We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. These words from the Declaration of Independence are familiar to many of us, and yet it took 143 years for women to get the right to vote and 189 years for Black people to get the right to vote. And still today, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are still only words for many people. Here in Boston, life expectancy varies by 30 years, depending on where you live. In Roxbury, with many poor and Black people, life expectancy is 59 years. In the back bay, wealthy and mostly white life expectancy is 91 years. It's tough to have liberty when you are in prison. The United States incarcerates 716 people for every 100,000 people. Our rate of incarceration is more than five times higher than most countries in the world. Millions of people in our country don't have health care, a decent job, good education, a home they can afford, and that makes it pretty hard to pursue happiness.  People today who are making the words of the Declaration of Independence come true. Hello, my name is Michael Jacoby Brown, and I'm happy to be the host of We Hold These Truths. And today, we're very honored to have with us as our guest, Jean Dubois, a longtime veteran organizer and executive director of at least two community development corporations. Jean, welcome. Thank you, Michael. Yeah, tell us a little bit about your background and where your values came from to become an organizer and a social justice leader. Well, I think it came probably growing up as a granddaughter of a minister, a Presbyterian minister. My mother eloped with my dad. She was Irish Catholic, and so they didn't speak to her until my brother was born three years after that. So there was tensions there between the Catholic and Protestant stuff. And that was always an issue. My granddad, the Irishman, was so exciting, and he always made things happen. But he didn't go past high school, but he made money and even bought strips of airplanes, I mean, fields of airplanes after World War II. He was in construction, his old uncle's company. So somebody like him didn't have anything beyond a high school education, but said, when you're building bridges, you go down to the solid rock, and none of his bridges ever washed away. So that's an example of the kind of what I call cowboy entrepreneur missionaries. That's my background. So there's something about going for it, going out west, building things. They hit a dinosaur, I mean, not a dinosaur, a rattlesnake nest in the mountains when they were cutting, you know, how the railroads, they were building railroads too, and they blew up this cut, and there were like a thousand rattlesnakes flying through the air. And with stories like that, he was exciting. He always knew he was going to bring a good story. So how did you get into organizing? Tell us a little bit about that. Well, I was a teacher in Wisconsin where I had gone to grad school and, you know, a feminist, and it was the late 60s, and the teacher thing was all through the 70s, but I met the Olinsky people in Chicago when they came and were trying to help the teachers get a little more political in their work. And who was that you met from? Well, Arnie Graff was from New York, and he was an organizer with the Olinsky network. So I really liked him, and they said, well, if you're trying to organize people, what are you doing hanging around with teachers in school rooms? You might as well come down to Chicago and check us out. So I did, and I really liked what I went through for them, just a shorter training time. But then they had me go to Buffalo, where I took a leave of absence from my teaching. And even my teaching is sort of similar to my granddad, where, you know, we broke a lot of rules. You know, we'd have all kinds of speakers. We even had the people that were the leaders of the Attica Revolt back in New York, way back in the early 70s. Prison Revolt.  We'd have women doctors and, you know, all kinds of unusual people when we look at what is normal and what is abnormal. So I was accused by one guidance counselor of messing up the kids.  And I thought, well, he said, if you feel that way, why don't you go burn all the books in the library? Well, I guess DeSantis must have learned that lesson. So tell us, I know we met in 1980, 81 at Mass Fair Share. Tell us a little bit about how you ended up there and what you've learned over all those years in Oregon. Well, I worked with the Alinsky Network for two years in Buffalo. And it was a life-changing experience. Yeah, how so? Well, I think people in Madison did a lot of talking. I mean, they were good people and they were trying, there were those who went and started working with unions and, you know, right. And I was organizing with the teachers, too. But it was all kind of verbal and the real organizing, I didn't see as many results. And I felt like we needed to learn more about how do you actually pick something and change it. So that's what I think they taught me. And I also felt that there are a lot of limousine liberals, as people would call them. Not everybody, but you talk a good line, but that doesn't mean you're able to make change. And I think we all had that to learn, too. So that's what it was, starting with short-term immediate specific winnable issues with a target, all those things that are like smart goals. And just working with regular people in Buffalo, these were blue-collar people who had nice little houses and raising their kids and working. And that was a steel town. There was a lot of US Steel and other companies. But a lot of people lost their jobs there. And poor Buffalo was really in the dumps. But now it's actually booming. It's getting gentrified, which is the other problem. So tell us, what were some of the issues or actions you did back, that was in the late 1970s? Yeah. It was like 78, 79. What were you actually doing then? I was organizing with, we had 42 churches in something called, I forget our name, United Housing. No, no, I forget the name of it. But it was an Alinsky-affiliated organization. We'd go to meet with other people organizing around the US. So it was two years of really learning, and we could pull off 2,000 people in a convention and make progress. We got 42, well, we had 42 church members, mostly churches. And we had some union people. And we got a lot of slum landlords to either clean up or tear down their bad properties. And they were also buying properties up and down the future rail line in Buffalo that was going to take people right out to the suburbs, where somebody with influence or people had gotten University of New York SUNY, Buffalo, located out there. So it was, there was a lot of corruption there. And the guy that used to run the United Way was a member of the mob. And even the mob was pretty active there in Niagara Falls. I was just there four years ago during big storms. And I went on a tour of Love Canal. And it's still burbling. They fenced it off. But people are living, literally living, right near it. And the mob runs that town, or did. So fast forward a little. I know you were in Massachusetts and you started Project Act. Well, Massachusetts. I went there. I knew Heather Booth and we talked about their network. And I felt in some ways that I needed to try an alternative. And my dad died. So it was a tough time. But I think just going to Boston and joining MassFair Share where I met you. Yeah. Again, I was assigned to Rosendale and Hyde Park. I'm still there. We bought a house there, raised our kids there. And again, it's what's nice about that neighborhood is it was working class and middle class people, a lot of Greeks, a lot of Irish, a lot of Italians. Not too many people of color, but now it's 50-50 in Rosendale and Hyde Park is 73% people of color. So it's actually very interesting now and more vibrant, I would say, because the people that really had issues around race probably left. And the people that were still here stayed and they're enjoying their neighbors. And that my street where I live is like that. And we've had our we'll be going on our 32nd block party in a row. Yeah, this year, next month. So yeah, I've kind of fallen in love with the neighborhood. And I worked there with Fair Share. And then again, I felt to use my experience in Buffalo with all the religious community. We started something called Project Acts Association of Churches for Training and Service. And we got the Greek Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant folks together didn't have any synagogues yet. But now that's that literally metamorphic morphed into Greater Boston Interfaith, because I left after I had my first kid. And I think I think Lou Finfer helped. He stepped in at that time. But I think then when the IAF kind of came back, the Alinsky network, and I always admired them. So we helped get different churches to support the kickoff. And my own church Hyde Park Presbyterian, my granddad was a Presbyterian minister. We were one of the co co founders. And we're still members. So that was, I don't know, it's been a long time, like 20 plus years, 30, 30 years. Do you have any lessons you think they're important from those years? Well, I was mentioning earlier about my four point theology. Abedience, risk, power, and joy. That if you're obedient to that calling that is in your heart, in your soul, listen to that and act on it. Then you take a risk usually, like starting Project Acts or going to work for fair share. And as soon as you do that, taking that risk, you are sent power in the form of people and money. Because what I learned from the Alinsky network is organize people and organize money is power. And so when people have it, you win things, then you have joy. So and I've used that over and over and over again for myself. I say my prayers each day.  I just feel that a faith community is helpful. And now I belong to a church with about 40 members. And five of us are white and the others are all Jamaican or African. And it's a great little church. It actually has more life and vitality, though it's small than it used to when it was like 20 old white people. No, that's great. And then I know you worked for many years with Dorchester Bay Economic Development Corporation. How did that transition and switch? The key was the Rosendale Village Market. We needed a supermarket to be an anchor business. And this was just all volunteer. I was on the board of Rosendale Village Main Street. And my son was a baby. And I didn't even have the second kid yet. But we organized over 600 families and raised over $80,000 and went to foundations and got a purchase and sale on the property near the old market. It was a dead market. And the people that bought it, we asked them to sell it to us and then rip it down so we could use the two parcels. But that was a real experience because that was my first experience in actually building something and organized people and organized money. And it wound up becoming an anchor for the Rosendale Village Business District. And it's been a success. It was business of the year in 2018 on its 20th anniversary. But we needed a supermarket like that. And we didn't want it to be a big chain or have just a lot of salt and fat. We wanted a healthy food, so there's a good mix of organics. Of course, every store is that way now. But we wanted to make sure it was. But that is what got me into Dorchester. I got a call one day and the board was looking for an executive director and they heard about the work we did on the village market. And I went for an interview and they offered me a job. I had been working during those years raising money for the, what's now called Blue Hub Capital, was Boston Community Loan Fund. Yeah, so BC, Boston Community Loan Fund. And I was there nine years and raising, or eight years and raising probably by the time we left, we had, by the time I got there, we had 400,000 of capital raised to make loans to groups who were doing affordable housing. And when I left eight years later, we had about eight million, maybe seven million dollars in capital. And it was below market. And that's, I think, what Dorchester Bay was looking for is somebody who's not afraid of raising money. And it's also about organized people and organized money. So then going to Dorchester Bay, EDC, we had 300 apartments and home ownership units. And by the time I left 20 years later, we had 1300. The last 300 were in construction. And then we also built two big, 14 million dollar factories. Digital printing because the people needed jobs. And also that what's now very famous, the Commonwealth Kitchen, used to be the old Pearl Meats building. And that one was fun because the Jewish families used to live in that area.  The rabbis, the book, Hillel Levine's book, when they were throwing acid at the rabbis and, you know, vandalizing their synagogues, it's just such a hideous story. But I think, I don't know, it's all that is about obedience to a calling, I think, whatever, whether it's a religious one or a political one, that voice inside of us. And now I'm reading a book about the tradition. It's called Anam Cara, which is Gaelic for soul friend. And the guy that wrote it, his name is O'Donohue. And he's dead now, but he wrote it about 25 years ago. His concern is there's not enough soul in what people are doing. But in Ireland, way back in Irish tradition, and my mother's from an Irish background, there's this sense of the belonging to the land that's a very strong thread in Ireland. And you're near the sea. And, you know, there's not a lot of wealth there or there wasn't. But that's my great, that's my granddad's history, his family came over during the famine. So I think the Irish tradition is, don't forget your soul. Let it drive you, because that's where the creative stuff is. And maybe that's where that obedience thing came from. So what's it saying to you, Jean? Says, find more people like us. And I've found a number. In fact, I'm very close friends with a woman named Adriana Cillo. She came here as an Italian, couldn't speak English, went to St. Thomas Catholic School in Jamaica Plain, was harassed by all the non-Italians, mostly Irish, I'm afraid.  And she actually slugged the leader. And she has that kind of spirit. But she also learned from this nun how to speak English. So she's one of my closest friends now. And I spotted her when I was an organizer with the churches. She helped win a footbridge so the people who lived in her area could get across to Hyde Park Avenue and catch a bus. That's something you're really good at spotting people. How do you do that? Because I know you spotted Felicia Richards and other organizers. Felicia is a good example. Yeah, no, I'd like to know how do you spot people? Well, one, they don't have to talk all the time. But they're smart and they're not afraid of talking. And Felicia was one of our tenants. It still is in Hyde Park. And when they were looking, we put together this big coalition of four CDCs initially. Now it's just three because the one I'm at a pan didn't continue. But when we won this big Kresge grant to work on climate change and with local activity, as well as state legislation, we were looking for organizers. And we watched Felicia. She was the chair of our organizing committee at the CDC, the Community Development Corporation. So our CDC started in 2001. It's now over 20 years old. This is Southwest Boston. Yes, that's what I run now. And what bothered me is they had 30 units, 35 units when I got there. And now we have 95, four years later. So, you know, we just got to get moving. We had a private guy that would loan us money to put down deposits. But Felicia is a good example of she would run the organizing meetings and she was clear about steps to work on something you could win. And she treated people right. She didn't bully people. And there's a lot of verbal leaders that just bully people. And one of my best friends who's Irish immigrant, she's like that too. She's really, she's clear. She's strong. She has confidence, but she's not a bully. And she has a huge family all around her. Let's talk a little bit about the development. You've built these houses. Now we're in Boston, where there's this incredible housing crisis, little apartments, triple-deckers that used to sell back in the day for $30,000 are now $2 million. A single apartment is $600,000. What have you learned in all those years of development? What's going on here? And what is possible to do? Outside speculation and corruption and cozying up to various politicians. That's what it's all about, people making huge money. I think it's a war and I'm happy to be a part of the war. But what's effective? I mean, you've done some work. What's effective is we were buying houses. I have pictures that we can show you. The smallest ones were three-deckers. The biggest one was 26 apartments. But we were just buying properties as much as we could in the last four years. So now we're up to 95 apartments. Well, what's it going to take to really solve this problem so people who are in gazillionaires could actually live in Boston and buy a house? Part of it is organizing people and money. So the good people, like all of us, need to cooperate, like up and down the Fairmount train line now. We've got a lot of affordable housing built either as home ownership or rental. And what does it take to build it now that's to allow it to be affordable? Well, the key is the city gives us a subsidy. So where somebody else would have to... I can't remember. I think the smallest property we bought was three-decker. And we paid $799 for that one.  We paid $900 something, $1,000 for that. But the prices were already going up. But now it's almost double that stuff. It's crazy. And my own kids, if I hadn't gotten a three-decker in 1981 for $31,000, we could all afford those. But that's where my kids have both lived without paying anything. So what is the city or the state or the federal government or people have to do to solve this problem? I think the CDCs are one important vehicle because we have experience buying, building, and also we built 27 new apartments right before I got to Southwest to Hyde Park. So the community development corporations... They play a role, but you need to be working with your organizing groups because they get bogged down in the details sometimes.  Any project that we worked on in Dorchester, we'd always go out and see all the neighbors first. What do you think? We worked closely with Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative, as Peter, what's his name, is an old group. But they're good. They're always focused on the people in the community having a real voice and also making sure that all the different ethnic groups have even roles and balance on the board. Can you describe any stories or what's effective in doing that and who the opposition is? Well, I would say the main opposition, well, the stories of the CDCs helping win with the community organizing groups. So we had two big coalitions all the way up and down. And so even Newmarket Business District became a part of that. So there's Fairmont Indigo Transit Coalition, which the organizing groups kind of led that. But they were doing organizing that the CDCs couldn't cover all of that. So there was more power that way. And we won the $200 million to get four new stations on the Fairmont train line. That's a big win. That's a very big win. Then we kept organizing, and still are, we got the fares lowered to MBTA level, the Boston Public Transit. And then there was, we won more trips per hour and weekend and evening service. And now we're working on electrification. Right. So what are the lessons, if you would look back on really what's 50 years of organizing, what would you tell people are the lessons you've learned and what's necessary for people to win other kinds of things? Don't stop and always use the four steps. There's my theory, my philosophy. You're going to say it again. But here's the four steps of organizing that we just talked about. One-on-ones, you got to go listen to people. House meetings. People will form a group like Lawrence Community Works. We just have groups just so that people could get to know each other, these house parties. And then they'd have a first Friday where the leaders of those groups would share learnings. And, you know, from those little things, they have gotten more than 20% of all housing in Lawrence being affordable. So we're only at 13% in Boston. That's outrageous. It's outrageous. Cambridge I think is up to 20%.  Then people pick something that's short-term and winnable so they get experience winning, whether it's a supermarket or, you know, in Buffalo we had a dirty supermarket and we got it cleaned up. We didn't have to build one. And then, so one-on-ones, small groups, group research, you go down, find out who is the decision maker on such and such a short-term issue, eight to ten week long issue. I had high school boys from the public housing in Rosendale going down to meet with the Parks Commissioner about the pool that had been shut down by prop two and a half, way back. And all the churches worked on that in Rosendale and we won. We won the Flaherty Pool and the kids, but they were a part of that. And when they came out of that meeting on the research trip with the Parks Commissioner, they went up to this TV guy that was filming somebody else and said, do you want to interview us? We just met with a commissioner. Right. If there was one thing, because we've got to end now, if there was one thing that you would like to tell younger people getting into organizing and social justice, what would that be? I think everybody should learn it. It is not just civics. If you learn these things, you will be successful in anything you try because it's always about relationships. It's about following a vision that you all agree on. It's shared vision. You're learning to do research. You're learning how to work with small groups and you're learning how to negotiate and win on things that are small and then huge like the rail line. Yeah. Thank you, Gene. These are real things. So we just want to thank you for listening. Our guest today, of course, was Gene Dubois, now the executive director of the Southwest Boston Community Development Corporation. And we look forward to seeing you again. Again, my name is Michael Jacoby Brown and I'm your host where we hold these truths. And we look forward to seeing you at the next thing. Thank you very much. Thanks, Gene. It's great to have you here. Thank you.


Mix his business when I be talking about your business. Yeah to my daddy. Yeah when he came in as an artist from 96 to now He probably the coldest I ever seen do it.  Yeah, I'm trying to help to push the whole whole south The respect level gotta be like like you know, everybody when they talk about our music for me I don't think it gets the same essence as as everybody else like they they call it the Chitlin circle when they go so far down and all this stuff I'm saying though, you got a kind of feeling though. Yeah feeling but at the end of the day We don't have to be we can grow we can evolve Well would now the problem is we not though, but we got to what I'm saying is the structure You know, I'm saying it because think about it Think about a New York artist or LA artist, right?  Yeah, put they know raven like that up there. You hear ice-spice flows Yeah, but how are you to say with sexy real Sam was saying you were much the wrong wrong No, no, because that ain't the only music we got down here. That's what all Really, that's really or F&L.  Yeah, but I'm gonna do it like that. We're not that Well, we got a quit trying to be them. We gotta quit trying to be the head of hip-hop Dean I think I think New York is no matter what we do down here. New York got the flow They got the does the style two different things I'm talking about the way that the information flows Yeah Like when you look at the history that was made in the South it wasn't depicted in the way that it should have been And if we'd have done a better job, we've been a better place today I know what you talking about just the lyrics when I'm talking about the whole build up because we don't fit people like you and I We the real ones got to build it up to where people are respected. The artist is just a part of the structure You're right. You see what I'm saying? So we got to do better in trying to figure out a way to make sure we don't even admit certain things and Come together in that way and the real boss has got to do that I'm just being real are you right cuz the real ones.  Oh man, you've been doing this so long. So at that point We got to have a committee My assistant Joe she on She created a committee and we ain't start pushing it or nothing, but She created a whole committee and she's starting to add people to it. Oh, you see what I'm saying She understand what you're saying. Yes, like the structure is so important and it's respected when you do it, right? That's the way all the mobsters move. She like that's how we're gonna help the artist, too They don't know about health insurance or that's how they don't know about Life insurance or that's how they don't know about what to do when music over all that like that was she want the committee That's the truth and I'm like, yeah, that's hard No, that's the truth because at the end of the day at that point once you start getting at that level Then people have to respect the way it moves in that format and you can't just come do us any kind of way Cuz we're so structured Let me ask you this is a question. They said a Boosie is the down south Jay-Z or he bigger than Jay-Z or something It was on my show a lot of times where we spoke on the It was one time I got a lot of critic. I was criticized for that Because I said I listen to I listen to Boosie before I do Jay-Z. Oh, you said that too. Yeah, I said I don't I don't like Spain. I'm not like that, bro. Yeah, I'm not I'm not Can't relate to that. See and I love hoes like because that's that okay. I love your generation too It's up in my generation too, but I'm just saying I'm not a I'm gonna be more if you go to the whole there. I'm P.m. C I'm yeah, I'm big Mike. I'm you start going there It ain't that I'm from the south.    You got a book So I'm not that nigga. I'm not that's not my thing.  I can't say no lie. All right No, I love When I hear Pock though still he still ain't got what J got though. Oh, no, I can't I can't ride with that because I seen what was going on during the time pockets in my top five You know, I don't say I'm riding down the highway listening that park going from city to city State to state doing things that I don't want to speak over on here. Yeah, and I was it was a it was a What you call it was soothing Was it was mentally Hey, you ever heard Jay-Z reasonable doubt CD Yeah, I heard a little bit of it. I'm pretty sure it was everywhere for a while So I had to hear it, but it didn't amuse me like that. Yeah No, no, I'm saying like now that you Pass no, no Just just just to see like it until my listen to it though on music Strictly on flow.  I went to his concert She took me and I'm talking about everything from there to though I just use 96 because I was a star but everything out to that to like I Don't know I put no words together like that. It's the way you do it the way you say it Ain't nobody doing it. I can't say that man story telling. No It's real or is this is this fiction or none fiction as you say well, what are we dealing with anybody saying that it ain't real They ain't they fake they so I'm asking like isn't it right up flow or is it stories or is what it? What are we talking about everything about music about hip-hop about rap? Like Everything that goes with rap, you know, people gonna give me a bad Like Jay-Z it ain't like that. Yeah, I just ain't into Jay-Z like that But you say and listen to it But I'm saying I've never just sit down and be like man I'm gonna go get this Jay-Z and pop this in I'm for the rock with it. You and Odisha be great for you We had the same conversation me you ever right now and it'll be y'all be like rolling with this, but for me I'm like no, bro. Like I'm reasonable doubt. Go listen to regrets number 14 I sold it all from crack the OPM and third person. I don't want to see go listen the politics Listen the king not the hustle number one like listen go listen to UGK now they got me running from the feed Full of stones came out.  I can't set up for it act like I couldn't listen to that man Always put GZ after damn near close after hole somewhere because With the and I was when when when Bumbie came out now. They got we running from the fairs him and him and UGK I really was out here dealing with task force. I really will get stopped. Yeah, I read they stop say I know you Oh, we've been watching you. You know this is helping me, bro You know this did you know Jay-Z? You know who Jay-Z favorite rappers here? UGK probably right Scarface and Pym C. Pym C If you listen to Scarface, I ain't gonna say pimp, but if you listen to Scarface Scarface like a Jay-Z like The way he put the words is I like a Jay-Z Like a Scarface. Well, maybe you got to flip that around Let me flip because go back to the music and you'll see When when when Jay first came out he was not rapping like he rapped on into his season Well, when Jay first came out, he was sick. That's what I'm telling you them songs. I just know that's the first You time we ever heard he wasn't flipping blood and I remember hearing them on some flipping type stuff when I heard his verse when He first came Go back to the reason we talking about dope Well Yeah, but I don't know man like I said when I heard when I heard dope talk the real dope talk going to the fairs getting out And all that that came from UGK For me I Think that's why we kind of claire cuz I'm going back to who I originally got my When I say I didn't get my game from her But I had to end I was doing what they was talking about when it was going down Yeah, so I can't set up her nine act like these niggas didn't help me with meditation making it through these different traps Yeah, that's right spot. I'm riding for 70 miles Nigga I need something to help me meditate a lot. We're gonna go.  Yeah, we on boss talk one-on-one. Yeah, we gonna


Libby, you did a great job. Thank you so much. It's impossible to sort of guess how you pronounce my name because I was born and raised in Seattle, Washington, and spent most of my life in San Francisco. Can everybody hear me? Because I see that Jay is asking if it's just him. Can other people hear me? I can hear you. Jay might need to hop out and read some more. Okay, Dan and Nigel say yes. Or play your settings. Jay, do the sound driver dance. While we do that though, I'm just another human on this planet. I was born and raised in Seattle, spent most of my life in Seattle or San Francisco. But my grandfather was born in Calabria in Southern Italy. And so my last name is actually Italian, Calabrese as they say. But that was in 1910. And my whole family's been in the United States since then. So I was raised with it being squillis. Because most Americans would look at it and go, okay, squill ace, you know, kind of thing. But in fact, somewhere along the line, my father decided he wanted to be more Italian. So he called it squillacci. And so I spent my whole life pronouncing it squillacci until I met my wife from Southern Italy. And my wife promptly informed me that I do not pronounce my name correctly at all. What's more like squillace. So nobody pronounces my name correctly, including me. So there you go. I'm gonna go ahead and talk about this. But for sedgissette potreppe, as they say. So listen, I'm gonna go ahead and launch the PowerPoint because I'm a Microsoft person, so PowerPoint's free and this is what I've been doing for my whole life. But what that means is I can't see in the PowerPoint display, I can't see the comments. What's really important here is this is a good, we've got a good group of people, but it's not huge. And that means we should be informal. So I've got a presentation here to talk about and walk through, but I can be driven by questions or interests at any time. And so you should feel free to comment in here or ask in the Q and A section. And like Libby said, I've asked her if she could just interrupt me. And she immediately realized that it's a tremendous joy to interrupt me. So let's play with this. So feel free to interrupt me. I'm gonna go ahead and start the presentation. And the first part of it won't take that long, but I wanna sort of establish a groundwork of why we are in this space that we're in. And we'll go from there, okay? So let's see here. If I share a screen and you get inception, you try this before and there we go. And then I go ahead and you've got inception. And then I hide it and then I go ahead and do this. So in theory, Libby confirmed audibly that you can see the screen. Because otherwise I can't see. All right, great. Okay, so this is what we're gonna do. It's gonna be quite informal. I am Ross Gulash, I'm a principal program manager on Azure Core Upstream. And that is, my team is the Deus Labs team, the larger Azure Core Upstream team handles pretty much everything that funnels into any container or OCI oriented service and upstream projects. So on the Kubernetes side, that will be things like gatekeeper and service mesh work. And I used to be the helm PM for years and years and various other things. The VS Code Kubernetes extension, which is in the CNCS, interestingly enough. But we also do things like the open source work that goes into Azure Kubernetes service and so forth. And so if that team finds a bug, they think it's a Kubernetes related bug, they will help them do a repro and then we'll take the fix and push it upstream so that everybody can benefit. That way the AKS team can concentrate on the actual service and still get a fix right away. And so that's sort of where I sit. Now Deus Labs is an interesting part of that. We actually only do open source stuff to help fill niches in development that we think are critical for moving forward or doing new work that we couldn't do before. So it's not strictly speaking container work, although as I say, it used to be the helm PM. So a lot of it was, still is, I'm the Porter PM if you're familiar with Porter and the cloud native application bundle. But if you're not, mostly what I do now is WebAssembly and Kubernetes. And it turns out that's gonna involve container dshins. So let's talk a little bit about the agenda, which is WebAssembly, what the heck? Because we've got to sort of square the circle, understand why we even care. Kubernetes is the JavaScript of containers and by the way, I claim the trademark on that and I will come and collect royalties. If anybody uses it, so please use it because I need more royalties. Container D turns out to be at least for me, the magic sauce and I'll try and provoke just after later on because he does Kubernetes integration in a different way. And this is very early days. So it's worth talking about or thinking about all the ways you might do it. And then we can let the yelling begin, we can open it up. But as I said, that's sort of a normal agenda and this agenda should be interruptible. All right, just to set the stage here. In the beginning, we used to do native code all over and then when the cloud sort of started, they were like, let's take a VM because we had things like VMware kind of early on in native when you're in Rackspace or something like that. There was some hypervisor that was used actually after bare metal. And eventually we got to cloud things and the VMs were the thing that were operable there which meant that the developers were really always delivering native code which could have, the state of which could have changed any time between when the developer last touched a button and when it was running in a VM. And in addition, it would acquire state while it was running. Things would change in the environment, the running environment. Things like that were troublesome, shall we say but we worked around them because basically if you pay humans money, they'll do all kinds of crazy things. Now when containers came around, it was pretty clear that they were the greatest things since sliced bread, mainly because you could sort of fix an environment and deliver it. We use words like immutability and so forth but it was also the shareability of it. They were smaller, much, much, much smaller and they were much, much, much faster which meant it wasn't just the shareability, it was the pure speed of something you didn't know about. So I always demo when we were doing conferences in person and I hope to do this again. I always demo a container that does the matrix, right? Like the matrix screen, I have no idea how to do the matrix screen but containers are fantastic because all I need to know is, excuse me, where is a container that does the matrix? And I can call it in and boom, it's on my screen and it's just fantastic. And you can do that with run times, production workloads and so forth. So containers still are the greatest things since sliced bread and that's not really why we're having this conversation. The sort of the reason we're having the conversation is because all was well but over the last 10 years, the practitioners, I noticed I misspelled practitioners because that kind of stuff drives me crazy. Please insert mentally an I in there. They discovered issues, right? They love POSIX but it turns out there are other operating systems in the entire world software environment. Yeah, sure, you can talk about Windows but really it's not just that. There are things like, oh, real-time losses and there are BSDs and there are UNIXs and there are all kinds of things. There are new operating systems being built all the time because the environment we work in, it's always changing. So POSIX is great but turns out it's not everything. In addition to things like Windows which is obvious since I happened to work for Microsoft. We also noticed that like architectures ruled everything but that was not as nice as it seems. So it's really great when you're looking at an AMD64. Then if you've got an ARM, it's okay but then you realize is it ARCH64, is it ARM64, is it ARCH64? Is it V7 or V8? And we're pretty sure that RISC5 is coming and is that really going to be the only architecture that we're interested in? We don't really know. And so when we think about like hyperscale like the world we're in right now and I work for Azure, so think about something like Azure or Amazon or Google or DigitalOcean or Alibaba or OVH. It doesn't matter what cloud you're talking about. That approach tries to standardize the architecture and standardize the operating system so that containers work really well in all of these places. And it turns out if you do that it really does which is fantastic. But in the rest of the world it doesn't work that way. And so what you end up having is this weird desire to run Kubernetes all over in little environments all over the place. And to do that you actually have to rebuild all your containers and you have to, if it's an operating system it's different, you have to figure out whether containers even exist and then you have to port Kubernetes to that. And so all of a sudden it gets to be a little bit more difficult. So architectures are an issue. And one of the things that's great about Kubernetes or excuse me, containers is that it's really an entire OS or at least it seems that way to the application. So you can sort of X copy or just RM the whole directory of the application into a container image and you can dork around with it for a while and almost all the time except for the most complex environment you can sort of get it working. Now that's an amazing bit of flexibility, right? It's absolutely fantastic. But if you notice it, it's an improvement in the ability to take the same code and run it in a slightly better way. But it's still the same code. And so in many ways you're actually bringing all the old vulnerabilities that you may or may not know about yet with it. And those may include vulnerabilities in other parts of the environment in the image that have nothing to do with the application at all. So those scenarios, it's fantastic to be able to dump the code in. But on the other hand, if we start running really critical workloads, how do I know that this image really is okay to run? You might be well aware that there's lots of stuff going on in the world about supply chain and security and signatures and so forth. But that problem is so large that even when we get things like the big one we hear about now is S-bombs and signatures, it turns out neither of those things really solves your vulnerability problem. It's merely one step forward in the vulnerability problem, right? Moving from HTTP to HTTPS was a step in the right direction, but it doesn't prevent you from going to the wrong URL. You still may have that problem. And it may also be that the URL is by definition malicious. You think you're going to the right URL and it may even be the right URL. And you'll know one thing about that URL is that it is the one that is serving SSL to you. But that doesn't mean you're not going to get hacked or extorted or phished or whatever it might be. So all the work we're doing right now has to do with all that complex code. It's possible. And I believe it's true that the way forward for a good chunk of our code, not all by any means, is to actually deliver less of it, far less of it. And finally, the last thing was that darn kernel, right? The great thing about container ecosystem is that you were given C-groups and namespaces, but you can hit the kernel, the shared kernel. And that meant that you could just needed the kernel to be the same. And that's pretty easy with POSIX and Linux, which is great. So that was a tremendous benefit. But being able to hit the kernel meant that we spent the last six years in distributions, both physical distributions and also things like, you know, EKS and GKE and AKS and anybody else's cloud distribution. All of those distributions spend millions of dollars and years of people work to try and figure out how to prevent you from hitting the darn kernel any way you want at any time you want, because they're either you made a mistake or somebody else deliberately made a mistake. And either way, you don't really want to own the kernel if you've got other things running on it. So these are problems that we live with today, but they don't tell us that somehow containers are bad. That's not what they tell us. But they tell us that there are some things we wanna be able to do, right? That we can't do as easily if at all with containers. So those people, geez, another typo they yearned for. I need an N here. It was an I forgot and an N, okay? I gotta get them down. They yearned for things like super fast cold start times. So the one thing that native had is you had the ability to start up pretty darn fast, whereas the whole container system was built for sort of like long running processes in a data center. That's what containers, containers are much faster than VHDs. And in that sense, they seem like they're instant. And for developers, that experience was fantastic. But in production, when you talk about like really hosting fast functions, for example, it turns out that they're really not that fast and especially compared to native. And so what you really want is how can we get stuff to move faster than containers generally do? And if you put the Kubernetes ecosystem around the containers, then the gearing is a two to three second delay no matter what it is. That's just the way Kubernetes worked. And it's a good thing for its design, but not for other scenarios or is it? That's what we're gonna get to. And the other thing we wanted was just pure size. Early on, we thought for sure that the developer ecosystem, and this is very true, the people who were in the Docker ecosystem, including me, we really thought that developers would find a Docker file easy. And so what they would do is they would actually develop their Docker files. That's not actually what happened. What happened was people would code natively, X copy into a Docker file. If they found a Docker file on the internet, they would Google for a Docker file for their particular language or project type or whatever was, and then X copy in whatever they were working on and then dork with it until it worked. And then they would check that in with the intention that they would go back and optimize the image.  It's not their fault at all. It's not that they can't go back and optimize the image. It's that they just don't have the time to do it. They've gotta go and build another image tomorrow or there's a tire fire in their service and boy, whatever their background task was today, it's gone now. And it could be gone for an entire week while the service is stabilized. So that results in big containers. So that's the second button there. The size, the containers for smaller or constrained environments where you can't scale out turn out to be too big. Even optimized containers are too big. It's just too hard to spend the time to make them smaller. People do and you can, right? And you can speed up their start times and so forth. But it's just really hard. And now as a developer, instead of working on your application or your business feature, right? You're now working on some little teeny optimization from your point of view that has nothing to do with your service has to do with getting smaller or doing fast starting. And so it just didn't happen. WebAssembly is an interesting solution here. But before we get there, I just want to point out that size became a problem. For those, I probably, I don't know if I'm supposed to say this, but quite frequently people complain about the size of a Java or a .NET container. No, I'm not even gonna say the one I'm supposed to say. You can't drag it out of me. But .NET and Java containers are routinely 500 megabytes to a gig. And that's just because there's a lot of stuff there. I mean, it's just the way it is. If you wanna dump a complex Python in there, you're gonna bring in so many Python scripts, it's not even funny. And so even Python, which there shouldn't be or node or whatever, these are big chunks of code. And really all they're doing is delivering strings in files. So it's fascinating. And by default, we want no kernel access. So we learned this because we spent a whole bunch of time doing mitigations in Kubernetes. I and any number of professionals have spent a good chunk of time doing mitigations, seccomp and app armor and all these other things. And essentially, all of those things do is tell and then of course, trying to get user images and not root images. All of this is really designed to prevent you from using the kernel or to control which kernel aspects you use. But even if you use a kernel aspect and you're being controlled, if you know a zero day in that sys call, you still own the kernel, even if that is the only thing you've been given permission to. So it's a complex problem when by default, you get access to the kernel. Well, we don't want that. We want to have a whole layer between the kernel and the thing. And so you start thinking about things like virtual machines and VHDs and hyperbites and stuff like that. But those are too big. And so then finally, and the thing about containers which we mentioned before, which relates to the kind of the issues that have to do there is we really wanted operating system, architecture, language and location portability. And by location portability, we mean things like, can you bring the code to the data? But at the same time, we really wanted all the usual container benefits. We want immutability, we want signability, we want to be able to attach a bunch of metadata that says where it came from and all that S-bomb stuff because it will provide value as we go forward. And we want to be able to do the things that we do with containers. We want to be able to store it in some sort of registry and pull it down with the stuff we already have. So that's kind of interesting. So while we were doing this, all of that Kubernetes and container land, there was hostile browser land. And JavaScript becomes slower during that period clearly the way to program the browser. But then in those environments, they're very rapidly understand that they want actually faster stuff because JavaScript is an interpreted language. So the first thing that the browser has to do is have a JavaScript engine that grinds the actual text down to an abstract tree and then spits that out in some sort of intermediate code that can be run in the VM, ground down into machine language and run in the VM eventually. And boy, that's fine for popping up a color or a little pop-up and stuff. But if you want to do something really complex, that's pretty slow, right? Okay, so that's one thing they know they want, faster stuff. And they want all the operating systems because why not? They're browsers, they wanna have a browser on everything. They also want all the architectures because why not? They're a browser, I wanna be on everything. And they absolutely have to have by default no access to the operating system. So the whole syscall thing is right out. And that's because obviously they're being attacked. So if somebody can get into the process in some way through the front door, that is through the browser usually, right? They can't be permitted to go ahead and download a script that then goes and hoses the operating system. That's very bad. And then finally, of course, because the more JavaScript you have, the more text you have and pretty soon your web request slows down and users get frustrated they have to wait three seconds to make a million dollars. And that's very disappointing because you wanna do it in like three milliseconds, right? So it has to be very, very small. And there are other reasons, other things that have come up in that period but I'm sort of trying to bucket the process in hostile browser land. And what came out of that is WebAssembly. And so if you think about WebAssembly in you're thinking it's from the browser and it's a browser thing, you're sort of right, right? That was where it was developed. But before we go somewhere I wanna really kind of talk about WebAssembly outside the browser, right? First of all is the key elements of WebAssembly that I think are critical. And I'd love to have an argument about this, right? First of all, and this deck we'll make sure we share and everything like that but this is a link to the VM specification. It's a stack-based abstract VM. So when we were thinking earlier we didn't want access to the kernel and we thought that sounded like a hypervisor or a VM of some sort of emulation and whatever. This is exactly what that is and you can think of it like the .NET framework you can think of it like Java VM and whatever it might be it is not strictly speaking emulation it's its own operating system statement in a way is a way to think about it which is why assembly sort of fits even though it's not really assembler either. But it's been in all major browsers since 2018 for things like Google Earth and Adobe Lightroom and things like this. In fact, I'm almost certain that this underlying platform that we're showing right now that's streaming my video to you almost certainly is built with WebAssembly from browser to browser, right? I don't actually know but I would lay money on it. So some of the critical things are is that the host in WebAssembly and in the browser that's a JavaScript engine but outside of the browser anything could run and including a JavaScript engine like you can code V8 or SpiderMonkey or any other JavaScript engine to host WebAssembly modules and execute them. All code in that environment is deemed untrusted and the sandbox for WebAssembly is unbroken. There have been, there are security areas where it's problematic and you have to pay very close attention but the sandbox itself works. It's not a sandbox problem and that's really, really great. There are problems that doesn't have, there's no threading, okay? So you can't think of like you can do thread pooling and there's no GC or memory management and there's a bunch of other things that are not there and it's only 32 bits so your addressable memory is like, you know, four gigs but and I do wanna be quoted as being the first to say really nobody should ever need more than four gigabytes of memory. So I'll, you know, claim that one. Most of these things have proposals that are on the way but they won't be here for a few years and so the real question is like, okay so what can you do with it? What did you probably shouldn't do? And that's the way to think about it because we're thinking about engineers. The other two interesting areas that I think are critical for what we're doing especially in Kubernetes and for the, the kind of definition of the problems that most of the ecosystems run up against are the Wasm System Interface or WASI which is really sort of an abstract syscall spec. So you can think of it as like an operating systems, a set of kernel calls, right? But they're virtual, they don't, they're not specific to any particular thing so they're not positive or anything like that. And the component model which is a way to create tightly constrained interfaces that define capabilities that the module can perform or requires the host to perform on its behalf and so there's two sides of a component interface and the way it works is basically that the WASI syscall set, right? That specification will sit on top of the component model. There'll be component model interfaces or at least that's the way it's being looked at and discussed right now. Both of these things are in an experimental stage but progress is healthy and rich. However, it's not moving as fast as like, hey, you're gonna get something tomorrow or next Tuesday because these are very complex systems and they have to be optimized for speed and for security. So what do those elements provide? Well, strangely enough, they provide a lot of the problem features areas that we identified as being an issue with the container ecosystem. And so we love containers but then if we need these particular things we might have to mix containers with something else. And so when we do that, we look at these categories. Because the host owns the mod of module, the host can't permit or deny anything it wishes. A module cannot request any feature or any behavior from those unless the host permits it, right? And the interface model constrains any ability of the module to make calls. So if you have a component and it implements one interface, for example, if you're talking about an HTTP request, that interface might say, I must consume, you know, I implement something that receive a function, one function that receives a request and I return that function returns a response and that's it. And if a host implements the opposite side of that contract, right? Then that module can be coded to that contract and you can code in any language and you can see that's part of the portability. That means though that both the host and the module, right, can only perform that function, which is fantastic. So interfaces constrain the abilities of a module to do whatever it wants. So even if a module has malicious code, even if it might find a way to invoke a call, it can only invoke the call through the interface. And not only is the shape known by the host, but the host could dynamically inspect those interfaces as well and make decisions on, you know, what kind of content the actual return value had and do something good or bad, depending on what the host decided. Modules have implementations, but they own nothing and that is a great stance. So the other one is the speed size combo because they're binaries, right? And because they're not containers and are optimized for speed, the speed and size combo is amazing. So you can treat it all, it really depends on your workload, but we're talking about somewhere between, hey, a 10x reduction in size to a 50 and 60, 70 where the x reduction in size, that's really amazing. And native cold starts are approachable. So optimized, you can actually start a web assembly module and enter a function in low nanoseconds. It's entirely possible, but most importantly, it's really important to realize microseconds, low microseconds is like out of the box. And so the throughput there with the size, that is the module gets delivered very, very fast. You can have density and you can cold start per request a new module. So your multi-tenant location of focus becomes the module and not the whole host process, which is very, very advantageous. So now you can start to see why things like Cloudflare and Fastly and Netlify and Bercel and even Akamai does this now. And I'm sure all of the major clouds will do this soon. Use this for their CDN functions. That's how they do. Okay, Ralph, we have a question. Yep. Okay, so Nigel asks, so when things like GC threading fully implemented, Waze, networking, et cetera, is there a risk it will bloat and lose some of its superpowers, side speed, security, et cetera? Absolutely, and that is the risk. So here's the deal. The reason I love web assembly, the reason I'm betting our company's investment on it and supporting the upstream. So for example, my company's is a sponsor of the Byte Code Alliance Foundation, which is doing most of the W3C work for the specifications involved here, things like that. My team contributes to those. But we also support, for example, the Python compilations. We support the infrastructure for building and testing the Python builds to Waze, for example. So we support all that, but the reason all these investments are happening is because the sweet spot for web assembly is not to replace the model that containers excel in. So think about it as a sliding scale. If you have no threading, that is, you have one thread, then by definition, you're, and you have fast cold starts, which is what you get. Then by definition, what you really wanna lean into with web assembly is the thing that containers can't really do, which is give you multi-tenant per request super fast response times, right? With super small functions. Now, the container model can't compete. You can't create a new container that fast. You can technically, but in reality, you can't do it at a democratic scale. So what is the value of the container? What is the sweet spot for the containers? You notice that pods actually are up and running all the time. And that's because they can. And they can do their own scheduling. If you put a web server in a pod in a container, then create pods and host them in Kubernetes, right? Those web servers, they have their own threading pools. They have their own connection pools, all that kind of stuff that was built for architectures like three tier models 25 years ago. And if you think about it, the container model enables us to continue building applications that way. But web assembly does not, but the benefit it gives you for not building that way is that you can do all kinds of things you can't do with the container. So that's the sort of the dividing line, the super fast, super small, single threaded, do your work and get back to business and create another module for the next work item. If that sounds sort of functioning or serverlessy or microservicey, it should. That leans into that kind of approach technologically. But what happens when you wanna actually run a big long running process as a web assembly? Well, remember, you only got four gigs, so you can't do it now. But if you get 64 bits, now you've got the memory space. If you get threading, if you get async, all the things that enable concurrency in a large process like an OS style process, what you're gonna end up doing is everybody who knows how to build three tier models and three tier software that is still being built that way will just port the same stuff to web assembly. Now, will it be good? Yes, will it be better? Yes, it will, just in the same way that containers were better than native. But it is not actually going to be so much better. It is going to be the same code with the same environment. For example, you're gonna see, and you already have seen experiments with full web VMs. In fact, there's one called webVMI.io, which I think is Chirps attempt at a full container or VM in web assembly. And the thing about that is, it's fantastic for what it is. And maybe that's the feature you want. So I'll use you, Nigel, as an example. So maybe Nigel, that's the feature that you want. I don't want it, I don't want it. If I'm gonna run a long running server process that wants all that stuff, right? I'll probably do it native or I'll do a container. Maybe I'll do a web assembly, but only if I need that web assembly to run on any architecture and I don't care about speed. I don't care about any of that other stuff. I basically just want to get the kind of default security and the portability that I get out of web assembly. And those may be enough, right? But you're not gonna get that for a while. And frankly, if you do that, you're going to still run into the same problem we have with VMs and containers now, which is we have no idea how to secure that entire operating system.  And remember that those big processes, now you're gonna have to open up all the kernel features to the module that essentially start to, at some part of the gradient start to negate the constraints that the security model of the component interfaces starts to bring. So that's not a yes or a no, I guess. It's really an argument for where you should start thinking about the difference. And in two or three years, maybe you wanna think about the difference differently, like on that sliding scale. Maybe I will think about it differently. I don't believe so. I believe that the next 10 years of computing must get more constrained. The developers have to be able to do more, but they have to worry about less and we have to ship less code. There will not be faster and bigger chips in all the little devices we're talking about around the world, not floating or not in 5G node towers, not in space, not in submarines, not in ships, rowboats, my cell phone. These things are gonna get bigger, but they're gonna get more electrically efficient and slower at the same time per unit cost. And that will be good. We need them to burn less electricity. But in that environment, you don't wanna bring your data set. You wanna do something different. And that's how I look at it right now. Did I, is Nigel, Nigel, is that a good thing? Liddy, I can't see the chat. So you gotta tell me whether Nigel says thumbs up for now or thumbs down for now. Okay, he says, so clarifying, are you saying you don't expect wasm to get GC threading, et cetera? Because if it did, it would lose its edge. No, that's not what I'm saying. No, I expect there is a GC proposal. Dan, I know is, if Dan is still here, he could probably drop the PR for the proposal, the issue for the proposal. There's GC, there's memory management. All the things that people will want are coming. And so what I'm really saying is, Dan might have a different opinion, but my opinion is those features will not arrive in anything concrete before two years from now. And maybe I'm pessimistic, but I actually think I don't want them. I don't need them. I want a new module, I don't want a new thread. That's the way I look at it. Okay, so these are the portability and so forth and we'll go on. And this is Werner Vogels doing the AWS thing. Very actually Prime Video basically uses WebAssembly right now for more than 8,000 device types and that's the kind of radical portability you get with a single module. That's incredible. And of course, it doesn't mean that the module is the only thing that's on those device types, right? You gotta have something that runs it. But the point here is that the service's job is to make sure that the thing that runs it is there, but the developer only has to think about the package for the process, which is WebAssembly and it's like you compile to WebAssembly, so it's more like a native process. There is no Docker file to build for WebAssembly itself, although I'll show you that there's more stuff to be done to make it work in Kubernetes at the moment. All right, so Kubernetes, and this is my take, part of my hostile provocation, is the JavaScript of containers. And by that, I mean, you don't necessarily like it, you might not have built it that way yourself, but you got it and you use it and so does everybody else. And then they gripe about YAML and service meshes and a few other things. Oh yeah, so ingresses are not good, it's like this kind of stuff, but we use it. And it turns out that network effect wise in the world, it's incredibly useful, right? So the question is like, what do you wanna do, right? You wanna integrate and people tell us this right now. So speaking from the perspective of Azure, all I hear from customers are, I wanna run Kubernetes on my automobile. I wanna run Kubernetes in my house. I wanna run Kubernetes in my whatever it is, okay? And then they say, but when I try and run Kubernetes, it's either too big or I have different machines like I have got ARM and Intel and I've got various other things. In other words, what they end up saying is some combination outside of the hyperscale environment where everything is the same skew, you gotta choose everything and line up your cluster a thousand nodes the same way. They're identical, clusters work great there and containers work great there. The real truth is that Kubernetes is what they want for the control plane. That's what they're asking for. But what they don't know because they haven't been told and that's partly my job is that Kubernetes could work in these strange environments where either they're heterogeneous by OS or by architecture, right? Or by language, something like that. Or they're constrained. They don't have a lot of room. They have flaky networks or very thin attenuated network connections. And they maybe like barely have any RAM let alone disk storage and things like this. So the size has to be really, really small. And the performance has to be really, really good for unit of artifact, right? Those environments don't work really well in containers. And like I said, the point here is not that containers are bad. It's that we were talking about compute environments where containers don't really work well. And for sure, and CDN it turns out that's true for pure cold start and security. So all of those environments are web assembly. Okay, that makes sense. Those are technological choices, not religious battles or emotional feelings. And so people sit there and think, okay, I wanna do Kubernetes but with web assembly. And so there's lots of work here. So Giuseppe is on the line. I know he's done a lot of work. We've been squabbling recently socially about CRUN integration, right? Like so CRUN can run containers or web assembly, which is a cool way to do it. Or some companies like Wasm Cloud, which is an open source kind of actor based model for the most part. They have a microservice orientation, but the sweet spot for them is actors, they have a Kubernetes integration that allows their actor model to essentially be scheduled from the CRD. And you use the CRD and that's their integration with Kubernetes. But in reality, you can use it in Kubernetes if you like the model and you have Kubernetes control planes, but it's really designed to run anywhere and it does its own scheduling and networking and things like this. And so you can do all kinds of cool, you know, transparent networking and neat mesh scenarios like that. So that's one way to integrate with Kubernetes. And the question is whether it's the useful one for you and maybe if Wasm Cloud is your kind of thing. There are also CRA implementations and Kubelet implementation. I'm gonna talk about those in a second. And of course, the interesting thing about WebAssembly is because it can be embedded very, very easily. It's already probably in your Kubernetes cluster. You just don't know it, right? So Envoy network filters except run WebAssembly. And now that's, you know, all the rage. So almost certainly some of your Envoy network filters are WebAssembly based. Kubewarden and a couple others do policy enforcement using WebAssembly. So if you use those projects, you're using WebAssembly and that's there, it's already there. So it strangely already exists pretty much everywhere, even in Kubernetes, but people aren't conscious about building WebAssemblies for Kubernetes and just using Kubernetes to orchestrate them. And that's what we're interested in. And to do that, we use a CNCF project called Container D, which is our magic sauce. And the question is whether it's yours or everybody else's because as I said, there are tons of ways to do this. So what we did is we failed a lot. And so when I say we, I'm gonna call back to my team at Azure, which is the Deus Labs team and we do completely open source. And we failed to integrate Kubernetes in a project called walk. So if you go to hdpsgithub.com slash Deus Labs slash walk, you will find a CRI implementation and boy, did that not work. And the short version is very straightforward. CRI really is a container runtime interface and it wants to be a container. And so it's very much hard coded to containers. And so when we implemented, we were basically faking out all the API calls that are container specific that had nothing to do with WebAssembly. And we realized that the abstraction wasn't there. There were, it should really be a compute runtime interface. And so personally, I think we have room for a CRI v2 over the next five years, but it'll take a while to sort of decide how that works because of course, wasm time is not the only runtime that somebody might want to work straight with Kubernetes. So then we failed again, but we succeeded with something called Creslit, which is in the CSEF. We don't continue to invest in Creslit except for to review people's PRs and so forth. There's several people that run with it. Many people use it for the rust-based KubeLit and also for the rust-based OCI distribution crate. So that's something and it's very useful for that. There's also a state engine crate in there called Cretor that is really, really good. But the problem with Creslit is that it tends to treat a node as if it's a special node. And so you actually have to say, this is the node that runs WebAssembly and no other. And that gets to be problematic because we don't need Kubernetes to teach us more things to pay attention to. We need Kubernetes to slowly but surely let us forget about things more and more. I would like in five years for Kubernetes to sort of finally find a default configuration that's pretty much a simple, but manageable and robust orchestrator. We're on that path, but it's gonna take time to get there. And Creslit is not added. That it adds complexity to your operations, even if the developers have a clear path to using it. So for us, a container D's shim turns out to be the right path, the great usage with Kubernetes. Container D is the wedge, the hinge in vanilla Kubernetes between the Kubelet, which calls container D API to schedule a workload. And the actual implementation of scheduling, which could use different binaries that could make different adjustments that might do different things and so forth. But container D is just the API facade or an implementation inside, which we typically call a shim. So for example, Giuseppe, I think RunSeq, C run has a shim. The default shim in Kubernetes, vanilla Kubernetes, is the RunSeq shim, I think it's called container D RunSeq. And so we basically use that same functionality to plug in a different runtime, which is wasm time. And that's a bytecode alliance runtime. And we then are able to schedule wasi run loads. It's run wasi, not run wasm. So run wasi does not run web assembly only. It has to be conforming to the web assembly system interface model. And use components in that regard as we go forward. Because the sweet spot is not, let's run some custom module that has custom interfaces as something. If you wanna do that, you're more than welcome to grab the shim, including run wasi and actually rip out the innards and modify it and do something custom. But we wanna be able to actually enable an ecosystem where wasi implementations, wasm components, right? Can be used on any standard Kubernetes interface, excuse me, Kubernetes cluster pretty much anywhere. And it just works. And it all brings the same level of guarantees that I talked about earlier. And so that's our objective there to scale out the possibility that Kubernetes could be used in these weird areas. That's what we're doing there. And container D lets us do it. Now, there is a little bit of history here and I wanna sketch this out. Where are we on time? I think we're at what? We have six minutes left. That's horrible. It's horrible, I was gonna do demos. I am a bad person. So the critical thing here is that run wasi, our run wasi used wasm time. And run wasi was forked by a second state because they were working with Docker desktop and they wanna use the second state's wasm edge runtime. And so they have a second state run wasi, okay? And that is what the Docker desktop project uses. And then our run wasi, the day's last run wasi was accepted into the container D project in the CNCF. And second state and Docker immediately sat down and said, hey, let's figure out how to bring composable run times to run wasi in container D. So it's really the same shim. And so we're all working on that together. And then we're also working on OCI compliance and OCI artifacts around the roadmap. And now I can go to demos, but I'm going to switch gears and come back to inception and basically stop sharing. And yeah, so it starts in five minutes. Oh, no wonder I timed it for this. This is great. So if there are any other questions, go ahead and ask them either in chat or in the Q and A. The chat's fine. But I will do a quick demo so you understand what web assembly really brings. I can also do a quick demo that helps you understand it in Kubernetes. Everybody vote right now or ask questions. Which demo will we want? We want to see what web assembly can do that's really, really important to make sense that you would want to run Kubernetes cluster for it or do you want to see how it actually runs in Kubernetes so you can try it out?  There's 22, they're technically still here, but they have the TV on over here. The ladder, how it actually runs in case. Okay, so here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to share the screen. Okay, and then I'm going to jump over here to this and I'm going to show you something I will show at the Docker community all hands tomorrow. And one thing I want to ask is you shouldn't be able to hear anything. Are you hearing audio other than my voice? I don't think so. Okay, so I'm going to do this. I'm going to go ahead and mute myself so that I can talk over myself. So what I'm doing is I'm showing you K3Ds. And so this uses our RunWazishim and so you should think that you would be able to in the future do this with the Docker desktop release or any other desktop release. And so we're going to use K3Ds and you see right here that what we're going to do up here is we're just calling in a shim right here. It's not a shim, a container. And in K3Ds, the nodes are modeled by containers and that container has the shim already on it. So we'll go ahead and create how this works. So you should be able to do this, right? In the deck that we'll share, we'll drop in the quick start for this but you should be able to find it very, very easily on the web. This is just K3Ds. This is basically real time. So you can start this pretty much anywhere you can find K3Ds and you should have roughly speaking the same experience. So what we're going to do here is deploy a two wasm time based applications using Fermion's spin. But before we do that and a DSLAB slight application, but we'll do that. We got to tell Kubernetes that the shims exist. And so right there, we've told them there are two one time classes. And those are the names, one for each app model, right? And all of a sudden when we deploy the application, you can see we've got five slight applications and five spin applications. And the interesting thing is we're actually waiting now for a container workload. Now I'm going to stop that in note. We are waiting for the ingress container to load while we have already started every single application but we can't reach them because there's no network path. Blocked by the ingestion, mounting and execution of the traffic container. So if we sit here and wait a minute, just a second, the container comes in, there it is. So now we can go ahead and start curling. And here I sped up the demo a little bit, but basically I'm waiting for the traffic container to create the local host path. Okay, I've got it. This is just a hello world, right? And so now you can see both of them there, right? So that's one real easy thing. From here, so I'm going to show you both curls, but from here you can see you can do any kind of thing. This is hello world. Now if I, from now on this demo is going to tear it down. If I go over here, one of the things I want to show is how it looks in Kubernetes and what you can do. And so here I'm in AKS. So you could run this in any cluster, you know, AKS has a service that allows you a Waze node pool service that this infrastructure supports. And I've got now two node pools, ARM and AMD.  And you can see that it gets scheduled for Waze pool two and it's failing, but there's a reason. And the reason is it's being loaded on an ARM node. Now remember, ARM nodes cost about 30 to 50% less and they consume less energy. So what happens if I do this with a five replicas, I'm going to do the same workloads that I ran on the K3Ds.  And if you look at Wasm Slite and Wasm Spin, you'll notice that the Wasm pools are essentially evenly distributed. Now for the container app, I have to go back and build a multi-arch build. I have to now have two copies of the container. But for the module, it just doesn't care. But there's only one module. I'm like, it's not like there are two or anything like that. And I can demonstrate that, but now I'm going to go in and choose Waze pool one, which is the AMD version. And I'm going to delete it right out from underneath the cluster. If I do that, now watch, this is not sped up. Terminating the nodes and all the applications are now redeployed. Every single one is now Waze node pool two. And that means that I've just migrated my entire workload from AMD to ARM and it never stopped. There's no redeploy here for the five that were already distributed to node pool two, which means your workload continued to be serviced. And you went ahead and redeployed all the AMD wants to ARM and it happened just that fast. You didn't touch it, right? Kubernetes did it. And all the while the Azure vote, which is a regular container version, right? Just doesn't work because I haven't done the extra labor I need to do in order to migrate the workload to AMD. And it's not that I can't do it. It's not that it's impossible to do. It's just one of those things. And so that in theory, should be good. I'm gonna stop sharing. And I wanna thank you very much for coming. And then the last thing I'm gonna do is drop in that link to the stuff. The stuff, well, I'll get it for you. Thank you so much, Ralph. Thank you everyone for joining us today. Did we get the link in the chat? I'm gonna get the link right now. Okay. All right, there it is. And we go ahead and this is the quick start right here. It does everything I just did. And I can drop it right in there. And it's a URL, so I hope that works. Thanks everybody. Thank you everyone. Grab that link before we end our session. And also you can probably hit Ralph up on Slack on the CNCF Slack channel. Absolutely. If you need to get any other information or links. And thank you all once again for joining us. Thank you, Ralph, so much for hopping in and providing such a great webinar for today. And again, this will all be posted later today on the website. You can catch the recording, all that good stuff. And thank you everyone for joining us. Have a great rest of your 2022. It's time to watch the match. Yes. All right, goodbye everybody. Thanks Libby. Bye-bye everybody.


Generosity is to help deserving person without his request. And if you help him after his request, then it is either out of self-respect or to avoid rebuke.


Hi, I'm Jeremy Pickens the nursery and greenhouse specialist with Alabama Extension and I'm going to present a study or trial that I did with Dr. Chris Marvel at University of Florida on post-emergent weed control in az egg jasmine and dwarf Mondo grass ground covers. So you know ground covers are a popular alternative to turf. You can use them on places or in places where mowers are not accessible like steep slopes or in deep shade where grass or turf doesn't grow well. Over time it can reduce your mulching cost. There's not a lot of pest pressure for most of these ground covers. However early on in establishment weeds can become a problem. So some of the species that are commonly used in Alabama would be aziatic jasmine, Mondo or dwarf Mondo grass, English ivy, cast irons, and junipers. Those are all pretty common but we are just going to be discussing the aziatic jasmine and dwarf Mondo today. There are some success strategies to keep the weeds out or reduce weed pressure and that would be to use fast growing species if possible or increase your plant density so the more plants you have per area the faster it's going to fill in and just keep in mind that the less amount of sunlight that is hitting the soil is going to equal less weeds germinating. So mulch can be used. It's a little difficult sometimes to get mulch in and around some of these small plants so you know chopped pine straw or maybe a little bit finer grade mulch sometimes may help with that. There's also some plenty of pre-emergent herbicides and I'll show you a list of these labeled for both of these species aziatic jasmine and dwarf Mondo. You definitely if you have the ability to to hand weed often you know just going in and rogan through that ground cover as often as possible is going to really reduce the weed pressure by keeping that seed bank low and then when you need it there's also the option for chemical post emergent control and that's kind of what we're going to be talking about today. So here is a list of some of the pre-emergent herbicides labeled for aziatic jasmine. Plenty of granular and spray applied products and you know you can always hit pause and write these down. There's also a post emergent herbicides and we're going to talk about some of these that we evaluated as far as plant safety goes. Also monographs plenty of options for pre-emergent products and post emergent products. So the purpose of this trial was to evaluate 10 commonly used post emergent herbicides for over the top of aziatic jasmine dwarf Mondo. We are just evaluating how this affects plant growth or plant safety you know did it hurt our our ground covers really what we're after and so this project was led by Chris Marble at the University of Florida and he conducted his trial at the station in Apopka looking at aziatic jasmine and perennial peanut. We're just going to be discussing aziatic jasmine today because we don't grow a lot of perennial peanut in Alabama and then at the ornamental horticulture research station we did dwarf monographs. So we repeated these study each trial twice and you know we used 2x the label rate at 30 gallons per acre so that's two times the I think the highest label rate and so this was kind of like a worst-case scenario so if you went out and kind of messed up on your calibrating and put too much out would these be safe and so also we did two applications one of course at initiation and then another one at eight weeks after initial treatment so all in all these plants were evaluated about 14 to 16 weeks and again that was two applications in that time period. So I'll just go through each of the active ingredients that we tested so benzozine we use the product of basacran turf and ornamental it really targets nut sedge what's nice about this product is it kills the tuber so it does several of net sedge it does several sedges and several large excuse me broadleaf weeds it is not labeled for asiac jasmine and it's not labeled for dwarf mondo and the amount of injury we saw I would not recommend using it again it's not labeled for either of these crops it did significantly injure both crops and reduce growth by 51 or 29 percent. Cloperalid the product we use was Lawn Trail it's used on several large broadleaf weeds especially thistles and it does suppress dollar weed there is an over-the-top application on several junipers and other ornamental plants asiac jasmine however is not labeled we did see significant injury with 30 percent reduction in growth dwarf mondo is also not labeled we did not see any injury after two applications the 2x rate we did see a reduction in growth by about 24 percent when we compared that to the control so this might be a product that could potentially be used although not labeled in a situation where you already had an existing stand of dwarf mondo and you had to control some weeds that might be on the species I mean excuse me on the label and you weren't really worried about a reduction in growth. So philazofop the product we use was fusilade this is a gramaticide so that is grass specific it will only kill grass it does control an assortment of grass you can consult the label for that some of the ones that might be interesting to you would be Bermuda grass crab grass or torpedo grass does an excellent job on all those Asiatic jasmine it is labeled for over top as well as dwarf mondo grass we didn't have any problems with this active ingredient being applied no reduction growth and no damage. Glyphosinate or glyphosate you know these are both broad spectrum systemic herbicides of course these are used to just basically wipe out whatever they are sprayed on and of course both of these crops are not labeled we did see significant injury with Asiatic jasmine and significant growth reduction both about 50% however dwarf mondo grass it totally wiped it out a nearly 100% mortality so if you want to kill dwarf mondo grass both these products worked really well of course we use the 2x rate. Hello Sulfuron the product we tested was sedge hammer it controls both yellow and purple nut sedge and several broadleaf weeds Asiatic jasmine and dwarf mondo are not labeled we did see significant injury after the second application on Asiatic jasmine and we did see a 26% reduction in growth excuse me there was no injury after two applications and so this is again a potential resource for established plantings if you're not worried about growth however it did it is not labeled for that use dwarf mondo grass again not labeled we did see minor injury after one application but that's but it was not acceptable it did reduce growth by 55% so I would stay away from mondo grass with this active ingredient halosulfuron. In maziquin the product we use was scepter turf and ornamental it is a product that controls sedges does control dollar weed while garlic hen bit it is labeled for both Asiatic jasmine and dwarf mondo grass we only saw minor injury and no growth reduction in Asiatic jasmine only minor injury with dwarf mondo in some cases moderate injury and it did reduce growth by 47% but again this is at a 2x rate and two applications within six to eight weeks of each other Scythoxidum another gramaticide does a good job on plenty of perennial and annual grasses it will control Bahaya Bermuda and crabgrass both Asiatic jasmine and mondo grass are labeled and we didn't see any problems using this product for the active ingredient sulfentrazon we use dismiss it controls both yellow and purple nut sedge with 24 to 48 hours control does do several broadleaf weeds including dollar weed Asiatic jasmine is not labeled we did see minor injury but it recovered did not see any growth reduction that's if the 2x rate dwarf mondo grass we saw severe injury and it reduced growth by 61% sulfosulfuron or sarkendia is a product we use it does also control yellow and purple nut sedge it does control chamber bitter dollar weed and several other large grass grass and sedges broadleaf weeds also Asiatic jasmine is labeled for over-the-top we saw unacceptable injury it reduced growth by 36% it's labeled for over-the-top use but again we were using the 2x rate so it may have different results if you were using the normal labeled rate dwarf mondo grass minor injury for first application under unacceptable injury for the second application and reduced our growth by 48% if you wanted to take a look at the data and a nice summary of this work you can find it free online at the journal environmental horticulture that's through the horticulture research institute's website under the title tolerance of three deep south non-turf ornamental ground covers to applications of post-emergent herbicides if you're looking for efficacy data on certain products related to nursery and landscape crops please take a look at the southeastern US pest control guide for nursery crops NC state hosted on their website there's a free PDF if you want to buy a hard copy you can purchase that through their website and also you can do that through Amazon it's a great resource and I would encourage you to get a copy if you have any questions please feel free to contact me at Jeremy dot Pickens at Auburn dot EU and you can always reach me at the station at<PHONE_NUMBER>


immediately expel the Israeli ambassador from this country and impose serious sanctions on Israel for the war crimes that they are committing unabated against the people of Gaza. Trickle of aid which is really just a PR exercise by Israel but in reality is a fraction of what is needed to deal with the humanitarian catastrophe that is now taking place as Israel starves 2.2 million people of water, of food, of electricity, of medical supplies and other equipment necessary to deal with this catastrophic emergency resulting from the murderous savage bombardment by Israel of Gaza. We believe words of concern are not enough. The Irish government need to impose sanctions that should begin with the expulsion of the Israeli ambassador and be followed by comprehensive economic, political and trade sanctions and we should be publicly calling, our government should publicly call for the referral of Israeli political and military leaders to the International Criminal Court for the Commission of War Crimes. These are self-confessed war crimes where we are seeing in front of our eyes the wholesale slaughter, indiscriminate murder of thousands of Palestinians and the ethnic cleansing of a million Palestinians from northern Gaza. We have also written to the Count Corla this morning asking for a particular debate about the role of the Israeli diplomatic mission in this country because as well as justifying the slaughter of thousands of people in Gaza and the war crimes being committed they are also now criticizing the Irish president for calling them out for for their crimes and of course we have a tweet coming from the deputy head of mission accusing the Irish government of somehow funding terrorism an outrageous claim but indicating that there's really no lengths that Israel and in this case the diplomatic mission of Israel will go to to try and blunt neutralize undermine legitimate criticism necessary criticism of the crimes that Israel are committing. We believe there needs to be a debate but we want to see the result of that debate being the expulsion of the ambassador and the imposition of sanctions on Israel murdered so I'm not going to accept a sort of one-sided narrative that the United States and Britain European Union leaders and to some extent our own government have pushed is that all this began with the actions that took place in October the 7th. What we are dealing with are the bitter consequences of decades of persecution of the Palestinians by Israel with administrative detention with the siege of Gaza with ethnic cleansing with settler violence against Palestinians and then an escalation of violence that flows from that. I just also want to say a word about Courtney Kerry for those who are not familiar she contacted me in the last few days and so yesterday yesterday morning I think it was yesterday afternoon I can't remember the time but she contacted our office I talked to her this morning and she was sacked by the company Wix that operate down in Grand Canal dock which is an Israeli owned company and really it's quite quite extraordinary what happened to Courtney she was sacked because she put up posts sympathetic to the Palestinians and calling out the crimes of Israel against the Palestinians and pointing to the fact that the origin of this current terrible escalation of violence was the Israeli occupation the apartheid system the siege of Gaza and for that she was sacked so this is really shocking stuff and but you know indicating that this company appear to be operating as a mouthpiece for Israeli propaganda to attack anybody who voices legitimate and widespread criticism of Israel for the crimes that is committing.