Isn't that cleaner? Yeah. Instead of what I'm using now. I think it's better now. Okay. Can you see your teeth? Oops. Welcome to Scoonsville. Hi. This is our reaction, our initial reaction to just finishing watching the Green Mile. Yeah. Yeah. We just literally just finished watching it. Literally just finished it when we set up. Yeah. We're going to do this after, to get the initial response right after watching a movie. Yeah. I've seen it I think once or twice before and every time it wreaks havoc on me. This is the first time you've seen it. Yeah. It did the same to me. It was, it was tough to get through. Napkins strewn about the floor. Tissues. Tissues. Yeah. Yeah. There's still kind of pain in my heart. When movies are particularly deep or painful, I'm a crier basically. Yeah. And that movie was just really tough. I don't even fully know why because I mean, I've seen a lot of sad movies, but I saw it the first time in high school and I had to pause it probably three times near the end, just because I just couldn't take it. Yeah. And I think, I think what it is is that it's about a three hour movie and it's a movie that is able to take all that time to really get you to not even necessarily like all the characters, half the characters are not likeable at all, but they get you to understand the characters and they're so interesting and, and real and physical characters, you know, if that makes sense. And so when something happens, the more you get into the movie, it just impacts and it just builds in such a beautiful way that especially the last half of the movie, I think it's just, yeah, I find it really hard. I challenge anyone to, to, to not be invested in it. I can speak. Okay. Michael Clark Duncan plays John Coffey. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Just incredible with how. He really captured that role perfectly. You feel when he says that he feels like shards of glass digging into his heart or his brain from all the pain that people cause on themselves. Like, you know. Yeah. Because I mean, that's, that's the thing. The, the miracle, I guess that, that are his supernatural powers. Such that he's like an empath 2.0. Because empaths are like that, you know, they, speaking from experience here, take on a lot of people's emotions, even if they don't want to. And so that's really his life, right? And I wasn't even a sewage when, when he passes, when he's about to get electrocuted, he's like, well, you know, or, or when he's bringing me peace. I want to see that. Yeah. Was it when he was getting electrocuted or when, when Paul asked whether or not what he could do for him? Yeah. Yeah. Paul asks him, should I break you out of here? And he's like, you know, I really, I just want peace, you know, and, and I get it because, because of that, those supernatural powers. I get it. It's hard to live life in that way where you can, you really, it's not even just being empathic. It's that you can actually see events that are painful. Yeah. That happen to other people. You know, whenever you come into contact with someone, you're able to see what they went through. Yeah. And, and you live with that. So I can only imagine how hard it was for him. And I, and I understand in the end when, in the movie, when he says that, well, you know, I just don't want to go through that anymore. It's like shards of glass. I just feel like, I don't know. I just wish he could have gotten it better. Yeah. I mean, yeah, it's, it's that. Who am I even to say? I know. Like, what's better? I think you always feel those two things of wanting him to live, but also realizing he's right when he says, let's go through with it. And it would be hell on earth to be on death row for anyone, but for him, again, you know, 10 times worse because not only does he feel the pain of those that maybe are innocent or are genuinely remorseful and want to atone for what they did. And then those that are just, for whatever reason, become so, you know, horrible to the core that you have to absorb all that. Yeah. I mean, the even, I think the movie tries to give you as much poetic justice as it can with having the two despicable characters get their comeuppance. Yeah. It's only kind of a slight return in, you know. One of the things we talked about, he's how, how lonely he's been in his life and how he never had friends. He was, he didn't have friends and I can only imagine someone who looked like him. Yeah. Even though you can tell that he's tender and sweet, he's also a huge guy and just a very menacing character. Yeah. And I also doesn't really have a lot of, like you could say skills apart from his extreme tenderness and empathy. Exactly. So he's kind of just wanders around. Yeah. Really unable to be helpful apart from his one gift. Yeah. I can imagine that he wasn't really, he didn't really have a lot of smooth interactions in life. And so if you're already someone like that, with that kind of supernatural empathy, I feel of course life would be so difficult. I mean, the movie was great. Probably better that it ended the way that it did. What do you think?   Yeah. And then while Bill, while that was the way and getting shot by a kind of a possessed Percy was kind of the way that they could both get, you know, be like at the same time kind of by possessing Percy, that's what then kind of made him kind of unable to explain all the stuff that happened so that the other characters were able to do what they need to do and not get in trouble for it. And I like the, I do like the part at the end where even though Tom Hanks' character is a good guy, he's always trying, in a way he still feels like he did still need to pay, his atonement is for living, outliving everyone he cares about, which is hard to do over and over again because as much as he says John Coffee wanted it and he would have let him go, he still did at the end give the order to have him get killed. So, I mean, of course, each time I watch it, I cry, first time most I've ever cried, sober, but this time, I can't remember if the last two times I watched it, but this time I was even getting, getting teary with Edward, was it Lacroix? I can't remember this last name or something, Lacroix. And the part where he's going to get electrocuted and he's talking about the Mr. Jingles and yeah, so that's good for me too, this time. It's interesting, I guess the thing, one thing I really like about the movie is how they don't really tell you, they don't tell you what these people did except John Coffee with the girls, that they say he killed the girls, but of course later we found out that they didn't. Yeah, you don't really get to find out what the prisoners did. And I like that because it allows you as a viewer to form your own opinions of these people. I remember when Edward is about to get electrocuted, he apologizes for it and talks about how he wishes he could take it back and even when he was still alive and he really just didn't seem like someone who belonged there. And it's really hard to, for me personally, knowing that he actually did do something, it's hard for me to reconcile the empathy I feel for him. Just because I saw how tender he was in that movie was just a soft guy. And of course John Coffee with the please don't put the mask on me. Yeah, that was really tough. Okay, battery died. Why I liked, another reason I liked the fact that we're not told what the prisoners did is because it, for me, was a... I think a big theme of that movie is that everyone has a past. No one is wholly good or wholly bad. Yeah. Holy, I mean that's completely. Yeah, and then I think we were just saying the other great theme of it is about mortality and facing everyone has to face death. And it's obvious people on death row have to think about it a lot more and it happens sooner I suppose and they know when it's happening versus people that don't know when their time will come. But in the end, let's say at the end everyone's walking their own green mile. Which is also just saying everyone also is on their own journey too. Everyone's on their own. So that's why, again, be kind of people because you don't know what kind of journey they've been on or all the things they're going through. Yeah, I felt that he really didn't deserve and I wished that there would have been a happy ending for him. And I don't want to say, I have this thing sometimes with movies they really try to just get all of these emotions out of you and kill off the character you love. They make you love the character and then they kill them off, right? And sometimes I'm like, this is just for show. They really didn't have to do that. They could have kept him alive. That happens too in life. But what happened to John Coffey also happens in life, isn't it? And I guess it also made more sense. I feel like if he was really someone with, if he was really a miracle with those supernatural powers, I think he probably would have... I think he's done what he was meant to do. Yeah, he feels that way and he just wants peace. He wants the peace that he deserves and that he looks for in people that he's never found. So, yeah, I guess if I'm looking at it that way, it's probably more realistic. Yeah. Just a lot of beautiful moments in the movie too between Tom Hanks's character and his wife, between, I guess, the warden and his wife and then also, you know, just the other guards and yeah, just a lot of... Yeah, I guess we got to give it a rating. 10 out of 10. Yeah, I give it a... Perfect ripe tomatoes rating. All right, well, should we say goodbye? We should say goodbye. Yes, goodbye.


Thanks so much for joining us on Think Tech Hawaii. And if you like what we do, please go to the website, click the donate button. If you can, anything and everything helps keep these conversations going because we're all here to serve. And that's what we're here for. And today for that service, we have the really special honor of having with us Tracy Wilkin, who for years has been the head of the Mediation Center of the Pacific, formerly the Neighborhood Justice Center. One of the leading community mediation centers in the country. And I know that from personal experience, not only with ours and hers here, but with others in many other areas of the country, cutting edge in so many ways, including in the eviction and other key housing issues, the use of mediation, the use of collaborative processes in people to bring about resolution by agreement rather than by conflict and litigation and all of the things that can be so divisive and destructive. Tracy, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks, Chuck, for having me. Happy to be here today. So what do people need to understand about why eviction as a key element of the housing crisis in Hawaii is a problem that really can and really needs to be addressed now in ways that you are bringing to the table. Well, as we all know, Chuck, eviction is destructive to everyone, not just the tenants. Obviously when a tenant is evicted, they may not be able to find another place to live. So they may end up living on the street. If they're evicted and they have Section 8, they lose that forever. When landlords evict tenants, oftentimes the tenants are desperate to move out and the place is not left necessarily in good clean condition. So therefore it costs the landlord more to clean up the place. In evictions, it takes landlord and tenant going to court, which oftentimes the tenant isn't going to show up because if they're behind on their rent, they know that they haven't paid their rent and so they don't even show up. So the landlord is highly unlikely to get any of the back rent, much less know how much time it's going to take for them to re-rent the place. So there's a lot of cost involved on both sides for landlord and tenant. And I want to add, when you think about when tenants are evicted, it's not just about the tenant being evicted, it's finding another place to live quickly, oftentimes requiring move their children out of school, taking time off from their jobs, so losing more of their income and their ability to find the appropriate place to live. All that creating stress on the family, on the kids, so there is a lot of harm that comes for both landlord and tenant through the eviction process. And that's why we really encourage landlords and tenants to mediate early. So we'd like to change the culture and the mindset. We know that already there's an inherent power imbalance between the landlord and tenant relationship. Not that it's intended, it's just a fact of life. You have a tenant who's dependent on paying rent. Oftentimes there's not a relationship between the two. And as long as the tenant's paying rent and being a good tenant, keeping the property in good repair and the landlord is getting their rent on time, it's a happy relationship. But when a tenant for whatever reason starts getting behind, maybe they're sick, maybe they've lost their job, maybe they had to take time off from their job to care for a child or another family member, they're often afraid to approach their landlord to say, hey, I'm behind or I'm going to be behind. So instead, they don't say anything, which of course ticks the landlord off when they don't get their payment, and it becomes a vicious cycle. But through mediation and encouraging this culture change of conversation with landlord and tenant coming to the table in an informal environment of mediation and being able to have these conversations with the assistance of an impartial mediator who isn't taking sides, but is helping each of them get their story out and helping them negotiate payment plans to pay what's owed and make sure that the tenant can pay the rent moving forward. So I'll stop because I know you have questions or I could go on and on because this is a really important topic. And that could easily let you go on and on because we could go well beyond our half hour with this and still be going strong. But one of the questions that comes to mind and you've touched on so many direct and indirect impacts on both landlords and the property owners, there may have property managers. These are people who are affected individually as well as in their professional worlds. Their life is affected, their work is affected, their mental, emotional health is affected, their kids and their school relationships and activities are affected, their families and their transportation and work relationships are affected and for landlords as well and property owners and property managers, this is really, really disruptive to them too. At a time when none of us can afford these things. We're still in recovery mode here. So what do this program, what do mediators bring to the table that's of special value here that the courts and the litigation and all the adversarial partisan stuff does not? Well, the key word is what you just said. Our courts, it's an adversarial system. That's just the way courts are created. So it's about winning and losing. It's about proving that the other person is wrong. And of course, in a landlord tenant matter and eviction case, it's the landlord saying the tenant hasn't paid. The tenant owes me money and under landlord tenant law when the tenant doesn't pay, they have the right to evict them. And if a tenant hasn't paid or is behind on their rent, they know they're wrong. And so it's pretty clear cut. And as I mentioned earlier, that's why 50% of the eviction cases, the tenants don't even show up at court because they know I'm going to be evicted. So why should I go to this very imposing adversarial system and have to face the landlord? And most of the time, tenants are ashamed. Nobody wants to be behind in their rent. And just like I need to say, no landlord wants to evict their tenant. So it's not a happy process from many perspectives. The difference in mediation is multiple. First of all, it's informal. It's not a structured process. It's set up at a damn time that works for both landlord and tenant. We offer mediation both in person and via Zoom. And for tenants or landlords, because there are a lot of mom and pop landlords who may not have access to the appropriate equipment for Zoom, they can come into the Mediation Center of the Pacific and use our equipment. And I'm going to say, interestingly, after the moratorium, so back during COVID, there was a moratorium on evictions. And when that moratorium was lifted, the legislature put into effect Act 57 for one year. And that required tenants and landlords to mediate. And after that one year, it was really interesting because the feedback that we got and through a study conducted by Hawaii Apple Seed, it was learned that tenants felt much more comfortable mediating via Zoom. Because that way they could be there, but they didn't have to be in the same room with the landlord or they didn't have to pass by the landlord like they might have to at court because they feel intimidated. And again, they're embarrassed. The other important thing about participating via Zoom is they could have their camera off, so they didn't have to be seen. And so they felt a lot more comfortable. They could be in their own home or at an organization that they are familiar with. So just creating a more comfortable setting. When we set up mediations, we have, if English is not somebody's primary language, we have an interpreter over the phone who talks about how mediation is going to work and how to prepare. Now, I do understand that when somebody goes to court and English isn't their primary language, they can request an interpreter. But here we have an interpreter over the phone helping them set up and talk about mediation. And then of course, we have an interpreter in the mediation to help them through the process. So there's a lot of things that are done to help create a more comfortable setting. I'm not going to say it's fun, but it certainly is less intimidating and less stressful than court. And then the other important thing, it's not an adversarial setting. It's about having a conversation. And so in private meetings, the mediator meets privately, each with tenant and landlord. The mediator learns from the tenant, what's going on? What happened? How is it that you weren't able to pay your rent? So they find out the backstory of the tenant. Similarly, they find out the landlord situation. I really worked with this tenant. So I'm really disappointed that they stopped paying or I really gave the tenant the benefit of the doubt or I don't trust this tenant because I feel like they're taking advantage. And so when they get these stories and start sharing it, they humanize each landlord and tenant. And then the landlord recognizes through the mediator that the tenant really was doing their best to try and make sure they were paying the rent. From there, the mediator starts helping them negotiate. Can they negotiate a realistic agreement? Can there be a realistic payment plan where the landlord gets their background? And going forward, can the tenant be able to pay the rent and keep current moving forward? And if not, then they could negotiate as an alternative a move out, but now they have more time. It's done in a respectful way. It gives the tenant time to find a place to live. It gives the landlord the time to strategize if they wanna make repairs when they're gonna advertise. They could already start looking for new tenants and be prepared to have somebody move in. So they're not losing as much money with the tenant gone and still trying to find a new tenant. So through the mediation process, it's a really a different approach. Once it's in court, it's about when you move in out tenant, but when it's in early mediation, there's more discussions about payment plans and working things out. And so it is a lot less stressful for both tenant and landlord as well. And I wanna go back to Act 57 because that was really a groundbreaking program and it was statewide, every mediation center, there's five mediation centers throughout the state ran that early eviction mediation program in response to the ending of the moratorium on eviction. And it was amazing. And that program showed the value of early mediation because Chuck, there was an 87% rate of agreement amongst the cases. So there was 1,660 landlord tenant cases that reached agreement going through mediation and 90% of those agreements resulted in the tenant staying in the residence. So that fact alone shows the importance and the value of early mediation. I'll give you a chance to ask questions so I don't keep talking. No, I think, well, two things that shows, one, if you give people a chance to communicate civilly, responsibly and safely in a context in which they're comfortable, they can begin to see each other and deal with each other as human beings. Something more complete than just is the rent paid or numbers on a table or a piece of paper. They can start to see that tenant and their family. Maybe the kids are in the background or the pets or whatever. And it's just, it's a different kind of relationship and communication that's offered. The other thing exactly, as you pointed out, the return on that investment, that opportunity for the people to communicate as responsible human beings, the level and extent of success, the human success, the way in which it improves choices and lives for people is incredibly great. I mean, if you look at what the funding for Act 57 was and the number of cases that it took in and resolved, what was the funding for Act 57? Approximately? The approximate funding was approximately $1.2 million. Okay. And you dealt with over 1,600 cases with a close to 90% resolution keep the people in their homes rate. So we're talking about serving somewhere in the neighborhood of 1,300, 1,400 plus people. You pencil that out. That's a pretty small expense for the return on an investment because the real return, the human return that we're hearing here is that both of those human beings came out far better in far less time at far less cost than any other process, any other communication form could have made possible. That's what you're doing. You're offering responsible human communication for people with an incredibly generous return on investment for doing that. Yeah, absolutely. And so based on that success, the hope is that we can have another statewide program that will encourage early mediation between landlords and tenants so that we can have that same success rate and keep tenants housed, which increases housing stability for the entire state. And that's why there's a bill right now in the legislature. It's House Bill 2642, which is promoting a statewide early eviction mediation program. And the idea is to run the program for a year and look at the statistics to determine whether a program like this should be a permanent program. And so it's a really important bill and an important program. And I wanna add, I know that part of the success of the Act 57 early eviction mediation program was the fact that there were very robust rental assistance programs that help tenants or actually help tenants pay back the landlords for the rent that was owed. And while there currently aren't the large rental assistance programs that were in existence then early landlord tenant mediation still works. There are some smaller rental assistance programs which are helpful. But I also wanna note that because of the positive response and the positive outcomes to the Act 57 program, over the last year in 2023, the Mediation Center of the Pacific on Oahu continued offering early mediation through the support of private funders and grants because we saw the momentum, we saw the value. And so even though it wasn't required, so not every landlord was willing to participate. And even though there weren't the large rental assistance programs that were in existence during Act 57, we still had a 67% rate of agreement with these early landlord tenant cases that were mediated. So I think that that, not I think, I know that those numbers speak for themselves that it goes back to what we were saying earlier. It's changing the culture and the mindset and getting people to sit down early and have a conversation before a tenant is in deep debt and owes so much money that there's just no way they can pay it back. And it's just obviously not in the landlord's interest to keep trying to work with a tenant when they need to pay their own bills. So I just wanna bring those important points out. And so what kind of funding are you looking at for the one year program? This is actually where I got the 1.2 million. So for this program, it's 1.2 million. And it was actually a much larger amount for the Act 57 program because we don't anticipate the high numbers that we saw for Act 57 because there was a moratorium on evictions at the time. So the numbers were much higher. Now that being said, I wanna bring out two points. One, it's currently the number of evictions are much higher. They're more than double than prior to COVID. And this is another reason why this program is important. And then I wanna take us to Maui looking at that situation as well. Clearly with the horrific wildfires, there is a moratorium currently in Maui on evictions to help tenants. And there's gonna be a similar concern when that moratorium ends that there's going to be a high number of evictions. So there is a separate bill that's going through the legislature right now to support a program. It's almost identical to the Act 57 program for Maui so that once that moratorium ends, tenants and landlords will be required to participate in mediation. With that bill, they have a little bit longer period of time to schedule the mediation. And so that is a very important bill. And I encourage everyone to support both bills. We know Maui needs that support, but also statewide landlords and tenants need the support of an early eviction mediation program. You know, and that's a really, really important insight and point Tracy, because we know at least recent figures have indicated that over 5,000 residences were destroyed or so severely damaged that they were uninhabitable. And there are consequences of that. That's over 5,000 families that are displaced. We also know that the temporary six month housing that were obtained through hotels and vacation rentals and things like that, that's expiring. The six month window from early August 2023 to early February is coming up. Will those get extended? We know that the state is scrambling to try to find housing for, we're looking at a large portion of those 5,000 plus people. So it's a huge and urgent problem. How does that connect with what's going on in housing and affordability and housing needs here on a larger scale? So that is really important because we know that the inventory is limited and rents have gone up. So it is much harder for tenants when they get evicted to find another affordable place to live. So keeping tenants in their residence and making sure landlords are paid is really critical to housing stability in Hawaiian on every island and certainly on Maui right now because the resources are very limited. So if this could come together, both the Maui and the statewide program, what do you see as benefits both for the landlords and for the community for the state, Maui and the state? That's a really great question. I think the benefits are huge if we can have landlords and tenants mediating early on every island and getting resolutions. One is gonna be keeping them out of court. It gives the landlords their money. It keeps tenants housed. That's huge because there's many other things going on and it's a relatively inexpensive program when you compare the cost of housing and trying to move families and trying to find housing for families and the court system, which is really back, I don't wanna say backlog, they're not backlog because they're very efficient in handling the cases but they have a high volume of cases. And so these two programs that are supported by these two bills that are currently in the legislature are extremely valuable for housing stability in Hawaii. And I would encourage everyone to support them because we've seen the success. It isn't a guesswork or a possibility. We have seen the program work successfully and it just made a huge difference. And if there isn't an agreement reached, they still have the option of going to court. It's not taking that eviction process away but it's giving them an opportunity. And I have to say that most people, even though mediation, the word and the process is very popular, it's in the forefront, but most people don't think about using mediation early and certainly tenants with many other things going on in their lives, they're struggling to put food on the table for their families and to keep their kids in school and help their kids learn and all the other important things that are going on. They don't think about mediation and when they don't understand what it is, it's a scary thing because they think it's like going to court. And when we had the Act 57 program, a large percentage of the tenants who participated in the mediation process reported they'd never been in mediation before, but after going through it, they thought it was a really good process. So just encouraging people and requiring people to participate and giving them that opportunity to work through these issues is huge. So I think you've identified a couple of things here that really deserve emphasis as we get to our last couple of minutes or so. Is one is that if you want manageable outcomes, manageable solutions, you have to have manageable communications. Yes.  Mediation offers all of those and it's the only form. Court does not, even arbitration and other adversarial processes do not. The other thing I wanted to ask you about as we approach the end of our time here, we know that some other areas in other states and in other cities have done some eviction mediation work. Some areas in Illinois, some areas in Florida, some areas in Ohio and some others, some cities like San Francisco. What is it that Hawaii's doing that has made it such a cutting edge leader in eviction and housing mediation that everybody looks to for the model? Because we are the first or practically the only who do it early. The other programs are wonderful programs, but it's once an eviction process is filed, we're doing it before. And I want to add last, one last very important piece, I know we're almost out of time. So when landlords and tenants end up in court, not only is the landlord now who's evicting the tenant going after their back rent or requesting their back rent, but they're also requesting attorney's fees from the tenant. So the tenants already behind and now they owe attorney's fees as well. So the whole is even deeper. With this early mediation program, both parties will pay their own attorney's fees if they're represented. If the tenant defaults on an agreement or there is no agreement and they end up in go to court, then the landlord can still request attorney's fees. So that's huge. It's reducing that possibility of a bigger debt. So I wanted to add that piece in because it is very important. No, and I think it's a really, really important insight to focus on as we wrap up here. That it's clear that for tenants who are in a hole, landlords who are in a hole with these financial conflicts, to offer them adversarial partisan litigation is like offering a guy in a hole a shovel to solve it with. It just gets deeper. The expense goes higher. The antipathy, the antagonism gets higher. It's not either pleasant or productive for anyone. You're offering a manageably pleasant, productive, safe, confidential process. You're offering people a chance to work things out as human beings. And if ever there were anywhere where the culture favors that, being mostly Asian Pacific, this has to be that place. Tracy, thanks so much. Any last words you'd like to share with us about why this is critical now? Don't wait for next year. Don't put it off for funding excuses. Because we have good momentum going and it's important for landlords and tenants to talk early and negotiate and stay out of court because it's not helpful to anyone and go and support the bills. Thanks, Chuck, for the opportunity. And thank you too. And I wanted to finish with one other really important point that you made here, which is do it now because everybody is ready for this. Financially, mentally, emotionally, they're ready for this. They have shown they can make this work. This is not an experimental pilot project that hasn't been tested yet. We don't need to send it out for studies. We know it works. We're simply asking, give it a chance. House Bill 2642 and the Maui Bill. Please, folks, call your representative, call your senator, get behind it, help people who need help. Take care. Aloha, thanks for joining us.


Hello beautiful souls, thanks for watching. This is Christy Martin with Art of Awakening with a quick daily reading for today. April 22nd, this is Earth Day. So happy Earth Day and if you celebrated Easter yesterday, happy Easter to you as well. I've got some beautiful beach rocks and my favorite piece of black tourmaline here to keep us grounded and it is actually with those beach rocks. It's a rainy day here in upper Michigan. A lot of water here today. I'm feeling kind of a peaceful day here. I'm using my spirit animal awareness deck and let's begin. I will be drawing between one and three cards just to see what comes up for today. This one wants to come forward. It's otter. All right. Okay so I think sticking with that water theme, I'm feeling just kind of go with the flow, relax from otter. You know otter can be a pretty high intensity kind of animal but it knows how to play. Right? So it's sort of like this balance between you know following your dreams, following your you know instincts or just wanting to get stuff done and I think that's true of a lot of us, especially in our culture. We are really pressured to get stuff done, get stuff done, get stuff done. But otter really, even though it's it's it's a predator, it you know does have to hunt. They've got a pretty high metabolism. They've got to get the prey in. They've got to get their hunting done. And you know they're pretty like they're kind of a fiery animal but they're also this in this water element and play is this big one. This otter here is just absolutely dancing and so the encouragement today is really to keep like the positive outlook, keep things light and you can actually dance through the day and get done everything that needs to get done in a way that's you know a little bit playful. See what kind of play you can bring into the daily tasks today to make it go just a little bit more flowy today and oops sorry. You know I think it'll it'll just make the day go a little faster. It seems like every time I turn on to go a video, do a video, I either get backup alarms or something but anyhow let's go with that. Let's play with that. Even backup alarms we can kind of laugh at them right? So hope you hope this helps you and if it does then definitely appreciate your likes, your comments, your subscribes, and your shares. Have a lovely day. Love you all so much and we'll catch you again tomorrow.


Hello, everybody, and welcome to this Community OKD Working Group Office Hour. We're going to use the hour that we normally use for OpenShift Commons, and we're going to bring together some of the members of the OpenShift, the OKD Working Group, and we're going to give you a really short intro and then some demos of the CRC and answer all of your questions. And to do this, I'd like to introduce from the University of Michigan, Jamie Magria, who is one of our co-chairs, and he's going to take it away and run through what's going on in OKD these days. Hello, folks. I'm Jamie Magara from the University of Michigan, co-chair of the OKD Working Group, and at the University of Michigan, we're using OKD for a variety of projects, a lot of data-driven stuff with research and development of web applications. And what I'd like is for the other folks on the call here to introduce themselves. So Diane, maybe just quickly reference again who you are. All right. And I'm also going to hit the Start Recording button, so I forgot to hit that, so here we go. Recording has started. And don't worry, because we keep a raw file of it, too. So no worries. Well, hello, everybody. And I'm the Director of Community Development at Red Hat and a long co-chair of the OKD Working Group, and been working on OpenShift and Origin since the early days, like seven years ago, so eight years ago now. So, yeah. Happy to be here. Excellent. And Charu. Charu Gruver, formerly an OpenShift Origin user and an OCP customer, now Red Hat employee, almost a year now, still trying to stay as active as I can with the OKD Working Group, but hashtag day job takes away from that. But whenever I can, I contribute with a lot of things I do in my home lab. I'm currently also trying to maintain the CodeReady Containers builds, which we'll talk a little bit about more here. Excellent. And Neil. Hey, y'all. Names Neil Gampa. I'm from Datto, and I'm here primarily working kind of to help bridge the gap between the Fedora community and the OpenShift OKD community, as well as, you know, trying to help make OKD and OpenShift the best that it can be as a Kubernetes platform. So, I use OKD actually personally and professionally at my workplace. We use it for doing reliable building of images in a consistent, repeatable, reproducible way with nice auditing and tracing and stuff like that. Yay, OpenShift builds. And you know, I like doing stuff with OKD, so that's why I'm here to help make OKD better. Excellent. Thank you. So, let's now, we'll provide a quick overview of what we're going to be talking about today. The agenda is that we've got an overview of OKD4. We'll provide a quick update on the state of OKD4. Then we'll talk a little bit about operators and operator hub. And then we'll talk about the collaboration, the cross-pollination between OKD and Fedora Core OS. And then we'll talk a little bit about code ready containers for OKD, and then we will open things up for question and answers. And if there's time, then we'll also have Diane talk a little bit about documentation in the working group and OKD in general. So let's get started with an overview of OKD4, and I'll walk you through a little bit of this. So, OKD is a community distribution of Kubernetes. And basically, this means that it's a community developed and supported distribution. And so when you ask a question, you're asking a question of the community for support, there's people contributing various components to it and even doing their own builds of OKD to add functionality that they'd like. And it has the OpenShift OCP, the commercial product as it were, code base, and it's on top of Fedora Core OS. And some tweaks to make them all work well together. And you can find out, you can get to all of the resources that I'll be talking about by going to okd.io, that's the website with links to the repositories, to documentation, guides, installation guides, and some recipes for some unique things. And also the ways in which you can communicate with the group, and we'll be talking about all of those as we go through those. And a little bit about this, a community distribution of Kubernetes. So it's an automated installation, patching, and updating from the operating system up. So from Fedora Core OS all the way up to the applications and services. And so you've got Red Hat and community operators, we'll be talking about operators in a little bit. And then we've got the platform of Kubernetes itself and the cluster management, which has your monitoring, your registry, your security. And then underneath, of course, is the operating system of Fedora Core OS. And this is for hybrid and multi-cloud deployments and also even just local single machine deployments. You can get it to work in a lot of environments. So the usual suspects, right? Over OpenStack, VMware vSphere, AWS, Azure, Google Cloud platform. Basically, across the spectrum, from cloud all the way to bare metal. There's options for you to use this in a variety of ways, actually. So what is the state of OKD for? And right now, we are currently at a stable release in 4.7. And there are new maintenance releases on a regular basis. We actually have a quicker pace than OCP. And there's community contributions getting added all the time. And we have a link actually to the repo and also documentation for getting the latest set releases and also the nightlies. You can get access to the nightlies to test things moving forward. And there's collaboration with Operator Hub and the Fedora communities. We'll be talking more about that in a little bit. And there are operators for OKDs specifically and stuff coming from these other sources that make for a really nice environment. And if we have time, I'll actually show you that. Last I checked, it was 146 operators that are available for install in OKD just by default. And it enables early adoption of some upcoming technologies. And we'll touch on that a little bit. So that's today and tomorrow what's happening with OKD. And there's 4.8 is up there for testing as well. So if you're looking to get a sense of what's happening with 4.8, that's also available as well. There's a channel with the releases for that to test. And I want to talk a little bit about operators and Operator Hub. So for folks that don't know, operators are a method of packaging, deploying and managing Kubernetes applications in the OpenShift slash OKD world. They got integrated in the 4x version. And basically, they are custom resources. They're controlled by custom resources. And these operators are written in, they can be written in Ansible, in Go. You can even write them in Bash, Script. And they simplify the process of deploying applications and maintaining all of the associated resources. And there's an operator SDK that's available that allows you to, on various OSs, create operators of your own. And there's documentation examples for Ansible, for Go. And they allow you to get up quickly creating your own operators. They're quite easy to deploy also to an OKD cluster. And so the cluster version operator, well, let me back up a little bit. So in essence, when OCP and OKD 4x, when we started down that path, essentially everything from the top applications down to the cluster management became operators. So you've got the cluster version operator, which actually is maintaining the version of OKD that is installed. And also the various components, right? Then you've got the QBasey API server, controller manager, scheduler, etcd. These are all operators underneath as well. And for networking, you've also got network operators ensuring that your plugins are installed, your CNI plugins are installed, your SDN is properly configured. And switching to operators really just radically changed the ecosystem that is OpenShift and OKD. And there's an image registry operator that keeps your local image registry, there's a built-in image registry in OKD, keeps that functioning correctly and sets it up with a few little button presses and some application of some YAML, if you so choose. And there's also monitoring for your metrics and Ingress. Your Ingress operator ensures that your routes are properly set up and functioning. And of course, storage ensures that your plugins are installed and that the storage classes exist. And there's, you know, if you do an install on AWS, you're automatically connected to registry and storage in EBS. And likewise, if you're doing vSphere, you can connect to that storage as well. And there's also some plugins for CSI plugins for example using SIFs. It's very easy to apply the SIFs plugin that's available, OpenSource plugin, to do SIF storage on OKD. So again, operators all the way down and it's very easy to monitor that way. You just look at what's happening with the operators, read their logs and you can see what's happening in your cluster. And Operator Hub is a community-sourced index of these optional operators. And there's a list there of them, Argo CD, very popular, Kubevert, et cetera. These are really cool. Now, if we get a chance, I'll show you in a little bit how OKD connects to Operator Hub and provides these for you. And there's an underlying system, the Operator Lifecycle Manager, the OLM, that takes care of the scope, right? Because you can have operators that are cluster-wide or only in a namespace. And making sure that these can be updated manually if you so choose. And this is something where, you know, if you have, you can update operators independently of updating the cluster itself, right? So these third-party operators can be updated on their own and that can be managed very easily. And as I mentioned, the Operator Hub is integrated into the console. So you can install these operators via the interface with just a point and click or via the OC command. Very easy stuff to manage there. And so now I want to talk a little bit about OKD and Fedora Core OS. I'll talk a little bit about this and then I think Neil will probably contribute a little bit of stuff and talk about Fedora in general and that integration. So essentially Fedora Core OS is the underlying operating system. And when you do an OKD install, the Core OS operating system bits and pieces are downloaded using OS Tree technology. And this is RPM, so it's RPM OS Tree. It's basically like Git for your operating system. And you're pulling down a version, the installer pulls down a version, then it adds some specific components for Kubernetes and OKD and then deploys that to the nodes. So you always get an updated version of Fedora Core OS on your node and the desired version of OKD. And it's very elegant the way that it's done and it allows for seamless updates of the underlying operating system of the nodes. And there's a lot of collaboration between the groups. There's multiple members of the Fedora Core OS working group who attend the OKD working groups and vice versa. And so there's always communication going back and forth about how to work together, how to make changes that might not overly complicate things for the other group and whatnot. And I think it's a good example of how working groups and work together to solve issues and to move technology forward. And both groups are open for people to join and become part of that collaboration. The OKD working group were on Slack. So if you go to the kubernetes.slack.com channel, we're in OpenShift Dev. There's also the openshiftcommons.slack.com in general there. There's a Google group that is great for discussion either via email or if you use the forum format in that Google group. And then there are bi-weekly video conference meetings. And right now these are on Tuesdays, Tuesday afternoons. Generally if you're in Eastern, it's 1 p.m. and they alternate. So there's bi-weekly general working group meetings. And then we're having on the opposing Tuesday a documents subgroup meeting. And so if you want to contribute to OKD or learn about OKD from a documentation perspective, these are great meetings to participate in because we talk about ways of improving the documentation, fixing errors in it, making it clear, and ways of better organizing the information and documenting the great functionality and features in OKD. And there's also repositories, one of them for sort of the working group itself and then also the actual OKD repositories. And we've now started to use HackMD for our meeting notes. And I can put a link to that in the channel as well. And Fedora Core OS working group, there's an IRC, and actually this is incorrect. Sorry, this hasn't been updated. They are no longer on FreeNode. They are now using the new project that was started from the folks that broke off from FreeNode. And I will update that slide. I apologize that that's incorrect. But if you go to the website, it is updated there. And there's an issue tracker for actual Fedora Core OS issues. There's a discussion forum. And there's also a documentation repo that's not mentioned on here. They work on their documentation as well, the Fedora Core OS working group. There's a mailing list and weekly meetings that are three of the meetings each month are IRC based. And then the first meeting of the month generally is a video meeting so that people can see each other face to face and interact more directly. And let me actually, well, I'm on Fedora Core OS. Neil, do you want to chip in a little bit about the general relationship between Fedora and OKD? Yeah, sure. So with a big complex technology like OpenShift, which OKD is the community distribution of, you have a lot of moving parts across the stack. You've got things like security features for filters and control groups and supporting volumes and data access. You have new container technologies around orchestration. You have service management interfaces. You have provisioning interfaces. You've got all these other things. And the goal of OKD is to be a self-healing, reliable platform to run and develop applications and services on. And the only way we can continue to make this better is to be able to consume the latest and greatest technologies and incorporate them into the OpenShift technology base. That is Kubernetes. That is the operators and all that stuff. So fundamentally, the idea of using Fedora as our base for OKD aligns with our ability to take advantage of these new technologies that come in through the innovation pipeline that is the Fedora project, you know, as with Red Hat OpenShift container platform. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is what underpins that. For OKD, we leverage Fedora Core OS so we can bring in the latest technologies to support that mission of making the best container orchestration platform. And that allows for, you know, things like, I'm going to throw out a term here, C Group V2. It's a hot thing in the container space. It's basically a rejiggering of how we actually do resource allocations and management with control groups. And that is available to us through Fedora Core OS and because it's been available to us within OKD, within OpenShift, within Kubernetes communities, all of us have been working together on making this a reality for all Kubernetes platforms, for all container orchestration, for all of this stuff. And so Fedora Core OS gives us that strong, stable, reliable and fast-moving base that gives us the ability to integrate the latest and greatest technologies to make the best possible Kubernetes platform. And through that, we're able to provide you pretty much the most awesome Kubernetes distribution out there, in my opinion. That's pretty accurate, all the way down to that last statement. It is an amazing distribution. And the community surrounding it is very active. And it's a great thing to be a part of. Thanks, Neil. So let's now move on. Here's a list of the resources. By the way, again, you can go to okd.io. And there's the repositories there, the various ones. And if you just go to okd.io, you can find links to all of those. And let's do demo time for code-ready containers on OKD. So here's the resources for code-ray containers on OKD. And Charo, take it away. I'll take over the screen share if I'm sharing. Before I start, let's just take a brief moment to think about what might be the absolute best Java framework on the planet. He is not biased at all. Not even a little bit. He's obviously a completely well substantiated, technically sound opinion. All right. And while he's blathering on about his carcass and showing off all of his carcass stuff, I will mention that if you ask a question or if you submit an issue, we now have actual swag for OKD t-shirts. So I encourage you highly to get your OKD t-shirt, submit an issue, make a pull request, and we will be able to send you off a t-shirt as a thank you gift. That's my contribution beyond docs. Absolutely. OK, are you guys seeing my screen OK? A browser on the right and an empty terminal on the left? Yes, you're good to go. Excellent. OK, so let's start with the downloads. The downloads, in theory, are available from OKD.io for dealing with a technical glitch on the website. Once resolved, you will be able to see them. We will post this link in the chat, and it's also in the slide, so you guys will be able to see them. But the Fedora project graciously gave us some disk space to hold these. So when you go to this pubaltokd-crc-release folder, you'll see folders for the Linux 64-bit Mac OS 64-bit and Windows downloads for CRC. So the installation is pretty simple.  Now, I've pre-run this because it will take a few minutes. It has to unpack what is effectively a binary disk image of a OKD installation as a single-node cluster that has been packaged up so that it can run on the hypervisor of your desktop operating system, be it Linux, Mac OS, or Windows. So you'll run the setup. It will extract the bundle. It will make sure that the hypervisor is installed and configured properly. And it will prepare you for starting your OpenShift cluster for the first time. Once the setup is complete, you'll run a CRC start. This will also take a couple of minutes, depending on the horsepower of your particular workstation, because it is going to fire up the OpenShift cluster, which means all of the operator that Jamie talked about that are part of the OpenShift install, they are all going to go through their bootstrapping and their validation processes. So you can see from the logs on my terminal output here that it gives you updates as this is progressing of what all of the operator is doing. And then when it's completed, you will see some output text here that tells you how to access your now running cluster. So one of the quickest ways to get to it is via a browser. If you run a CRC console, this from a terminal, it will pop open your default browser and bring you to the login for your now running single node cluster on your desktop. It will default to logging you in as the developer account. This is configured to actually create two accounts in this cluster. The default Kube Admin, which is your administrative account, and it gives you a randomly created password here for your Kube Admin account. And then you have a developer account that is developer developer, so extremely secure on the developer side. I'll log in as developer developer. It will bring me to the developer perspective, which starts with a tour. So the first time you log in, you can click through the Getting Started tour and it will take you through the various components of the console and how to access what. You'll also have this nice little disclaimer up here at the top reminding you not to use any containers for anything in production. It is a stripped down installation and a single node cluster, so availability and redundancy. The developer perspective is limited, so if you want to configure things in your cluster, then log in as the Kube Admin account by being and pasting the password. Now you'll be logged in with the administrative perspective, which gives you access to everything in the cluster.  So you can add additional operators to it by going to the operator hub and selecting whatever you want to install. So if say you want to try out Eclipse Che, there's an operator for that. If you, for example, want to do some work with Kafka, you can install the Strimsy operator. Now with all of this, you need to bear in mind that you are running this ecosystem on your local workstation and so you are limited by the resources available on your local workstation. Can tune those things. If you follow our link to the documentation on how to use CRC, you can configure the memory, you can configure other things about the virtual machine that underlies this. So if you've got a big, fat MacBook Pro with 64 gig of RAM, you can crank up the memory available to this cluster and do a whole lot more with it. All right? So that's basically a quick tour of this little guy here. The next thing I want to show you is where all of this comes from. So in GitHub, under github.com slash code dash ready, that's where the source code for code ready containers is. So if you are so inclined and want to build this thing yourself, there are a couple of projects in here that you're going to care about. First one is SNC, which does what the acronym stands for. It builds a limited single node cluster. And so if all you want to do is get a single node cluster up and running that only has local access to whatever station you're building it on, you can actually use this to build and run a cluster. If you want to package it up as a CRC bundle, that's where you switch to the second project. After you've built the SNC, then build the code ready containers bundle from this CRC project. One of these days I'll actually get around to posting a little blog entry about how I do this for OKD because we don't yet have the CICD mechanics built in for automating the build of code ready containers. So if you're looking at the CRC bundle that you downloaded from the site where we're hosting it and it's a couple of releases out of date, that's my fault because I haven't built and released a new one yet. One of these days we'll get the time and the community effort underway to get this automated with CICD, but for now we wanted to provide the community with a version of code ready containers that is completely unencumbered from having to have a red hat specific secret key or registering with the red hat developer site. I would still encourage you to do that because there's a ton of free stuff, tutorials and labs and documentation and things that are available with a red hat developer registration, but we're community members too and we're also very sensitive with our privacy and our own data, so we fully understand not wanting to have to register with a site to use a piece of... and thus we support code ready containers for AD. And I could go on all day and talk about home labs and single node clusters and things like that, but I'm going to stop there. Let's see if there's any questions out there. I don't know Chris and Bobby who are producers if there's any out on Twitch and YouTube or doing it, but I'm not seeing any in the chat right now, so I'm going to end. Here's one now. And Jose, thank you for that. So Jose is asking, are there any plans to add support for ARM architecture? So interesting you should ask. I'm going to give you two answers to this. So the first answer is code ready containers specific. The official code ready containers does run on the M1 processor. It's running under an emulation though, so it's still an x86-64 runtime that's running on the virtual machine. I haven't yet had an opportunity to test our OKD CRC on ARM. My wife does have an M1 MacBook Pro, but she hasn't let me borrow it yet to subject it to code ready containers. So by that I might sneak around and see if I can buy my own on-base MacBook Pro. The bigger answer though that everybody is interested in is yes, ARM 64 support is in the works. I don't know where it's at. I believe the Dean or Christian who are a part of our group do have some insight into where engineering is. The first goal is to support data center sized ARM 64. So we're talking the big metal that you can rent from AWS or Google or that you can buy and deploy in your own data center that will be running the ARM 64 architecture. Support for things like the new 8 gigabyte Raspberry Pi 4s. As soon as we get enough community effort around that and we have a base of the operators built, I can see pretty quickly because these are so accessible now and 8 gigabytes of RAM is enough, barely enough but is enough that we could get it running that once we get the machine config operator and the cluster version operator and a lot of those things ported over to ARM 64, we'll probably start seeing some Raspberry Pi based OpenShift clusters, which I know there's a lot of folks out there interested in. The last thing I'll say on it before I talk forever on this one thing is join the community and contribute to it because a lot of the making this work on ARM is just the muscle of lifting and shifting and compiling and fixing, you know, compiling errors and making all of the go code and run on the ARM architecture. So it's not like there's an insurmountable block in our way. It's just we got to get all the packages built for it. We got to get Fedora Core OS fully supporting it from an OpenShift perspective, so on and so forth. Yeah, so actually Vadim chimed in remotely on this and in essence Christian Glombeck is one of the people working on ARM 64 in general and once it's working for OCP, OKD will follow and it's looking like hopefully in 4.9 or 4.10. No promises on a Pi 4 though, but in general ARM 64 coming in future releases, again the 4.9 or 4.10. Thank you for that question. That's a good one. That question gets asked a lot in the working group probably once every working group meeting and we do have working group meetings bi-weekly. Was it bi-weekly? Yes, bi-weekly we have the main working group meeting on Tuesdays and you can subscribe to it on the Fedora calendar and I'll throw up the calendar URL in a second and we also have the docs meetings on the other day, Tuesday of the week and so another great way to contribute to OKD and the community efforts is to help us improve the documentation. So one of the, if you go to docs.okd.io, I don't know, Cheryl if you want to just pop over there for a minute, there are some decent I will say docs for OKD that we are currently working on and there's stuff for pretty much every version and the latest version is there, but especially if you're a newbie to OKD and you are trying to use the OKD for documentation, I would highly encourage you to keep a journal like if something didn't work or you needed more depth on something and if you go over to one more link that I'm going to make you travel over to is the, you go to openshift slash docs in the repo under openshift and I'll throw the link here but I'll just share my screen for a second. If you want to log, yeah, you've got the OKD. I'm going to open shift docs, dash docs, rather than OKD and just pull up any issue that has OKD in the subject line. Here, let me just see if I can give you a link here to one. It's openshift dash docs, there we go. Yeah, there you go. There is a third, just slide down until you get one that's in looks there. So probably the easiest way to get involved in any open source project is to use the docs and comment on the docs. And here, there's lots of things. We're not perfect. We generate our docs off of the OCP, the openshift docs and so there's always usually a reference to Rail Core OS as opposed to Fedora Core OS or perhaps our language isn't as inclusive as it should be but there's lots of easy fixes as well as grammar fixes. And if you want to log an issue in here, this would be great if you could pick one and just show us that. We'll show our appreciation for your finding it and even better if you can suggest the fix. We'll be happy to take those as well. So docs is a big part of community development and community building for OKD. So please feel free to come in and critique our docs as we are very happy to have your input on that. Absolutely. And another thing worth showing is, Cheryl, go back to the main okd.io real quick and show folks the guides because this is a great thing. So there's the official documentation for the install and if you click on the very last hyper, second or third to last hyperlink guides there, there is a repo that contains guides for installation for primarily what's called UPI, so user provisioned infrastructure on all of these platforms, AWS, Azure, GCP, HomeLab. I wrote one that's in there for vSphere. And basically this is, instead of using sort of the automated functionality of the installer, you can use the UPI. Well, that one's for IPI, yep, there's a good example there. And then there's also for UPI, which is your user provision. So you configure your various components ahead of time and then install onto them, configure your VMs ahead of time, et cetera. And so there's some documentation that augments the official, in quotes, documentation for okd and it's really, really helpful and can always use contributions as well. And one thing that comes out of this is that when you see folks doing stuff repeatedly that maybe the installer doesn't provide for or if you're doing UPI, there's been a couple of instances of folks coming up with scripts to automate or terraform or any of your other deployment control mechanisms to simplify tasks that we see that folks are doing over and over. So it's a great way to contribute to the project as well. And do we have any other questions coming in? I don't see any. People must be stunned with all the amazing stuff here, but I would highly encourage Charo to continue to, here comes one. Chris is asking, can we make multi master clusters with okd4? Oh, yes. Yes, I would hope so. I'm pretty sure that's our default, right? Yeah, it is the default. So yeah, I mean, essentially you have three masters and three workers are the default for the IPI installation on any of the platforms except for doing sort of the single node approach. So yeah, three masters and three workers. As a matter of fact, there's a switch that's flipped in the installation configuration by default that makes it so that your masters do not handle any workloads and keep that separation. You can do that or you can do three nodes where the nodes provide both master and worker functionality or then you can go down to single node. But the minimum for the standard install is three masters. Yeah. All right. Well, Chris, definitely get yourself a t-shirt. I know you know how to do that. And we'll make sure that happens. And I think that that actually highlights the really great thing about OKD is that you can use it in production in a highly available resilient fashion. And then you can also do something small with a single node to do development and whatnot. And it's very flexible, including all of the tools that come with it or many of the tools that come with it by default, which is really great. Yeah. We should also. Sorry. Go ahead. All right. Yeah, go ahead. We should also keep in mind that because of how awesome OKD is with all the stuff and supporting multiple providers and between UPI and IPI type stuff, you can even go into the realm of having, maybe you have your master, your control plane, Kubernetes term, meaning the masters that actually like orchestrate the setup, have that. Maybe that runs on a VPS, a digital ocean or you want to run it on on a machine that you have at home or whatever. And then you could have a worker. You have workers in AWS or Azure or GCP or on machines remote somewhere else.  Well, you could do the masters could be, you know, machines on your home network and you could dynamically make workers come up and down as you need them, you know, in the cloud. Like there's all kinds of interesting permutations that you wouldn't normally be able to think about. And that's really cool because of the way that operators and the OKD installer and CRC and all these other things, you can do whatever crazy configuration you want to achieve what you want to do. And what be even better is that if you've come up with something neat that we haven't really thought of or done before, right, you can send it to us in this OKD deployment configuration guide so other people can see this, maybe help improve it, make it better. And, you know, this is also, it's also an opportunity as I think Diane and Jamie mentioned earlier about contributing the docs, like the UPI stuff is, you know, because user provision infrastructure, which is what UPI stands for is kind of whatever you want it to be. It is probably one of the least fleshed out aspects of OpenShift deployments and OKD deployments. And using, if you come up with something cool and, you know, you've come up to some stumbling blocks so you need, you have some clarifications that would make sense to like put in the documentation, by all means send it to us and help us fill this out because that'll make it better for everyone else and you'll get a free t-shirt out of it. So there you go. Like everybody wins. I know. This is, I have to say, this is the first time we've had t-shirts for OKD. So that's why we're flagging them so much here. We're really thrilled to, that we actually have something to give away besides our thank yous. And so that's, we're really thrilled to get this support and the work that Mike McEwen and the team have done on these deployment configurations is amazing. The biggest issue I think we have is testing, you know, on UPI, on all of this stuff. I mean, we have a regular cadence of releases that go out and each release, basically we need testing. And if you have some esoteric edge case deployment on some cloud that's, you know, or not so esoteric, maybe it's Alibaba or Digital Ocean or something like that, but like testing to make sure that the Fedora Core OS images are available to make sure that once you've got, if those are there, we need to, if they're not there, we need to work with the Fedora Core OS community to help them get them on that and get the latest versions of them, continuously. There's so many moving pieces to open source projects in general, but this one, especially because it is a collaboration between the Fedora Core OS community and the OKD and OpenShift communities that we really are looking for people to help us grow the folks who have access to these different deployment target platforms and maybe commit on a regular basis to do this, that also some work could be done on testing pipelines so that, you know, if you could build scripts to test so that other people could do them, there's always something else if you're interested in contributing here. And that's, you know, we've got a great core of folks that have been working, you know, since the early days of Origin, but especially since the 4.0 release of OKD came out, we've had a pretty vibrant community and very active, but, you know, we are active normally in the spaces that we are currently deploying to, so I am seeing someone screen there popping up, there you go. But that's the key is if you have platform, whether it's ARM or Alibaba or, you know, ZCloud, wherever that is, if you want it tested on that and you have access to that and that's always on a reoccurring basis, please reach out to us. We are with one of the cloud hosting providers, whether it's Microsoft Azure or Alibaba, we can go on because there's tons of you guys out there. We would love to have you take on helping us with the testing and help you create some of those automated scripts for doing that. All right, we've got another question here. Self-created OKD 4 cluster or Rosa and AWS, which would you prefer? It really depends on what it is you're trying to accomplish. Rosa is a subscription based and it is managed by Red Hat and Amazon on your behalf. So if what you're mainly interested in is getting access to an OpenShift cluster but you really want your resources to be focused on application delivery, then Rosa is the way to go to have something that all of the site reliability engineering is taking care of for you. If your budget is really tight and you've got some really, really rockstar engineers and you want to roll your own, then OKD would be an approach that you could take and support it on your own without the subscriptions. Let me add some color here because I have had this thought process for my own personal, like me, super personal, like I want to futz around with Kubernetes and not break the bank and break my time doing it. So the way I tend to make this decision tree go is if I'm learning about the Kubernetes platform, if I want to learn more about the underlying technology, if I want to get my hands dirty doing all the things, like working with operators, working at the administrative level, developing those things, plugging those in, doing some tuning, that kind of stuff, wanting to really deep into the guts, OKD on AWS is a fantastic way to do it because then you get access to all the things, you get the opportunity to really dig into the meat and potatoes of what makes a stellar Kubernetes platform for container development, orchestration, software delivery, application delivery. And I'm not saying you can't run OKD and do your production workloads on that. I'm not saying that. That is totally fine, totally workable, and totally a thing. However, if you are not necessarily up to the task of doing all of that stuff and that includes making the decisions about how you set up the cluster, making the decisions of the sizing of the cluster, making the decisions on what the machine types are going to be, how the storage is configured, how the authentication is being put together, how you interoperate it with your services infrastructure, how you plug it into S3, how you set up IAM roles, how you do this, that, VPC is like, I can throw it more jargon if you like, but the idea is when you do all the things, if you don't want to do all those things to kind of figure it out, then Rosa takes all that away. It makes it magic. And the nice thing is that the pricing for those, like, so, you know, Charo mentioned the subscription thing, Rosa is pay-per-use. And so that means that you can budget it based on how much you're going to use it. And so that makes that, that's where I would put the decision tree in. All right, Jamie, now you can say something. No, no, no, first off, let's back up for 30 seconds to say that there are multiple options for running OpenShift in the cloud, or OKD in the cloud. There's OpenShift on AWS, which is the Rosa in which your control plane is managed, basically, and you use a tool called Rosa to create worker nodes and interact with the control plane. There's also a provided OpenShift service on AWS. And then there's running OKD in AWS doing an IPI or UPI install. So actually, my day job involves doing OKD in AWS. And we are going that route currently because of the ability, as Neil said, to have control over the control plane and to be able to get into the tofu and potatoes of this process and be able to control those nuanced things and integrate different components. And you can, you, you don't lose anything by doing OKD in production or in development in AWS, but you gain knowledge, I think, of the underlying system and the ability to tweak. And so, yeah, if you want to pay for the service of Rosa, you can. But I think you miss out on some of the nuance and some of the controls, basically. And it should be pointed out that Rosa just became an official service just in the past couple of months. There's also some, I don't actually have like GovRAMP for Rosa yet. They're not on the GovRAMP list and things like that. That's not coming to next year. So if you're doing any type of work with federal guidelines, you have to be mindful of those things as well. Yeah, and there's a hybrid opportunity in between those two as well that is subscription-based OCP, which is the exact same code base as OKD. It runs on Red Hat CorOS, which is slightly downstream of Fedora CorOS. The main benefit, if you call it of the OCP subscription versus OKD, is that you are Red Hat supported. You have access to the Red Hat engineered and vetted leases, as opposed to the community support of the OKD. But like with any of the major open-source applications that are out there, it comes down to how confident are you being self-supported and community-supported versus having a lifeline on the other side that... And to kind of add a little bit to what Charles said, another advantage of doing the OKD style for an AWS deployment is you can actually make different choices. So like for example, let's say I'm going to go a little deep here and let's say you want to do Cilium for your networking. Cilium is not included in any Red Hat OpenShift product to the last I checked. But Cilium is interesting. You can see that in the DBPF, it's super fancy on the filtering networking stuff. Actually fairly cool and you cross my fingers, someday it will actually show up in OCP. But I want to use Cilium now. In OKD, you have the opportunity to use Cilium instead of something else, like whatever is in there by default. I think it's OpenShift SDN or OpenVswitch or OVN or whatever, I forget what it is. But like, Cilium is interesting. I want to use Cilium, but I like everything else around OKD with Cilium and so I can do that. So that's where I feel OKD tends to be a much more of an interesting value proposition where you have the opportunity to be a lot more flexible with how your deployment is actually going to look. Whereas with OCP, you lose a little bit of flexibility normally because you're operating on Red Hat OpenShift and then Rosa, even less flexibility because they're managing it. But there you go. Excellent. So we're coming down to the last minute and so I just want to encourage folks to go to okd.io. And again, we have a Google group where you can ask these questions. There was a question about auditing. I'm not sure if the person meant security or resource auditing or both. If you join us in the OKD Google group, we can answer your question there in detail. We're happy to get into detail. So again, okd.io links to all of the things that we've talked about. And again, we're looking for people to join us and to get involved and growing as a community together. So thank you so much for joining us today. Take care all. Thanks everybody. Thanks for being a great bunch of community members. This has really been wonderful to have you all with us today. So thanks for taking up the time. As ever, thank you for the CRC demo. Great stuff.


So Chris has been talking about the telescope itself and the science. John has been talking about the instrument that receives the light. And I'm going to be talking about something which is in between, which is called adaptive optics. And adaptive optics, as I will show you, is something, a kind of instrument that processes the light, cleans it, so that the instrument can actually take advantage of the full resolution, the optical resolution of the telescope. Australia, in the past years, we've been developing expertise in adaptive optics, and that's actually one of the areas where we think we can contribute in a major way to GMT, as I will show. So, what is adaptive optics for us and what does it do? Well, Chris told us that when you build larger telescopes, of course it's to answer a fundamental question about science, but how does it do that? Well, you'll be a larger telescope because it's going to collect more light. That's an obvious point. But something you have to know also is that when you build larger optics, the amount of detail that you can see in your object also grows, and it grows inversely, linearly, with the diameter of the telescope, meaning that if your telescope diameter increases by a factor of two, the amount of detail you're going to be able to see in the image is four times the amount of detail you are seeing with the initial telescope. So that's illustrated by this slide here, where this is here an image that you would see with the VLT, which is a ground-based telescope. This is an image that can be seen, actually, nowadays, by the HST, the Hubble Space Telescope, which has a diameter of 2.5 metres. Now, if you go to this eight-metre telescope underground and you apply it at the optics and you just forget that there is atmospheric turbulence, then you can see many more details. You can see deeper, you can see that the exposure now is going down from 1,600 seconds to 166 seconds, but you can see also more details. If you go to this extremely large telescope, and that's what it will provide, it will provide many, many more details. And it's the same as saying that your angular resolution is actually increasing quite significantly. And on top of that, of course, because you have a larger collecting area, your exposure time decreases quite significantly. Let me demonstrate the power of having larger and larger telescopes. However, what's bad when you have a ground-based telescope, meaning a telescope which is built at sea level or on the ground, I mean, not in space, is that you are going through the light coming from an astronomical object is going through the atmosphere.  And that's the effect of atmospheric turbulence. So it's the same as if, you know, in summer, you are looking at a distant object across a desert or across a parking lot, you will see it moving. The image is moving. Well, it's exactly the same when you are looking at stars. And so in effect, what it does is that the image that you had before with this atmospheric turbulence is now transformed into that, which is a blurry image. And in fact, the fact is atmospheric turbulence blurred the image, so taken from the ground. And it does so that the angular resolution of a 25 meter, for instance, the GMT, is actually not better than the resolution that you would get with a 20 centimeter telescope. So of course you have many more photons, but if you don't do anything about it, you don't have a better angular resolution, which means that you won't see more details. So to solve that situation, you can do two things. You can go in space where you don't have any turbulence, you don't have any atmosphere, but it costs a lot of money. I mean, typically, you know, space missions, they are extremely good, but they cost about 100 times more than an equivalent telescope on the ground. Or you can try to correct for this atmospheric turbulence that has induced this blurring of the images. So that's what I'm saying here. I'm going to demonstrate you how we do it, but adaptive optics can fix this and restore the ultimate resolution of your telescopes. Okay, so how does it do it? Well, essentially it does it with two main optical elements. Two main elements, I would say. One is what we call a waveform sensor, which is in fact, you could call it a light wave sensor. So what it does is that it looks at the star and analyzes the deformation of the light wave being induced by the atmospheric turbulence. And then this information is processed by a computer and sent to deform a deformable mirror that wobbles and counteracts, in fact, the effect of the atmospheric turbulence, so that when the light, you know, the distorted light bounces off this deformable mirror, it's straight again, and therefore allows you to reach the ultimate resolution of your telescope. So that's a technique that's been around for about 25 to 30 years, first developed by the military in the U.S. and then applied to astronomy about 22 years ago, and recently it's been also applied to medical imaging and other type of science applications. All right, so it exists. It's been around, as I said, for 22 years. It's installed in most of the 8-meters, or even all of the 8-meters telescope in the world, but a couple. And that's actually, you know, a real result that you can, that they have gotten in, for instance, the Gemini 8-meters telescope. So this is what you get looking at this globular cluster where you don't use adaptive optics, and if you use adaptive optics, that's what you get. So it demonstrates very, very clearly that with adaptive optics, you see first more details, many more details, but you can see also deeper, because, okay, here you see all of these deep, very faint stars, you don't see them whereas it reveals the faint stars here with adaptive optics. Another very nice example is, for instance, by a Keiko observatory that Chris was mentioning earlier. This is a new major of Uranus, without and with adaptive optics. So you see the really striking difference. So one thing which I'd like to show, because it's very nice, is that it's related to laser gas stars, and I'm sure that if you have read about adaptive optics, you have heard about laser. It's something that you might see within the next couple of years atop Stromlo because we are developing also a system with laser guide stars for different applications. But it's something which is related to the need of a reference source. As I was saying, you have a lightweight sensor. So if you have a sensor, you have to have a signal. And the signal is provided by a nearby guide star, or a star, just a star. But sometimes you're looking at a fraction of the sky in a direction where there is no bright star. And then, well, before laser guide star, you couldn't do anything, you just go to somewhere else. Well, now there is what we call laser guide star, is that if you don't have a star, you can create your own star to be your reference signal. And you do that by actually shining a laser, which is at the sodium wavelength, it's the same orange wavelength that we have in public lights. And you actually excite sodium atoms that are 90 kilometers above ground, and they fluoresce, they shine, and you can see you can collect some of the light. And it serves as a guide star. So it's extremely nice when you go now in many, many sites, you can see guide stars. This is a picture, a long, long exposure picture taken at Gemini, and I have also a movie which shows, that's actually, it's been taken at Monakia, in Hawaii. One of the Gemini telescope is there, to which Australia has a partnership. And you can see that, for instance, those are the two tech, they are pointing toward the galactic center over there, and they were using laser guide star. Another big success actually was the discovery of the black hole and the, oops, okay. So it's actually quite impressive, because at the top of Monakia, there's four telescopes having laser, and sometimes you see the four lasers shine during the same night. So it's quite impressive. The bad thing about laser is that other people know where you are pointing, so you cannot hide it anymore. All right, so this image is dear to my heart because it's an instrument, first of its kind, a West PI for that, at Gemini. Actually, AO Adaptive Optics was the first concept, but now it has diversified into different breeds. So you have the Adaptive Optics, for instance, for moderate resolution gain, but very wide field. You have other Adaptive Optics to study planets that are very, very small field, but you go toward very, very high image quality. That's an example. It's actually one of the most, I think, exciting applications of Adaptive Optics because now, for instance, this is the ground dwarf GL-299 as it was discovered by Palomar, then imaged by HST, and this is now what you can do from the ground with eight-meter telescopes. You see how far, how superior this is compared to even space just because of the nice control of the light and how it scatters it. And finally, so as I said, there is a strong expertise in Adaptive Optics in Australia. There is three instruments, plus a laser-guest star facility that are envisaged for GMT. And I hope that we will play a major role in two of these, the laser-automography Adaptive Optics and laser-guest star facility. And finally, okay, so that's a simulation. This one is not a real image of what we should achieve with the GMT with Adaptive Optics. Without, sorry, and with Adaptive Optics. And finally, my last view graph is to say that aside this GMT activity, we are also applying this knowledge to other things. Like, for instance, we are a participant at the ANU to the Cooperative Research Center for Space and Environment Management, where we are applying Adaptive Optics techniques to track and eventually maybe deal with some of the space debris. So that's a very interesting application. Thank you.


This is Shepard Humphries, and I would like to talk to you about speaking into a radio clearly. People frequently have a problem with this, and I often, when someone's communicating with me when I'm working in the pits, we're doing long-range shooting, I can't hear what the people are saying, and that's frustrating. I spent ten years as a cop using a radio all the time. There's some mistakes you make that we can fix. So here's how we're gonna fix it. First big thing is holding the mic right here some distance from your face, at least four or five inches. If you have it right over here, it's gonna sound really muffled, and nobody's gonna be able to understand what you're saying. So take it out just a little bit. About this far is fine. I'm even okay with angling it a little bit. So if I was gonna talk into it, I would hold it out about this far, angled away from me, and the next big thing, only two things that you really have to remember each time, press the button, wait about one second, and then start speaking in a normal voice, normal volume, clearly, and enunciating your words properly. If you do those two things, holding the mic out from your face, and speaking slowly and clearly, after depressing the mic and leaving it depressed, then you're gonna be just fine. After you finish your transmission, keep the mic pressed for another half second, then let go. Doing those things will make you an expert speaking on the radio, the two-way radio anyway. This is Shepherd Humphries. Hope that helps.