Okay, we're recording great. My name is James Pepper. I'm the chair of the remote control board. It's Monday, March 7 11am. And I call this meeting to work. So first thing I need to add an item to today's agenda. We're going to take a second look at our health warning and consider a possible amendment. It's in Rule 2. So I'd like to add that after we do the walkthrough of 3 and 4 but before public comments. So I guess the big news since we last met is roughly 40 towns voted on town meeting day to permit retail cannabis shops within their borders and the overwhelming majority of those towns voted yes in favor. And we know that there are a lot of questions that that raises for these towns and also the prospective licensees about the local control issues. We do work fairly closely with the Vermont League of Cities and Towns so that they are a good resource to reach out to about these issues. We also have an FAQ document on the home screen of our website. It's ccb.vermont.gov and you know those have answers to most of the frequently asked questions. And you can also always submit additional questions to the board. We do all look at those questions when we see kind of reoccurring themes. We try to create new FAQ responses to those. We also have our next social equity and economic empowerment networking event on Thursday this Thursday March 10th from 5 to 7 p.m. It's a totally virtual event. We don't have in-person attendance of those. The link the RSVP is available on our website. The topic this week is going to be about energy and sustainability issues that are in our rules. Kyle if you want to just say a little bit more about... Yeah well I'm excited to take my time to facilitate a meeting that we want to call on these really awesome events. We're going to have Barry Murphy from the Public Service Department there who did a lot of heavy lifting when it came to informing the board and our subcommittee when it comes to energy regulations and you know we adopted a lot of PSDs you know the suggestions that they gave the subcommittee to look over before it came to the board. We'll also have Jacob Pulitzer from the Cannabis Conservancy. He was our our leader on the environmental sustainability subcommittee and he again has been working in this industry for a considerable amount of time you know as an energy-focused guy. So Barry and Jacob are going to tag team trying to demystify what some of the terminology means trying to help folks get comfortable with some of the requirements and Barry can kind of signal how his department really looks to help people understand when you know CVs apply something along those lines. So I'm excited about having them there to kind of help people get comfortable with the requirements. We're also going to have a team from Efficiency Vermont there that will give a broad presentation on their various different rebates and services and programs that they offer and then you know I've heard that they're looking to make some special accommodations for social equity applicants. So before which is really exciting and they're really happy to do so. So we'll learn more about all that on Thursday. I'm looking forward to it. That's great. Yeah just a reminder we don't record those sessions you know they are designed to help kind of facilitate open conversation and so you know please just sign up and try and join even if it's just on in the background while you're cooking dinner or something like that. We are about this kind of very important aspect of the industry. So just the last announcement again is just that our pre-qualification application window opens on March 16th. We have some good information up on our website about what that means and what's going to be required in that stage. There's still a few issues that we're working out internally so we're not ready to open it right now but we'll open it on March 16th. It's just a basic kind of overview. We expect to have an online form. There will be kind of a paper backup if that's what people want to use but you know we will have you can apply online to our website. The fee will also probably most likely be online with kind of a backup of money orders or checks which will have more guidance about as the date approaches. Because we don't have our federal authorization from the FBI quite yet we are going to need to do fingerprints both for pre-qualification if you choose to be pre to pre-qualify and at the kind of operational licensing application stage. So and you also have to kind of go through VCIC their website and kind of do a Vermont based background check. So it's a little bit frustrating that that's the case just that you know you know folks that are looking to do this will have to kind of get fingerprinted twice but that's just the kind of state of things currently. And you know beyond that we're just asking that you submit a basic operating plan. All this will be laid out in the application itself and again there's some very helpful guidance on our website about what we're looking for and what this means and just a reminder that this is a voluntary process.  You know pre-qualification probably is not the right move but you can do whatever you like. Other than that I think just we need to approve the minutes from our last meeting which I believe was February 22nd, 2022. You guys had a chance to look those over? Yep. Take a motion to approve? Seconded. All in favor? Aye. Okay let's move to the agenda then. Today we're going to do a walkthrough of the kind of remaining issues, the kind of final sweep of public comments around rules three and four and hopefully get those voted on today so they can move on ahead. Thanks so. Some of those final changes? Yes, let me plug in here and get going. We'll go through like we have in the past and just note what the changes are. And we'll be looking up here at a clean copy of the rule subsequent to the changes as adopted by or not yet adopted but as discussed by the board regarding the various public comment requests. I'm just pulling up my documents here. So there were not a huge amount as you as folks remember not a huge amount on rule three but I'll just go through the few that we had and there's some stuff that's really purely technical or grammatical with a couple things that I won't bother talking too much about but if you have any questions, board have any questions let me know. So first change we have here is the definitions. This is actually a comment that was given to rule four but is applies to rule three as well. A commenter noted that it would make sense to have the caregiver definition track more closely with the patient definition. Patient definition as you'll see talks about or defines it as somebody who has a registration card board agree that that made sense to use that format and the caregiver definition as well. So the caregiver excuse me caregiver definition now reads caregiver means the resident of Vermont has been issued a caregiver registration card by the board identifying person as someone who has agreed to undertake responsibility for managing the well-being of a patient with respect to the use of cannabis or cannabis products for symptom relief. So that is change one move along here. We have a ways to go to get to the next one. We're looking at we're going to look at 3.5.3. We'll get there 3.5.3. There we go. So this was a question about maintaining records and a commenter had noted that maintaining records is not part of the adult maintaining records of people who purchase cannabis at retail establishments is not part of the adult use scheme and questioning about whether that needed to remain in the scheme for dispensaries and the way this was written it sort of exempted anything that was an integrated license from that. So had turned it into a really narrow piece. I think some feedback we are and I should say this is an open question in the at the end of the last board meeting about what to do and we wanted to gather some information from medical staff. Medical staff had noted that there is good enforcement reason to want to ensure that people who are buying product from medical dispensaries are in fact patients because patients do get to do they have access to products that the general adult use market does not have access to and also have access to things like delivery and so forth that the adult use market does not currently have access to. And so for that reason they noted that there could be some enforcement benefit to retaining this requirement. In accordance with that comment this read now read the following I wanted to make it so that there was if we were going to have the requirement it made sense to have it exist for any patient not including people that integrated licensees. So it now reads a record shall be maintained of all individuals who purchase cannabis or cannabis products from the dispensary provided that when an integrated licensee operates a dispensary location that also serves an adult use retail location records related to adult use customers shall not violate the provisions of rule 2.3.8 and that's basically a way of saying that you won't keep records on adult use patients because to rule 2.3.8 says 2.8.3 sorry says that limits the types of records that can be kept for adult use patients and then it just notes what the record should contain if the person is a patient. So I've actually opened it up for board discussion since this is what there was I don't think it really was a final decision by the board on this this is a proposal in accordance with where the discussion sort of ended up based on information gathered from staff. This makes sense to me. Yeah. I mean I think where we left things are we are going to talk to the medical team and ask the genesis of this and the need for it and I think we've heard that it makes sense to me too. Great. Sounds good. Moving on to 3.5.5 quantity limits. So there was comments about the quantity limits more generally and one thing that came out of that was that it made sense to do in this rule we've done elsewhere which is instead of importing statutory requirements directly into the rule reference the statute because statutes change and they don't make it easier for folks trying to stay in compliance with the law to make sure that we don't end up with contradictions between statute and rule. One way to do that is to reference the statute instead of restating in the rule what the statute says at this moment in time. So this was rewritten to say in a single transaction dispensaries may provide no more cannabis than a patient has permitted to possess in accordance with any limit set by that statute in section 952 no more than the equivalent in cannabis products or no more than the permitted limit in a combination of cannabis and the equivalent in cannabis product. So it's basically exactly the same as what was there before just restated. What would happen if that statute was repealed? Then this would effectively this would just go away because it says in accordance with any limits set by the statute and if there's no limit set by that statute then there's no limit. One other thing we had here was 3.8. This is a new section and this is just putting in language that we've had for every other entity or person who's involved in the market which is just that you have to disclose your information of the changes between your application renewal periods or between your renewal periods. That's true for dispensaries for cannabis establishments for cannabis card ID holders and now we're making clear that it is will also be true for patients and caregivers and the language is the same as it is for everybody else there. This I can't remember. Did we give it a time frame for for people on the other side or how quickly we need to update. We haven't given any time to any of these and that's it for rule 3. Open it up for any other discussion. We go back to employee training which is not the title of the section. So it is found in 3.4.3 B. So in the current DPS role there's a requirement for confidentiality training for employees of dispensaries and I'd like to keep that doesn't appear here. And then for patient education that's not included in rule 3 and it is in the current DPS role. And thank and David could explain this better than I but I think we can just take what's in the current DPS role and put it in rule 3 so that patient education is still part of this role. Is it do we know what that looks like in practice. I don't I don't I'm I thought about it for a while because I know that we talked about it in some of our medical subcommittee in different conversations. What it says is that their hospital patient education that includes like methods of dosing like strains and terpene and things like that. It's not necessarily substantially different than the flyer that we've talked about but I think it would at least with patient education would specifically probably address the high THC high potency THC product that only the 3 can sell. Yeah, it's a good thing to include. Sounds good to make those changes. There to go rule 4. All right. So moving through rule 4 got a few changes here. First we start at the definition section. We got rid of the definition of campus license agent because that is no longer relevant. It's no longer part of the rules. We also made the same change to caregiver that I just discussed the definition of caregiver that I just discussed in rule 3. Moving to 4.3. There are a number of changes made here and throughout the rules. I should say that address a comment that the board agreed made sense to be responsive to, which was that rule 4 is not always clear that the board has the power to take enforcement action against cannabis establishment identification card holders. So those individuals who've effectively also been licensed by the board to work at cannabis establishments. Board agreed that was a fair point. And so here and elsewhere, and I won't necessarily point out every single one, but I'll point out a few of them as we go through. Changes have been made to make it clear that this does apply to cannabis establishment identification card holders as well. So an example is in this section, it used to just say licensees shall cooperate. Now it says licensees and cannabis establishment identification card holders shall cooperate. So in the same with 4.3.2, the same change was made. So that's one example. And there's a number of other examples later in the rule, which we can touch on briefly, but any questions come up about that. We can talk more about it. One other place where that change, a change was made to accommodate that point is 4.4.2, subsection C and D added that reference again to cannabis establishment ID card holders. Moving on to 4.5.1, which is the category one, category one violations. And a number of these, I would say are really quite technical. There is a change to H to make sure that the citation was correct and also just to use the same language that we've been using elsewhere in the rules with regard to control. We deleted one section because we thought it was repetitive. And a couple of places where it says selling, we added transferring in addition to selling because we use that language consistently throughout the rule, selling or transferring. And there was a number of times where this section and other sections said cannabis and we've been consistently referencing cannabis or cannabis product as the phrase we used to reference the regulated substance. A change that we made throughout is that we added corrective action plan as an option pretty much anywhere, because the commenter pointed out that even if there's something as severe as a suspension, you may also want to require a corrective action plan to make sure the person has a further entity, whatever it is, has a plan to not make the same mistakes or commit the same violation again. So that's been added in. And then there's also on all of the penalty sections, it as an and or to make sure that the board could do multiples of, you know, so it could be a corrective action plan and a suspension, for example. Can I ask a question about that as it relates to the ID card? So right now the ID card is attached to the license and if the board provides a corrective action plan instead of a fine or suspension of the card, does that have any impact on the at will status of the employee because we're providing a plan to correct instead of the employer doing it? I mean, we're a regulating entity that has authority to enforce compliance with our rules.  I think it would be the equivalent to any regulated entity where, like if a lawyer, for example, to take my own profession, got in trouble with the professional responsibility board, they have to do whatever the professional responsibility board requires them to do. And then if they work at a law firm or at the Canvas control board, for example, it would be up to their employer, the law firm or the board or whatever wherever it is they're working to decide how they're going to address that employee issue. And that could be that, but that's fully within the control of the employer and not something that the board can. Could interfere. So there's no correction that we could come up with that would also limit the employer's ability to do what they need to do. And what do you mean, the ability to do what they need to do? What are you thinking about? Well, if they wanted to terminate employment, right, based on a corrective action plan, there's no correction that we could come up with as a board that would limit their ability to do that. We couldn't interfere with that. Not knowing what a corrective action plan is going to look like. That's no idea of what the realm of possibilities are there. Right. No, it would be fully up to the employer to decide what they want to do. And if they wanted to terminate that employee, they could do that. Moving on to our next section. Again, a lot of sort of technical changes here. I don't think we need to go through every single one. One of the changes we made that's slightly more substantive and technical is to subsection D. And elsewhere in the rules, we made it clear that we're in this case, we actually are going to keep the language quite close to what the statute says in order to be a little bit more accommodating of the realities of how people are going to move around Canada's establishments, including Canada's establishments that may be at somebody's home. And so for that reason, subsection D was rewritten to adopt that language from elsewhere. It now says, allowing a person under 21 years of age to enter a transport vehicle or a building or enclosure on the premises of a cannabis establishment where cannabis or cannabis product is located. There's, you know, that's that's a violation. And then there's a carve out for patients, registry cards. But that was that now imitates the language elsewhere in the rule. And that does allow more flexibility. Of course, there's a balance. There are a couple of subsections that are added here. And again, these are in response to board discussions that didn't quite come to conclusion at the last meeting. But there were two questions that came up, which was basically that that were heard by other comments and they were basically the questions were, do we have a sufficient provision that names the issue of unlawful or unauthorized cannabis product so like somebody selling something an inhalant that had an ingredient that was not allowed under our guidance, which we're going to be put forward or something we're sort of a more general issue around testing requirements or general statement of testing requirements. And I reviewed it and felt that, in fact, we did not have sufficient language on those two pieces. That's not to say I do think that under our two things to say about that generally, one is that the board does have the power to if there's a violation that isn't named in these subsections, you still do have the power to issue a notice of violation and to put into the category that makes sense. So that's present. And I did think that there were ways we could have gotten at these issues without including this, but that clarity is always good. Naming things plainly is always good. And adding these two subsections in response to those four comments, I thought, did make sense after reviewing the full subsection. So I'd open that up to any discussion if there is any. This is a category two violation. This was in category two. And that's something that you could discuss, too. It makes sense. There's certainly a difference between intentionally doing this versus doing it unintentionally. I'll assume that we have different options in terms of how we enforce it, not how we enforce it, but with the violations. We do have three options here for this. Yes, I just I wonder if doing, you know, selling to say a vape cartridge with quite many S10 in it, you know, something that we know is potentially deadly, whether that should result in a fine or whether that should be as potential suspension or relocation. I say that because, you know, the original underlying intent of what we're doing here was a consumer safety angle. I mean, we know that there's a lot more to the legislative intent Act 164, the original kind of motivation was to protect consumer safety. So I think you're right. There's a difference between putting corners and doing this intentionally and then getting a product and having to use the information. So I guess my question is, I mean, and maybe this isn't a question we can answer now, who will ultimately be responsible for the selling or transferring of the product? Is it the retailer? Is it the is it all the way down the supply chain? Is it the ID card holder? Like who's the one who's the final piece? If it's the ID card holder and I have no idea, that's what's going to result. And, you know, some kind of training of such an option but if it's a manufacturer, we know what we're doing. That's I almost feel like we just don't have to include this. We can look at the facts of the case and decide how how severe it's required or sanctioned. That's required. Yeah, I agree. I think I think facts can be so variable, especially, you know, depending on if the retailer holds its own manufacturing license versus understanding that relationship. Yeah, David, do you have any kind of advice for us about if we were to leave this tower? Are we not being clear enough? Are we kind of being too vague with people that this is something that we're going to take very seriously?  I am always in favor of making it plain where things are and what you're going to do. I think that but it's obviously your decision. I mean, you could take it out and you would still retain the authority to take a violation, but I think some of the problems you're talking about are going to exist, whether it's written or not written. And so I think it might make sense to add something like knowingly selling or transferring an authorized or unlawful product because then that sort of or you could put it, you could divide it into two like you've done out like it is elsewhere where there's where there's an intentional one that's in one category and an unintentional one that's in a lower category. So I think there's a number of ways. I think those are fair points about who should bear the burden in terms of enforcement. And I think there's a couple other ways that you could deal with it that I would think will work better and will provide more warning than just deleting it entirely. I like adding no. I was going to say, even adding no in late and kind of help zone in on maybe the fact that her new retailer didn't maybe they both go well, you know, I mean. So at least in that given example. Yeah, I don't know what you think, but if we're going to do knowingly, what I mean, I think knowingly should be a class one category one violation. And then this kind of more general intent crime of selling her general intent violation could be a class two. Recognizing that, you know, we have the authority to kind of fit the sanction to the crime for the violation. So class one category one doesn't necessarily mean automatic suspension of the revocation license. It could be a fine or it could be corrective action. Yeah, so yeah, I would say we're going to do it this way, David, that we would do knowingly selling or transferring as a category one and that we would be able to see it. That sounds good. OK, with that. All right. I think that's all for the best that we can without the specific set of acts right now. We will be that moving on to the next changes here. Subsection L of four point five point three seemed to be exactly. Sorry, let me go down there first. It seemed to be exactly the same as well, now it's changed, of course, and it's very doubtful. I'd be right if you said exceeding maximum serving requirements for cannabis or cannabis products. Thank you. And that seemed to be exactly the same as category two violation we already had. So I thought it made sense to just which was the transaction limit part of a number of category two. And that was subsection is still is subsection I have category two. So it just thought it made sense to rely on that, but I did want to bring that forward. It's not the exact same. So if the transaction limit, you know, one ounce or the equivalent for transaction, this could be, I mean, maybe it's the same. This could be putting 100 milligrams of THC into a single package labeling it as 50 or something along those. I don't know why you should do that. That's what I'm saying. So it's not the exact same. But, you know, there's certainly similar aspects. No, I think that makes sense. Let's keep them both. Just in case such a hypothetical ever comes forward. The next change is. After a little while. On the aggravating and mitigating factors, which is four point seven, anywhere that it's a licensee, it's now says person. And again, the point of that is to make sure that we're being clear that this could apply to cannabis establishment. I D hold the car holders and not just licensees. A lot, you could argue that licensee was intended to include the ID card holder, but I think this is a clear way to write it. And the other reality is that as we discussed in the last meeting, the board could take an action against somebody who is not a licensee at all, who is operating without an unlicensed manner. So I think this is just a better way to say it. Sure. Moving to the next changes. We go to the issuance of the notice of violation and four point eight point four, the sufficiency of service. Peace. This has been reorganized a little bit, but there actually isn't much substantive change, except to say that we're making clear that you can achieve adequate notice by sending certified mail to the registered agent of a licensee. As recorded in the licensee's business registration with the Vermont Secretary of State, commenter pointed out that that would make sense, and it does. So we put that in. And then one other change. There are a couple of places in four point nine and four point ten were against tweak the language a little bit to be clear that this can and will apply to ID card holders. One more substantive change was to add a standard of proof to this process. So where and that is a fairly common thing when we talk about due process procedures and it will likely. You know, it provides some clarity for how the board should make their decisions and also may make it more likely that those decisions will withstand judicial scrutiny down the road. If the court can understand what standard the board was holding itself to and making its decisions. And so now subsection E was added in the same subsection as out of the four point ten that says to the extent a person is contesting whether a violation occurred, the board may not find that a violation occurred unless such a finding is supported by a congruence of the evidence. So that's all. This is going to be applicable to the board's own process. If somebody decides to appeal this to the next lawyer to the administrative law procedure and then potentially into court, that's going to operate under different a different set of standards. But this will, I think, provide some clarity to this process and hopefully make the board's decisions more likely to withstand scrutiny down the road. It's a little bit of an unusual situation because essentially what's happening is the person or entity who has gotten the violation is appealing directly to the entity that gave them the violation, but that's the nature of administrative action. Sometimes that's not unheard of at all. So just giving the explanation for why that is there, but I'm happy to open that up for discussion. I think it makes sense. So these violations will then contain kind of a statement of facts that kind of get us to a proponent to be evidence. And then kind of the violator, the alleged violator will have to argue that that's not a proponent. That's exactly right. So, you know, it says this is what's going to be in the violation will be required to be in the violation of the nature of the violation, the factual basis will be there. And then, you know, penalties and potentially a couple other things here and information about how to contest it. So, yeah, I think the person could say, well, you don't have enough facts or they could say the facts aren't what you said they are. And then the board, and maybe, you know, I think it's entirely possible that somebody will present to the board different evidence than what the board's investigators had found before and could certainly change the board's mind or show that there actually isn't a proponent to be evidence to show that they committed whatever the alleged violation is. And this is just a giving a clear standard by which to measure that decision. And the other thing I just want to note is the language says, to the extent a person is contesting whether a violation occurred. The reason why that's there is because this procedure also does allow for somebody to appeal to penalty, which is a very different type of consideration. There's no real factual question to be determined in that case. It's just sort of a general fairness question. So this is focusing on the evidentiary issue that might come up, but there's a question about the violation. So, thank you. No problem. I just got cut up checking some formatting, but I think we're okay. And that was it for other than a couple other minor tweaks. Again, many of them focused on that ID card holder issue. Other than that, those are the substantive changes to roll for it. So, David, what do you want us to do at this point? Do you want it to take some time and make the edits and then do a final sweep and then we'll vote? I think it makes sense to, yeah, to take a little break here. Yeah, take a little break. I'll put in the changes and then be able to present our versions with the... That sounds good. Then can you walk us through just the health warning issue? Yeah. Yeah. I think we can give a little bit of context because essentially what we're doing is reopening with two. I think we all remember, we got a comment about, I'll let David do the specifics about what the comment was. You know, as of the opinion, we're not going to change anything because the health department went through a process to get it to where it was, but I did send it to the health department to propose change. And they essentially said just that, like we went through a process. We don't have time to reopen that process and consider this because we just don't, we can't do it in the, but it was like a matter of days or a few minutes. Yeah, a weekend, right. And so, but subsequently, the department has what they said that they're, I think, well, David, you were the one that had the conversation, but they said that essentially that they're okay with the change. So I just want to look at it and see if we want to make the change. Yeah, I mean, that's exactly right. They did take a look at it in part that's because the Elkar process has been ongoing and Elkar expressed some interest in having folks look back at this. So they did that and here is the potential new language for the health warning. The changes are not significant, but they do account for the fact that this health warning is going to end up on a bunch of different things, not just product packaging. It'll end up on advertising might end up on advertising that isn't advertising product, but it's advertising a store or establishment or a line of products or also anything like that. So in order to accommodate that reality, the health warning now will just say if the board decides to go in this direction, a cannabis has not been analyzed or approved by the FDA. And then again, everything stays the same except for where the other mention of this product is a couple of sentences down. It'll now say possession or use of cannabis may carry significant legal penalties. One other piece of context here is that as the board knows any product packaging that does include cannabis will also have the THC warnings on it. So there will be clear if you have a package that has cannabis, it'll have the THC warning and then it'll also have this, but this works better for that situation and for the general advertising situation. And the health department was fine with this change. If they're fine with it. I thought that this made a little bit of sense some sense when we first looked at it, but again, we decided not to touch anything specifically kind of approved by the federal. So I'm fine with this change. You know, I mean, it makes practical sense. It doesn't really change the substance, right? But then we will approve that one as well. Sounds good. I think that has a proof of motion. All right, so that's it for now. I'll make those changes. When we do a public comment first, just in case, the following comes up and then we'll take a break for you to make the changes and we'll come back. Sounds great. So if you join via the link, we're now in our public comment section. Please raise your virtual hands. We'll take them in order to raise their eyes and we'll move to the folks on the phone if there are any. So you can help us with the order. Jesse Lynn is first. Good afternoon. How are you all? This is Jesse Lynn Dolan. I am a registered nurse. I'm a patient. I'm a caregiver. I'm also the president of A&A Vermont here and I'm a director at the American Cannabis Nurse Association. This speech, you know, my words do not necessarily represent them specifically. I wanted to comment on a few things on rule three and then also on rule four, please. So please mind me, I kind of wrote down some chicken scratch notes. I'm going to reiterate. You started out and mentioned that you do not record the social equity sessions that are, I believe, on Thursday evenings. And I would love to see if that's something that you could in the future record. I have attended some of those sessions and I think there's some great information out there. And there are some people who just cannot make themselves free at specific times. So having that recorded, I think would be really helpful. Couple of other things I wanted to mention specifically about the medical program. You guys mentioned transparency in the medical dispensaries themselves. I'd like to confirm whether that is only transparency that they specifically put forward as far as their passing lab tests. So if they have failing lab tests, if they choose to remediate their products, is that remediation going to be information the public knows that this cannabis has been remediated? Cause I know those are conversations that have been had. Also, as far as transparency around their language and labeling, I know the hemp program has done a great job and put very specific wording in that. If you have a distillate product, it is not allowed to be listed and advertised as full spectrum. I think that is extremely important for patients to understand and consumers. There's a very big difference medicinally and how products work when they are distillate versus if they are full spectrum. And I think both from the consumer standpoint and from the efficacy point for the financial burden that cannabis can be on many patients, we absolutely need to define that language. I have not seen any language defining, labeling parameters like that. So I'm hoping you're using and going off some of the parameters that the hemp program has put in place, which are great parameters, but I haven't necessarily specifically heard anything about that. I also had a question as to, are there gonna be more medical license available? And at this point, is there medical licenses opened up? Can someone apply for a medical specific license? I don't think I understand for sure whether that is an option. Regarding the education, I do know and understand you guys have a legislative mandate to not make more burdensome requirements for the medical dispensaries. So I just wanna confirm as to whether if there was a medical dispensary, he chose not to get an adult use license. They are no longer mandated to fully be transparent about their labs. I'm unsure about that, as well as do they have to have any education that the adult use needs to have or are they gonna be waived for that? I believe you guys talked about it, but I don't know if there's been a hundred percent confirmation on that. Another thing I'd like to mention and more specifically in the medical program than the adult use, but I would love to see the adult use though this way as well. When we talk about medical, THC is not where the limits are at. We absolutely have to understand the terpenes that are in our medicine again, for both consumer safety and financial efficacy. So I strongly believe that the medical dispensary program should be mandated to test terpenes, not just cannabinoids. And again, I would love to see the adult use program follow that as well. But when we're talking about consumer protection and efficacy, specifically medical patients, they absolutely deserve to have their cannabis tested for terpenes. And if we are not testing for terpenes, we are not doing our due diligence. Maryland, Connecticut, several other states are moving towards mandated terpene testing with cannabinoids. So if we could continue to push that, please. I will also continue to reiterate that I would love for something to be addressed along the lines of patients having better access. So right now patients are only allowed to shop at medical dispensaries and not pay that extra taxation. What we know is that the medical dispensaries are going to be providing the Budweiser of cannabis instead of the Heddy Topper of cannabis. And they also are very far. I have a patient that regularly drives from Newport to Burlington and would love to shop local at Craft Cannabis and not pay those extreme taxes. So at some point, if we can address that, I think that's more legislative. While we're talking about taxes, I know this is something Tito Bern brings up often, but unfortunately it's not something that has been taken up for the conversation continued, having vaporizers be something that is the safer way to combust cannabis. We should be encouraging that in the adult use rather than demonizing that or taxing that to the point that it's not an option. And then we are pushing people towards using that butane lighter instead of using a vaporizer. And that is on the state and the state taxation system for misunderstanding and not having the education, though they are repeatedly talked to about it and educated on it. So I would love that also. Another thing that hasn't been discussed in a while is I know since March 1st, the program, we've been looking at changing, you guys now have the program instead of DPS, the program funding that is still residing in the medical patients program bank account, is there a plan or support system around keeping that separate? I know that's something if Amelia was on this call, she would be asking as well.  And like I said, some things that have been I feel talked about in address but not necessarily confirmed. I'd like to take a minute or two, I'll try to be quick on rule four as well. You guys, I have to say it really concerns me in the idea of a whistleblower not having any protection. As a nurse, I've been in the situation and had to be a whistleblower and had to worry about my job and my career and my nursing license. That is not putting patients first. I also feel that if it's up to employer to then be able to fire an employee that is doing their job and coming to the state with due diligence that there is some concerns about compliance or anything that we are setting up a system to have employees not feel comfortable bringing that information forward. About a year, year and a half ago, I worked for a CBD company here in the state of Vermont and did everything I could to ensure consumer safety and healthy products. Somebody that was working there called OSHA, rightfully so, because all the cannabis they were using was covered in mold. Nothing happened about it, but the four employees that did work there all no longer work there anymore because they came forward with concerns that there was moldy crops being sold into medicine and into CBD products. There was a state report, every employee is no longer there. So there is no consumer protection based on that. And that is the system from what it sounds like. Unfortunately, we are setting up moving into the cannabis realm as well. So I'd really just like to reiterate from both my nursing perspective and as a CBD employee here that I have seen some not great things come based on not having literal blower protection at all. And another one I'd like to just ask is as far as education for employees is do, I don't think we know yet, but is that the financial responsibility of the individual company they work for, the state responsibility, but where is the financial piece as far as people that need a specific amount of education are they burdened with cost? Is the state covering that? And I know you guys don't have indisclosable income unfortunately, or is that an expense that's gonna be the licensee holder themselves? So just a few thoughts as well, unrule four, excuse me, unrule four. I believe that's it. Thank you so much for your time. Thanks, Jesse. Next is Adrian. Hi there. How are you folks doing today? Great. Great. So again, my name is Adrian. I'm a reporter with NBC5 News. I have reached out to Nellie, who said she would put me in contact with one of you at some point today. But if you have time to answer a couple of questions when it comes to what businesses can expect now that more towns are bringing retail, have said yes to retail cannabis distribution, I know it was briefly brought up at the beginning of the meeting that applications and such may be happening in April, if that's correct, I heard correctly. So I'm just wondering in terms of just what businesses can expect if there are any rule changes? Cause I know this is retail cannabis has been a thing in certain cities and towns already. So for the people that have just voted in favor of it, is there any new things that they can expect to see for businesses who are trying to get into the business? And also, is there gonna be an encourage incentive or anything for more local distributors to kind of take part in this, as opposed to letting more outside entities come into the state and start participating in the retail distribution? Great, thanks, Adrienne. We'll be in touch. Thank you. I have no one else and there's no one joined by phone. Okay. Oh, wait, I got Tito. Hi, everybody, happy Monday. Just to comment a little bit about what Jesse Lynn was saying. And I know I've gone on on about this and I understand the limitations of the board are real, but in respect to the vape tax, there's a million problems with this vape tax. It just, it wasn't intended for cannabis, yet here we are all wrapped up in it. And the most bizarre part of the tax is that the current dispensaries don't pay on the exact same items that we're selling where we're expected to pay it. And it feels like all the CCB can do is file a recommendation, but I guess I just wanna make sure that in the least happens. Like just, you know, something's gotta happen. We need some guidance here on how to move forward. Thank you. Hi, Tito.  This isn't, if you don't generally do repeat comments in these public comment sessions, we do have our kind of traditional after hours meetings where we do allow for repeat comments and we also, at the networking events, allow for kind of questions and answers and repeat questions, et cetera. So if you don't mind, you can, obviously you can submit, you know, comments to the board directly. We have a portal through our website for comments. We do read those every single time it comes through. So unless there's any other final comments, then I will close the public comment section. And before we break, do we wanna just have a quick conversation about any of the comments that we heard as they relate to rules three and four before we send David off to make final changes? Yeah. Yeah, any specific? I think that whistleblower already exists in certain areas of the state law. Anyway, particularly on safety. But I have to make it up. So I don't know that we need to add that to the rules. The, and it's not a perfect protection in the case that Jesse Lynn brought up kind of highlights that, which is, but we do, we will allow obviously for, you know, anonymous tips. You know, we will have a place on our website just like the agency that agriculture does to log complaints anonymously, but you know, it certainly doesn't help if an employer then goes and fires all of their employees because of the tip. Well, that is another argument for having me and you separate from the license. Yeah. Anything else we want to address? Again, you know, vape tax. You know, I think that the issue there is we would need to define what's cannabis vape versus a tobacco vape. If we're really going to try and get the legislature to not have the vape tax apply to cannabis products, which could be challenging. But I do agree that, you know, it's a huge burden to have a 92% tax on the kind of cleanest, healthiest way to do cannabis. The rules, the current PPS rules are those in place until July. Not. Okay. So, all right. Well, David, do you have all the kind of direction you need from the board on three and four? Yep, I think so. So it's just about noon right now.  I think I could be done in a half an hour. Okay. That good for everyone? All right. And then why don't we take a break until 12.30? We'll come back and just kind of review the final edits three and four then take a moment. Now, you have a screen. I am working on it now. Awesome. Thank you. All right, we're all set. All right. Well, it's 12.30, we'll get started again. So, David, I think the last thing to do is just do one last sweep of the changes, make sure everything looks good, and then we will vote on it. Sounds good. All right. So we will start here with the changes to rule three point four point three. I added the confidentiality piece to the end of A, which already had a related language. Plans to ensure patient privacy and confidence and now adds and confidentiality to the end of that. Added a new subsection C in line with the first two subsections here. It now says dispensary applicants must submit plans to provide educational materials to patients and if applicable their caregivers. Sound good? And then moving to rule four, we had just those changes around the, well, we had two different changes. One of the changes was around the unauthorized or unlawful products. And so now in, for the category one violations, there's been an addition that says intentionally selling or transferring unauthorized or unlawful cannabis products. And I use the word intentionally because that's the word we use throughout this section when we're talking about knowingly or intentionally or whatever, I figured it made sense to use the same language. And then in two, the category for, I should say in the category two section, I have unintentionally selling or transferring unauthorized or unlawful cannabis products or failing to abide by cannabis and cannabis product testing requirements. And the final change here was returning to section three, or sorry, category three, which is in 4.5 here, exceeding maximum serving requirements for cannabis or cannabis products is back in. That was it. We want, would you say unintentionally selling? We want unintentionally, I mean, essentially what we're saying on this, we might not be able to meet the burden of proof of knowingly, but it might not be an unintentional act. I just wonder if selling or transferring unauthorized cannabis, which does, in the least criminal law, default to kind of a general intent. If there's no specific language or anything. Yeah, I think that you could, I think it certainly would cover it. I just wonder if we're missing a gap there where we haven't found, we can't prove intentional, intentionality, but it certainly didn't seem unintentional. I mean, is there a gap there or am I just? I don't think there's a gap. I mean, I think because there's only two ways you can do something, which is you can do it intentionally, you can do it unintentionally, that covers the entire universe of action. I think what you're getting at though is the sense that just because we couldn't prove that it's intentional doesn't actually mean that it's unintentional. And I think you could count, you could account for that in the penalties, in terms of how severely you assess it. You have a belief that it's intentionally, can't quite prove it for a violation, but you can take it into account. Like negligently would be covered under P. Like someone who just, yeah, I think so. I mean, the other thing is you could just delete, I think it's fine to delete intentionally. I'm not speaking against that. I think that that would just be a broad category. It could cover anything. It could also cover what's in category one, of course, but that's okay. I don't think there's a problem in doing that. I only ask, like someone negligently sells these things. They like specifically like don't ask, don't tell me what's in there. Yeah, don't tell me, because then it might be, yeah. I think it makes sense. I think your point is valid and it makes sense to, it's a safer phrasing, even though I think we could cover everything that we need to in these two phrases. I think you're right that there's some clarity actually, we have to say that, but clarity that could be provided by deleting that word and making it clear that this does cover any permutation of unintentionality. Yeah. I think we should. Okay. I can remove on it. That sounds good. I'm coming with that. I see the kind of, the box, that's your, yeah. And then other than that, is there anything? That's it. That was the only stuff that. All right, so with that one edit, any, I take a motion to approve these rules three and four as amended here. Do we need to go through four first? Oh, this is. Oh, this is four. Sorry. So moved. Seconded. Any further discussion? No. Not for me. Okay. All in favor? Aye. Aye. Aye. Great. Great. And there's nothing left on the agenda. So I will adjourn this meeting. Thank you, David. Thanks. Really, I thought that was going to go on much longer. Okay. We can't possibly be done yet.


List of assets SOMEIZA will lose to MOHAL as marriage ends in tears. Well, they have made all sorts of headlines from cheating allegations to divorce drama implicating VASI NOVA into the equation. No doubt the two have called it quits but can make it official yet. In the mix of things, late last month rumor had it that SOMEIZA was served with some divorce papers. MZANSI even termed it the MOHAL heist. How far true is this though? MOHAL MOTONG has just hit the divorce settlement jackpot. And it's going to be a bitter holiday for SOMEIZA as the 26-year-old will be getting more money from him and he won't be losing the business the Idle's essay judge help him set up. How much exactly will the divorce settlement be? Well, now that MOHAL has served his former Uncle Bay with divorce summons it's only wise for him to calculate all his assets, right? You'd recall that SOMEIZA recently lost his mom, MEREI TWALA, who did exceedingly well in the entertainment industry and had a net worth of approximately R13 million which all went to SOMEIZA as the only heir. Apart from MEREI TWALA's assets, SOMEGAGA on his own has assets that amount to R76 million. These include his lavish home featuring creature comforts like a designer kitchen, a lounge, suede coaches, paintings, and other things, the house is said to be now valued at R11 million. He bought another house worth R6 million in July 2018 at the well-known Zimbaylai coastal resort and estate in KwaZulu, NATO. In October 2016, he bought himself two cars worth a massive R3.3 million. He later added another one worth R1.5 million. This is just a taste of what he has done. Talk of nice life problems to have. His collection includes a Mercedes-AMG E63, a Range Rover, Jeep, Jaguar, and two BMWs. G-Wagen and his Lamborghini Urus is one of his favorites. And there's a lot of art antiques and jeweler that will also be part of the divorce settlement. It's still unclear if SOMEGAGA has answered the summons but should he hesitate any longer Mohal and his legal team are ready to issue out a default judgment.


My name is Sergey, and I'm glad to see you at this session. I work as a project manager at Altorus, and today I'm going to share the experience that our team gained working on one of the projects in the health care industry. The project is about building a highly available cloud solution for customers who operate various medical devices. And today I'm going to focus on some specific technical aspects related to connecting various medical devices to the cloud and using different network protocols. Also, we'll talk a bit about porting the cloud solution between OpenStack in AWS infrastructure. OK, let's see about the implementation requirements. I won't describe in details business and legal requirements that initiated the project, but instead I'm going to focus on technical challenges and how we're able to solve them. So from the technical point of view, we need to build a cloud solution that connects medical devices and users located at customer sites in secure and reliable way. There may be thousands of devices located at each customer site and from thousands to hundreds of customers. Each customer must be provided with secure and isolated connectivity to the cloud. And they also need a space to store the data from the device. So we call this solution as Internet of Things for health care to some extent, at least to some extent. And it is planned that cloud implementation should be portable between OpenStack running on the hardware and public cloud provider like Amazon AWS. AWS is our first choice of a cloud public provider, but the architecture should be quite generic in terms that it can be installed or deployed on other public cloud infrastructures. So even when cloud is deployed on AWS, the access to the cloud should be limited to only the users and customers who subscribe to the service. OK, let's talk about a bit high availability for HA and scalability. It is common to think that when we have a cloud like AWS, cloud infrastructure like AWS, scalability and HA features are available out of the box. But it's true to only some extent because HA, it means that it should be supported on all layers of the solution from infrastructure to the applications. Of course, it includes virtual machines, networks, and most importantly, applications. When we talk about AWS, probably we don't care about the physical networks, servers, switches, and redundant power supplies. But it's a very common case when AWS sends the notification about the retirement of a virtual machine, and we need at least be able to migrate a virtual machine without downtime to applications and services. A few words about the security. Because it is a health care, and the security is a central part of the business, the main mode to connect to the cloud is the VPN mode. So there are various devices located at customer sites, and they operate WebSocket, TCP, and HTTP protocols. And what is interesting that old legacy HTTP devices, they have B-directional mode. It means that the device can send a message to the server, and a server as well can send a message to the device, which works well in isolated network when there is a direct rosin between the device and the server. But it's challenging to solve this problem in the cloud. We will see a bit later how we designed the solution for HTTP devices as well. But at the same time, non-VPN mode should be provided as well, at least when we have a cloud in AWS. And we have a public endpoint, which is protected by the list of, let's say, AP addresses for customer offices who are allowed to connect to the cloud. So this is a kind of mixed mode to access the cloud, the VPN access to connect to private IP address space and a public access. It's quite obvious that we talk about moving cloud implementation between several infrastructures. In our case, it's OpenStack and AWS. Cloud Foundry is one of the best choice to use as a platform for applications. But it's maybe challenging to configure highly available Cloud Foundry deployment, especially on OpenStack. We'll take a look closer on the next slides and how Cloud Foundry components are distributed on OpenStack virtual machines and the physical nodes. Cassandra is the choice for many projects where there is a need to store the data from devices because it's almost unlimitedly scalable. And in our case, we did a lot of benchmarks with Cassandra to identify the performance of cluster on virtual machines on OpenStack. And we found that it is enough to run Cassandra on virtual machines to process and store around 2,000 or 3,000 messages from this device data per second. But according to data stacks, it's not a good or best practice to run Cassandra on virtual machines. And we also evaluated additionally Cassandra on OpenStack bare metal. OpenStack bare metal support is available from OpenStack version 8 with the project called OpenStack Ironic. For structured data, we use myEDB Galera cluster, which is also an open source project used in many solutions. For example, in OpenStack, the database that contains all the configuration of OpenStack services, it uses myEDB cluster. We did also the benchmarks for myEDB cluster. And we found that the performance of myEDB is much less in terms of DML operations compared to Cassandra. But it was enough to our use case where most of operations are read operations. And myEDB cluster scales for read operations, but it doesn't scale well for insert or update operations. And in our deployment, we just tuned or updated several configuration parameters for myEDB that controls the behavior of commit transaction. RabbitMQ is also the solution that we use as the message queue to store data messages from devices for subsequent processing. And because all the messages from devices they hit the RabbitMQ, the performance of RabbitMQ should be also around several thousand messages per second in terms of being able to store a message in RabbitMQ and to retrieve the message from the RabbitMQ. ElkStack is our choice for storing application logs. And it is integrated with Cloud Foundry. Kibana is the web interface probably who were on our booth seeing the web interface of Kibana. And the Kibana web interface allows to access application logs in easy way to do full context searches. And it is protected by default. Kibana open source project does not have any authentication. And the way that the plugin that allows to protect Kibana web interface by with Cloud Foundry authentication. And it also allows to filter the data that are stored in Elasticshort cluster to the data that should be visible just for organization and spaces in Cloud Foundry that is allowed to the user of Cloud Foundry. We also found that the most critical part of ElkStack is the logStash process, which is quite slow because of the set of rules. And each rule in logStash it is processed sequentially. And let's say if an application generates like a million of lines of log output in debug mode, it puts a big workload on logStash processes. So in our development deployment, which we use as well for the testing, we run from six to 10 virtual machines for logStash process. But it's flexible when Elk deployment is managed by Bosch, we can spin up new machines for the logStash dynamically. And most of the monitoring and delercing features is provided by Zabix. So we have a separate server for Zabix installation, and it contains a database. The database grows very fast if we collect all parameters from the hardware, open stack nodes, and if we collect parameters even from the Cloud Foundry jobs. So let's see the deployment diagram or deployment view for our open stack. When it comes to open stack, we need to choose, of course, the hardware where to deploy an open stack. And one option is to use the blades chassis. There are a number of vendors who provide blades chassis. These are AHP, Dell, SuperMaker, at least these vendors that we are evaluating for our development environment. But the recommended deployment of open stack is vendor neutral, I would say. To achieve high availability of open stack deployment, we need to use three physical nodes for open stack management components. They are in yellow on my slide. And open stack compute services. These are the services that are responsible to run virtual machines on open stack. They are distributed across three availability zones. In our case, three availability zones are represented by nine boxes in gray. And each availability zone is a group of physical nodes or physical blades in the hardware. So if we need to extend the capacity of open stack deployment, we just add a new blade or new chassis with blades connected to the networking and extend the capacity of our open stack deployment. Also in open stack, we have a storage services. There are two major storage services. SAF, it is a service that provides volumes for virtual machines. And the second one is Glance that stores virtual machine images. And Swift is optional because it provides open stack. It provides object storage in open stack. Also we have additional services. We call them administrative services. These are the main name services, time service, and mail service. We deploy them on separate nodes and also at least two machines are dedicated for these services to achieve resiliency for these services. We have network switches and we have a firewall, the physical hardware that protects our cloud deployment. Everything is installed in a data center, in a data center cabinet with redundant power supplies. So let's see how the network is represented in open stack deployment. For our development cloud, we use Cisco SA5545 hardware as the cloud firewall. It supports up to more than 2,000 VPN tunnels. This is a concurrent VPN tunnels. And the total bandwidth of encryption traffic is about, should be less than 400 megabits per second. This is the middle model of Cisco encryption hardware. And if we need to support more VPN tunnels and more bandwidth for encryption traffic, then let's say we can use Cisco SA5585. What is important is that it provides connectivity to personal user accounts for administrative access to the cloud. And it also provides access for side-to-side VPN connection between networks. So when we need to connect a remote network to the cloud, we use side-to-side VPN. It also can be clustered in active standby mode, which means that we can achieve even a high availability on the layer of the firewall, which the failure of firewalls from Cisco and switches from Cisco is quite a rare case. But nevertheless, there is an option to build HA for firewall. As the networks, we have administrative network, which is 10.setty.0.0 slash 24. We just designed it in this way. It is used to connect to management interfaces of physical nodes, to connect to a switch and firewall as administrator and be able to configure remotely the hardware. So no need to go to the data center. Then we have a cloud, I call it the public network. The public means that this is the network which is exposed from the cloud to a client which connects to the cloud through the VPN. That's why we call it public. So we used it. It's one of the examples. And actually, it's from one of our deployment. 172.setty.0.0 slash 24, not a big network, just 250 addresses. That's enough. Also for OpenStack, there are management and storage networks. They're internal for OpenStack deployment. The traffic in these networks, it does not leave an OpenStack. So it goes only between the nodes of OpenStack. And also we have, I think, about six subnets for virtual machines. They are represented as the last line. On the next slide, I show the physical diagram for our network and the hardware. So I mentioned that we have a firewall, 6.com, I say 5545. It has three interfaces. One is external interface, which is a public IP address provided by Datacenter, for example. And then two internal interfaces. One is for administrative network, 10.setty. And the second one is for public cloud network. So a firewall is our entry point to the cloud. And it also controls the access between these two networks, internal network management and external network of the cloud. Then we have a switch. This is a regular 48 port Cisco switch. It has just the management address in the management network. And we configure also all virtual ones on the switch to be able to provide communication between OpenStack nodes and between the virtual machines. And we have, with the chassis, super microchassis 16 blades, we have three nodes for OpenStack management services. Actually, in OpenStack, the role of these nodes is called controller. And we have 11 nodes for OpenStack compute and storage services. In a summary that practices for OpenStack deployment, storage nodes, they are separated from compute nodes. But in our case, to save the budget for development deployment and just to evaluate if it works, we use OpenStack compute nodes as well for the storage. In each node, we have just two hard drives. One is configured as the drive for the base system of OpenStack. And the second drive is used specifically for storage service of OpenStack. And also, we have two physical nodes for administrative services. And the interesting point is they are on the left side. And the interesting point is that for to run these nodes, we use ESXi, VMware ESXi, a free licensed hypervisor. So ESXi hypervisor can be used in free until you have two CPUs on the hardware node and probably without limitation by memory. So almost all the nodes, they are the same in configuration, 128 gigabytes of memory. And one CPU with eight cores. So once again, in our case, firewall, it controls the access to from outside world to the cloud. It also controls access how any service or visual machine can access the internet as well. So in our case, we just allow to access NTP services outside of the cabinet. And probably the mail service also should have access to the internet. That's all. Sure. What do they administer? Do they administer the OpenStack system or the legacy model? On VMware, we have several virtual machines. One virtual machine is used for OpenStack deployment tool. In our deployment, we use Mirantis OpenStack. And it has a fuel project or fuel tool that is GUI-based tool to deploy OpenStack and to manage OpenStack. So we spin up an OpenStack. Yes, the answer is we spin up an OpenStack from ESXi node. And then we run virtual machines for DNS, NTP, and SMTP services as well in ESXi. OK, let's see. Distribution of Cloud Foundry components and our backend services by OpenStack availability zones. As I already mentioned, to be HA highly available on the level of services on top of an infrastructure, we agreed to have at least three availability zones. These three availability zones, they are a group of physical nodes in blades chassis. And if we distribute Cloud Foundry jobs in these three availability zones, then we may presume that we'll have HA on the hardware level, on the platform level. And then we have sync about the HA on the application tier. So in Cloud Foundry, almost all components, they can be deployed with at least two or three instances. I don't have the three zones that's working fine for my perspective. But the administrative nodes are only one zone, isn't that the problem? It's not the problem because our administrative nodes, these are also two physical nodes. And virtual machines, for example, for DNS server, we use open source Linux tool called Bint. It has master slave configuration, and it allows to put the DNS records on master server, and then they are replicated to the slave server. For some services, we agreed that we cannot achieve configuration with two or three instances of virtual machine. And for example, in Cloud Foundry, these are database that contains all user records, all application states. And when we test it, if we lose the database, we cannot push an application in Cloud Foundry, but we can access application. That's OK. That's OK. So for Cloud Foundry, we deploy virtual machines for application containers in all three zones. In our test, we identified that to support from about 50,000 concurrent connections from the devices, which are emulated, of course, we need around six VMs for application containers. And each VM is 64 gigabytes of memory, and as far as I remember, 16 virtual CPUs. That's OK. And another important component that should be made as HA is router. Because it has a routing table for all applications, it also maintains all connections between external client and an application. In the case of the device, web-socket devices, they establish persistent connection. And this persistent connection, they consume, of course, memory, CPU, so the routers should be also adjusted. We apply the same principle of three availability zones to Cassandra, myEDB, and RabbitMQ. That works well, except that for Cassandra, we can extend the cluster, combining virtual nodes into racks. This is a terminology from Cassandra Rack. So in our test deployment, we have, I think, six nodes of Cassandra cluster, two nodes in each availability zone. OK, let's see what is outside of the cloud. I call this cloud resources. So we have a VPN endpoint, which is our entry into the cloud. And we have a domain name. Because this is a private cloud on the hardware, on a data center, and it can be accessed only through the VPN connection, we decided to use private domain name. For simplicity, I called it, and it's like a pattern in our real deployment, cloud1.cloudprovider.corp. So the corp, it means that it is a private cloud. And the main name is not resolved outside of our connection to the cloud. We have two DNS servers for HA mode. We also have NTP servers that are optional to expose to clients. And we have Cloud Foundry API endpoint. Actually, for the customer who connects to the cloud, they don't need access to an API of Cloud Foundry. They need to work with applications that are published in Cloud Foundry. But because when you access an application, you can hit the endpoint of Cloud Foundry. These are two addresses that I used to connect to Cloud Foundry API. And these are two endpoints to connect to an application, which is published in Cloud Foundry. Actually, it can be more than two. And at least we have to publish two endpoints. And to have two endpoints. And as I already mentioned, there are two main types of VPN connection. One is provided by any connect VPN adapter. This is a small software which is installed on the computer when you connect to the VPN endpoint of Cisco. And it is installed automatically for it is available. And the VPN adapter is available for Linux, Mac, and Windows. So no manual configuration. We just go to the VPN endpoint in the browser and it downloads a Tiscani Connect VPN adapter. And for the network, we set up site-to-site VPN connection, which is the well-defined process. So with the remote networks, we exchange with VPN template that defines all VPN connection parameters. And then we exchange with security password that is used to establish VPN connection. For every VPN connection, the recommended practice is to use the password of at least 20 characters. So it's two-step process. I exchange the template and then configure the firewalls on both sides, exchange the password, and the VPN tunnel is established. Let's see what we have from the network perspective when we have VPN connections. On this slide, these two VPN types are represented. The purple circle on the left side, it is a Tiscani Connect administrative VPN connection. For this connection, we expose from the cloud completely two networks, the public network and internal administrative network. So it allows using this network connection to manage all the physical hardware in the cloud and it allows to manage virtual machines, it allows to manage open stacks, so do any kind of administrative actions. And for the customer VPN connections, there are two situations. The first one is when the customer network does not overlap with our cloud network. And the second one is when the customer network can potentially overlap with the cloud network. And in the example on this slide, the customer one has an internal network, 172.30, which overlaps with our cloud network. That's the problem when you try to access any resource in the cloud using the same network address, which is inside our customer private network. To solve this problem, there is a technology which is called network address translation. It is defined by the RFC, special RFC. And the range of this network is defined by <IP_ADDRESS> and network mask, yeah, probably it's 10. So it is a range of four million addresses. So we can translate the address from the cloud using this technology. And it will be represented to the customer as an address from this special network address range. So in our case for the customer one, we translate addresses from the cloud. These are cloud fundering points and DNS servers. We translate these addresses using the special network range. So let's see how it looks. The representation of network addresses to three major types of VPN connections. For any connect, we expose from the cloud two networks completely. So we can manage hardware, we can manage OpenStack, we can manage virtual machines. And when we connect using the VPN adapter, CISCANI Connect VPN adapter, it establishes an automated way access to DNS servers and cloud fundering points. So all the main name resolution, it goes through the cloud in the case of CISCANI Connect. For side-to-side VPN connections, we publish on the cloud firewall, we publish only end points for DNS and for cloud fundering. Just in our case, it's just four addresses, four addresses. If the VPN connection without address translation, then we have original addresses, 172.saving. And the last number in the network address, it represents the real address of server in the cloud. And with side-to-side VPN with address translation, we translate these addresses to 100.64. And the last number is the same in addresses. And it's easy for us to remember and to understand what we expose from the cloud even with not. One just additional comment is that there are clients who requires to set additional address translation on top of these addresses inside a network. So the user inside the corporate network doesn't know the origination of cloud address. This is a double address translation process. It works with CISCANI perfectly. So let's see how to resolve the main names in the case of VPN connection. There are two approaches. And one is to set up the process which is called DNS zone forwarding. It can be configured on customer DNS server. And it defines that all requests to the zone, wildcard.cloud.provider.corp, they should be forwarded to our cloud DNS servers. And there are two cases. If we have a connection without network address translation and if we have connection with network address translation, the configuration on customer side will be different. But for some customers, it turned out that they don't want to do any changes inside a DNS policy. For that case, we decided to use public domain name. Let's say the cloud provider. I mean the customer, not the customer, but the owner of this health care cloud. It has a domain name cloudprovider.com. And for that, to be able to designate that it's cloud one, we create a record VPN dash cloud one. And the addresses are private addresses. So the resolution process is served by public domain name server, for example, Route 53. But addresses are private. And finally, to work with applications, when we have two domains, at least in Cloud Foundry, we will have a main domain. In our case, it's cf.cloud1.cloudprovider.corp. And we also add a domain for public resolution process. All these domains, they are shared in terms that can be used by applications published in different organizations or spaces. And the final step to be able to provide access to an application with two domains, we need to add a route for public domain name record. And in the last part of presentation, I would like to describe briefly the problem of connectivity for various device types. So in our case, we have to provide connectivity for TCP devices, which establish persistent TCP connections for web socket devices. They also establish persistent connection at some point of time. And also we have legacy devices that operates bidirectional HTTP mode. I mean that device can send a message to the cloud. And an application in the cloud also should initiate a message to the device. And when we have two customer networks, very likely that they will have the same network range. Let's say 192.168. And the routing from the customer network to the cloud, it is transparent. And it is supported by Cisco hardware. That's no problem. But the routing from the cloud to the customer network is quite complex. And in case if network ranges overlap between remote networks, in that case, we have to design a way so the pair of device and service in the cloud will be unique. And we identify that we can do this creating proxy services in the cloud. And they map on this picture by the color. So from customer one network, we have device in the red color. And in our cloud opens stack cloud. We also have a proxy server with red color. And for one remote network, there is enough to have just one proxy server. For the customer two network, we have a blue box with the proxy server for this customer network. And it works so it will work because the pair of addresses of device, proxy server, and VPN connection is unique for all connections. And this is a quite easy implementation. And it works on standard IP with version 4 protocol. We evaluated to solve this problem. We related some expensive solution like Cisco application-centric infrastructure. But it turned out that they don't work as we expect. And as an implementation for proxy server, we use open source engines. It can run on OpenStack. It can run on VMware ESXi. So in our case, to provide HE, we started inside an OpenStack. And the last set of comments is about migrating the platform to AWS. So our first platform was an OpenStack. But then we had to migrate to AWS. So in AWS, architecture is pretty similar. We use Visual Private Cloud in AWS. And for Visual Private Cloud, right from the start, we decided to use a network which will not have an intersection with customer networks. This is a 100. In our case, this example from real deployment in AWS, we use 100.64 as the network. And it contains Cloud Foundry, all our backend services, and also contains proxy for old legacy HTTP devices. And for proxy servers, we just allocate a subnet within VPC network. And as the VPN, we use the Cisco SA Virtual Firewall. Because we found that AWS VPN Gateway, that is a standard way to connect to Cloud based on the AWS recommendation, it does not fit to all parameters, does not match all parameters required for the VPN connection. That's why we decided to use Cisco SA Virtual Firewall. As the comment for Cisco SA Virtual Firewall, I would like to mention that the price is quite high. It's about $2 per hour, which turns into almost the same price during the year as the hardware unit. So this proof that our architecture can be ported between OpenStack and AWS, and it's fairly infrastructure-agnostic architecture. There are a lot of other chances that we saw during the project, which, of course, I would not be able to explain during the short time. But I will be glad to answer your questions after the session right now. That's all that I would like to share. Thank you very much. Any questions?


Let's have a look at this very simple if else if else end branching Also reads almost just like English. So I'm gonna create this computer variable. I'm gonna call it value inside of them I'm gonna put an integer value and that being 10 So I write this if statement The first line is gonna evaluate something if the value is less than 10 Print this it is less than 10 Which of course it isn't and if it returns a false it jumps to the next line else if and Another else if you can nest many else ifs in here But it's gonna go down one by one by one until it finds something that's true if it does not find anything That's true. So they tend is not less than 10 It skips all the lines of code until it gets to the next else if If that one was true, it would actually do whatever is written after the else if and jump all the way to the end If it's false and indeed 10 is not more than 10 It just skips that line all together and goes to the next else if Etc etc etc so you can nest many else ifs in here and Then if all else fails you can always have this last else and have it do something just in case All of these that first if and all the subsequent else ifs of there Untrue they all return a false. You can always have this last escape which is just an else and it'll print out Once one of them are true though.  So in this instance, they're all gonna return false so it's going to just jump to this very last one that says the value is 10 and Print that out print that as a line out to the screen If one of them was true though If any one of these returned a true it would execute that line of code in between the statements and then Jump outside to this end. It won't carry on and it won't do the else either It's just looking for the very first true statement that it finds Executes that line of code if it finds nothing It's gonna execute whatever is in the else statement once again You can also nest things within in each other, but this continued iterative use of else ifs can Can be pretty clear and make things quite easy and you can do quite a bit with it


Are you great in front of the camera and can match it up with good nourishing skills? There's something out there in the gig economy for you. I know we're not talking about becoming an actor. Vlogging, short for video blogging. It is one of the latest fads that have come about with the advent of cheap internet and smartphone availability. Essentially, blogs in the form of videos, the format allows for experimentation with different styles and is far easier to monetize. Today at Start It Up, we will tell you how to go about it. So, who can become a vlogger? Well, just about anybody. But to be a good and successful one, it has to be someone who is good at spontaneity in front of the lens and has the ability to keep the audience engaged with the narration. It is also not necessary to always put your face in front of the camera. Considering there are vloggers out there and successful ones at that who only have their voices running in the background. Apart from camera presence and voice, what you also need to be good at is making videos and doing research. A few years ago, you would probably not have needed as much research. But with so much competition, you really need to differentiate yourself in terms of what you put out there. Your topics may range from talking about comic books and television shows to everyday things such as cooking and making delectable delicacies. But whatever you choose, remember that there are others who are already doing something similar. So put enough work in before you begin. The first thing you would need for vlogging and it shouldn't come off as a surprise is a camera that captures high-resolution videos. If you think your content speaks and you can make do with hiring a videographer, think again. With that model, your cost would go up significantly. We would recommend venturing into this with a good handicap to begin with. You would also be needing other camera equipment such as tripod and a good label mic. Secondly, you would need to have a computer system and the requisite software to help you edit these videos. Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects Audition are good places to go if you want high-quality output. There are also free video makers out there and if you are constrained for budget, they can help you build your base before you move on to these paid applications. While vlogging is fairly cheap, if you just want to test the waters with a simple phone setup and free software to take it to the next level as a professional, it would cost you a bit. A basic handicap will cost you upwards of Rs. 30,000 while adding the additional equipment may cost an additional Rs. 10,000 to Rs. 20,000. These are largely one-time costs. A decent computer system which will be your workstation may cost about Rs. 70,000. Buying the video software from Adobe will cost you Rs. 1400 per month for each of the three apps. But if you take the entire suite of products that includes several other apps, it would come to about Rs. 3500 a month. Well, do you need to spend on marketing? Perhaps. Since your earnings will depend on the number of people who see your videos, spending about Rs. 3000 to Rs. 5000 on ads initially is not such a bad idea. In terms of earnings, your primary source of earning would be from in-video advertisements. YouTube is still your best bet for this as they start paying you on a per-thousand views basis after you have reached a certain threshold. On average, a channel can earn $3 to $5 per-thousand video views. This is based on the fact that not everyone viewing the video will see the advertisements for more than 30 seconds. The metric to consider one ad view. If and after you are large enough in terms of subscriber base, you can also do sponsored videos by approaching brands as well as open an account on Patreon where your loyal viewers can contribute to keep you going full time. Well, that is about vlogging. And for more such videos, log on to www.entrepreneurs.com