Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to the stage founder and director of Colloquate Design, Brian C. Lee, Jr. I'll be on. There it is, perfect. How are we doing this morning? Feeling all right? All right, good, good, good, good. Yes, my name is Brian Lee, Jr. I am the director and founder of Colloquate Design in New Orleans, Louisiana. And I am really, really happy to be here. Thank you for coming out this morning to give me your eyes and ears for just a little bit of time. We're gonna have a little bit of a presentation time and then a conversation like you're in my living room. I used to do this back in the day when I first moved to New Orleans. A lot of my friends would kind of get together and we would just have a real serious conversation about the things that we're kind of dealing with in our respective work. So I'm gonna talk through some of the things that I've been working on over the last few years and I appreciate it. Thanks again. So my efforts, my work focuses on a conversation around this thing called design justice. And design justice came about over many years of dealing with social impact design and public interest design work and then thinking about myself as a young black man in architecture school in these environments that were maybe not servicing the communities that I was from and wanted to serve. So this is a story. This is me telling a story, right? It's based in this idea of colloquial architecture. Now colloquial architecture is the sophisticatedly informal use of formal architectural precedent as a means to speak directly to the communities in which we haven't serviced in the past, right? There are disinherited communities that we often neglect in this work. And so my objective as a director of this organization is to think about the ways in which our work speaks to organize, advocate, and design for racial, social, and cultural equity. And that's not an easy task. It means that we have to acknowledge the difference between equality and equity. It means that we have to dig deeper in our past to understand the injustices and inequities that have been pervasive in communities in order to understand how we interact moving forward. And so that's what our practice does. So I'm gonna tell you a little story. When I was seven years old, eight years old, my mother was sent off to Sicily, call me so Sicily. Now this was during the first Iraq war and this is where all the kind of nuclear warheads were held, right? But she was working on recreation there. And so we ended up living there for a few years. I ended up walking around the city and enjoying the space and ways that I really didn't understand until I moved back to Trenton, New Jersey. So this second bubble here is my grandmother's house in Trenton, New Jersey, right? And so my grandmother's house was this space where all of the family members would, we would pack 30, 40 people in this house, run up and down the stairs. And I remember seeing my grandmother walk up and down the stairs and feeling like this house, this old house, this house that she had lived in for such a long time was taking advantage of her. It was hurting her legs. Every time she walked up and down the stairs. And I remember thinking, I don't want this house. I don't want this space to interact with someone I love so dearly in this way. I want to design something different. I wanna do something to help her. My parents said, okay, well, that's architecture. So you should think about the ways in which you design spaces. And so I started designing houses frantically, frantically, right? And so over that time, that kind of put me on the path to looking at being an architect proper. This is my grandmother's tall woman right here in the center bubble. So about seven months ago now, she passed away in Philadelphia. And obviously my grandmother, like everybody's grandmother and a lot of people's grandmother is super important to me. But when she passed away, I tell this little story because I wanna connect the ways in which that space really bound to my heart. My grandmother passed away and my aunt kept saying, let's play this particular song. This particular song was by Charlie Wilson, I'm Blessed. I don't have the best vocals so I'm not gonna sing this song for you. So you're just gonna have to look it up, you just Spotify out and do what you gotta do. And so my aunt just incessantly wanted to play this. We're all a little bit down. So do what you gotta do, auntie. They played it during the funeral. We're all just crying. Oh my God. And so after the funeral, I go back to New Orleans and I'm working, I'm in a meeting about three weeks later and someone has this song on their phone and it comes on and I just break down. I'm just, oh my God, I can't, I can't with this. And what it meant to me in that moment and what I think it means to me still to this day is that there was an inextricable link between this cultural moment, this social kind of interactive person that was important to my life and these spaces that created who I am to this day. And this happens so often, right? Whether it's music or a painting or anything else in this world that kind of distills your experience and that can be in a note in a keystroke and the like. And so this is about, I always say architecture is the hardware to the software of life and art and culture is the user interface. It's the way we understand these complex constructs and put them into a space that we can fully grasp, right? And so that in a sense talks about the form, talks about the content and talks about the context to which we understand those things. So design justice, what does it do? It seeks to eliminate the privilege and power structures that use architecture and design as a means to perpetuate injustice into the world, right? And design, it allows us to then stratify the profession in a way that brings in people who have historically been disinherited from a process that creates our cities, right? The marginalized have always been the mass. And so finding ways in which design speaks to the masses is where we start to find those little wins and those little wins start to pile up if only we're on the same page. There's a quote by Whitney M. Young. You'll find this to be true in this particular presentation. My presentation is about 90% quotes and about 10% memes and that's what you're gonna get. So, no, it's not that much. But, Whitney M. Young, 1968, spoke to this particular issue talking about my profession in architecture.  Yeah, I know, right? I say this in a lot of architecture rooms and they've heard it a lot, but that was nice. That's the reaction I wanted. It is, it's a powerful statement when a profession of 100,000 speaks so softly or doesn't speak at all on issues of injustice or inequity in the work that we do, and specifically when we have such a powerful impact on the world that we're serving. There's another set of quotes that I talk about, one that is directly by James Baldwin, Giovanni's room, that says, perhaps home is not simply a place but an irrevocable condition. And I say this because this is the Baldwin test. This is how we kind of understand whether or not we are working with our clients in the right way and whether or not this is a project that we wanna work on. Are we thinking about conditions that are actively seeking equity and justice in the work? It's not simply about the shell. It's not simply about the physicality of the space. It is actually about the forces that create that space and perpetuate that space into the future. The second question that we always ask when we're dealing with clients, when we're dealing with communities and in community conversations, we can disagree and still work together unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression, the denial of my humanity or my right to exist. Right? Yeah, you can go out to school. Yeah, I dig that. Yeah, I'm gonna take that. I'm gonna take that. I'm gonna take that. It's super important because again, when we're dealing with spaces that have embedded histories to them, if the conversation does not speak to the ways in which we lift oppressions, lift people's humanity and lift people's right to exist, then we're having the wrong conversations and it's not a conversation personally my company will be a part of, but we hope that within the larger conversation of design justice, we ask that other people consider these as principles as well. So, how does this affect us, right? So, how do we look at the system? When we do this, we can talk about individual biases and we can talk about systemic biases, right? Oftentimes, when we talk about prejudice in the built environment, we often think about these interpersonal connections, interpersonal disadvantages. And that's important. That's important to understand the ways in which bias plays out individually, but the ways in which systems work, the ways in which systems work extend beyond the individual and extend into the community in ways that last in perpetuity in a lot of ways, right? The city is often seeking immortality and the ways in which the city, the neighborhood seeks immortality is through the system itself. It's through the pedagogy, the policy, the procedures, the practice that we put in place, the projects and the people, right? All of these things create a system that we have to interact with in order to make a better space for more people. So we ask that you understand these and you start to see the ways in which these principles can start to impact your work. Because again, as designers, as a designer, my focus tends to be in the practice and project area. And if I'm not careful, I will stay there. And so what we ask is oftentimes for people to think about the ways in which your primary focus goes up and down this continuum and the ways in which you can play a broader impact on that. So within the design profession, we also have health safety and welfare. A lot of times people don't necessarily understand what the welfare component is. And I find this to be a really, really powerful moment for us to think about the ways in which we already have systems that can be pushed forward even further. The welfare component of HSW speaks to the demonstrably positive emotional and physical response amongst buildings and users. Positive emotional response. There's a directionality to it. There's a force, a mass times acceleration equals a force. There is a direction and a mass to that. And that's what we're asking people to consider. So in this, I'm gonna ask you and I'm gonna show you a little bit of ways in which there's a critical path of injustice that has been perpetrated within the built environment over time. And then I'm gonna show you a couple of projects that I've worked on that tries to consider these issues. I'm gonna run through these just because we're gonna have a conversation about a lot of this stuff. Again, the black codes were a really important thing after the Emancipation Proclamation, we started to see the extension of slave codes go throughout the South and creep its way up into the North a bit in certain aspects. The other one we talked about is Euclid versus Ambler, which really started to stay at the Supreme Court level. What does it mean for cities and states to have rights around police powers for changing zoning requirements in particular areas? Whether that's going to project housing after 37 to 41 in New Orleans, Levitown, the kind of segregationist community in New York, sep-ted policies that happened in the 70s and 80s, and then housing and urban development, which has really, we saw in the last 10, 15 years around the housing crisis, the ways in which the Fed actually put a lot of money into affordable housing in ways that were not sustainable over time. So this is an image I often show that really talks about the ways in which institutions of oppression take hold. There are more prisons than there were ever plantations. There are more prisoners than there were ever enslaved peoples. We're creating spaces from a, again, from an architectural standpoint that do not speak to lifting people's humanity, do not speak to lifting oppression off of people. And we've got to be better about those considerations. And when we talk about the ways in which our history tie, what's important to particular communities, we've got to acknowledge its totality. This is a series, this is Alton Sterling and Baton Rouge on your left-hand side and Eric Garner in New York. Both men murdered in front of convenient stores and their respective cities. This is important because the convenience store is a particularly powerful place within communities of color. And to understand that means to understand all of the nuances around those interactions and those spaces and why it's important for people to be able to have a safe space, a space of solace within a community, specifically in this type of community. And so, if we look at how these two men were accosted, this is policy in place, right? At the bottom, you'll see the Black Coals in 1876. No Negro shall be permitted to preach, exhort, or otherwise disclaim the congregations of colored people without a special permission in writing. Person to loaf, at the top you see, in 2011 they did a vagrancy law. This was all the ways in which they did this through vagrancy laws. Person to loaf in the streets habitually or who frequent the streets habitually or loiter around a public place. So the laws haven't actually really changed all that much. We use the same things to criminalize Blackness, to criminalize marginalized communities. And so we have to understand that all of this is still embedded in who we are. It's still embedded in our policies and procedures in place. We obviously know about redlining, separate but equal. So what I'm gonna talk to you about is a few projects to which we consider these things explicitly. So one project that we, I don't know if you know, we took down a few monuments in New Orleans a few months back, yeah. So monuments to the Confederacy, monuments to a lost cause, right side of history, wrong side of history. This conversation happened and so before everything happened in Charlottesville, those same people that were in the streets in Charlottesville were standing in front of Jeff Davis, in front of Robert E. Lee, in our faces in New Orleans with AK-47s pointing directly at us. Like this is the state that we're looking at in 2017. Now, I did not lead this particular push but being a part of it was eye-opening in a lot of ways. So the bottom you'll see Malcolm Subur and Angela Kinlaw and Michael Questmore, these three right here. They led this in its most contemporary form but it extended over 60 years, right? Like people had been attempting to take down these racist monuments for a very long time. One of which was to the white lead which is essentially the KKK in New Orleans which overthrew the city government for seven days and had the National Guard have to come in. And for some reason they felt like, all right, well let's throw up a monument to that. All right, so I mean, these are the things that were hoisted as valuable. And really the critical point here is that we are, and I oftentimes, I'm a little bit of a nerd, that just happens sometimes. But the idea here is that if you've ever watched any time travel movies or TV shows, there's always somebody that's trying to protect the timeline, right? They're trying to protect the timeline from somebody jumping back or this, that, and the other. And what we see here is that people are changing the timeline when they put and exalt and lionize things that had no bearing or were completely false from the narrative of what our cities were or are, right? It doesn't mean that they didn't exist. It means that we honor what actually happened. The Confederacy did not lose. Why are you the highest point in our city? Why are you the person that's standing on the highest point in the city of New Orleans? You didn't win the Confederacy. You didn't win that battle, right? So anyway, we had the conversation during that time. What does it look like for us to challenge those narratives, to tell a full story about what it meant to be Robert E. Lee? We talked about the 197 enslaved people to which he owned, the brutality to which he treated them. And so as we started to see these takedowns happen, we started to see those who were on the wrong side of history and the right side of history. And by the final one, we were a jump rope in the streets and having a good time. But that mission doesn't stop in that day, right? It has to keep going. We have to, once that palette is cleared, what does it mean for us to tell the stories the true history? We've got to acknowledge that and we've got to root it. And so Paper Monuments came about. So Paper Monuments is a project in New Orleans that is a public history and public art project that combines artists and historians to tell stories that are beyond the stories that are often told, a way for us to kind of acknowledge the people, places, events and movements that are bigger than individuals, bigger than lionized soldiers, right? And so that's what we've set out to do. And over time, we've collected more and more of these stories and these are being posted around the city and we're able to extend that story beyond just the individuals that get a chance to be heard. We also tell these stories publicly. We allow those stories to permeate our environment. This was at the old side of the Jeff Davis Memorial. We actively collect public proposals. We ask artists to do murals and what you see on the far right here is the story of project, which is the next phase which allows us to take those stories, turn them into physical space interventions that hold history in place and start to acknowledge it in a way that previously had not been given. So the last project I'll talk about before we sit down is a project called the Claiborne Innovation District. So in New Orleans, there was a highway, like in a lot of disenfranchised communities, a highway that cut through a historically black in African American community. Now this highway destroyed about 300 or so businesses in that community and has caused exponential damage to the housing stock, to the wealth inequality in the space and the like, right? And so how do you change it? How do you start to think about the ways in which design can be a positive actor in that community? So we asked, how do we think through this in a way that specifically talks to the way people already engage in the community? We second line, we dance down the streets all the time. We festival in New Orleans all the time. That's what we do, play music every single day. That is who we are. And so our job as designers was to tie into that and allow people to be expressive in the ways in which they already are, right? And so we combined ourselves with a Chame Seventh World Festival to do a lot of community engagement. And what that resulted in was a series of projects with the community that built out small little quick shelters that were booze designed with community to ask these kind of critical questions about what was the past here in this space? What was the future in this space? And then we went on a design strategy that extended our scope of services beyond the five scope that we generally do. We added programming and planning in a way that really hadn't been done in the city before. We had over 85 hours of community engagement over four and a half months. We had six hour workshops, usually weekly, in which people came and did the lecture component and did a workshop component in which they had direct hands-on in the design process. We talked with our elders, we talked with our youth, we talked with our artists, we talked with our business people. They became design advocates for this project. And so this will be the first project that I know of in the country that will hire 16 young, 16 between, 16 and 24 year olds that will serve as design advocates that will be organizers for an actual architectural project, almost like a political campaign, and they will be in the community constantly drumming up support and working on the ways in which the things that people don't support can be derived. Create reports around that, and we get to a design that has some impact, right? And so over the next 18 months, we will be seeing a newly refurbished space underneath the highway in New Orleans that speaks to the cultural, historic, and economic needs of a community that has historically been disinherited from a process. So I wanna leave you with one last thing. Again, all of this is about the language we speak to the communities that we are serving, right? There is a lot to it because language is important. The stories we tell are extremely important. The culture that we acknowledge in those spaces is extremely important. And for people of color, for people in general in America, there's a power in the places and spaces where the culture is recognized, where stories are told, and where that language is valued. So that's not just because that is good design, it's because that's justice. So thank you very much. I appreciate it. Thank you again for giving me eyes and ears. And now please welcome to the stage the Future City Summit panelists, Eleanor Esser-Gorsky from the City of Chicago, and Stephanie Meeks from the National Trust for Historic Preservation, with moderator David Dudley from City Lab. I have you down. Actually, I think I'm moderating, but do you wanna take over? I am not prepared to moderate. Please take over. Brian, that was fantastic. Thank you. I appreciate it. Very inspirational talk, and your work is inspirational. I appreciate you sharing it with us today. We're supposed to have a conversation here, as Brian said, like we're in our living room. I'm sure this is what your living room looks like, and certainly what mine looks like. And so please feel free to just, don't wait for a question, just jump in anytime if you'd like to do that. But I did wanna start with this premise. It's one of the ideals that the National Trust aspires to in our Reurbanism Initiative, where we say that cities are only successful when they can work for everyone. And Brian, I think you made a very compelling historical case here about the many ways that the deck has been stacked against cities and citizens of cities for a long time. So Eleanor and Dave, you're both keen observers of the American city, and I'm curious what observations you would have to add to those that Brian has already shared about equity and justice and access and how we make cities work for everyone. And Eleanor, do you wanna go first? Sure. So, role that I serve for the city of Chicago is a newly created role where we're integrating planning, design and historic preservation together in one division to first, kind of get our own house in order and understand how those disciplines work together, and then we can better bring those services to the people of the city. And that was very mindful, putting those three items together, recognizing that often they were practiced in their own silos, and it wasn't serving the people of the city well, and there's a lot of close collaboration with those different disciplines that different neighborhoods are expecting of us. So the work that we just saw under the bridge and doing design charrettes, they're common, I think, to planning practice, not so much in historic preservation. So it's been an interesting journey that we've had in marrying the different techniques and borrowing what's most successful and taking those to our neighborhoods. Yeah, go ahead. David, what about you? What do you think, and all the cities that city lab studies across the country? Sure, sure. Well, I love Brian's talk because it touches on so many of the themes that we cover in our daily lives at city lab. Just as by way of introduction, city lab is a digital publication where operated by the Atlantic Magazine, FAME, and we cover sort of the current challenges and future promise of the urban world and the urbanizing world. And it's a great gig and it takes me places like this, which is awesome. And it's also a very challenging one because we're in this very difficult time. And for a lot of the reasons that Brian mentioned, cities are increasingly places of concentrated inequality. And this is the great challenge of our time, I think, in terms of making this notion of urban places that work for everybody. So there's this concentrated advantage and there's concentrated disadvantage. One of our contributing editors is the urbanist Richard Florida and his latest book is called The New Urban Crisis and it is very much focused on this question, which is, in a way, this is a great success story in the last 10, 20 years. People reclaimed neighborhoods in cities that appeared to be dying. There's been a surge of investment and several cities in particular are enjoying spectacular results. And we can see the results around us in certain neighborhoods, in certain cities nationwide and globally. But there are a lot of unintended consequences to that and the degree to which certain communities have been disenfranchised and whether we're talking about highway removal project, which is a great example of how design can be a weapon that destroys communities. You know, there's just a lot of baked-in inequality in American cities in particular. One of our five channels on our site is just equity and that was a way of signaling, look, this is a fundamental issue and if cities are gonna survive, they can't survive just on the investments that have gone to a small percentage of people and that's the great challenge we'll be dealing with and talking about throughout this rest of the week. I'd say it's been my observation as I travel around and talk with communities about equity and injustice and integration of communities and cities that work for everyone, is that where there's a political will, there's usually a way. And I'm wondering if you agree with that. Is it, do we have the tools that we need or is it that we lack the tools? I'm curious, there's certainly some bright spots out there of where what we're talking about, I think, is being done really well but it's not as widespread as we'd like and I'm sort of curious why that is. I mean, I think we have the tools, I think we're out of scale, right? So at the city level, we deal with city issues, we deal, I worked for New Orleans City for a little while and the policies and procedures and ordinances, all of those things deal with city-wide affect and so the ability to make true impact is really at neighborhood scale, honestly. And so if what you say, because neighborhoods have those different forces that apply distinctly to them and so being able to bring in the community members and the forces that actually act on the ground is where we have to be able to get a stronger foothold or to lift, again, lift the people who are actually doing it already. Yeah, the tools are there, we just have to be able to, oh, there's a fork, let's use it. We gotta be able to use the right tool. And I think Taylor, those tools for different neighborhoods and different situations, not everyone has the same issues or the same problems and I think that in a city as large as Chicago or even New Orleans, I think that when you look at the city level, you do have a scale that you need to deal with, again, city-wide, but then we need to change our mindset to go into individual neighborhoods and I think it's spending the time and creating the trust with the community members there to really have a fruitful response and for us, that is how we're starting to tackle this. Going into certain targeted neighborhoods strategically and integrate that with other city agencies, the work that we're doing. Can I have one note real quick as well? Like, there's a, so I've been fighting furtively around the word gentrification more recently. Like, I really hate the word. I think it's like saying somebody died of old age, right? Like, people don't die of old age anymore. They die of specific processes, death processes and so if we actually understand how neighborhoods change, we know that people die of different things or expire, transition, however you want to solid it, whatever spiritual level you have, right? They change, but I think neighborhoods do the same thing and they have a combinatorial set of issues that lead them towards a path of transition and whether that's policy or people or there's a bunch of different things and until we understand what that is, if we just keep throwing the word gentrification at different things, you're never going to solve it.  Now we can live to 120 sometimes. The thing is, if I put gentrification in the headline of the story, everyone clicks on it. That is true. So, I need to keep using that one. Yeah, understood, understood, understood. Your other points are well taken home. Yeah. Respect, respect. So let's just stick with this theme for a second because we obviously, in the preservation community, Bristol, let the idea that preservation necessarily equals gentrification, necessarily equals affordability and displacement issues. So I think you're, I love the idea of sort of unpacking that and diagnosing it. I'm curious, David, all these people who are interested in gentrification, what's sort of the current state of thinking on that topic? You know, it very much depends on who you're asking and what you're asking. I think you hit on something. It's a very powerful world. It's a very kind of, it's full of signals. Communities and neighborhoods are always in a state of transition. They're always changing. They're growing or they're shrinking. There's no stasis. There's a lot of research about how rare, quote unquote, gentrification actually is in its sort of classical sense of people being forced or pressured to move out. Anecdotally, however, it's a very, very powerful force. And it really is, you know, it's the idea of gentrification that is incredibly powerful. In my city, I live in Baltimore, Maryland, which has a host of interesting problems which are occasionally discussed nationally. Gentrification is an issue that has affected a very small handful of neighborhoods. Most neighborhoods, if you look in the last 10, 20 years, the ones that were sort of struggling got worse. A couple that were on the upswing got way, way better. And the degree to which those handful of neighborhoods sort of changed the narrative of the city because it's very visible when that happens, when suddenly you have five craft breweries in a neighborhood that used to just have a diner and a couple of vacant storefronts.  That happened very quietly. And that is sort of the power of the word. There's no other replacement word or whatever. We talk a lot about displacement, displacing communities, which is, I don't know if it's better or more accurate or just sort of more neutral. But certainly, when you talk to people in neighborhoods that are feeling anxiety about real estate speculators moving in or there's a rumor of something about to happen and my rent's gonna go up. Displacement feels too bloodless a term for that fear. It strikes me that part of the dynamic that we see is the difference between owning and renting and access to capital. And I was wondering, Eleanor, if you could talk a little bit about the Chicago Neighborhood Opportunities Fund and how you think about access to capital as part of the design equation. Yeah, no, I'd be happy to talk about that, but can I add one thought on gentrification? So what I particularly liked in the example that you had about bringing young people in and kind of teaching them to be a design core, I think that in my observation, gentrification is used by communities as a blanket word because they don't know how to articulate in planning terms or design terms how they're feeling. And that's why I love about your example and just creating this fluency and how to explain what's going on in the community. And we're seeing in Chicago, it's even cultural change that's happening. It doesn't need to be economic. So it's having that discussion with them specifically that we have found important here when that comes up. So the Neighborhood Opportunity Fund. This is a new tool that we've developed in the past year in Chicago that is a fund that basically leverages the amount of development that's happening in downtown Chicago, capitalizing on the great growth that we're seeing right now. And developers desiring additional floor area in the downtown area pay into a fund for that privilege and that fund is then used for commercial development in our neighborhoods most in need. And by commercial development, that's a blanket for really revitalizing or rehabbing existing buildings. And this is where the National Trust Study of our character buildings in Chicago and buildings that are kind of the background buildings really came into play and helped us identify those areas. It's also areas that had a commercial core that were vibrant maybe in the 50s and 60s and have since come been depopulated but they're still served by transit. We've really targeted those investments. In the first year, we had 700 applications. We were only able to award 32 but we're seeing the fund continue to be replenished. So we're hoping to keep this program going forward. Yeah, and I don't know in New Orleans, are there interesting things happening regarding capital access? So we attempted the very same thing but actually, so I was at the Arts Council of New Orleans for a while and what we looked at within the ordinance for our Percent for Art program, which Chicago has a Percent for Art program as well, was to essentially say any developer who is putting dollars into a particular community would put 40% within their own radius of the building. The other 60 would go into a trust of some sort and so that ordinance is still kind of making its way through policy but it's good to see that one's working out in the world already but the intention is the same is that most of the Percent for Art ordinances require even the ones in San Francisco or Oakland, they all say let's go ahead and add developers giving fees to a trust but they have to do it within the radius of the building, which actually continues to lift in equity because all of those dollars being taken out of communities proper is still not adding to bettering those communities overall. So the hope is that this gives us an opportunity to push those dollars back into communities that have historically been neglected from the artistic standpoint, from the economic standpoint, from the housing standpoint so on and so forth. So Brian you had that wonderful graphic about the design continuum and the different elements of it and I think that raises a lot of interesting questions about how communities are engaged at different phases of design. Assuming just for a second that we all agree with the biases and the challenges that our cities face today. Dave, I'm curious at City Lab you think a lot about design and the design of cities. I'm always looking for the examples of who's doing it really well so that we can share those and I know you're trying to share those as well so that we can inform the design of other cities and I'm curious where you're finding inspiration these days, what cities you think are doing a good job and what is it about what they're doing that's particularly effective. Well this notion that Brian mentioned of making design a positive actor rather than a weapon is something that a lot of cities are dealing with. The one example that leaps to mind, there are a couple related examples but so in New York City, the High Line is a great urban success story of our time if you're not familiar with it, this is beautiful elevated park, created this magnificent public space full of park throughout a big chunk of the city and it was not well accessed. It has been a great success in many ways but it's also been kind of an intensifier of inequality or a factor in New York City's increasing and affordability and the degree to which future cities that are contemplating similar sort of marquee signature projects whether they're parks or kind of connective projects is something that has really consumed a lot of folks. So one of the parallels is with in Atlanta which has a project called the Beltline which is a 22 mile transit mixed use pedestrian path corridor encircling the city. Huge project, it's not gonna be finished until 2030 cost billions of dollars. It should be this great amenity for the entire city. It's gonna affect all kinds of neighborhoods that need investment, it's gonna help people get around, help people get to work, help get cars off the street, all the things that we like to tout in city labs cosmology at least but it's also raised all these terrors of displacement which are well founded on the section that's been constructed, housing prices have gone way up, affordable housing has become a real issue. It's now entering I think it's the east side of the city, Atlanta's who are here can correct me and there's a lot of concern. This is a historically black part of Atlanta and there's a lot of legitimate fears about housing. What I think the community is doing there is pushing really hard knowing what is coming to make it an inclusive project and to mandate whether it's inclusive housing zoning so that a certain percentage of the projects that are going to be stimulated by this amazing project are going to be set aside for people who are already living there so that the people who are living there can actually enjoy this amazing amenity and access it. That is something we're watching very closely. It's too early to say whether they will succeed in sort of easing or mitigating the innately kind of concentrating qualities of this project but it's one of those projects that has huge potential. There's a similar one in Los Angeles, the LA River Project which is going to open up this kind of industrial kind of concrete waterway that had been historically not something that was seen as a great amenity. That has huge potential for opening up investment in the neighborhoods that are surrounding that but again you're going to see a lot of anxiety about who's going to benefit from that but it's certainly enormously promising. Solana, you're the kind of person that has to make those projects work. Both get them done and move them forward but also make them achieve the larger social good that the city is designed to create. So what's working in Chicago? Well I'd like to take on a little bit on the affordable housing discussion. We have an elevated park as well to 606 and that was a project that again went forward not seeing or not understanding what the repercussions could be on the neighborhoods around it and that's part of the discussion here now. Not just around that particular park but also other big public projects that we have planned. There's a Paseo trail that's planned through a largely Mexican neighborhood in Chicago and kind of preparing now for that discussion in parallel with planning for the trail. In other areas of the city where we've opened up development and in our industrial areas, there's a huge track, it's over 700 acres, the North Branch industrial area. There was a discussion about equity in terms of parks, green space, what the surrounding communities could benefit from opening this up to the river that hadn't previously been accessible. Also affordable housing and we have a pilot affordable housing program that just went into place in September that was voted through city council to set aside a certain amount of units that we anticipate will be coming into this area. So it is learning from other cities and really reading city lab and seeing what other cities are doing and what's working and looking at case studies. Good. Thanks for the plug. Yeah, that's why I'm here. No money changed hands, right? Yeah, good. Bye, drink later. So one last question. I wanna ask you all about historic preservation and bring the conversation back to that and Brian, let's start with you. So historic buildings and neighborhoods, we've done some work at the National Trust trying to document the economic and social and environmental benefits of historic buildings and believe that there is a lot of inherent goodness in keeping our historic buildings and our neighborhoods but I'd love to hear each of you talk a little bit about our historic resources and how they are contributing or not to the things that you wanna see for your cities. Yeah, I mean it's absolutely vital to kind of retain a culture and to understand what's valuable in the historic context for all the communities that we're serving, right? I think that's the critical point here is that there are always multiple sides of history's lens, right? And we wanna make sure that that's the case. And so in New Orleans, 80% of our city is historic, right? And so the ability to find value in the building that's dilapidated but was the straight university was the start of Dillard University which is one of the oldest historic African-American colleges that HBC use in the country, right? Like that place started and was almost destroyed by a highway that kept through it, right? And so the values that we place on that are really, really important. And so I think the building stock in our particular cities that hold these histories and tell these stories allow us to maintain cities that have a soul and have a voice to them. A lot of what we do now, and most of you know this, they're the CBREs of the world, the JLLs, the kind of mass institutional housing complex that they purposefully don't necessarily have a soul. Their purpose is to generate dollars, not to generate culture and kind of the wealth of community, right? And so I think the more we lose that stock, the worse off we are. So yeah, I'm all for it and I'm all for the ways in which it's integrative into the new spaces that are built, but holding on to the ones that have shaped our city for so long is absolutely vital. So a lot of historic buildings in Chicago. How does that make your life more complicated or not? You know, the joke is you can ask any cab driver to take you to the Reliance Building and he'll know what you're talking about here in Chicago. So in a way, our job is very easy when it comes to landmarks with a capital L. I think that it's pretty well regarded and recognized. I think where our challenge is going to be is in the neighborhoods and a lot of the histories that are more layered in Chicago. And this is something that we've not tackled before such as in a neighborhood that's gone through many different changes as different immigrant groups have come through. How do you preserve each one of those layers in a meaningful way and still keep it affordable, keep it a living neighborhood? So I think that's kind of a new direction that we're going to be taking and hopefully in partnership with our friends at the Park Service because an important component of what we do here, of course, is meeting the standards, qualifying folks for hopefully the tax credit and certainly the tax freeze to keep those neighborhoods affordable and I see that as kind of the new frontier here. Yeah, there are two things that leap to mind from our perspective in terms of the stories we cover about preservation, which is a big part of our MO. There is no city in America that has enough affordable housing right now. We need to build a lot of apartments and they're not all going to be pretty and they're not all going to be something you're going to want to preserve in 100 years, but that inherent tension between build, build, build now and the neighborhoods that are like, please preserve our historic fabric, that's not going away, that's going to be an enduring source of tension and probably always has been but really it's an acute issue in places like Seattle, places like San Francisco, which have these very, very severe housing crises but are also older historic cities that have all sorts of amenities.  So that's a big topic we are constantly following and it creates very strange bedfellows. So it's certainly something to monitor. The other thing is that when you're involved with this historic project, who is going to be the beneficiary of it? In Baltimore, where I live, we have a host of beautiful old industrial buildings, old mills that were in a very disinvested part of town on the Jones Falls, chemical laden cotton duck factories ignored for the last 30 years. Now they're condos, now there's a Brazilian restaurant in one of them, it's magnificent. There are no sidewalks to get to them.  It's in the middle of the city. These kinds of things are the kinds of projects that even though it's a magnificent adaptive reuse project, something went wrong there. You can't access that, that's a pedestrian in your own city. So those are the challenges that I think the preservation community has in terms of being positive actors in an equity conversation. Well, I feel like we've just scratched the tip of the iceberg and with the conference in San Francisco next year, I have a feeling we'll be picking up on these themes of affordability and the intersection of all these different points that we've been talking about. But will you please join me in thanking Brian and our panelists?


Everybody forced here ripping a box of 2022 tops chrome baseball Jumbo for Robert S. Good luck Robert Let's get a big card here Short print a red Superfractor a big rookie orange or something. I don't know man. It's not the big, you know Know the deal you know we're looking for see it now prism Brandon belts Rookie base auto Griffin Jacks Rookie refractor Sammy long I have a danger again She's a big touchdown. I'm back in the losing chair That'd be a double whammy only Cooper cup. You know what it is. That's fine, too We're Dolpho Castro pinstripe DJ La Mayhew 87 Gerrinder ran and a refractor Kyle Tucker It would destroy me Ryan's legend right there set the beer Brandon Marsh new classics Raphael Devers prison Willie Castro Rookie refractor Otto Oliver Ortega 200 of 499 refractor Andrew McCutcheon Heart of the city Bryce Harper 87 design Tim Anderson Rookie base auto Giovanni Moran And refractor Jared Kalnick Gavin sheets New classics Jonathan India a rookie prism Max Krannick and refractor Casey Mice That a red that is a red coming up. You pulling reds tonight. Come on monster. Here we go Casey Mice future stars red wave Jesus Lizardo Number two of five There we go nice Lizardo guy throws heat Grats on that one Robert 87 design Brandon Marsh refractor Alex Bregman Calrally based rookie hard of the city Huan Soto 87 design Arunato and a rookie refractor Zach pop photo negative Manny Machado chrism refractor Elohim and as rookie base auto Peyton Henry Cole Calhoun refractor Jackson Kaur Future stars Luis Garcia 87 design Luis Robert and refractor Miguel Cabrera New classics Fernando Tati's junior prism refractor Austin Meadows refractor rookie Roanzee Contreras Maybe the Rams he jared Goffat. He's playing pretty well, and then you know They will help him manners also have six acts. So Something tells me the line isn't super great pinch striped Freddie Freeman 87 design Matt Olson rookie base auto Spencer Watkins refractor of sunny gray Yeah, that's all I'm doing There's no reason for me to be doing that. Yeah, I'm not just sitting here. I'm making sure that they're unstuck basically. That's it Otherwise, I just go right through them Jaren Duran part of the city Green yeah, it is green six of 99. It's only the Washington C part. That's green one Soto hard of the city green the 99 nice Soto Prism refractor Evan Longoria And refractor keep Ryan Hayes That's gonna do it. Thanks again, Robert get those cards right out to you


Thanks, everybody, for joining us today. We're really excited to have this crew together and to interact with you, especially. So we're going to ask a few questions as we go through this. And we want to get your input. We encourage you to use the chat window. You can use the chat or the Q&A window. The chat window is a little more interactive. So we prefer you use that one, but either place you feel comfortable typing in questions or comments or feedback, please do so as we go through this. As Megan introduced all of us today, we did a presentation or a live panel like this a few months back, I think maybe four or five months back. And with DJ and with another product manager here at Sneak, it was really good. We had a lot of great interactivity with the audience. And we talked a lot about adopting IAC and adding security practices in things and also how you do that and still maintain the speed and the velocity that you want to get with IAC. We had just written this e-book together. Sneak and Engineer Better had written this e-book together. And so it was just barely published at the time we had this last presentation. It's still available. It's free. It's a fantastic resource that talks about a bit of a roadmap for adopting IAC for speed and security and those are things we'll focus on. What we didn't have last time, which we do now are these code samples. So if you're interested in actually trying out some examples of these practices that are outlined in this book, you can see that in these code samples. There's different stages of commits throughout these code samples that will line up with the things that are in the book and the practices that are in the book. So we encourage you to go and do that and you can learn even more. But in the book, we have a bit of a call it sort of a roadmap or a journey of adoption. This is taking a lot of feedback we've seen with customers that each company, Sneak and Engineer Better in our histories have worked with and some practices along the way that help with these ideas of achieving speed and security with IAC. The last time we did this, we kind of focused on the early stages of adoption and those first few things that you wanna do. Today, what we're gonna focus on is a little bit of the later stages of production and sort of underneath this category of safety, some key functionalities that I think are desirable, key outcomes that are desirable, maintaining or minimizing drift after you've started to deploy things with IAC, making sure that things are functionally correct when they're in production and of course, making sure things are auditable as well. I see that somebody asked for the links and Stefan and others are posting those in the chat too. So we'll get those, I'll get those here in just a second. So that's what we're gonna focus on today. And again, as we said, we want this to be very interactive and it's great that people are starting in the chat already, that's fantastic. So we'll start with the question just to get some more feedback into the chat. So is you're thinking about your own personal journeys and your organizations work with IAC today and kind of where you are? What kind of obstacles are you facing in your adoption of IAC? A few of you may be lucky and say, we're doing great, we've got this thing licked, in which case we may turn you on as a panelist here to join us in the chat. But a lot of people are facing other challenges. You think about people process and technology. I encourage you to go and pop your responses in the chat panel so we can kind of see those and we can discuss them. But we see things like just not enough skills, not enough people that know the format of choice that we've chosen where that might be Terraform or Kubernetes or things could be the technology. We just haven't made a technology to choice or we don't feel like have enough tools to automate and implement and secure. Could be process as well and just not knowing what the right process is to bring all these different teams together. I see a few things coming into the chat here. DJ or Stefan, anything that you kind of see is sort of come, actually let me ask a different question first of the customers you've talked to. How many do you see that you would say really do have this like down pat? I'm assuming it's probably low because if people are calling an engineer better they probably want help. So they probably identify as like we're not doing this so great. Yeah, unfortunately, very few customers call up saying hey, we're having a great time. Can we hang out and pay you to do so? So yeah, we do have a selection bias. We tend to work with a lot of large enterprises who they have a lot of legacy heritage stuff so they're not starting from a clean slate. And sometimes the kind of the join points between what's new and what's existing are the sticking points. That's where things become slow, where you're dependent on a central global networking team who need to make changes to a global load balancer manually and aren't quite on the IAC track yet. So those kinds of things often hold back further adoption. I don't know about Stefan, your thoughts? Yeah, another common pattern that I met with talking to users of the tools, the open source tool that we built is a little bit different. Sometimes they are very skilled at one cloud provider. Let's say they automated like 99% of AWS deployment. They are very happy about it. And then they had this different project on Azure or GCP and they are less skilled at this new provider. And they don't have the time to get up to speed and like gain, I don't know, four years of knowledge in like three months. And here they take a lot of shortcuts and then the multi-cloud automation is definitely not as good in this new cloud provider and it was with their AWS provider. That's a common pattern that I saw talking to users. Yeah, good. And one thing too, I want to point out real quick, we should have done this in introductions, but Stefan, I neglected to point out that you came from a company called Cloud Skiff, which we sneak had just recently acquired, but you have an open source tool called Drift CTL, which is still open source, still available for everybody here that if you want to go and try it, that is a drift management tool. And so a lot of experience around that. We'll get into that more as we go through this, but something that I would encourage everybody here to go and check out as well. I saw a couple of things come into the chat panel. So one person said, struggling to pull out of a inheritance model and realize a composition model. I'm not sure what that means. I don't know if Christopher, if you have more details or DJ or Stefan, if you maybe have more understanding of. I'm not sure either. I would probably imagine something around legacy and get started creating new resources and building on that, starting from something already there. It's something quite common as well. You start automating new stuff, but you still have the legacy, the existing stuff that you have to import in Terraform or any other tool and it can take time and it can be an awfully long process and the way to automate it is often quite ugly. The code is not maintainable or really like verbose. So it might be something like this and definitely it's a major blocker when you have like thousands of resources to import. Maybe, Christopher, it would be great to get your additional input on this and maybe we can come back to it throughout the session. If you're thinking from a programming model of composition, sort of go lang style versus inheritance and something more traditionally object oriented, that would be interesting to hear more about actually. It's something that came up a little bit in the last session talking about Terraform modules and being able to compose those together to create a system and in truth it's something we don't tend to do a lot of in that when we're working with customers it's often deploying one platform so that there's less need for reuse between things. So it would be interesting to hear more about that. Yeah, he followed up and said, simple to import a resource. He said Stefan was kind of right. He nailed it. It's simple to import a resource. But then to make the abstractions to migrate up composable configuration from those individual models is a tough mindset to keep modules. It's a tough mindset to keep. So yeah, I think you nailed it there. The other is another person here mentioned inconsistency between the deployment and the state. So I think the intended desired state in the true state which we're calling drift. We'll definitely be drilling into that a little bit more today. And then incomplete providers for AWS Azure and OpenStack and probably other things as well. Yeah, sorry. I was just going to say that incomplete providers are definitely paying and this is where certainly in my experience we work a lot with teams who are going from operations and kind of traditional system admin into infrastructure as code and treating it like a software development project, which I have found time again that people, once they click into that change and feel empowered, it's a really satisfying one for them motivation wise, building something instead of doing daily toil. But having some go lang skills to be able to contribute to Terraform providers and dig yourself out of the corner. That's a totally mixed metaphor, but you know what I mean. It's definitely useful. I also saw that Robert said earlier, it's a source provisioning time to the cloud platforms. I'm going to make no comments about which ones you may be talking about, but I have my suspicions. Yeah, as we else mentioned, you know, missing operations. I think, you know, like real programming operations, like if statements we had in the last one, we talked about item potency, right? Being able to run your pipelines, run your plan and apply for Terraform and always get the same, the same output, which is a challenge when you don't, you can't test like you can't do an if statement or a case statement or switch or things like that, right? So you have to be creative and it's a complex problem. I think. Isn't there a new addition to Terraform that has more functions? Yeah, they have an SDK now. And I think, I don't know, Esteban, you probably know more than I do about it, but I think they've been debating whether to add more programming like control. Yeah, you have more control in the latest versions of Terraform, but you're right, CDK, you can, with CDK, you can basically like write your Terraform, you're using like JavaScript or something and it converts then the code back to Terraform, the standard HCL, so it can be like run so you can have a more complex logic in your like traditional programming language and have, I don't know, big iteratives, iterations, if statements and all the, that you're used to and generate in the end HCL, it's definitely something new and in the Terraform, there's also technologies like Pulumi. I remember speaking to those folks at KubeCon where it's more of the opposite of declarative, imperative programming model, which would definitely be more flexible. I would temper this conversation though by saying that there's great power in declarative simplicity and I can totally imagine edge cases where you'd need to do something that maybe isn't straightforward, but generally I would, if I found myself needing more flow control statements, I would probably want to take a step back just to double check like is this really the best way of solving this problem or is it the simplest way? Sometimes it absolutely will be, but other times it might be a smell that maybe you're doing some working against the tooling rather than with it. Yeah, I see another comment here too from Karen about a challenge of migrating between existing versions. So as folks like Terraform, I think produce a new version of their format. It's maybe not compatible with the previous versions of their format, which is a challenge I think all around too. I think it's a challenge for somebody like for Sneak too, where we have this whole set of rules that work well with a version and there's a new version and some things change and the rules have to be adjusted and policy checks have to be adapted. Yeah, it's definitely a problem. We've been bitten by it in the past and this ties into one of the themes in the ebook about reproducibility and making sure that everything that goes into your pipeline is versioned and you can pin it to a particular version. It's all very well saying, well, we've got this Git repository which holds some Terraform config and we're going to be really controlled about which versions of that make their way through different environments. But if, I don't know, you're using Jenkins and a Terraform plugin or something like that, which auto updates, then that could totally invalidate all of your testing, all of your promotion. So yeah, definitely being restrictive about, okay, there's a new version of Terraform got to be tested before we allow this any further through our procession of environments because I've definitely felt that pain. Yeah, for sure. All right, I'm going to go to the next question just so we can continue on here. But I'm curious too, in your organizations, who's responsible for IAC? We've seen organizations that have just like, we're full DevOps and the developers can write whatever they want. It's their responsibility to own it, maintain it, keep it healthy over time. Other organizations who have said, we're going with more of a centralized model, our app teams can come in and request things and maybe they can make some one-off changes. But for the most part, we're going to centrally control things. And we've seen people who have even said, everything is coming through our infrastructure team. They're the only ones that can do anything. We're not going to let anybody else do anything. And just kind of curious where people are in that thinking and also where you think it will go in the future. So if you have any input on that, we'd love to see that in the chat. We see a mix of those things. Any thoughts there? Kind of what sort of mixes you guys see, D.J.? As a consultancy, we see quite a few different models. And as a consultancy that gets called in when people are facing challenges, one of the ones that we see, different organizations work different ways. And there are many different ways of being productive. So there's not necessarily one universal right answer. But where we do see people have problems is where those responsibilities are not clearly defined. Where you've got a platform team who are kind of doing all the back-end infrastructure stuff, but they're not really running platform as a product and with developers as customers in mind, they're just kind of the ops people with a new name. But then you've got some developers who are managing infrastructure and you've got to be a bit to the infrastructure. That gets to be a mess really quickly. So I think having clearly defined responsibilities, whatever those responsibilities are, is better than having a kind of mishmash where the gaps can occur, especially when we're talking about things like safety and security. If it's not clear what's being tested and what hasn't, that's definitely dangerous. If it's not clear who's responsible for something, then who's responsibility for the security of that and making sure that it's auditable and that things are properly configured. Yeah, clear definition of roles is a thing to strive for. Yeah, for sure. I think you see all the headlines about breaches and a lot of them start from some sort of misconfiguration. And I think there's a couple of different ways that that happens, but it falls to controls to some degree, but also just maybe not people knowing who's actually responsible for making sure this thing is still in the right controls. And we're going to talk about drift as we said a little bit later, but things can drift even from what we said it was going to be to what the actual state is. So I think that clear definition of who's responsible for it, not just defining it, but then maintaining it over time is critical. I see Robert Newman has contributed that their whole scrum development team is responsible. Those kind of cross functional teams could be so productive. Having transitioned from being mostly a Java developer to doing kind of a full stack infrastructure all the way through. It can be a challenge for folks. And I'm a big fan of kind of platform as a product type setups where you've got a team who are not managing infrastructure, but they provide self service platforms to developers. They don't necessarily have to kind of worry about those lower levels of abstraction. And then Christopher, on the other hand, is saying there's no kind of centralized use in Christopher's organization. The developers are relying on the SRE team to handle all the infrastructure stuff. So it's kind of already seeing two quite different ways of doing it there. Yep, yep, for sure. Okay, let's go to our next one. This one's a poll question, so you don't have to type your answers, although we would love to see if you have some details in the chat. But this is about the types of tests to use. So we're talking about who runs this and some of the challenges you have.  I'm just kind of curious as to what types of tests everybody uses here. So you should see a poll pop up on your screen. You should be able to pick a choice here. I think you can only pick one. I know probably several people are running more than one. Pick the one that's sort of the biggest, I guess, or most common that you're using. DJ Estefan, what kinds of things do you see as sort of maybe starting with like early adopters, the first things that people do to like more mature organizations? Yeah, probably the first thing people can use is like this very simple built-in validation from like terraform validate. It's the most basic thing that you can do. And then you can probably very easily just launch a live linter. Like there's different linters on the market from TF Lint to our own SNCC ISE analyzer. So that's the kind of things that can bring an initial high-quality feedback loop. It's to start with that. And it's already great because you have already quality feedback instantaneously. And then you can move on like to move on to the next step, to the next step, to the next step, and you can move on like to much more advanced like unit testing and more advanced testing as well. And up to, I don't know, you can even finish with one product I love from Chef that was in spec. So you can write in Ruby fully. You can test all your compliance using pretty simple Ruby checks and that you can render that at the very end of your pipeline to just ensure that everything is definitely the way you intended it to be by writing it properly. That's the kind of things you can do just a few examples, a ton of different examples can be done. Terror test. Terror test, I think Daniel, you have probably a lot to say on this one. It's wonderful, but it's quite complicated for early users to use.  So it requires a bit of time and skills as well, but Terror test is great. Yeah, and again, we're not being paid by anybody offering Golang training, honest, but yeah, useful skill to have for people who are treating infrastructure as code. Regardless of the tool, I'd probably just recommend to make if there is anyone on the session or watching this who is, you know, not from a software development background and maybe from more of an infrastructure admin or upside to really try and embrace testing and embrace early testing as much as you can, getting that fast feedback and knowing quickly when you've done something wrong is so valuable. A customer that we're working with has some unit tests for some of their infrastructure projects and they just weren't running them as part of the CI build. And, you know, our consultants were like, why do you have these but you're not running them? And yeah, they went about making that change and one of the engineers on that team, one of the customer engineers, like, oh, this is really good. We find out much faster when things are wrong. I say, yes, that's exactly the point. So if you can test, do and do it as early as you can. Yeah, the results here are pretty interesting too. So we've got good, you know, basically kind of a split between two. There's, you know, everybody, there's a little, there are a few answers for everything, but a split between the two. So one, we're not doing much automated testing yet. And the other is linters and some of those early sort of feedback type checks. For the other ones, the, you know, the more full featured security and checks and policy tools, relatively low usage, which is not, I mean, I don't think that's a different answer than we would get if we had 5,000 people here. It's probably, you know, fairly same in terms of percentages, but yeah, fairly, fairly consistent there. Okay, let's talk about, you know, actually implementing these changes. So as you go through, we talked about automatically testing and some people are doing that and some people, you know, haven't really yet, but if you are doing some automatic testing, do you promote these changes through multiple environments? In other words, do you have several stages that it goes through to make sure everything is working as expected prior to reaching that production stage? So really sort of having that thorough pipeline that you're testing for IAC. This is pretty common, I think in software development or becoming more and more common, I think in software development and really kind of getting to treating your IAC as if it's a, you know, it is, you know, in this case, a software thing, right, a product. So curious if people are doing that when we make the question live here for you. So you can pop an answer in there too. Again, I'd say this is so important. The number of folks who test the hell out of their software and then infrastructure, you know, they're just applying it straight to prod without it going through any earlier environments. It's, you know, that's kind of undermines all of the testing that goes on in the software process and nobody wants to be the person that makes a prod change and causes a massive outage. You know, ask the people at Facebook who made that networking config change. So it's super important and there's another benefit that you get from having promotion through different environments. One of the things that we talk about in the ebook and in the code examples is we're quite big fans, and you know, better of having like one instance of a pipeline representing one environment. And once you do that, and if you start from the assumption that everything that you need for an environment should be createable through a pipeline automatically just spin up a new pipeline and it should run and give you everything that you need for an environment by itself. That sets you up to chain those together so that then you can test them one after the other, but also starts giving you so much more flexibility in kind of providing development environments for the software developers that are using your infrastructure. On the subject of the type of testing, you know, we talked about more the kind of unit testing. What do you do close to the commit? There's some, for the SREs here, I think there's some really interesting intersections between things like acceptance testing and service level indicators.  You know, can you log into the system, not just is the login page returning healthy when I hit the health check endpoint, you know, can write tests that step through things like a user. That gives you your SLIs and, you know, the service level indicators and also gives you real confidence that stuff's working, not just metrics, not just, you know, response rates and those sorts of things, but like you've got some proper confidence that somebody stepped through each of these stages and if our test can do it, a user can do it. And if a user is telling me that they can't do it and our test just ran and said that they can, maybe it's a, you know, problem exists between keyboard and chair type problem, which as an operator is a useful kind of way, you know, for triaging things. Yeah. Yeah, one, one, first let me just say this. There's an interesting, so looking at the poll results, interesting, zero people said they're actually fully automated with these multiple stages all the way through production. If you said they're close, but not quite all the way through. I just, you know, again, not something that I think is uncommon. We, before we did the book, we had actually commissioned a survey to go out and just talk to IAC users and see kind of where they were and their journeys and how, you know, how good they felt they were doing and what sort of things they were doing. And a very small number of people. I think 6% or 7% of the respondents, there were like 500 respondents and not just sneak customers. This was, you know, a wide audience who said they thought they were doing, you know, sort of best in class, IAC automation and testing and security and management all the way through. So, you know, if you're in that group of people who say zero, which is everybody on the, on the joining us today, you know, don't feel like you're way behind. I think it's a fairly common thing. People are still working to that. The other thing that was interesting as we worked on this book, DJ was the notion of the pipelines and, you know, but if you go through the code examples, like they're set up for Jenkins, I think, right? And we talked about like what, what tool should we use? Should we use Jenkins? Should we use something else? There were challenges we had with Jenkins, right? Because it's good for some things, but for IAC there, you know, there are specific things, you know, outcomes that you want to achieve that Jenkins, you know, doesn't necessarily inherently understand. So curious. I've seen some other, some other tools that are, they're maybe not CI tools or pipeline tools per se, but are interesting sort of IAC specific testing tools where they do try and replicate this idea of having these multiple environments, either simulated deployments or not. Have you seen much of that in your, in your practice? You don't want to be a DJ or a Stefan or anybody here if you're using something like that. Definitely be interested in hearing what the people on the call have to say on that one. We actually did a series of blog posts on this. I don't think I can get the link handily whilst also focusing on the webinar, but we did a series of blog posts comparing, inspired by the work on the ebook to look at Jenkins, Argo workflows, Tecton and a kind of niche tool called concourse that we're quite fond of. And Tecton and Argo definitely support pipelines in a better fashion. They tend to be quite GitOps driven in that there's got to be one thing that triggers the whole pipeline. And, you know, maybe it's a file or a Git repo with a file with all of the versions in and then you've got to write something to update all those versions when a new thing becomes available, which concourse does more elegantly. But anything that is CIS code or declarative CI config and allows a whole pipeline workflow rather than discreet individual jobs. You know, Stefan, what about you? What do you've seen work here? Well, I've seen things not work. Definitely like very badly. And it falls back again on the question. I think it was Christopher like 10 minutes ago, telling about the modules and the versions and the dependencies and the versions of the providers and probably even up to the Terraform versions as well. And I even seen development or staging environments like they were working very well because people were like pushing and testing like every day or hour or so. But production much less often. And basically the impact in production for the small focus that you have on your module and you burn the versions and you upgrade it, it's all okay. And then at the end, it's big day, you deploy something and as it's not tested and automated up to production, then that's when things break because there's too much of a gap from the version that was actually deployed and production and the new version and dependencies from the Terraform providers or versions from Terraform itself. And sometimes it's even like just the pipeline not being like compatible with what was expected from that upgrade for production directly. So that's definitely the kind of issues as well that you can have here. And that's why testing from the stage into production is definitely so important. And you have like tools as well like kitchen Terraform. It comes from test kitchen from the chef days. And today it still works very well to iterate through a set of configuration variables and you can inject data from your test cases to test and simulate up to production if you want to. And you can even like did you mention like definitely test for real if the results actually is the one that is expected. Yeah. Yeah, there's a comment or question I guess in here from Don about, you know, just getting started on my IC and wanting to get some advice on a simple start to get going. I'll just I'll plug shamelessly plug the ebook again. A lot of the stuff early in the book is very simple, simple sounding at least been somewhat simple to do as you're getting started just things like, you know, they'll just store your IC on your laptop, put it into a shared code repository and start collaborating on it there and follow sort of that software development practice. So there's some good advice for just even the early stage things to set you up for better success as you as you start to, you know, bring this into production. But DJ is to find any any feedback you would have. Definitely agree with you on the book because we we use our experience kind of taking teams through this journey. And there's a fictional count of Perry, I believe, who is a operator who turns into an IAC kind of developer. So hopefully if we've done on your well, then some of that should be relatable. So skip to that section that's about that journey. And if it's not relatable, let us know we can improve it. The things that Jim mentioned, getting the under source control, making sure that, you know, you standardize formatting. I know that sounds really trivial, but like if you're going to work with other people, it will make your life a lot easier. Find some way of testing things. Once you found a way of testing it on demand through your own CLI, look at integrating into a CI server, something that will every time you commit run those tests. So you'll start to get certainty on it. Then you can start thinking about continuous deployment. And, you know, okay, once we've run those tests, sure we do a terraform apply automatically on every commit to an environment. I expect that you'll find, depending on the sector you're in and the kind of organization you're in, you may find some resistance. Security folks who are objecting to things being automatically applied, even if it's in dev environments. Hopefully there's some arguments in the book that, you know, we use when we take people on this journey and take organizations on a transformational journey about why it's safer and better to do things these kind of ways. So hopefully those will be of help. But whatever you can do, whatever small incremental improvements you can make, I encourage you to do it. You know, every little helps, every little thing that's automatically continually checking that things are better is better than nothing at all.  You can have the linting, you can have all the quick feedback that you need. Well, as a developer, you want that feedback as soon as possible and that will help you get started. You can even have, like, small snippets with code default that can be tested automatically in VS Code or other IDEs. So definitely do this and it's highly helpful. Even when you're, like, scale a little more experienced in the area. Yeah, I'll just say too, again, on the responses to this question in particular, there's a good number. It's around, it's 28% basically who said they're running a Terraform plan and then it's straight on into production. So this whole idea, having these multiple environments and promoting through it and automating all this, right, it's not something that everybody's doing it. I feel like you're way behind the curve, like everybody's learning this at the same time. So there are good communities for this too.  Drift CTL has a huge open source community when you start to get into tools and things like that. Some of these other tools we mentioned, TerraTest and others have open communities too. So you can definitely jump in there and start learning and asking questions. I do want to move forward because we said we were going to talk about Drift and we're getting to that point now. So we'll start with this. How frequently are you reapplying your IAC? And in particular, you know, as a practice, reapplying your IAC, even if nothing's changed, just reapplying it. And I think when we talked about this in the e-book, the idea was, you know, to help to converge things back to what the expected state is, right? And just sort of make sure that we're always capturing those things. But just kind of curious what other people are doing. But DJ, Stefan, any... I'm going to say that Stefan has probably got a way more deep insight on this, given his career history. From the e-books perspective, we were talking about the three R's, which I think is Martin Smith, who's ex-Google and ex-pivotals, who have rotate, repair, repave, make your credentials easy to rotate, repair, apply patches, all of these things that having IAC and a CI pipeline will help with, but also repave of... if you're continually reapplying things, then any drift, whether it's detected or not, will be blatted.  I don't like this.  So from that point of view, that's valuable. This may be something that just reapplying won't do in the repaving fronts and a bit of a tangent. So I won't talk about it for very long. But recreating systems, if something does get into your production infrastructure, if you're tearing it down and recreating it and slowly doing a rolling update of pods or whatever, at least then you've got a short time to live on anything that's got into your system. The worst thing then, you know, malicious code being in your system is malicious code that's been in your system for six months, harvesting data with no visible signs. It's not trying to make any network egress. And then all of a sudden it sends the whole lot out to nefarious hackers somewhere. So if you can, you know, minimize your exposure by recreating things, that'd be good. But Stefan, definitely would love to hear your thoughts on this. Yeah, I definitely agree. And I would even add, like, that in this process of applying as soon as possible and as often as possible your infrastructure as code, I would as well, and before applying it, I would use a tool like Drift CTL, the one that we created, the open source tool, Drift Control, because what you want to ensure is the parity between the state that you currently have, as in terms of terraform, it's the terraform state, and you probably have many of them, because probably you have a state for your eye abusers, for your S3 buckets, for your Kubernetes or something. And you want to ensure that parity between two states, aggregated states, and the reality on the APIs and AWS or something, or between regions as well, and before doing anything else. So you want to start from a clean state and beware terraform apply does not actually enforces the parity. It just basically uses a the state is not a conversion of the HCL. It's also interacting with the API from AWS or the cloud provider, and it may make changes to that state. It's meant that way. It's not the source of truth. And that's why in reapplying stuff, sometimes you can end up importing, sorry, manually added resources. It's hugely disappointing. A lot of people can have bad surprises. I was the first one to have terrible surprises with manually added rules or some settings changing S3, etc. So that's a reason why I would do two things regularly. First check for the parity between your states and the reality. And depending on the result of that clean state, then apply again anything because you're sure that what you wanted did not change from the last time that you applied it and it was working. Because the worst thing you can do is basically be think that you are secure because, well, I turned from applied. It's okay. Well, no, you just applied like your security group is now open to the world. Good job. It's on your terra from state. So, yeah, I would do the check before that. Yeah, responses here. So we had around 14% who said they do this often and automatically, which is great. But we also had 32% who said they never do this. And so why, you know, why bother if nothing changed. And I, that was a bit of a flippant addition to the response on my part, but, but still 32% who are never doing this. So I think it's, you know, it is a great practice. The bulk of people about 45% said they do this occasionally, but it's ad hoc. Like it's not an, it's not an automated thing. So definitely room for improvement. I think for time purposes, I'm going to move ahead to the next question because it digs a little bit deeper here. And just curious how often are changes made to your infrastructure, the things that you're managing with IAC outside of your, outside of your software practice here, outside of that IAC coding and, and pipelines. This is, you know, I think of probably a fairly common problem is to find you. This is one you've been spending a lot of time on in the last couple of years, but any, like what do you see out there? Well, the reality is always fun because very often you, you know, I met a lot of people that were like, yeah, we have all the good practices in place. Nobody can do this or that, et cetera. But then you dig a little deeper and say, okay, you don't have customers like you're not a consultancy. You don't hand over like accounts to someone. Are you sure it's completely locked? Are you sure that even, I don't know, you don't even have any single service that it authenticated. So basically nothing runs on your infrastructure. Nothing is live. Nothing like, did you unplug the full infrastructure and you fired the whole team or what? So the reality sometimes is a bit different. You always have this team on call during the weekend. They have to do something quickly and basically maybe they don't even have the time to change this on Terraform.  And guess what? They forgot. And that's when all the manual changes happen. And you have all those authenticate scripts as well. Like, I don't know, backup scripts for hard disk or things like that. And sometimes they are authenticated. They do actually make some changes on the APIs. And sometimes you have bugs on the scripts as well.  And I've seen this. So that's, it's not even drift. It's just pure bug, but it's, and it's in the end, it's definitely manual changes because it's not under control by any code or any real intention. And definitely not tested. I think the, yeah, this goes to show the importance of being able to detect and visualize, detect drift and visualize the state of systems. Because exactly a step out says there will be times when it's entirely legitimate for people to make manual changes. You know, it's an emergency. We don't have time to push it through the pipelines. They'll forget to backport it. I think we can talk about that in the book as an example, which is based on a real life experience. So, yeah, being able to see what the state of things is and detect automatically when things have diverged from what you want. Really critical. Yeah. Yeah. The responses here are kind of just basically spread across the four response, the four choices, which, you know, was basically zero. No changes can happen except in pipelines, which is the fund said is probably not quite right. But the next choice was 25% at 50%, 75%. Maybe kind of scary to see that still 75% or more of changes are happening outside of these pipelines and outside of the software practice for a fairly significant number of people, 27%. So that's still a bunch.  And, you know, you have some chance of everything being in the pipeline and captured in code. Most companies aren't that way. And so a lot of companies are trying to bring things in to, to IAC. When you have that mixed model, I would imagine, you know, some people don't know which resources are manually managed and which resources are managed via IAC. And they just make changes and don't know that they've affected somebody else's work. I think I see that being an issue too. And drift detection is a great way of identifying that and finding out like, hey, you know, Rachel and the other team, she didn't realize that this is being applied automatically. And, you know, we found that it's diverted. Yeah, for sure. All right. Let me pop up this next question because we are just down to our last couple of minutes. Do for the folks that are here, do you actually have something that you're using today to do any kind of drift detection? Some people, we've seen people who do just sort of manual audits, which can be harder. They can compare the, you know, manually compare the deployed state to what's in IAC. There's loads of tools. We've talked about drift CTL as an open source tool and there are others there. I was kind of curious how many people have something that they're doing there. DJ Stefan, what's what's sort of the spread of people that you're, you're seeing there? Well, I've seen and I've used and created a lot of internal tools like based around like, I don't know, the AWS CLI comments are during the chef years. You could do a lot of things to actually list and compare based on like inventories that you could have like chef server was a huge, great resource a few years ago to do this. So you could do things like this, but it was highly, you had to do a lot of manual, manual steps. Yeah, that's that's one of the reasons that we created drift CTL. It's, it's so like easy to use it. You can aggregate and all the states that you want works for the free main cloud providers today and you can do it and do things that we do, we actually do in, in real life like having multiple terraform states or running them at some point on S3 and sometimes stored on terraform cloud and sometimes stored somewhere else and you can aggregate them all and compare it. So that's one of the reasons you know, drift CTL exists because I think it's a great point too because I, you know, as a simple marketing minded person, the extent of terraform that I've used is like there's a state file and that's it. It's very simple, right? Because I deploy like three things and then I destroy it but real the real life is you're going to have multiple state files and maybe in different places and you have to have a converged view of the world to really know what's, what's happening. Yeah, and definitely you do not want to have everything on single state, the day it's corrupt. You're not happy about it at all. For sure. I'm going to, we'll skip over this question because I want to get this because I know we're, we're going to be out of time here in just a second. I do want to think, first of all, I think DJ is the fun for joining us and think the Linux foundation for, for hosting us today and especially thank everybody for, for your participation and for just joining us and taking time out of your day to be here with us. If you are interested in, in learning more, we have loads of resources for you the ebook and, and the code samples we posted early in the chat to scroll way back up to the top, you'll find those links and we'll make this presentation available and of course the recording will be available as well. You can get to sneak if you want to learn more about sneak IEC we do have a security tool for, for your IEC love to have you and talk more about that obviously. Drift CTL as we mentioned, we acquired a company called Cloud Skiff who had an open source tool called Drift CTL. It's still an open source tool. It's still called Drift CTL and we would love to have you participate in that community as well and use that tool and then engineer better. Of course, fantastic consultancy. If you're looking for help and you need some guidance with these, with these things and these practices and implementing them. Encourage you to, you know, reach out to engineer better and bring them in and see what they can, what they can do for you. But, you know, really appreciate everybody joining us. And I guess we will end there. Wonderful. Well, thank you so much, Jim. And thank you, Daniel and Stefan. It was a very engaging presentation today. And as Jim mentioned, this will be available on the Linux Foundation YouTube page as well as the webinars page where you found to register. And we hope to see you at the next one. Thanks, everyone. Bye-bye.


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