Welcome to the first meeting of the Covert. This morning we will take evidence from the Scottish Government on the latest ministerial statements on coven 19. I'd like to welcome to the meeting John Sweeney, Deputy First Minister and Cabinet Secretary for Covert Recovery, Professor Jason Leitch, national clinical director, Penelope Cooper, director of coven coordination and Nev O'K konta sceneswilas, deputy director for testing and contact tracing I wish you all a happy new year, and I hope that you managed to have some sort of break over the festive period. Deputy First Minister, would you like to make any remarks before we move on to questions? Thank you, convener, and good morning. I'm grateful to the committee for the opportunity to discuss a number of matters, including updates to Parliament on Covid-19, and to make some opening remarks before taking questions. I set out by the First Minister on Tuesday, while Omicron is continuing to cause extremely high levels of new cases, we must remain careful. There are grounds for cautious optimism that our current additional measures and the efforts being made by people across Scotland are having an impact. Last month, our central projection was that new infections could reach 50,000 a day by early January. So far, this has not materialised, and we estimate that the total number of daily infections may be around 30,000. We have also seen the number of cases that are confirmed by PCR tests have fallen in all age groups except the over 85s. That is encouraging and gives us some hope that cases might be at or close to the peak. Further, although the number of people in hospital with Covid has continued to increase over the past week, there are signs that the rate of increase may be starting to slow. In line with our guidance set out last week, people with symptoms should test positive with a lateral flow test. No longer need to secure a confirmatory PCR test. That means that the current daily numbers are capturing fewer positive cases than before. To address this, Public Health Scotland will, from today, augment its daily reports to include the combined figure for the number of people who have recorded a first positive PCR or lateral flow test. That additional data will allow us to assess the trend in cases more accurately. I encourage members of the public to continue to record in their lateral flow results whether they are positive or negative. That can be done very easily through the UK Government website under the report a lateral flow test search approach. Although we must remain careful and cautious, Cabinet agreed in Tuesday to begin lifting the additional protective measures that were introduced before Christmas. We will do so in a phased manner and further dates will be announced in due course. From Monday 17 January, the attendance limits on large-scale outdoor events will be removed. Certification will remain in place for events and venues previously covered by the scheme, and we are asking event organisers to check the certification status of more people attending events. From Monday, for the purposes of certification, the requirement to be fully vaccinated will include having a booster if the second dose was more than four months ago. By the time being, baseline measures that were in place before the emergence of Omicron, such as wearing face coverings in indoor places, and working from home where possible, will remain in place. For the immediate period ahead, our advice remains that people should limit their contact with other households and, in particular, not meet indoors with more than three households. We are not asking people to cut all social interaction, but reducing contacts and prioritising who we meet will help to reduce the risk. Our advice remains to take a lateral flow test and report the result when meeting others. When the First Minister confirmed that the Scottish Government intends to publish a revised strategic framework in the next few weeks, I will update the committee further once that has been published, and I am happy to be there to answer any questions that the committee may have. Thank you, Deputy First Minister. I will turn to questions. If I may begin by asking the first question, I think that we are all very cautiously thankful that Omicron is not as severe as we first expected when it emerged in early December. With the schools going back in the last week, I really wanted to ask about the effect of Omicron on children, on my school children, and especially as most of them have not been vaccinated and maybe an update on vaccinations for the five to 12-year-olds. Just in the school settings, is ventilation adequate at the moment as the schools have gone back? Obviously, we will be monitoring very carefully, convener, the impact of schools returning, and that is central to the approach that the Government is taking, because we recognise that the schools returning marks a gathering of individuals within our society at a fairly high level. As we know with Covid, the meeting of individuals from multiple households leads to spread of the virus. We will be monitoring that data very closely. That is why we are taking a phased approach to the relaxation of restrictions, because although the data at the present moment is encouraging, that could be influenced by the effect of schools returning. We will only now just be beginning to see the effects of that in the numbers to the extent that that will have an effect. In relation to the questions on vaccination of our younger citizens, we do not have the authorisation for widespread vaccination of children in the five to 12-year-olds group from the JCVI. The case has not been made for that by the JCVI. As the committee will be familiar, we look to and take forward the advice of the JCVI. Obviously, in relation to some children, the JCVI has indicated that it is appropriate for vaccination to take place, simply where a child may be of themselves clinically vulnerable or living in a household with individuals who are clinically vulnerable. We are obviously taking steps to implement those recommendations, as has been confirmed in the Parliament. In relation to the last part of your question, convener, on ventilation, this is ostensibly a local authority priority. We have been engaging with local authorities over the course of the past 20 months on the issues of ventilation and have made requirements of local authorities to enhance the monitoring of air quality in schools. First, we will ensure that we have a good understanding of where some of the ventilation requirements may need to be in place. On Tuesday, the First Minister announced some further expansion of the funding that is available to local authorities to enhance ventilation schemes should that be a requirement. I would also point out that local authorities have undertaken extensive audits on a classroom-by-classroom basis about the ventilation requirements. We would expect local authorities to act accordingly to address any ventilation weakness that emerges out of those surfaces. Thank you, Deputy First Minister. If I could just ask one more question. Just given that we do know that our NHS at the moment is under a lot of pressure—and we always knew it would be—in light of some of the NHS boards calling in military help and declaring major incidents, can the cabinet secretary provide the committee with the rundown of the position of the other NHS boards? There is a huge amount of pressure on NHS boards around the country. I think that it would be fair to say that all boards are under intense pressure. They are having to manage high demand for services along with some of the difficulties of staff absence, which is caused by Omicron of itself. The changes to testing arrangements and isolation periods that the Government has implemented will be beginning to have a welcome effect on easing some of those staffing pressures. We are confident about the sustainability of NHS services at this moment, but I have to say that that is a constantly dynamic position. The individual hospitals will come under greater pressure as a consequence of incidents that take place and demand that presents itself. Across the national health service, we are circulating and issuing advice, encouraging people to use the appropriate health services for the circumstances that they face. At this stage, I would say that the national health service in all parts of the country is coping, but it is coping under enormous pressure and the headroom that is available to deal with increased demand is very limited. For that reason, I have been leading along with the health secretary and the social justice secretary dialogue with the local government about expanding the capacity of social care services around the country. The more we can have in place effective social care services in the community, the more we can support individuals to have their needs met at home and, on other care settings, avoid them presenting in NHS facilities. That is one of the crucial interventions that we are making to try to stem demand and pressure on the national health service. Thank you, Deputy First Minister. Your update is appreciated. I move on to other members now and, if I could bring in Murdo Fraser, please. Thank you, convener, and good morning to the cabinet secretary and to colleagues. I would like to ask a couple of different issues this morning if there is time, and I would like to start off by raising again an issue that I have raised previously, which is the question of data. We have been trying to pursue this question of understanding in terms of hospital admissions. How many of those admitted to hospital are there because Covid is the primary cause of their admission, as opposed to it being secondary or incidental? We saw some limited data being published on Friday from Public Health Scotland based on two health boards, but I wonder when we might have a fuller picture, because I think that that is actually really important in terms of understanding the true impact of Omicron on the health service. The second issue is around the question of vaccinations. How many of those in hospital because of Covid, and in particular in intensive care units, are vaccinated as opposed to unvaccinated? Thirdly, has there been anyone as yet who has died that we are aware of as a result of the Omicron variant? I do not know if the Scottish Government has this information, but it has not been shared with us or with the public. I would be interested to know if that data is being collected. I will draw on some contributions from Professor Jason Leitch in relation to some of the material, but let me work my way through the different points that Mr Fraser raised. First of all, on the issue of the reasons for hospitalisation for individuals, whether it is because of Covid or people admitted with Covid or people who are in hospital with Covid, the data has been developed by Public Health Scotland working on datasets from Greater Glasgow and Clyde health board and NHS Grampian. Those are two very significant boards at NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde, the largest board in the country, which covers a substantial share of the population. We have to get into a proper perspective the scale of the country that is covered by the data from. There was the subject of release last week, if my recollection is correct, yes, it will be. That gives us a fairly substantial picture around the country. It demonstrates a pattern that is about 60 per cent of people who are being admitted to hospital in connection with Covid are being admitted because of Covid. That is a relatively similar number to the number in the studies that have been produced in other nations in the United Kingdom. It is also not that dissimilar to the position with the earlier strains of the virus. My recollection is correct that the previous data in the exercise that was published by Public Health Scotland was 68 per cent in the previous survey that was undertaken by being admitted to hospital because of Covid. In the context of the volume of data that we publish on these questions, the data that has been published on this issue gives us a pretty good understanding of the balance and breakdown of that information. Obviously, Public Health Scotland will be working on further iterations of that data in due course. On the second point, in relation to the position on vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals in hospital, the latest data that I have seen showed that the unvaccinated hospitalisation rate was 59 out of 100,000, while the boosted hospitalisation rate was 15 out of 100,000, meaning that the unvaccinated hospitalisation rate is four times more likely to be hospitalised than people who have had their booster or third dose. I hope that that data helps, but I will draw on the input from Professor Leitch in the further detail that he will provide on that. Can I bring in Professor Leitch, please? Good morning, everybody. Good morning, convener, and a happy new year to everybody. Your questions are good, Mr Fraser. Let me deal with them in simplicity order. I will come to the harder one last. The vaccination status of hospitalisations and deaths are published every week. I do not know why there is too much fuss in finding them from individuals that were most recently published yesterday by Public Health Scotland, Mr Swinney. As read out, one of the elements of it is 59 versus 15. There are also mortality rates in that same publication that was published a week before, and each of those publications shows the previous four weeks, but they divide them into seven days. The mortality rate—and forgive the callous way of talking about mortality rates—I understand absolutely that those are real people with families who have had to grieve even over the Christmas and New Year period because of this horrible disease, but the unvaccinated mortality rate was £4.79 per 100 k and the boosted mortality rate was £0.21 per 100 k. If we needed it confirmed again that the best protection you can have is your booster dose, will those data be replicated globally? Bear in mind that, if you just look at the raw numbers of deaths, you may come to a different conclusion, but that is because the vast majority of the country is boosted. You have to age adjust and make it rates in order to understand the difference that the booster rate is having. Those numbers vary a little bit from week to week because the numbers are quite low. Your key question about whether those people die of Omicron or not, I am afraid, is not straightforward to answer. Over 92 per cent now of every positive case in Scotland is Omicron, so we have no reason to believe that there is a continuing big delta wave, but we probably still have some stragglers coming through the system who will have delta. It is not absolutely certain that those deaths are Omicron, but I am anticipating, as is the rest of the research community, that Omicron does lead to some deaths, particularly in the unvaccinated. We are learning more and more about risk, and I think that I have said to this committee before that we now know that the principal risk is immunity. Whether your immunity is hampered by disease—a transplant, HIV, something else going on with your leukemia or something—those are the big risk factors now and age, because, as you age, your immunity diminishes. That is why vaccination is such a big solution. The intensive care data is harder to get than the hospitalisation data, and the death data just because of the nature of data collection and the small numbers of people who end up in intensive care. We rely on a slightly different mechanism called the Scottish intensive care audit group. They are about to publish their most recent data in the next two weeks, but the last one that they did was that they were six times less likely to be in intensive care if you were vaccinated. That is the headline. They are six times less likely to be in intensive care if you are vaccinated. They will redo that data now for boosters and for Omicron, and I look forward to seeing their conclusion. However, the global data is around six times less likely. Let me come to your slightly harder point that we have covered here before, and Mr Swinney covered it. That is in with Covid or because of Covid. I do not know what the fascination with this data is. You have all the data that we have. We have published everything that I have around this question, but it speaks to a, if you will forgive me, a slight misunderstanding of how healthcare works. Healthcare is not a single disease. The people in hospital with Covid, who are in trouble, do not just have Covid. They have diabetes, they have leukemia, they are 87, they are all kinds of things going on. The death certificates often have five reasons for death, not one. Principal diagnosis, just a secondary diagnosis, is a matter of judgment at a time of death by the junior doctor who perhaps is filling in the death certificate. By all means, you can get all the data that we have and you have it, I promise, but I am not as convinced that this data is as important as perhaps some think, because healthcare is not linear. There are very few people in who are having their leg fixed because they fell over in the ice who get a positive Covid test. There will be some, of course, but the vast majority getting care in our hospitals with a Covid test and getting it because they have Covid and they have other things going on as well. I will bring you back in for a brief supplementary, but can I ask for the answers to be brief? I really have to. Thank you, convener, and thanks to Professor Leitch for a very detailed comprehensive response. I will make a point very briefly. When the reason I am asking those questions is that I have been asking those questions for some weeks now and it has been really hard to get as clear an explanation as we have just had as to the numbers. Specifically, on the question of the difference in hospitalisation between vaccinated and unvaccinated, I just asked whether the Scottish Government should be doing more to put that message out to the public because we are all wanting to encourage people more and more to get vaccinated and get boosted. I think that if it was as clear as you have just stated about the statistics, and that was more widely known amongst the public, that would be a really helpful message to you. That is fair, and I agree. I think that Mr Swinney will say the same. To me, those messages are communicated by Government. Our clinical advisers have been to the forefront of arguing for the rationale for vaccination and the booster programme and ministers likewise. I think that, at the heart of many of the interventions that we have made, whether it is about the public communication or whether it has been about policy interventions such as vaccine certification, the purpose has been to increase the level of vaccination within the population because it is a compelling protection against the virus. I can assure Mr Fraser that those messages will be communicated—what has been communicated by ministers—and will be communicated by ministers. However, if I can give my reflections on this, some of the endless speculation about these matters muddies the waters. It has been pretty crystal clear for a long time that vaccination was a critical issue as an obstacle to the circulation of the virus. When we go through all those different issues about extra bits of data, it is almost trying to leave the public thinking that there is something that they are missing about this data or that the Government is missing about this data. However, it is crystal clear that, if you get vaccinated, you have more protection against Covid. Alex Rowley, can we please move to you? I would re-emphasise the point that Murdo makes. I think that it is important that if we have information that demonstrates that you are much better protected and those ending up in hospital are those not vaccinated, then it is important that we share that information. The latest figures that we have on vaccination focus on two areas. One is that our advisers have pointed out to us that, in terms of the uptake of the booster, there is a tendency that it goes up with age. However, when you reach the eight to plus, there is a dip. There seems to be a dip in the over-80s getting the booster. One of the reasons for that may well be that many of those people are housebound. However, one, what do you think of that? Two, what are you going to do about it? Likewise, in the SPICE document that we have, it shows that the uptake of the booster is good across the country generally, but particularly poorer in the cities. We Glasgow at 52.6 per cent, Edinburgh at 59 per cent, you have the islands up in the 80s, you have Fife in the 70s, so there seems to be an issue with take-up. Do you acknowledge that? What are you doing about it? Obviously, there is a huge amount of effort that is put into securing the take-up of vaccination and boosters. I am just checking. I do not have in front of me the breakdown in the over-70s category, but over-70s? The group over the over-70s has 95 per cent got boosters, so it is a very, very... Over-80s, Deputy First Minister, there is that. I will look at those figures specifically, but we have got to have a sense of context here that there is a very, very high level of vaccination undertaken at that level. We obviously take a range of steps, whether it is about the prioritisation of care homes for the delivery of the vaccination programme. Again, at the outset of the approach to this, there was a bit of criticism of the Scottish Government that we were not moving as fast as there were now, but we were doing the painstaking work of doing the care homes to make sure that people were well vaccinated within our care homes. I think that that level has been very high. Equally, we have got to make sure that people who are housebound are vaccinated. From my constituency experience, I think that I certainly dealt with a number of cases where it was perhaps slower than people would have liked for housebound vaccinations to be undertaken, but my recent case law would indicate that that is a substantially enhanced position. I agree with Mr Rowley on the importance of vaccination, but we have got to keep a sense of perspective about that. We have very, very high levels of vaccination in those age groups. I might ask Neave O'Connor if she wants to add anything to what I have said or Professor Leitch for that matter. Not on vaccinations, Professor Leitch has the request to speak in the chat box, Deputy First Minister. Only to give the data, Deputy First Minister. Mr Rowley, your premise is correct. I would give some reasons for that. The 70 to 74 is 96 per cent, the 74 to 79 is 98 per cent and the over 80s is 92 per cent. Those numbers are astonishing when you compare them globally and across the UK. The over 80s group is slightly more complex than thinking that it is one homogenous group. Forgive the short hand again, there is quite a lot of end-of-life care in that over 80s group who you would not vaccinate. Quite a lot of people in that group proportionately who you would not vaccinate for a number of healthcare reasons, but you are right. If some of that group is because we have not reached them, then we should do everything we can to do so. I have colleagues all over the country working to do precisely that. My inbox has not got almost any cases of over 80-year-olds waiting to be vaccinated. I am relatively confident that the health boards have found all those people and have boosted all those people. Care homes are done, most home visits are done, but if you have individual cases, of course, we will be happy to do it. Do not rely entirely on the percentages, because there is good reason, particularly as you get very old near the end of your life, when you perhaps would not have your booster vaccine. What about the cities? No one is picked up on that point. As I say, last go, 52 per cent have had their vaccination. Edinburgh is a bit higher, around 59 per cent. There seems to be a problem in the cities compared to Fife, which is well over 70 per cent. As I say, the islands are over 80 per cent. Is there a problem with the cities and people not getting the booster? Obviously, the data will vary from area to area. What I am absolutely satisfied about is that the Government and health boards have put in place adequate opportunities for individuals to secure the booster jag. The level of performance has been very high. We have had a surplus capacity, so there has been absolutely no difficulty about people getting appointments. There will obviously be, in some circumstances, a time lag that if individuals were slower in coming forward for their first and second doses, they would be delayed in getting their booster dose because of the time limits that have to be applied. We are not at the end of the booster programme by any stretch of the imagination. That is continuing on an on-going basis to vaccinate people with the appropriate gap—the 12-week gap—from the second dose to the booster dose. The best way to explain that is that we are still in a work-in-progress on the booster vaccination programme, and I would expect that the rates of coverage to increase. We have to continue to intensify the message. One of the points that concerns me a little bit is that, if there is a sense that Omicron is a less acute variant, that might suggest to people that I do not need to go forward to get my vaccination, but, as Professor Leitch has just explained, there is an absolute necessity for individuals to have the booster vaccination because that will give them a level of protection that is absolutely critical in dealing with the virus. The Government's messages will remain resolute about the importance of rolling out that booster vaccination programme in all circumstances and in all geographies. Finally, on that point, given that the vaccination in the cities is so low, is that, given the Government's concern and the specific actions that you are proposing or are you just letting it run and seeing if the update comes? Obviously, we are tackling it because we have the capacity available within cities to enable people to be vaccinated. We have got headline messaging and marketing, which is encouraging people to undertake the vaccination. There have been very focused communications issued to individuals around where they have not had a booster vaccination, where we have been communicating with them directly to encourage them to do so, and the capacity will be maintained to ensure that we have opportunities for vaccination available for individuals. Given the point that I just made about the fact that there may be time gaps between the moments at which people have been vaccinated, I assume, Mr Rowley, that the Government intends to maintain the messaging, the communications and the approaches to individuals, and we will maintain the capacity to ensure that we can deliver the vaccination programme. Thank you, convener, and welcome to the committee and to the panel. I am very happy that you are here today. I hope that you all are in a nice break. I would like to go back to both Murdo Fraser's and Alec Rowley's point about emphasising the point about the numbers of people who have not been vaccinated who have landed up in hospital with real illness. That is a message that we have to continually get out of. One of the things that I am confused about is why there is, and I think that Jason Leitch touched on it, emphasis on whether people are in hospital because of Covid or with Covid. I struggle to see where the differentiation is. We have just had a clinician give us some private advice that she is having the position where people will go in, particularly when the patient will go in, with a condition, to discover that they have Covid, but it is not until she gets to know them better and studies them that she realises that Covid is hampering their recovery. We also have the position where people who are in hospital with Covid, whether it is affecting them or not, will still go through the process of being isolated and everything else. I really like the messaging to get away from whether people are in hospital with Covid or because of Covid, because it really does muddy the message and it muddies the waters for us. Could you answer how we get over that position? I think that I am in a slightly difficult position to do that, because I am not the one making the big song and dance about that particular data. The Government has to respond to demands for information. Mr Fraser set out to the committee this morning that he has been demanding this information for some considerable time. The Government has an obligation to address issues raised by members of Parliament. Ministers have made it pretty clear that we rather take the view that you have expressed that we do not think that there is particularly a particular significance in the difference between the cause of or with. We have a massive Covid challenge in our healthcare system and the more we can do to tackle the prevalence of Covid, the more we will relieve that pressure on our healthcare system. The Government's messages have been absolutely crystal clear about the dangers of Covid. We have been ensuring that there has been understanding of the severity of Covid, whether it is Omicron or not, because we cannot have a relaxed attitude prevailing that somehow Omicron is not a big threat.  We have to get that across to people, which is why the Government has been taking the strong action that it has taken to protect the public. We are not in control of all the questions that we get asked, but we certainly are in control of the key messages about the importance of tackling Covid and ensuring that people in whatever circumstance they find themselves. In Mr Bailey's points about the advice from your clinician that is absolutely correct, if somebody has an underlying condition and they also have Covid, their ability to deal with their underlying condition will be severely compromised by the presence of Covid, and we know that very clearly from the clinical advice that we have had. Will Jason Leitch confirm that later point? Yes, I am going to argue against myself slightly here in defence of the data. There are two categories of people who are slightly different from that group, but they still require infection prevention control and it will still complicate their recovery. That is very straightforward admissions, so let's say a 24-year-old with no underlying condition breaks their ankle on the ice and comes in three days in tests positive for Covid. That will still affect their recovery, could severely affect their recovery and the hospital will still need to behave differently, and those who unfortunately still get nosocomial spread of Covid, so those in hospital who perhaps catch Covid in hospital or in an institution, which is still possible, much, much lower than it's ever been but still possible. Those two groups, you could argue if you kind of squint that you would want to know those two groups separately, but in reality you're still going to treat them for the disease and you're going to be complicating their recovery because of Covid. Okay, I'm very conscious of the fact that we're out of time, but my concern is that messaging is absolutely vital and I really cannot see why we're worrying about whether people are in because of or with Covid. Given the fact that we've only got a 50 per cent uptake in cities of the booster, we need to keep the messaging strong that we've got to get the boosters out there. Siobhan, thank you very much. Thank you, Mr Fairlie. Can I bring in Brian Whittle? Thank you. Good morning and colleagues there. I want to return to the question of data, really. A couple of points. One is around data collection of non-Covid-related issues. I've had a constituent or friend of mine who has unfortunately been diagnosed with stage 3 pancreatic cancer with complications but waited six months to get that test. In terms of data, are we collecting the right data here with regards to the stage at which people are now being diagnosed with the likes of cancer compared to pre-Covid and are we collecting data on how many people are being diagnosed with those kinds of conditions? I presume that Professor Leitch would be the best person to answer that question. If you were just before I come to Professor Leitch, it is absolutely critical that our healthcare system is able to meet the needs of all individuals, regardless of the health condition that they are facing, and recognise the necessity of interventions where they are appropriate. That is one of the arguments why we have to manage and suppress the prevalence of Covid, because the more Covid cases that are in our hospitals, the less space there is for other conditions to be addressed. That has been a central argument that ministers have set out to the committee and to the Parliament and to the public in the steps that we have taken to take what I think is appropriate and proportionate action to tackle Covid, so that our health service is able to meet the needs of all constituents, such as the individual that Mr Whittle has raised in his question, and to do that timuously, although we also deal with the pressures that come from Covid. Those are fundamental questions about the capacity of the health service. I invite Professor Leitch to give some more detail. I agree wholeheartedly with the Deputy First Minister that whatever the answer to your question is, the answer to the problem is to reduce Covid infections, which consequently will reduce pressure on hospitals and allow us to treat more cancer bluntly. Globally, cancer is presenting later. There is no doubt about that for two principal reasons. One is that people were staying away because they were either told to stay away or worried about coming to hospitals everywhere in the world, so Scotland is not immune to that. Secondly, because of capacity issues, most cancer patients do not have cancer on their referral letter. Most cancer patients are found because of some other symptom with which they are sent to a hospital. Subsequently, after tests and a number of visits, they are discovered to have cancer. Some of those people are on waiting lists, waiting lists in Cardiff and waiting lists in Edinburgh. We have to get to them. The way to get to them is to relieve the pressure on the health service. Most of the data that I have seen around the world suggests that the late presentation of cancer is becoming more common. I do not know exactly what that looks like in Scotland, and we will not know until we audit it over time. However, I would not be remotely surprised if that is the case. The way to fix that is to reduce Covid care and therefore increase cancer care. I think that my point here is totally understandable that we have a capacity issue, and we have only so many people who can work within our health service at the moment, and that Covid has such a significant impact on that. I think that my point is around the collection of that data and the potential issues that might be coming down the line. In our last private session, we had a sort of expert condition suggesting that we are going to do an investigation into non-Covid-related conditions. The adequate data is not being collected to make the decisions that need to be made. I think that that is really the point that I wanted to make here, is that the collection of that data is so crucial and pointing to the potential future issues that we have. Who would like to speak to that? Those are absolutely legitimate points that Mr Pyttle raises. It does come back to some of the points that I made in my earlier answer, but we must ensure that the needs of the population are met by the national health service. That is the fundamental founding commitment of the national health service, free at the point of need when individuals are in that need. Covid poses a threat to that, because it takes up capacity within our hospitals. There are over 1,500 patients in hospital with Covid at this present moment. That is 1,500 beds that could be used for other purposes if Covid was not a problem for us. The more we can get on top of Covid, the more we can reduce the circulation of the virus for the better, because it creates the space for patients such as the people on whose behalf Mr Pyttle argues today and for that matter, is argued consistently for some considerable time. The Government has tried to take all the necessary steps to sustain the engagement of critical services that have a life-threatening impact on individuals. We have worked very hard, clinicians have worked hard, health services have worked hard to sustain cancer services. Obviously, on acute presentations of life-threatening conditions, the health service is there to meet the needs. That is why we look carefully at the numbers in ICU with Covid, because we have to have space in ICU for the people who are coming in because of heart attacks or brain hemorrhages or whatever it happens to be. Mr Pyttle is right to raise those issues. I want to assure him and the public that the Government, in its management of Covid, very much has the patient group that Mr Pyttle raised with me this morning very much a link to ensure that their interests are protected. I want to give one final point. I know a lot of our data, especially initially pointed to the fact that the morbidity from Covid came in tandem with high levels of obesity, high levels of diabetes and other comorbidity issues, even some of the cancers. If we want to treat Covid, it highlights to me that we have to look at the health in a much more holistic way. Does it not point to the fact that we need to look at our healthcare service in a more preventative manner that, in long term, we need to do more to tackle the poor health of the nation? Yes. In whatever circumstance we look at, the Government accepts the argument. We have accepted it for many years and we have taken a number of steps to try to address it. I noticed some of the data and detail that is available on the challenges that individuals will face as a consequence of Covid will be made worse by other weaknesses in their health and fitness. Mr Whittle makes a strong argument that the Government accepts for people to pursue a healthy living approach. Many of our public messages are supportive of that approach, to encourage people to exercise, to look after their health, to take preventative action, to make sure that they are in the strongest possible position to be able to withstand the effects of conditions such as Covid, or, for that matter, some other challenging health conditions that they will face in our society. The emphasis on preventative interventions is a core part of the Government's health strategy and will remain so in the future. I thank you, convener. Thank you, Mr Whittle. Can I bring in John Mason, please? Thank you very much, convener. A few weeks ago, the numbers in hospital were under 500, and on Tuesday I think there were 14.79 and then yesterday there were 15.37. So they are still rising, and for me that is the key figure that I have been watching day by day. When they are still rising, is it not too early to be relaxing some of the restrictions, such as those huge crowds at football and rugby? It is a very careful judgment, convener, that has to be established here. I think that Mr Mason puts a fair and challenging point to me. The situation that we have to consider is a balance of considerations around a number of factors, around the prevalence of the virus, the presence of hospital cases, the pressures on intensive care and a variety of other social and economic indicators, not least of which the wider wellbeing of the population and the ability to sustain restrictions and the impact that that may have on the mental and economic wellbeing of individuals. There is a careful balance to be struck here. I hope that Mr Mason would accept from the explanation that the First Minister gave on Tuesday and the explanation that I have given today that the Government, although hopeful, continues to take a cautious course in the relaxation of restrictions. We are taking a phased approach. I have dealt with a range of broadcast media in the course of this week where I have been dealing with criticism of the Government that we did not go further in the relaxation of measures that we went on Tuesday. Those criticisms have been strongly expressed by a number of sectors, but I would essentially say that Mr Mason puts the counterpoint to me that he is going as fast as he is going. It is a not unreasonable point. There is a careful balance to be struck. We judge that the larger events such as in outdoor football stadiums, where vaccine certification and lateral flow device testing is required, at least 50 per cent of the crowds, is a reasonable first step in the relaxation of the restrictions to enable some of those events to take their course. Whilst we consider whether, with the benefit of another week of data, we can see a wider improvement in the situation that allows us to relax measures further. However, I acknowledge that it is a careful balance, and it is one of the Government's wrestlers with a great deal of consideration. I take the point about balance, and I suspect that you might be going to give me a similar answer to my next question, which would be about isolation. We were at 10 days, we are now at seven, and the United States is at five. How are we getting the balance and what is the thinking about exactly how long that should be? That is the balance question again. I am going to invite Professor Leitch in a moment to give some detail about the clinical justification, because we need to hear that. Ministers have heard that, and we have come to conclusions about that. However, I think that there is an important perspective here that has to be borne in mind. It really goes back to, I suppose, many of the questions that we have wrestled with as ministers, which I shared with the committee on a number of occasions around the Four Harms framework, that there are multiple harms created as a consequence of Covid. Loss of economic wellbeing is one of them. Loss of social interaction is another. Ministers have to be conscious of those factors when we take decisions around questions such as self-isolation. We have been criticised for taking so long to relax the self-isolation rules. I think that we took an appropriate amount of time to make those judgments within the context of the arrangements and the policy approach that we have taken to managing the pandemic. That will be an important point in the judgments that we have to apply in the future. I invite Professor Leitch to add some remarks to what I have said in relation to the clinical explanation on the relaxation of self-isolation requirements. It is a balance, Mr Mason. We did go from 14 to 10, if you remember. That is as we learn more about the virus, and it is as we learn more about the risk of the virus in your position that you have, not only in the state of your pandemic, so the number of cases that you have, but also the science that you have available to you. We would not have gone from 10 to 7 without testing, for example. The UK HSA, who is the real boffent here who does the risk adjustment for us, roughly said that 10 days with no testing is about the same risk as 7 days with two tests. That was a relatively straightforward piece of clinical advice to politicians to say that it is not exact, of course, because there are confidence intervals in the statistics, but, roughly speaking, moving from 10 days with no tests to 7 days with two tests was about the same risk that you were taking. What we now need to know is that France and the US have gone to five days with testing, so we need to know what is the risk percentage that you would be taking of release of infected cases on day five. In reality, what the US and France have done has been a little bit misunderstood. What they are doing is actually five days of isolation release on day six, which is only one day less than us. Actually, the headline is not quite right, so in France or America you would test and get released on day six. We test now and release on day seven if both your tests are negative. We do not yet know what that percentage risk would be, and that clearly changes if you have 15,000 cases or 150 cases. If you have 150 cases in your community, your risk can be higher. You can take more risk, because you are less likely to meet positive cases. If you have 15,000 cases, your risk is higher, so it is not only a matter of the percentage risk that you will be taking by release, but it is also the number of people that you have in your community who are positive. We will take that UK HSA advice, as will the other three UK countries. We will adapt it for our date of our pandemic and we will give appropriate advice. My instinct right now is that we have only just moved from 10 to 7. We need to let that work through in the real world, because the theory is one thing. People actually doing lateral flow tests in houses with kids running around their legs and pets and everything else does not really work like it works in the laboratory, so we need to see what happens with 10 to 7 before we would give advice about 7 to what would effectively be 6. Thanks very much for that. My next point would be concerning vaccine passports. We heard a lot about them in September, especially, and there was a lot of discussion around them, but we might not have heard so much about them recently. However, the suggestion is that we might have greater use of them in the next few weeks. If there is a vaccine passport, a negative test will be accepted. I say that a vaccine passport, I realise that the correct term is certificate. Will there also be a negative test that will be accepted? The cabinet will consider the steps that we take on any future expansion of the vaccine certification scheme. The vaccination certification scheme works well. I failed to understand what the fuss is about it. I think that it is a completely reasonable request for us to make. The arrangements are in place, and it functions well. As I indicated in my response to oral questions in Parliament yesterday, where you have a system involving over 10 million individual vaccinations, there is bound to be teeding issues on certain vaccine certificates. I have made it clear that ministers will help to resolve any issues. Indeed, I had an email last night from a gentleman who is not a constituent of mine looking for my help to solve a vaccination certification issue, and that is under way this morning. We will resolve those minor issues when they arise, but the vaccination certification scheme works perfectly well. The cabinet will consider any future expansion in our discussions on Tuesday. We have put in place steps that enable negative lateral flow device tests to be an alternative to vaccination certification. That would remain an option for us to take forward in any future expansion, and the Government will consider that. The committee's next meeting will be on 20 January, when we will take evidence from the Deputy First Minister and Cabinet Secretary for Covid Recovery again. That concludes the public part of our meeting this morning. I suspend the meeting to allow the witnesses to leave and members to move on to MS Teams, and I move the meeting into private.


All right, also an early bird special, if you're one of the first 20 who picked up spots here, there's the early bird list, there you go, from Marty down to Martin. Then you have a shot at an extra spot, so let's do that right now, different dice roll than the other randomizer, 10 times, name on top after 10, extra spot, 1, 4, 10th and final time, after 10, Scott, there you go, Scott thanks for being an early bird, you have caught the worm, there you go, now we can put all of your names and teams into that tab right there, good luck, let's roll it, randomize it, 5-5, 10 the hard way, different kind of 10, 1, 2, and 10th and final time, after 10 we got Tim Tyler down to Scott, Scott's regular spot, 5-5, hard 10 for the teams, 1, 2, 7, 8, 9 and 10th and final time, after 10 we got the, my rivals, the Celtics down to the Mavs, or I think are down to the Clippers at the moment, at the half, all right, so Tim you have the Celtics, Mike with the Cavs, Marty with the Knicks, Thomas with the Clips, Scott with your early bird spot, the Pelicans, this is 2019, 2020, right, that's pretty nice, Rich with the Trailblazers, Matthew with the Spurs, Andrew with the Magic, Ryan with the Hawks, Tony with the Bucks, Anthony with the Warriors, Brandon with the Kings, Marty with the Wizards, Steve with the Nets, Tang with the Sons, Ria with the Sixers, Martin with the Pacers, Anthony with the Bulls, Natalie with the Pistons, David with the Jazz, Martin with the Hornets, Edgar with the Rockets, Mark with the Thunder, Rich, Last Spot, Mojo, Nuggets, Martin with the Gris, Chris with the Lakers, you got my Lakers, Martin with the Timberwolves, Matthew Shear with the Heat, David with the Raptors and Scott with the Dallas Mavericks, now just kind of a, until further, could change without notice, but as of now we are still shipping Luca Dodgecic's second year, Vet Commons, we're sending, I guess if there is Cavs LeBron, we'd send it, but it's most likely gonna be Lakers LeBron here, Chris Miller, those will still ship and Yanis base, Vet Commons will still ship as well. Alright, I'm gonna pause the video, when we come back we'll see if there's any trades, I think Bulls are up for trade, so anybody wants to make a play for Kobe White's maybe, so when we come back we'll see if there's any trades and then the break, stick around. Alright, welcome back everybody, a little bit of trade chatter, but no deals were done at the end of the day, all good, thanks for hanging with me on a Friday, there you go, two box, fat pack version, pick your team number seven, so you've been seeing us do some of these individual packs as like filler breaks, mini breaks, but this time we're just doing all 12 packs in this box right here, times two, that should be pretty fun, a lot of fun stuff in here as well, so good luck everybody. We're at half time, boys and girls, Mavs and Clippers are at the half, do I have, what's the score here? Clippers up 68 to 54, looks like the earlier today the Raptors are cruising, they beat the Brooklyn Nets 117 to 92 to take a commanding 3-0 lead in the series. This Utah Nugget series seems to be going back and forth a little bit, Utah, I think last game Denver looked really good, or no, maybe game one Denver looked really good, anyway, even though Don and Mitchell scored a bunch of points, but now Utah has taken a couple games and they beat the Nugget say 124 to 87, ouch, then Boston looked good today too, they beat the Sixers 102 to 94, taking a 3-0 lead, looks like Sweepsville for Toronto and Boston, I don't think the Sixers are going to win a game, I don't think Brooklyn is going to win another game, what does Philadelphia do? That team looks so good on paper, I remember in the off-season last summer when we were breaking and talking basketball during the baseball, you know we were talking off-season basketball and people were like well they got Al Horford, look at that length, that defense from Al Horford, look at Tobias Harris, the length and shooting a bit from Tobias said look how big Ben Simmons is, look at Joe L&B, it's healthy, dot dot dot, you know, even their draft picks were pretty solid too, but then the season was a little weird, right, they were winning home games, a bunch of home games, these are considered veteran comments by the way the Chronicles cards, those are the ones that most likely will not shit everything else would, all those inserts will shit, there's just a lot going on here, but it's Kendrick Nunn for the Heat, that will be for Matthew Sheeran, but then you know Sixers started struggling on the road, they couldn't win road games, they really struggled on the road, and then Ben Simmons got injured, that wasn't good, so it got kind of strange, I think these copper ones are exclusive to the, yeah the bronze is what they're called, the bronze ones are exclusive to that, nice Zion right there, so that bronze Terrence Davis will go to Toronto, David with that one, Lebron James Lakers will go to Chris Miller, and the Zion Williamson Palakins, that's going to go to Scott who got the Palakins with the Early Birds file, good things can happen if you're an early bird laser drone, here's Terrence Davis, those are the Prism updates, okay so a lot going on here, we got a, we got a Kendrick Nunn for the Heat, Matthew Sheeran, there's John Morant, Grizzlies, Martin, McSub, there you go, got Randomized the Grizz, you'll get all the John Morant cards, there's Giannis, there's Kobe White for the Bulls, Anthony, and Luca Doncic, how's Luca Doncic doing, let's pop a box core open here, Doncic has 11 points, four rebounds, seven assists, these Prism are update cards, these tend to be, carry a little extra weight in these breaks, Raptors, David, Phoenix, Zion, nice, thanks Matt, yeah I don't, I don't make that call, but as long as you, you shoot us an email, I'm sure that'll get to work through its channels, appreciate you looking out, there's Goga, Bronze, John Morant, Luminance, I'll save those Lucas though, so I again, I forget, was it you, David Downer, are you listening, I don't know if it was him that told me this, I feel like someone told me that, because I was like commenting when we first were doing these hobby breaks too, I was like man, what a dunk, you know, like a poster Kevin Love, and someone was like no, you know what Joe, I'm pretty sure that, that he missed that dunk, like it looks so good, but the, the lulls was that he totally just missed it, right, hit the back of the rim or something like that, there's Kendrick Nunn, someone told me that, so I appreciate that, someone that, that still tickles me to this day, to this day, I crack up, and there's John Morant right there in the playoff, playbook, five, yeah that might, that Luminance card might be John Morant's best looking card, right, great shot there, Crusade, Giannis, looks good, look at that, this shot of Zion, you know what this looks like, that he just bounced off of a, like a, like a bounce house or something, like he's like boing, doesn't look like that, that goes to the Pelicans, that'll be for Scott, that bronze, that might be a bronze John Morant, kind of hard to tell in this lighting, but there you go, John Morant, Hachimura, some Giannis, all sorts of stuff, now I saw that, Patrick, and they still won, so that's, that's a, that's a pretty good sign for the Celtics, save some Kendrick Nunn's, his value can, can go up just due to the playoffs, I think this is bronze, right, you can kind of see the bronze P right there, it's prestige, I think, I'm not sure what this design is, Pantheon maybe, there are bronze right there, here's another guy that can significantly increase his stock throughout the course of the playoffs, I'm good, thank you though, and Daniel Gaffer for the bulls should be bronze, I think, from my eye, and there's the Threads Zion, and a Phoenix John Morant, I think these look really cool, bronze, and the rare autograph in this, that's Chris Clemens, apprentice Otto, coming into focus right there, Rockets, a slightly thicker top loader here, all right, that'll be for Edgar in Houston, and don't sleep on RJ Barrett, I know I've been, I haven't been grabbing all of his cards, but still, he's still got some, some upside, he's a good Biolo candidate, I want to say, so rookie Darius Basely has been doing some work for OKC, these Flux cards, I feel like people have been telling me, they've been selling a little bit better than all the other designs, other brands, so that Tyler Hero will go to Matthew Shearer and the Heat, all right, that was first box, second box, we have another two boxes in the store, if you want to keep running this back tonight, we can, oh was that a little tried to trade, couldn't trade mojo Edgar saying, Chris Clemens could have been someone's, a little more difficult than the other ones, pull it away from the corners, Trevor is saying going to be funny when the undrafted rookie TD gets a national title with the Raptors, the Raptors going to win it again, oh, Terence Davis, so if it's unlikely the Philadelphia Sixers, 76ers of the Brooklyn Nets are going to come back from the 3-0 deficit, so it's going to be, this is going to be a good series, I think, Boston and Toronto facing off against each other, I don't think there's like huge, are there huge mismatches there, no, I feel like both teams have some pretty talented players, one through five, Tatum can obviously take over any game, but I think that'll be a fun series, Kobe White was playing great basketball leading up to the pause, unfortunately they were not in the playoffs, so you can get a lot of receding attention, but he's going to be a great ball player, there's John Morant, another one for the Gris, that'll be for Martin, Trevor saying Toronto's bench held up at the beginning of the season with Hathor Starr, and then Terence Davis led all rookies in February, are you saying buy low on Terence Davis, I think that's what I'm hearing, all right there's the score version of John Morant which I think, right there it says look for the exclusive score insert, we don't see a lot of score inserts, so nice, that's a special insert right there for the Grisly, it's Martin with the Gris, so good, Donchage misfires on a three, I think did he just get his own rebound, I think bounce off the backboard, drove into the top of the key, gets his own rebound, drives in a couple steps, makes a couple moves and hits a basket, it's so good, and I feel like he still has like a, he's only like what 20 maybe, how old is he, 21 maybe, like I feel like he still has like some baby fat to like, I feel like he still needs like, he still has like man body that he can still develop into, and then what does the league do then, if Porzingis stays healthy, I feel like Porzingis isn't even playing at prime Porzingis levels, a couple pieces here and there, Dallas could be a very scary team, is Lonzo, Rex is asking Lonzo gonna be on the pelicans next year, I think so, I don't think I've heard any rumblings about them getting rid of him, I don't know if anybody really is gonna trade for him, you know, like not that he's a bad player, he's got some upside, but but not enough to trade a significant amount for, I think the pelicans will just end up keeping him at that point, unless they're like, they get some sort of godfather offer, here's another scorecard right here, Zion this time, it's for Scott, pelicans, nice, nice jammer and great photo right here, like we discussed earlier, so Bryce is saying, yeah, Luca's young, like Soto, like 21, right, yeah, not old at all, you have a Lonzo prism green emergent, I was wondering if I should, something you should hold on to, I don't think it would hurt to hold on to it, I mean we did give away that Lonzo, you know, didn't we give away that Lonzo like prism autograph that was graded really nicely, that still was almost a thousand dollars, I think there's still some, I don't know, look it up, but it's like 50-50, it could go either way, you know, he may just need the right coach or a good system to really to really put him into a position to succeed, in my opinion, he's got to work on that outside shot, a jump shot, he's got to work on that, you know, there's some things he needs to work on, but his court vision is just unparalleled, like he passes the ball incredibly well, you know, so he's just a really smart basketball player, but you know, there's more to the game than just slick passing, score, bowl, bowl, Rich Schmidt, I mean if they're only going for 10 dollars, I mean I think it'd be worth holding on to, if he sucks, like you, what, values, values, it's going to drop to a dollar, that's not, that's not the end of the world, at best, it's, I mean it's an insert, I guess, but even with an insert, if you can eventually sell it for 40-50 bucks, that's a good return, I know it almost might be, it might not be worth your time, Rex, to sell a $10 card, if you add up, you know, what you're worth, your time, your money, another Luca right there, oh no, Luca, get up, oh he's grabbing that right ankle, you can't see it, that right ankle right there, no, he's limping off the court, no Luca, not putting weight on it, and he's, he like, hopped on one leg to the, oh no, wait, I missed it, he, I think he's going to, it looked worse than it, but everyone, I think everyone's rolled their ankle like that before, he was walking, he was coming up to block a shot, the knee inadvertently of the other guy hit his knee, and then his, you know how when you're, when you're like jogging or something like that, and you, you hit like a crack in your ankle, kind of turns in like that, right, that's what happened to him, now sometimes I'm jogging, I'm running around, and I do that, and it hurts like hell, but like, you know, it's fine the next day, you know what I mean, one of those, but then I've heard, you know, I've had friends who were running, and hit like a crack or a, you know, one of those sycamore seeds or something like that, twist and then just destroy ligaments. Have I just missed the score cards previously, or am I just, are, have they, there's just been more, I might be my bad folks, I feel like we're, we're seeing an inordinate amount of these score cards, all right, let's get Gogo back into focus, there he is, Pacers, Martin, those would chip anyway, but they are exclusive, they are exclusive to this set, there's Bronze, Kevin Porter Jr. for the Cavs, Tyler Hiro, Pianis, Kendrick, Donchich, get well soon, Donchich, get well now, Tyler Hiro, Bronze, AD, Prism Update, okay, so Bryce is saying you've all, you've seen more score than you would normally expect, I feel like I must have missed some in some previous breaks, even though they'll ship, but there's a Tyler Hiro one too, I feel like there's more than, more than what I've normally seen. Also, Trevor was talking about Terrence Davis area, Terrence Davis rookie card, what's that one of those aside, Kobe White, Matisse Tybal Bronze, I mean, so you're gonna get swept, you may as well just put Matisse Tybal out there for, for, you know, 40 minutes and see what you got with him, he's pretty good, yeah I know, we were watching the game, we saw it all unfold, as I get up Luca, and last but not least is a Bronze Threads Zion, for Scott, we've got the Pelicans in the, got the Pelicans with the early bird spot, so awesome, and there you go ladies and gentlemen, that was two box, Fat Pack, pick your team number seven from jaskiescasebrace.com, the always excellent 2019-2020 Panini Chronicles basketball, another two boxes in the story, come on check it out, I'm Joe, I'll see you next time for the next break, bye bye.


Welcome everyone, thank you for joining us. Come on in, there's some additional empty seats. Well, a few of them, although they're going. Are these reserved for somebody, or are they for us allegedly? What does that say? There's a few more seats, if you wander up this direction, is it good? Okay, we got reserved, there's one here. We got a lot of friendly people here at KubeCon. So make some friends, you got empty seats there, maybe raise your hand if you got an empty seat next to you, and you're interested to meet a new KubeConner. But we got tons of them up here. Come on in, make room. We're gonna talk about CERN and what they've done with the operator framework to make their lives easier. I am Michael from Red Hat. This is Varsha, we're operator framework contributors and maintainers over various times. We also have here with us Francisco and Rajula, their SREs at CERN. And we're going to talk about how we came together, their operator they created caught our eye. So they're gonna introduce what they've done. We'll discuss a bit amongst ourselves some observations about what they've done, their experience. We'll have some discussion over here and then invite you to ask your questions and join in that discussion in the latter portion of this. So thank you again for coming and Rajula, please take it away. It's just a great bit of intro about CERN. So we're the Center for European Nuclear Research. We are the world's largest and the biggest particle accelerator. This is one of the accelerators where we collide subatomic particles. This is called ATLAS. Just to give you a bit of glimpse, this weighs around 7,000 tons, which is equal to the weight of the IFIL tire. This is the collider. So it's an LHC, it's around 27 kilometers in diameter. And you see the Geneva Lake and the Swiss Alps in the background. And it's not just physics, what we do. So CERN is also a place where the World Wide Bed was invented and we actually do a bit more than just that. So we have a lot of member states around the world and the main source of collaboration and communication happens through websites. So we host a lot of websites. So we specifically come from the team where we host publicly available websites like home.CERN and ATLAS.CERN. So just a quick glimpse of our infrastructure. So we manage content management systems. Basically, it's Drupal instances. So the users basically can create, update, and delete without a lot of technical knowledge. And we want each of these instances to have a life cycle to be autonomous and isolated. And we also want to enforce all the dependent resources. And at the same instances should also be integrated with CERN specific stuff, like SSO, databases, and backups. So why operators? The first reason would be time saving because we wanted to create and delete sites on the fly. So at this point, we have around 1,600 websites, of them 800 or 900 production websites. So we create previews and test sites on the fly. And standardization. So we wanted to reduce inconsistencies and errors with manual creations. So with operator, we have a standard of configuration. And the flavor of quality of service. And scalability. We want to scale up. So there's a new version of Drupal. And we can just, want to create a preview for all the production websites. We can just double the number of sites. And we have quite a large number of instances, like I mentioned. And access control. So we also want to have a fine-grained access control of what the users can do, what they can access on the site. And self-healing, of course. So if someone deletes some of the resources, the operator should be able to heal everything back and bring everything back to normal. This is a user portal that we have for the interface through the operator. So most of our users are non-technical users. So they use this interface. They just mention the URL they want and the version they want. And this translates to a custom resource definition, which is basically just basic stuff. It just spins up a site with a database, with integration with SSO and everything else. Is the operator publicly available? So a lot of stuff is done specific in our operator right now. We use a lot of our internal databases. We integrate with our own SSO. And we assume that we retrieve images and push images to our own image registry. And we also assume our own GitLab instance. So it's technically not open source, but it was a consequence of our design because of the academic environment. The code is publicly available. Yet there are a lot of integrations that are coupled with the operator. So I'll hand over to Michael. Great, well thank you for that introduction. So we've seen a little bit about what they've done. And so now Varsha and I have had some discussions with Francisco and Rizula. We've looked through their code. And one of the things that really caught our eye and really led to this collaboration and this analysis that we're doing together here is just the fact that they've created an operator as real end users. They are the human operators themselves. We see a lot of discussion and a lot of attention given toward, it's perfectly reasonable, like often vendors creating an operator to install their software for their customers and their end users. But much of the operator pattern really shines when it is the SREs, the operators themselves, creating the Kubernetes operator to help them. And these guys even referred to this operator. It's two of them maintaining this incredible number of websites and it's infrastructure around it. The operator is the third member of their team and the only one who's working today. So that's really neat. And it's fascinating I think to get that perspective and that view on what it is like, what's the experience it's been like to develop and create an operator. So one of the things that for me in particular caught my eye is the multi-tenant aspect and the self-service aspect of this. So just for a brief moment on multi-tenancy, what this means to us is we have multiple users or groups of users, we would call tenants, sharing some pool of resources. Probably most of us use like an email service and a calendar service and some kind of office document product that's delivered to us over the internet as a service, those are all multi-tenant back end kinds of systems. Tenants have discrete data that needs to stay separate from each other. So my email is separate from your email, separate from somebody else's email and we depend on the services to keep those things separate. There's a common characteristic of delivering software as a service or in this case, some kind of a software in a self-service fashion. And we can write applications natively to handle that separation, but many vendors and software producers have older school or existing software that a single tenant, something like Drupal or WordPress or some other kind of web application like that or maybe something very domain specific. Maybe it's an accounting software. I'm from the US so taxes are on my mind right now. We just had that day go by. So if you have a single tenant web application or some service like that, you can still offer it in a self-service way in perhaps even a software as a service subscription kind of way by using Kubernetes namespaces. And that is what namespace level tenancy is. Every tenant that you have gets a unique namespace in a Kubernetes cluster and we just deploy a copy of the application for them in that space. It may include a data store that's unique to them. It may not. Maybe there's a shared database management service that's external or in some ways joined. But one way or another, we're enforcing that isolation with namespaces. This gives us a pretty easy on ramp and an easy path to delivering a single tenant application potentially in a self-service or even a SaaS model. And that's what they've done here. So I think it's a really interesting example of that. Now I'll hand it off to Varsha. Coming on to the next observable part. We all know operators handle a lot of complex applications and there are a lot of moving parts too. Now having metrics alerts and visualization is an important aspect and they constitute what is known as operator observability. Now collecting metrics helps us in providing a deeper insight about what an operator does and how is it behaving, whether it's behaving as expected. And having alerts helps SREs in cluster admins to make sure that cases do not turn to be critical so that we don't have to wake up in the night. And visualization helps us in getting a better understanding of these complex moving parts. Now some of the key reasons why operator observability is important and something which we advocate while writing operators is one, to quantitatively understand the deployment success rate in turn the number of successful deployments of the operator workloads which are running on cluster. Two, having continuous health checks that ensures that the operator is performing as expected at any instead of time. The third and the most important is resource utilization. So having an idea on the resource utilization on cluster by the operator helps in providing a better understanding of how the operator is performing and if there is anything which we as operator authors can do to improve the performance. There are a lot of metrics which we have from controller and time we'll talk about that in a bit. But the other two important aspects are scaling and availability and they measure how well an operator is able to scale at what instant of time, at what workload and availability is basically the percentage of time the operator and its workloads are available in action doing stuff which we want them to do. So we have a doc on the best practices on metrics related to operator SDK. It has in-depth details on how alerts should be set up, what are the labels and other suggested format. Now as operator SDK users, what does it provide to all with respect to monitoring metrics and visualization stuff? So there are three things which SDK provides us. The first one is the controller and time metrics. So we all know that operator SDK uses a library which is known as controller and time and it exposes a set of controller or reconciler metrics to be specific. Now what they are and how they are useful I'll briefly cover it in the next slide. But moving on to the second point is when you build an operator with SDK you get a manifest which creates a service monitor. Now using the service monitor you can integrate the operator metrics, you can expose the operator metrics and push it to end Prometheus operator or any standalone Prometheus instance running on cluster. So the metrics are available at the endpoint. It's just up to us to scrape them, see them and visualize them. And the third most interesting and beautiful aspect of this is the availability of a Grafana V1 Alpha plugin. So this plugin is available on Cubilder which can again be used in operator SDK. What it does is it scaffolds out a JSON blob and you can copy this JSON blob, put it into a Grafana instance and you get the visualization of the metrics which you have collected. So we went through the Drupal operator code and these are the few metrics which we thought would have been helpful to the SREs and to the CERN folks and also in general to all of you when you all start writing an operator or you all try getting metrics from an existing operator. So some of the controller runtime metrics to briefly go over are a total number of reconciles, the number of errors during reconcilation and the duration of a reconcile in a controller. So these metrics give an overall idea on the performance of controller. They help in monitoring the health of the controller and identifying any issue or any request which is possibly blocking or taking a lot more time than expected. And the other two metrics which we thought would have been useful are the available backups and the scheduled backups but the idea is using the tools available. We can also extend them to create our own custom metrics and this is something which we recommend. So the recommendation is to have as many metrics as possible which are custom to your application logic and having a visualization out of them to better understand the operator performance. Moving on to the internal discussion. Great, let's have a seat. Live, hello, okay. There's a switch on the bottom, mine is on. So we're going to have a bit of a discussion. This is fantastic, thank you for the chairs. We were envisioning maybe some couches and some coffees or something like this. So that's at least what we're going for here. So we thought about some questions and some maybe discussion and a little more of the story of what the experience was like. So maybe could you guys just elaborate a bit to start with us on how did you get to the point of you wanted to use Kubernetes at all and write an operator and what was that experience like of actually creating this thing from the ground up? Okay, so first off, we were a bit lucky in the sense that we already have another Kubernetes based services around. It was logically wise more simple but it proved that we could have our CMSs on the same platform. So once we understood that Kubernetes would be a place where we could put our Drupal websites or our public websites, we then started the development of this operator which is very logic heavy. It was written in Go which was the one more flexible, more capable of being custom. And well, it was a learning process. So we discussed this already before. It was let's say our first big operator. It was very logic intensive and we did not realize in the beginning how we were making some mistakes. So this is for example, one very simple but crucial mistake is that we created one very long controller which was handling a lot of logic. So in the end, the reconciliation loop as you guys can imagine was very long. We initially because the operator is and he still is super fast, once he started to take more than just a few seconds, we started realizing that there was something that design wise was not great. So we were basically from that point on doing smaller adjustments and improvements on the operator in order to basically keep the performance we wanted.  What was that like writing in Go? Were you already comfortable writing in Go? Was that a big learning curve itself and how is controller runtime and the whole, that whole experience around it? Okay, from my side, my experience, I was not a very big developer at all. I had previous experience with many languages but Go, it was very basic. Writing the GoLang operator was, I didn't find it a big of a challenge. It was very easy to understand the code structure, the methods that I needed when I needed. So I would say it was fairly easy. Yeah, so as they mentioned, having a very long reconciled is something which is not useful. And a suggested pattern is to break down the reconceler into multiple different parts. Now, one thing which we wanted to highlight as operator SDK developers is that can bring a kind of issue in terms of how many CRDs does a controller manage. So the suggested pattern is to have just one CRD per controller and just to quickly highlight the reason behind that is that if there are, if there's a CRD which is being managed by multiple controllers, there can be contention of the update. So multiple controllers can update a single field and that can cause issues in terms of causing race conditions and debugging race conditions is definitely a major pain point which we would suggest never to do so. So I think you guys also had some similar conclusions and ended up going from your like long reconciled function and thinking about how to break that apart into multiple, right? What was that like? Well, so in our case, we don't do what you would say as a correct approach. So we use more than one controller for the same custom resource, but we defined that on this resource that would be a super resource that would only be managed by a separate controller. So what we did was we had the basically, and this is how it actually went, our operator was managing the backups and the backups were taking very long. So we separated that into different controller and then it's completely fine because they are basically separated even though they use the same custom resource. Yeah, and there's a couple of knobs here, I guess we can try to turn to deal with that particular issue. One of the first things we think about is controller runtime defaults, of course, to only doing a single reconcile at a time and we can configure and in fact, that's a good idea. For any of you who are maintaining operators or thinking about creating operators, go look at that setting, think about enabling it to reconcile multiple. Do you recall what we call that? It's max concurrent reconciles, that's right, is one of the options there on the manager, I think, right? So did you start with that? Did you try multiple and how did that go? Yeah, we actually tried with that but our problem remained the same. So now we have more, but they all get basically stuck in this one operation that is very time intensive but it's not very high priority. So we realize this is a low priority test that takes a long time. So for us, even though we basically increased the number of reconciles, it just made more sense to have these, let's say, operations decoupled into different reconciliations. Yeah, make this. Rajul, did you have something to add? Yeah, so there were some parts of the status. We had just wanted to always have the status as a priority, even with a slow task. The other reconciles were putting the status up to date. So it was kind of useful. Interesting, yes. Status management is always a tricky thing to get right sometimes, yeah. And so another thing that caught our eye about your API in particular, I love looking at API choices and design. Well done. Is the fact that the Drupal version is actually embedded into the spec. We typically, the way we develop operators at Red Hat and what we recommend operator developers usually to do is to couple the version of the operator with the version of the operands. So if you wanna upgrade, for example, Drupal, you would upgrade the operator and that enables you to limit the scope so that your operator logic always knows what version of the operand it's gonna be dealing with or maybe it's just upgrading from this one to that one. I think need some more flexibility than that, I understand, for your use case and your user base and some flexibility, maybe tell us a bit more about how that went and what you did in the API here to actually get that flexibility. First, the version is basically the serving image. It's just a image tag. So it's not related to any of the resources because everything else is the same resource. So the version change on the CRD will just change the serving image on deployment. Anything else? No, I was just going to say that the operator itself is basically agnostic to the version because the expected operations for all of them is still the same MySQL database, et cetera, so it will still be able to do database backup or restore and so on and so forth. So it's, like my colleague said, it's just a serving image. The operator is completely agnostic. We can provide a second or third image and the operator will be able to serve all of them without any fuss. And I think through your portal, do I recall correctly, you were able to give people some flexibility in terms of when their particular instance is going to get upgraded, for example? That's correct. So the version itself of the CMS evolves through time. Users have to upgrade and if we just upgrade them all at once, we by risk putting some websites offline because they have something that was not compatible with the latest version. So we basically announce ahead that we have a new version that they can try, they can install, and they can easily create a copy which is this other custom resource that they're just going to create, have a new website running with the latest version. They can compare, they can basically then change the URLs to the copy. They can just then upgrade the previous website. And then changing the version is basically you go to the portal, you select a new version. That changes the custom resource, operator reads it. Okay, there's a new image to serve. Is it a different version? So if it's a different version, I have these operations to do and then it upgrades and then it's back online and like nothing was ever done. So me and my colleague have nothing to do. Our third colleague took care of that upgrade for us. So you can come to Amsterdam and speak at KubeCon. Exactly. Excellent. Well, maybe we should get them in on this. What do you think? Yeah. Great. Well, let's... Now it's your opportunity to ask some questions of some certain folks in operator framework and I've already got a hand up here. Please go ahead. I'm not sure if we have mics running around or... There's mics on the side. I see a couple of mics on the wings. Why don't I just come give this to you for now and other folks maybe if you want to make your way to one of those. Hi there. Thanks for the talk and it's very interesting. Just a quick question on... Or two rather on the base conference but to bring up the GUI. How much flexibility does a user have if he wants to... Can he go crazy and do 100 of them? And what is behind it? So it dumps the CRD somewhere but the website where you create this request is that running on the cluster where the CRD will end up that will trigger the operator? I'm not sure if I completely understood but you're asking basically what connects the graphical interface with the cluster. Yeah, exactly. Because in there you would request... Yeah. So basically in the website you basically create whatever and that impersonates for you an operation behind the scenes which would be either create or update this custom resource or even delete it. So all the CRD operations are done behind the scenes and in the portal you just have the fancy buttons and it's basically impersonation. Okay, but how does it get there on the cluster itself? If it... Yeah, it has a service account so it's basically a dedicated account and within the cluster it does impersonation so it applies the operation with authenticated user accounts so you will only be able to do the things in the cluster that you actually can do. Okay. Thank you very much. No worries. It's a bit more complex but that's basically the storyline. We're happy to have a further discussion if you want a bit more of details on that. So is your internal identity management is connected and set up for your cluster? Yeah, so we have role bindings within the cluster, etc. So it's part of let's say our namespace template so when you create a new project, a new website there's already roles there so you can only, let's say, work with that specific namespace with specific resources within that specific namespace so basically that's how everything gets managed and well, that's it. Thank you for amazing work. If I understand correctly, you are together handle big load due to operator and it's a very efficient way of working but what I'm afraid did it freed for you time to learn something better, learn something new or just instead you squeezed up to the last drop and just get more more domains to handle instead of free personal time? I would say that the operator definitely freed a lot of work from us so we are definitely very happy with the solution we have actually we are very happy and we still agree that there's improvements on the operator that basically release a lot of work from us so a lot of operations that would have needed to be done by us as soon as we notice oh, this is something systematic that users might need we introduce it into the operator and from that moment on, our third colleague takes care of all these operations for us so let's say in the short term we might have to do some extra development to introduce the operator but medium to long term it eases our lives in terms of daily tasks on the infrastructure well, here we are someone is doing exercise today hello, hi I happen to be one of the main users of this service I know Francisco hello we had some conversations and my question is more about the downside of creating an operator because I'm not very familiar on operators or maintaining them but do you think it's any downside having an operator and something that's software based rather than having some other type of solution like Helm charts or an Argo CD instance or something like so if you're asking if we wanted something more of ETOPS kind of thing so in the sense that you have a repository and you have some specific thing for that well, you're at CERN so there's also a service that allows you to if you want something custom with a specific image Helm chart, whatever it's a dedicated place for that the goal with our service is providing a software out of the box so you as a user don't have to have a lot of technical knowledge and you get a website up and running and our operator basically enables us to do that very easily without a lot of actual work to keep the things running thanks I'm not sure if it answered but thank you I think typically it may just add a thought to that and I'll come to you and then you you know operators we talked a little bit about this as well like maybe GitOps is an option here but that gets you a deployment story and maybe a deprovisioning story also but not the continuous operational story here it's not the let's go you know have fun and go to dinner in Amsterdam and not worry about what might happen because there's an actor ready to react to unexpected or expected changes in state that's the story we tell at the operator framework actually one thing that I might add is that for example for some specific users that might want to do extra things with their website to actually provide them permissions to for example work with the deployments change the config maps and so on and so forth and one thing that you actually realize is that the operator even even in well protects them from certain mistakes because if you delete the deployment don't worry the deployment will be back very soon after because the operator will enforce it so it also has that into to be in place and also help us with probable accidental operations that's it we do sometimes see and this gives an opportunity potentially a mix of these where you might use GitOps or some kind of pipeline like that to actually create the CRDs that still an operator might use so then that just moves the source of truth out of the cluster to get repo which has its advantages potentially but it's another thing to deal with that's a different topic outside okay who is over here here you go as you already mentioned status updates tend to be tricky I've been there are there any best practices or tips you'd like to share like is it worth having a separate reconciler just for the status decoupled from the main logic or what are your thoughts Varsha do you have any thoughts on this first it depends on it depends on the business logic regarding the status updates it depends on the application logic I don't think we have special recommendation on having a separate reconciler just for doing that but in general what we suggest is to use status conditionals so that whenever a status is updated the when the operator updates the status the third person who is looking at the operator status knows the reason behind what's happening it's a way to communicate to the user on why a status has been updated what is happening in the reconciler loop and what is a cause of an error a failure or a success so using status conditional is something we would suggest but having a separate reconciler just for doing so is something we haven't it's something which is not so common yeah there are a few ideas and best practices sometimes if you only write the status if you know there's a change to the status don't just blindly write an update to the status on every reconcile that can be a significant help and then when you do need to to do a write doing a patch instead of a full apply is a much lighter burden at least on the API service so we like for example with OpenShift it's based on operators you know top to bottom and we're very sensitive about the burden we put on the API server and so patching is a very important part of that as opposed to the entire you know safe update workflow those are a couple ideas did you guys have anything to add? some of you is over here I promise to come back I have a question is there any work involved to keep your operator compatible with different Kubernetes version you cannot hear me? I could not hear it I'm sorry is there any work involved to keep the operator compatible with different Kubernetes version you're asking if our operator is compatible with the Kubernetes version and are we upgraded? yeah do you have to do any work with your operator maintaining it as the version of Kubernetes changes underneath it? it's a very good question so we upgraded the operator and went into production around two years ago so two years ago it's basically where we said okay this is good enough to start handling production workloads and ever since we have not upgraded operators so the operator has remained more or less in the same version we didn't have the need so far to upgrade it we are actually planning on doing it in the upcoming months but there's no actual need so currently up until now it has been very good with the upgrades so the cluster has been upgraded ever since with the latest version but the operator itself remains in the same version and it's very compatible so it's very easy to keep and keep it running yeah also the APIs we use just talk right into it so the APIs we use haven't changed much in Kubernetes like the client APIs so it's totally fine that we are using an older client but a new server well for one last question for you if you were to maybe think about it even perhaps in the near future do this again start from scratch what would you do different it's a very good question so there's a few things that we would do differently so we already learned the lesson about big reconcile loops that would not happen again a second thing is metrics so we are aware that the operator exposes metrics but we never use them so we at some point realize our operator was slow but we never had actually proper visualization of that so one second thing is from day one we would definitely monitor our operator workload see how it handles the workload how fast it is and what's going on with it so these are definitely two big points about it that we would take into consideration one third point is that we actually in terms of the architecture of the customer resource looks really good and we would probably keep the same which is custom resource to deploy to deploy and handle everything about the software that we would keep for sure because it works pretty well with us it's one single point of information to provide everything for a user nice, Rajul any thoughts from you too? I think mostly we would also focus on more testing but a unit testing and also we don't use all the latest features that come with the operator SDK so we don't have that much of time to actually focus on it but if you have it we would write a new one then we would start with that first and follow up with new features very nice, Farsha any any parting thoughts? yeah probably testing metrics and yeah the upgrade process they covered it all yeah well I guess say goodbye we have one last request for you this is a QR code where you can tell us how we did we love your feedback because of feedback is also helpful if you just had a good time it's helpful for us to hear and for our bosses to hear who sent us here but we'll stick around up here we can stay in the room I guess for a little bit more time and then we can go outside too if you got there's a lot more topics we could cover so bring your questions bring your last time we did this something similar we got some pretty good confessions about real world horror stories and mistakes and things gone wrong so coming up share, listen and thank you for coming