God communicates to us well ahead of time. We understand what God wants to do. Many times there's a warning that God gives us. He reveals to us what the enemy is up to and when we are tuned into God with the work of the Spirit in us, we can pray things through and we can also act on those things and that's what we were talking about in the last class. Now today we will talk about persistence in prayer. Persistence in prayer is definitely necessary because we do see that there are several promises of God, some of which may need for us to wait for the right time. So while we wait for example Abraham, Abraham also needed to persist in prayer. He needed to wait upon the Lord for the promised child to be born to him. So there is a need for patience, there is a need for perseverance and there is a need for persistence. Meaning we continue to keep standing on that promise and we don't give up. So that is what we will look at in a little more depth today. Before we get into the discussion, there are two passages which are very helpful for us to read today. One is from Luke chapter 11 verses 5 through 8. If you have your notes open in front of you, page 40 is where I'm at and this reference is given there Luke 11 verses 5 through 8 and then there's also Luke 18 verses 1 through 8. So one person can please read Luke 11 and the other Luke 18 please. Okay, I can see you reading but you have to unmute. Luke 11 verses 5 through 8. Luke 11 verses 5 through 8. Then he said to them, suppose one of you has a friend and he goes to him at midnight and says friend lend me three loaves of bread because a friend of mine on a journey has come to me and I have nothing to say before him. Then the one inside answers don't bother me. The door is already locked and my children are with me in the bed. I can't get up and give you anything. I tell you though he will not get up and give him the bread because he is his friend yet because of the man's boldness he will get up and give him as much as he needs. Yes, thank you. Thank you Satsikino for reading that passage. So this is about a friend disturbing another friend in the night because he is in need of bread. So he's desperate and reaches out to a friend at a very odd time but because of the persistence of the person who's asking the friend reluctantly yet surely responds to the request. So we see the persistence here and the response to the persistence. Similarly there is another passage that talks about persistence which is Luke 18. So the next person anybody if you can please read Luke 18 that will be wonderful. 1 to 8 verses. Luke 18 verse 1 to 8. Now he was telling them a parable to show that at all times they ought to pray and not to lose heart saying in a certain city there was a judge who did not fear God and did not respect man. There was a widow in that city and she kept coming to him saying give me legal protection from my opponent. For a while he was unwilling but afterward he said to himself even though I do not fear God nor respect man yet because this widow bothers me I will give her legal protection otherwise by continually coming she will wear me out and the Lord said here what the unrighteous judge said now will not God bring about justice for his elect who cried to him day and night and will he delay long over them. I tell you that he will bring about justice for them quickly. However when the son of man comes he will he will he will he find faith on the earth. Yes thank you John thank you for reading Luke 18. So again another example of persistence and in this case there is a judge who is not even a God fearing person and yet because of the request of a widow he responds. He actually is worried or we would use our regular terms and say fed up of the persistence of this widow. She keeps saying okay protect me from my enemy protect me from my avenger. She's repeatedly saying the same thing and though the judge it says he's not righteous in any way he doesn't fear God but the repeated request pushes him to make a decision for this lady in favor of her. Okay so what does God say? God is saying look if a person like that who's not even a God fearing person can respond to persistence of patience on the part of an individual think about this. How much more God?  He is not unjust. He is not unrighteous like the judge whom we see in this illustration but God who is good don't you think that he will answer readily or in other words even though our waiting may seem long it's actually not that long because we have a God who is willing to respond but for whatever reason you know there is there is a period of time that we are having to wait for to see that promise but God's heart is ready and God is for us is what this passage wants to tell us. So both of these accounts one is in Luke 11 where we saw that a friend who is unwilling late in the night he just because of the persistence he's like okay just stop calling me now it's late night I want to sleep for that sake you want bread okay take take whatever you want just leave right so he responds in that manner but he responds in a favorable manner and here the judge responds in a favorable manner and God is saying look if these people reluctantly can respond positively to the persistence of human beings how much more God who is not reluctant God who is a willing God and who wants to see his promises fulfilled in our life so God is actually encouraging us through both of these accounts and when we study two more scriptures from the book of Hebrews we are encouraged to have faith and patience it is through faith and patience that we inherit the promises of God and we should not become sluggish it says we should not become sluggish as we wait upon the promises of God but instead trust in the Lord that he will you know cause the manifestation of that promise all the promise will be fulfilled in our moments so Jesus taught us to persevere in prayer Jesus in as we started reading in Luke chapter 18 man men should not lose heart but they should pray that's what Jesus said so sometimes you know in our life situation when we are trusting when we are holding on and something doesn't seem to be moving even though we know that it is in God's will it can be trying it can be painful for us to wait on God for a long period of time but Jesus told us don't lose heart and should not lose heart but you must pray so how do we continue with our persistence through prayer don't get discouraged but instead of getting discouraged you pray you persevere in prayer you be persistent in prayer you be consistent in prayer you keep holding on in prayer now we have discussed this earlier doesn't mean that we are begging God or we have lost our faith and that is the reason we are going back to God again and again and asking him for what what he needs to do for us no it's not that we are trying to afflict God with our repeated requests similar to what that friend did or what that widow woman did it's not like that but what we are doing is we're saying God we trust you this is your word and we know that you are coming through for us okay so when we pray about matters for a longer period of time and we've discussed this you know initially maybe our heart is also not in a place where we are assured that God is going to do this but as we keep praying what happens our heart undergoes that change our heart is aligned it becomes aligned you know to the will of God and through the work of his spirit in our lives God is able to do that so we come to a place in ourselves where we are in a place of confident assurance so our prayer sort of changes from that place of you know clarity where we are saying okay God you have you have confirmed to my heart that this is what you are going to do and no longer anxious I'm waiting in expectation I'm giving you thanks oh God for what you are going to do in my life and I know that my request has been granted because it is in line with your will it is in line with your purpose so the prayer kind of changes as we are waiting upon the Lord but I hope you understand what I'm saying we're not saying persistence in prayer is like the two examples that we saw there we go bang bang bang you know like evitate God and say when are you going to do it when are you going to do it you said you'll do it do it do it do it no it's not that kind of a begging then we speak about persistence but it is about staying on the promise okay praying through the promise yes you pray through it repeatedly but your heart is also journeying along where you've gone from having doubts to a place of assurance and finally a place of thanksgiving so you're waiting in prayer with thanksgiving trusting that God is going to cause something to be fulfilled or manifested in our lives and we are encouraged in scripture to be persistent in prayer to be steadfast in prayer Romans 1212 even that verse says we persevere and be steadfast continuing steadfastly in prayer so don't give up just because you know something didn't happen in our lives it's human nature sometimes we just get tired and we say it's not at all happening and not at all getting the job why should I keep praying maybe God is not listening to us but scriptures encourage us and say don't lose heart keep praying be steadfast keep going on there are lots of such passages Ephesians 618 says being watchful to this end with all perseverance so continue don't stop don't become sluggish no even the the people in the world of God those who have received the promise and we repeatedly mentioned Abraham's name faith and patience faith and patience so patience is required on our part and persistence steadfastness in prayer is also helpful for us to receive those promises so continue continue earnestly in prayer Colossians 4 to says that's alone in 5 17s pray without seizing so all these are encouragement for us to continue in prayer now why is it that sometimes we are having to wait for the answers you know to come through in our lives there can be several reasons some reasons are listed here one is the timing of God so we know that God is outside of time but we dwell in time and even in the spiritual realm when God says okay yes and amen so-and-so has asked for this prayer request granted it is done it is outside of time but for that manifestation to happen in our zone which is we live in a time zone okay there is something we talk about to be we say the fullness of time there has to be the right time for that thing to happen so we have to trust in the Lord and wait upon the Lord till that fullness of time you know we say Cairo's the Cairo's time so this a good example is when the world was corrupted with sin we didn't see Jesus being born immediately but Galatians 4 for it says in the fullness of time the fullness of time the Son of God that he was manifested he was sent so God did he have the plan of redemption yes before the foundation of the world the Lamb of God was slain for us so it wasn't God's heart it was already a plan that God had before Matt ever sinned but when did Jesus come the Cairo's moment or that right time there is always a right time that God has ordained for something to happen so maybe some of us we are so passionate about ministry and God has already spoken to us about our calling and things that we are going to be doing in our lives that we want to jump into it right now and we are praying and saying God you know you said this will be I'm going to minister like this like that when is it going to happen I'm not doing it right now how long do I have to wait okay so there's a persistence there is a you know duration there but just wait on the Lord continue to pray continue to thank God for the visions that he has put in our hearts and you just say thank you we've already revealed that you are going to lead me in this way I give you praise I give you thanks I thank you that you are you are orchestrating things on my behalf you are putting the right people in touch with me Lord you're opening the doors for me you are equipping me with the knowledge the wisdom the skills the experience that I need to do what you want me to do Lord continue to to you know give me details of you know how you would want me to to prepare myself for this so basically you don't lose heart but you wait on the Lord and yes at the right time the right doors will open so why is it that sometimes we have to wait because it's not God's timing yet it's not God's right timing yet and we can discuss this so much in detail you can talk about you know even the life of Apostle Paul I'm sure you would have touched on this touch in other courses it is said that there were something like I hope I'm right about the number of something like 17 years or something which are known as a silent years of Paul after his conversion nobody knew you know much about what ministry he's doing he was doing it in a in a quiet way where he had he had you know had to hide because people were not believing him he turned from a persecutor to a believer so the people who found out about this and especially those who were persecutors with him they wanted to harm and hurt Paul so for his own safety he had to go up go into hiding so those years you don't read too much about Paul what he was up to those details we don't have but at the right time doing acts 13 you see Holy Spirit tells the people who are praying ministering unto the Holy Spirit set aside for me Barnabas and Saul for the ministry for which I have called them to do so God moves Paul into the main way of ministering roughly about you know 17 years after his conversion and then if you were to ask Paul what were you doing those 17 years how were those 17 years Paul can you tell us I'm sure he would have been persevering in prayer trusting in the Lord and saying God you who called me you are faithful and for whatever reason I have to go through this phase of preparation go through this phase of phase of waiting upon you and I'm trusting you Lord at the right time so there's always the right timing of God so we receive promises but let's hold on and let's not lose heart sometimes it feels like a particular promise it's not happening at all why Lord so much time but trust in the Lord okay trust in the Lord and at the right time those things will take place and let's not be Nahari to short circuit God's time of preparation I've heard this said God is not in a hurry God is not in a hurry and God wants us to to be well prepared for what he has called us to do so stand in prayer stand in faith so I just give you one example normally there could be other things in our lives where it's not the right time yet for us to do something you know maybe we want to do something for our family build a house something like that but it's not happening you're praying about it all the time it's not yet happening you want to move into a certain career it's not happening doesn't matter if you have the promise of God over your life continue to pray trust in God's timing and say Lord this is your what you have spoken to me you will fulfill you are faithful I'm holding on to your word so because of the timing of God we may need to wait we may need to be patient sometimes okay and that's the reason perseverance is required now they can also be times when God has granted it but the enemy may bring the hindrance and that is the reason that the promise is not coming through or the answer to our prayer is not seen so Daniel 10 verses 12 and 13 that is a good passage to look up so can I just request someone please can you turn to Daniel chapter 10 and read these two verses 12 and 30 anyone chapter 10 was 12 and 13 then he said to me do not fear Daniel for from the first day that you set your heart to understand and to humble yourself before your God your words were heard and I have come because of your words but the Prince of the Kingdom of Persia which stood me 21 days and behold my kill one of the chief princes came to help me for I had been left alone there with the Kings of Persia thank you thank you Rosalind for reading that so here the answer to prayer you know how quickly did it actually come when Daniel prayed we noticed that God sent the answer immediately God released the answer immediately but the explanation is given to Daniel that there were demonic authorities in the spiritual realm that were preventing the answer from coming through to Daniel okay so because of the hindrance in the spiritual realm it took 21 days now we also know that Daniel prayed he prayed for those 21 days he sought the Lord he you know he he was persistent in prayer and because of engaging in prayer that's where the whole spiritual warfare aspect comes in when we are praying you know also you notice that Michael is sent to to engage in that warfare up there in the in the spiritual realm and finally after 21 days after all that struggle the answer is coming through to Daniel so sometimes God gives the answer immediately but there can be these disturbances because of the work of the evil one in our lives and that also causes delay in answered prayers so how do we deal with it how do we deal with you know demonic disturbances and things like that answer is again very simple you first be persistent now when we are praying we are continuing to pray yes there is a delay yes there is there seems to be a hindrance but our prayer is also bringing us that release you see how Daniel is praying and through those prayers you know God is God is sending in the angels to fight on behalf of Daniel and that answer is breaking through right after waiting on the Lord in prayer so whatever happens continue to pray now how our prayers causing things to shift in the spiritual realm we may not know all the details but one thing we know that our prayers are making a difference up there and God is breaking those strongholds God is working against those demonic powers and even if the delay is because of these demonic powers or because of Satan and his tactics we don't have to be afraid it's a matter of time the answer will come because we are victorious right we are praying and we are breaking these strongholds in the name of Jesus so sometimes there is a delay because of demonic interception in our lives okay so remember that that could be another reason why there is a delay the third reason is we may not have the right heart attitude okay maybe the timing is also correct God wants to do something in our lives God wants to release a blessing in our lives but our heart is not in the right place with the Lord and we are praying and praying and we are saying not why why am I not getting this opportunity now why am I not moving to the next level but maybe God is noticing that we are wanting that for the sake of you know there is pride in our heart so there is some kind of an envy the motives of our heart are not right so God we want to wait till our heart is in the right place we want to do the right thing for example I'll just tell you one example maybe like I want to preach okay and I'm feeling bad I'm saying Lord you only gave me the vision that I am going to be proclaiming your word and I want to preach I want to preach you know I'm praying things like that but that chance is not coming but maybe you know God is saying look your intention is good my will for you is that only but your heart is not in the right place why do you want to preach what is the motive of your heart so our answers could be like I might say God I want to you know I want to preach a good sermon or I want others to know that I'm called to preach or I want everybody to think that I speak well so deep in the depths of my heart my reasons could be wrong the motives of my heart could be wrong but God may say okay you know what Nancy hold on you want to do the right thing but your heart is not right yet so let's wait okay and then you're waiting you're waiting you're waiting till the heart aligns and you come to this place in your heart where you're saying Lord I just want to live for you whichever way I want to serve you whichever way you know only preaching I don't care anymore whatever you tell me to do I will do you know I just want to serve you so when you come to that place your heart is in the right place then God says now you're ready you're ready to depend on me for everything so fine even if I give you a big opportunity you will not become proud you're in a better place now come on you take it up so you see how God also is concerned about the condition of our hearts so till the complete you know all obedience or our heart condition matches what he wants for us right that could be some delays and we may be wondering not why why why it's not happening why am I not getting why that door is not opening but God is saying I'm working in you okay and let that work be done in you so these all could be the reasons now we're talking about completing obedience there is an example in our notes here where a preacher that she she he shares about a woman who was praying for an unsaved family member but the person was praying with a very self-righteous attitude and saying wow you know these people they are not they they are not living for God look at me I am living for God you know so the the request is legitimate you want somebody in your family to be saved but the attitude with which you're going about praying for that person is not correct so when this lady who's praying for her family member you know God speaks to her and ministers to her heart and she changes her attitude towards her family member she repents of the wrong attitude so gives you know the the family members for their bad behavior against her and all of that and then she goes ahead and prays and ask God Lord let the let the deception that the whales which cover their their eyes let that be removed though she prayed for her family member for many years she didn't see them come to Christ but once she changed her heart attitude in a matter of months those people apparently they were saved okay they also became believers so what was the difference here the attitude of the person who's praying so sometimes there is a work which needs to be done in me and that is causing the delay in the answer from God so in these are all things they could also be sins that God may be wanting us to deal with and it's only when we do that that he's able to open up the next door and lead us forward in Christ so things like that you know that we must remember so delays can be because of so many different reasons but our the call for us is to follow God and to be patient to persevere and be persistent in prayer now another wonderful example of somebody who was persistent in prayer is Elijah we have talked about Elijah earlier we looked at the first Kings chapter 17 where you know God speaks to him and he releases the word you know that God puts in his mouth and and you know he he proclaims that word that this is going to happen again one Kings 18 there again we see how God speaks to him and says that you know it is going to rain so he goes and he tells King Ahab that but later on we observe you know that same passage down when we come to verses 41 through 46 Elijah is actually praying the revealed will of God but that sounds strange why should we pray and wait for something that God has already promised he said he'll do it no that's it when God says it's done but remember he talked about believers dominion he talked about core labouring with God working together with God so God has put us in charge and Jesus taught us to pray die will be done or not so there is a part for you and me to play God's will is clarified God's will has been revealed to us yet even Elijah understood this concept of core labouring as a prophet and you know Elijah moved in miracles and the supernatural things that took place during his time and in his ministry we would think what Elijah you said no it's going to rain finished God said it and you said it you are Elijah it has to happen but he understood the concept of core labouring with God so he held on to that word God said okay I will I will send rain it is going to rain so he goes and in praise how much does he pray see that seven times seven times he tells us so when go look go look whether the cloud has come on so he prays prays prays prays still there is a sign of the cloud and at that point we don't know the spiritual dynamics somehow within himself he said okay you know I hear the sound of the abundance of the rain and then he he he just runs from that point to escape the rain but the point is even Elijah knew the concept of core labouring with God which takes a while okay which takes patience which takes persistence and perseverance so even if there is a word which God has spoken over our lives it may take some time but at this but the important thing is that we must pray and then we are engaging in prayer that's when God is also able to cause that thing to happen now what if we don't pray what if Elijah didn't pray that day my guess is it may not how can you say that you know God said it right but there is a reason why it's in the Bible that he prays seven times he's praying seven times easy no it's not we we can get discouraged and say why should I pray seven times long but perseverance till it happens you know we pray through you know some people use that it's called an acronym right like push pray until something happens so there are times when God's promise is there but we have to pray until something happens about Elijah in James chapter 5 we are told you know again okay I think it's good somebody should read this James 5 verses 16 through 20 it's here in your notes also James 5 16 through 20 please page 41 James chapter 5 16 to 20 confess the trespasses to one another and pray for one another that you may be healed the effective fervent prayer of a righteous man awails much Elijah was a man with a nature like ours and he prayed earnestly that it would not rain and it did not rain on the land for three years and six months and he prayed again and the heaven gave rain and the earth produced its truth brethren if anyone among you wanders from the truth and someone turns him back let him know that he who turns a sinner from the error of his way will save a soul from death and cover a multitude of sins amen thank you so here we are told that Elijah was a man with a nature like ours and he prayed earnestly that it would not rain and it did not rain on the land for three years and six months and he prayed again and the heaven gave rain and the earth produced its truth so Elijah a man with a nature like us means he's a human being so we are also human beings so when Elijah prayed you saw the effects of it based on the word of God it will not rain it didn't rain and then it will rain he prayed the same thing and it actually rained so we are being encouraged here that as human beings when we pray the will of God which has been spoken to us we too will see the results the way Elijah saw but we have to be willing to co-labor with God the way Elijah co-labor didn't pray and also here two things are there one is about praying for the sick person and in the end there is a mention of a sinner right somebody who has gone far away from God so both of these examples are mentioned in the same passage so it's it's like you know sometimes when we are praying for somebody who is sick or somebody who has gone away from God we might have to apply persistence in prayer because it's not easy okay and many of you I'm sure you will also say that yeah I've been praying for so long for this healing to take place or you know this person to come to Christ yes there are some testimonies where we say wow it happened immediately it happened right now and how did it happen when Jesus minister it happened immediately healings happened immediately that is the goal that we are moving towards but for whatever reason whatever reason sometimes we don't see instant immediate results in healing or in the same way you're praying for your father mother long time you don't see instant results and that can be very discouraging but here in the same passage we have also shown about the persistence of Elijah so let's not give up basically persevere be persistent yes God reveals this will but we are called to pray through hold on till we see it happen so yeah and later you know there is in the next section here there is about there are three passages given and it's about Daniel pressing in because Daniel from the scriptures he had an idea like Israel was in exile under Babylon but through the scriptures he had an idea that there is going to be a release after a certain number of years and also like Jeremiah prophesied it and all of that so you see that once Daniel comes to know what God is going to do you find him praying a lot why why you praying Daniel God already said no after so many years he will bring you out you will not be under the Babylon needs anymore but when we come to know the will of God even Daniel understood I have to go labor God has revealed this to me I have to now start co-laboring I have to pray I have to persevere till we see it happen okay so that is that other section there once again encouraging us just like Daniel just like you know your Elijah that even if the will of God has been revealed to us let us continue to co-labour with God so just yeah I think we have only about seven minutes left so if there are any questions any thoughts and you could please go ahead and share it about waiting on the Lord and persevere in maybe I'll just share a quick testimony here and this is about my father so my father like he is from like a Christian background but then you know he never really liked the whole concept of you know like being a believer and salvation and things like that and so I from when I remember from when as a kid I used to always pray for my dad that he should be saved he should be saved you know and it took several years and what I wanted to say is like last I don't exactly remember which year this was just a few years ago it was one of our normal like evenings where I had just made some tea and I gave it to my dad and I was talking to him and I was just saying like okay so what do you think about Jesus and all and mind you if I had done this kind of a thing a few years ago my dad would have been furious and said don't teach me about God and about salvation but actually like about two or three years ago I sat and I asked him so what do you think do you think you want to accept Christ and can I pray with you will you repeat this prayer after me so actually he did and very emotionally also he said yeah I've been thinking about it and yeah you pray I'll pray with you and I prayed with my dad and he accepted Christ like officially I knew this happens already in that place of accepting but he accepted it and I mean the bigger story is that some of you know that my father's not well he is a stroke patient right after that week and it's amazing right after that week I think he had a very major stroke episode and from that time he cannot speak words he speaks a few words now he can't speak many words anymore so like I always look back at that and I think oh my goodness what if I had not prayed the salvation prayer with him he was able to say every word and you know he kind of like okay dear Lord Jesus I repent of my sins I accept you but a week after that till now he can only speak a few words he can't speak many words right now but one thing we know that he's saved he's born again right and God is sustaining him in a very beautiful way in his health and everything so but when I think about my father's salvation it's been years years and years sometimes to pray and think Lord why he is not you're not accepting how many years are we going to wait for this right but in matters of praying for your family to come to know the Lord or maybe healing some of us might be struggling and thinking Lord how long is it going to take how much I got to pray but just to encourage you and say that God is faithful right God is faithful and we will see you know as for me and my house we will serve the Lord so yeah just just a word out there for those are praying for your own families don't give up God will God will make it happen so yes any other questions any other thoughts about perseverance in prayer yeah so if I got it's always amazing when I think about it how God works anything else about waiting and praying let me share one of my friend actually now he's serving the Lord yes actually there was a time he came and stayed with the same apartment where actually I'm staying and when he came to know that okay I'm a Christian and I serve the Lord then he said to his friends don't mingle with this person or else actually he will convert you and I think it took almost three years and that he came to Christ and just to make the story short the when actually for the first time I invite him for a birthday celebration and he came and have a philosophy with us then once I say the gospel and he heard just the gospel and he said okay maybe he will convert me so he forgot but his friend came to Christ and left the room but this boy actually when we are praying continuously for him and once actually he said okay I just want to come with you church and I think even when my friend was a pastor even when I introduce him nobody thought that he will come and even when my family they were praying continuously for him even my friends and because he was a very negative guy he always say negative things about Christianity and about the pastors that they forcefully convert people but in between actually he was hearing the word of God whenever actually he comes to our home they have philosophy with us and many times actually we pray and say the word of God and praise God that though we didn't believe that okay he will come to Christ but it took almost three years and I think three plus years to come to Christ and when he once decided that I will serve the Lord even we are surprised that how this guy he actually made a decision to follow Christ and now he made decision to serve the Lord so it's really amazing and the things maybe I will say that sometimes we will not we cannot believe that the things will happen but when we trust the Lord God will so maybe amazing and we will be surprised when we see the result yes thank you thank you subashish and you know it's wonderful to know that through prayer people have given their lives to Christ despite you know the duration of the period of waiting but we must persevere we must pray we must not give up okay not just in the in the matter of seeing people come to the Lord but every other promise of God that we are waiting on be encouraged and trust the Lord so any anything any question anything right now if not we will wrap up and we could pick up the questions also in the next class yes ma'am I have one question yeah okay quickly to pick up yeah ma'am when we pray sometimes there is a quick question from God and sometimes it's giving late why ma'am is depend upon on faith and the patient or what yeah so that's what we're because we are saying that there can be many reasons you have answered you're given one reason yourself one is faith so there is no faith then obviously you know it will not work and we discuss few more reasons today there is a right timing for the answer to come or even if God has given the right the answer there is a hindrance in the spiritual well and that's why it's not coming through or a heart attitude is not yet correct and that is why there is a delay God is waiting for us to change for us to receive that answer so these are some reasons why yes thank you ma'am right answer okay sure great okay thank you all right class so I think we will wrap up for today and let's meet tomorrow I would like to request somebody to close with the word of prayer anyone please unmute and pray I'll pray yes yes Sivya please go ahead thank you thank you Lord for this wonderful opportunity Father Lord to sit at your feet Lord in the fellowship Lord of your children Father Lord hearing from your word Father Lord being enriched Father in our hearts in our spirit in our mind Father with the truth Lord how you want us to pray Lord persistently Father with perseverance Father Lord thank you for encouraging us Father thank you for giving us the Lord once again affirming us Father that you are a faithful God yes the word says Abraham waited patiently and received what was promised yes Father Lord we pray Father that you Lord help us pray in the according to your will Father aligned to your words Lord aligned to the the leading of the Holy Spirit Father Lord that we may be able to Lord align our hearts Father our will Father Lord our life Father ask for your desire Father Lord thank you that you have promised us Father that you will grant all the desires of our heart Father Lord according to your riches and glory yes Father Lord as we trust in you Father Lord you're faithful and good Father to answer us Father Lord thank you that you are attentive to our prayers Father Lord thank you that your word says that the Alliance may grow hungry and weary Father but one who waits upon you will be renewed Father thank you Lord thank you Father for all your promises Father Lord we hold on to your promises and we know that your words are true thank you that you are a faithful God you are a good God and you're a loving Father now thank you and praise you in Jesus precious amen amen amen thank you Divya yes thank you for praying and thank you everyone for joining God bless you continue to have a wonderful rest of the day and we will meet again tomorrow take care okay and Sid Kenu has initiated a group here what is this group Sid Kenu he's left the call I think thank you amen thank you bye


It's difficult to get there, but it is really worth it when you do. And if you have a model for your automation, then it means that other people can contribute more efficiently, more quickly, and it just feeds on there. So getting to a certain tipping point can be difficult. But if you've got the right tooling in place, then it can be very effective. There are some cases when you probably might not want to automate. And you have to ask yourself, is it worth the effort? If there's a task that you only do once per year on a handful of servers, it might not be worth trying to automate that because you don't do it often enough. And the efforts that it would take to automate that task may not be worth it, so that's worth bearing in mind. But things that you can automate, they're not just unit tests. There's lots more things, particularly from a DevOps point of view. You can automate your development environment, of course, but you can automate the integration of that software through the QE cycle into production. You can automate the provisioning of your infrastructure using tools like Chef and Ansible and Puppet. You can automate your change management processes and your release management processes. Subtle difference between change management is change management could be changing the memory footprint or the thresholds for a certain setting inside the platform where release management is more about doing deploys in a continuous delivery fashion and the managing the releases coming from the engineering team through into production. Automation is also very, very valuable in a scheduled maintenance context when you're dealing with the cloud because you have the ability to take the tried and tested techniques and deployment processes that have already been exercised by the developers and by your QE team, and it should, using the same tools, then just go into production in the same fashion because you've already automated all of the processes. So I could spend all day talking about automation what I want. So as I said, change management can include release management, configuration management and data management. Release management, from our perspectives in the DevOps team, is managing the various software releases and the cadence of your releases but making sure that they flow through from development into QE and into the SaaS platform smoothly and that you have a repeatable process for doing that. If your code is going out into production, ask yourself, what's the impact of deploying this? Is it something we can dark deploy? Should we dark deploy it? Or is it a major release, a big bang release where it'll be launched on the same day or are you drip feeding some of the functionality into production? Be aware of how your code is actually going to end up being deployed into a production environment. If you're deploying some new replacement technology, do you need to do any data migration? Could that mean that you need to do a scheduled maintenance window or a change window to deploy your software? Think about these things and talk to the DevOps team and ask them what impact that might have. It could just mean that you need to give more advanced notice to customers about a certain software release and that's fine but know about these things before you consider timing around the deploys. If you're deploying into a scalable platform onto multiple VMs running the same software, it's nice to think that you could do a deploy in parallel to every VM at the same time and that would take far less time. But you shouldn't do that because if you deploy to all of them at exactly the same time and you're bouncing EAP or something like that, you're going to take the system off the air. So be aware of that. Is there a way that the DevOps team of device where you can deploy software to VMs in series, take a method of load balancer deploy, open shift and lots of tools have nice ways of doing that as well. Do you have a rollback policy? Do you have a process for doing rollbacks? You can have a process but not have a policy. Policy could be if it's not done well in the first hour, we're rolling back because it's clearly not working or you can set time limits on these things. Again, talk to the DevOps team, be aware of these things when you're developing your code because the people deploying the software don't like surprises. So configuration management, again, it's another form of change management. It's tweaking settings inside the software but if you do have a change you need to make, is there some way that you can eject that property into the platform using API? That would be good. Or do you have to restart some components inside the platform to do that? That's okay too. So as long as people know about it and you have notes in your, your Gira tickets and struck people that that's a requirement of the release. So you're introducing a new feature. How much data is going to consume is going to start turning out gigabytes of new data. That's okay too. So as long as people know about it, you can do capacity planning. If it is generating a lot of data, maybe some of it's temporary data, throwaway data, will your software self-prune that data after 30 days? If not, it should. If it doesn't, you need to tell somebody and you need to work with people to manage the impact of that in your production environment. All of these things can lead to surprises that the on-call team or the production team probably won't thank you for. So it's good to talk about them. Capacity planning is another interesting area. Again, as I mentioned earlier, if you think that your software is going to consume additional memory, disk space, CPU, let's have that conversation. You could be driving up the cost of your platform, which are shiny new feature because you need a terabyte of storage or gigabytes of memory on every server or some new piece of Java that doesn't exist on that particular layer of the platform. Know your market. Know the context in which your software is going to be used. So how many end-users, think of a mobile app, how many end-users are there going to be? Is it a driving testing system where there's really only 100 driving testers in a particular country or is it a full-blown airline app with hundreds of thousands of users every day? And what's the impact of that? Have you considered the resource implications on that and discussed people? There's a very good article, capacity planning on the back of a cocktail napkin, look it up, and it helps you understand, okay, so you've got 50,000 users at peak hours, only 10,000 of those will be awake, and then only 5,000 of those will be coming to work and the rest will be on the tram. And it helps you understand, okay, the user pool is huge, but in practice, how many people are actually going to be using this application at the same time? Do a little bit of research into that and come up with some reasonable assertions on it. If you get it wrong, at least you've had a discussion about it, and if your customer gets upset, you say, look, we did capacity planning, here's our logic, this is the data we had, we're sorry, well, we didn't just put it into production without considering this. Similarly, what's the impact of your software going to be on the existing environment? Are you going to blow the RAM requirements in production or not? Or what's the impact on the system going to be when all of the masses of people come along to use your new feature? Understand these things and have that discussion. So, at the end of the day, when your software and your code is in production, somebody's going to have to support it. So what can you do to help that team not be bothering you to help them debug your software? So there's a number of things you can do. Because I'm a cloud guy, monitoring is top of the list. You can never have enough monitoring. Automated monitoring is even better. I'll have a slide on that in a moment. Similarly, it goes without saying that your product documentation should be accurate so that either the customer can self-manage their own issues, good KCS articles or knowledge articles in the support system. So when somebody is searching for an error string, they'll find the right article and somebody's already written the answer. It's tried and tested approaches. If you've got some particular angle of your software that needs to be administered and you know you can do it from the command line or you can tweak the Apache configs to do it or something like that, that's great. But the software engineer that might be having to support your software or the customer service, this team, if you will, it would be great if they could administer your product for you and that way you don't have to do it. And you don't want to be launching software into production. That needs a rockstar DevOps guy with some command line tools to be configuring the software. That's not a good idea. So an ability for other people in the support organization to administer your software, that's very important. Logging, again, if you're producing logs in your software, think about who's gonna be looking at the logs. Sometimes it could be you, sometimes it could be a support engineer. And what's the quality of the logging like? How useful is it? Are the timestamps the same? Is the information helpful? Is it an access log? Is it a debug log? Who's the audience? Think about these things. Most of the time, if you're developing, you're probably gonna be putting in log statements that will help you to debug the software during development. That's great, but there's other people who may be trying to do similar with your software after the fact. And it can be very helpful to think about some lighter weight information that you could put in there that might be in the headspace of the person trying to support the software. Again, tooling for support. So what tools can you provide to the support team? So they can help support your software. Command line tools are great, but there's lots of other kind of options there as well, monitoring dashboard access and things like that. Regression testing tools. And you will need to have a sustaining function in your organization that can support that particular release of your software for a period of time after it's been released. Accept that now and life will be better for you because escalations can happen and you haven't really put in place any processes or resources to deal with that. In particular, in light of a new release, the adoption can be quite positive, but there can always be feedback coming back through how to use the thing or maybe feedback on the documentation after the fact. So monitoring. One of my favorite topics. You can never have enough, as I said. Types of monitoring that we have found invaluable over the years in Red Hat Mobile would be system health. So is the system working correctly right now? Are the dashboards green? How many monitoring checks do you have? Well, the more you have, the better. But how accurate are they? Did you test your monitoring checks during pre-production and did you force them to fail to make sure they go red? Because you can write a monitoring check with a bug in it and it won't turn red or it won't send you an email when that situation happens. So have you tested it? If you're provisioning new infrastructure and you've got really good monitoring dashboards with 50 different monitoring probes per server, when your dashboards all green, you're done. Your dashboards that are used by the support team to analyze the health of the system are the very same systems that will tell you, say, right, we can close the change window. We've reached our all clear criteria for doing this work. So can you contribute something in your software that exposes a little API where somebody can interrogate the health of your component of the software? Maybe you could return a simple JSON object that is in a consistent fashion where all of your software components conform to that. And that can be integrated into the monitoring systems and they can trigger alerts when the status string is not OK or something like that. So again, think about these things.  They may not be all green. There might be one yellow in there because there's a backup or something happening or there's a disk space pruning going on. So many times we've done schedule maintenance. Looked at the dashboards when we're finished and there's one check that's orange and we spend about two hours trying to figure out what did we break? Turns out it was orange before we started. So we didn't actually break anything. We didn't regress in the window. So it's crucially important to do that. If you're integrating to customers' back end systems as we do in Red Hat Mobile over a VPN connection, have you got a way to determine whether that connection is up or down? Monitoring, yes. If the customer is telling you about a VPN connection, the chances are you're having a discussion about their various subnet ranges and what systems in their network you're going to want to talk to, what port, what protocols. Instrumenting those into a monitoring check, expose that to your support team. Bob rings up and says, hello, my name's Bob. My app is broken. Click, click, click, view. Hey, Bob, you know what? One of your systems inside your own network is down according to our monitoring systems. Thanks for calling, Bob. That's a really helpful thing to make available to your support team. We've developed a number of tools to warn us about SSL certificates when they're going to expire. Do they have Poodle or do they have Heartbleed? So once you write that check once, you can instrument it to anywhere in your cloud environment that you have security certificates installed. So when, I think it was the year before last, there was a lot of, maybe last year, security scare with Heartbleed and Poodle and whatnot.  Issue a security advisory on our status blog. Hey, everybody, we're done here. Nothing to see here, move on.  We have monitoring checks and production that tell us if any one log file grows above a certain size threshold, usually one or two gigabytes. And if that happens, chances are, somewhere in that system, the log rotation mechanism is not working because that file should be getting rotated every day and it shouldn't be growing that big. Those little things are invaluable. And then if you find that it is, log a ticket and have somebody correct the automation system to make sure there's a log rotation configuration settings, configuration management gets fixed in the next release. Taking inspiration from test-driven development, we like to do test-driven ops. And one of the other favorite phrases I have is giga ops. So, armed with an army of monitoring dashboards, and what we call a cheat sheet, which is a how to fix most of the items listed under the monitoring dashboards, we've coined the phrase of giga ops and giga means get it green again. If you're on call in the middle of the night and a system is broken and you look at the dashboards and two or three checks are red, they shouldn't be. Chances are, if you follow the instructions in cheat sheet, which is usually maybe restart a service or try something like that, if you can get the dashboards green again, chances are the system's back on the air. That's enough to be on call and get the cow out of the ditch is one of my favorite phrases described there. So, I mentioned earlier about product administration. I like to express this in the context of the three I's. Any product should expose an API, have a CLI, and preferably be available in a UI. That's ideal. You don't always have the UI, but the other two are absolutely essential. Similarly, logging. Your logs probably should be centralized, so you can look at them all from one place. But are they consolidated into one stream where you can look at all of the logs in a context of each other, or do you have to fish through log files belong to this system over here and then swap over to another system to look at the timestamps and try and trace through the flow of a certain issue that you're trying to troubleshoot? And are your logs consistent? Do they all use the same timestamp? Do they all use the same kind of number of fields and things like that? If they're developed by different people, they might not be, and that can be very hard to support even though you may have consolidated and centralized logging. Each log entry looks different, it has much harder to debug, and you can't use crazy bash one-liners to snarf out of the interesting information as easily. Again, tools, of course, in the context of support, if you can give your support team access to the regression test tools and they can run them, maybe they'll have a reference app in the platform, and this app is known to work all of the time. And Bob brings up and said, I'm developing an app and it's not quite working. I said, sure, Bob, here's one we wrote, it works. Would you like to take a look at that one and maybe look at the differences and there's a selection of apps available if you're doing one relating to a camera functionality or something like that or best practices ones. So if you can give your support team some sample code that they can use as a reference to help customers fix their issues, but also to reduce them a number of time that we spend repeatedly doing the same thing for those customers, that can be a big help as well. Sustaining is difficult to quantify, what is sustaining? So in our world, sustaining is more about not new features, but it can be bugs, enhancements, or documentation deficiencies. Again, your documents can be incomplete or they can be inconsistent, wrong, or you might not have a feature documented at all. Again, have a mechanism and a software process that enables you to correct these things efficiently and you'll be fine. So a couple of slides on some other elements of running a SaaS platform, which you might not have a lot of visibility into from a developer's perspective, but when you're running a SaaS platform with real enterprise customers paying a lot of money, business continuity, keeping the show on the road, uptime is all very important. If your system can't tolerate faults, then you won't be able to have a highly available system and you're going to have service availability challenges and issues which could impact on your revenue. If you don't have well documented standard operating procedures, and these could be born out of talking to development team for these things where this is how it's meant to be done. If you do it like this, it should get your dashboard screen. It should achieve the desired result. If it doesn't, let's fix it. Let's update it based on some deployment note or release note that's come through in a release. If you don't have an effective way to communicate with your customers how there's an outage happening, but we're working on it, most customers will be happy to know that somebody's awake and working on their issue and they'll leave you alone to do the job. If you have an effective way to communicate that to your customers, which we do in a form of a, most companies have a status website where you can go and look and see something's wrong here, is Amazon having an issue? Oh, they are, great. Now we know it's not my code. I'll wait for them to fix it. Similarly, if you don't have a good infrastructure partner with good resiliency and scalability elasticity features, then it's gonna be very difficult to have all of those things. So for types of fall tolerance that we have coined, essential maintenance, if you will, is Amazon rings you up and says, that VM over there, we think it's on a server that's about to die. You need to move it. We'll move it for you on this date, but if you wanna move it yourself, before then, that's fine. You need a mechanism to deal with that. A software patch comes out or a security defect is announced. You need a mechanism to deal with that. It's not quite a fault, but it's an issue that you might wanna deal with and change. And then of course, the unexpected. Stuff happens all the time, network peering issues. If your system isn't able to tolerate these faults, it won't be highly available. You also need to be able to deal with schedule maintenance as developers to say, hey, this release is gonna require one hour data migration. How are you gonna do that? Communicate to your customers, set the expectation, arrange a change window, get it done. Some schedule maintenance can be service affecting and some may not be. Generally speaking, if it's not gonna be service affecting, you don't need to do much about it. But sometimes it can be helpful to put up an article, say, we're going to make a change. It's not going to be service affecting, just letting you know. Then if something bad does happen, you can at least say, well, we did say we were making changes and we're sorry. High availability, absolutely key. I'm often asked, what's the difference between resilience and redundancy? My answer is resilience is really about keeping going at the application there when something goes wrong. Now, you can't take a piece of software and deploy it onto multiple servers in the cloud and say it's a cloud application. It needs to be architected and designed to know that it's going to be deployed across those. Therefore, it won't be scalable. That's really about having a stateless computing model where there's nothing shared across the application there. Redundancy is more about preventing data loss. So it's database replication, Mongo replica sets, that sort of thing. So that's my definition of the difference between the two of those. Disaster recovery, all school disaster recovery is have a second data center in some other city. You're doubling your costs. The more modern model in Amazon is to use their cross availability zone features where your platform is actually horizontally scalable but distributed across those highly connected data centers. Doesn't double your costs if an entire data center or Amazon availability zone goes off the air. Their load balancers are capable of balancing across these regions, sorry, across the availability zones. And you can still achieve the same levels of uptime because your horizontal scalability and resiliency and redundancy should keep you on the air with the other availability zones that are still there. Quick slide. Note the difference, the striking difference in the amount of downtime per week you're allowed just by adding one nine. It's staggering, going from two nines which allows you just under two hours per week which is healthy enough time. Just by adding one nine, that goes on to 10 minutes. That's a striking difference. Be aware of this. If customers say, oh, could you do four nines? Perhaps not, but it may increase your cost. Communication strategy. Key elements here are if you can provide notifications in your UI, you should, and present a status dashboard where you can communicate these things and people can come and say, oh, look, there's a red. I'll come back in an hour. Status blog. We're having an issue. There's a security advisory. We're doing schedule maintenance.  Get them used to looking at your status website and your blog for interesting information and they'll probably not log so many support calls or not be phoning up so often. Finally, security and governance. Again, it's an area that's quite important in the enterprise industry. The main ones that I would focus on here is what are you securing?  Yes, are you securing the infrastructure it runs on? Yes, you're doing both. What type of encryption are you doing? In transit, SSL, at rest, encryption on disk, EBS encryption on Amazon. How do you manage your vulnerabilities? You can do vulnerability scanning or you can do penetration testing. They're different. Customers might want to do one or both. You need a way to deal with security issues and issue a fast response. Know how your data in your platform is going to be inserted or managed and who's controlling it, who has access. Where will it be? What happens when the customer leaves? How do you prune their data from the platform? Again, not quite developer stuff but stuff to be aware of in case you may be able to make a contribution or come up with some new ideas on how that can help. So, finishing up to recap, what makes DevOps happy and what makes DevOps sad? Well, some of the things that makes DevOps happy include fault tolerance. If you have good fault tolerance, your DevOps guys are going to be happy. If you've got high availability, they'll be happy. If you've got automation, they'll be really happy. So will I. If you've got security, of course, your customers and everybody else in the organization are going to be happy. Monitoring, monitoring is king, can't talk enough about it. Logging, I mentioned it earlier, it's the unseen hero but it can be absolutely priceless to have good logging and be thinking about who's going to be reading your logs and the ability for your product to be supportable by those who will have to support it. Anything you can do there is going to make everybody's life easier. Things that will make you, ooh, that's a little bit smaller. The consequences of not having these things could be if you don't have fault tolerance, your service levels could be impacted. If you don't have a high availability, you may have to issue a service credit to your customer so your revenue is going to be down. If you don't have automation, then you probably can't do continuous delivery in the way that you want. If you don't have security, there's a brand and a trust issued as a consequence of that. If you don't have monitoring, you could have serious problems with your quality because you're not catching fault before they go into production or you're not enabling your quality team to detect when a certain port stops listening during pre-production when you restart a service or it doesn't come back online correctly. If you don't have good logging, your support team won't thank you for it. And if you don't have a good support organization, you're going to pummel your sustaining team with all escalations from customers. So really working together to achieve the items on the left can eliminate a lot of the risks that would make people very sad. And I do thank you for your time and thank you for listening. Made it just in time. Is there any questions? Repeat the question. Yeah. So you're asking, is there any tools I recommend for certificate management? To be honest, the OpenSSL command line tool has tons of support.  Yeah. That's what we use and a couple of lines of bash and you're done. And there's usually not a lot of variation in between detecting the certificate expiry time or is the certificate chain still valid or is SSL 3 supported or still enabled or not or is a certain site for enabled? You can usually detect a lot of that using the OpenSSL command line tool. Yeah. Okay. I'm very excited by Amazon's new certificate management service where the certificates are free and there's APIs to create them. That's really exciting because one of the things that is difficult to automate today is the creation and provisioning of your SSL certificates. But Amazon, of course, I come along with a great solution to these things most of the time. Let's encrypt. Let's encrypt. Yes, that's a new one as well. We saw that one before Amazon released their one quite recently. Yes. Yeah. Okay, no problem. Thank you. The problem in the beginning was very good. That's okay. I really like it. You have my slide now. Can you please export also the PDF? Oh, sure. In case there are phones or other. Yeah, yeah. What we actually did, the release of the new applications, we had this automated load balancing stuff that it automatically checked that like 30% of the servers will still be in the load balancer I mean, I'm fine with that, but yeah. And we did it out of the peak hours. Yeah. So it was all automated. Okay, so we have your presentation. This is the presenter. Oh, I actually have my own. Okay, that's good. Very similar one. This is the connection ace. You can choose either HDMI or the VGM. Okay, so that one. Would you like to give out this card for the session? Oh, yes. Of course. Is it on? Yes. It was an easy one. It was an easy one. Easy one. The blue. And if we can have this slide then after the presentation just be done around the way. Bye. And you are Jay, right? Yes. Okay. We will start again. Thank you. Thank you. Read your messages. Remember, we have a telegram group for the afternoon where you can get the last information on the conference. Also finally, someone from director. You're on. Okay. Just do not slam the door, please. I will introduce. Yeah. We're still on. We still have seven minutes. Yeah. That's okay. I'm very glad that we have seven minutes. Nice. Are we going to do a hit demo on fly? Okay. Yeah, we will do some examples, right? Yes. The microphone is already... Did you walk out? The microphone. Okay. We need to... Oh, hey. Hey, how are you? Fine, and I'm just holding the slate. We're only three. Only three?  Thank you. Okay.


So, before I ask our respondents, our panelists, to comment on what they've heard, I'm curious whether our first four speakers maybe have questions for each other or comments in relation to each other's talks that they want to flag. One of the issues that I thought, Mark, was interesting in terms of what you raised was the democratic deficit and this challenge between the need for leadership and purposeful institutions to deliver the innovations, I think, Vim, you were talking about in a context of, let's call it, democratic malfunctioning. And I'd be curious, Vim, what you thought of that comment and from your experience in working in a wide range of democratic and semi-democratic contexts, what your reflections were when you heard that comment. Yeah. So, my first learning is that there's not one model. That's in China, we always talk about scaling. In India, we talk about how to spread, that's a complete different way of thinking at things. But I think, you know, whatever system we have, we have to come to informed decisions. I think it's two minutes to 12, you know, we can study forever. In the meantime, there are still 3 billion people living on the planet of a dollar or less a day. There's malnutrition, people have no access to health care, no access to education. So what I've learned specifically in India, that I have to develop products in a different way. If I develop products in the mature markets, I develop for features, for specs, for convenience. The first products I've developed in India are for footprint, are for scalability, and are for energy management. And then we have in a frugal way, but the point I tried to make, the question, we have to come to informed decisions. And whether this is democratic or not, it's trade-offs, and it should be informed. Question that I would have to all the big tech companies who have really identified this market as an opportunity to move IT and smart grids into the management of infrastructure is whether they would be prepared to enter into a dialogue of this kind with a range of researchers, NGOs, community groups and so on, around the longer-term consequences of these techno-fixes, which are being offered to developing country cities where governance frameworks are weak. So for example, Siemens is flying to Munich, mayors and officials from my country and other sub-Saharan countries, where kind of razzle-dazzle, kind of imagery of the techno-fix, quick-fix solutions, including financing, are offered. What are the consequences of that if it is accepted with relatively limited understanding on the part of those mayors and officials for those cities in the longer run? Who gets excluded? And can these cities really be planned? You know, there's that old saying, if the only solution is a hammer, all your problems will be nails. The problem in African cities, even when it really is a nail, you're not sure. Thanks, Mark. And I know Simon will come back to this theme, and I know in the audience there are also some members from this community of private companies who's interested in that space. We'll flag that question for now. Julio, do you want to come in on this discussion for now before we move on to our commentators on the panel? Yeah. I think very quickly. I mean, first of all, sorry that my 10 minutes was 15 minutes crammed into 10. It was very fast. But if anybody could do it. One of the things I found very... It was riveting, so it was fine. Okay, good. One of the things I find quite fascinating is how actually technology can simply mask a problem and make us feel better about it without actually fixing the underlying problem. Now, using technology for personal security, which is something that you mentioned in the first talk, if you don't tackle the underlying problem behind the insecurity, then the insecurity is still there, you're just finding a way of hiding it away. And I've always wondered, certainly traveling around African countries in brand new, shiny landrovers that have air conditioning, I mean, it's almost impossible to live in some of these places without air conditioning. Should we be even thinking about populating places where it's impossible to live without technology? I think that's kind of, sometimes to me, is a fundamental question we don't really ask enough. Just a thought about that a lot of the case studies that we looked at or have you mentioned have tended to be large metropolitan areas, and really the next demographic transition, urban transition will be in medium-sized cities. It will not be in the Mumbai's. It will not be in the Chennai's. It will not be in the São Paulo's. It will be in satellites, which are located within a certain distance of those and probably will benefit from that growth, too. But to echo the point that Mark made earlier, that was made earlier this morning as well, are these cities, unlike Medellin, that can actually cope with that transition, that have the human resources and other resources to resist, for example, the siren calls for sort of techno fixes, was opening up that, or filling, rather, that democratic deficit. And that's what I find interesting about Medellin, is it's probably a one-off example, unfortunately, but it's a city that has, for reasons which are too long to explain, but it has a very strong institutionality. And I wish that other cities of that size, or even smaller, also had that to say. That's where the transition is going. That's where the country, the world is organizing. Thanks, Julio. Well, I'll now move on to the last part of our panel discussion. And I will ask Wang Xi to start off reflections. Of course, in the case of China, you have the issue of scale. And Mark, in terms of your question, can planning actually happen? And I think China has an interesting recent experience, or track record, with that regard. Surely, where there's also been the challenge to combine both a more resource-efficient way of creating cities, but also dealing with a massive demand for accommodation and for housing. So would you share some thoughts with us based on the inputs that have been heard and some of your own experiences? Thank you. Okay. How the role play the emerging country, especially in China? The McKinsey report on how to reduce emissions in China has been suggested maybe for the next 30 years, that for 50% they use the law technique, so that the central government of China will be happy to hear that, because the law technique means that the law applies. And in my opinion, in China, maybe that if you use the high technique, maybe that high price. But I think maybe that not only all of our middle tech suggests a traditional industry, like the property developer, they need to use a lot of materials, such as timber, cement, steel, water, electricity. As the developed country, there are material techniques, electricity, such as the prefabrication that can reduce the use of timber, 85%. And as you know, that on the world, eagle and illegal, they cut the timber from South America or Africa, that 70% import to China. And in China, 70% of the timber used in construction site. And in construction site, the 70% used as the residential property property. So our company as the host introduced as the biggest residential property developer in China, not only in China, but also on the world. Last year, our company produced a residential unit, 100,000 units. And this year, we'll project 120,000 units. So that I use a lot of timber. And I remembered, six years ago, I visited the agents of Greenpeace in Beijing. Asked him, how can my company deal with that problem? That chief of Greenpeace surprised. Because normally, the company avoids meeting them. And I met them, and they arranged an Amazon rainforest. So that travel gave me the surprise. Because some destroyed, some protect. The rainforest protect that were there. Some areas of the Amazon rainforest destroyed badly. And that surprised me also how linked between that destroyed the rainforest, the China construction site. So that began that 2007, that our company deal with how to produce the green buildings. Of course, as the middle technique needs price. So also, that was higher, but our company promote to produce green buildings. And now, in China, as the national stand, green building stand, that name three, three is done, the buildings. On all the market, 50% of the field at the stand of green buildings, green star buildings, that 50% are produced by our company. But our company only share the market 2%. So I believe that only one company to do that not enough. So our company now that promote, stimulates, that are prefabricated method for whole industry. And also our company that every year, we follow the kind of pattern. But if other companies use our company's pattern, that make companies policy for free. Because I think that the more and more companies to do that, that they can change that, now changing the situation. So maybe some ask me, why are you generous? Why are your patterns are used for free? I think they're very simple. Because as the company is stated for three states, the fourth product, the produce product, second for brand, third for stand, for our company for the future, for the enterprise stand that may. Great, thank you. Excellent example of some of the discussions earlier around the need for smart or strategic regulation and questions of new standards for new sectors, as John Ari earlier intimated. I'm now going to ask Nikki Gavron to share some of her perspectives based both on her experience, but also her responses to the presentations as well. Well, first, the challenge, you asked me to talk about challenges, affordability. So I thought I might just take one aspect of what we've tried to do in London. Because we came in in 2000, after 14 years of no London government, you might remember Mrs. Thatcher, a Polish London government, so with a huge backlog of investment. And in all the infrastructures that are very important in terms of CO2 and resource effectiveness, that's transport, water, waste, energy. Now, I can't take all those, but we were absolutely locked in. Lock in has been talked about quite a lot. We were locked in to the wrong kind of infrastructure. How on earth can you make London in an accelerated way, because that's the name of the game, acceleration, how can you accelerate the transition to a low-carbon resource-effective economy? And the way we saw it was that we absolutely have to use our leadership. We had to have vision, and we set our division to make London an exemplary sustainable world city. I was just strived to do that, to learn collaboration from all sorts of other cities, particularly we learned from small cities, and small cities seem to be able to innovate much more easily than the large mega cities. And we were the first industrial mega city, and we felt we had some kind of responsibility to try and be the 21st century version of the mega city, a concept, the very high carbon city that we exported to the rest of the world. So we had this massive backlog, and what were we going to do? We decided the first thing to do was you must have a part from the vision. You must have a very, very strong policy context. And you've got to set the policy framework, and you've got to use every tool at your disposal. So regulation, as you were just saying, is absolutely crucially important. And we set all our policies out in what's called the London Plan, which is a spatial integrated, spatial strategic plan in terms of integrated investment, integrated infrastructure. But one of our main aims was to accommodate the big growing population of London, and I know it doesn't compare with what's happening in the global South, but our population, we've underscored, and we're going up by a million over the next decade, and that's a lot for London. And so how are we going to manage with that? And we set out a framework which said, we are going to become a compact city. We're going to go for vastly extended public transport system. We're going to build high density, and we're going to build green if we can, new buildings. It's much easier to do green in new buildings than existing buildings. And we're going to redress the imbalances between East and West. We just heard about Hackney and the Olympics and so on, so try to do that at the same time. And the main aim of this, and to build, by the way, to higher density, and mixed use, and something that hasn't been mentioned today, mixed income neighborhoods, because if you, you know, you're not going to have a vital city in any way. You're not going to have social mobility. You'll eventually get unrest if you don't have mixed income neighborhoods. You can't get our eyes the rich and the poor. And it's this, and we have to watch the way demographics are changing. It's really crucial this, a compact city which isn't mixed income, you know, isn't really a sustainable city in any way. So we wanted modal shift in the jargon. We wanted people to get, we wanted people to have choice and to get out of their cars, but there was an equity issue because 38% of London households didn't have a car.  So there was a sort of consensus about what we should do. Now I'm going to talk about one bit of this, which is congestion charge. And I'm mainly talking about it because of its affordability.  People are thinking, this is what we're going to have to do because the economy is underpinned by transport and because it's so polluting. So it's a really big issue.  Now we tried, I mean, we vastly extended the bus system. Draconian enforcement of bus lanes. Very, very simple stuff. This is almost old technology, isn't it? Not even low tech. Our buses, our buses, we moved from putting a filter on them to filter out PM10s. We then moved to a filter to filter out NOx. We then are now moving towards hydrogen buses. We're looking at the Chinese electric bus with a lot of interest. Anyway, just a bus story. Now, you had to improve public transport before you could bring in congestion charging. Congestion charging has really worked. 23% are exemptions. We've managed to catalyze an electric car market just by actually exempting low-carbon cars. And the other points I would like to make is that now the bus gets around much faster. There are many more of them. And whereas before, the bus was, as Mrs. Thatcher said, the bus was only for people under 30.  But now people use a bus, not just women, not just students, not just people on low incomes, but everyone, because you get there much quicker. And what we've seen is that a charge, that a charge has actually changed behavior, and that's changed attitudes. And that is a really crucial, I think, interesting thing about the congestion charge. Now, the payback. The thing about congestion charge is that we had 147, no, was it 100? No. We invested, sorry, 250 million, got to wind up, 250 million, and then another 100 million in complementary measures around the edges. And it was paid back in a few years. And that really matters, I think, that we use a very old technology, really, vehicle license place and cameras. And now we're moving to the next stage. And we're looking forward to the Galileo system. We're looking forward to GPS working properly, which it does in the city. And now what we would do, this is me personally. This is what I would do. I would have a congestion charge, road pricing, differential charges for different times of day, different engine sizes, and different lengths of journey. And I would have it across the whole of London. And then, of course, you could use GPS because you wouldn't have the problem of the high-rise in the middle. And the payback, of course, would come just like that because the revenues would be so enormous. Meanwhile, everybody can get around the city easily if you invest in good public transport. And the bus is the cheapest form of that. Thanks so much. So we've got some really interesting provocative ideas on the table and a wonderful, historically-grounded story. I'll ask Abba to share some of her reflections with us. Thank you, Ed. I think we went through a nice yin-yang of discussion today, starting from the morning where we looked at cities with smaller houses, smart houses, smart cars, everything happening based on technology, people working out of rural areas and so on. But we know today that it is actually not the truth. So I think this discussion grounds us very much into where we are. And just to put some sort of what we call killer facts or hard facts for the audience and for the table, today we know that by 2030, there'll be about 2.7 billion people moving into cities. And 90% of this is going to happen in Asia and Africa. And it's not going to happen in the Rio and Sao Paulo and the Mumbai and Delhi of this world. It's going to happen in small, middle-weight cities. These are the cities where we have the weakest institutions and the weakest capacity. We also know today that, especially in Africa and in India, 90% of the economy in the large cities is an informal economy. The housing is informal. The livelihoods are informal. There are no safety nets for the poor. So in all of this, where we have peak urbanization and we have weak capacity and weak institutions, how do we use technology? How do we use technology to give voice to the poor, to build communities, to build networks, to make cities livable, inclusive, sustainable, and equitable? So we look at what is actually happening with what we call ICT. So we're not talking about very advanced technology. We are talking about simple things like mobile phones, cell phones, and internet. Today we know that about 5 billion people in developing countries have access to mobile phones. In the year 2000, that was about 200 million people. So you see how this penetration has grown. Although the penetration of internet is only about 21%. And we keep all of this in mind and say, if we're looking at voice and accountability in cities to make them livable and sustainable, how do we use this? We also find that in the World Bank projects now, and in our policy advice, at least 75% of our projects will have an ICT component for governance and for voice. And I'll give you some examples, and I think Ken brought in some really nice examples, of using open data or available data for citizen participation. Using geospatial mapping for mapping slums. Where are your water points? Where is your health clinic? Has the waste been picked up or not? Which roads are totally flooded? Open data, open budgeting and participatory budgeting. If a city opens its budget and citizens can say, well, we thought you were going to build a school in this area. There is no school, or there is a school, but there are no teachers. This is actually, sorry, I think this is my alarm somewhere. This is the sort of voice which brings in accountability from citizens. Just give me a second hand. I have it somewhere. I had nothing to do with that. She still has two minutes. I should have turned it off. Time to get up. And then we also note today that people in the developing countries do not use phones just for talking or for playing games like our children do. They use it to find where the best fishing is, that day's fishing. What are the prices in the fish market? Who is doing illegal logging in the forest near the village? And so it's a completely different way of bringing in voice, bringing in accountability and actually creating virtuous circles of citizen participation and demanding of governance. And I think that's what makes the city inclusive and livable. The other thing is when we talk about sustainability and the fact that the infrastructure needs in India alone, and you may know this, run into trillions of dollars if we were just thinking of putting roads and so on. We also know that with the rising middle class, there are aspirations. We can talk about bicycles today here, but every aspiring African and Indian and Pakistani person wants a car and wants to ride that alone, irrespective of the bus or public transport availability. How do we bring in sustainability there? I still have the picture of Beijing with a million people on bicycles and today 200 mile long traffic jams on the same roads. So how do we change that culture? And then coming to sustainability and climate change, I want to say that you can also use low technology like mobile phones and other applications to actually map precarious hazardous areas, especially where the poor live, are near water areas on precarious slopes and you can have very simple interventions to make these cities adapted. That's how we want to look at technology. We want to see it in terms of making cities inclusive, making them livable and making them sustainable. And given the resource constraints, we just have to think differently and I just wanted to say that we've done some fantastic competitions, global competitions, apps for climate change, apps for development, hackathon for sanitation. We just finished that last weekend. There were about 300 software engineers globally on the phone thinking about how can we solve problems of sanitation in very, very simple ways in developing countries. So that's how I see technology taking us and making this world more inclusive. Thank you. Thank you very much. And I'll go straight on to our final commentator, Simon Giles. Thank you very much. One observation that I've made through the course of today is just how big the gap is between the large core technology companies, and I'd include Accenture as one of those, and the field of urbanism. And I think it's reflected in a lot of the discourse that we've seen around smart cities and a lot of the trust in, or the lack of trust in the development of the smart city industry. And hopefully what I can do in the next few minutes is talk a bit about how we might be able to bridge that gap between urbanism and technology, because technology could be a huge accelerator to development, especially in developing countries. But I wanna make sure that we are able to bridge that gap, so I'll give a couple of examples, mostly from work that I've done over in Mexico with my team about how to address some of these core issues. And the issues for me that are holding back the development of sustainable economies in cities around lack of innovation in institutional frameworks, lack of innovation in business models and financing models, and lack of innovation in the way that we do master planning of cities. So I'll touch on the last one first, so the point about master planning. A lot of the work that my team have been doing has been in an interdisciplinary master planning approach. The traditional approach to how we do development in cities is the city looks for an area to redevelop. They sell it to a master developer at a relatively cheap price. The master developer goes out, develops it, maybe sells parcels out to secondary developers, and then takes the lion's share of the economic profit. And most of that starts with a real estate plan and then goes directly into a master plan, a physical master plan. They're calling the architects, they're calling the urban planners, and they develop a physical model. What we've tried to do in Guadalajara is say, actually it has to be much more holistic than that and interdisciplinary. We need anthropologists and ethnographers in from the beginning. We need to understand the context, the cultural context within which we're developing. We need to understand the level of ambition. And we need to create a strong economic ecosystem that will support the development. This isn't just about developing real estate, this is about developing sustainable economies and sustainable communities. So the starting point is, what does the economy look like that you're trying to generate? Then we say, well, what does that mean in terms of the human capital that's required to make this community work and to make the economy function? And then understand, well, what does that mean in terms of lifestyles that you need to deliver? And then what services enable the lifestyles, and it's only then, at that point, that we try and work out what's the physical and the digital infrastructure that's required to enable that. And taking a much more holistic and integrated approach where we're bringing teams like myself and that do economic and service development planning with anthropologists, ethnographers, and digital designers, all at the table in an integrated process can change the way that we do physical design. So that's the first point. And the second point is about institutional innovation and business model innovation. And what we try to do is a much more, a very different approach to governance of how you do master planning. So I talked about the fact that most of the economic profit is captured by the master developer. What we did in Guadalajara say, there are 70 something hectares to be developed here. Can we set up an institutional form, a foundation trust that can be funded to acquire the land on the behalf of the community? And then they take control of the development process represented by trustees that represent the whole of civil society. They then sell on parcels of land for development under their control, repay a lot of the financing, create a sustainable economic ecosystem. As the economic profit is earned over time, there is a very clear covenant within the foundation trust structure that says that all economic profit has to be reinvested outside of the development area and the surrounding communities, because it's those surrounding communities that are servicing that cluster. And that's a way of reducing some of the income inequalities that we see. We don't create this reverse ghetto effect, but we actually say that there's a symbiotic relationship between the communities in the center and the communities that are being serviced so that all of the economic profit is reinvested in social enterprise schemes, education, healthcare, and housing to make sure that the children of the people that are developing on the periphery of the development will be the people that will be working within the development in the future. The final one is about reframing business models for development. Most developments that I see are predominantly based on a real estate development model and normally short-term real estate development models. And what we've tried to say is, as a master developer, as a foundation trust developer, can we identify other potential revenue streams, other services that can be delivered that supplement the real estate revenues and allow this to become a sustainable community where the private sector allowed to play a role in the development of concessions to reduce the capex burden on the developer, but under the license to operate that's held by the trust. And I think that is really what underlines all of this innovation that we've been trying to drive is social justice, protection from the vagaries of electoral cycles. Often we end up in situations where at the end of an electoral cycle, the development grounds grinds to a halt or gets put onto another person. And then finally, how do we create trust for the community in the institutional frameworks that are representing them in the development process? Great, I feel absolutely awful having to cut all of you short because I'm deeply fascinated and intrigued by what you're saying. And specifically in terms of the example you mentioned since I've studied local government for a long time. Very interested in what that means for the role of municipal government because in a sense you're trying to bypass that which of course is great from a democratic embedding point of view but of course again at the end of the day we do need functioning local authorities to sustain these processes over the long term. But I was curious though Mark whether you thought that answered your question about whether there's still a role for planning or not very briefly. And then just to say we've got five minutes before we've got to wrap up the session and I wanna make sure that our keynote speaker has an occasion to share some final thoughts after he's heard what he's provoked. So yeah, I was just because you put a very provocative idea that maybe we should abandon the idea of planning given the complexity and the conditions that Abba was describing so I was curious whether particularly innovation that Simon was referencing as something that helps us to think beyond maybe some of the questions you were raising. Yeah, I'm very much the last person to suggest we give up planning. What I think we need to give up is some of the underlying assumptions of planning that it is possible to compile a plan that everybody is going to rationally engage with and follow and that it's based on the assumptions that cities are planable. So what I like about what is being suggested here and there are many examples in developing countries is there's an investment taking place in capacity in institutions that make it possible to manage the flows of investments and new ideas and innovation, rather than assuming that that capacity is there. That capacity is there in many fractured and quite often opaque forms and it's actually quite, as you probably discovered, quite easy to mobilize that into the building of appropriate kinds of institutions that are not just copycat imitations from other contexts, but kind of work with the natural grain that's there if you can connect into it. And if you can connect the planning processes to that, then I think you have a much better recipe for success. Thanks Mark. Thank you. Yes, a lot has been said and I tried to articulate it from a technology point of view, solutions are possible, but it's the human beings who have to get it done. And it has to be done with social responsibility, trust, and specifically I would say collaborative, that if we have all the constituent around the table, if we make a master plan with the municipalities involved in different models, because we have different models around the world, the Middle East, Africa, China, India are different models. But how can we get a representation involved and to come up with a collaborative plan? Time is ticking and that we have a lot of people of living one or two dollars a day who have no access to nothing. And I think that's that urgency that I still miss. And then how can we get constituent together as a call for action and to get a hundred cities being built of a million people and more and to get inclusive growth in rural areas? Because the solution is close.