Welcome. This presentation is titled Unlocking New Platform Experiences with Open Interfaces and I'm here with Thomas to talk a little bit about different tools that you can use if you're building platforms. How do you combine them together and how can you face some interesting challenges? Let's get started. Let's go right into it.  So challenges that you will face when you're building platforms or dealing with a bunch of teams working with Kubernetes clusters and infrastructure and all that stuff. Let's start with the first challenge. The first challenge? How do you get people in newer teams to get faster to use all these crazy tools together? It gets complicated because again the amount of tools that you will need is pretty large and each tool has been designed with different use cases in mind so you need to learn all of them in order to be effective. So we need to do something about it, right? The second challenge is that you're building distributed systems so how can you reduce the cognitive load around developers building these more complicated systems that needs to be resilient from the get-go and that they just need to scale in some way or another, right? Because your business will do good so you need to be able to scale down. And finally how do you run this and how do you operate this in your production environments, how do you do promotion across environments and how do you know the things that you need to do with your applications and observe them and figure out what's going on when things are not working as expected, right? Let's start with a very simple application. I presented this application of developers on this year with the data folks. I don't know if we know them but what we showed here is that even from very, very simple architectures things get complicated really, really fast. So this is like an application that was published by Docker folks to show how to containerize applications using different languages and using different infrastructure, right? Simple application to cast them out and then see the results when the data is being, you know, aggregated by the worker's service. In this case, we're using Java, C-Sharp and Go, just a very quality environment. All of these things will need to be containerized and deployed into Kubernetes cluster. But then you have the infrastructure layer also that you need to take care of and we'll take a look into how to deal with that as well. Let's have a look at how it works. Let's take a look at the application. The application is pretty simple and it looks like this, right? So you can cast boats and you can actually see the results that are changing. So pretty simple stuff, very basic. Again, we want to show a simple application working and yes, the architecture around that application too. So we'll use these to exemplify the challenges that we mentioned at the beginning like the onboarding side, the distributed system patterns and tools that you can use around that space and then the operation, you know, running in product space too. So my name is Mauricio Salatino. I'm a software engineer. I work for a company that's called Diagrid. We are doing a, you know, Docker and working on also the G-18 project. I wrote this book titled Plasma Engineering for Kubernetes. I was given some copies away for the web, for the book club, so feel free to check it out. I'm involved with different open source projects in the CLCF space and outside too. So, you know, if you have any interest, like, if you're interested in these topics, please check the book out. Yeah, and I'm Thomas Vitale. I work at Systematic, a Danish software company. I'm a software engineer and CLCF ambassador. I'm really passionate about anything. Club Native or Java Related and combined these passions of mine and wrote the book recently. It's called Club Native Spring in Action. I'm also really a big supporter of open source technologies, contributing as much as I can both in the Club Native ecosystem and in the Java space. So, let's get started and analyze a bit more of the challenges that we face, in particular developer space when onboarding a new process, because there's always a reason to introduce more complexity. So, for example, how do development teams boost up a new project? How much will it take to go from initial idea to some prototype? We need to consider that. So, how much time are they going to spend before they are able to write the first line of code implementing business logic? So, how much boilerplate is there to deal with during the onboarding process? Yes, good question. And then an important question also the platform team should ask themselves is, do we want to enforce Kubernetes for local development? And if we do, how are we going to set it up? Will it be a local Kubernetes cluster running on the developer machine? Will it be a remote cluster that each developer gets access to? And how about multi-tenancy? So, we need to consider this part, because it will have a huge impact on the developer experience. And then, of course, we need to containerize applications at some point. How are we going to do that? Are we going to use some Docker files? Are we going to control that centrally from the platform team if we need to patch some security vulnerabilities? For example, there are challenges there as well. Next step, we need to configure the deployment and it will be different on the local environment, especially if we use Kubernetes also locally and in production it will be, again, very different. How much detail from Kubernetes are we exposing to developers? That's another important challenge we need to face when we design this end-to-end experience in terms of Kubernetes. And finally, when we put all these pieces of the puzzle together, we should evaluate how much cognitive load are we adding to developers that are using the platform. If it's too much, then we have to iterate through our design and start over and try to fix those areas that are affecting badly the developer experience. Yeah, it's kind of funny, because we are here, we all know Kubernetes, right? And we all went through that learning curve where we just understand how it works and then we can use it. But think about, like, new people coming out fresh out of college, all the stuff that they need to learn. It's kind of insane. So thinking about how to reduce that is quite important. Think about the very simple applications. It's just three simple applications in a distributed system. How much work will it be required by developers to run this locally? Yeah. So that's one of the questions we'll try to answer today. Yeah. So the next one. The next one is a little bit more closer to developers and also to infra, actually. It's how do you, the company, infrastructure from application? Like, the main idea here is that no matter how the application looks like, it will always be storing data or just changing events. And in this case, we are storing data in two different, you know, components, Redis and PostgreSQL. Both requires to have clients or drivers to be able to connect from the application, right? Imagine, in this case, we have the whole application in Java and the worker application in C-share. They are both using the Redis client, but those are two different versions of the Redis client, really in different languages, right? The fact that we need to connect to Redis basically means that we are just coupling these components together in a way. Like now, we need to make sure that the Redis client works with the Redis instance that is running on the same version and the Redis client in the worker written in a different language also needs to work with that specific version. If we want to upgrade Redis, maybe we will need to re-release these two applications. And then the lifecycle of these things gets much more complicated. The same happens when you configure, you know, the clients themselves to connect to an instance, configuring the Java client with the C-share client might be different. The defaults might be different, so these applications might be different when things go wrong. If the Redis instance is misbehaving for some reason, or the Redis clients are configured in a different way, they will behave differently and then debugging and troubleshooting that takes a lot of time. Most of the time, it's like, developers' time, right? Yeah, exactly. The next thing around like building these similar architectures, the same dimension already like the versions in the infrastructure, but also where that infrastructure lives. Where are these instances running? Are they, like, remotely located? Are they managed services? How do I access that when I'm just doing my development tasks? Do I have Docker Compost to run them? And what happens if my Docker Compost have different versions of these components that the one that I'm using in production? Then we are introducing all these mismatches that we need to deal with at some point, right? So, yeah, so in general, like, you know, even for simple applications, we are running infrastructure, like applications doesn't run alone. It's not our code alone. We need to run other components. There is coupling between the environment where these components are running and the application code. And again, same versions using clients that are written in different languages can be the main cause of disruptions and troubleshooting issues that people will need to spend a lot of time dealing with. Event-driven scenarios, this is like very common if you're building distributed system, again, like exchanging events across systems. It's a pretty common pattern. And if you're building platforms, you actually need to enable developers with certain tools to enable these scenarios. When you build, like, event-driven applications, the idea is that you can extend the overall application functionality by emitting events and consuming events from different services in a very decoupled way. But as you can see here, we also need a RabbitMQ client using RabbitMQ to emit events every time that we cast a vote. And that will actually, again, just take us to that scenario where we are coupling all the producers and consumers, in a way, because they all need to have the RabbitMQ client configured in the same way and upgraded if we are upgrading the RabbitMQ instance. So, again, it's like, it's not like a very, very strong coupling, but it's a coupling at the end, and if you want to upgrade RabbitMQ, you will need to release all these services. Again, sometimes there are some cases where you don't have the client available for a piece of infrastructure, and then you just need to start rewriting services and all that kind of stuff. Event-driven things, event-driven, like, the event-driven patterns and interactions are pretty common in the cloud-end of space, and I think that we should help teams to basically promote teams to build more applications like that. But, again, there are several coupling there between producers and consumers, and misconfigurations will happen. One thing that I want to mention about message brokers and that space of event-driven space is that, again, it's like when I think about cognitive load of people learning how to change our applications, this simple application should be pretty easy to change by someone who is starting with software engineering. But it's actually not if you are using something like Kafka that you need to learn about how Kafka works, how you need to configure it, and how to use it. The APIs are not as simple as just publish a message, consume a message. They are around that space, but it's not something that you will learn in a single day. And finally, complex service orchestrations. The more complex your application is, the more that you will need to orchestrate things against different services, and this is not just calling three services in a sequence. I'm not calling three things in a sequence. Maybe I need to call an internal service that requires certain certificates or maybe credentials, and then I need to wait for a person to just tell me that I can proceed with something, and that person might be on a holiday, so I just need to wait for that to happen for a long period of time. And then maybe I need to connect to an external system that it charges me for every transaction that I do. I'm not spamming that service, and I'm not just spending a lot of money doing so. Those complex orchestrations are usually hard, and you need to start figuring out which libraries will help you to deal with that kind of things, like, you know, retrying libraries in different languages that, again, can be configured differently, and how are you going to handle errors consistently across different languages. It's also a common problem that I've seen. So, yep, the same thing that I've just said. It's not as simple as calling a system, but sometimes we need to have custom retries, circuit breakers, or domain-specific logic hooks where you can inject specific logic in an easy way. We need to deal with long-running things. These interactions, these orchestrations can be across different days, months, or years, and we need a way to compensate when things go wrong. Maybe we are calling a system that it's like making a debit out from my bank account, and then, well, for some reason, we need to undo things. So, we need to have the right mechanisms to implement these operations. Yeah, and once we are done architecting the distributed system, we need to go to production, of course. Otherwise, our application will not produce any value until it's there, right? So, we need to address other challenges. So, how do we roll out new deployment safely? Do we have a backup option? Can we roll back deployments? Do we need something like progressive delivery, or maybe some canary deployments to slowly test the new version of the application just to a small amount of users? And then, how about auto-scaling? Because there's both a cost-optimization point of view, but also an environmentally friendly aspect to scale to zero applications, and that's actually pretty easy to do, scaling to zero. The challenging part is scaling from zero, because the platform needs to support that somehow. It needs to intercept that request and spin up a new instance of the application, and the application also needs to be designed in a way that can support processing the request immediately, so without waiting too much time during the startup before it's actually active and ready to process a new request coming in. And then, all the configurations specific to the application, where do we place that? Is it developer responsibility, or is it the platform that can support that? So, are we building an application-aware platform, or are we enforcing that platform-aware? Then, we need to infer the state of the application from its outputs, like we can't go to production without observability, right? So, we need to have the right signals in place and collect them and make them consumable in a way that can help troubleshooting and visualizing what is going on in the platform and in the application, and then this platform needs to be managed and operated somehow, so we need to consider that aspect as well. So, we're going to show some solutions about this, but perhaps we can have a little fun now. Let's have some fun. Let's make it interactive so we don't sleep. Yeah. Let's do it. So, if you scan that with your phone, again, we are going to be using the app that we showed before. You are going to be using the app. So, try to scan that and let's play a bit. We have some prizes at the end. I don't want to spoil it. Yes. Also, we need to settle the debate with the app to find out yes. So, is it more cats or more dogs? More cats or more dogs? That's the question. I think we're going to lose this. I don't know. I don't know. They are like... Keep voting, keep voting. Cats and dogs floating all over the place. It's really cats and dogs, right? There you go. That's insane. So, what's going on there? So, a lot of events. A lot of events going on, yeah, exactly. Oh, it's a tie. Ouch. It's very, very close. I would say that it's very, very close. And you can keep voting, of course. So, this is nice. Yes, it is. So, basically, this application is running on Kubernetes, of course. It's running on Google Cloud. We make it public. And we actually are using a bunch of tools to solve some of the challenges that we mentioned before. Please don't close the application.  We will use that later on in the presentation. But I just want to keep seeing kind of like the things that are running on Google Cloud. Let's switch back to the presentation. Should we unfold what's going on under the hood? Yes. Let's talk about that. Let's talk a little bit about the tools that we are using. So, that's how the architecture looks like, right? Yeah. That's a lot of things going on there. That's a very, very high-level view of the things that we are using. We're using a bunch of open-source projects, CNCF projects to get this up and running. Again, it's running on Google. Let's break it down. We want to unlock new platform experiences. And the first challenge we mentioned was around onboarding new projects. So, first of all, we want to boost up a new project. And there are different ways of doing that. But we want to minimize the time from a development team getting a new idea to develop until they are able to write the first line of code implementing business logic. And, of course, a popular way of doing that. So, we have a couple of Java applications. We integrated already with Dapper based on the Spring Boot framework. So, a development team can go there and boost up a new application and focusing immediately on the business logic. Yeah. If you have the C-Sharp team or the Go team just having similar templates, then you just can make it really, really easy. And you find some golden path for the development team. So, we can accelerate the onboarding and the development team will make it really easy. So, we have a lot of stuff to do with this. We have a lot of software files have some downsides. So, perhaps we want to use cloud native build packs. So, from a platform perspective, we can centralize all the rules and how we containerize applications and developers get a nice experience because whatever the language project and make it part of your pipelines. So running on Kubernetes, you can use the Kubernetes native implementation. It's called K-Pack. So you can actually make a build service, a centralized build service. And as a platform team, you can centralize, for example, rolling out new patch updates. So one of the capabilities of Cloud Native Build Packs is being able to re-base the image. So without having to recompile and talk to all the development teams, centrally, you can replace just the bottom layer of the image. Maybe there's a vulnerability in the operating system layer, and you can do it centrally. But there are other ways of doing that, of course. Because if we say one option is not requiring Kubernetes to run locally for development teams, we still need to provide integrations. We talked about we have Postgres, RabbitMQ. We have different integrations. So a great tool of dealing with that is Test Containers. With Test Containers, you can have support for different languages again, because we really want to establish a polyglot design. So Test Containers support Java, Golang, Ruby, C-sharp, and can make it part of the application lifecycle, the management of all these integrations and services that the application needs, both at development time and for integration testing. Another tool that can help if you're working with functions specifically is K&AD Functions that actually combines different tools to provide an end-to-end experience. So it has a bootstrapping capability. So instead of using backstage, you can use K&AD Functions pointing to a template. You get a new project bootstrapped. Under the hood, it also uses cloud-native billpacks to containerize applications, and also for deployment, it uses K&AD Serving. So you get one entry point to deal with the entire lifecycle of the application, which is pretty good for functions. And then we can have also a better experience when we work with pipelines, and for example, Dagger, that lets you implement pipelines using normal programming languages. I wonder how many people was in the app developer concession that we did the other day. So basically, we were showing how to automate the same application with some Dagger pipelines for local development experiences, so pipelines that you can run in your laptop and in CI. It was pretty interesting. If you didn't see the presentation, just look for the recording. I think that was covered there. OK, so at this point, we have the onboarding phase done. Developers are building their application. But I guess we still need to address the challenge of how we deal with state in a distributed system. Dealing with the state is important. I think that this is kind of like the part of cloud-native distributed challenges. I think that we can agree that we spent a lot of time at the beginning of the presentation talking about this separation between infrastructure and application code. I believe that this will help teams to go faster. And for that, we are using basically APIs. And that's what the Dapper project is about. The Dapper project will give you that separation of concerns between infrastructure that you're using and application code. So from the application point of view, you will have APIs to interact with the infrastructure. Do you want to send a message? Do you want to store some data? You will use those APIs instead of interacting directly with Redis, PostgreSQL, or RabbitMQ in this way. Having APIs, of course, as you might know, is really important also because then you can have different implementations. Which takes me to the second image, where if we are running on Google Cloud, maybe we want to use Google Pub-Sub instead of RabbitMQ because it's a managed service. So I don't need to run it myself. I can just use the managed service. If I can pay for it, I might use that. The same with Redis or the Google in-memory store. It's the same API. So I can actually replace the implementations and move my application across environments without changing the code. And the Dapper project has different implementations for different providers. So you can use DynamoDB in AWS to just store data instead of using PostgreSQL. Again, using managed services and having this API that allows your applications to move across environments without changes, I think it's a good thing to do. Again, because we have one more thing because we have APIs there that gives us the possibility of tapping into observability of how our applications are accessing this infrastructure. So you can extract data and see that in Grafana, something that we will do later on. But when we talk about states and integrations, there are some very well-known cloud-native patterns that we can actually start relying out of the box. Something that I mentioned, and when you see cats and dogs flying around the screen, that's basically some RabbitMQ messages that are being sent to the dashboard. Not to the dashboard, but to RabbitMQ, and the dashboard is consuming those messages. This is a very common thing to do where you want to store a state and then emit an event. This is a very common thing that developers will do. And we need to make sure that that's easier for developers. But something very common in this scenario is that you might want to only send the message if you are guaranteed that the information was stored in this case in Redis. The moment that I commit the information in Redis, I want to emit a message. If I cannot commit the information in Redis, I don't want to emit that message. We want to have some sort of control doing that. And if you take a look into the DAPR APIs that I'm using in the application, we can check quickly how is that looking like. So I have here the SaveState API. This is basically the DAPR APIs. And I'm using the DAPR client to access this from a Java application. I don't know if you can see that. So basically what I'm doing here is I'm calling the SaveState operation. And then I'm checking if the messaging side is available. I will publish an event. That's what a developer will usually do. This doesn't guarantee any kind of transactions. It's just wait for something to be saved and then submit it there. What I can do with DAPR is also use transactions. So I have a way to list operations that will be executed in the same transaction no matter which infrastructure I'm using down below for messaging or for storing a state. So that's kind of like it's building on functionality and common patterns that we know. And as you can see here, I am just have a list of transactional operations that I want to execute. I want to create a new state, basically store the boat into a persistent storage. In this case, it's ready. And then I will execute that transaction to the configured state store that I'm using. Something that you are not seeing here is that I'm emitting an event. Because again, the DAPR project gives you that functionality of implementing common patterns. And what you can do there is that you can configure these to happen at the infrastructure level. So instead of saying, I will push the developer to code and codify when to send events, I can configure DAPR to say every time that a state is stored, no matter the persistent store, I want to emit an event into a queue, in this case. And that's quite interesting with the Java application specifically, because using RabbitMQ, actually RabbitMQ doesn't come with that kind of transactional support, where we are using a pattern like Saga, where we want to save some state and we want to also publish a message. So we're not getting a better experience with DAPR, but actually, we managed to do something that is not possible with the plain RabbitMQ client, in this case, and get it in transactional guarantee. Exactly. And that takes us to the next slide, where that's what we want to achieve. And the next one, basically, it's the name of the pattern. It's called the Outbox Pattern. And you can just look for it in the DAPR documentation because it's pretty that simple to just store transactionally some state, and it will automatically produce a message for you without complicating the code with transactions and more complicated stuff. So that's one thing. The other thing is that when you can do these basic functionalities like storing state, sending and consuming events, the next step is what we discussed before, more complex service orchestrations, where you need to, for example, let's pick a winner between cats and dogs and then ask for the audience to see if the winner is around. But we don't want to be waiting there forever. So we can have a timer to say, if the winner is not in the audience, then we will just do something else. If the winner is in the audience, then we can give the winner a price. And if the winner is actually not coming to pick up the price, then we might need to pick another winner because it's like we have an uncomparative winner. So yeah. And then finally, you need to coordinate with an external service, for example, saving the winner into the Hall of Fame. That might be stored in a different cloud provider like Azure, right? We want to do all that complex coordination. And we can do that, again, with dapper workflows, with this kind of one of the newest addition to the framework that will give you a programmatic way to basically codify those interactions. Again, I don't have time to show all the implementation. Again, this is Java, but this can be implemented in any language, again, using common APIs. And we have here a workflow calling activities, in this case, like picking a winner activity and then waiting for events. You can see how easy it is to say, I'm waiting for this event, but with the timer for five minutes, right? Like if it's not coming in five minutes, then I have the way to say, well, now I need to go and do something else. Just do plan B, for example, or whatever you want to do. Again, very friendly for programmers, like for developers, because they will have an API to create these complex interactions. Let me go back to the Zoom here. Meetings, there you go. Yeah, so let's talk about how we can solve some challenges when going to production. So first of all, we want to autoscale our application. So all of you were voting. So we're going to see in a minute if we needed to autoscale, actually, the application, right? Or if it was enough on replica to sustain all the voting, and we're using K-native serving for doing that. So we can do autoscaling, scaling to 0, and most importantly, scaling from 0. And then we have applications that, of course, need to be ready to be run in a serverless environment. So for example, with Java, we can use Graph VM native compilation in order to get instant startup time and reduce memory consumption. Then we can use KDA, because K-native serving is providing autoscaling, but for HTTP-based request. So if we want to do the same for event-driven calls or transactions, then we can use KDA. And we can pair them together by themselves, or we can even use a higher level project like Open Function that brings them together and provide an overall function runtime and left cycle management. If you don't know about Open Functions, it's a very interesting project that basically combines K-native serving, KDA, DAPR, build bugs, and a bunch of other things just to provide that functions experience. If you are really into functions, you should take a look. It's not easy, because, again, it's combining a lot of projects together, so you need to understand how it works. But I think that it's a pretty good thing to look into. Yeah. And then we have the platform. So in this case, we use Carvel to package each capability as an OCI artifact. And then everything is bundled as one big package that can be installed on any environment with one command. We have Flux for doing some continuous deployment of all our application workloads and to manage all the different data services as well. And then OpenTelemetry, because observability is really, really important. We can go in production without observability. And OpenTelemetry provides these unified APIs and protocol with support across different languages. So again, we want to ensure this polyglot experience across the entire lifecycle of an application. And maybe we can have a look. Let's see what happens. Let's take a look. When you vote. I can take a picture. There you go. Thank you. So I'm really curious. So you need to go to the Cuts. Yes. And there. All right, first of all, let's see. Thank you. Let's see about Knative. And we have the VoteService. So we had some concurrency here last, let's say, last 30 minutes. So that's pretty nice. So we actually didn't need to scale. So we got more concurrency. You can see in this area. But one pod was still enough. So we actually did some load testing here. We used DDoSify to DDoS our application. And that was really cool. At some point, we had more than 1,000 pods. And we got the cluster autoscaling as well. So that was pretty neat. Well, just because we did the DDoS attack, I guess. Yeah, it did us like that. That's good, otherwise. There you go. Ah, there you go. Yes. And then, of course, we are using Dapper. So we are abstracting all these APIs. But under the hood, we still have a concrete implementation. So for the message broker, we are using RabbitMQ. So let's see if it's actually using RabbitMQ, right? So I can go and check in the RabbitMQ. So we can see we have a dashboard here. And we can see message is incoming and outgoing from RabbitMQ. So from a developer perspective, I'm only dealing with the Dapper client and sending and consuming messages in a neutral way from the application. And then under the hood, the platform team then would pick the implementation for that type of service underlying Dapper. It could be RabbitMQ. It could be Kafka. And for me, it's actually convenient because I know RabbitMQ. I'm familiar with it. I can run it. But then if you switch with Kafka, maybe I would have problems. So actually, using Dapper would help me. So I don't have to learn all the details of how Kafka works internally. Yeah. And I think that this is pretty important, at least from a platform engineering space, is that we will have observability at all the layers, right? Like application layer, looking at how the application is using infrastructure in a generic way, but also like at the infrastructure, all the dashboards for the specific tools that we are using. So it might be time to wrap up. Yeah. So yeah, I think that the main things that we wanted to show here in this presentation is that APIs are usually important, like choosing the right APIs. If you are building your platforms, it's really a good way to help to protect your platform investments, right? Like you need to figure out, where do you need to wrap everything up with your personal, like your domain-specific interfaces? And when you are doing that, like looking into standards and open source projects will help you a lot, right? Like people in the open source communities here in the CNCF, we are spending a lot of time like solving common challenges across the entire industry. And those standards and APIs are being created. So if you're interested in joining these movements, just please join the specific working groups. We need to actually speed up the onboarding processes that we have nowadays with all these tools and with all the ecosystem. So try to always aim for reducing cognitive load and try to improve the integrations between the tools. We have used a lot of tools here. And I think that because we knew the tools, we were kind of like, OK, efficient enough. But for people that doesn't know those tools, you need to make the process simpler. Look for out-of-the-box cloud-native patterns, right? Again, if you're building very complex distributed applications, you need to have the right tools in place to not push developers to solve these common challenges. And finally, like smooth operations, I guess that have observability all over the place so you can troubleshoot when things go wrong. And I don't know if you want to add something else there. Yeah, so I think we tested a few things from the distributed system. We tested storing the state, reading the state. We tested also exchanging messages, but we didn't test the service orchestration workflow. Maybe we should test that. Maybe we can test that. And I have two books here. Let's see how the cats and dogs are doing. Yeah, you have a code on your phone if you kept the window open. Yeah, so if you have it open there, I can see more boats coming. But what I'm going to do here, if it works, there is a button there just to choose a winner. I don't know the results. What are the results? I just don't even see my mouse. Yeah, it's a lot of cats and dogs. Dogs are winning. The counter is not working. Apologies for that. I thought it was working. It's not. But look at that. That's pretty wild. OK. I don't know if we'll be able to settle. No, I don't think that we can settle. No, we cannot settle that. So let's start with cats. I will give you that. So let's pick a winner. This is where the demo can go really, really wrong. But like drum rolls, there you go. Let's see. Let's wait. There you go. We have a winner. So is the winner in the audience? Let's see. Is the winner in the audience? Yeah, there it is. We have a winner. Where is it? Yes, yes. You need to come to pick your book. So let's mark it. The winner is in the audience. The winner get a book. He's coming. I will say that he got the book, right? Yes, if he's coming, that's good. He will get the book. Yeah, let's pick a second one. And we can do like the dog's one. So drum rolls again. There you go. There you go. Another winner. It's in the audience. Is it in the audience? There we have it there. There you go. It kind of worked. I'm amazed. And that was the service orchestration. Thank you very much, guys. So yes, books. And that's it? Yes. Let's close this up. There you go. Yeah, thank you very much for joining. Marissia tomorrow will be the Knative Functions talk. So if you're interested in learning more about that, feel free to join and we'll be around for questions. And in the QR code, you can check the source code as well. Thank you. Have a great day. Good stuff.


Good morning, Mr. President. Good to see you again. Yes, after some time. Yes. I'd like to ask you and probably probe into the person as Alfredo Pascual, the 20th UP President of the University of the Philippines. And the first thing I'd like to ask you is probably to describe yourself as an individual, as a person. Probably first, how you started at the university as a student and how did you get into UP? Wow. Do I have to bear my soul because that's where my real personality lies, you know. People have seen me so they know how I look and that's the outward personality. But anyway, yeah, UP has always been a dream for me. I studied in a public school for my elementary grades and towards the end of our graduation where I finished the valedictorian, I was already eyeing to go to UP. So I took the entrance test at the UP high school. I passed, I was admitted. But my mother was so concerned because she kept on reading in the papers, you know, the kind of activism that was already starting in the early 60s, you know. And she was concerned that because she was very, you know, I don't know to use the popular term there that time at the Bout Catholic, you know. So she wanted me to have a Catholic high school education. So she asked me to also apply at UST high school and I got in as well. And when the decision time came, of course, I was still very young then I go by the pleasure of my parents, you know, particularly my mother. So I went to UST where I also finished at the top of my class and I said there's no holding back now, you know, I have to be in UP. And at that time, valedictorians have automatic admission in UP. So I didn't have to take the UP cap. So that was one argument I gave and there's a attached scholarship to that. But in addition, I also earned a scholarship competitively from the, at that time, the NSDB, National Science Development Board, which is now the OSD scholarship. So there was no more barrier at the time. After high school, I thought I could decide for myself. Well, I came to UP and right there and then I, my first year, I joined the nationally score and did my rounds of engagement with the people. I was going around Tondo at the time, you know, at the time when there was still a smoky mountain in that place. So that's where I got exposed to the true living conditions of the mass base for people. And that kind of exposure has made a permanent impression on me, which I up to now, you know, still defines my choices. So I was an active student follower initially and then leader eventually. I joined the debate workshop and eventually we organized it into a debating society and I led the group, you know. I was also active in student politics. I ran for the student council at the time with the party consisting of the so-called activists of the time, you know. It may second year, I was a member of Kambatang Makabaya, you know. And we got together and formed a party to compete for the student council election.  So that means campaigning in the Liman during the day in Manila in the late afternoon and los baños in the evening. That was quite an experience, you know. And I would sleep with friends on the floor of their dormitory rooms in los baños, you know, because too late to come back to Manila. Our party had only seven out of the 12 positions. So I won together with another colleague, two of us, got to the student council. And girl, it was a time of affirmation and we were part of that. Well, eventually I got hooked up in my course because I was late by a semester, so I had to focus. And I practically dropped all other activities to focus on my thesis. I was then taking up chemistry. And in my last semester, after completing one semester of my thesis, one of the faculty members in the department of chemistry then went on maternity leave and I was asked by the chair of the department to assume a teaching role. I told him I've not graduated yet. Said, anyway, I'll talk to your thesis advisor and see what we can do. Because I was to be appointed as instructor, so I should have a bachelor's degree at least, you know, at the time. But anyway, I was well in progress as far as completing my thesis. So the department chair reached an agreement with my thesis advisor so that I could be given a grade and be considered already a graduate. So I was reviewing my transcript lately. And I noticed, yeah, in fact, I had the grades of two semesters of thesis being given in just the first semester. And that enabled me to teach. But then after I graduated and while I was teaching, I was applying at research institutions of the government at that time. I remember I tried to apply at NIST, National Institute of Science and Technology. Being an NSDB scholar, I thought I had the obligation to render service to the government. I presented myself and I was told by the interviewer that I was asked, do you really want to work here? I said, yes, yeah, it's my obligation. But we can only make you an apprentice, you know.  Then I said, you know, if you insist, and if you give me a waiver of my obligation, I will probably not insist, you know, of working here. So I was given a waiver and I got carried by my friends, you know, to prepare for admission in an MBA program. So I took the so-called GMAT, which was the Graduate Management Admission Test, which is a global test and I passed it and I was admitted at UP College of Business. So that's also my second alma mater in UP, and I finished my MBA while working at the same time in another company in fall places, Tondo. You know, I was working with Procter & Gamble and it has its manufacturing facilities in Tondo. And I was back dealing with the people whom I interacted with in my youth, you know, in my early part of my youth, you know, first year in UP, second year as well. That was a short stint, two years. Then I finished my MBA and one of my professors then who also worked in Procter & Gamble said that in manufacturing, you do one year of work, the second year is just a repeat, you know. So you stay here 10 years, it will be one year experience times 10. You need to go somewhere else, you know. And he was then working already in the Pioneer Investment Bank in the country, Bank of Development Corporation, invited me to join the firm. And that's where I got for the first time my exposure to finance, you know. It was really financial engineering, not the usual banking. I didn't work with a commercial bank. We dealt with commercial banks. But this investment banking is making what looks like an impossible financing situation doable. So that was financial engineering. And I stayed in that field for eight years. And eventually, the calling I had for teaching came back and I went full-time teaching at the Asian Institute of Management, where I spent nine years, you know, as a professor of finance. But prior to that, let me just also emphasize my commitment to teaching or my passion for teaching, is that after I finished my MBA, I was invited by the head of the Management Engineering Department of Ateneo de Manila University. They invited me to teach part-time. And I did it, you know. It was an early morning class. And I would go to Ateneo Loyola, do my class for an hour, and then drive to Makati for my job in an investment bank. So I was doing that for four years, or five years, you know, part-time teaching, until it could no longer be reconcilable with the growing duties that I had. Okay, then I went full-time teaching, and that was up to now, I always tell my wife and my kids, you know, the best years of my life, you know. Being a full-time professor at the Asian Institute of Management, where I had the freedom to be my own. I think that's the syndrome of academics. They don't want bosses. And that has always been me, you know, if you want to know who I am, I don't want to deal with a boss, you know. Maybe if I were the boss, it's fine, you know, as eventually I was able to become. So the teaching job is what gave me that freedom, okay, what we all love, you know.  But eventually, when I was in AIM, I was invited to be a consultant in the Asian Development Bank, and at that time they were starting a new program. It was a program to help develop the private sector in the developing countries of Asia. Since I had almost ten years of experience in the private sector prior to teaching in AIM, you know, and I developed a specialization and finance. I fitted a bill, you know, and I joined ADB to start, that's a pioneering effort on our part to start the department. And eventually I wrote the strategy for ADB on the development of the private sector in the various developing countries of Asia. While in ADB, I never neglected my links to UP. When I was right after graduation from chemistry, I joined the Alumni Association of the Chemistry Graduates, we called it UP Chemistry Alumni Foundation. We organized it as a foundation. I was on the board and served as a treasurer as well. And when I was in the UP Chemistry Alumni Foundation, the president then told me that perhaps I should join the UP Alumni Association Board, you know. And I did run because the president was already an ex-official member. He said, so there will be two of us from chemistry on the board of the UP Alumni Association. So that was, I think, sometime in the 80s. So I had my first three-year term as a board member of the UP Alumni Association. When I was in ADB, it was very busy schedule. Even in AIM, it was a very busy schedule. I must have spent a third of my life outside the country because we were doing, remember, AIM then was considered a very regional institution. So we had the operation in the various Asian countries. And we would run programs in Malaysia, Indonesia, and Taiwan. So I spent a third of my life outside the country when I was in AIM. More so when I got to ADB because the work covered the whole of Asia. And there were a lot of travels also to our donors located in the industrialized countries in North America and Europe. So I didn't have much time to really focus on the responsibilities of being a board member of the UP Alumni Association. But eventually I got invited again because I was about to retire already because retirement age at ADB is 60. So I joined again the board of the UP Alumni Association as a member of the board. And the president then, of course, could only be president one term. Then they were looking who could be a candidate for the next president of the UPAA. Since I have retired already at that time, they thought I had time on my hands. They asked me to run for the position and I did and I made it. And as president of the UP Alumni Association, as you may know, you become automatically a member of the board of UP. So that's the connection. How I eventually ended up being directly involved in the governance of the university at the level of the governing board, the UP Board of Regents. And that's where I was able to see how my alma mater really was at that time compared to what I've seen in many other countries. When I was in AIM, I used to collaborate with universities in other countries. When I was in UP, we were supporting the development of education. So I had a good idea of what a good university or what I eventually say as a great university should be. So when I was in UP, I tried to inject many of those things including governance practices that I learned from my previous engagements. One interesting example was the UP Town Center. People look at it as my project, but actually it's an old project that has always been there. And when I was on the board, an offer from the developer came in on an unsolicited basis. And it was presented to the board. I was sitting and we were being asked to approve or accept the unsolicited proposal. Coming from where I was having spent 19 years of my life dealing with public-private partnership. I thought that was not the right way to do it. It has to be an open competitive bidding basis. So I opposed the proposal and of course I was reminded that normally the alumni region is supposed to be supportive of the administration. Why are you not? I said, fine, if it fits my concept of how things should be done, I will be supportive, but not this time. So I had to convince the rest of the board, and after I think two or three meetings, I was eventually able to convince the majority of the board and we rejected the unsolicited proposal and opened a public bidding for the development of that high school campus. We didn't call it yet UP Town Center at the time. And eventually it was a very successful bidding process. But while the bidding process was going on, the call for nomination to the position of UP President was announced. And my board, the UPAA board, said that they were all watching who are the names coming up. And they tried to egg me into going for it on the basis that my international exposure could perhaps help introduce some reforms and innovations in the university. And my financial expertise, having done finance work since two years after I left college, since I finished my MBA, they said that I might be able to contribute. And they did submit my nomination, the whole board. And I was not ready to just accept it because my wife and I have already lined up three travels abroad, having retired, just retired from ADB. I thought that we should now, we've done a lot of trips before but these were all business trips, do long vacation trips. There were three trips coming up. At the time they submitted the nomination, which I have not accepted yet. So we went to Shanghai for the World Expo and I told my wife, you know, I really have to make a decision on this. Why don't you go ahead and go to the World Expo, I will stay in the hotel and really think this over. I mulled over it, you know, see whether that's how I should spend my retirement years because I was already committed to retire.  I don't want to be called an alumnus of a university that we cannot be proud of, you know. So I said, I think I should be able to contribute. So I sent in my consent or acceptance of the nomination a few minutes before the deadline, you know. The university secretary then kept on reminding me, you know, that if that didn't get through you would not have been officially accepted as a nominee. She said it came just five minutes before the 5 p.m. deadline of that day. So I was there. In the meantime, I already, as a regent at the time, I was trying to really understand, you know, how the university was, you know, and what are the big challenges, you know, and what are the strengths that can be enhanced and which are the weaknesses that should be addressed. I reviewed the minutes of all faculty conferences. One thing I noticed is that the same issues were coming up every time, you know, from one faculty conference to another. I said, you know, they know the problems. And in fact, the solutions are there, you know. But why are the solutions not being implemented, you know. I mentioned this in my vision statement, you know, that perhaps what is needed here is really just to implement what people in UP already know. So which would lead me to an interesting question? Maybe, I mean, the benefit of your experience is such that having been in the Board of Regents as alumni association representative, you had an early peek into the nature, into the problems, and probably the potential solutions of the University of the Philippines. And having that as a background, fast track to having been elected as the UP president, what vision did you have or did you bring, did you introduce into the University having learned from all those years that you were sitting in as Board of Regents? Well, what I brought was a challenge to the University, you know. Well, we always look at the past as the glorious days, you know. So we can only think of, you know, regaining that greatness. I remember UP as a student, as a great university. It was the topmost university in the country and the topmost university in the region, you know. And how do, why do I say this, you know. In my travels, I've come across UP alumni, Malaysians, Indonesians, Indians, and from other nationalities. And they were, at the time, that was already 20, I finished my term in ADBED 2008, you know. During all those times they were, because they were alumnus, you know. I mean alumni of the university. So they were concerned also. And they asked me, what happened to our university? We have many alumni in Indonesia and I was posted in Indonesia for about one and a half years. I interacted with them, in fact I organized them into an alumni association. And they were concerned, you know, met somebody in Malaysia and same feedback, you know. And then we were watching the ranking of universities. And at one point, up to now beat us in the ranking, you know. I don't know how, but it happened. And also alarmed, you know. In fact, that was the major trigger to my, finally, you know, agreeing to accept the nomination. To be able to see how I could help, you know, bring UP back to the greatness we always remember UP. For when we were students and, you know, in the early years of my being an alumni of UP and being active in the alumni association. Well, by the way, after UP Chemistry Alumni Foundation, I became president also of the UP MBA Society. So I've always been active. So the link, my link to UP has been maintained all throughout my working life, you know. So it is not as if I just decided to come back, you know. I've always been there, you know. So I challenge UP to, again, launch itself on the path of greatness, you know. On the path of a great university in the 21st century. I always say in the 21st century, because people say, are you saying we were not great before? Yeah, we were great before. Precisely why the challenge is there. I'm not saying UP was not great. I want to make it great now, you know. No, UP was great. But then, I don't know what happened in between. Now we need to launch UP or relaunch UP on the path of being a great university in the 21st century, which we were not. And up to now we're still struggling, but we're on the rise, as you may know. The ranking of UP has started towards the end of my term, you know. Because the basis of the ranking is the cumulative output for the past five to six years. Five years for publications, six years for citation, you know. This is the more stringent times higher education ranking. So that's the challenge that I posed to UP, which became my challenge to myself, you know. If I were to take leadership of this university, and I'm challenging the university to be great, that means the challenge is on me, you know. That's my vision. And through to my training as a manager, having done my MBA and my experience as an executive, we needed to do a strategic plan. And that's exactly what my executive team and myself did to do the UP strategic plan 2011-2017. And I was trying to ask the old-timers here to see where we can link up with the past by them showing me the past strategic plans. And they were not able to show me any past strategic plans, you know. So that's how, you know, I got to formulate my vision. The concern that we were not great anymore based on interactions with our alumni, not only in the Philippines but outside, based on that ranking, you know, where I don't know how, you know, we were beaten by another university in the Philippines, you know. So as a university leader, 2011-2017, and you were saying you wanted to shape University of the Philippines to be a 21st century university, could you tell us what probably were key points and key programs that you tried to translate and operationalize based on that vision of UP being a 21st century?  When they amended the charter of UP and called it a bill to strengthen the National University, and they formally called us in that charter the National University, the only one in the country up to now. And I essentially said we need to realize all the mandates of UP as enshrined in the charter, which happened to be the same criteria that's being used by the ranking agency, research, internationalization, teaching. So I was guided, of course, by these ranking criteria. Just to go back, the ranking business or the ranking practices came about the first decade of the 21st century, you know. And at that time UP said I was on the board, you know. I told the board, you know, we need to be concerned about the ranking of UP and we have to do something about it. And the administration at that time said no, we don't want to be ranked, you know. And based on my interaction with others, they said why should we allow others to rank us? We are the best university, you know, in the country. But I said you need to benchmark UP, not with the other universities in the country, but with the top universities in our neighboring countries, we're being left behind by miles, you know. And I said, okay, if we are to consider ranking for UP, let it be just UP Dileman. I said, I will not agree. Why? Because if it will just be UP Dileman that will be included in the ranking, the resources will all be focused on UP Dileman. But UP is not just UP Dileman, you know. UP at that time already had seven constituent universities, you know. We're a system of seven constituent universities. It should be all or nothing, you know. That was my belief and that is what I followed eventually when they took the reins of the university. We worked on the ranking of UP as the whole system, not just UP Dileman. And eventually we proved ourselves right, you know. Because it helped by that move alone, you know, it became imperative for me as the leader of the university to make sure that we pull up the other campuses, the other CUs, constituent universities, that is, particularly the younger and smaller ones, you know. So what programs did you introduce as a president to be able to pull up the entirety of the university? Well, firstly, I have to convince everybody that UP plays an important role in the country, you know. We're not just UP for ourselves, you know. We are UP for the nation. So we come up with the tagline, you know. That's why we came up with the tagline. UP shaping minds that shape the nation, you know. So we always keep in mind, you know. We're producing leaders for the nation and leaders not just political leaders, but leaders in all fields, you know. All fields of science, all fields of humanities and the arts, you know, et cetera. And then the next one is for people to start thinking that UP is not just UP Dileman, if they are in Dileman or UP Las Baños, if they are in Las Baños, because we are one UP, you know. Guided by one charter, all committed to the same values of honor and excellence, you know. So I came up with this slogan, one university, one UP, which eventually got shortened to one UP, you know. Which became our so-called catch call, you know. And that was a paradigm that guided many of my decisions, the one UP paradigm, you know. Well, I'll jump to the sharing of income, of our income earning properties. You know, among the campuses, Dileman had the most valuable land that can be developed into income earning properties. And we have the Technohub and now UP Town Center. I made the decision, which was confirmed eventually by, of course, the Chancellor of UP Dileman and the Board, that the earnings of these facilities will not just go to UP Dileman, you know. It will be a certain percentage to UP Dileman, but the balance will be distributed to the other CEOs. Would you consider that as a bold move? Up to now, I hear people are questioning it, you know, how it happened that way. And the logic was this. When UP started, we were one UP, in fact. We were not a system. The transformation of UP into a system happened in the time of SP Lopez when he was president. And it happened because of the pressure of UP Los Baños trying to secede from UP. So instead of allowing UP Los Baños to secede, why don't we organize a system of autonomous universities? So the term then was autonomous universities, you know. Okay. And the model, apparently, was the University of California system where you have University of California, Berkeley, University of California, Los Angeles, et cetera. And I said, UP was one then. So the property of each and every campus, you know, is shared by all. Okay. Now that we have been transformed into a system, it doesn't mean that, you know, all the properties in Dileman belong to UP Dileman, you know. There are still communal properties, you know, owned by the system, effectively. Okay. That was the logic, you know. So it cannot be claimed 100%. The earnings of these properties cannot be earned 100%. It cannot be claimed 100% by UP Dileman, because they were communal properties. So that shows your... Yeah, my commitment to one UP. Yes, your commitment to one UP. And my commitment to pull up the others. Because at the time, in 2011, I inherited a budget that was lower than the previous year. You know, we were suffering a declining budget, you know. That's why there were a lot of relays, you know, not to budget cut and all the things, you know. I said, we need to go back to the original concept behind establishing the different campus. And this is the concept of each campus having a specialization, you know. UP Manila, medical sciences, you know. UP Los Baños, agricultural and eventually veterinary and forestry. And UP Visayas, ocean sciences and fisheries. Okay. And the smaller campuses, you know, Baguio, the indigenous culture of the north, Mindanao, indigenous culture of the south. And the Visayas, similarly, well, Visayas already officially, Simbu, to take care of the central Visayas. And of course, there is Tacloban, which is part of Visayas, to take care of preserving the culture of eastern Visayas. The UP Open University, our unit that is able to run classes without the students coming to the campus and joining face-to-face classes. But it could be face-to-face also, but through electronic means. Okay. So we need to make use of what we have here and further develop its capability to deliver open, distance learning modules and courses and degree programs. Okay. For the benefit of those who may not have the opportunity or the resources to spend full-time on UP campuses. Very important in our real world now, because we're now producing young people who are digital natives, you know. And for them, they might find it more effective to learn making use of apps, making use of games, making use of online interactions, then attending classes and listening to lectures of professors on a face-to-face basis. The concept is that dilliman should not be the gauge for excellence. Because when I was going around the campuses, they always said, sir, apart from dilliman, you know, all the resources in the past have gone to dilliman, you know. And that's true, you know. Very little development has been supported, you know, had been supported in the other campuses. They're always trying to benchmark themselves with dilliman. Why should you do that? I told them, you develop your own niches and you become excellent in your respective niches. And all of you, all the CUs will be excellent unto themselves, you know, and by themselves without having to look up to dilliman as a benchmark, you know, and trying to just hang on the reputation of the whole UP system. Each of you should develop that state of being excellent in your respective areas of specialization. And that was the principle we followed, you know. In fact, when I would allocate resources, if they would ask me for money, they have to justify it on the basis of how it will support the development of their niche. Earlier you spoke of dreaming of UP as a 21st century university to move in that direction. How did you conceptualize and operationalize UP as a technological learning university? A great university has been in the definition of various authors, you know. World Bank has done a book on this, you know. It should be one that is a what's called nowadays the research university, you know. So a purely teaching university cannot be a great university. Why? Because to be a great university, you should push the frontier of knowledge, okay. You should be engaged in discovery, invention, innovation. For what? For the nation and for humanity as a whole, okay. Because a teaching university, yes, you produce future leaders. Aside from that, what else do you contribute to the country?  The beginnings of the university was in the time of the guilds in Europe, you know. Where apprentices are trained by the guilds, you know. But they're all linked to being trained to be able to contribute to the economy. And then the concept of corporatized university came, you know. Made independent, autonomous from whom? Two major institutions then, the state and the church, okay. So the concept of academic freedom came about precisely to protect the scholars in the university from the intrusion of the state and the church, okay. But the view is that the scholar will have the academic freedom to pursue their curiosities, and, you know, indulge themselves in the life of the mind. But for what? To be able to eventually come up with discoveries and inventions that they can share with society, okay. So to be a great university is to be able to produce leaders that your teaching function. But also to be able to contribute to knowledge, the form of new knowledge that is from discoveries, from inventions, through innovations. And with this contribute to the development of society as a whole. But since a university operates in the context of a nation, so the first beneficiaries will be those in the nation. You're known to be an expert, an excellent financial management person. Could you tell us, could you talk about how you applied your expertise on financial management and bring this to benefit the university and eventually the nation and eventually the poor students who are in the university? Finance is not just bringing in resources, you know. Finance, I remember in my turnover speech, you know, I talked about working to bring resources into UP. But I cautioned the audience then, you know, saying that if I succeed in doing this, let's make sure that we don't waste the resources which we have now and which will be given to us. So financial management is not just about bringing in resources, but also making sure that the resources that you now have and that you will get, further get will be utilized efficiently and effectively. How do they do it? Firstly, I transformed the concept of budgeting. I noticed that budgeting in UP when I came in was simply an exercise to have something to present to the government for purposes of government allocating funds to UP. It was not linked to strategy, the budget is a planning tool. Its purpose is to make sure that the resources being managed are contributing to the attainment of the vision, of the objectives enshrined in the strategic plan. So the process has been modified, reformed so that it's a three-year rolling plan that each CU needed to present. I don't know whether they're continuing this, but at that time they present their plan for the next three years, make sure how it supports the strategic plan and the more detailed plan for the coming year, which will provide the budget for the coming year. And request for funds should be justified on the basis of whether the plans to be supported by the funds are in line with the strategic plan. So that's one aspect of financial management that I brought in. The other is how do you sell or how do you generate funds? When I was going around as a candidate for president and then a member of the board, the president, and eventually in my early days as president, I've always been told that the problem of the university was money. I said from where I came from, money has never been the issue. There's a lot of money floating around. What we need to do is convince people that UP deserves to get the money, because in my experience as an investment banker and a development banker for 30 years, almost 20 years in ADB, 8 years in investment banking, I have not seen a worthy project not being implemented because of funding. A good project to package it well, to present it well, will always get funding. That's the kind of principle I followed when I came as the head of the university. Think about how we can sell UP and what did they do? I noticed that in the past, I participated in the budget process, and I was on the board because we would review the budget for presentation to the government and to Congress. There was a heavy emphasis on right. I was looking back, seeing a lot of materials, manifestos, articles in the Collegian, in papers about it is the right of UP to get funding from the government because it's a state university, it's a national university. It's fine, that may be true, but why should it be funded beyond that? Because not everybody might recognize that we have the right. And don't others have the right as well? How about healthcare? How about basic education? And there's just a given pie to be shared. How do you get a bigger share of the pie? That's the issue. Even if the government recognizes that you all have the right to be funded by the state, but where will the resources come from, especially those days? In fact, UP was suffering from budget cuts in the years up to my first year in the university. So I said, the way I would sell UP is to say UP is so vital to the country that if you don't help UP, you are in effect not helping the country by showing what UP has done. I looked again at my presentation that I sent to the president of the country at that time. And I started by highlighting all the achievements, all the contributions, the major ones of UP to the country. The policy studies we have done, the leaders that we have produced, the UP faculty who have served the government, the research outputs have eventually been used. These are all assets of UP that mean the... The logic is that, hey, government, this is UP. Why should you finance it? Because every time you need an expert, you go to UP to fill up a bureaucratic post. And of course, many of the political leaders are UP alumni. This is what UP has been contributing to the country. This is our plan on how to ensure we're able to maintain this contribution. Now, give us the funding. Now, speaking of the benefits that were going to UP, that have gone to UP, could you tell us about how you manage and how you operationalize, for example, exactly how all of these benefits benefited and gained well-being for the constituents of the university? Before going into that, let me just highlight a couple of experiences. When I said, let's make sure we don't waste resources entrusted to us by the government. In my first few weeks, I was visited by Manila Water Vishals. Pia Curtis called to me as the new president. And I innocently asked, how much is the annual water bill of UP Dileman? And I was told it was 72 million a year, 72 million a year. I thought hard. I said, isn't that too much? Okay, through to my own logical way of doing things, I once searched for a benchmark and I asked, is it a 10-year-old under you as well? How much is the bill of a 10-year-old? 10-year-old? One-fourth of the bill being paid by UP. Okay, let's normalize it for population. How much is the population of UP Dileman? So I did my mental arithmetic. So I said, we assume UP is managing their water resources efficiently. UP, and we are as well, we should be paying only double what UP is paying. So we should be paying only 36 million a year instead of 72 million. So I called the Chancellor of UP Dileman at that time. Review all the water bills of each and every building in Dileman. There were more than 100 buildings. And it's not because of illegal connections of residents. We found out that there were many of the old buildings were paying water bills way out of expectation. For example, Pavilion 2 of Palma Hall. Pavilion 2 is where I spent four years of my life as a student in UP. When I was president of the UP Alumni Association, it burned down. So we had to transfer all the facilities and the people to the new building of the Institute of Chemistry, even if it was not completed yet. So in other words, Pavilion 2 was vacant. There was nobody there, nobody was using it. What was the bill? 500,000 a month. Times 12, 6 million a year. Being paid by Pavilion 2 of Palma Hall per water with no benefit to anyone. But there is a benefit, I will tell you. Anyway, I told them, cut the line immediately. They cut the line. And then next month, I called the chancellor, how much is the bill now? Still 300,000, what? Where did they cut the line? They cut the line near the entrance. Where's the meter? The meter is at the other end of the building. I said cut the line where the meter is. When that was done, the bill went down to a minimum of a few hundred just to maintain it. A few hundred pesos. Okay, that's an example. Okay, next example, International Center. Remember International Center, it's now being rebuilt. That was a project that I funded during my time. But you know how long it takes to do projects in government. The water bill was so much, I asked the chancellor, divided by the number of residents, how much will it translate to? 2,800 pesos per student per month. How much is the dorm fee? 800 pesos per month. In other words, UP Diliman was paying 2,000 pesos more than the dorm fee. And the story went on and on. All the dorms were leakages. So that was the big challenge. We started doing temporary solutions. I told them to tie the leaks with rubber tape. Eventually, we were able to do this, but I had to work quickly on finding the money to do the replacement of the pipes. Actually, I was able to get from Malacanyang. Because at that time, I had already convened the budget secretary. So we were able to solve it. I checked a few years afterwards. Diliman was already saving 25 million pesos a year just on water in Diliman. And with that experience, the other campuses did their own work and their respective. And like PGH, two years upon paid water bills now, they were able to pay and they are now enjoying lower bill. So what's the related story to water leakage in Pabilion 2? Earlier on, I was asking again to save money, where can we get free water for watering or so many gardens and the big loans of UP Diliman? They said there is a natural spring beside what they call that NSRI across Pabilion 1 and 2, there is NSRI. There are many migratory birds already in the natural spring. And true enough, there were migratory birds. Oh really, then let's make use of that water, I said. I got curious. After we cut the leak out of Pabilion 2, I got curious and asked, how is the natural spring? Sir, it has dried up. So all along, we were paying to maintain a natural spring at the rate of 6 million a year. Who knows for how many years that leakage has been going on. It must have been decades because migratory birds do not develop association with the place unless they have gone there many years before, over the years. Anyway, if there was something wrong with water consumption and the bill we pay for water, there must be something wrong again, also with electricity. So again, I asked the chancellor to give me the water bill of each and every building. 109 buildings, they told me eventually 39, in 39 buildings, UP Dileman was paying an amount higher than actual consumption. Why? Because the builders of those old buildings contracted a higher capacity for the buildings. So there is what's called a minimum power demand bill that the building is paying. So even if actual consumption is below that minimum committed rate, still the minimum is paid. The worst situation was where UP Dileman was paying four times the actual energy usage. So having said all this big and small, what would you consider to coaxialize the term between 2011 to 2017 as probably the legacy that you rendered to UP when you were president? In the area of evidence, of course, I will claim because the evidence will show that I was able to really convince government to commit resources to UP, not in a small way but in a very substantial way. I was able to convince the government and I kept on saying this and I keep repeating this when I deliver my presentation in hearings of Congress and Senate that the budget of UP is not an expense but an investment that yields copious dividends for the country. The MOE budget of UP increased from 700,000 including PGHs to 2.8 million pesos to 2.8 million. That's four times. But academic units, I always separate the budget of PGHs from the academic units of UP. The academic units of UP got a much more increase in MOE from 400 million to 2 billion, that's five times. So it is the... Increase. Not only the efficiency and the utilization of resources that came to UP but it translates into a thousand fold of what the university could do. In my first year there was no money for capital outlay. When I finished my term we were able to raise 14 billion pesos of budget for capital outlay and this enabled me to allocate funds to about more than 80 new buildings across the system, 80 new buildings and more than 60 major renovations. But also in the spirit of the academic contributions, the efficiency and the resource, the sound use of resource mean also the university that is able to engage in the mission that it performs. Because in deciding which to fund I gave priority to capital outlay that will help us pursue the other pillar of my administration which was to transform UP into a research university. So we gave priority. The very first project I funded was a one billion peso commitment to put up the National Institutes of Health Building. And now it's serving the nation. Which has contributed, as you may have read all over the papers now, the quick diagnostic kit for COVID-19. That particular project, that particular diagnostic kit I supported the development of when I was in office. So I think you have presented to us, you have shared with us the details, the operationalization which is magnificent. It reflects the skill, the talent of the manager, the manager of a national university. But there is one other aspect that I'd like to relate to you quickly because another pillar of my administration is to strengthen the capability of UP to deliver public service. That's another area where I also supported a lot of projects where I built institutions. TBUP is one of those. But more importantly, the Resilience Institute. There is now the hub of information and activities related to our effort to mitigate and address the risks of climate change. And others, including now the Enshrine UP Padaion, the UP Padaion Public Service Office. Public Service, yeah. That's there. Which at one point was under you. And this means that through the small isolated building blocks that you supported through the programs, through the projects, put together all of this, translate actually and have started to be felt that indeed as a manager, you have moved the University of the Philippines to be a huge contributor to what public service means using the talent, using the skills, albeit probably with resources that continue to demand for even more support for a national university. Yeah, I think once in a while, UP should have somebody who would bring a fresh look to the university. I was told this by one of the regents then, who has passed former president of UP, Senator Angara, told me that because we were discussing about my presidency and like him, he was coming in not from the faculty but from outside. He said that it might be good. So once in a while, turn UP on its head by bringing in somebody who will look at it differently. But I still... And that's a trend now in many international or U.S. universities to bring presidents with unconventional background because the challenges have changed. In the past, state-owned universities here in the U.S., they just wait for the funding to get... The challenge really was just focus on delivering the academic function and the research function. But now it's... We're experiencing innovation, technology, the growth of technology. The technology is changing very fast. I've not talked about the number of technology business incubators that have been set up. I've not talked about the enabling environment that I created to facilitate innovation and research in UP. Firstly, the adoption, the approval of the intellectual property rights policy of UP. The first thing I paid attention to, because without that, we cannot incentivize our faculty. And then I created the technology transfer and business development office at once signal that we're doing this innovation to eventually parlay them to the economy through commercialization. And then I created the laboratories. I mentioned NIH. There is the Philippine Genome Center and another major funding commitment, 300 million. They now have their own building. And I was adding up. I have committed close to 700 million for the rehabilitation of... and refurbishing a number of laboratories across the system. And then I encouraged the setting up of the technology business incubators in Cebu, in Dileman, particularly in the College of Engineering in Dileman. Well, UP is now in the midst of rapidly changing environment. The technological developments are coming in rapidly. And a lot of changes will probably be called for to make UP to remain effective as a learning institution. One area I think that will require significant attention of the current administration in UP is this issue of the digital transformation of UP, which I've started, and I've laid out future-proof fiber optic network to link different buildings in the different campuses. And also there are information systems that we have implemented. This infrastructure or the cyber infrastructure will now provide the support, the base, for digitizing the activities of the university. So that's one thing that I'd like to emphasize. If you ask me about what I would love to see future administrations and even the current administration should be focusing on. So all this, you have to have a system approach.  You're going to just be bringing resources without making sure that those resources are used efficiently and directed to the right uses. And the right uses would be dictated by a strategic plan. You should know exactly what we're doing and where we want to bring the university. Looking back and having done your own contributions, what could you say to probably the University of the Philippines now? And what is there? Are we in step to the 21st century challenges? Are we on our way? And what more challenges do you want to say to the incumbent and to the next generation of leaders? I think what I have achieved is what I committed to do, which was to launch UP on the path of a great university in the 21st century. But the path doesn't end at one point, you know. The path moves on. And the bar is always going higher, you know. So there's no stopping. And as I said, you know, when I came in, I helped continue building the edifice, which is UP. My successors, you know, should also put their contribution. I think we have to think in terms of continuity. And it is the board of pretense that should provide the control for that continuity. Because there is always an urge for a new leader to bring his own mark or her own mark to the university. That's fine, but it can be done in the context of a clear vision for the university, clear strategy, which is adjusted to suit the time, to suit the changing environment. But the direction should always be clear, you know. And I would really be very happy to see that there will be continuity in UP, even with the changes in leadership. Let's not follow what has been happening to our country, you know. Where every time there is a change in administration, it's a shift. We're starting again from square one, you know. That should not be the case. But we're starting to see also continuity. The planning department of the government, you know, is now making sure that they are able to impose a long-term vision. Remember Ambition 2040? It used to be just five-year, six-year, ten-year rolling plan. Now it's a much longer 25-year plan at the time it was developed. So I think that should be the approach. And that's where governance comes in. And the governance is the responsibility of the board. Okay? And one thing about governance in UP, I also highlighted this when I was on the board, you know. Both when I was a regent and more so when I became president and co-chair of the Board of Regents. That UP should be viewed as an entity that has its own life, you know. And the members of the board, although they're in there as representatives of certain sectors. Okay? Students representing the studentry, the faculty representing the professors, the staff representing admin staff, alumni, the alumni, et cetera, congress, appointees of the president. They're not there to represent the interests of their respective sectors. They are there to represent the perspective of their sectors so that decisions can be made in a way that takes into account these varying perspectives. But in the end, the decision has to be made on the basis of what is for the best interests of the institution. Not for the best interests of the students, not for the best interests of staff or faculty, not their parochial interests. But the interests of the institution as they benefit from this interest of the institution. That's governance, you know. And up to now, as you may have noted, after I left UP, I focused on governance, but mainly corporate governance, you know, since I've gone back to the corporate world, you know. But the essence of governance is the same, you know. And it has to be exercised at the top, the governing board. That's right. So with that, we'd like to thank you.  We expect you to continue to become a continuing guardian of the university as an alumnus forever. So thank you very much President Alfredo Pasqual, UP President 2011 to 2017. Thank you.


5 reasons the narcissist hates you.  They may want you around but you can tell that they can't stand you but you don't know what you did to make them that way because at one point they were very anxious to be with you.   So why did they suddenly change?  1. Envy. The narcissist is envious of you. They feel discontentment and resentment. Aroused by your possessions, qualities or luck. They desire to have your qualities, possessions and desirable things. They wish they had your skills and achievements but they don't. Which leaves them the feeling of grudging admiration and desire to have what you possess. They become very bitter and resentful because they feel like they're being treated unfairly which results in them holding a grudge against you. If anything good happens to you they will get mad or they will be passive aggressive. They will always have something negative to say. They will always have a reason why you should not be happy or proud of your possessions or achievements because they can't be happy or proud of you. Because they're envious of your success. 2. Jealousy. They're jealous. They're resentfully suspicious that you were attracted to or involved with someone else. They feel angry and bitter because they think that another person is trying to take you away from them. Because they're very paranoid. They're always on edge. They're always scanning the environment for threats and they tend to be disloyal. So they assume that if they can do it you and other people can do it too and they hate you for that. 3. You get attention. People like you. People admire you. People look up to you and they don't really mind if people like you.  But when you have people's attention they feel like you're taking the spotlight away from them. 4. You take care of yourself.  They see it as though you're being selfish as though you only care about yourself. Even if you only do something for yourself once a month they see it as though it's taken your time, money and energy away from them.   They're envious of what you're able to do for yourself and they wish they could be like that instead of them being so heavily dependent on you.  So when they're not getting your attention they will behave badly because it makes them unhappy and upset. They need supply. They need constant attention and admiration. They can't live without it and they may not be completely aware of why they need to get your attention but they will feel the surge to get you to notice them because then they can feel alive. Then they can feel like their false self exists. Five, you're confident. Narcissists are very insecure. So they hate to see that you're confident in your own qualities and abilities. They hate to see that you feel good about yourself because they don't feel good about themselves. It makes them feel envious and jealous. They see it as a threat.  The narcissist will hate you for anything you have whether it's the life that you have or your money or possessions or they may even hate you for your own feelings because you're able to feel love and compassion for other people but they can't feel that. They only have feelings for themselves. All they care about is getting what they want and they're envious and jealous of people who have anything that they want. Thank you for watching. If you found this video helpful please give it a thumbs up. Share your thoughts in the comment section. Hit the subscribe button to receive the notifications. If you would like to support the channel you can donate at papal.me slash Narc Survivor. You can book up one of one with me on my website. It's narcsurvivor.co.uk. Thank you for watching and I'll talk to you soon.


The threat of terrorism in Australia is real. Homemade explosives and toxic weapons can be made from chemicals used in agriculture and horticulture. But we can all contribute to keeping Australia safe and secure. The National Code of Practice for Chemicals of Security Concern provides guidance on practical measures you can take to help keep chemical secure in your workplace. Whether you work on a farm or sell rural supplies, you can help build a chemical security culture. Know the chemicals you work with or sell, which ones are in the code and their legitimate uses. They may be of interest to terrorists for use in homemade explosives or in toxic devices. If you're on a farm, keep your chemicals secure and be alert to anything suspicious, like any unexplained loss of supplies or workers that are too interested in your chemicals or asking odd questions. And check that you are being delivered the same amount of chemicals that you ordered. Trust your instincts. Report any suspicious activity to the National Security Hotline on 1-800-1234-00. If you sell rural supplies, assess your security and inventory controls. Train your staff to be alert for unusual purchases or suspicious behaviour and encourage them to raise any concerns. Suspicious behaviour or activities could include someone taking photos of the premises or paying too much attention to your security, someone buying an unusual amount or odd combination of chemicals or insisting on paying with cash. It could be a customer wanting commercial quantities delivered to a residential address, missing stock or unusual patterns of attendance by staff who may be trying to access chemicals while no one is around. There are important questions you can ask. Are new customers involved in legitimate use of the chemicals? Do they know what the chemicals are for? Are they aware of safety implications of some agricultural or veterinary poisons? Consider if there is anything odd about any online order. Have they made repeated orders in a short space of time? E-mailed asking unusual questions or requesting a strange delivery address as the order come from an odd IP address or location. You know your business and you know when something just doesn't feel right. Trust your instincts. Report your concerns to the National Security Hotline. You can help keep dangerous chemicals away from terrorists. Know the chemicals, know the risks, know the code. For a copy of the code, go to nationalsecurity.gov.au slash chemical security.