I am going to be talking today about cross-sectional surveys at the UK Data Service, which tell us something about mental health. I'm going to talk a little bit about the variety of surveys that are available, talk about some of the analysis issues, present some examples of how they've been used and then say a little bit at the end about how you can access them. Okay, so in the UK Data Service, which we love, there are many, many different cross-sectional surveys. Now, there are a series of general health surveys, which are really useful if you want to look at sort of non-specific general mental health problems. So, for example, the Health Survey for England, which has been running since the early 1990s, includes the general health questionnaire, which is a very useful measure. Then it is really worth having a look at some of the attitudes on surveys. So, for example, which social attitudes and also the Scottish Social Attitudes Survey have included modules in various years that ask people questions about their attitudes towards people with different mental health conditions. They've also included modules which ask people about their attitudes towards therapy and treatment and things like that. Really interesting and worth a look. Also worth noting that many different surveys now include subjective well-being measures like the Warwick Edinburgh Measure and the O&S IV. So, that opens up a whole range of different studies if you're interested in more general well-being. Also have a look at something like the Crime Survey because they ask questions of victims, for example, victims of violence about how their experiences have affected their mental health. So, there's also different ways in like that. Now, my focus today is particularly on the specialist mental health surveys. Those are surveys that are focused primarily on mental health. Now, I'm particularly interested in the Psychiatric Mobility Survey series, but there's also another series that's available in UKDS called the NHS Community Mental Health Survey and that has been running for 20 years or so now. That's another resource. OK, so what this chart shows us is some of the different surveys that form part of the Psychiatric Mobility Survey series. It's a terrible name. You really should just be called the National Mental Health Survey. The ones in green at the top refer to the adult surveys, APMS, the Adult Psychiatric Mobility Survey and the ones in the bottom refer to the child surveys. That's the Mental Health of Children and Young People Survey. Now, these are general population surveys. That is, they include people with mental health problems and those without. So, we can look at prevalence and we can make comparisons. They also are carried out in home and they span different ages. So, the surveys at the top are from age 16 upwards. The earlier surveys were a younger age range, but from 2007 onwards, the whole adult age range and no upper age limit. I'm going to say a little bit about the child surveys, but I'm not going to focus on them so much. Just to say that if you are interested in child mental health, the website to go to is NHS Digital have a really good page on the Mental Health of Children and Young People Survey. It's a survey series that's run by ONS and the National Centre for Social Research. It's funded by the Department of Health and Social Care and it's really well managed and overseen by NHS Digital. So, it's a very close collaboration of a number of different organisations. Academic leadership has throughout the whole survey series really been provided by Tamsin Ford and also Tamsin New-Love Delgado. So, they know absolutely everything about the measures that are used and there's very detailed measures that are used and I recommend you have a read of this data resource profile in the International Journal of Epidemiology. Also to flag about the child surveys is that although the main face-to-face surveys were carried out in 1999, 2004, 2017, there have been a series of COVID follow-up surveys that have been carried out online and these have provided really, really useful insight into the pandemic and school closures in relation to child mental health. Now, my focus today is on the adult psychiatric mobility to survey series again. This is also funded by the Department of Health and Social Care and is commissioned overseen by NHS Digital now NHS England. First one was carried out in 1993 when the government realised we know very little about the prevalence, inequalities, treatment gap in relation to mental health and the design of this study was set up and the methods have remained remarkably consistent over time. Because the survey has been carried out every seven years or so, we can really look at change over time. It's repeated cross-sectional surveys so whilst the longitudinal studies you'll be hearing about in the other sessions today are really good for looking at causal inference at individual trajectories. These are the surveys that are really good if you want to look at change at the population level and at temporal trends. It's a household survey. Interview takes place in people's homes medium sort of size, around seven to eight thousand. The interview is really, really detailed. It takes on average about an hour and a half but it can go up to three hours. It's a two-phase interview so everybody's interviewed in the first wave but a sub-sample are followed up with very detailed different sorts of questions where the trained research interviewers are able to make judgments that are more clinically informed. It also assesses certain mental health conditions to diagnostic criteria. Diagnostic criteria are used by clinicians if they need to decide whether or not somebody meets the threshold for a particular mental health condition. That takes account of the range of symptoms that they're presenting with, the severity, the frequency, the impact that it has on their life. Now, this means that the assessments used are far more detailed. So, whereas on a lot of surveys we'll have perhaps a 12 or 10 item screening tool, number of the conditions that are assessed on the APMS series are going to much more detail. So, for example, when we're looking at anxiety disorders and depression, we use information collected in the clinical interview schedule revised. It comprises well over 130 questions. So it's much more detailed. It allows us to look at the presence of 14 different types of symptoms. So when you're analysing this data you might decide you're just interested in one of those symptoms and you could hone in specifically on that. We then apply algorithms to the data using those diagnostic manuals and that enables us to identify up to six different types of common mental disorders. So generalized anxiety disorder being a very common one as well as depression. We are able to look at any common mental disorder being present but we're also able to look at a general severity score. So that is the CISR score. We can look at it as a dimensional measure. You can also look at it by applying thresholds as well. So there's many different ways that analytically you can use this measure. Now, APMS data, as I said, isn't so good for causality but it is good if you want to look at some of these types of research questions. So first of all, population prevalence. What does it mean when we talk about the proportion of people with a mental health problem? So this paper, I really like this paper because it's incredibly simple analysis but it was kind of trying to highlight what it is that we're talking about when we talk about, for example, one in four of the population a commonly used term has a mental health problem. Now on the survey we look at some very specific severe mental illnesses. For example, using the survey we're able to identify about one in 100 in the population experienced a psychotic episode in the past year. So that would suggest a particular rarity. Now if we expand that definition to include those with a particularly high score in the CISR threshold to that scoring 18 or more, that's a group that we would really expect to need intervention of some sort, being talking therapy or possibly some sort of psychotropic medication. We would expect around one in 10 in the population to be having a mental health problem. Now if we expand that further to include those with milder symptoms, symptoms that may well be troubling for them but perhaps wouldn't necessarily warrant intervention, then we start to approach one in five. If we add in, for example, those who've got dependency, substance dependence disorders, we're a bigger group still and then the survey also allows us to identify people who may well have different sorts of neurodevelopmental disorders so attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. A short screening questionnaire for that as well, we can certainly reach one in four of the population. Another approach that we've used with the data is to take a latent class analysis approach that allows us to produce a population segmentation that looks at how these different conditions might overlap, identifies those who have multiple, those who have a few and that's another approach which you can apply using this particular dataset. Now this is possible because the survey covers such a wide range of different types of mental health problems, symptoms and conditions. So you could look at different aspects of substance dependence. You can look at very specific and quite rare disorders such as eating disorders and the exact problem gambling as well. Population prevalence is one thing you can look at. You can also look at because we have this repeated cross-sectional survey series. You can look at temporal trends, a change over time. Now in this particular paper, we used data from a number of the surveys to look at trends over time in self-harming behaviors. Now this is quite a useful example for us to talk about in terms of what you need to consider in your planning and analysis of this type. First thing to do is when you've downloaded the data from the UK Data Service website is to download the questionnaire and to download the information that is provided with it. This documentation is really key because it allows you to look at the exact question wording that was used each time. So you need to make sure that the question wording is consistent before you start to produce temporal trends. Another thing you can do is make sure that you are looking at the same people each time. So in 1993 the questions about self-harming was filtered and it was only asked of those reporting depressive ideas. Therefore we had to exclude that data when we were looking at temporal trends because we didn't have a comparable sample for the analysis that we wanted to do. The other thing is to look at the mode. So whilst on APMS we've used a consistent methodology over time, still there are subtle changes. So when looking at temporal trends I limited the analysis to where it was asked face to face because it had been asked face to face in every survey. But in more recent surveys it was also asked about in the self-completion. But I had to exclude that data when looking at temporal trends. So consider that you've got a consistent mode of data collection when you're constructing temporal trends like that. Geographical coverage also had to be considered because the earlier waves in the survey series were all of Britain whereas the later waves in the survey were England only. So when doing temporal trends I had to restrict the earlier waves just to the sample that was living in England at the time that the data was collected. Likewise age group has changed over time. The earlier survey only went up to age 64 so when looking at temporal trends I had to limit it to a comparable age group over time. So using this approach we're able to see that in fact the prevalence of self-harming behaviour has increased over time. Chart A here is men, chart B here is women. We see there's been an increase in both groups but the proportion of women reporting that they were using self-harming behaviours in order to cope mechanism that had changed particularly steeply over time. Okay another thing that the survey series was really really good for is looking at the treatment gaps. So if we rely on data from those in contact with health services then it doesn't tell us anything about those people not in contact with health services. Sorry that's my cat coming in. So when we were looking at the data we could see that of those people who reported having self-harmed around half said that they had not received either medical or psychological support for that and we saw no evidence of that gap improving over time and in fact certain groups were particularly unlikely to get either medical or psychological support after self-harm and that's people who were younger, it was men and it was those in debt. So there's a real sense of socio-economic and demographic inequalities in treatment access and the APMS data is ideal for looking at that. It's also really good if you want to do all sorts of subgroup trends, comparisons, looking at inequalities and looking at the context and circumstances for people experiencing difficulties of that kind. So this is a really lovely paper, I highly recommend produced by Gargi Ahmad who is based at King's and she used data from the 2007 and the 2014 surveys to look at inequalities in treatment access by ethnicity. However she was really held back by the fact that the surveys so far have had a relatively small number of participants from different ethnic groups simply because they were representative samples but in the next survey which is currently in the field this is the 2023 survey, it's going to be a full year of data collection then there will be some processing of the data but that data should be available come 2025 and it's going to be an absolute corker of a survey it has for the first time in its series a really substantial boost of different ethnic groups it's been funded by the Department of Health it's been a hard one so I'm very very grateful to the Department of Health for making this happen there's going to be translation into Urdu it's available for those participants who need it so the next survey really will be much better placed to look at variation by ethnicity and you'll be able to use the data to explore variation by ethnicity in a whole range of different outcomes these are some of the characteristics that are studied on the survey note also that as well as an ethnic boost there will also be over sampling of areas in more deprived neighbourhoods which means that we're really going to be much better placed for exploring things like the impact of debt context of poverty, housing conditions and other socio-economic circumstances just to flag a few uses of the data just for examples of different sorts of outputs that are possible this is a report that looked at those with intellectual impairment that's another group that can be identified on the survey with the measures used and it really showed a very steep gradient whereby those who have the greatest intellectual impairment are also the most likely to be experiencing depression and anxiety this is another analysis done which really highlights the situation for people with recent experience of domestic violence particularly flagging up the very high rates of suicidality and self-harm in this group and finally this paper as well shows how just having one question can open up a whole analysis so there was one question that was added in the 2014 survey about whether or not people had ever been in prison and then this paper used analysis that was centred around that variable that just compared the experiences of this group and their childhood antecedents and their life's subsequent to that so you need to access this data it's a wonderful data source this paper by Tamsun Ford and many others highlights that accessing mental health data of all kinds is an opportunity but also a challenge just to say that data that was collected up to about 2010 is very very straightforward to get hold of via the UK data service so what you need to do is you go to the UK data service website you log in, if you don't yet have a registration you can register, you need to have information about your university or your academic institution to do so then you can search for different it's very useful if you know the name of the data set you're looking for but there's also keywords you can search on and you'll be able to find your data set in that way there's different access conditions for different surveys different classes of use increasingly there will be other and additional criteria conditions to your accessing that data but once you've found the data set that you're interested in you'll come to a page like this highly recommend that you look at the documentation page there's reports and lists of variables and other key information and you can download the data set from there for the more recent surveys you need to have permission from was NHS digital now NHS England the data access request service there now what you need to do first is go to this page which is the data access request service site you will need to register with them if you're not already done so then you open up a form, it's quite a detailed form you need to have information about your organisation and how you can securely hold the data you will need to have information about what you need to do with the data and very clearly be able to explain how your analyses can lead to patient benefit and improvement in services there are increasingly new ways being offered by NHS digital about being able to access the data that they hold remotely so there may well be other information about that sometimes the system looks like you're going to be charged to access survey data but our understanding is that there are no plans to introduce charges for accessing survey data so let us know if you have any difficulties with that be prepared that this process could take quite a long time so it can take at a minimum several months this is the last slide really just to flag up the very very wide range of different topics that are covered on the survey it's ideal for really detailed exploration of different types of mental health conditions that allow you to look at severity and different thresholds but also provides insight on a wide range of different subject areas known to be associated with poor mental health outcomes so you might be interested for example in carers or in parenting or in sensory impairment or any of a wide range of other topics


When the governors of southern Nigeria met on Tuesday, they not only resolved to ban open grazing, they also called for the convocation of a national conference. The governors say a dialogue is needed to manage the widespread agitations among various peoples for greater inclusiveness in governance. Public Affairs Analyst Mac Adebayo is joining us this morning to discuss this call and to answer if indeed a national conference is needed in Nigeria at this time. Good morning Mr. Mac Adebayo. Good morning and thank you for having me here. So our first question really is on necessity. Do we need a national conference right now? Well, thank you so much. That is the most relevant and pertinent question for Nigeria today. We do need a national dialogue, we do need, by whatever name we want to call it, if people are afraid of a sovereign national conference where there are agreements we must have reached remain binding. If people are afraid of the sovereign national conference, at least let us have a national dialogue, let us have a conference, let us talk to one another, let us talk together and arrive at some sort of consensus about how Nigeria should proceed moving forward. Because we, the far corner, at the moment, cannot hear the far corner. The center cannot hold, everything seems to be falling apart, you know. We have terrorism, we have banditry, we have killer adders, menace, now on top of that we now have cessationist tendencies and that is why we need to quickly and audibly sit down and talk and fashion out the way to restructure this country. This structure, the college structure will restructure this country if we don't restructure. So we need to quickly restructure this country. We cannot operate under the abattoirs of the 1999 military decree, aka 1999 constitution. No, it is unsustainable, it is unworkable. And that is why under percent, many Nigerians are giving kudos to the 17,000 Nigerian governors for coming together to say that the time has come for us to sit down and talk together. And the society at the crossroads that refuses to sit at the round table, we eventually meet in the battlefield. We want to avoid that. Mr. Adebayo, I'm sure you remember that some of the things that you mentioned were part of the resolutions from the past national conference that was held during Goodluck, Jonathan's government. But those resolutions were ignored over time. So do we need to have another conference, another dialogue, or do we just need to go back to the resolutions from the 2014 national conference and take a closer look at some of those resolutions and maybe also implement them? That would be a great recommendation. That would be a great step forward to go back and look at those 2014 recommendations. But this government will not do it. I mean, this government is not going to do it during the campaign. They said they were not going to touch it. It's one of the terrible errors made by Nigerians who have gone ahead to steal food for the party that says, look, we are not going to implement the 2014 national conference. So they were not a part of it. They were invited. They didn't go. So there is no way, you know, they have remained consistent in saying that they are not going to touch it. They have refused to touch it for six years. They are not going to touch it. But at least if they are not going to touch that, we don't want to give them any excuse for us not to sit down together and talk. Let them bring their own template and call people from all... People are angry, you know? People are angry. Justify a blessing. Because of the injustices, but still injustices in the appointments of this government, in the way this government is treating the people. So we need some sort of forum to sit down and talk together. And the basis of our speaking, of our talking together is to find the main means to restructure this country where we can remove every matter of perceived injustices and imbalances in this country. So it is very important. Look, they are not going to touch 2014. It will have been a great step forward, but they are not going to touch it. We shouldn't deceive ourselves. But they should, by themselves, define and structure their own national conference or national dialogue by whatever name you want to call it. You know, I used to call it the National Peace Conference so that we can come together. You see, the way we are, we cannot conquer terrorism and banditry because we are not speaking with one voice. The South is saying one thing, the North is saying another. The South, you know, and for the first time, the Southern governors have come together. We should salute them. You know, for them to have been able to aggregate the courage to come together to stand for irrespective of party lines, whether PTP or APC or AFGA, they came together and said, look, this is the way forward. This is what we think. And I think they have demanded it. And I think they have a duty. They have now realized that they cannot keep quiet. They cannot leave the initiative to the federal government. They cannot leave the initiative to the United States governors. You know, you can see that even the United States governors in the North are now criticizing the South. There are other counterparts. Because of this, the open-gracing matter and the open-gracing of Katu is also sustainable. We will continue to be in the perpetual state of war if you allow killer others to be moving around with their Katu. And for the Southern governor, for the first time, especially for differences in party lines, for them to come together and make that a fatty public declaration. Kudos to them. Kudos to them. And it is high time we understood that there is no way that Gila could proceed with Katu moving around all over the place. All right. Mr. Adeboyo. It is a good intention and crisis and war and bloodshed and rape by these killer others. All right. Mr. Adeboyo, stay with the call for a national conference by these Southern governors. You've mentioned that, you know, the presidency says they would not implement the resolutions of the 2014 national conference, possibly because that was from an opposition party, you know, who organized that. And you say, maybe they should organize theirs. It's less than two years to an election, and maybe it is likely that maybe another party might, you know, come into power. So if another party comes into power and they create, they do organize a national conference and have their own resolution. So this president doesn't want to, all right. So I think we'll take a break here and we'll be right back. So, Mr. Adeboyo, can you hear me? I'm hearing you like that. OK. So I am saying that there was a national conference in 2014. There were resolutions. This administration says they would not implement that. If this president's administration goes ahead to have a national conference, have a resolution, it's less than two years before they're out of power. If another administration comes in and refuse to implement that resolution, where does that leave the people? Because government is supposed to be a continuum. So if one administration keeps saying they would not implement the resolution of the past administration, where does that leave us as a country? Well, you see, we really do not need to reinvent the wheel. The situation we have now, you know, we have enough time to be able to hold a national dialogue. And this government, in the life of this government, they can start implementing the results of those. That the coming administration will not be able to tamper with it. Because if we have reached such, we have made such variation decisions and arrived at conclusions. And then that was the error of the Donald administration. If it had started implementing the 2014 national conference before it left office, it would be difficult for this government to come in and say that they would not be able, that they would not implement it. No, because by that time, the country would have been so restructured that all these agreements we are having today, since for the past six years that the world came to power, we would not be having these discussions, we would not be having these conversations. They are not these crises. By that time, nobody would be able to be moving cattle over the place. Nobody, the appointment at the federal level would not be skewed, the way it is skewed now. That means, all these issues we are discussing, all the matters that our conversations with the government wouldn't have arisen again in the 2014, the result of the 2014 conference have been implemented before Donald had left office. So we have enough time. We are there to say we will, there to say we will. One way of hope is that this government will have the political will to want to hold a national dialogue, a national conference. So if they are able, we have enough time.  So this is 2021 May. They can, before the next election, we can hold a personal conference in January. You can hold it in December or even November. You know, what is the government to start now? We'll be able to hold it, all the templates would have been organized, everything would have been put in place. We can hold one this year. And the government can start implementing the outcome of that conference immediately. They will have had the opportunity of implementing it for two years. So this government coming with, they are not touch water, they are sat down together. So Mr. Adebayo, why does it then seem that in Nigeria, it's when it's close to elections that political parties or the current administration begins to do things that they should have done right from when they, you know, got into power. Why do we have this, we just call it five great approaches to doing things. This is a recurrent decimal of incompetence and blood and blood leadership. It is called on, you can see who might, they're after a debt of regret. They didn't do this, they did not do that. It's part of our leadership malice. It's, I mean, it's inexplicable. It's totally, it's totally unnecessary. You know, people, I cannot understand why you superimpose your political self-interest, of a national interest. That's what, what they have this time. That's why, it's because of self-interest. It's self-interest, political interest and because of artificial differences that they have created in their own mentalities. And it's not working for this country. It is not working for this country. Look, I believe that, you know, when you say people, when they come to government and they begin to blame their predecessors, it is part of the lack of reparations of leadership. Because when you are coming to a meeting, you have an idea of what the problems are. You criticize it, you expose it, you discuss it, you say there's corruption, we are going to fight it. You say there's insecurity, we are going to fight it. You say there is a, there is a moral contest, we are going to deal with it. You say there's a problem with our health and educational systems. You are going to deal with it. You knew there was a problem and you said you are coming to office to fix those problems. So why do you now call and begin to complain about the problems you said were there and then you are complaining about the problems? It was because you said that the past government was not good. That's why you said it was a deficit. You say come and continue campaigning, come and continue the blame game. No, the blame game does not work for this country. All right, Mark Adebayo, one of the things that you've mentioned and our previous guest also mentioned as one of the big topics that should come up with a national conference is restructuring. But if you've also been closely following the reactions to a call for restructuring, there are certain people who have continuously stood against it or found a reason to not support it. There is also the agitations for their own country by IPOB, self-determination, that's the word, by the IPOB. How do you think that all of this, which has been in place, can come together in a national conference and there would somehow be an agreement on anything? The IPOB wants out. There's also a certain Euro bar group that's also wanting out of Nigeria. And at the same time, there's people who don't agree that there should be restructuring at all. So how do you think that we, if we set up a national conference, would come to some agreement? Well, you see, in the Nigerians, of all particular device are working out to smell the coffee. We are now seeing that we are not really united. We are just telling ourselves lies that we are really not united in terms of what we want Nigeria to look like. You can see that the not and the self have never agreed on the issue of restructuring. So when you wake up today and begin to shout about restructuring, the not will disagree with you. If you wake up today and say, look, let us do national conference, the first opposition will come from the not. Why? It is because we are not speaking with all voice. It is because we are not really one. So when people say Nigeria is indifficible, when people say the unity of Nigeria is non-negotiable, it's a lie. Because we are not saying things the same way. We are not saying Nigeria the same way. We are not saying the same way forward the same way. We are not, we need to, these are fundamental issues we really need to discuss as a national conference. You know, the former governor of Nassau House State, Abulai, something, came out to size the southern governors for burning, open-gracing India, all states, who does that? What is, that's why we don't marry one wife. Because what you like, I don't, I may not like. That is why people marry their own individual wives. What is not, what we know is not good for our people. We cannot accommodate it. So if you say you want to open-gracing, let them leave me to the not. The southern governors have said they don't want it here. Why do we run away from things that can give us peace? One of the things that can give us peace is this structuring. One of the things that can give us peace is this non-aggressive, and then let us let people begin to arrange their catch-we. But no, so will they. Mark, that would be a, you know, from your own understanding. And I believe, you know, I'm guessing that you also believe that a lot of Nigerians have woken up to smell the coffee and, you know, would agree with you. But if we also, you know, would admit that there is, like you've said, a certain region of the country that might not want to be in the country, certain region of the country that might not want, you know, to get into a conversation on restructuring and all of that, you know. And like I also mentioned, there's the IPOB, there's the Yoruba Groups, Oduwa Groups. Yes, exactly. So how do you think that, you know, with all these persons and with all these political leaders here who don't agree with the idea of restructuring, why do you think a national conference might be able to bring us together to that agreement? It will, you know, if you are looking for a way to bring us together to be that national conference, you know, if we show respect, not respect, the IPOB will come, or the Oduwa safety, the damnation rules, they will come, middle belt, agitation needs, they will come. You need to show them respect, you need to invite them to the table because they have justifiable reasons for calling for separate states.  They were not carrying arms before you tagged them a terrorist organization, now they got angry and now they are armed through the ESA and then the bubble is about to burst, we should not allow the bubble to burst. Look at what is happening in the South East. I'm not a happy man. We know, we wake up every day and see that 12 policemen have been killed, one soldier has been shot, military and police personnel, I don't know that comfortable we are in their uniforms in the South East. If that once you get to the South South and South West there, what are we looking at? So it's better we talk now, let us talk, they will come and I can assure you they will come.  People will come and table their, what you need to do in resolving an issue is that you allow people to table their differences. So Mr. Ajay Bayo. Without politics, without ethnicity, let us stop our issues and move forward as a nation. All right, Mr. Ajay Bayo, your points are noted. Solutions to our issues. Mr. Ajay Bayo, your points are noted, you're saying yes, we do need a national conference, and that yes, all the aggrieved parties would come together to the table. But I think the other question remains, will the government actually call for a national conference because of seeing the Senate president, Amit Lawan, and Bajabirah as well say, it's wrong for the Southern Governors to have reached this conclusion, asking for a national conference, asking for a structure in banning open grazing. So that's just the remaining question. Is the government willing to actually, you know, call for a national conference? Would they do that? So that's yet to be seen. But thank you very much, Mr. Makade Bayo, for your time on the breakfast. Thank you so much for having me. All right, here's where we'll take a break on this conversation and return to discuss more issues on security. Do stay with us.


TikTok is potentially getting banned in the US and today's video is going to cover everything that you need to know on how it can potentially affect you, whether you're just somebody that's just scrolling through TikTok for entertainment, a business owner, or a content creator. So first things first, why is TikTok potentially getting banned? Well, the US government is simply saying that China is using TikTok as a way to spy on its citizens, primarily through just gathering their information through their phone. Also, another big one is a supposed threat to kids, primarily in the form of cyberbullying. Also, a lot of the content that's shown in the US or really the content that people here watch is pretty much just brain rotting and just straight up entertainment. Nothing else. A small percentage of people actually use TikTok for educational purposes. Whereas in China, apparently there, they're actually using TikTok more than anything for educational purposes. So here in the US, you have a higher percentage of people consuming very useless content pretty much. Whereas in China, more people are watching actual useful content that provides some sort of value to them. So is TikTok going down for sure? Honestly, nobody knows. This has been tried in the past and it did fail. But this time they're actually going a lot harder on it. They're actually really pushing towards this. And they passed a bill already. It's still in process, but it's gotten a lot further than it did last time. Now, what needs to happen in order for this to pretty much just entirely be avoided is the US is saying that in order to not ban TikTok here, what needs to happen is TikTok's parent company, ByteDance, needs to sell TikTok to a US-based company. So pretty much they need to move TikTok from China to the US and it needs to be operating out of the US. So pretty much just get rid of China and completely cut them off. TikTok will be 100% an American company. And not surprisingly, ByteDance said, no, we're not selling. So how long do we have before it actually shuts down? If it even shuts down at all? Well, that's another thing that is honestly up in the air. Nobody knows, nobody can tell you. It's really easy to sell a product to somebody. But when you're talking about an entire company, that takes a lot of work. That takes a lot of moving parts. That takes a lot of paperwork, a lot of legal work. And it takes a lot of time. So some people are saying you have three to six months. Other people are saying you have six months. Other people are saying you have maybe a year. Some others are saying you might have four or five years even. Because there's a lot of different bills that have been passed through that are still awaiting implementation even after they were approved years later. So honestly, nobody can tell you for sure. But the general consensus seems to be anywhere between three months to about a year. Yeah, that's a wide, wide window. But again, nobody knows for sure. You can't really put a time frame on that. Now, what happens if TikTok actually does go down? Let's talk about the worst case scenario here.  On top of that, it's also going to be content creators. So many people found their start on TikTok, myself included. I got started in the content creation space, as well as the e-commerce space through TikTok, because it just made it that much easier to get started. It's crazy because TikTok actually helped a lot of people quit their jobs and help them get started with their side hustle. And it helped them take that side hustle to the next level and really make it their main form of income. So tons of different business owners and content creators are going to be affected in potentially a negative way, especially if they're using TikTok as their main marketing platform. A lot of businesses are going to see slowdowns and sales.  Some companies are only selling on TikTok shop. It will also take billions of dollars out of the pockets of creators and small businesses. It will put more than 300,000 American jobs at risk and it will take away your TikTok. Now as far as creators, same thing. A lot of creators got their start on TikTok because it was an easy platform to go viral on. It's a very easy platform to discover completely new content that you never thought even existed. The most random videos can go viral just by picking up a little bit of traction. So because of that, a lot of companies and a lot of content creators got started on TikTok. They got their businesses started. They got their livelihoods started. Now I'm not trying to say that every single creator or every single business is going to go down or even suffer. Some are luckily going to stay afloat. Others might not even be affected at all. But what is for sure is that most of the people that are on TikTok, whether they be content creators or small business owners or big business owners, they're going to move to another platform and that's going to be either Instagram reels or YouTube shorts. And that's not including whatever other platform comes up in place of TikTok because you better believe that if TikTok goes down, somebody's going to try to take its place. Somebody's going to try to come up from the dirt and establish a brand new platform with pretty much the exact same features. Now speaking of other platforms, I think what's going to end up happening, honestly, if TikTok does go down and people start migrating to Instagram reels or YouTube shorts is that there's going to be two things that can happen. Either it's going to continue on and the creators are going to be forced to learn how those new platforms work and how you can actually use them to your advantage, which is going to be kind of hard for a lot of people. But the other option is going to be that these other platforms are going to try to restructure their algorithm to be more like TikToks. Either way, they're all trying to compete against each other. That's one thing that everyone needs to understand. All these social media platforms, even though Instagram and Facebook are owned by Meta, at the end of the day, they're all competing against each other.   TikTok shop has the potential to make tons of money. And not just that, regular content creators, people who just go online and start talking about different topics, they have the opportunity to make a lot more money as well by receiving free gifts. Now, regarding those gifts, there's one thing that you need to know. There's a lot. And when I say a lot, I mean there's a massive amount of people online, on live at any given time.  Now, imagine receiving 10,000 gifts, right? 10,000 gifts spread out amongst 10,000 creators. Of course, from those 10,000 creators is probably, I don't know, 100,000 that are on live as well, but they're just not receiving gifts. So let's talk about the smaller percentage, the 10%, I guess. From those people that are receiving gifts, TikTok is taking half of that. Some of these people are able to make hundreds of dollars every single day. Imagine how much money TikTok is making, literally just by hosting this. It's free money for TikTok. And then on top of that, they're also making money through small businesses when they charge their fees through the TikTok shop. And again, TikTok shop has been just absolutely going insane right now. So with all of this talk about money, think about it this way. How much money is met up potentially missing out on? How many people do you see on Instagram Reels or Facebook Live just talking about a topic or just sitting there doing random ASMR videos? And be making over $100 every single day in just gifts. Free money. It's free money for TikTok. It's free money for the content creator. I'm pretty sure your companies like Snapchat or Instagram are getting kind of jealous there. Kind of thinking we're missing out on a lot of money. Like a lot of money. So again, I mean, there's a massive amount of different factors that go into this. So you can't really pinpoint anything. But at the end of the day, there is competition between all of the different platforms and who can make the most money, like I said. And again, just to say it one more time, you better believe that if TikTok goes down, somebody's going to try to take its place. Somebody aside from Meta or Snapchat, a brand new company guaranteed is going to try to come up and take its place. Not just one, it's going to be multiples. And you're going to have to kind of see which one is actually working, which one is gaining traction. And then you're going to have to jump on that wave, but a little bit more than that later. So where does this leave us? Well, unfortunately, like pretty much all of the answers at the beginning, nobody knows. It leaves us up in the air as to what's going to happen. Because again, it's unpredictable. They might sell, especially if once you start getting closer to the date that, you know, that the US gave them by dance might just end up saying sell it, or maybe not, because they're going to end up losing a lot of money if they do. I don't know. It's way too much to really take into consideration. Like there's no way that you can expect what's going to happen. So honestly, at this point, the best thing that you can do is just wait. Now, like I said, this has happened in the past, but it hasn't happened to this extent. There's a lot more support now than there was before, but there was a lot of support at the beginning too, and it ended up going nowhere. The bills just dropped or they just forgot about everything and everyone moved on with their lives. The elections are coming up pretty soon. They're coming up in November. And when the election times come around, a lot of things start coming up. A lot of problems start coming up and people start trying to resolve, trying to move to one party, move to the other party. So maybe all of this has something to do with the elections, trying to sway your vote one way or another. But at the end of the day, do I personally think that it's going to get banned? No, not really. A lot of people that I've talked to, they have the same opinion. They all think it's not going to happen. It's just for show.  But at the end of the day, not a lot of people are actually thinking it's going to go through. But with that being said, be prepared, because again, you never know what's going to happen. Even though I don't think it's going to happen, that doesn't mean it's not going to happen. If it's going to happen, it's going to happen and you better be prepared. So what can you do to be prepared in case TikTok goes down? Well, all of this should really put into perspective the fact that you should be marketing in more than just one platform. If you're using TikTok as your only marketing platform, then you have a few different problems to worry about. Honestly, you should really be varying from right now, if not from before, your one different source of income and two different ways to market. There's still opportunity in all of the other platforms. There always has been and there's always going to be. Now, the only thing you need to do is you need to adapt to those platforms. You need to learn them the same way that you learn TikTok, because guaranteed, your first video isn't the one that went viral. It was after a bit of trial and error. And you have to do the same with these other platforms, like YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels, or even Facebook or Facebook Reels. I think they have, I think it's called Facebook Reels on Facebook, but whatever. The videos from Instagram Reels end up on Facebook. So if you haven't done so already, or if it's not something that you've been trying to do, if you have an audience at TikTok, if your business has an audience at TikTok, then try to migrate them to the other platforms. What I do, honestly, is I just post the same videos from my TikTok to my Instagram and on my YouTube Shorts. That's not the best strategy, but it at least keeps a consistent flow of content going. So whoever follows me on TikTok, I can tell them that this information is going to be on Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts. So make sure you follow me on there, just in case we do get banned. So lately, what I've been doing in my videos is I've just been sprinkling in a little bit of that. I've been telling them towards the end of the video. Look, also remember I'm available on Instagram at here. So make sure you follow me. Also, make sure you start diversifying your businesses and diversifying your marketing tactics. So start posting everything on Instagram. Start posting everything on YouTube. Start posting on Facebook. Start different ways of marketing. Start doing email marketing. I know a lot of people think email marketing, ew. But statistically speaking, email marketing is actually one of the most effective ways to market. It's probably number one, I think it was. But aside from that, you also have SMS marketing, cold calling. Nobody likes cold calling, but it's still an option. Facebook ads, if you're only selling on TikTok shop, let's say, then start diversifying your marketplace. Start importing those products from your TikTok shop to eBay, also to Etsy. Well, of course, the relevant products to Shopify. So start also diversifying not only your marketing, but also your selling platforms. It's always good to have multiple streams of incomes, whether it be from different businesses or different platforms. So that way, if one of them gets cut out, like let's say in this case, TikTok shop, you still have the other ones supplementing you and keeping you afloat. Now, the most important thing that you need to do though is if TikTok does get banned, you need to keep an eye out for the next big wave. And that's guaranteed going to happen when that's what you're going to have to keep an eye out for. Because there's going to be a lot of waves. There's going to be a ton of small waves that are going to be coming out. But that one tsunami is going to be that one app that's finally going to take over TikTok's place. And that's the one that you need to look for because there's going to be a lot of apps that are going to try to take TikTok's place. One way that you can actually keep up with them and see what works is, again, do the same thing that I'm doing with TikTok and Instagram and Shorts. Take one video, sign up for all of the apps that come out and post it across all the platforms and see which ones work. If you notice that one of the platforms actually starts to pick up a couple views, a couple likes, try to more or less see how it works and what kind of content is actually going viral on there and adjust your content to that. Because that's another very important thing that you're going to have to do. You're going to have to be flexible. You're going to have to be able to adapt to changing trends. But that's a worst case scenario if TikTok were to go down. Now, the important question, should we stop using TikTok for our dropshipping business? Well, up until now I haven't talked anything about dropshipping, so for those of you that don't know, dropshipping is a simple business model. It's a fulfillment business model where you don't take care of pretty much anything. All you're going to be doing is sourcing products, listing them online, and pretty much selling them.  You sell a product for $100. It was a pair of shoes that cost you $50. You made $50 a profit. Simple. So, dropshipping on TikTok is a huge business. There's a lot of opportunity on there. There's massive potential, especially through TikTok shop. And if you want to learn more about dropshipping on TikTok shop, fully automated, then you can check out this video right here. In it, I explain absolutely everything that you need to do in order to get started dropshipping through automation with AutoDS on TikTok shop. Now, I'm going to tell you one thing about that video right now. There is nobody else on this platform that has covered it the way that we did. So, make sure you check it out. It is the most informational video that you're going to watch on the topic. So, the simple answer to the question, should you stop dropshipping on TikTok shop, is no. Do not stop what you're doing. Whether TikTok is at risk or not, whether your business on TikTok is at risk or not, that doesn't mean that you need to stop what you're doing right now. Because for one, nobody knows, or nobody has really a timeframe on how long TikTok shop is actually going to go down if it does go down at all. Two, it's uncertain whether or not it's going to go down. So, why are you going to stop doing what you're doing? And then two years later, it's TikTok is still going. Now, if you haven't started, then I suggest that you still start. Even if you've been considering maybe not starting because of the whole TikTok fan. Again, you don't know when anything is going to happen. So, why not start right now?  Start to build your brand. Get some brand awareness. Bring in some loyal customers. And then if TikTok were to go down, you already have an email list. You already have loyal customers that will follow you to whatever platform that you're on, whether that be Instagram, or just making content on Instagram and rerouting them to Shopify to make their orders. There is absolutely no reason why you shouldn't get started or why you should end what you're doing on TikTok. TikTok still has massive potential to make you a lot of money in a short amount of time. Now, I don't like saying that a lot. I don't like talking about making a lot of money in a short amount of time. But on TikTok, it's possible. Is it likely? Somewhat. It's actually not impossible. It's more likely on TikTok than it is anywhere else. So, why not try to get that in right now? Before the bend. Let's say you have six months. You have six months to be able to go viral with a few different videos and make either a few hundred, a few thousand, a few tens of thousands, or maybe even a few hundreds of thousands. People have literally made tens of thousands of dollars in the course of a few weeks by just having a few viral videos and good products. And to be completely honest with you, nobody is slowing down with TikTok. Everyone who's been on the platform and who's been active on the platform, they're still as active as they've always been. If not even more active to try to show the government, look, we don't want to leave this place. We want TikTok to stay where it is. So, there is no slowing down with TikTok right now. There is no reason not to get started or to continue what you're doing. Now, remember for the most up-to-date guide and the only guide that thoroughly shows you exactly how you can get started dropshipping on TikTok shop, make sure to check out this video right here. It's completely worth it. Trust me, you're going to get a lot of value out of it. Now, in that video, I do mention that you need to connect everything through a series of apps. So, like two different apps. But just so you know, AutoDS is actually working right now. This is top secret. We're working right now on a TikTok dropshipping integration. So, you're going to be able to dropship directly on the TikTok shop with AutoDS. Fully automated and the best part is not limited to just the U.S. This is going to work in multiple countries in multiple regions. So, even if it does get banned in the U.S., you still have the potential to make a massive amount of money with TikTok shop. So, make sure you hit that subscribe button so you do not miss out on that. Trust me, you don't want to miss out on that. So, also hit that little bell notification so that way you get notified each and every time we post a video. So, be on the lookout. That's going to be 100% worth it. You want to be the first on that. So, pretty much to sum it all up, TikTok shop is potentially getting banned, but nobody knows for sure whether or not it is going to be banned or not. And if it does happen, nobody knows how long it's going to take in order for it to actually get implemented. So, keep doing what you're doing. If you've been wanting to start on TikTok, whether that be creating content or starting your own dropshipping business on there, do it. If you've been doing it up until now and you've been thinking about stopping because of the ban, don't stop. There's no reason to slow down. Keep going. Keep going. Keep going. But that's not to say that you shouldn't prepare for the worst. So, don't just stick to TikTok. Also, any content that you post on TikTok, put that on Instagram. Put that on the shorts. Put that on Snapchat. Whatever platform it may be. Make sure to check out the How to Start Dropshipping on TikTok Shop video. To get started, dropshipping on TikTok Shop. And remember that we're also working on that feature to be able to dropship directly from AutoDS to the TikTok shop anywhere around the world. Remember to always diversify your income streams whether that be with different businesses or different platforms that you're selling on. Stay flexible and learn to adapt to change because if you want to succeed, you're going to need to be able to adapt. The bigger companies, that's why they're still around because they've learned to adapt to change. They've learned to adapt to changing trends and changing pretty much everything. Remember, change is inevitable so you might as well embrace it. My personal thoughts, TikTok's not going anywhere, but just in case it does, be prepared. Hopefully you found this video helpful. Hopefully you made it all the way to the end. If you did, please make sure you smash that like button. Let me know down in the comments below what you think about this whole TikTok ban. Is it something that you think is going to happen? Is it something that you think is just going to blow away with the wind, especially after the elections come? Let me know your thoughts down in the comments below. I really want to hear what you think about this. Huge thank you to everyone for watching. Again, if you liked it, if you made it this far, smash that like button, hit that subscribe button, and ring that little bell notification so you don't miss out on any future videos. My name is Mario with Out of DS. I'll catch you guys next time.


So, the 1.05 patch dropped today for Elden Ring, or last night maybe, and I want to show you the very best update that's included in that patch. Here we go. Most of the stuff is little bug fixes and balances and stuff like that, but in system, on PC, you go into the system tab, and there's a return to desktop button, and you can save the game and return to desktop, and it closes the game. It's glorious. Enjoy.


Since 1994, the structure of the economy hasn't changed that much. It was characterized by high unemployment, high poverty levels, predominantly informed by low growth rates. And these, to a large extent, are explained by a historical phenomenon of poor education, quality of education, and low levels of skills, which means even if people cannot get themselves employed, they cannot self-employ. But the restructuring that took place since 1994 was also characterized by an economy which relied more on capital intensity rather than labor intensity. And what that has meant is that we've had what people have started labeling a growth program that has not generated jobs. We need to improve the quality of jobs for us to be able to change the balance between labor demand and labor supply. As we think about making our sectors more competitive, it's not only thinking about activities within the South African economy, it's also thinking about them being competitive globally. And part of them being competitive globally is not only with respect to the quality of products that we produce, it's also with respect to the pricing of those products. Labor costs are still uncompetitive, costs are rising according to inflation, but productivity is not increasing. If we cannot temper wage growth, we need to do something about the productivity of labor and that can only be achieved through tweaking what happens in the education space and also what happens in the skill space. If we invest in the right infrastructure, which is going to be private sector crowding in, contribute directly to the economy, absorb more labor into its process and hopefully in the process generate more skills, we should be able to have or put a dent on the high level of unemployment that was sitting with today, which is sitting at 26%. Institutional challenge becomes our biggest hurdle going forward. The way in which we govern our economy, the way in which we govern our state owned enterprises and the quality of delivery that we put out into the market is going to become our biggest challenge going forward.


All right, we're good to go. Thanks everyone for joining to the session about hardware onboarding and burning in the CERN data center. My name is Arne Wieberg. I'm the cloud and Linux team lead in CERN IT. And just to introduce CERN briefly in one minute for those of you who have no idea what that is. So CERN is the European organization for nuclear research. Our mission is to find answers to some of the mysteries of the universe and in order to do this, we have built the large Hadron Collider, the largest machine ever built by mankind, which is a particle collider 100 meters underground, 27 kilometers in circumference, where we collide particles, protons and ions in particular. And these collisions are then recorded and tracked by so-called detectors. We have four main detectors, each of them roughly the size of a cathedral, 100 meters underground, each of them producing orders of like 10 gigabytes per second with this event data. This data is then sent into CERN IT. So you see here a screenshot of the, one of the main rooms in CERN IT where the initial reconstruction of these events happens, where they are stored permanently and then fed into a worldwide grid of around 170 data centers worldwide where a second copy is stored and where part of the analysis takes place. So this is CERN in one minute. For this talk today, it's basically split roughly into two parts. So first, I wanna give you like the big picture, like how actually, hardware moves in and out of the CERN data center. It would be a little bit more theoretically. And then we were talking about the working horse that enables this, which is Arbonic. So new hardware in the CERN data centers goes through several phases. So the first phase is basically from specification to delivery. When new hardware is about to be bought, the ones using that hardware basically specify what they need. There's usually a meeting taking place which is called the pre-specs meeting where service managers express what kind of servers they would like. Then these servers are procured, which is also a multi-stage process because we're like an international organization that has to go out for tender. Vendors can apply, send their offers. And then at some point the hardware is procured following the delivery instructions that we give and all the specification that we give. And then, however, it finally arrives in the CERN data center. And you see on the left-hand side, this process takes about nine months from A to Z. So it's quite a lengthy process and needs a lot of planning, okay? And this is also one of the reasons why we introduced OpenStack in 2013 in order to reduce the time until the service manager actually has resources, gets a lot shorter. Now, once the hardware is there, it's of course installed physically and then it has to go through a process called acceptance. So before we actually pay the hardware, it has to be checked. Is everything as we ordered, does the hardware work, and so on. That takes a couple of weeks depending on the server. So if you have a large disk server with 96 drives, for instance, and you need to go through Burnin that may take quite a while to go through this. And then we keep hardware usually for something like five years, roughly. So it gets commissioned and moves into production so it basically gets to the service manager to the various services that run their services on that hardware. We repair the hardware during that time, of course, we monitor it. And then at some point, after a couple of years, hardware gets decommissioned, it gets removed from all our databases, and then is that physically removed and either recycled or offered for a donation because the hardware usually is still good. Okay, so this is like roughly the whole process like in a nutshell. And many parts of this or many components in this process are actually driven by ironic. So that brings us ready to the second part, the working hose, the underlying working hose, ironic as the bare metal management framework. So what is ironic for those of you who are not intimately familiar with it? The idea is to extend the cloud approach to bare metal servers. So basically when we introduced it, we wanted to complement the offering that we have in our service where we offered already virtual machines and for instance container clusters to also offer bare metal servers to our users using the same interface. Why? Because that simplifies a lot of the work that has to be done like workflows, accounting, approval. All of this is the same, whether you use physical machines or virtual machines. So ironic provides an API service to interact with these physical servers. So originally this was a provisioning driver and Nova and then was like moved out, but nowadays it can be either be used with an open stack. This is the way we use it. So it's tightly integrated. Or you can use this as a standalone tool, which also many deployments do. You can find a lot of details on the website, ironicbaremetal.org. One important point though, is that ironic leverages open source standards and tooling. So many of the things that, or all of the things that ironic actually uses are like open source and open standards. It relies a lot on things like IPMI and RedFish and on Pixi and DHCP. But it also allows for vendors to actually write their own plugins to make it more flexible. And also we have our own plugin, a CERN plugin, that does certain things that we need at CERN. So ironic basically on a very high level, consists of three main components. There's a database where all the notes, the physical notes are listed with their name or which we use the serial number in our case, which state they are, what kind of credentials they have and so on. Then there are so-called controllers, which are the service processes. There's an API and conductor that acts on these physical machines. There's an inspector that can receive information about the internal state of a server, which components are in there. There's a message queue that allows to exchange messages between these components. And then the third component is the IPA, is the ironic Python agent, which is an image with a demon inside that is launched on these physical notes. And with these three basic components, ironic manages physical notes. On the right-hand side, you see how it is layout at CERN at the moment. So you see at the bottom, we have groups of 500 notes, which are controlled or managed by one ironic controller and then one Nova controller. And this way, the whole deployment is basically split, and the number here is around 20. So there are 9,000 physical notes at the moment that I managed CERN with this system. Our initial use case was provisioning. So as I said, to give physical notes just as virtual machines to the user. So provisioning was our initial use case. So you have the user, which basically talks to OpenStack and then to Nova in order to get a physical machine. And then Nova via the ironic driver talks to Ironic and then with glance and neutron, basically pick a physical note, which is then given back to the user. So this was the initial use case, but of course, physical notes are not created. They are just instantiated. Physical notes are already there. Now, one of the things that we ran into, like very early on, is to have like universal images. And this is already the first detour that I take in my tour, in my talk. In order to not have different images for physical notes and virtual machines, we worked a lot on having a single image that can handle both. And during that journey, we had a lot of various things that we needed to adapt. So it all follows the extend the cloud to bare metal paradigm still. So as I said, when you create a VM and if you instantiate a physical server from the user point of view and from the API point of view, it's basically the same. The first thing that we needed to add was GPT support. This was driven by very large servers for elastic search actually, where we needed to have GPT partition tables. So we needed to add a bias boot partition. Then we had to move from U of I because the hardware colleagues preferred U of I for various reasons. So we needed to make the image U of I capable. Which meant that we had to do additional partitions inside the image and could not rely on the NBR gap anymore. We use extensively software rates. So we had to do something in our running and also in the image in order to enable software rate when deploying images on physical note. And then something rather recent is that we also have to keep an eye on what to do with these software rates over time because there's some details that you need to pay attention to when you have a software rate for a longer time. So for instance, when you replace disks, you need to, for instance, relocate bootloaders and so on. Okay, so another use case that we had is physical batch and then the top left corner says back to the future. So basically what we did when we introduced OpenStack at CERN is that we moved our batch farm from physical nodes to virtual machines. Because we wanted to leverage or the batch team wanted to leverage the APIs that OpenStack has in order to like create workflows. Now with Ironic coming into the game, we actually had the opportunity to revisit this virtualization tax that we were paying. So we were like accepting that there's a three to 5% loss in performance when using virtual machines over physical machines and we basically moved back. So this is right back to the future. So we basically moved all of batch into virtual machines, run it as virtual machines for eight or nine years and now we basically converted everything back to physical machines.  We use Terraform as the infrastructure as code tool to interface with Ironic. So this is basically the batch team having using Terraform in order to talk to the OpenStack APIs in order to leverage all of this. So this is still provisioning, right? Still the initial use case giving physical nodes to users. But of course there's a limit to this. Physical servers are not virtual machines, okay? That may sound like silly, but if you don't realize this, you will learn that the hardware, so there's some limits of resources that you can provide. You cannot create physical servers out of thin air. You cannot create a physical server wherever you want. And the booting on bootstrapping, the debugging is more complicated. It may involve multiple teams, multiple skill sets, so it's a lot more complicated. The batch conversion that I just mentioned needed weeks of cleanup of BMCs not working, I know it's not booting for whatever reason, so it's a lot harder. And there's also less flexibility because a physical server is what it is, right? You cannot necessarily create a second interface card very easily. So there's also a talk by a colleague later this week, by Marina, who will look at some of these difficulties explicitly. Now, this is the Ironic state machine, and I have only 25 minutes, so I won't go through all of the bubbles here. I will only go through the high-level bubble, which is basically, you ever know that's available? It's been deployed, which means there's an instance that's created, then it's active, which means there's an instance running, so it's an in-production server with an instance, then it gets cleaned and becomes available again. So that's the basic cycle for servers that servers run through. And I will mostly look at the cleaning part because most of the things that I'm going to talk about now, from now on, the burn-in or onboarding in burn-in will be based on this cleaning step. We basically built most of the things into the cleaning framework of Ironic. So this shows the whole life cycle of physical servers at CERN. So you see there's the preparation that's taking place, then the physical servers are installed, they need to be registered, there's some inventory happening, some health checks, or is there all the memory there, are all the CPUs there, are all the disks there, and so on. There's some burn-in, where the components are stress-tested, benchmarking to make sure they behave as we want. Some configuration like software rate, their provisions are given to the user, there's some adopt step where you can roll in production servers into Ironic. So basically trick Ironic. Repairs, of course, have to happen, and at some point they get cleaned and retired. And you see I put the bear, and most of them, because I updated this slide over the past couple of years, and the bear is getting more and more full. And you see most of the components or most of these steps are actually now handled by Ironic fully. So how does that work? So the generic work cycle for Ironic is basically something triggers Ironic to do something on a node. So that was a very generic statement. So you have the admin or some tooling that sets Ironic, hey, clean this node. Ironic checks on the databases and then talks to the node, usually via the BMC, so via protocols like IPMI or Pixi, and boots it into this image that I mentioned before, with the IPI daemon, which then calls back home to Ironic, and Ironic gives the instructions of what to do, for instance, clean the disks. So this is the cleaning framework in a nutshell, and this is basically what we leveraged for the things that we're doing. So, second detour, you see I like detours. BMC interaction I just mentioned. So one of the things that we are moving to is Redfish. So rather than using IPMI, which we've been using for a long time and still use a lot in the sender data center, is that we're moving now more and more to Redfish. Why? Because it's becoming the industry standard. It has a lot of advantages over the traditional IPMI standard. So we moved newer deliveries into Ironic with Redfish. We found a couple of issues in the various implementations. So implementation means on the BMC side, how the Redfish protocol is actually, or the Redfish standard is actually implemented. So one famous thing that we had to handle was the ETAC handling, verifying that the state of the node is the same before when you last checked and when you send commands. But the basic functionality is there and you can handle nodes with Redfish. So we have like 600 or 700 nodes out of the whole park now that are totally handled with Redfish and it works for our use cases, which is basically like all the cleaning, instantiating and so on. What we're currently working on is like moving this into the specification process that I mentioned earlier. So in the specification document that we give out for a tender, for companies to like actually to validate that their hardware matches our needs, we're looking into the interoperability profiles. So what is that? It's basically a list of things that you expect from a Redfish endpoint and there's a validator that actually allows you to consume such a profile and tries it against the physical node or in the Redfish endpoint in more general terms. So in this profile, you can basically describe what you need, you give it to the tool and the tool verifies that the hardware is actually doing the right thing. So this is the plan to have these as part of the specifications and when we say that we wanna buy hardware, it has to fulfill these kind of characteristics on the Redfish endpoint so that we're able to actually deal with it with our running. Now the other question that we had around Redfish is like how users should interact with Redfish and you may ask, okay, why users? So why do users need to interact with BMCs? It's very peculiar in our data center that users actually have access to the BMC credentials. So it's a relatively trusted environment so users can actually talk to our BMCs and also the repair team can talk to the BMCs. That's not the case in all clouds but it is the case in our cloud. So one of the things that we were wondering is like how to interact with the Redfish endpoint for IPMI for instance, there's the well-known IPMI tool but what do we do with Redfish? So of course you can ask the users to use curl but when I wrote the documentation I realized that it's not going to fly very far because then it's getting complicated very quickly and also hits the limits of me editing websites with quotes and stuff that was very complicated. I mean there's like a Redfish tool which is like an IPMI tool for Redfish but it was only a temporary kind of stop-gap solution and there's the Redfish tetra box which is basically a set of tools that you can install in order to interact with the Redfish endpoint and that seems to be working very well for us and I also would like to point out that the community is very responsive there were a couple of issues where we said like, hey, can we do this with the Redfish tetra box for instance, see the service event log more easily and they were very responsive and implemented this. Okay, so much for the Redfish detour. So one of the things that we do now, basically we go through this like big loop that I showed earlier, one of the first things that happens is like nodes are now auto-registered with all the databases that turn automatically. So basically the node switches on for the first time in the data center and then gets redirected by our DHCP server to Ironic, basically not to Ironic but due to the IPA image. So it boots into the IPA image for the first time. So you can see this over here which then registers the node into our non-open stack network databases and sends the introspection data so it doesn't introspection of this node and sends the introspection data to Ironic upon which Ironic itself learns for the first time about this nodes and registers the node with its own databases. Okay, so this is the enrolls in your node step and then also forwards this inventory data of this new server to S3 which is in our case on top of CIF. Now what do we do with this introspection data that I just mentioned? So this is basically the part up here so there's like data that is going into S3 and then there's some enrichment with benchmarking data but in the end you see down here this open DCIM so we have our data center and inventory management system based on open DCIM where it basically can drill down from the room to the rack to the quad to the server and then you can click and basically get that into inventory data if you want to and the inventory data that we collect per node is quite extensive so you can basically see like all the disk serial numbers, everything. So it's quite a large chunk of data that Ironic is able to collect. So this is just how this is embedded. Actually I should have called this a small detour as well. Verifying that a server is actually looking the way it should can be done with introspection rules. So that's a feature in Ironic that allows you to describe how a certain server or in our case a whole delivery should look like so you can say it should have that many cores, that many disks, this size and so on. And Ironic will automatically check these and flag nodes where this is not the case. So imagine you get 1000 nodes and there's like a couple of them where a memory module is missing. It's very hard to find this in the past. We were basically sending this data somewhere and then looking at huge text files to see if there's any difference. You can do this with sort and orc and grep, I see. I mean, we have done this as well, but introspection rules does that for you. Okay, you describe this and you can describe this per delivery. So you write the rules once and then you basically let this run against the inventory that you get from node. You can do this online. So the first time the node sends it in, you can also do this offline and retrieve the data from S3 later on. Then after you're fine, all the components are there, we burn in the hardware. So basically we do burn in four stages. We stress the CPU, the memory, the disk and the network. For a CPU and memory, we use stress and G and for a disk and network, we use FIO. We use the same tool because that means that we have the same tool in the image where it makes the image a little bit smaller. This is also part of cleaning. So there are cleaning steps that are also like added upstream where you can basically trigger these steps, okay? This has all been released with Xena and something that we had in addition is to watch what is going on in real time. So we have added to our IPA image a FluentD daemon that actually, I was about to say live tweets, what's going on, but it's basically like sending data into Elasticsearch and Kibana so we can actually see where the nodes are in the stages because some of these burn in steps may take very long and you wanna see if something is breaking and how it's going. Now, networking is a little bit more complicated because actually, networking requires pairing. All the others you can do on a node, you just launch and basically run a script or run a command. Networking is more complicated because you need pairs, okay? So we started with something like static so each node basically knew its counterpart and then both nodes were starting to clean and then they were waiting, one, the first one was waiting for the other and then they were basically burning in. This has a lot of some drawbacks. So for instance, imagine like one of the nodes doesn't show up, then the other one is basically waiting and timing out. So we quickly moved to what we call dynamic pairing so we have a distributed arbitrary in the back where nodes can just say like, look, I wanna burn in and then someone else is someone else. Another node is coming up and say I wanna burn in as well and then they just pair and go off and burn them in. This is the advantage that you don't have to wait for nodes that are, for instance, in repair. All of this is all upstream and we have tested this with more than 150 nodes in parallel. So 150 nodes send into this, they go to Zookeeper in the end and find their pairs, it works. Benchmarking, also part of cleaning. So basically what happens in the benchmarking step is that the benchmarking step downloads a container, in our case a singularity image, runs a specific benchmark and then sends the data into a pipeline with elastic search in Kibana. And this allows us for different deliveries, so this is basically different processes, different kind of hardware over time to see how the nodes are doing performance-wise. So you see like for most deliveries you have a more or less nice normal distribution but sometimes we had cases where you had like double peak structures, okay? And this allows you very easily to find nodes where something is wrong. So you have like a fraction of the nodes that don't behave well and then you can like dive in and see what's going on. And at the very end, okay, talk is called onboarding but I also want to talk about offboarding a little bit, we also use Ironic for retirements. So basically what we added to Ironic also upstream is the possibility to tag a node as retired. So what does that mean? And basically initially it doesn't mean anything, the node just carries that tag, it's an in-production server which is retired. But the moment the user deletes the instance, basically the node does not go through the cycle anymore and goes to available, it goes back to management with a retired flag and it doesn't move anymore. So you cannot use this for a new instantiation. So the idea is basically when we plan retirements and you saw that the cycle is multiple months, we can like one year in advance, okay, this row of racks needs to be retired, we set the retirement flag and then whenever the user deletes the instance it will basically move to side, okay? And then we can at the very end also like re-burn in. So usually before we donate servers they are like tested again so that we don't like hand over broken nodes. But this is not something that we are doing yet. This is also what the bear I hope was like half. So all of this together allowed us to grow Ironic since we started in like late 2017 to okay, the graph is not brand new but trust me it's like around 9,000 nodes somewhere up here. And you can see some certain structures here. So you see like very steep increases here. So these are deliveries. So new how we're coming in. And you see it's like a couple of hundred nodes that are added. And then in between there's also like smallish, either smallish deliveries or nodes that are added to Ironic. Equally you can see retirement. So here's a retirement of like 1,000 servers. So that makes me of course very sad because the numbers in Ironic go down. But we're still like overall we're still going up. And then we have something here which is very steep which is adoption. So this is like where we run a campaign to add in production servers. So while they were being used under the control of Ironic. Okay, so like a running mail server rather than control the old way is now controlled by Ironic. And we enroll these nodes. If you wanna know how that works, there's a blog post on this and I also recommend the talk that I mentioned earlier and we'll also briefly explain this. If you wanna know more about like how Ironic is used, at CERN we have a blog where we post very often articles about how we're doing things with Ironic and in general at CERN. And also a couple of videos that describe why we're using Ironic in more detail, how we do the whole life cycle or how we scaled to that size. And with this, I'm done and happy to take questions. Thank you. So if you have a question, there's a mic over there. Otherwise, I would just repeat the question. So the question is whether we do this, provide this to users or if we keep it all for ourselves. So I like to keep things for myself, of course. So we do both. So the open stack hypervisors are provisioned in Ironic, okay, which is a very nice loop. So the physical node that runs a hypervisor is an instance in Ironic, which is a hypervisor running the control plane for Ironic, okay, so let that sink in. But we also give this to users. So users in this case means mostly services within IT. So for instance, I don't know, the mail servers, the surf servers, the other storage servers, DB team, they get instances in Ironic, that's one thing. Also the experiments, so this physics experiments that I was mentioning earlier, they get sometimes need physical machines, for instance, because they need something that is performance-wise very stable when they tune their code, they can't do necessarily with a VM because the optimization that they do is actually smaller than the fluctuation of the performance of the VM so they can't really see things, okay? So in that case, we also give them physical nodes. Something that we are introducing now that I haven't mentioned at all is multi-tenancy. So what we do with specific deliveries is that we even give the users more power on the nodes. So the security folks are already scratching their heads because they have the BMCs already. But with multi-tenancy, you can basically, Ironic has the concept of having owners of nodes. So when you have, for instance, certain delivery that goes to a specific service, like, say, the mail team, and they wanna have a specific rate configuration, you can basically give them the nodes and then this opens the API or you can open the API to change certain things on the nodes. So for instance, do the rate configuration themselves rather than us doing it. Or they can drive a node through cleaning so when they, if there's something wrong with the node and they get stuck in cleaning, they can fix it themselves. Or main use case, they can actually see how many nodes they have because there's no quotas for flavors. It's sometimes very hard for users to actually see how many nodes or which type can I actually instantiate because they only get cores and RAM and have access to 20 flavors. But I don't know which is which. Or which, how many of which can I create? So this is one of the drawbacks of physical nodes. And with multi-tenancy, they can actually see, okay, there's like 20 of this type and 10 of this type and eight of these are instantiated. So the answers we do both, right? So the question was whether we considered other tools, like from, well, there's other tools that we can, the answer is no, the short answer is no, basically because we had like open stack at the time. So for us, it was very natural to look at ironic at the next time. And once it got momentum, we basically rolled with it. We did not do an extensive study and compare this, for instance, to Canonical's Mars system or any other system. No. So the question is whether we use, whether the ironic that we use in order to provide the hypervisors is inside the same open stack deployment or if this is a separate open stack deployment. Actually it's the same. So it's like one open stack deployment which has ironic, which also provides the hypervisors. It's the mic actually on one second. Okay, yes. Can you hear me? Yes. A couple of questions. First, how do you deal with BMC passwords when they are, you know, nowadays often they are unique per node? And second question is, do you rerun the performance benchmarks and reanalyze against the previous results to see if there was any regression in performance following maybe a BIOS firmware update or a wearing of the devices? Okay, so on the second question about benchmarks, the answer is no. So what we do is like, we buy capacity by the metric is basically like performance per dollar, if you like, or performance per price. So we try to like optimize to get the most performance per dollar. And this is basically, so we roughly know what we should expect. And the benchmark is mostly to confirm that this is the case and also to give this to the experiment. So we basically give, not course to the experiments, but basically the unit of this benchmark to the experiments. Okay. What we do is we have for each delivery, we basically take nodes aside and they are continuously being benchmarked. So we can actually see if a new kernel or a new software library actually changes something so that later on we don't get surprised. We basically constantly monitor this with a small or a tiny fraction of the delivery. The first question was about the BMC hardware and the passwords. About the passwords. Yeah. Do you register them via introspection rules or directly in the ironic data? Yeah. So BMC passwords, setting them and resetting them, that's a hard problem. It's not that obvious to do. So the way it works is basically like initially the hardware comes with password that we tell the vendors to set and this is the passwords that we use initially and then the passwords are set by an external tool so it's not inside ironic that does that. So that's basically like the hardware team that deals with this. So they have a separate database and then they can manage the passwords via their tooling and then update ironic. So ironic is not the source of truth for the passwords. Thank you. There's one more question. Yeah. Yeah, very good question. And so the question is like, how do we discover physical location? Okay, so my cloud answer to this is that physical location shouldn't matter, right? This is what I tell when people come to my office and say I want this server in this specific location, I say that's not cloudy and you can imagine that they're super happy about this answer and say, ah, okay, very good then. So. So yeah, that's usually not what happened there. So the way it's done is, this is actually a problem as well. So the way it's done is, the way the network is structured as soon is basically like mostly per rack. So when the node discovered in which, what we call an IP service basically in which network it is, in which switch it is connected, it knows where it is. So this is roughly how it works. This is then reflected in the resource class, which is tagged that you use in order to do the scheduling and also in the flavor. So users can actually see in the flavor where the node will go. But it's actually a hard problem and if you come to the other talk, you will see that it's hard. Right, we can use this, we just didn't do this yet, but we can, yeah. There's also LADP, we didn't do like super sophisticated stuff. We've started looking into this as well. But in most cases, I also try to insist that people should not care necessarily where exactly their server is. So like look, we make sure we can like say it's in different availability zones. That should be enough. You should not rely on whether it's like on the top position of the rack or not. Doesn't work with all use cases. But yeah, there's room for improvement as always. And they're back. So the question is about the image that we have. I'm not sure. No, it's a public image basically. It's so public to our users. There's nothing special about the hypervisor image. So users instantiate their instances, virtual machines with the exact same image as they do for physical nodes. So there's nothing, this is why we try to like extend the initial image that we had for virtual machines to be capable with physical nodes as well. Sorry, say it again. It's a stream mate, central stream mate. Yeah. So the question is about the networking. That's very often a question like what we do about networking. So the networking at CERN and the standard is very simple. It's like a flat provider network. So there's like the interaction that we have with ironic to like new transfer instance basically non-existent in our case. So basically this is all cut short. So, well, it's because of like historic reasons that are this infamous database that I mentioned. So ironic does not really touch the network in our case. So yes. Yes. So it's very simple, very straightforward. We're looking into like interact with Neutron, but so far there was no need and when we started actually it wasn't needed. So, never back. So the question is about like how we validate that servers are collected, correctly connected network-wise, is that a question? Yeah. We don't validate this by ironic. And of course they are also visual inspections and it's cabled basically by our team. So that's not part of ironic validation for physical nodes. Okay. Okay. I think that's it. Thank you very much.