I'm Ryan McMakin, I'm a senior editor, Mises.org, and frequent contributor to our articles on the front page. Hopefully you visit Mises.org daily. We run a couple of new articles there, at least a couple of new ones today by a lot of good young authors in many cases and also by a lot of our good senior fellows who are still doing work to this day. But what I want to do is build a little bit on what Jeff was saying about the federal government and its spending. While there's lots of good trends going on in terms of decentralization and people realizing that what's going on at the state level matters and that there is a lot of good resistance going on to the regulatory aspects of COVID, there's also bad stuff going on still at the federal level and a real acceleration of power at that level through what we might call a new new deal or new dealism or the new deal ideology. And this doesn't mean that it's a recreation of what happened in the 1930s under FDR, which continued of course through World War II. These new deal years really continue for 15 years almost through the 30s in the first half of the 40s. But you know what we mean by new deal in terms of the public imagination, right? We still hear this a lot from the left. We need a new new deal in order to increase infrastructure spending in America. We need a green new deal. There's always discussions about reviving the new deal and it's many presumed successes from 80 years ago. And so it's still popular. Most Americans still consider the new deal to have been a great thing and it was very successful and it got the US out of the Great Depression and those same tactics also worked in the Second World War. And in many ways, what we see going on in Washington right now is a repeat of that philosophy, even if it's not being done in the exact particulars, because of course we exist also in a very different time and situation in America. But there's three pillars that I think we could identify that are key to this and I think helps us understand to a certain extent about what's going on in Washington and help us appreciate maybe what's different from this crisis from the previous crisis. I think there's a real discernible difference between what's going on now compared to what's going on during the Great Recession. And if you're old enough to remember that, there were comparisons back then between the Great Recession and the huge spending that went on then and what happened in the 1930s in terms of regulation, government spending bailouts, that sort of thing. But what's happening now is many times larger than that and really kind of leaves the Great Recession in the dust in terms of the amount of money being spent and the deficit spending that's going on as well. And it's the fact that it's so much deficit spending that that's a significant factor that we'll talk a little bit about here as well. So what are these three pillars of New Dealism? Well, the first is that when crises hit, the federal government should spend as much money as necessary to solve the problem and there really shouldn't be any limits. In cases of domestic policy, governments should spend money and whatever amounts are necessary to keep people employed and off the streets. And if incomes fall, just have the government make up the difference and if necessary, go into debt to do so. And of course, it's clear that there's not much opposition to this pillar of it, that if you wanna sound really quaint in old fashioned, express concerns about the level of government spending that's going on in Washington right now. Second, the federal government should become the dominant institution in political life. This is the second pillar. In times of crisis, the federal government must take over the tasks of state and local government that maybe they had done in the recent past, but now can't do because they don't have enough revenue or they're unwilling to do it. The political will can't be mustard. And this can involve building vast new infrastructure projects like the Tennessee Valley Authority in the first New Deal. And also like in the first New Deal, bailing out state and local governments, that could be an issue as well. But the point is that the feds have a good ability to collect a lot of revenue and they can spend a lot more than the states can. So why not do it? And this creates a larger role for the federal government in general. And third aspect is that we should rely upon the alleged experts. Back during the first New Deal, it was Roosevelt's brain trust. We brought in, Americans learned to trust Columbia professors to solve the problems in America. And they learned that the thinking can be done in a centralized atmosphere by a group of intellectuals who can really hand down to us what the solutions to Americans' problems are. And that philosophy I think has been accelerated in recent days as well. But as we shall see, it has some deeper roots to it and is not only just a threat to local autonomy, but reflects just a general turn away from the very concept of due process and the idea that regimes should be limited in their powers, even if they can promise some great outcome from their technological innovations. So let's look first then at the deal with spending, just how much of it is going on. Now, Jeff showed some of those stats that basically they spent $6 trillion and they collected about $3 trillion. So we were looking at a huge deficit. And of course, we're in a situation now where people don't really think a trillion dollars is real money anymore. And so, oh okay, so it was a trillion dollars, three trillion dollars, what does that even mean? Well, it could be helpful to remember that in the days right before the Great Recession, three and a half trillion dollars was the entire US federal budget. And so here we are now in 2020 where just the deficit is equal to the entire federal budget from about a dozen years earlier. So that gives you some idea of the amount of growth that was taking place there. These are huge growth numbers. And so spending in 2020 exploded far beyond anything we had seen before with the exception of the Second World War and the New Deal. If you look at these charts and graphs of spending as a percentage of all GDP, you have to go back to 1945. It's not even good enough to go back to the Vietnam War to see similar amounts of government spending in terms of how much it's overtaking the economy as a whole. You gotta go back basically 75, 80 years. And so, and what it did was from 2019 to 2020 went up from 20% to 31%. These are all in inflation adjusted numbers. And in 2020, spending was nearly 55% larger than the previous peak during the Great Recession in recent years. So this isn't just a continuation of Great Recession type spending. This is basically increasing again by half as much. And so I don't think that's even really a good comparison at all. And what's interesting about it is the fact that you have to go back to World War II, I think it really indicates something about just how successful this effort has been to convince Americans that the COVID crisis is something that's just so huge, it's almost incalculable. The way Americans thought about the Second World War. So in 2021, I mean, this propaganda machine has convinced a great many Americans to see COVID in a similar way to how Americans saw the Japanese military threat in 1942. And if you measure by government spending, COVID apparently outranks even Stalin in the days of the Cold War. So Stalin getting the nuke in the 1950s didn't warrant as much government spending as COVID did in terms of people's panicky reaction to things. And so this rise of the level of people thinking, in the 40s, people thought that Tojo was gonna start bombing Los Angeles and San Diego. And so that was the sort of spending that you have now in terms of federal spending as a percentage of overall GDP. So I leave it up to others to determine. Now I actually don't think that the Japanese were ever gonna bomb the West Coast, but that was the perception. And so that was the level of the panic that existed. And apparently we're now matching that because it warrants the exact same amount of government spending and a growth in the federal role in daily life in terms of fiscal policy.  And because he thought maybe we should vote on it and have a recorded vote, instead of just having like a voice vote where two people were present and we just had the leadership declare the bill passed. And so for thinking that maybe there should be some sort of due process and maybe an actual vote on this multi-trillion dollar bill, David Trump or Donald Trump declared Massey to be quote, a disaster for America, unquote, who should be thrown out of the Republican Party, quote unquote. And Democrats were not more complimentary on this, so just lifting even the smallest finger, say, hey, maybe we should vote on this. This was just the hysteria completely overwhelmed in the notion that that was appropriate policy. So Congress just became a rubber stamp. We, hey, we need to spend an extra three trillion dollars and we're gonna do it and no one should stand in the way. And it doesn't look like 2021 is gonna be much of a year of normalization either. Last month, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that 2021 will be much like 2020 with a deficit of three trillion dollars, not quite as high, but I wouldn't exactly consider a three trillion dollar deficit to be normalization. And again, 2021's numbers are second only to 2020 in terms of these huge spending numbers compared to 1945. So this is all World War II levels, level spending even for this current fiscal year even after the initial panic has died down somewhat. And so this is generational type of thing. Now, so a lot of people just say so what? So you've spent a few extra trillion bucks, we'll just pay it off later. What's the problem? Now it would be one thing if this was just a matter of well, we collected a bunch of taxes and then we redistributed them. Now you don't have to read a whole lot of articles on Mesa.org to know that there are some problems with that, that all government spending redistributes wealth from one place to another, from a more efficient use to a less efficient use, also causes lots of malinvestment in bubbles in the economy, which creates boom busts and other problems. However, there's one specific issue here that I wanna talk about and that is the monetization of this debt. This sort of spending where you spend, you just decide on a weekend, we're gonna spend an extra three trillion dollars that we don't have. That sort of spending isn't possible without a scheming between Congress and the central bank. What you need is a central bank that could essentially launder that money in the sense of it is keeping interest rates low on the debt you're issuing. So this is a somewhat complicated issue in the sense that it's not clear what this line of transmission is. But let's just spend a couple of minutes looking at it. So you want to spend an extra three trillion dollars. So what do you do? Well, obviously you could just put out three trillion dollars of extra government debt out there. The problem is, is you need to make sure people buy that debt and at a interest rate that you, as a politician, want to pay. Now obviously if you were paying 10% on treasuries, people are gonna buy it, right? That's a great deal. It's a safe investment. I'll buy a bunch of federal debt and I'll get 10% on it. But as you can imagine, federal politicians don't wanna pay in an interest rate like that. What they really wanna pay is something under 1%, which is what they're currently paying. So how do you make that happen? So the way you do it is you get the central bank to help out. Now there's of course gonna be some demand out there for federal debt no matter what and pretty decent amount of demand compared to other governments, right? Because it's not like the other governments of the world right now are being all fiscally responsible and there's austerity everywhere and they're hardly spending anything, right? The situation is even worse in Europe in many cases and China deeply in debt. And so if you're looking out there about what sorts of governments seem to be fiscally sound and whose government's debt should I buy, the US doesn't look too bad. On the other hand, when you're rolling out the door, $3 trillion worth of that debt, you aren't gonna have enough buyers at under 1%. You're just not. So somebody's gonna have to buy that up even if American debt is still pretty popular. It's not that popular. So here comes the central bank.  We'll help make sure that the interest rate remains low. And again, why do you want the interest rate to remain low? It has to remain low because otherwise if it's not low you gotta spend huge amounts of your federal budget on debt service. So the way it is now is, okay, we spend an extra trillion dollars with the debt. We spend 1% on it. And at current debt levels that still means the United States government has to spend $345 billion a year on debt service. So that's just money that goes to paying interest on the debt. Now, to give you a sense of what sort of money that is, well, that's combined with the budgets of the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Department of Education and a nice big sizable chunk of several other departments as well. Now, obviously politicians would love to have that money back so that they could just buy more votes by pouring money into a variety of different programs. So you can imagine if the interest rate went just to 2% or so and they had to pay say 700 billion instead of 345 billion that that could force you to take huge chunks out of various popular political programs then. So there's a big political motivation in Washington to keep those interest rates low because we don't wanna have to take larger and larger shares of the federal budget of the money we used by votes and to stay popular as politicians and just pay it down for debt.  What they would rather have is a lot of money currently in their hands that they can spread out to the voters and then tell the voters all about it. So the political reason is huge. This is different from the economic arguments against high interest and all of that. This is just simply they don't wanna have to spend this money on things like interest so they wanna make sure they've got lots of money to spend for political reasons. So that interest rate has to stay low. So the Fed's gonna help them do it and they're gonna do it by buying up a lot of that debt and that by buying it up, they're gonna be able to keep the interest rate lower because there are artificially goosing demand basically. And so the effects of this are significant because as in past situations, what they have to do really is just create new money in order to buy all of that debt. So the question is well, where does all that debt go after they buy it, after they buy all these treasuries? Well, it goes into the Fed's portfolio and then it sits there. And currently there's $8 trillion worth of mortgage securities and a huge amount of government debt sitting in there as well. And just for an example of what happened last year, between mid-March and late June, 2020, the treasuries total borrowing rose by about $2.9 trillion. So during that period, treasury, so the federal government itself, borrowed an extra $2.9 trillion, but at that same time, the Fed's holdings of US Treasury debt rose by about $1.6 trillion. So that's a pretty hefty chunk of that new debt that's occurring that the Fed's then buying up. They don't buy directly, am I in the secondary market, but the effect is essentially the same. And just for comparison's sake, in 2010, the Fed held about 10% of all treasury debt outstanding. Today it holds more than 20%. So a sizable increase in the amount of US debt that the federal government is buying up, or that the federal reserve is buying up from the federal government and just holding in order to keep interest rates low. And so this is great for politicians. It allows them to just keep proceeding like everything's normal, like they haven't really added all that much debt and that they can just ignore the problem for now. But it should be clear by now that this isn't some temporary measure. In fact, shortly after the Great Recession, when the Fed initially bought $4 trillion or so of mortgage debt, a lot of that was to prop up the banks, so it wasn't just to keep interest rates down, but it was to keep all of this essentially worthless debt from being out in the larger economy and driving down home prices and so on, again, for political reasons. They kept saying, if you were paying attention back then, the Fed kept saying, oh, we're gonna unwind all this. We're gonna find a way to get rid of all of these assets we hold and we'll put them back into the economy. And they said that for a number of years from 2009 to about 2015, then they kinda stopped saying it. And so it's clear now that it's not some temporary measure, that they're not going to put this back into the economy. They've essentially monetized all of that, all those securities and all that debt. It turned from securities, from mortgage bonds, from U.S. debt into money, turned into dollars. And those were dollars that didn't occur today, occur before, they didn't exist before, and now they exist. It's new money that went out into the economy. So it was monetary inflation. And to see a similar situation yet again, you have to go back to the Second World War. And we have some good text on this from David Stockman, who talks about it in The Great Deformation. He says, during the war, the Federal Reserve became the financing arm of the warfare state, making short shrift of any pretense of Fed independence. So Fed independence was gone. The Fed was there to facilitate deficit spending for the federal government during the war. Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau simply decreed that interest rates on the federal debt would be pegged. Obviously, the only way to enforce this peg was for the nation's central bank to purchase any and all treasury paper that did not find a private sector bid at or below the pegged yields. Accordingly, the Fed soon became a huge buyer of treasury securities, thereby monetizing federal debt on a scale never before imagined. So this is a textbook scheme that central banks use. Look, we have to do a whole bunch of deficit spending. Someone's gotta buy up this debt because we don't wanna have to pay exorbitant interest rates to people who are holding out and so just have the central bank do it. Joe Solero is a great essay called War in the Money Machine. He talks about this, quote, under modern conditions, inflationary financing of war involves a government monetizing its debt by selling securities directly or indirectly to the central bank. The funds thus obtained are then spent on the items necessary to equip and sustain the armed forces of the nation. That's in wartime, but it doesn't have to be spent on military stuff. You don't have to buy tanks with it. You can just simply issue checks to everybody to stay home and not work. You can just issue checks to local governments that have gone bankrupt because they shut down all of their sources of tax revenue. And so you can use it for any purpose that you like. The mechanism is the same. It doesn't have to be used in wartime and we're seeing it being used now even though it's not wartime, it's peacetime. And so this was considered a very radical thing to do at the time, but now it's basically standard operating procedure ever since 2009 or so. We've got this thing in place. We need to issue a lot of debt. So we'll just buy more assets. The Fed will just be there to eat up what excess exists. And we'll just do it by monetary inflation, just by monetizing that debt. And this, of course, then helps hide the costs because the true cost, of course, is price inflation, booms and busts. And price inflation, we're starting to really see it. Gas prices are back to like Iraq war type levels, getting dangerously close to $4 around here. Food prices were up in one report, 31% this year over last year. Certainly services are all up significantly. Health, education, all very, very high in terms of inflation. Now, maybe those numbers will come down in the next year. Maybe 31% is the peak of it. Maybe it'll just go down to 10%, or maybe even 5%. But this is all much, much higher than what the Fed promised would ever happen. This is just a temporary thing, and we're going to manage it. And all of this monetary inflation we're doing is never going to turn into any price inflation for regular people. But we can see that that's clearly not the situation now. And so that's just one of the effects. But politically, it's very helpful because it hides the effects from ordinary people. We can do immense amounts of monetary spending. The government, without having to tax people, because if you raise taxes, that, of course, is politically problematic. People might resist to that. Aha, but we don't have to raise taxes. We can secretly get more revenue through this mechanism, the scheme we have going with the central bank. And then we can spend a lot more money. We can buy more votes with that way. We can do whatever it is that the experts tell us to do at the federal level and problem solved. So, oh, yeah, there might be a little price inflation, but whatever. Also, even better, most people don't understand how that mechanism works. So we can extract more money from the voters, from the taxpayers, through this inflationary mechanism. And this is something Mises pointed out many times, is that central banks enable governments to tax more secretly or in a roundabout way that people don't understand. And this avoids the whole trouble of having to go to a legislature, a parliament, and actually raise taxes. So this is another political benefit of having the central bank there to help with more deficit spending. So it would be impossible, without the central bank there, to do these levels of just coming up with a $3 trillion extra of spending that we're going to do. This is not something that just occurs in a normal government. What you need is something like the Fed. And so we've hidden the true costs. And what this leads to then is our second plank of New Dealism. And that is this aggrandizement of the federal government related to state and local governments in terms of its role in everyday society. And this isn't done really constitutionally or on paper, but you can see what the effect is. If the federal government consistently becomes the place that you have to go to in order to get more resources, it's going to become more important to you than the state and the local government. And of course, we see this now with the way the welfare state is constructed in America. One of the most important things that Americans could do if they really wanted to diminish the size of the federal government, they don't even necessarily have to get rid of the welfare state, which we all know is pretty politically impossible under current conditions, but they badly need to decentralize it because the way it works in America is unlike, let's say, the EU, where everyone still looks to their independent nation state for their welfare checks. In America, everyone looks to Washington for their social security check, for their Medicare, for their Medicaid, for their healthcare, and so on. So as you can imagine, this prevents decentralization in a certain way of, well, I can't have my state do its own thing because we might get cut off from the federal largesse, from the federal spigot, from the federal free money. And even better, since the federal government's the only institution that has a central bank, the federal government always has that ability to engage in huge amounts of deficit spending without rising interest rates. The state of Illinois can't do that. Sure, the state of Illinois can take on some debt. They can do lots of spending, but in the end, they can't be sure that the central bank of Illinois, since it doesn't exist, they can't be sure that they would have somebody step in to buy up a lot of Illinois' debt to keep those interest rates low. So the states are constrained unlike the federal government and how much spending they can do, and this increases the power, the relative power of the federal government over the states. So lobbyists, ordinary voters, people who depend for their salaries, for their social benefits from the federal government, they view it as a much more reliable and potentially lucrative place to go for money. And that translates into political power. So just as in the old original New Deal, in the current New Deal, we're seeing an increase in this relative power, not through any changes in law, but just from the fact, the byproduct of more federal spending occurring while state spending is basically flattening out. And that's what we've seen in recent years, is that state and local spending basically flatlined over the last couple of years while federal spending increased about 25%. And that's further increased. The percentage of federal spending as a percentage of all spending has now rocketed up to levels not seen since the old Vietnam War. So while it was somewhat declining in terms of how huge was federal spending as a percentage of all government activity, it's suddenly in 2020 spiked up to basically 50 year highs. So there's a definite different trend in place now where the federal government, fiscally speaking, in terms of the money being spent in America by governments much, much higher than it used to be. And just over time, this turns the states and the local governments into basically administrative subunits of the federal government if this trend continues. It erases the autonomy, the fiscal and the political autonomy that they might have had if they hadn't had to rely so much on federal grants, on federal welfare spending for their own citizens, and so on. And this brings us to the third plank. And this is the issue of the experts. And we've seen this nationwide. So this clearly isn't just a federal government thing, right? As Jeff pointed out, right? There's no shortage of experts at the state level and the local level working for cities and states in their own health departments that were handing out recommendations. But it's bigger in the federal government in the sense that we're relying not just on health experts for that sort of thing, although we certainly have those in the CDC and other places. And it was these health experts who were used to create this totally unprecedented moratorium on evictions, for example. And that's a perfect example of the use of the idea of the federal expert is, oh, is it constitutional? Is it legal? Is there any due process involved in installing this moratorium? No. We're gonna do it because the experts say so. And this is a fundamental shift in the thinking of how law and expertise should be used. And I came across this in a very observant essay by a French political scientist named Bertrand de Juvenel. And in 1963, you wrote a great essay called the results or the consequences of the rise of science. And it's not just a matter of people thinking government experts are great, but it's a fact that people have really increasingly started to abandon the idea that experts need to be on a lower level than the idea of due process. So he talks about how, I would say, the 18th to 19th century as classical liberalism became more popular and became a thing, people wanted to ensure that there was a reliable, stable legal process that was in place that could be relied upon and that regimes couldn't do just whatever they wanted. And so that no matter what happened, I knew that there was gonna be some sort of due process that my property couldn't be taken away without this slow, the wheels of justice turning. And what de Juvenel says is that, well, by the time we got to the 20th century, there were sociological cultural changes, political changes that really started to doubt that idea. That maybe due process was too old fashioned and that maybe not even just in times of emergencies, but in all sorts of cases where we have some great goal in mind, some great national change that we want to happen, if we're too much restrained by these old ideas of due process that stands in the way and it's an impediment to progress. And the way de Juvenel phrases it is he says that, quote, precedence is the most ancient basis of law and the safest, it's very safe. But that judicial procedure is the sole remnant of the old idea of the right way. And it's therefore an islet of stable procedure in a sea of shifting procedure. But that stands on very shaky ground now. And I think we definitely saw that with the rise of COVID regulations. Because as de Juvenel notes, social organization under the technocrats, under these experts becomes a matter of systems engineering and specific decisions become problems of operations research. Whereas the old model is this idea of a courtroom, of jurists working to make sure that procedures were followed, the new model is of a laboratory. That we have a certain goal we wish to achieve and that progress demands that we act quickly and that we just act with information from the experts and we don't allow ourselves to be held back by looking at what were some government abuses from long ago. That's just not important anymore. And if you, similar to speaking up and saying, well, I think there's too much government spending now, you would also say people would probably maybe even laugh at you if when they were shutting businesses down and telling people to stay in their homes and you said, well, where's the due process for those people? Shouldn't there be some sort of legal process before you lock a person in their home or shut down their business? And people will say, we don't have any time for that.  And how dare you call for due process for someone before you take their property away?  And so it's been a significant shift that's taken place is that there's necessarily in many ways a decision that's been made rather than embracing the idea that we have the slow process, the stable process of due process, rather we want to embrace the idea of technology, of science, of progress where we have an idea of what this goal is out there somewhere and we don't have time for debating it, for talking about what's the right way to do things, what's the proper process, we just have to do it now. And especially in an emergency, this is all the more important. If we can convince the public that there's an emergency, then it becomes even more quaint to suggest that people be subject to due process. And so the old legal order in the West has basically gone into decline. The technological expert, or even the financial expert, as we've seen with all these Fed actions, right? There wasn't any real meaningful debate over whether the Fed should be able to buy up these trillions of dollars in assets. It was just agreed upon in some back rooms that this should happen. And this was all agreement on the part of experts everywhere. And so you just, it's a new cultural shift that's occurred. Return to these old dominant ideas of new dealism that to stand up against spending, that just seems silly, to call for due process, none of these things are really appropriate in what's viewed as the new reality. But we've got to keep sticking up for things like due process. We've got to keep pointing out the problems of just printing up essentially trillions of dollars in new money, of monetizing debt on such a huge level. It's not popular and it's difficult to explain to people. That's one of the biggest problems. And people, you tell people that, oh yeah, here's an economic argument right in there. Their eyes immediately glaze over. But the important thing to remember about economics is that we learn economics to understand how we're being ripped off.   How understanding how huge amounts of government spending, or really any amount, but especially when we're talking about $6 trillion worth, how it distorts the economy, how it impoverishes you, and how it sets up problems for booms and busts in the future. And you can't just know this through common sense or just simply observing people around you. We have a science of economics that's extremely useful and very important in understanding these mechanisms that work. And so of course in the Mises Institute, we try to run a lot of content, a lot of articles that explain this, but it's a difficult battle. But it is something that we have to keep an eye on. This new dealism, the amount of public resistance to these huge levels of public spending at the federal level has been broken down. And while yes, there are positive trends that are going on in terms of decentralization, there's also these negative trends that are going on at the same time in all three ways, in terms of deference to experts, in terms of building up the relative power of the federal government opposed to the state governments, and also just this runaway deficit spending that ends up in the end causing mayhem in terms of inflation and booms and busts. So we have to keep an eye on all of that. And at the same time though, maybe this time around will be better. Back in the new deal, it took 15 years really for some sense of normalcy to return, that people were so convinced in 1932 that this was the way to go and how wonderful it was, that you didn't see any opposition for more than a dozen years. So maybe things will be better this time. And I think maybe there are some reasons to believe that, maybe people will resist a little bit faster. And so I'm an optimist, so maybe they'll come to their senses in just eight years instead of 15, I don't know. But we shall see. I always hope for the best. So thank you very much. Thank you.


With this, we'll move on to the next session and this is going to be an interesting one to say the least. The past year has been a testament to the resilience of search as a meat product. We all have done that. We've seen a lot of growth in how to do things over your internet searches. Even during the pandemic, search marketing continued to be an area of investment for brands and advertisers. What has evolved over time is the way which brands advertise on search and leverage it in a way to build brand awareness. The digital arsenal for search is well equipped with mediums such as voice, vernacular and video that can help brands to enhance their audience engagement and build authentic personal experiences. In this fireside chat, we have Mr Rohit Nosey, director, Microsoft editor, Movi, who's in conversation with Mr Anand Padmarkar, CEO of Denso India, and they will be discussing innovative brand building with search. I welcome Anand and Rohit both on dais, Alhanyu and Rohit. Hi, thank you. Hi, everyone. First of all, thank you for that introduction and a very warm welcome to all of you who have joined us for this fireside chat. Hope you all are doing well, staying safe, and also getting your vaccinations done. I would also like to invite you Anand, you know, thank you for being here with us. Great to have you. And I'm looking forward to hosting this chat with you, hoping for the best. Hi, good evening, everyone, and Rohit, pleasure to be here, looking forward to this chat now. So just Anand, before we get into the conversation, just setting the context here, the theme of the conversation today is innovative brand building using search, right? And I think the past year has been extraordinary for everyone, right? I think it has been crazy for marketers out there to kind of figure out what to do, what not to do, because it was a new one for everyone, right? And I think these times, search as a medium remained very strong, right? I think even when at the onset of the pandemic, there was a dilemma for everyone in terms of redefining their marketing strategies, right? How to look at budgets even then, but then search continued to be an area of investment for brands and advertisers. And I think what has evolved now over time is in the way in which brands are now using search advertising, right? We have worked with multiple clients now leveraging brands for search for creating brand awareness, right? They're using the medium very, very innovatively to kind of, you know, build on top of what their brand awareness is right now, right? And then now search being equipped with multiple technological advancements, right? And a lot of that happening around voice and vernacular, right? I think brands can leverage search to enhance their audience engagement and also build authentic and personal experiences for their consumers. I think with that context, right, I will kickstart this conversation with you. And my first question to you is that according to the recent Dan report, right? Search is the second most invested digital medium both across PC and mobile. And like I mentioned during the pandemic, right? Search marketing continued to evolve and be an area of investment. So my question is how has the marketing toolkit evolved for brands when it comes to building awareness specifically? During pandemic or over the last few years itself, digital has been growing quite aggressively. Internet penetration has increased, with the data rates coming down, with introduction of geo and all evolution over there. The internet accessibility became very, very sort of easy for the market. Almost 50% of our population, it's 1.3 billion, is the population of India. Almost 650 million users are there on the internet and they all are there out on internet searching or looking for something or the other as they sort of they are accessing, be through YouTube or be on Amazon or everywhere. The pandemic, definitely what it has done is it has changed the habits. The big, big shift is the consumer behavior which changed in the last year. And that's something which is helping the search or it's helping the brands and advertisers also when we are reaching out to the consumers, how to go and target now. And with digital being at the forefront, and as you said, that during pandemic, digital was the only medium. In the dam report also you would have seen that. That digital was the only medium which has grown during pandemic in 2020, over the previous year. So that's something which has helped gain much more prominence for digital. The way digital has been part of the entire market year toolkit because that becomes a key component of the way you are reaching out to the consumers. What's changed quite, quite big time is during pandemic consumers getting onto e-commerce, the social commerce or your day to day buying your viewing habits, everything has undergone a change and it's moved more onto digital consumption. E-commerce platforms have become very prominent, your Amazon, Flipkart and others have started doing a big role. And search has evolved over the years. Earlier it used to be Google being the buzzword for search. From there, it's sort of moved on and obviously with e-commerce getting on to layered onto top of that. I think that's something which is becoming more and more important for the brands and advertisers to take into consideration. Over the last one year that has become a critical component as we look at search to be the part of the overall aspect. And one interesting part is actually tier two, tier three cities are the ones which are driving this. You refer to those three Vs or it was from voice, vernacular and video, getting as part of the overall ecosystem and how digital is evolving. And that's playing a big role in search also, the video or the voice. That's something which is getting part of the entire search system. And then as we are sort of evolving. So that's one thing which is definitely a big shift we are seeing over the last one year. Yeah, I think pandemic has for sure changed habits. I think all of us do very differently the way we used to before. And definitely there is an opportunity for brands out there to have and gain higher mindset of their consumers and users. And obviously there are other trends such as voice and vernacular. And then search happening outside of Google, e-commerce, social commerce. So all of that just accelerating the trends. So I think my next question to you Anand is that I think the pandemic has, while we say that pandemic has accelerated digital adoption, that people spending significant time on their personal devices, which is leading to brands capturing more and more attention and revying for their consumers attention actually through different digital channels. And then that also reflects back when I was mentioning that brands are now using search for 360 marketing funnel goals. So my question here is that any recent, I think we had the first festive season last year. And this one is going to be at least some learnings into the pandemic in terms of how brands leveraged advertising and search advertising as well. So any recent campaigns that you have done where, which stood out for you, where innovative use of search happened or any instances that advertisers or marketeers should keep in mind as they enter into the festive season this time? So I would say I won't call out any specific campaign specifically, but with IPL coming in last year or earlier this year, many advertisers or brands have used that for targeting or reaching out to the consumers because I think that's smart targeting. At Denso, we have Denso Marketing Club, which we do use for getting those insights from the data that we are collecting. And that correlation is for advertisers or for brands. Actually, what's important to be effective in search also is getting their data, right? The first party data and then sort of using that for targeting your consumer in more effective manner and more efficient manner. So we have Denso Marketing Cloud, which is our property tool. Actually, we use that for gaining insights on ensuring that you are reaching out to the right consumer and a right target audience at the right point of time. So you optimize the sales actually because e-commerce or your commerce transactions have moved on to net. Almost 75% of your internet consumption when we are speaking now is happening through mobile. When we keep on saying it's still PC and mobile, but at the same time it's actually converting as the user is most of the time on to your Android device must be your tablet or be to your phone. That's what the consumer has moved on to. And I think targeting the consumer with that data point and then getting across to the clients. So a few things which we have used is actually YouTube has become one of the first proponents because with video, YouTube remains the first one. So at many of our clients' campaigns, we have done work with ESPN or Citafil or even a few Edite clients. I think optimizing those videos that has been quite useful. And that's something which has helped us actually increase the awareness, increase the reach, increase the entire access and footfalls onto the clients' websites. And then getting that prominence for the clients and then driving that forward. So video optimization is what I would say has been sort of quite relevant when we are speaking of current or recent FESTIA period or as we have seen during API period for search to sort of take that next level. And within that, again, vernacular has been quite important because beat on Amazon also or Flipkart or where your people are transacting on. There, what's getting important is your content, which is delivered more through a local language, my vernacular language. When you look at the search or video consumption, almost 54% of video or our content consumption is through Hindi as the largest, followed by English. And then it's your regional languages, which follow Southern languages, the large part in that actually. So while you're targeting, creating your content or reaching out your video optimizations, I think keeping an eye on that vernacular reaching out to the right consumer and getting the right tools to sort of target. That's earlier, even the denounced presentation also, Mr. Baksha, when you were speaking about that using the right tools for reaching out to the right consumer or the right audience, I think that becomes important. So using the data, right tools for that purpose, right content. What we look at, Denso, also, is this actually ultimately advertising is ideas business, right? Getting the right idea across to people. But it ought to be data driven and take in the bill. So getting that right technology in when we are reaching out to the consumers for optimizing your search campaign, I think that that gets quite important. And the brands or advertisers who are able to do that effectively and efficiently, they are the ones who are gaining during these periods of time. Those two, three campaigns which I mentioned, we saw huge sort of success and sort of turn around and that sort of replicates across multiple platforms. So that's something which gets quite important. So I think at a broader level, what I'm picking up is that data and targeting becomes really, really important for the brands to be. And the content is important. It has to be localized more probably a lot more vernacular because the next set of users that are coming online are going to be not comfortable with English is their first preference, right? Then I think mobile is the other big one, which is going to be important. And brands really need to have a mobile first strategy and then of course optimization and the right tools to kind of do all of this together. Yeah, I think great insights, Anand. I think my next question to you is I think we've spoken and you've covered like voice and vernacular, but kind of diving in that a bit more, right, how do brands leverage search with voice and vernacular coming in and the whole personalization becoming really important as they move ahead? So how do brands connect with their audiences to build on these authentic personal experiences, right? Whether it is through, it could be content, right? Which plays in a crucial role, right? But how is voice vernacular and content going to play? How big that is going to play the part in the next set of 100 million users that come online? It's extremely important, but at the core again what remains Rohit is which I was saying earlier, understanding your consumer. So for that, the first party data or having the right data sets with you and analyzing that data set with the right tools. I think that that gets very important and that's where your agency partners, they come into play in actually guiding you in the right manner when you're sort of going to target your consumers. Voice vernacular or video when we are speaking about it's in a way where your consumer is and then you're going to target him or her from that perspective. One example I can give you is we had worked out or done for one of our clients actually, a record for the Giza, the water heater brands actually. So typically when people go and search on internet or it would be on Amazon or Google, you would search for Giza. But when I'm coming from a background where I don't know English so well, people pronounce that in a different manner because when our team did the research, it's pronounced as Giza or you pronounce it as Giza or Giza, Giza. So when you're typing typically from one another person, I would type in more in the way I say the word. And many of that gets lost when we did the research almost 1.3 million searches were lost because you could sort of relate to that word. So we use them in the meta tagging on Amazon and then other sites actually for the brand. And then when we did the research almost 560 misspelled spellings or misspelled words, they sort of generated almost 3.6 million searches. So that's the power when you understand who is your consumer, how he or she is thinking. And then how you should go and tweak your campaign or tweak the way you're sort of targeting them, make some modifications. And these were quite simple insights actually, means it gives you great insight. So the research, the data point which you have with you, and then understanding your consumer completely. I think search, the beauty of search is over there actually that it lies in that as well that when you have the right tool sets, have the right understanding and have the right kind of data points. I think it helps you sort of build on your campaigns or build on your sort of target audiences and get the conversion going through. And within that, as we are moving forward, as I'm moving more towards as a consumer, mobile first or only mobile, people are started using search commands on your city or your Amazon or on your Alexa or on Google. So the search commands are going through voice and understanding what people are saying, how the pronunciation is going to be. The Indian pronunciation is going to be different from what an American pronunciation is and then build your campaigns around that and train or sort of use the meta tracks appropriately so that you reach out over there and making your videos or your content that much more relevant, somebody who is Hindi speaking or Tamil speaking or say Marathi speaking, he or she's going to understand the video or relate to the video or what your brand is communicating with, getting in his own language. It's going to be all the more important and getting more and more people attracted to what you are trying to convey. So I think that that gets important while search remains at the core. But using that in an innovative manner, which many of our brands are doing. And then as I said, one of the examples was a record which I mentioned. So using that in the right manner, I think that this is going to be the way for targeting those next 100 million which you said are going to be there. They're waiting for you to get in the right manner and understand them and reach out to them. And then I think that that's how the brands and advertisers need to sort of look at it. I think completely aligned to a point where advertisers are missing sometimes on a lot of queries that users are searching for because they're not comfortable with the language. So I think that technological advancement to kind of get these people online. And I think that is where vernacular and then probably speech text to speech and all these things are crucial part in search advertisers strategy as the next users come online. That's right. I think we've seen multiple brands ourselves miss out on a lot of monetization activities possible within the campaigns because of the keywords or the search queries not being there as a part of the campaign. Yeah. Yeah, so I think that brings us to the end of this discussion. I think it was really fun to have you with us, Anand. Thank you for taking out time to share insights on the future trends of search advertising. And I think, you know, marketers should definitely look out for some of these as we move into our peak quarters and festive season. And I would also like to thank all the audience that has joined us for this session. Thanks. Thanks, Rick. Take care and stay safe. Thanks. Thank you, gentlemen. But before I let you go, I have some questions here that the audiences are dying to be answered by Anand. So if I can, as a manager for content solutions, provide your brand, what are some of the tools in which I can optimize voice search to reach the right consumer to its full potential? So it's, again, based on which sort of tools you are referring to or understand, it's essentially for understanding the consumer, right? And when you're reaching out. So the tools, if you can actually reach out to me separately, maybe I can discuss that I can sort of share that it's, it's more from that perspective. But it's not, I won't use this more from saying ABC or in that perspective. But I think I'm happy to sort of connect offline and then sort of take that forward. But it's essentially more, as I said earlier, it's more understanding the consumer, how you are sort of using that and taking it forward. So it's not calling out A against B or C actually, for that matter. Right. Another question that I have that we'd be very happy to give you to sense about, what do you think is the scope of voice search marketing for OTT platforms specifically? Sorry, I missed the last one. What was what? What do you think is the scope of voice search marketing for OTT platforms specifically? It is, as we were saying in the last part, right? That I would say, unfortunately, it is tremendous because as people are using or as consumers and as viewers are using other platforms and the capabilities which are getting built in, the voice search gets more and more important because you're using smart remote source for your phone or you're using the OTT platforms connected through your Alexsars or through your Google and everything. So those search commands and using that voice search platforms for that purpose are all the more relevant means people want to use the benefits or the more convenient it gets to your searches. That gets all the more important. And that's the potential is tremendous because then it just takes away the pain of typing it out or pain of sort of understanding English as a language. But when I kill the users or if I'm not comfortable with English as a language, there's no sort of forced entry getting into the platforms as well and sort of doing that search. My language, what I understand with voice search, you're able to sort of communicate with your platform. So potential is tremendous. And I think that's where the next developments are obviously going to be. And a lot of investment is needed over there. And I think, Praveen, to add to this, I think, inherently the way users are searching, the user is the same. So probably it's the same user searching across different platforms, whether it's OTT, C-commerce, or just normal search bars. I think since the nature of the user is the same, effectively search will play a crucial part as more and more content comes online and play an effective part in the OTT search strategy as well. Yeah, muted, Praveen. Praveen, I think we have... Oh, yes, my bad. So that's one of the key factors in understanding how technology helps and also what you need to be careful about while you're doing it. OK, great. So one question that I have here, let me just quickly get to the question here. So with most brands trying to do a hyper-local and personalized messaging, how does a brand ensure that it's not adding to the clutter and standing out? That's a good question, actually. But it's, again, understanding who your audience is, your messaging, what was said earlier, right? Your content or how you're sort of getting across the messaging to the consumer. So when you want to stand out or being different from the clutter, when I said those three points which we look at at Denso as well, it's ideas led, what is the right idea that you're getting across, your tech enabled and data driven. So you're getting the right messaging across to the right audience. You're not just sort of bombarding your audience with your messaging and the right message curated in the right manner. I think those three things which we speak about, that ideas led, tech enabled, data driven, getting to your consumer, that's going to be quite important. And then obviously use of technology in identifying that right consumer, the proper tools for getting that. I did mention about one such tool which we have in some marketing club. So getting the insights and right optimization. So that gets important. So use of data, use of technology, and obviously the right content being created for getting across to your consumers. Rohit, can I invite you to extend that off? Yeah, so I think understanding the customers around is important. I think if the profiling of those customers is important, then messaging can be creative given the variety of the audience that is there to be targeted. And then basis that there are multiple features available now. I mean, obviously voice and vernacular is going to come in at some point in time. But then there are also extensions and a lot of features that search platform offers. In terms of targeting, I mean, you could have a call extension or a different image extension, etc. or the users or the brands to be kind of targeting their users more effectively. So I think identifying the users and understanding of the profile of the users or localizing better is important. And I think once you do that, then entire strategy kind of evolves and defines around that. And then obviously I mentioned the data and insights around it. Mobile strategy, which is as the focus is on mobile, right? And then content, all plugs in together. So yeah. Right, so I think I would like to thank both of you for your valuable time and it was a really interesting conversation and some amazing insights there. So thank you so much once again for being here with us. Thank you. Thank you.


This one Bible verse transformed my mind and I almost missed the truth it reveals. Once I saw this revelation my mind was changed. It changed the way I see sin, holiness, and my own mistakes. This increased my desire to live holy and helped me to overcome shame. I'll read it then explain it. Galatians 5 17. And the Spirit gives us desires that are opposite of what the sinful nature desires. Now this seems simple so why is this so mind-transforming? Well it reveals that the Holy Spirit is the one who helps us fight sin. I used to think that the Holy Spirit came closer when I did well but then distanced himself when I made mistakes. This led to condemnation which made it harder to get back on track. Yes sin has consequences and no we shouldn't continue in sin but the truth is that even when we make mistakes the Holy Spirit stays. He doesn't abandon you. He stays with you to help you fight against sin and become holy. So get up and try again.


Yeah, so let me introduce myself first. So my name is Thinveer Kil and I am CTO at a startup called Flux Ninja. And today I'll be talking with you guys about observability-driven load management which is a set of techniques which are used by operators to ensure fall tolerance and reliability of the services. So let's get started. So let's start off by talking about the base capabilities that you get in this year today. So the capabilities of Istio are centered around three pillars. First one being security. So basic encryption between services, mutual DNS between services and also some basic access control. So use cases such as microsegmentation making sure that services are talking to each other intently. The second pillar is centered around traffic management. So these are some basic network settings like timeouts, reprise, load balancing algorithms. And also things like passive checks, like outlier detections and circuit breaking. And also some CI CD oriented kind of features like canary deployers, AB tests and so on. The third bucket is observability. So given that Istio is kind of at this interesting vantage point where it's witnessing all this service to service chatter. So it's able to give unprecedented visibility into this chatter and that too without modifying your. So even despite these great base capabilities like once you go and take your and take any application into production there's still a dearth of features around flow control. So what I mean by that is like whenever you take your apps into production you need basic rate limiting when basically at the gateway you wanna make sure that if you have a shared service or a multi-tenant service which is shared amongst various entities or users you wanna make sure that there is fair access between the users and also it isn't the case that a subset of users are monopolizing the majority of resources. Need some kind of basic protection in that layer. Another thing is like your capacity of your services is finite, right? And because it's expensive to provisions like or over provision services. So another thing you wanna make sure is that if your services are getting overloaded it should not lead to cascading failures and the good throughput essentially of your service should remain high despite any kind of overloads coming into picture. And so the next thing is like when you're working with because whenever you're developing an app like you're always dependent on some third party systems or some open source APIs or even some managed services like DynamoDB or if you're using it if it's an AI app you're dependent on open AI for instance. So you wanna work backwards from those limits and first of all you wanna make sure you're a good citizen you stay within those limits because otherwise those third party APIs might even penalize you for instance GitHub penalizes you if you go over limit too often, right? So you wanna make sure you stay within those limits and also you wanna make sure for both these use cases both for protection as well as when it's working with external limits you wanna make sure that you're using those quotas or those limits effectively like any app will have its own set of priorities or based on the business use case like certain or not all requests are equal, right? Certain requests are more important. So you need some kind of scheduling when you're close to these limits. You wanna make sure that high importance requests are given a better chance of getting accepted. So yeah, so flow control is a must when you're running at scale even at moderate scale to be honest, right? So you need API rate limits to ensure fairness and prevent abuse. You need adaptive limits per service to prevent overload. So what I mean by that is based on where the bottlenecks are in your app typically they are in the most heaviest kind of APIs or data intensive portions of your workload typically databases or big data systems. So those usually become a bottleneck. So you wanna make sure that you get the saturation signal or the queue signal from those systems and use that to basically do throttling and do throttling as downstream as possible detect the problem upstream and block it as soon as possible to reduce wasted work. And again, you need prioritization. So once you start throttling then you wanna make sure that the most important requests get at the head of the queue. And the third one is like what we talked about like when working with third party APIs you want to eliminate the guesswork essentially like let's say you're hitting a API rate limit with open AI and get a port 29 then what do you do? When do you retry? Especially when it's shared quotas, right? You're using the same key across a lot of distributed workloads. Then how do you eliminate that guesswork and basically go as fast as possible while also prioritizing the requests. So keeping that in mind I'm gonna introduce this open source project called Aperture and how it can help to flow control in Istio service mesh and even other environments. So here's a quick overview of the Aperture project. So it's an open source observability driven flow control system. It has got a programmable declarative policy language which lets you express basically these flow control policies as control circuit graphs. These are like signal processing graphs and it's an observability driven system. Essentially it's completing the feedback loop taking observability signals from the infrastructure and using that to do flow control. And interestingly it works on top of your existing stack. So if you're using service meshes such as Istio so it's just a drop in replacement just not a replacement like a drop in augmented functionality that you get on top of Istio or even if you're using API gateways like IngenX and Com we have like Lua plugins into those projects. And if you're using none of those if you're just plainly using like simple HTTP servers then we have SDKs which can either do middleware insertion or you can pretty much write code to do this kind of flow control functionality within your application logic itself. So that's a brief introduction. Now let's delve in a little bit deeper. So what does Aperture bring to Istio? So it basically brings in these observability driven flow control capabilities. So there's a Rago based request classification layer which lets you basically look at labels in your traffic and have criteria for driving new labels or even going deep into your PLO for instance, going deep into your GraphQL APIs and extracting labels from those. And now these labels interestingly can be used for both visibility as well as control. It provides a distributed rate limiting implementation. So think of it as like Istio's rate limiting service although we are not using rate limiting service we're using Auth API but it's kind of giving you this rate limiting capability so you can do rate limit users in a distributed fashion and in a very scalable way. The second capability is adaptive limits and request prioritization. So this capability builds upon that that circuit based policy implementation essentially letting you to take any signal from the infrastructure which is basically measuring the bottleneck. It could be a queue size. It could be thread counts. It could be latencies. Any signal which indicates in a reliable way overload buildup in your system. So that signal can be used to adapt every limit your APIs API calls essentially closer to the entry point. So that's the adaptive limits feature and the third one is quota limits. So essentially working with third party APIs or even within teams you might have quotas like some team might have given like microservices teams. They give each other quotas like so that they so that one team doesn't overwhelm one particular service. So it could be either between services within a larger organization or it could be some third party like DynamoDB or OpenAI or GitHub. So you want to work with those limits and again ensure prioritization of requests. So you want to make sure you use that quota in a prioritized fashion. And the last one is like telemetry. You get some telemetry with STU as well but the telemetry that you can get with Aperture is even more surgical like because it's tied to the ego-based classification rules.  So if you want to get like percentile kind of matrix so it's geared towards those kinds of use cases. So next let's look at how Istio plus Aperture the entire stack works together. So Aperture agent sits next to the on-vibroxy so it's like a sidecar to the sidecar and essentially the way it integrates is through authorization API I talked about earlier. We're going to look at it in more detail in the next slide. Essentially a couple of integration points. One is the auth API which lets us intercept calls coming into on-vibroxy. So Aperture can be installed at various vantage points that where on-vibroxy or Istio proxy is also installed. So at the ingress, the Aperture agent can help you achieve things like rate limits. So any call that goes into on-vibroxy so it gets forward to Aperture agent and it lets you implement things like rate limits. Like within services it lets you build functionality such as adaptive limits. So again the same insertion modes running next to your on-vibroxy and in this example we are looking at a database. So a typical bottleneck in a distributed app is usually a big data system or a database. So taking saturation signals from these bottleneck services and using that to adaptively limit traffic going into your service. And then also prioritizing that traffic. And now there's another use case of Aperture and Istio service mesh is on the ingress. Like calls going outside your cluster to some third party. For instance, this could be like open AI and you want to work backwards from that limit. You want to model that limit internally using token buckets. And you want to limit, you want to be a good citizen. You want to stay within limits. And once you're close to the limits you want to prioritize traffic. So you want to use that open AI quota in an intelligent fashion so that high priority requests get to use it first. So yeah, so these are the new set of capabilities we are adding on top of your existing Istio service mesh. So let's look at the insertion in a little bit more detail. So this is the on-voy proxy, Istio proxy. So it gets requests from outside that's step one. And the way Auth API works is, so by the way, this Auth API which was implemented by the OPA team for authorization kind of use cases. But for Aperture we are using the same technique the same glue for flow control. So the way it works is any time request comes in the on-voy proxy forwards it to Aperture agent for a yes or no answer either to admit it or to drop it. And plus also we attach some data for telemetry purposes. So if it's a no, then on-voy proxy won't release forward the request to the service. It will just send the response back with a 503 server BZ. And the response can actually be configured through the Aperture agent, the policy in Aperture agent. But by default, it's like a 503 or if it's a rate limit, it could be a 403. And the second point of integration is the access log. So this is needed for telemetry. A bunch of telemetry that we're doing like looking at things like latencies, even estimating tokens dynamically and things like that. So we get this access log stream from on-voy, which is observability lag. So essentially completing the feedback loop here. And yeah, so if the call gets accepted it's just forwarded to the service as usual. And then the response goes back and modified back to the original caller. So that's basically the insertion. And the configuration, the way configuration looks like is like we use this CRD called on-voy filter. So on-voy filter is a construct in Istio configuration which lets you write these kind of interceptor rules that get inserted into the on-voy proxy. So this on-voy filter basically describes couple of things, it's the external LOTC with the address to the local agent that's running next to the on-voy and also the access logging address. And this on-voy filter can be applied selectively. It doesn't need to be pervasive. So you can do it per visibly. If it's a demon set, you can do it per visibly or if you wanna do it more surgically then you can even have a workload selector. So workload selector is in Istio that you be more surgical with this insertion. Okay, let's move forward. Let's talk a little bit about Aperture's architecture next. So at the heart of Aperture is a control loop. So the way it works is the Aperture agents they have an inbuilt open telemetry collector which lets it gather metrics both locally and from external technologies like databases and such. So that telemetry is written to Prometheus and then there's another component called Aperture controller which could either be hosted by you or it could be hosted in our commercial solution called Aperture cloud. So everything above Aperture agent is hosted in Aperture cloud or it could all be, if you're using the open source origin it could all be hosted by you. So the job of Aperture controller is to run these policy circuits which are evaluated periodically. So it will periodically request the result of those metrics using PromQL queries and then run a signal processing circuit which results in some adjustments which are written down into XCD. So XCD is used both for sending these adjustments down to Aperture agents and also for propagating configurations. So if you install new policies so the same mechanism is used to populate those policies in Aperture agent. So far so good. So yeah, so Aperture control loop is kind of the heart of the system and let's move forward to maybe more functionality inside the Aperture agent. So the first functionality I want to talk about is distributed token buckets. So these distributed counters essentially we have this distributed hash table. So Aperture agents form a peer to peer group between agents belonging to each agent group. So we form this kind of peer to peer network which is being used for maintaining these distributed counters. So these are used for use cases such as rate limits. You want to limit incoming requests by users, let's say. So there will be a bucket for each user and it's a token bucket. So it's like unlike window counters this is like pretty accurate and very smooth. So the same technology is also used for quota limits. So if you're working with third party APIs the same kind of token bucket mechanism. So there's a leader for each token bucket. So there's a look up on the leader. It could either be a synchronous call or a lazy sync kind of a call. So this is basically how counters work in Aperture. Another technology typically used by some users as Redis. So this is more high performance implementation than Redis. So Redis is a single service which can become a bottleneck. So this is more of a peer to peer kind of architecture which is more scalable and it dynamically shards the keys. So if an agent goes away it will dynamically shard the keys or if a new agent comes it will dynamically resharp the keys based on that. So that's the distributed token bucket. So moving on, the next technology I want to talk about in Aperture agent is the scheduler. So just like operating systems have schedulers for processes you have nice values and such. So we have this kind of this network based scheduler and the algorithm that we have here is called weighted fair queuing scheduler which is used in packet switching networks and also used here. So each request essentially gets a priority or a weight and based on that weight this algorithm makes sure that the utilization is essentially in the ratio of these weights. So if you say, a user's get a priority of 200, trial users get a priority of 100. So this means there's a one is to two ratio. So paid users get double the priority. So if they're both seeing similar kind of request rates then on average paid users will see twice the acceptance rate. And this comes into play when you're under overload or when you're close to quota limits. So the scheduling comes into play and maybe you want to de-prioritize something like a background task or maybe free tier users in this case you want to de-prioritize. So it's like 10 times less or 20 times less than paid users. So those requests will be the first ones to get dropped or the first ones to be at the tail. They'll be essentially at the tail of the queue. So requests coming in, getting classified into these different categories. And then the way they get de-queued is based on this weighted for your team's schedule. And by the way, the way requests get dropped is based on the timeout that is configured. So when you do this integration, this OTC integration, so you define a timeout value. So this is the amount of time you're willing to queue the request within Aperture. So far so good, let's move on. Pretty much covered like the core tech pieces in Aperture. So let's move on and see how Aperture works in practice. So I'm going to show a demo application where Aperture is running in action. So the test setup that we have, so we have a PostgreSQL database and we have a service which is making a request to PostgreSQL whenever there's an incoming request. It's an HTTP service. So whenever there's an HTTP request and it's all glued together through STO. There's a K6 based, K6 is a project which lets you simulate users and traffic and such. So K6 is making these requests, making requests to the service and going through on Y. And the traffic mix that we have is like there are desk users and subscribers. Subscribers are higher priority and the breakup of traffic is 50-50, like 50% subscribers, 50% guests. And the traffic pattern that we have is like it's like a sinusoid or more of a square wave where it starts with 10 users for one minute and then it goes to 100 users. So once it goes to 100 users, then this service makes a lot of API calls to PostgreSQL and PostgreSQL queue starts to fill up. So we are monitoring the number of active connections in PostgreSQL. So if that active connections goes near 100%, then there would be queue build up here. And the latency will spike up for all the users. So we want to make sure that PostgreSQL connection usage stays within bounds. So that's why we are monitoring PostgreSQL using a Perture agent. So it's got an hotel pipeline which is scraping matrix from PostgreSQL. And then using this in an Angolan to do this dynamic throttling of API requests coming into the service. And then also prioritizing traffic. So here is the policy which does all this. So the first part of the policy is defining an hotel pipeline. So it's defining this address of PostgreSQL instance and the collection interval. So this is how we get matrix into our system into the Prometheus database. The second part of the policy is basically defining criteria, the algorithm for throttling. So a set point of 40 is defined. This means that 40% of connections are used in PostgreSQL. We want to start throttling. And the throttling policy is very simple. It's a progressive, additive increase, additive decrease kind of a policy we have. So we do a 20% decrease in load any time we detect an overload. And if let's say we are not in overload, like that means less than 40% usage of connections, then we do a 5% increase progressively every 10 seconds. So very simple policy, but it works pretty well because connection usage will have what happened there? Can you guys see, still see my screen? I'll just tell you. So yeah, this is the policy. And yeah, so that's algorithm 5% decrease every 10 seconds. So down here is selectors which identify requests for scheduling. So it's like a workload selector. Actually, why not just workload selectors also looking into traffic labels. So basically identifying the service where we want the scheduler to act. And down here we have defined priorities. So we're saying guest users have 50 priority and subscribers have 250. So let's see how the metrics look like once we have the policy in place. So on the left of the graph you see before the policy was deployed. So we saw, so this is like before aperture. So nearly 100% connection usage when the traffic ramped up. And like after aperture is installed, the overload is prevented and we stopped seeing any errors. Like earlier we were seeing too many clients already on the service. So we stopped seeing this error but also we started getting this prioritization of traffic just shown in the graphs here. So incoming token rate is higher than accepted. This means there's some queue build up happening because of throttling. And we see higher acceptance rate for subscribers versus guest users and conversely, higher rejected rate for guest users and loads rejected rate for subscribers. So yeah, so this is the priorities in action. So roughly five times acceptance rate for subscribers versus guest users. So this number is almost five times. So this is the rejected fear queuing algorithm in action. So that is it guys. So let's move on to Q&A. So I would encourage you guys to check out the aperture project on GitHub. Even try out the aperture cloud which is the commercial solution which does controller as a managed service and also gives you rich analytics. So I'm open to questions now. All right, so I'm looking at the Q&A section. So there's a question which is from Mitch Connors. He's saying, is it possible to detect overload without dedicated matrix like Postgres queue perhaps using Istio layer seven matrix? Absolutely. So we do have policies which can actually look at things like latencies. We haven't used Istio's matrix but there's nothing stopping us from doing that. Like you can write, because Istio matrix are exposed as Prometheus compliant matrix. You can write an hotel pipeline to scrape those matrix but you can also use apertures built in flux meter. There's a component called flux meter which lets you create histograms which are even more detailed than Istio's layer seven matrix. You can go down into like graph QL payload and looking at labels inside that to get these layer seven kind of latency matrix, percentile matrix and so on. So that was the only question. I'll check the chat as well. Any other questions anyone? That's all the slides I had. So maybe I can show you guys a little bit more if you guys are interested like how circuit based policies look like. So essentially we're designing these signal processing graphs but by the way we have made it pretty simple like for anyone to use this product. So you don't really have to design this. We have these high level blueprints that you can use out of the box just fill in like high level YAML and get started. So we have these basically these kind of recipes. So under load scheduling. So for instance, someone was asking, can we do we need specialized matrix like Postgres SQL? So you can even look at things like latencies and use that as a feedback for throttling requests. This is like a quick view of how the entire stack works from classification stage to scheduling. And this example doesn't show STO. So essentially a service could be directly talking to a virtual agent. It could be doing through STO. It could be doing through con, but essentially the same kind of interface works for all these technologies. And so the interesting thing we have done is with this Rego. So Rego is typically used for authorization use cases but we use Rego over here for more than that for flow control observability and so on. So the same set of labels can be used both for observability and control. So that's an interesting innovation we did here. And yeah. And this is like the architecture of a aperture in open source. So just the stuff we talked about. So there's a control circuit running in the controller which is periodically computed and the decisions are propagated through HCD. So I'll just go back to the Q&A section if there are more questions for me. Okay, no questions till now. All right, I think we can end the session if there are no more questions.


Okay guys, we're here and welcome to arch land. This is actually my account. I've reached level 60 probably a week ago I just had I haven't had a time to give you guys an update and I've acquired a lot actually a Lot of heroes already since the last account showcase. So with this account showcase Let us just go to I don't want to bore you with my progress here Just want to go through The tree here this one almost finished. I'm actually here doing work with these guys here and I'm actually here ready unlocking these two. So soon I'll be unlocking Level 14. I'm just generating enough resources for this one. So Academy wise what is my progress? So what I've been doing is prioritizing warrior boost mage boosts secondly Next is tank boost and priest boost Those are my priorities so far. I'm actually working on mage boost at as of this moment. So again, this This is really really hard to level up as you expect it to be so so far. I'm Happy with my progress Very happy in fact and quietly been playing this game Daily action really really happy that I played this so in terms of what I have saved up a couple of resources ready especially these ones here so Sorry, excuse me. Sorry for that Actually, I'm hungry. I'm not full. I'm hungry. So in terms of This one night brawl. I haven't played much with night brawl Don't have the time you to grind this. I'm also playing another game battle arena. I'm at 16 I Don't grind this too much and spend resources for this. I just spend I just finished the three then for secret realm There are a lot of things that I have to Finish guys. I tell you I've been busy for the past few days that I haven't gone through I but I just made sure that I finished my dailies and everything Made sure that I opened this already. So this one for the heart. These are all opened So I'm good to go With the skills that I have for my heroes Almost I think all have already at max traits. So that's speaking of heroes Let's move through By the way, the interface right now the green one the highlight I like it because it pops out. It doesn't blend with the background. So kudos to the devs for having this type of Interface in terms of the event. Let's go to the heroes Okay, so so far these are my heroes most of them are at rank for the only the only We have one rank 5 Gabriel here and rank 5 Clarisse, which I'd really I'm I got two copies over in polls. So again I just wish that it could have been a different hero with a dupe, but I Cannot complain at this point. So let's go back to my heroes here and explore Equipment most of them are already rainbow colored and straight So I'm For sig hard. I'm go. I got I went with the top. So again, I told you guys I'm actually full with them rune wise. I'm really good So just lacking a couple of resources or gold. So moving to next.  So I have her gear here straight wise I got the one in the bottom So for rune wise, I'm ready kind of good with her. Just need to take these to 20 again lacking gold for Gabriel Also good. So gave her additional HP to withstand more beating from, you know from from enemies so Equipment wise Actually, I'm contented with the equipment that she has straight wise This is where I have a problem still. I don't know how to reset the top row I thought at 60 we could reset them Apparently at this point no, but I assume that will will be going beyond 60 So as of now, I'm missing this I cannot farm this anymore and take this this is You know plus 3% to every stat. It's actually invested here. So I'm actually paying for a mistake an earlier mistake that I did so it's not a problem I don't think it's going to be a problem. I just hope that I can Get this in the future and I think that we can actually get all of the trees or all of the skill or trait Levels here or trait rose. I don't know what to call them at this point. So that is it for Gabriel Recently I was able to get YGG After that summon video it got her and so far she doesn't disappoint Charlotte killer at this point and I like her kit. I like her kit very very impressed. So so far. I'm actually I'm getting her exclusive weapon or exclusive equipment Straightwise I got the bottom row for her So Very nice. She's a support kind of support page. She supports the Warriors and For her root I gave her Damage more damage with the wand and this one is for critical rate because her kit it revolves around crit rate and moving to Jin Jin I haven't used well He's actually my third ward my team but He's kind of a situational guy. I don't use him that often so equipment wise I'm actually happy with this equipment trait wise. I got the bottom row and the rule that I have for him is A vampire set because of he lacks really survivability, but he has crit rate here with monstrous wolf Okay, so moving on I think now I'm gonna, you know, apologize if I didn't you know didn't See the potential of Valak, but now she's my favorite mage at this point. She gives a lot of firepower buffs Again firepower buffs to the team. I like her for PvP ready and even for PvE. I'm actually bringing her so She's a support priest who can deal a lot of damage deal damage decent damage not a lot Equipment wise. I don't have her exclusive one. So but I'm happy with how she's built so far I got the bottom row for her. I don't have still have this. I don't have This girl here, I don't have Lena and for her rune I Of course healing wise and this one is just for additional firepower the magic eye Okay, one of my favorites, which I really really worked hard to level up is actually Michael. So Michael here Again for PvP, I enjoy using her to take off stragglers for team buffs and the like Equipment wise. I was actually very very Fortunate I got her unique equipment with another unique equipment in one pull So very happy with that Straightwise I got the top one But I'm not using both skills. I'm actually using these two this one and this one So but for rune, of course, it's the axe and Holy sword because of normal damage attack. Usually I would do normal damage attack just to poke You know poke damage at the enemy. So that is how I built her next up We have here Susie and Susan one of my favorite mages in terms of damage and deep house Clearly in terms of damage there. They are one of the top. I I like using them especially in Situations where I need to stun somebody and more or less Two buffs and this kill will stun them and Equipment wise still no unique equipment. It doesn't matter at this point. I like how they're built. I got that the bottom row But for their Rune I got the our glass because again this one is Chance at skill reduction So our glass is pretty much difficult to get and this one is additional magic attack Okay, moving on to Catherine Catherine I'm enjoying as well. I've been using her as a support mage not so much for damage more in support Equipment wise really happy with her Sometimes I use rate PVP PVP Straightwise I got the bottom row and for Rune. I actually am using this inflicts one random debuff 50% but I'm planning to switch to the our glass if I have enough So probably the future this will be our glasses. I'm gonna be switching these out as of now I don't have much. So there you go. This one Cleferey top Healer as always. I don't have any complaints with her Straightwise I got the bottom row and Rune is heals This one is for HP Additional survivability Okay, next up is Marguerite So for Marguerite, I'm not using her much Probably just if I need a light element, I will use her but not so much I have tons of mages in my lineup that I don't use her that much. I have if you can see here one Two three and she's the fourth So I have three I have four mages and she's the fourth in terms of usage Equipment wise I have her unique equipment straight wise. I got the top She's actually versatile. I like her kit as well. So I have our glass here. I Put our glass on her instead of Catherine. She needs it more And I put magic eye here for magic attack Okay, next up is semi semi here Haven't been using semi really Because of Michael it's Michael's fault so Don't have your unique equipment still Straightwise I got the bottom. So it's ready full Rune wise She has battle axe and she has gladiator so still need to get more battle axes Okay, so one of recent acquisitions is Richard Richard is I still have to build him. I'm not really confident with him yet I'm still waiting for her his unique equipment. So hopefully after YGG then him As you can see their decent equipment not really the best for him Straightwise I am actually going after the top row So far and Rune wise I have This one the kite shield for your defenders and the Ouroboros is just for HP. So that's it so hopefully if If I plan to really, you know invest in him I'll swap out Gabriel for him in PVP eventually eventually But as of now he's in the works in terms of combat power is at two nine Gabriel is at three six. So really not a you know equal contest at this point So also moving on to Erica Erica here are also happy with the herb build So far the recent unique equipment I got is hers Which is very helpful in terms of increased range Straightwise, I'm still finishing up the top row But I'm actually using her in terms of her basic attack. So single unit assassin That's her build and her rune here. So I have here battle axe as well And crit rate so built like an assassin The shooter so so far that is my main team. I haven't been using our main character and Nola is was parked because of YGG in favor of YGG But she has decent equipment here, but I don't use her much as you notice and this is her gear I when I got YGG obviously I stopped, you know developing her at this point and These guys when they become SSR's I'll be using them Then this girl Clarice, I haven't been using her a lot of assassins don't know what to choose at this point So she's there for you know development and Zelvinath is the last SSR that I'm you know the current one that I'm What they call this I'm building I Don't use her probably will will park her. I'm gonna be using more of More of Michael instead of Zelvinath So you've seen my if you've seen my video in terms of build guide then good if not go over to that video If you want to build her up and in terms of how to use her as well Also, Avia is still here. She's the last I'm still just waiting for them to turn SSR The rest of them here. I'm not building anymore So I'm concentrated with a lot of heroes anyway, so one two three four five six seven eight eight nine ten Eleven twelve thirteen fourteen right now. I Have fourteen heroes that I am mixing and matching in terms of matchups in terms of stages And I'm very very happy where I am with them at this point. So that is it guys So what how what do you think of my account? Um Hopefully you guys have you know questions for me the comment. How did I build who and you know? How how did I build? What did I use so throw your questions on you know on my account? Whatever questions you have there. So again guys, thank you very much for staying this far.  This is the warden and I'm out of here