So, hello Mesoscon, it's great to be back in this town, I was living here for a few years, two years ago and great to be at Mesoscon. So I'm Adam Sandor, I work for Container Solutions and Amsterdam based consultancy company specializing in helping other companies utilize cloud native technologies to deliver software better, faster, more resilient, all that stuff. And today's talk was partially inspired by my favorite video game called Doom, who here has played the old one from 19, oh wow, awesome crowd, great. The new one?  I was very surprised by how awesome it is. So, how does Doom come into a talk about microservices and cloud native technologies?  Turns out it's not all that clean and demons invade Mars and later Earth and all that stands before them. They practically wipe out everybody anyway, but our hero goes and the Doom guy just goes and kills them all anyway. So, companies who go and start adopting microservices. I'll talk a bit more why. Is that a good idea? But what happens many times is that they go for this new architectural style, go for utilizing the cloud, breaking up their applications, delivering faster, and they unleash a host of demons on themselves. And if they're not prepared, then those demons gonna cause them a lot of trouble at the very least. But what's also happening in the past few years, because a few years ago it was really like this. A lot of companies went down this road and really burned themselves because they burned proper tools around to manage the complexity introduced by a highly distributed architecture. But today we have new weapons that have been invented in the past few years, like Docker and container orchestration that really help us tackle running distributed systems. I would say they take it so far now that we should be architecting applications as microservices. There is very smart people saying monoliths are fine, don't overdo the whole microservice thing, and they're right. But the cost associated with running microservices previously is mitigated a lot by the fancy new tooling we have like Mezos for example. So, just a bit of definition of what do I mean really by microservices. I mean services where code is independent, so no commons library where 90% of the code resides. The code is largely independent, they are packaged as independent artifacts, and they are run in production as independent pieces managed by a container orchestrator of course. So not like this, not deployed to VMs, just a few VMs and many applications running on the same VM, because in this case the production system doesn't really know what you're really running, it just sees there is some VMs and there is some stuff running on them probably. And also not the old school monolithic thing. Of course we knew how to modularize applications before microservices. Microservices are not just about splitting code up, but so modularized code, but then packaged into a single artifact. Again, it will not provide the benefits that a microservice architecture does. So back, this is what I'm talking about. And why would we want to adopt a microservice architecture? Basically the most important thing is to leverage the elastic cloud resources that are available to us from mostly public cloud providers or internal clouds. So a monolithic application that only supports vertical scaling is not able to leverage this new type of base infrastructure that is available out there. And it's also not able to leverage new tooling that we have for more resilient deployments. I will talk about that later. But basically with microservices we want to increase development velocity, especially down the line when we have lots of services and we really want to deploy them independently to know that we are not breaking the ones that we are not deploying right now. With the monolith, you just can't do that because you have to always deploy everything. The other thing is resilience. So when we had just a few servers in the basement, resilience was not such a big deal. But now, of course, big companies were doing this before already. But for smaller and medium-sized companies, they rather ignore this problem. But now with cloud providers, everybody can build resilience into their application. Everybody can scale out. Everybody can run several instances over geographical regions or at least availability zones. And there is the elasticity to actually optimize your cloud build to only run so much compute, so many instances of things that you need and that you can scale out, scale in, etc. So this talk will take you down on the first episode of DOOM, a bit retitled the levels. And I will show all the demons, all the problems that companies run into and cloud native technologies help tackle. There is other challenges with microservices that I will not be talking about. I'm focusing on the things where the containers and orchestration and stuff actually help. So first, packaging. One of the things microservice, a microservice architecture allows and people love to utilize is having different types of code bases, different programming languages mixed together. But once you have, and we needed a proper packaging to support all these, we didn't have that before, like running a JAR file or a VAR file from Java, in production was completely different than running a Ruby application or a PHP application. They required different runtimes, different ways of deployment, etc. So along came Docker, which in my bit twisted analogy is the chainsaw with which you can kill all of them. Of course, you can kill all of them with all the other weapons too, but I really do love the chainsaw. And so basically, also it's a bit of a metaphor for Docker helping us like carve up that monolith, especially that big fat one on the right, the mancubus, that's the right for you, the left, yeah, whatever. So Docker came along and of course containers existed before Docker, but I'm just simplifying it to say, especially in the mesos world, containers were around for a while. But Docker is really the one that made it really easy to utilize containers and suddenly it became straightforward to package any kind of application and ship it in that package to production. That's one of the big improvements Docker made on our software development. The other is the Docker actually supports the whole software development lifecycle. So it's a build tool, it can run your tests, and it can push to a container registry to host your artifacts. We did have artifact registries before Java had a whole ecosystem for this, but that only worked for Java. We had build tools before, but you had to make sure to install whatever your application, your build pipeline needed on the Jenkins server or wherever. Now everything can be done with Docker in a nice and easy way, which is a big step forward in managing large application code bases with different potential different programming languages. Then our next thing is continuous delivery. Now basically the more application components you have, the more of these pipelines you will have to manage the code, tests, build, deploy to some test environment, deploy to production or another acceptance environment or whatever. To achieve good continuous delivery, all of these steps must work flawlessly and fast. Again, now we have Docker to support many of these steps and also container orchestrators, which I'll get around in a moment. The important thing is to manage a microservice application, you will have many of these pipelines for each of your components. You have to get them right, each of them. In this talk, I cannot go into details how to exactly do each of the steps. Actually, they are not that different in how we were doing things, but you have to get them right because the more applications, the more components you will have, the harder it becomes. There's also another important thing in this picture is you can see all of them have different versions at any point in time. So don't tie your components together. Have continuous delivery on each of the components because that's what will enable you to keep your velocity down the line when you have lots of components. I see companies doing microservices and then do big bank releases with all their microservices at the same time. That does help a bit with backwards compatibility and this kind of stuff, but it's way better to invest in the backwards compatibility and in making sure that services can talk to the older version of the other service rather than doing the big bank releases. Also, when you have like lots of components, just knowing that you're only deploying that one thing and not potentially breaking the whole application is a big plus. So continuous delivery was a very good idea before and is really essential if you're running microservice applications. And now got that whole build stuff out of the way. We're coming to the really interesting part, the scheduling. Of course, this is Mezoscon, so all of you know what a container scheduler is, but I would still hope that you find something interesting in what I'm going to say because what I try to approach this problem not from the point of view of how to run containers on nodes and stuff, but why is container scheduling and orchestration and all this stuff important for our application development? How does this really help? So resource allocation in a distributed environment, I put a really big monster, the cyber daemon up for that one because that's a really hard problem. Not just the resource allocation, but also other distributed problems like managing configurations and stuff. But actually for this is the problem that many have set out to tackle and actually we are really succeeding now.  It's not much remaining. Well, it's kind of a problem where I think we're really solving very well, but let's get back to the basics. So what is container scheduling? Basically, once containers came around and became really easy to use, the funny thing was that you can run them on any Linux machine, but public clouds are not Linux machines. Public clouds are giant hypervisors. So you actually have to spin up machines to be able to run containers on top of them, which in a cloud environment is a bit of a hassle. Of course, if you're using physical hardware, it's a no brainer. That's why containers actually came out of companies who were trying to utilize their physical hardware like Twitter and Google. But still, you spin up a few nodes. So how the container scheduler works is there is one or more master nodes, but we can just logically call it like one master that manages a set of virtual machines. These virtual machines have their IP addresses and stuff. And once you want to run containers, the master will decide where is the best to run them. And these containers start up as Docker containers on the nodes wherever the master decides to put them. First problem, each of these containers needs a port as you can see there. You cannot trust your front-end containers to always run on port 3000 in this case, because if you run two of them on the same node, then they will collide. So you have to start managing ports, which is really not something. So this is the DevOps track. So I'll try to highlight this from the point of view of collaboration between developers and operations. First thing, this system is not enough, because developers delivering software don't want to care about port mapping stuff. And if you only have this, if you only have Mesos, they will have to care about the port mapping, they will have to build logic into the application to manage the ports and somehow find the services. So here is a short list of the most used container schedulers, Mesos, Kubernetes, MAWS, ECS, Nomad, Docker swarm. They all do a great job of managing your resources in a cluster of computers. But because of these networking port mapping problems and also the problem of how the hell to find your instances, let's say I want to talk to a front-end pod container, then I need to build a service discovery mechanism where a container comes up, registers itself like console or LCD, and then other containers must know that that service discovery mechanism exists, and they have to talk to it and get the current state of the cluster. So that's still not a proper microservice platform. How do we get from a scheduler to a microservice platform? Well, solving the networking problem. So it's for me, I come from an application development background into the world of operations, and it's really weird for me that these are hard problems, this whole networking thing and with the ports and everything, but it can be solved, but it's tricky. So first thing we do, we have to introduce a virtual network for our containers in the container cluster. So if we introduce a virtual network, suddenly all our containers can get their own IP addresses. So suddenly they can run on the port they wish to run on, so this problem has shifted from development to operations into the platform. Now, to make that happen with the virtual network is a tricky problem. It's pretty much solved now. We have overlay networks, and we have IP tables magic happening, at least I know more or less how it works in Kubernetes. It's all a lot of magic in like rewriting packet addresses in IP tables. It works. It does the job. We have IPs per container. I'm still a bit surprised that in DCOS this is still an extra feature you turn on, but it is there. Again, it works and you can wish away the whole port mapping problem. Of course, ports will still be mapped to certain node ports, but now it's all randomized, and basically as a developer you don't have to care about it. The next step is solving the service discovery problem. So actually, even before we started distributing all our applications, we had service discovery mechanisms even inside like single processes, like for example Java Enterprise Edition or Spring basically instantiate components and then make sure components can find each other, but it all happens inside one process space. So it's a whole whole different kind of logically the same problem, but of course the solution is much actually simpler also, but also very different. How do container orchestrators, and now I kind of distinguish between like the schedulers or just that the scheduling part is just placement and like orchestration is like all these extra features. I'm not sure if I'm using that term correctly, but I don't think anybody has ever defined it very well. So the container orchestrators DCOS does this in the form of whips, basically enable you to create something like a service that is a virtual IP address inside your virtual network, and if you talk to that virtual IP address your packets will get routed to the right backing containers. So now when backend wants to talk to the front end, actually because it's usually the other way around, but whatever, you get the point. So the backend can talk to <IP_ADDRESS>, which is not the IP of any container, and the requests get routed using a load balancing mechanism to any front end container that happens to run. And however tricky it is to implement this whip mechanism, the scheduler, it was possible to build this because the scheduler already has all the information necessary for this. It knows where those front end containers run, so it's possible to, and once the virtual network has been added, now suddenly you can create virtual IPs in your virtual network and create something like a front end, a virtual front end service that happens to be backed by a number of containers running over some servers. Add a bit of DNS to that and call that IP address front end.internal, and suddenly you can even hard code the address of the front end into your backend containers because you no longer even have to configure that. You can just rely on the cluster DNS to be there. Let's say if it's an internal application and you kind of know that you will be deploying to that production environment that you always do, then you can even hard code front end.internal that that's the address of the front end and just let the orchestrator take care of it. So the service abstraction is essential to building a microservice platform. This takes away all the pain of discovering also load balancing from the developers to and moves it all into a platform managed by operations. You can see this evolution happening in the past few years because the best is to see like Spring, does anybody here know Spring Cloud, the Spring Cloud project? Okay, not many people. Spring Cloud really is still a project built on working around these limitations of public clouds where this functionality doesn't really exist. So there is client-side load balancing, client-side service discovery using something like console etc. This is all stuff how Netflix did their thing because they were running on Amazon and they didn't yet have all this container orchestration goodness available. So yeah, I already told that. Yeah, so which ones can we consider which orchestrators or container systems can we consider like true microservice platforms? I would say Kubernetes, DCOS, lesser degree Docker swarm has less features but they do have a lot of the stuff that is needed. So Amazon ECS doesn't do any of the networking stuff for example. Mesos in itself doesn't do it. So these are the levels of abstraction you're looking for. Unless you're doing some very specialized thing you should just go for DCOS. If you're using Mesos just go for DCOS because you don't want to burden developers with all that stuff. You want to provide a platform for them where they can just deploy. I'll get back to that point. I'll have a few slides about DevOps at the end. So next thing is of course you need to monitor your distributed applications. So to defeat the observability monster as I can tell in this talk. So monitoring is a very interesting case to show because, let's just go back here, because it was considered a big problem to monitor containers because virtual machines were monitored by an agent running there and monitoring a bunch of processes that were running on that agent. Of course the kernel and stuff and then application processes that you were interested in and then you configured which ones to monitor and that data was fed back to the monitoring system. But with containers you don't know where your processes will be running. So suddenly this was a big problem that any process you're interested in can just start up on any one of the nodes. It turned out not to be such a hard problem because there is a very interesting thing with container orchestrators. They all have very nice API and they have tons of metadata inside them about your application. So suddenly one of your monitoring tools is the orchestration tool itself. You can just go and ask a lot of data about your application from it and what the monitoring tools did, so here is a picture illustrating that that's this USUI of course showing some data about one of your services. And then what the monitoring solutions did, here are some examples of cloud native monitoring solutions that can call themselves cloud native because they really can monitor natively applications running on container orchestration clusters. So like Prometheus, Techdriver, SISD, Codescale, Datadog, there is probably more of them that I didn't mention but there's just as much space on the slide. Actually monitoring has really caught up with the world of containers. So what they do, this is an example from Codescale, is they actually monitoring has become easier with container orchestration because the monitoring tools can just talk to the orchestrator, ask all about your application and high level stuff like services, not just like this random named container running somewhere, but because the orchestrators now have this service abstraction which was originally designed to solve networking and service discovery problems. Now the monitoring tools can just use that data and know, okay so you have a front-end service with five backing containers, so how much memory is your front-end service using, well is the sum of the memory usage of all the containers that happen to be grouped under the front-end service. And they can grab this metadata so you don't even need to configure this stuff and I could create a dashboard like this in like five minutes in Codescale after it read the metadata of my cluster. So you can see there is a spike in CPU usage of the front-end service and here is a spike in number of containers of the front-end service. The labels are a bit messed up but never mind that. So that's like an autoscaling event on the front-end service when it's hit by load and you can see that this all just makes sense to also not just an operations person but a developer of the application who thinks in his codebase, he thinks in the codebase that I've developed this front-end thing and I don't even care that much that there is five or ten of them running, how much memory is it using, okay it's using a lot of CPU and aggregate of that is very useful. And I'm not saying that monitoring individual containers and VMs even is just not necessary anymore but you can see how this is closer to a high level overview of your system and also how easy it was to implement this. And how the monitoring solutions did this with using the metadata from the orchestrator is also a great example of how you can build your own tooling in a much more easier way simply because the tooling you're using on your base infrastructure has a higher level of abstraction and understands what you are running on it, what your application is. Actually just a side note on that so one of the important things about Docker I forgot to mention is that it's packaging individual application components.  Yeah log aggregation, super important. Not that much has changed around log aggregation. Again you might want to aggregate logs of all the containers of a service. This is from Google Stackdriver. I really like this one because they did this statistical analysis of your logs so like they find what is the really interesting part in your logs and just show like that error has been happening really a lot of times maybe you should take a look at that. That's really cool and then there is alerting which I mainly it's also super important but I mainly mention it because of this screenshot from the new Doom game where they actually like put in an error message into their system saying demonic invasion in progress. You know you're doing the wrong things once you have to put in or you're really well prepared. So getting towards the end of the talk we are going down to the depths of hell and that's cooperating between people because hell is really other people and that's what DevOps is about trying to solve. Yeah these two guys end up shooting each other a lot instead of shooting you which is not a very good idea for them because then you just shoot both of them. It's a beautiful tale of how people should cooperate. So how do these cloud native technologies do they help with DevOps? Of course DevOps is mostly about cultural change, about not building silos in organizations, about people who know how to run things in production, being friends with the people who know how to write things and maybe being the same people and just having these these full stack engineers who know everything which works up to a level but of course specialization doesn't happen just for no good reason. There is no people who can really keep everything in their head and learn all the technologies on both sides. So development and operations as two separate things up to a certain degree is a reality and probably will keep to be a reality. But what I've seen as obstacles to implementing a proper DevOps culture at companies is a lot of times the tooling and there is people screaming on Twitter about it's not the tooling it's really it's like coaching and people and being nice to each other and they are right up to a degree but I've seen initiatives at companies when the new DevOps initiative is in and then all the operations people get in the same room with the engineers and the engineers show them their Java code and the operations show their 5,000 line puppet scripting and then they look at each other and shake hands and decide this kind is probably not going to go anywhere but let's just have more of these meetings and we'll see. So container orchestration as I said it's really a brings a higher level platform to your applications kind of like a pass so passes are good but they're also super limiting in what you can do with them. So container orchestration or sit between passes and just puppet installed VMs in a nice sweet spot where you can do a lot of things your way but they give you still a high level interface. So here is an example of a manifest file from a Kubernetes application. This describes to Kubernetes how it should run your front end. Maybe I should come with something and just front end back end so generic but anyways. So you can see maybe I can get the pointer over there to show some stuff if I find out which okay no this is super hard this this is not good. Anyway so the important part here is you describe a service you want to run you say how many instances it will have you could define auto scaling for it you could you save each Docker image to run of course that's the most important part you describe some ports that need to be exposed you describe where the health check endpoint of your application is you specify some environment variables like what log level is getting configured so what's interesting about this is there is barely anything in here that an application developer can honestly say that he doesn't he or she doesn't care about it right this is all stuff that really describe that that actually developer should be writing down and it's formal and it's executable straight on the on the production or test or whatever environment so it means that developers can get their stuff into production without asking operations to now write some scripting for it or whatever like that so suddenly this tension a lot of the tension that happens in organizations in the DevOps part is that developers want to push and operations are like because they have to do this and that to get the new release out and whatever and but once your your application platform supports this nice high level of abstraction where where developers can actually like for in a formal way describe their application and just get out a new release without operations getting involved at all that's great that really brings a new level of cooperation because then operations can start focusing on providing new and new services to developers and on coaching developers on how to write a good manifest file and maybe don't translate instances because you only get two requests per second so that's that's I think a very important shift in how we can do DevOps there is still all the coaching and the culture and all that stuff companies do end up with Kubernetes or DCOS and still in a trench war between operations and development if they do if they don't take a close look at the culture and they don't make people work together and don't send the developers on the Kubernetes training for example in this case because then the developers will not want to write this so there is a lot of people things that need to be done but they are all like doable and not really having to understand like the the the puppet scripting and that kind of stuff yeah last slide if you want to know more about cloud native go to the website of container solutions I probably should have put a URL in here but I'm sure you'll be able to find it and we have a new book out by Ann Curry worked with us on it it's called the cloud native attitude and kind of focuses on exactly the same stuff I was talking about here and how to really think about cloud native not the not the specifics there is case studies of companies and there is just just the the mindset you should have when when you think about implementing these technologies at your organization and Q&A thank you any questions it's all very very clear or all very boring sorry lunch yeah thank you very much


Okay guys, so I am back with another Destiny video and today I want to talk about weapon mods and weapon customisation but before we go any further to be in with a chance of winning my weekly giveaway Simply drop a like and comment details are on screen now Okay, so weapon mods if you do not know there is a new way of us being able to customize our weapons Within Destiny 2 and it's with weapon mods now for certain We do not know what these or how these mods will work But I do have an idea of what they could be and it kind of makes sense and in my opinion It's definitely a great move by Bungie Okay, so during the destiny to reveal stream We saw a snippet of a guardians inventory being checked out We see the user scrolling down through the weapons and it's clear that this was point in place to show off This new weapon mod feature as every weapon in the inventory has this weapon mod feature Now when I was at the LA event I got to play destiny 2 and these weapon mods were not available for us to see so it's definitely Bungie's intention when showcasing these during that snippet that they want to get us talking and that worked out great for them Now we see a sidearm a hand cannon a grenade launcher all bearing this weapon mud slot Now this is what I think this is each weapon type will have a set of weapon perks some available and other weapons some not This weapon mud slot is a slot for you to apply certain mods that can bear them aka certain weapon perks which these weapons can bear Imagine new obtainable loot in the form of weapon perks for instance for being a weekly nightfall You have a chance of getting a glass half full mud This mud will be stored in your infantry until you apply it to a weapon which can bear it Imagine it within destiny one with this example You grind your ass off through a certain weapon mud when you eventually get that weapon mud Let's go with looking a chamber You then need to grind to get the weapon this mud can be applied to in most cases hand cannons So you have the perk now you got a grind again to get the Iosluna so to speak if that's the weapon you want to apply this perk to you have to go and grind PvP Once you have obtained the Iosluna You can then apply this perk to that hand cannon and have you're locking the chamber Iosluna In bunch of working weapon mods this way within destiny 2 it doubles your grind for that perfect rolled weapon Maybe certain weapons can't drop with certain perks and then certain perks can only be applied when you obtain that perk as a loot drop Maybe you can even stack certain perks on certain weapons Choosing between which mod you want to apply for the right circumstances Again, let's reference destiny one here for a simpler explanation If you have a single 1000 yard stair sniper rifle This has an empty perk slot which you can apply weapon mods to aka perks to And you have two perks or mods stacked on this weapon unflinching and firefly You can choose to use whichever perk you want by applying the weapon mod when you want to do so If you want to play PvP you can apply the unflinching mod if you want to play PvE You can then apply the firefly mod This does make sense for two reasons first like I said it doubles the grind for that perfect rolled weapon But secondly also allows you to save a lot of space when it comes to storing weapons Because you won't need two or three snipers for certain situations if one sniper does the whole job That's honestly what I think is weapon mods are I mean why else would they showcase them under the usual perks when a weapon is Hovered above I have heard many people state that these could just be ornaments so to speak like weapon skins Although I believe they are definitely making a return within destiny 2 they in my opinion are not what these weapon mods are They do not need to be showcased on a weapon when you hover above it more so when you inspect that weapon So yeah guys tell me what you think about this idea down below Okay, so I just mentioned ornaments for your weapons now as far as I know bungee haven't confirmed As such are coming back or making a return to destiny 2 But you can mark my words that weapon skins or ornaments will be coming to destiny 2 Unscreen now is another snippet from the reveal stream It shows a single weapon and this weapon which I believe it is a hand cannon is shown in a variety of different colors Now trust me it is not bungee's intention to make people think they are just Reskinning weapons and changing their names. This was put here with intent and in my opinion It was bungee's intent to let us know weapons may just have shaders or different ways for you to customize their colors I mean it's something we have asked for for quite a while now and it would be absolutely amazing Now to end the video I want to finish on something I think would be great, but from what we see it's hard to know for sure Unscreen now you are seeing a serious weapon. What stood out to me instantly was the emblem on the back It just doesn't fit right. It also doesn't match the color of the weapon now in my opinion This is one of two things a new faction weapon Although in my opinion if this is the case why apply the faction logo there Why not blend it into the weapon or at least make the weapon match the faction logo? It just doesn't seem right to me. It just doesn't fit right to me The other thing this could be is your clan emblem now We know clans are making their way into the actual game and it was clear that bungee said we can customize our clan emblem And today I'm happy to say that in destiny 2 Clans are coming into the game and custom banners for you to help shape your shared identities And you can also apply the emblem in your inventory. Who's to say you can't apply this clan emblem to your weapons too? I mean it isn't like Activision haven't been doing this for years. We've called it duty But hey, it's just an idea and I could be completely wrong But that's why I'm actually hoping this is but let me know what you think down below in that comment section about What I've covered in this video do drop a like if you enjoyed my ideas Remember if you're new around here subscribe for daily destiny videos And if you never want to miss a video hit that bow button next to that subscribe button to receive email notifications of when I upload But guys thanks for stopping by as always and I will see you on that next one


We are so delighted that you've joined us for another episode of The Non-Profit Show. And today we have a really interesting guest doing super interesting things. Maria Bruner, founder and director of Musically Fed, is going to come talk to us about her journey being a CEO and a really interesting trajectory that she took seeing a problem recognizing a solution and putting them together. Super hard to do, had to be a super creative person, and I can't wait to get into, you know, really talk to Maria about her journey and what this all looks like. So we are thrilled to have her with us. Before we get going, I'm Julia Patrick, CEO of the American Non-Profit Academy. Here at Ransom, the non-profit nerd, my trusty co-host, she is traveling back from AFP icon that's been held in New Orleans. If you joined us for the past two days, we were live on site from the Blumerang booth. And so Jarrett had an opportunity to talk to a lot of different folks that were attending the conference from all over the world and it was really, really fun. So we'll be interested to have her back with us tomorrow and learn even more about what went on at AFP icon. Again, we would not be here day in and day out if we did not have the support of our amazing sponsors. They include Blumerang, American Non-Profit Academy, your part-time controller, non-profit thought leader, fundraising academy at National University, staffing boutique, the non-profit nerd, and non-profit tech talk. If you've missed any of our nearly 800 episodes or you want to search for a specific problem, you can find us on a lot of different streaming broadcast platforms. You can also get to us through podcasts if you like to consume your information via audio. And the coolest of cool things, Maria, we have a new app that just was launched and you can download actually from this image, connect us up, and then you'll get our content to you pushed out every day. Super fun and I want to make sure that we thank our internal team here on the American Non-Profit Academy, especially Kevin Pace, who actually created this app and has put us forward on this technology. Okay, Maria Brunner, woohoo!  I try to work with them. Okay, talk to me about, first of all, best name ever, Musically Fed. Tell us what Musically Fed does. Musically Fed repurposes unused catering with major tours, major shows, major events, major festivals, etc. With the purpose in mind that when I first started this was to take care of our veterans. But of course, as we've grown and expanded, we are very strategic about finding outlets in every city we work with, including our own hometown here in Phoenix, as to all different sorts of non-profits, family organizations, etc., that are food insecure. Okay, so I think that what is so fascinating is that obviously you saw a problem. And then you figured out that there was a solution. And so often, you know, we grumble about, well, there ought to be a solution to this, but nobody does it. And you did. Talk about this. You mentioned you started it with veterans in mind, with a husband who's passed away, correct? Correct. And how many years ago was that? Seven. So only seven years ago, and then this corky thing happens called a global pandemic. How did that go into this whole ecosystem of public events and taking, you know, the food? So prior to that, we had been doing some national tours. We'd been going strong in Phoenix for, I'd say, three years or so, and we had just finished with the Grammys. I had just come back from Los Angeles, and we were getting ready to work on another project when the pandemic hit. And when it hit, we obviously had no events, but I began to wonder, having just come from Staples, which is now called crypto.com arena. What were they doing with all the food in their freezers and refrigerators? And I called Chef Manny, who was in charge of that at the time and said, what are you doing with all of that? And he said, well, this will be over in two weeks. And I said, hmm, the owner of your basketball team is going to be announcing at three o'clock today that the season is done. And this was before NBA came up with their fabulous bubble in Florida. But I think if we all remember that was the thing, the NBA and all the athletic, different athletic genres began to shut down. So he called me back two days later and said, I don't know what to do. And I said, we'll help you. Wow. I wasn't sure how, but an artist manager that I knew at the time called just to chat and say, what do you think? Are we in this for a month, two months? That's really the thinking everybody was in. And of course, in the entertainment industry, we couldn't imagine not being on the road, not doing shows, et cetera, little did we know. And then I heard him in the background talk about that a family, he was close to just lost their lunch program in the L.A. school district. Sure. So I called back Chef Manny and said, you know, there might be a need here. And I'll just try to figure out how that need is. Where do we go? Interesting way enough, Bernstein, who works with AEG, I called him and said, I'm getting ready to try to track down someone within the Los Angeles school district. And he said, well, my wife knows someone with Desert Ridge. And I went, Desert Ridge, they just lost their lunch program. And that's how it came together. And long story short, in about a week, we dispersed a little over twenty two thousand, thirty thousand meals by emptying out the freezers, refrigerators from staples at the time. And then produce companies came up and said, we bring a truck of produce because we have nowhere to get it. And a person with essentials called and said, I have dishwasher soap and I have toilet paper. And if you remember back in the day, toilet paper was gold. So we did that in L.A. Then I called up our wonderful arena here. It's now called footprint arena. But at the time it was Sun's Arena. Go Sun's. Just have to say that game coming up.  We probably have something. Oh, my Lord. They too had twenty two freezers and twenty some refrigerators. So we repurposed meals all over the Valley, Tucson, Flagstaff, Etc., taking care of people in need. But Julia, the most interesting thing during the pandemic is about a week into it, I started getting voicemails on our office phone going, hi, I see you backstage. You have food. We need food. Click. No number to hit back. No name. I got eight calls like that. So I called a friend of mine, Jake Berry. Jake lives about two miles from me, and he is one of the world's top production managers. He does McCartney. He does Coldplay. He does you, too. And I said, Jake, what's going on here? And he goes, can you hold a minute? And I said, sure. And the next thing I knew is I was on with the CEO of Rhino Productions. Rhino is worldwide, but interestingly enough, their corporate office is in Tempe. Oh, wow. And so there. The good news is they learned how to reach us. The bad news is they were 1099, making $17 an hour and no medical so they couldn't get unemployment. They had no medical. They had no salary. They had nothing. And Jeff said, what do we do? And Jake said, well, I'm going to give X amount of dollars and you're going to give double that amount of dollars. And that's going to be a slush fund for Maria to figure out what we're going to do. And by 10 o'clock that night, I had figured out we could do a car drive through and we could do maybe 60 families. And I called Handelbar Jays, a local restaurant here in town and said, we have food that maybe you might need to disperse because of what's going on. And I told him what the deal was and he said, whether we do or don't, I will do six meals per car for 60 cars. And we'll have them boxed.  And then I went to a company, no wrong nonprofit, another one called Resurrection Street Ministry, Mesa. We had been providing them individual meals for three years for their veterans, their meals on wheels throughout Mesa, Chandler and Gilbert. So I called Bill Berry, their EV, and said, I could use a wee bit of help. I'm going to have 60 cars. Do you think we could get a jug of milk, maybe a six pack of yogurt? Two days later, he had a commitment of 10 pounds of dairy for every car, and pounds of protein, such as beef, et cetera, fish for every car. And then he said, why were you out at McClendon's trying to get produce? And I went, because we need produce. And he goes, we do that. Don't go to the farms. Let us go to the farms. So we ended up with 30 pounds of produce. So we staged it at Handel Bar Jays. It was wonderful. Sixty families came through. We were touchless. They couldn't get out of the car and they ended up with six boxes that took them through almost three weeks. However, Julia, we knew this wasn't going to end. So for the next 18 months, we did a car drive through every week here. Then we decided to do it in other cities across America. We did it in Minneapolis, Austin. Gosh, I'm just trying to remember everywhere we went. And Denver, we actually teamed up with another nonprofit called Conscious Alliance. They are fabulous out of Boulder. And they helped us do a drive through every other week. And then it began to be every week in Denver. We did LA, Anaheim. In fact, LA was so loaded with illness, we had to move it to in between LA and Anaheim. And that was an interesting story. And we did 300 cars there. In Austin, we did 600. So for 18 months or more, I was on a plane all the time. And we just were so lucky that the industry stepped up, upstaging, trucking, whatever we needed. They would truck it. They would get us refrigerator trucks. In Nashville, where we did a huge, huge car drive through, a country artist by the name of Martina McBride called me and said, my husband wants to talk to you. You're doing something at soundstage. Can you use some help? Oh, my God. Jesus. So we ended up with people from Florida, Georgia line on Jovi's people were there. I mean, it was just an amazing thing. So through the pandemic, we truly, I would say, learned the word of community. So let me ask you about this because your story is fascinating. And I really am interested about this this next question because everybody thinks, oh, my gosh, if I can get to a celebrity or a star or an endorser and an influencer, I'm going to, you know, I'm going to hit the jackpot for my nonprofit. And this is like one of those things that I feel like, you know, people in the entertainment sector are just hammered all the time to give back and give back. And it's fraught with a lot of issues. How have you seen your relationships grow? I mean, I know you do have a connection to the entertainment sector. But how have you been able to communicate that you're trustworthy, that you're safe, that you have shared values to a community of entertainment folks that a lot of times it's easier to say no than yes, maybe to look at it. Well, I have 30 years history in the entertainment industry. I've worked with everyone from not to be a name dropper, but just to follow the path that you're outlining here. I've worked with the Beach Boys for many years, Clapton. Many done many tours, know many people within the industry. Consequently, Jake Berry, when we talked about the car drive thru, the good thing is Jake was the first person I called to do musically fed. And he went, oh, great, more work. And I went, you've got you two coming into rehearse. They'll be here a week and then they're doing two sold out shows. You don't have to do anything except just help me talk to the tour manager. I'm going to catering and then I would say three minutes. He had the head of live nation for the Southwest Terry Burke on the phone. Terry became our first board member, by the way. Not sure how this is going to work. And I said, either way, but let's give it a try. So begrudgingly, and I will say it was begrudgingly on the part of the local caterer, Jake and everyone. I was like, OK, and the local caterer insisted I get my food handlers permit. And I was a step ahead of them. I had already gotten to and instead of doing it online, I actually went to school with the Gateway Community College. And it was amazing what I learned. And so the first night with Mitch Katz from Arizona catering who owned it at the time, we packaged up what was left. And we literally went to veterans on the street and had a little push cart. And this was in the days when cell phones were pretty good at taking a photo. Pretty good at showing what was going on. So we took a photo of the guys, including their dogs who benefited from burgers and said, look what you just did. You did this. You made this possible. And there you go from every night of their rehearsal, every night of their both shows, we repurposed the food and got a call the next day from a guy by the name of Louis Messina, who had Kenny Chesney coming in, doing his first stadium show. So we did that one. And then a few days later, he called and said. Some Dallas, I went and and he went tomorrow. So we did and and not without bumps in the road. So Louis is a very prominent promoter. He does Garth Brooks. He's been around for years. So by people like Jake and Louis and people, other promoters that we've worked with, were they open to it? Yes. Did we have to earn their trust? Yes, because there was a smaller company on the east coast that is still in business that does it. But I pride ourselves on being very healthy. We have good insurance. We have good liability. We have great part time people that are believers. We follow up. We follow through. We provide the figures. We provide the data. So walk me through for someone who's never been behind the scenes. I think a lot of times we hear the word like craft services or catering. But you're talking about quantities of food that are provided for the the working organizations that put on show. So I learned about you through the Super Bowl because you were engaged in one of the recent Super Bowls. What are you looking at when when you walk in and you've got to be talking about a lot of food that's different every time, right? Or or is it pretty much similar from venue to venue and how it's worked? We never know. In fact, I I was stunned by someone that knows this very well that texted me and said, well, how many meals is it going to be? And this was from a Hollywood Bowl situation that we're right in the middle of right now. And I went. We never know. But I know the caterers to I know Jeremy will have food left over or he would never have asked us to work with him on it. But it is what it is. And so here's the situation here locally. There is still an Arizona catering and they do 80 percent of the shows that come to town. We have approximately 100 between now and December at the various venues and will be most of those are live nation. And thanks to Terry and live nation, we have carte blanche at any of those in the Southwest. So the local caterer we've met with, we've worked with, we've had our ups and downs on policies and procedures. Sure, because they feel we should walk in, pack it, wrap it, heft it, move it, inventory it, temperature control it. Well, that's part of their job, too. So we've learned to become a good team. Tourists that are across the nation, 60 percent of them carry. They carry their own catering. Yega is a prominent caterer to do it, to do it as all of Coachella. So there's like four to five nationwide catering companies that work with tours. We have great relationships. I'm happy to say we're very, very blessed, so blessed to work with all of them. So we have local, which is one way of working. We have national tours, which is another way of working. We do Lollapalooza, we do the Grammys, we do other festivals, and those have another way of working. But the point is, it is to benefit each city and community where that event is like we're getting ready to work with Dirk Spently again. And he has 58 dates in 58 cities. The food will be repurposed in each one of those cities. It's given back to them. So what's that kind of answer, Sid? Yeah, it's absolutely fascinating because, you know, as a leader, you're really blessed to have come at this knowing the trade, knowing the sector, right? But what's, you know, you've known the entertainment business, you know, obviously know venue management, things of this nature, which most people would have no idea about. And then you were able to link it through to serving and this nonprofit aspect. What are some of the challenges that you've had as a leader and overcoming them? I mean, first and foremost, I gotta believe that most people have no idea the amount of food and waste that occurs with these major productions. I mean, have you had like a communication issue to start with as a leader? Or has that been something that you found was easy to communicate? Honestly, here, because we started here, I found it fairly easy. I can't say that Mitch was excited to acknowledge that, yes, they were throwing food away. He wasn't. And I said, but we're that solution for and with you and to you goes the glory. We're not in it for that. We just want to make sure we can feed people. And I would say nationwide, some of the tours that I have approached, I've been turned down by two and you know them. And it would be, no, don't want the liability. Well, but the Good Samaritan Act, which is very, very solid, by the way, and our liability, which is some of the priciest and about to get even tougher because we're upping the ante, we're covered. And then I think there's just some that go just don't want to deal with it. And then for us internally, I think our biggest issue is volunteers. And we are very, very fortunate to have a staff person, Suzanne Cooper, that helps us coordinate and reach out, et cetera. We haven't found that magic way to find a solid base. I would say we have in Nashville and we have in Chicago. Thank you, Lollipalooza. In Nashville, we do, we work with Live Nation there. We repurpose every show from Ascend, their outdoor amphitheater, and from Bridgestone, their arena. So over time, and we're getting ready to go to the CMA Fest for the umpteenth time, we've been able to formulate volunteer databases. But Julia, I don't know how it is when you talk with other nonprofits. Volunteering is such a serious issue and hard to find. Not only is it hard to find, but when they show up, what are we getting? And we've gone the gamut of, oh my gosh, I cannot believe this person showed up in this condition to absolutely wonderful stellar people. It's, you know, Maria, I gotta say that is a challenge. And I hear this a lot and it's one of those things. I mean, and especially now, I mean, let's face it, we're in a labor crisis in America anyway. And so that issue has even become more amplified and it's going to continue to be such. And I can tell you on the nonprofit show, we are spending more time on this topic because we're hearing from our viewers. I volunteer. Yeah, about this because you're absolutely right. You know, I could talk to you all day. I think you're just riveting. And I love your energy. I love your concept. And now I gotta finish this up and take this home with the question, I love to ask leaders and sometimes it's really hard. But where do you see yourself, Maria Brunner, in five and 10 years? You've done really interesting work in an, dare I say, an interesting time in this country. Where do you see yourself moving towards? Like how do you see this going forward? We need to find serious funding. And I believe it's out there. If we can just get the message to the right corporations, et cetera. Honestly, I put in no less than 80 hours is a good week. Hundreds pretty typical. So in five years, my hope is we have found the funding to actually hire a very legit ED executive director. I would be happy to stay on the board as a founder and really help keep those connections going. But it needs a solid staff because this is never going to go away. It shouldn't. It shouldn't because the need for food insecurity, I think has been there since the dawn of time. In fact, very close. You know, Joel Osteen, a person that's close to him, sent me this very interesting article on how they were starting food banks way back then, way back in biblical times because it was so needed. And they did flower, flower loaves. So in five years, a really great leader, a really great staff doing wonderful things. And I will be going to a desert or maybe a Bahama Island. In 10 years, I would just like to be able to watch it happening and being able to possibly just enjoy the things we want to enjoy. Nothing, though, makes me happier than, you know, this past Saturday we just fell together. We were at Resurrection Street Ministry and I ended up with two people coming down. And we just did some amazing things that resulted in us serendipitially feeding some families that we had heard about here in Phoenix. Oh my gosh, it was wonderful. So I hope that part doesn't ever go away, just seeing the good that people do. Well, this has really been fun.  And I love, love, love the creativity within a creative community, right?  And it's really been fun to see this grow and to see that somebody's out there thinking about these opportunities and turning these things into really strong outcomes and impacts. Maria Bruner, founder, director of Musically Fed, check out their site MusicallyFed.org, and you can learn about who they're working with and why they do what they do and how it all comes about because it's just a fascinating approach to food insecurity and food waste. I think it's like this marriage that is so interesting, Maria. So check them out because they're doing great things around the country and maybe you too can get involved one way or the other. Maria, you've been just a delight. This has been a lot of fun for me. Well, Julia, just one last comment. You mentioned the word community without our part time staff, our board of directors, people in the industry that will step up here and there. It couldn't have been done and it can't be done without this ever-growing community. So them, again, goes the glory. Yeah, it's a cool thing. It's really a cool thing and good for you for providing that outlet for so many people to get involved. Again, I'm Julia Patrick, CEO of the American Nonprofit Academy. Jared Ransom, my trusty co-host, the non-profit nerd will be back with us tomorrow. As we speak, she's on an airplane coming from Nashville back to our home community where she was attending and broadcasting for us at the AFP Icon 2023 convention. Again, we want to thank our amazing sponsors, Blumerang American Nonprofit Academy, Your Part Time Controller, Nonprofit Thought Leader, Fundraising Academy at National University, Staffing Boutique, Nonprofit Nerd, and Nonprofit Tech Talk. These are the folks that allow us to come on air every day and have amazing conversations like we have had with Maria Brunner today. My new friend, I love this conversation. Thank you so much for this opportunity. We really appreciate it. Well, it's been lovely. Maria, we have this sign-off that we do every day and we started it with the pandemic and its meaning has changed throughout our three now going into our fourth year. And it goes like this. We'd like to remind everyone to stay well so you can do well. Maria, you're doing very well, my friend. And we'll chat soon.