open pixel library and then you will just go through all the different Rows and it will then configure your door, which is like wow. How did we not do that all these years? but now we have these enormous spreadsheets and There there are conventions so no oom louts no spaces everything has to be very very Excuse me very strict and you have to communicate that to to the guys from dinoteur because there we have the people like responsible to to creating these spreadsheets and then putting in the the images and the text and all that stuff so Communication and again like and again and again. We have to tell them. Please. No oom louts. Don't use the the spaces in between Yeah Speaking of order The at some point they decided now we have all these different resellers that do white doors Wouldn't it be nice if we have all these white doors in one place? Yeah, but then we realized okay now because we adjusted the lighting for each manufacturer to make it look really nice Now the the white the shades of white are not quite as even So they wanted us to unify that So we have to go to all these different Brands and folders from the doors and make and unify them And now we wanted to unify the script as well So luckily Jonas and Clemens Formed a team and they worked on something we called scripture So we have just one script to To rule them all Well, of course, it was not just one script it was like like a system So you have a batch script that will then call the batch But then you have to manage the infos and all that stuff you have to configure the pile the file path Where is the environment? Where's the door? Where's the texture? Put all that in a script and then load that in blender At that point, I didn't really understand what they were doing, but it was amazing Of course for that to work you have to be very strict with your folder structure. Otherwise it's chaos Well, they they they continued to come up with more doors front doors in this case Because there's like as many front doors as there are indoor doors They are all beautiful but They have to be an environment too. So we built these Environments to put the door in Front doors are a little bit more complex So the hinges look different. There's a certain locking mechanisms and all these stuff So, of course, we needed the information like how how does it actually look like? I mean we cannot just use one Black and white image from the front to to build that we need more information But often that that was hard to get from the manufacturers Not always many of our many are very helpful and give us DXF files and references and all that stuff But the point is like often it's really hard to get the information you need to build something in detail Well, then okay, they have a 360 view of that as well And they wanted to change the color from the front and the backside. So now we need to find a way how to how to differentiate that and how to assign the The colors so this is just a small Overview of the how a front door blend file looks like so that's all the different paths in DC's And because you lose track and don't know which pass index was assigned to which object We built a script like a pass debugger. So when you run that Depending on the pass index the the object color of the open GL object will be then colored So we know if something is not green from the front Then the pass index is missing or wrong So Yeah, that's the the door to a script because things get complicated. So there's all these helpers that let you assign a material For a door or a hinge or whatever you want So, yeah, the complexity Was growing then there's so many collections So we needed script to to cycle through the collections without clicking in the outliner always because there's so many doors like the Front or the term will save one seventy seven the five or one five or two 504 and all these all these doors with all these numbers is like super weird so We kind of had a hard time to keep track of that and communicate all that with the guys from dining tour like which Exact model are we now talking about is the five or four or the five or five Which one has the glass thing which doesn't? It's it's a lot Yeah, that's the the different view layers So the main model is in the is in the blend file, but there's all to the views that we can use to to render them like the detailed view from the with the cutouts and Then I'm gonna skip this now because time is getting short so That's front doors Wait, there's floor and more because when you have a pipeline that can render doors Why not use a pipeline to to render floors? So they started to sell floors now. All right Now floors they they have these different patterns how how the the planks are getting laid out So we had to script that as well put that in the environment Do all that stuff luckily we could reuse the environments So this is one of the door environments, but it looks different because we just inverted the camera like mirror along the X axis So everything looks totally different Again with the h and three to seven images on the wall Yeah, that's the script that lets us Put the planks in the right order and if you have Wooden floors you can have tiles as well. So yeah tiles in this case we used Evie but Evie is Difficult because they're so easy to lose your baked lighting So in the end we were happy to switch back to the cycles because it renders faster, but it's easier to handle You need something to put on your floor like a floor mat so And imagine like this is not just one image like there's thousands of different sizes of these floor mats So it got all a lot That's all the manufacturers that we are in the meantime now dealing with and each manufacturer has these different kinds of doors like the The line which line of product you want to render. So each manufacturer has that many lines That will have different doors inside. So it was time for another upgrade Scripture 2.0 and We were very lucky to have Simon Lenz who went to an internship for us at us And he helped us to to rewrite everything So now we have a GUI so we can open that we can pick the manufacturer we pick the the Excel file which renders script and was very automatic and was lifesaver He also Made us use classes because that list that's all the different door types the indoor doors the steel doors The sliding doors wet room doors The sliding wet room doors the slidel sliding winged doors. I spare you the rest and then he made a very clever system where you can put all the information about the job that you're rendering into one class and then you pickle the class and then you put that inside some Thing which will then be loaded in blender and I don't really understand how it works anymore But it works and it's amazing So now our photos look like that. It's just the The textures the doors and there's one render script which we can adjust It's just a few lines and everything else will be configured by Scripture at the moment. We are working on a script to a 3.0 which will follow the Object-oriented Thing so nothing is linked anymore every door is unique So no more bullying a sliding door a cut out from an indoor door and so on So thank you Zemon for that. He's not here But thank you again and thank you Clemens. He is really amazing Thank you Zilke to you do amazing work and Thanks to Dynature as well for the trust and patience and the collaborations because we do that since eight years now And it's a rare really friendly Collaboration it's it's great. It's a lot of fun Sometimes, but it's good. It's a good collaboration. Let's say that and also thanks for the money oh wait Numbers so we have one million and almost four hundred thousand dollars that we have rendered now There is thirteen thousand floors probably as many o's as well and 2626,000 tiles and probably more So and I think there's a lesson to be learned from all this stuff And my point is always there is an industry outside the industry So nothing not not everything has to be Hollywood and stuff There's many many small companies who have can make a living with smaller Projects that are not as visible anymore, but there's money to be made outside the industry Thank you. Also Create your own pipeline. So we when we started this it I stumbled into that I didn't know about pipelines and scripting but if you just continue to to try to figure out your your Stuff that you have to do then at the end you will end up with a pipeline that is really tailored to you so do it yourself and don't trust the some Reconfigured things that you might find online. Sometimes it's better to to do your own Also build a good relationship with your client. That's really essential. I think because this would not work If we wouldn't have a good relationship with dinature. So we have weekly meetings where we Talk about the things we have to do our plans their plans and it's over the eight years It's has developed into a really friendly Kind of work, which is very nice and also learn Python. It's it's really helpful. It's the most versatile tool in blender and that's it. Thank you


And we are live. What's up guys? Welcome back to another episode. I got an exciting guest for you today I got Anne Connelly, which is the network lead with Ixo. Ixo is really interesting That's why I got her on the show and plus she's from Toronto as well. So local Torontonian She's also the faculty at Singularity University and is on the board of Blockchain Canada and how you been? I've been great. Thanks so much for having me on today. It's my pleasure. You and I we actually had a Video before this but due to technical reasons. We couldn't actually show the video so basically we want to do this again and actually make it right and When you approached me, I think it was because we sat down at Defcon that was in September I believe but before that you approached me with Ixo and what you guys are trying to accomplish and do which is Something it's quite big actually. I won't lie. It is as massive what you're trying to do Which kind of got my attention It's quite different from what everyone else is trying to do and kind of like to start off this conversation with you first question I have for you is what is Ixo? I've lost you been there. It's alright. I think okay. You're back. Sorry I'm so to preface. I'm living in South Africa now. So our internet is so so yeah, so we I want to pause so She's in South Africa. I'm in Toronto. There is a leg So if you guys don't see our words and our mouths sink properly There is a massive latency issue with the internet connection Yeah, sorry about that But this is one of the most exciting things about being in South Africa is being at the heart of everything that we're working with with Ixo So essentially our passion is really solving some of the world's grandest challenges looking at issues like climate change And access to water and access to healthcare a lot of the issues that the UN is trying to tackle through their sustainable development goals And when we look at the problems that are tapping the space one of the biggest ones is a lack of access to trusted data So when you're looking at all these organizations all these people around the world trying to solve these problems They're very much going into it blind. They don't have the information They need to make reform decisions about their work and to actually optimize their work And so for us at Ixo we're creating a blockchain based protocol that enables organizations to create impact claims so you could claim that you taught a hundred kids or you planted 10 square kilometers of trees whatever it is as long as it's in the impact space and then that claim gets validated by evaluator Oh, either a human or a data source of some kind and then you have this verified impact claim that is essentially proof of impact It's proof that what you say you've achieved has actually happened And this is really exciting because the proof can open up access to social impact bonds impact investments Impacted economy that we've never seen before And the data that is collected as a part of these claims becomes a part of an open data comments A global impact ledger that organizations and researchers around the world can use to actually make the work They're doing more effective So let's talk about this for a second What are the major problems you see in the world today that you're trying to tackle? Yeah, so the main two issues really are a lack of funding for sustainable development initiatives And then a lack of effectiveness of those initiatives So when you look at this is Daniel development space in the funding side of things, there's a lot of fraud Which is an issue. I'm sure you've all seen it in the headlines and that kind of thing and so for impact investors for them to want to be switching their investments over from a Traditional investment vehicle into the impact space They have to have these evaluation mechanisms to be able to prove that what they're investing in is legitimate And the problem is those are very very expensive And so one of the things that we're tackling is looking at how you can use data to drive down the cost of that evaluation and make impact investing a much more attractive Investment vehicle for investors that are out there. So this is a massive market Right now. There's more than a trillion dollars that goes into the sustainable development space every year And if we can get more impact in the past minutes, it's upwards of 25 trillion And you're mentioning data like what what kind of initiative of plans you guys have to kind of track the data to confirm that data is legit Yeah, so we're looking at it from a couple of perspectives. I mean, we're we're using Data schemas to ensure the actual quality of the data is good But in terms of trying to determine what you know, whether the impact Is quality or not we leave that up to the users of the protocol We're very much an infrastructure operation where if you as an organization to look for us It's good enough if someone says they clean the beach and take a picture of it and that's good for you Then that's great for others. They may want to see, you know Have an IOT scale that connects the weight of all the garbage that was picked off the beach And then you have you know subsequent levels of funding that are given as a result So we really leave that up to the users who are building out on the protocol And can you kind of give us like a rundown of how would this would look like once it's launched like what like? Let's say you guys are up and running operational Would I be able to use a platform to help right away? So what you'd be able to do is to build out an application So a really good example of one is actually the first one we built out called Ampley And Ampley is looking at the early childhood development space in says Africa So in South Africa preschool isn't free costs a lot of money and most parents just can't afford it And so there's an incredible government subsidies for over 800,000 kids across the country but in order for these preschool teachers to actually access them They have to fill out attendance every day on paper and it's this insanely inefficient process And so what we've done is built out this application that enables them to take attendance through a mobile app It's very simple and very basic, but each attendance Will essentially create an impact claim that a child was taught And down the road what we hope is that these impact claims will enable them to access automatically these government subsidies So the government knows that they're legitimate and it makes a lot easier on the teachers So we're in 72 schools across the country more than 55,000 attendance records taken so far Which is very exciting. That's amazing. And then you guys anything else down the road map to start targeting We have a few exciting projects that are coming up in terms of concepts on the on the protocol I can't make any exciting announcements yet, but we're looking very much at Issues around climate change and environments are one of the projects. We're very excited in the area of cookstokes So in developing context a lot of people will cook and keep their homes with fire And this is bad both from an environmental perspective where you know They're burning trees cutting on forests, but also from a health perspective where they're breathing in all this party doesn't matter And so there's a lot of projects that are out there that will provide people with cookstokes These little mini stoves that they can use instead And that's great But from the perspective of saying impact investor who wants to know how many tons of carbon have I pulled out of the atmosphere because of these stoves Newly information they can really get is a stove was delivered or it wasn't you know and and with applications like With it's own protocol what you can end up doing is if you get say an IOT Enabled cook stove that can transmit data every time it's being used every time it's turned on or off and then Impact investors can know exactly how much carbon they've eliminated from the environment And they can have access then to carbon credits and health credits as a result of this So your major play-doh, too, is you're trying to evolve and integrate all these IOT technologies Within in South Africa We really want to try to take humans out of the process of Creation of the impact claims and evaluation of the claims as much as possible And this is for a couple of reasons first and foremost It enables you to get a higher quality and a higher volume of data. We call it high resolution data So and and it also helps eliminate fraud in this process And so as much as you can try to incorporate data into things and it becomes a great feedback loop, too Right where you get this amount of data that then come back and help with the evaluation of future in my plans as well But you're also mentioned when you and I were talking in Mexico that It's a massive market for like impact bonds. I think they have them in the UK I think they have them in Canada, but like you said, it's very difficult to track So is that your main let's say target at the beginning focus is looking for investors for impact bonds Or can like say a regular person like say my father my mother over there kind of like you participate in this network Yeah, I think at the end of the day anyone can participate We want this to be a real community effort in terms of trying to solve some of these sustainable development goals Now in the early stages, we do want to target impact bonds because simply of your scale You know and you can get one set up And the amount of money and the amount of impact that you can have as a role as a result is enormous But as I said, you know, this is infrastructure We want everyone to build out on it and everyone to try to tackle some of the challenges They're most passionate about whatever those are What do you say are your biggest challenges right now? Biggest challenges. Oh my goodness You know when I look at all of them the challenges that UN has identified as being most critical of it bring just everything from gender equality to access to water It's a climate change. I think when I look at them all climate change is such a critical issue that spans The entire world and every person here So I think that's the one that we certainly need to take a really serious look at especially in the current political climate And have you guys been looking at it for at XO or that's like later down the road map We're definitely looking at doing some proof of concepts around Environment that we're all really passionate about and so we will have some announcements about that very soon.  Where are you guys in the road map? So we have been working on this is sort of in conception Our two founders Dr. Sean Conway and Lowen's piece have been thinking about it for about four years now Actually, their initial Conception of it was built out on ripple because if you're in didn't exist, you know And so this is how long we've been dreaming about this and and the idea has grown as the tech in the space has grown as well Now the full exit team has come together Earlier this year in about July and so that's been very exciting But we've got we're looking to have our MVP ruled out by Q1 up next year, which is really exciting and so we'll have a few more applications building there beautiful and So then he would say maybe you guys will be fully operational next year at some point Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we'll be looking to have we're gonna be launching a partnership program in the new year that looks to bring on new partners that want to be building out and having a greater impact and tracking their own impact using XO So we'll have more information on that Yeah, in the new year, but we're I mean this for us is very much a community initiative We want to be working with as many people as possible to see how we can help you Optimize your own impacts and really see the change in the world that you're trying to achieve Do you see in the future that if you're like say a foundation charity trying to make change and impact that? Obviously not through legislation Well, maybe to legislation because you are a tax exempt that if you're not using Certain technologies to be more transparent to actually track the data to show people exactly what's going on with their dollar that they put It in that they're pretty much be out of business That's that's really what I think and I think it's not even just about being able to track your dollar I think it's about what is your dollar achieving? How are you going about things? So there's really exciting work happening with UNICEF Innovation Fund who's one of our funders They've got projects where they're looking at how do you track the path of Ebola using cell phone tower data and Looking at the patterns of movement people on different days of the week based on markets and transfers and that kind of thing And so how can you predict where disease is going to be in the future? And so instead of just this reactionary style of Aid we're going to be seeing use of data playing a much much larger role And so that's why it's so important with the data that we're using is high quality high resolution and a hundred percent trustworthy That's amazing. I know when we're sitting down as well as bring back Mexico about You guys are planning to use a lot of a lot of oracles to cross for our friends the the validity of the data, right? Yeah, so we're working with a lot of partners to bring in their data sets particularly in the early stages We build up the volume of data that we have so again Looking at UNICEF. They have access to some data from Google and from telephonica and a few other sources So being able to leverage what we already have to make is as effective decisions as we possibly can now while we build up I'm much larger and to decentralize that a base of data Is what we're hoping to do so if people want to get involved with you or kind of figure out What XO is more or somehow just help you guys out. What's the best way they can get in contact with you? Absolutely check out our website xo.network and you can join our slack channel our telegram group and follow us on Twitter We're at at XO underscore foundation And you can also just shoot me an email and an XO foundation Awesome, and thank you so much for coming on show. I wish you guys all the best and I'll speak to you soon Thanks very much. Take care. Bye. Bye


And situated at a height of 1500 meters, the hill station of Shilong is the capital of Meghalaya. The first Khasi organization was founded in Shilong a century ago in 1899. The Sen Khasi was a cultural movement that sought to rekindle the pride of the Khasi nation. The Highland people subjugated both politically and culturally by the brute force of the European invader. My grandfather also was very much involved in Sen Khasi because he was a spirit behind it. Because he always wanted the culture also to remain. Because he had seen that it's eroding like that. And so when they started Sen Khasi, he was very much behind. And because of Sen Khasi, our culture, our dances, our discussing music and all, we were able to survive out there now. You see, otherwise we would have all done this long time ago. Though Sweety Mon Savyan leads a semi-retired life, this granddaughter of Khasi pioneer Babu Jibonroy is still an active participant in various social and intellectual efforts aimed at benefiting Shilong society. It was in the days of the Raj and in particular during the early years of the 20th century that the city of Shilong experienced its golden era. Many are building an institution of that era still survive, testimonies to the passage of history and to a forgotten pace of life. Under British rule, the political importance of this city in the colonial scheme of things ensured that people from different parts of eastern India made a beeline for Shilong. This is the nerve center of Shilong, the Barabaza. It is the women who traditionally formed the bulk of the shop owners in Barabaza as elsewhere in Meghalaya, a reminder of the matrilomial nature of Khasi society. These are the women of Shilong who run their business even as they do their homes and it is their name that their children take even as property and family responsibility pass from the mother to the daughter. In the days of the Raj, the city of Shilong was an important center of business and government and the multi-ethnic city of Shilong stems from the fact that when the rest of what today is northeastern India with wide wilderness Shilong was already an administrative center and the political capital of the composite stage of Asa. The city became home to people from all walks of life and even the royalty from neighboring kingdoms had set up their own palaces overlooking the Shilong of the commoners. No longer kings and princesses, some of them had stayed back even after the Union Jack had departed these shores. Though ensconced in their royal retreats, they are today very much a part of modern Shilong.


Ukraine will have right to strike with F-16s on legitimate targets in Russia, NATO chief. Ukrainian pilots of F-16 fighter jets will have the right to strike legitimate military targets in Russia, according to NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg. When asked when Ukraine would be able to deploy the F-16s, Stoltenberg said it was impossible to say. He confirmed that all of Ukraine's allies want the fighter jets to be in Ukraine as soon as possible, but noted that the effect of the F-16s will be stronger if the pilots are well trained and the crews and other support personnel are well prepared. So I think we have to listen to the military experts exactly when we will be ready to or when allies will be ready to start sending and delivering the F-16s. The sooner the better, he said, according to Stoltenberg, each ally will decide for itself whether to supply F-16s to Ukraine and the allies have different policies. But at the same time, the Secretary-General noted, the war in Ukraine is a war of aggression and Kiev has the right to self-defense, including strikes on legitimate Russian military targets outside Ukraine. Last August, the Netherlands and Denmark promised to provide Ukraine with 61 American made F-16 fighter jets. Recently it became known that the Netherlands planned to prepare six additional F-16s for Ukraine. Ukrainian pilots are being trained in Denmark and the United States. Earlier CNN reported that the first group of Ukrainian pilots consisting of four people will complete the F-16 training program by the summer of 2024.