Live from Copenhagen, Denmark, it's theCUBE. Covering Nutanix.NEXT 2019, brought to you by Nutanix. Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage of Nutanix.NEXT here at the Bella Center in Copenhagen, Denmark. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Stu Miniman. We're joined by two guests this segment. We have Mayur Shah. He is the Global Head Data Center and Software Defined Everything STX at Wipro. Thank you for coming on the show. Thank you. And Tenu Kitapa, Director, GSI Sales at Nutanix. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. So we're talking today about Fluid ITs. Wipro, of course, is an Indian, multinational corporation based in Bangalore. Talk a little, you gave us a talk yesterday here at Nutanix.NEXT. Tell our viewers a little bit about how you view Fluid IT. Sure. So we believe that the kind of transition industry is going through. The pressure businesses are getting in terms of having their offering aligned to the customer expectations, the digital natives, and so on and so forth, have digital transformation. They are also under tremendous pressure of innovating much faster than they used to do before. And the same pressure has been put back to the IT. How IT support that kind of changes and agility, which business would need in general. We believe that now, previously, we used to have a plan for five years in the roadmap and we used to forecast what kind of architecture we should be in. But now it's time for us to give that back to business. There are a lot of uncertainties and how we can handle those uncertainties. That's the main reason why we are thinking a little out of box in terms of getting things fluid. Yeah, here, I like that comment because part of the transition used to be I bought a product and I thought about how many years did I depreciate that product for? So I want to get your, what are you seeing and how is it impacting your customers? Nutanix talks about building experiences. So are they meeting that goal? How is that helping with both what you're doing and ultimately your end customers? So what we believe is, as you rightly said, that end user customers experience business agility and their competitiveness for customers at the prime. So the way we are now aligning our offerings, aligning two customer needs, changing our models of measurements from SLS to business level BLS, I mean, those are the things which we are doing for aligning to their business needs and ensuring that they've been benefit in terms of many of our offerings are now experience-driven. So if, and SLS and BLS are also experience-driven. So we, in our virtual desk offering, we offer to customers based on the experience problem the penalties are been assigned. So we proactively manage their end user experience without them even knowing it, right? So those are the few examples. Yeah. So Tano, I have to imagine this is a big piece of your job is the traditional channel used to be, how do we get beyond selling boxes, selling services, consulting and everything up but the SI is more about that whole experience. It's actually a whole different experience. It's been a great show for us from that perspective. We have a lot of our partners turning up giving us the support we need from the SI community. Vipra was a sponsor, so it's been great. And to be honest, that's exactly what we're trying to do with SI's here. We're taking the solution and outcome-based approach. Let's talk to the customer what their business needs are. Let's see what kind of solutions we build to fit that, right? It's not just Nutanix, how does Nutanix work with HPE? How does Nutanix work with the networking, SDN? Like, let's give them an outcome-based solution and let's support it with the right level of experience. So essentially, just in time to market is the goal that we're trying to achieve with partners like Vipro.  So normally, when we work with customers and with GSIs, right, you start with a core problem of what are you trying to solve over here, right? You have a five-year plan. Are you trying to grow to a certain extent? Are you looking for your VDI to cater to a certain security needs or certain financial needs? And so then it comes down to what is a business requirement here? Is it scalability? Is it reliability? Is it security? Is it financial modeling, right? You might be sitting with a customer who says, this is a great option, but I don't have budget to do this, right? I want to transfer myself to the next level of technology, but I don't have a budget. And when we have these joint customer conversations with partners like Wipro, they say, great, let's offer a solution. And here by solution, we not only cater to the technology, but we're also looking at where you need to end up in five years, what kind of business models and commercial models we can do to support you and what are the right products we can bring to you such that you only concern yourself with the outcome. You don't care about the infrastructure or stack underneath it. Let's make everything invisible for you. They just take our invisible story to the whole different level. Major, when I think about the transformations that customers are going through, it's the education and training is often a big piece of that. Where does that fit into what you're doing, what services Wipro offers education there and how much of it does just the simplicity of Nutanix involved in that? It's a great question. What we actually, and it helps us a lot when we bring in the complex technologies for our end customers, they also have the owners and they need to get appreciative of what we are offering. With Nutanix simplicity, it's all given. They know that things work and things work super simple. Now, whatever we bring on top of that, that's where it adds a lot of value without wasting too much of time for enabling our end customers. And that gives the outcome. So we are, I mean, as a whole, as a solution, we are able to give that outcome confidence and experience to a customer. So what kinds of conversations are you having at this conference in terms of what kinds of learnings are going on where you're talking to fellow customers of Nutanix and able to say, hey, what you're doing over there, maybe we could try something similar at Wipro. Yes, so one good part of what I've seen, people are using a platform for variety of use cases, variety of business applications. Now, at Wipro, we have mastered some of them, but not all of them. But we see a lot of customers speaking about how they are using massive scale for the hybrid cloud, for instance. They are using it for databases, application, mission critical applications. And we feel now it's time for us to venture into that all, all, all hook, right? So with, with all house pass. I actually like to add to that, right? All the conversations we've had is amazing with customers. You think you've built a product to meet ex use cases and then the customer comes back and says, you guys did great with beam on these ex use cases, but guess what? I divide, I found out this X plus one use case and it's perfect. And then that is what we take back and say, okay, is there a market around this, which we can then commercialize and make it easy to consume? What would you say? So you're based in San Jose. Yes. And you've been with Nutanix for five years now. What would you say are some of the differences that you've seen from US customers versus here we are in Copenhagen, European customers and also Indian customers? Oh wow, that's a difficult question. You're really putting me in a difficult position here. But in general, I would, you know, are European customers look to innovation but they also looked to baked in solutions and more tighter integration, collaboration with partners. The US customers want to be on the cutting edge of technology. They're very high risk takers. So when you're defining a solution and a model that works for them, it's a completely different ball game in terms of how much risk they're willing to take, what price point they want to do. And then they're also very, very particular about I want vendor A, B and C to work together. Go make it happen, right? With a lot of the Indian and the Asian customers and even our European customers, they're more SLA based. Mayor, what do you think? Absolutely. I think we see a clear here in this area of Europe, they are much mature, the second and third level of outsourcing people. They're aware of SLAs, they are aware of services. They expect a little more than what we do. And we, let's say if you compare that to India and US in some time, they are the first time or second time outsourcers. But here's the difference. They clearly bother about the outcome. All right, Mayor, the announcements that we've had this week, are there anything that you're looking to take back to your customers or anything that either announced or some of the previews they've been giving that you're especially excited about? Sure. So I think there's a great timing. I was just talking last night. We are doing investments, innovation investment for three years, it's a three years plan. And exactly the synergies are so well. The announcement what we have heard here are kind of synergizing what we are doing in the roadmap. For example, we and the fluid idea what she told is all about delivering those next generation future proof architecture, leveraging those announcements. So we, the era, we are working on database as a service which covers the mission critical applications and things in a much advanced way. And we believe in our roadmap, we are calling it a service theater which actually delivers the experience and outcome. So there are synergies, they talked about insights and we are talking about delivering those real-time predictable stuff based on, and our vision is to give intent based everything. So you have to just define the intent and things will fall in place. So there are a lot of synergies and we definitely take back few of them, era, which is databases as a service, insights, IoT edge, a few key things we'll take it from here. And of course the hybrid cloud, the AWS migration. Well, Mayor is being very, very humble here. One of the announcements that we did make over here at the conference was, Mipro has standardized with Nutanix on their virtual desk solution. And we're going big to both our customers, their customers and our field with this offering. So it's, the virtual desk is their own IP. They've done very well in the past with virtual desk. But as they are looking to do more standardization, get into the next generation solutions, we worked very closely with them to build a Nutanix and HPE based stack with Citrix to offer this as a turnkey solution, which they've already done, but with better economics and time to market. And do you see that as sort of the future? Oh yes, that pretty much becomes a fundamental building block based on which almost all of our other solutions are going to get built, right? The next one coming up will be database as a service. Similar constructs. How do you make database consumption and ops transparent to the end user? Followed by IoT. Now IoT is a real different ball game because everything is customized. A lot of customers like to go dabble in it, but at the end of the solution, and at the end of the day, you need to build a solution around it. Yeah, and Tenu, actually it's one of the questions we've had is if we look as Nutanix moves beyond just infrastructure software to some of the application software, it seems that GSIs would be a critical play for building these services. Yes, we actually have this really funky graph, verticals, base AOS, where do GSIs fit in? It's the solution and pulling everything together and making it more of a customer business case-based offering as opposed to the customer piecing itself. And it's becoming a big ask with the GSG2 case, right? They're not doing large RFPs, they're actually doing very business-based SLAs and now the control lies with the business owners within large customers. So it fits very well with our story. Excellent. Well, thank you so much Tenu and Mayur. Thank you for coming on theCUBE. Thank you. Our pleasure. Our pleasure. I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. We will have more from theCUBE's live coverage of Nutanix.next coming up in just a little bit.


Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to another episode of Kondo Insider. My name is Jane Sugimura, and I'm your host for the show. And I don't have a special guest because I'm gonna stand on my soapbox today and talk to you about something that's kind of near and dear to my heart, mainly because I feel like I bear some responsibility for it because I was appointed to a task force that worked on drafting the ordinance 18-4, that's the fire safety ordinance. And those of you who are regular listeners to this two Kondo Insider know that I've talked about this fire safety ordinance for a while. I've talked about it many times, okay? But recently I was interviewed by Civil Bee. They ran an article that discussed Hawaii's condominium maintenance fees and how they're the highest in the nation. And it may be because we live in Hawaii and everything here is more expensive, mainly because we live on an island and everything has to come to us. And that means that we have to pay extra. But that interview and the discussion we had on the show kind of revived a discussion about why do we even have this fire safety ordinance? And maybe, and we kind of know that it's not working well because it's in the implementation of this law, it was passed in 2018 and here it is 2022 because of the pandemic, deadlines in the ordinance were extended because people couldn't do inspections and people weren't working. And so they were having trouble making paying their maintenance fees. There were cash flow problems with the association because they're dealing with the challenges of repairing and maintaining older buildings that are 30, 40 years old and a myriad of other issues. And now on top of everything else, you have to deal with this fire safety ordinance. So anyway, people have been asking me, why do we need this? And is there something we can do about it? And the answer is, yeah, we can repeal it.  I grant you that it's much harder to repeal. Maybe it should never have been enacted, but who knew? Who knew back in 2017, 2018 that we were gonna have this worldwide COVID-19 pandemic that would turn everything upside down and create economic havoc, where people lost their jobs and the economy was disrupted. I mean, who knew back in 2017, 2018 that that would happen? I didn't. And now that I know, I kind of regret that I was part of the process. But anyway, that's why I'm talking to you today about discussing why we even had this and maybe it's time to think about repealing. But to just give you some background, the fire safety ordinance 18-4 was enacted as a response to the Marco Polo fire that happened in the summer of 2017. And the original bill that was introduced by Mayor Kirk Caldwell provided that all high-rise buildings that were over 10 stories and did not have open exterior corridors were required to install fireshifters. That was the original bill in a nutshell. And as a result, you had hundreds of condo owners showing up at City Hall objecting, testifying against this bill. Why? Because they felt that it was unfair to impose this huge financial burden of installing fire sprinklers is not cheap. The Marco Polo, which is probably the only one that I can think of that did the retrofitting, it costs them $5.4 million in $20, $21, $20 and $20, $21. That they flip the switch in October of 2021 for their fire sprinklers. It costs them $5.4 million. The Marco Polo has almost 600 units and you do the math for your buildings. So it's not cheap. And so, you know, back in 2017 and 2018, when we were having hearings, when the city was having hearings on this bill, I mean, you had condo owners protesting in City Hall. And one of the hearings happened just before Christmas. It went on for hours. And the testimony was, this isn't fair. You know, where are we gonna get the money? We're gonna have to assess our owners.  We got old buildings. We have to worry about spalling and we have to worry about railings and, you know, fixing our elevators and other things that are health and safety related. And so, you know, now you're burdening us with an additional expense of installing fire sprinklers and we don't even have money in our reserves because it was never required before. And so, there was a huge protest and the city council set up a task force. I was one of the members. And so we tried to come up with an alternative to fire sprinklers. In other words, you had a choice. You could either do fire sprinklers or you could do something else. And the something else turned out to be something called life safety evaluations, the kind of inspection.  And most of these buildings, 30, 40 years old, you know, they're worn and, you know, so if you had safety features in the building, they're probably all worn out and have to be replaced or upgraded. And so, but the cost of upgrading those of the safety of the building and to install fire equipment was a lot cheaper than putting in fire sprinklers. So we thought that that was an acceptable alternative. And then, so that passed, that passed. And at the time when we were doing this, the fire department made a list of all the high rise buildings that would be subject to this law. And it was about 360, okay. And then from the 360 buildings because the ordinance did not apply to buildings under 10 stories and buildings that had open exterior corridors. Open exterior corridors means that when you come out of your building, there's air. You don't have, you don't have walled-in corridors. And those buildings were considered, you know, safer. Even, and to give you an example, you don't have to be a small building to have open exterior corridors. The Yarnhofer Tower of Wailana, I think they're both over 20 stories. They have open exterior corridors. And so a lot of you probably live in buildings, you know, that have open exterior corridors. And that means that you would be exempt from fire sprinklers. You still have to pass the life safety evaluation. And you know, the whole purpose of all of this is to make sure that the buildings are safe. And nobody, I don't think anybody objected to that. It's just that this ordinance has deadlines. And because of the pandemic, the deadline for complying with doing the life safety evaluation was extended twice. And I believe that the last deadline was August 31, 2022, which was just a few weeks ago. And coincidentally, in August of 2022, the fire department released a report, that said that 275 buildings associations in Honolulu had submitted life safety evaluations. And of the 275 buildings, 20 had passing scores. That meant that means there's 255 high-rise buildings in Honolulu that did not pass the life safety evaluation and have to do additional installations. And the most popular one seems to be upgrading your fire alarm system, which requires a building permit. And the building permits have to be issued by the Department of Planning and Permitting, DPP, at the city. And we all know that DPP is having its own problems.  They have staff shortages. Some of their inspectors and evaluators are facing criminal charges for taking bribes. So they have, this is a city department with a lot of issues. And now you've got 255 high-rise buildings in Honolulu that didn't pass their life safety evaluations that are gonna need building permits. And guess what? Under the ordinance, we have three years. Those 255 buildings, they've got three years to comply with the LSE, the Life Safety and Evaluation. I think some of the buildings would be lucky if they get their building permits within that three-year period, much less comply with the three-year deadline. So I'm pretty sure if we're gonna keep this ordinance, we're gonna have to go back and extend the deadline yet again, because there's no way the building, the DPP that's part of the city agency is going to be able to issue building permits to 255 high-rise buildings in Oahu so that they can comply with the LSE in the next three years. I mean, that's like impossible. It would be a miracle if that could happen. So now we've got the pandemic, the COVID pandemic resulted in lost jobs, wages, and when things started to come back to normal, you had supply chain problems and all the costs of everything have gone up. And this is just making everything worse. And that's not only to comply with the ordinance, but for just getting your ordinary stuff done for your buildings.  And now you're telling us we're gonna have to get a permit so that we can comply with the life safety ordinance in three years, give me a break. It's not gonna happen. It's not gonna happen. So that part of it is just unrealistic. We're gonna have to go back and if we're gonna continue with this process, we're gonna have to go back and amend the law yet again. And what we're finding out, and this has nothing to do with the fire safety ordinance, but in January one of 2022, the insurance business suffered some losses. I mean, they suffered the losses in 2020 and 2021, but in 2022, they raised the insurance on all high-rise buildings that did not have a fire springer. And the buildings, their insurance premiums increased by 30 to 40%. The insurance in my building on January 1, 2022 went up $45,000 and we didn't have the extra money in our budget, so we've been, you know, scrimping and saving, you know, to just make it through this year. So I've heard worse. I've heard some of the buildings had increases of over a hundred thousand, not covered by their budget. So now you're dealing, now you have the condominium associations and co-op associations dealing with trying to repair and maintain aging buildings, and they've got increased insurance and you have an ordinance that has these deadlines and the next deadline is three years to comply with your LSE. And we know that we have 255 buildings in Honolulu that need building permits that aren't gonna get them so that they can comply with the statute, comply with the ordinance within the three years remaining. And, you know, and it just seems like, and you know, the thing about the insurance, which is really galling, because it's the industry, it's the industry, insurance industry, they suffered losses, the reinsurance industry suffered losses. And so our local carriers who rely on the reinsurance companies, you know, to provide them with money to pay off claims, they had to raise their insurance to us. And the ordinance specifically says that if you have, you are under 10 stories and you have open exterior coordinators, you're exempt for fire sprinklers, but yet the insurance commissioner allowed the insurance companies, the reinsurance companies to raise their rates to the same buildings that are exempt. And to me, that's not fair, but, you know, that's what, you know, we are dealing with now.  It's a law that mandates it's us, it's a condo and co-op owners to do something. And that's to install a fire sprinkler or to comply and to spend money to comply with the life safety evaluation. But yet the city has not given us, they promised, you know, in the original bill that they would help us by, you know, providing some kind of subsidy or even low interest loans to help associations deal with, you know, finding the money to pay, you know, for these improvements to the building. But neither the Caldwell administration or the current administration has been moving to establish meaningful, you know, financial assistance, you know, by giving incentives, you know, you know, like tax breaks to go with the mandate or to establish low cost loans where condo and co-op associations can apply for money to help them comply with this ordinance. And on top of that, you know, all these high rise buildings with no sprinklers are facing skyrocketing insurance premium costs. And, you know, the Hawaii Council of Association of Apartment Owners did a study of other jurisdictions that have mandatory fire sprinkler ordinances. And Honolulu is by far the largest municipality. And it's not states, they're cities. And so Honolulu is the largest that we've been able to find. And none of the other municipalities are mandate, are enforcing the mandates. They're letting them happen voluntarily.  It's just, you know, there are certain issues that were never contemplated, you know, at the time we were working on drafting it. And now it's come to the implementation and it seems like every time you turn around, there are roadblocks or obstacles to compliance. And one of the obstacles is money. Where's the money? And, you know, so, you know, so I think it's time to consider maybe repealing this ordinance. And you ask me, how do we do that?  There are nine people who sit on the city council. And I think we're going to be scrolling. There they are. Those are the nine people. And there's the link. And if you go to that link, that's www.hanalulucitycouncil.org backslash council members. At the bottom of the page, if you don't know who your council member is, there's a box right there that says, not sure who represents you on the council. Look at, and then you click on that box and it will tell you. You tell them where you live and it will tell you who your council member is. And so it's up to you to tell your council member that you would like their help in repealing this law that is creating, because you as a member, as a condo owner, you're going to be paying for this because any installation is going to come out of increased maintenance fees or special assessments. And that means it's coming out of your pocket. And if you're having trouble paying your bills, meeting your financial obligations, so the last thing you need is a special assessment or increased maintenance fees to pay for, to comply with this ordinance. And or, we don't have to do a total repeal. We can just do a modification of the ordinance to make it, to take away the deadlines because the deadlines we know now, we know now are terribly unrealistic. Nobody is going to be able to comply, especially the city, the city who issues the building permits that we need to do the installations. There's no way the city is going to be able to issue a building permits for 255 buildings in the city and county of Honolulu so that they can get there so that they can comply with the ordinance in three years from August 31, 2022. That's August 31, 2025. You have to be in compliance.  And all we need is five members of the city council to repeal it. And one of the members is somebody that I'm talking to, I'm not going to reveal that council member's name, but that council member has indicated that they will prepare a bill to repeal ordinance 18-4. All we need is the will, is for the constituents.  That's all we want. We want messages to go to the council member to tell them that that's what condo owners and co-op owners would like them to do. And we will probably have the council member introduce the bill. It has to go through three readings, which means it has to have three different public hearings where you can testify and you can go online and submit testimony or you can show up. And I think they're allowing in-person testimony so you could go to city hall or they're using, I think they're using Zoom, but they're allowing remote participation and you can go on the city website and they will tell you how to participate in a hearing by submitting testimony or even just showing up on their Zoom or go to meeting. I can't remember what platform they're using, but they do allow remote testimony and you just need to tell your story.  You know that the fire department issued a report in August of 2022 that says there's 255 buildings in Honolulu that have not comply with the life safety evaluation. They need building permits. There's no way the city is gonna do it. And even if they could, you can't afford it. And so what you need from them is their vote, their political willingness to help you, their constituent to get rid of this ordinance that is causing such hardship to so many condo owners. And again, that link is www.honolulucitycouncil.org backslash council members. There it is on the screen right now. That's where you go. That's who you talk to and when you call them, their staff, I mean, they have paid staff and the only job the staff has is to talk to constituents and to deal with constituent concerns. So I guarantee you, if you call a contact your council member once you find out who they are and just say, I'm a constituent and I have a concern and you tell them the concern, give it to them really quick. There's an ordinance, 18-4, fire safety ordinance. I live in a condo and we can't afford to put in these things to put in the fire safety installations. And it's gonna cost us an arm and a leg. We can't do fire sprinklers because we have to do special assessments. And we just can't afford it. And we would appreciate it if you would help us repeal this ordinance. That's all you have to say. Or you don't have to say all of that. Just say 18-4, can you help us repeal it? Cause they'll look it up. They know, they understand that shorthand. So they will understand. So if you tell them that you would like their help in getting 18-4 repealed, they will know what you're talking about. And if enough people call their council members, they will talk to each other and word will get out and say, I'm getting all these calls about 18-4. And we gotta do something because I'm up for election and I need their votes or I'm gonna run for another office and I want them to vote for me. I want these people to vote for me. And so, yeah, your voice matters. So, please, please, please, if you're concerned about this, that's how you fix it. You go to that website, figure out who your council member is, give them a call, ask them to help you by repealing ordinance 18-4. Okay, now I'm gonna get off my soapbox. And I wanna thank you for being with us for this episode of Kondo Insider. And I want you to join us next week when it will be Raylene Tenno and she'll have another very hopeful, hopeful, interesting show for you about Kondo living and dealing with Kondo issues. So thank you for joining me today. Mahalo and Aloha. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn and donate to us at thinktechhawaii.com. Mahalo.


Pack Expo Connects will kick off soon with hundreds of virtual showrooms, thousands of live technology demos, dozens of educational sessions, and best of all, direct access to technical experts. With so much to experience, you'll want to have a plan in place so you can hit the ground running on November 9th. That's what Preview Week is all about. It's time to populate your My Connects planner and use it to add exhibitors, products, and live demos to your schedule. Browse educational programs and add sessions to your itinerary. Export your events to your Outlook calendar to get reminders so you don't miss any opportunities. The product search tool is streamlined, with 12 product categories available for you to easily find the right solutions. You'll be able to chat directly with technical experts during the show. Search through live demo listings to locate and schedule the demos you're most interested in attending. Better yet, you could win a $100 Amazon gift card. Just attend a minimum of five live demos during the show to be entered in the drawing. And don't forget to schedule in some educational programming. Choose from morning jumpstart sessions, trend chats with CPG leaders, innovation stage seminars, interactive sessions in the solution room, and more. A little planning will go a long way to making sure you find the solutions and make valuable connections with technical experts and leaders in the industry during PacExpo Connects. Log into your My Connects planner today.


Γεια σας, είναι Vicky here and welcome back. Σήμερα είμαι σχεδιασμένοι χώρες χρησιμοποιώντας βασικούς κομμάτων. All The New has just released new wash-it-tape designs. Τα 4 είναι βασικούς κομμάτων as you can see. This is the first one and it is called Botanical Rhapsody. It has beautiful designs in black and white. In today's video you will see examples with all those wash-it-tape. So here is another one in this beautiful teal color. It is called Teal Shadow. It has lovely flowers. This one has some foiling on top. Hopefully you can see it as I try to catch the light. And it is the Misty Meadows wash-it-tape. This is the Gold String wash-it-tape. All those lines are really shiny, they are foiled. And I think it makes a beautiful background for pretty much any occasion. Finally you get this very thin wash-it-tape. It is called Golden Trim. And it is nice to combine it with all the other wash-it-tape that have that foiling on top. Now they have also released a new embossing paste. This is a paste that you can apply with a spatula over your stencils. And you can do so many different techniques with that. Nice and fluffy. And I will be featuring this in another video with lots of ideas on how you can use embossing paste. Now let's move on and start making some cuts with those white wash-it-tapes. The easiest way to use those is to just cover up a panel like I'm doing here. It is really forgiving if you find that you will end up with some bubbles you can always peel it off and put it back on again. The design is just gorgeous and with those beautiful designs you really don't have to do a lot on top of a card. And that makes this white wash-it-tape perfect if you want to mass-produce cards. You can create lots of panels, background panels in no time and then just stick the sentiment on top. The good thing of using white wash-it-tape instead of pattern paper is that there are so many meters in a roll plus there is glue already at the back. I have used the fancy Hello Die that has just been released and I die-cut it out of a gold cardstock that matches perfectly the gold foiling on my wash-it-tape. And my sentiment is quite dimensional since I cut it out many times and stuck one die-cut on top of the other so it looks like a chipboard. Now to finish off my sentiment I have also stamped one more phrase. This comes from a lovely stamp set that I absolutely love. It has beautiful flowers and sentiments. It says you are absolutely amazing and I stamped that with most ink pad so it matches the leaves at my background. All I have to do is to stick it on top of a standard card that's 4.25 x 5.5 and you can see here some close-up photos. For my next card I'm going to use the gold string wash-it-tape and I'm going to stick that on top of my panel on an angle and I'm going to combine it with the golden trim I found that this wasn't sticking on top of the other wash-it-tape so I'm just going to use a line of white glue and I'm going to place it on top. Remember that you don't have to use the wash-it-tape only as a background. You can always use them as focal points but I've just used a piece of that wash-it-tape and this is on top of a white cardstock just to make it more sturdy and I'm going to use my scissors and fuzzy-cut some of the leaves.  Now I have fuzzy-cut the leaves that I need and I'm going to stamp the sentiment for that I went with one that says to make my heart happy and I stamped that again with most ink that matches my leaves I'm stamping it on an angle to follow the golden line and this sentiment comes from a lovely stamp set which is packed with wreaths and lovely sentiments and as always you will find everything I'm using link down below. Finally I'm going to embellish my card with the focal points that have cut out using my wash-it-tape but I'm using foam-tape at the back of those leaves just to add some dimension. I created a standard card that's 4.25 x 5.5 out of this lovely green cardstock and here are some close-up photos on the second card for today. For the third card I'm going to use this lovely teal-shadow wash-it-tape I'm going to cover up completely a white panel and again I'm going to cut off all the excess to some die cutting I have this large A die which I'm going to place at the center of my panel and cut it out this is a great way to personalize a card using the initial of your recipient Now I went through my stash and found a cardstock that matches perfectly the color of the flowers and I'm going to stick those on top making sure that they are raised so I end up having some shadow there since I used foam tape at the back and just like I did with the previous card I have cut out some of the flowers from the same wash-it-tape just stick it on top of a white cardstock and fuzzy cut it so I have a couple of flowers there which I'm going to stick on top of my panel with foam squares at the back and I'm going to also stick down the sentiment to complete my card and you can see here some close-up photos For my last card I'm going to use this gorgeous wash-it-tape this is really white and it would cover a standard card completely and it is in black and white and as you can see it has those lovely floral designs I have tried it out on this side as you can see and I actually checked alcohol markers work on top of it which is great, you can use it in black and white if you want or you can just go ahead and color parts to use them as your focal points which is exactly what I'm going to do for this card Now remember that this is not paper it is wash-it-tape so the alcohol marker kind of beats up a little bit on top of it however it is going to dry completely and you will see the result it's going to give a kind of a sepia look which I find really cool so I have added the darker shadow at the base of the leaves and I'm going to complete the leaves with the lighter one at the top by the way I'm using my Altenew alcohol markers and once I finish coloring the leaves I'm going to try if I can move the color remember this is wash-it-tape it's not paper however it is quite porous the alcohol ink has completely dry on top of it and I cannot move it at all and the result is very soft as you can see the colors don't dry they are as vibrant as they actually are I'm also going to add some color on my flowers for that I will be using only one shade of pink and I'm concentrating the coloring mainly at the center of the petals just adding some brush strokes from the center towards the end and making sure that I don't cover up completely the whole flower and now I will move on and do some fuzzy cutting I will cut out the whole image making sure that I leave a white border all around again just because it makes fuzzy cutting easier this will end up being my focal point and remember that on this wash-it-tape with black and white designs you will find many different designs of flowers and leaves that you can use just like I'm doing for this card so here I'm using the other wash-it-tape to create a little panel to decorate my card and I'm combining all the elements together by using foam tape at the back of those flowers to have some dimension for my sentiment I went with a fancy hello die that I have cut out of gold cardstock and I'm also adding some embellishments using my Nuvo drops by the way this is part of a blog hope you will find lots of inspiration and many giveaways so make sure to visit my blog for all the details and here are all the 4 cards that I made for today using wash-it tapes from the latest release by Altenew and these were the projects for today I hope you had fun that you got inspired and if you did don't forget to comment, like and subscribe if you haven't done so already thank you all so much for joining me today and I'll see you all next time


Hi everyone, thanks for joining us for hereby services. My name is Stephen. And my name is Laura. And we're going to talk to you about the uncharted unexplored world of multi cluster services. Let's start with the map, shall we? This is the Linux globe, famous for anachronistically representing an unknown region with the words hereby dragons. They're in the corner here, where it says Hickson Traconis. So this is a good setup for our conversation here about conversation about services across multiple clusters. We can imagine it like our Kubernetes clusters are islands on this map separated by dangerous and uncharted seas. You want to open trade routes, but that means having open ports and sending ships which risk being attacked by pirates across those uncharted seas. Even if port taxes is controlled, which is good because you can then collect taxes, there's a lot of effort in each port. And since the seas are uncharted, how do other islands know about your ports? Now, there are some other ways that people have been trying to do this. We are at the service mesh track of this conference after all. So Istio is an option. This is an open source service mesh that you can deploy across your Kubernetes clusters and VMs in any provider. It's super powerful, but not everyone chooses to implement a whole service mesh or it might have a smaller Kubernetes deployment for which it feels too heavy. Other folks choose to roll their own solution. So sometimes people will stand up a reverse proxy. For example, engine X between multiple clusters and handle the configuration to route request multiple backends themselves. The downside is that there's no general configuration pattern for this. So you basically have to figure it out yourself. But there is another way. So CIG multi-cluster, which Stephen and I are both part of, have been working on a standard that describes how to extend the existing Kubernetes service concept to multiple clusters, leading to the multi-cluster services or MCS API. The whole idea CIG multi-cluster is going for is to provide a multi-cluster solution that feels really natural to how people already use Kubernetes services today. Everything is modeled around the existing service primitive and MCS defines the minimal amount of extra stuff needed to make them available across the clusters. The goal is that client application should have barely any changes in order to use a multi-cluster service instead of a cluster local service. This API is based around the idea of a cluster set, capital C, capital S, which is some number of clusters that are working together. The standard describes certain concepts that must hold true for clusters participating in a cluster set for them to safely deploy service objects across multiple clusters. So let's talk about what those concepts are, Charlie. First up is namespace sameness. This is the driving principle for MCS that shared namespaces across a cluster set should have the same contents everywhere, especially services. This is similar to the idea of extending services to a cluster set or extending namespaces to cluster sets. Think of it like when the same type of terrain or climate is shared across a certain latitude on the map, like we can see in our little map here with the colored regions existing across multiple islands. When it comes to climate on islands, this means that the same type of plants can all grow in the same colored regions. Plants that need the red regions climate could grow on the big island or on the smaller islands to the south. When it comes to clusters, this is like the fact that if your namespace exists across both of those clusters, you would expect the same services to be able to grow in both of those namespaces too. So in real practical terms, this means that services in a given namespace must be the same in any cluster in the cluster set where they are deployed. They will be considered functionally identical and the back ends of any matching namespace name are safe to respond to any request for service of that name and namespace, no matter what cluster in the cluster set they come from. The second concept is the MCS controller. This is the agent that actually implements the behavioral requirements of the specification. Sigma the cluster was very careful to define this broadly. The MCS controller could be a human type in kubectl commands all day, as long as they kept to the spec. The important point is that this MCS controller implements the cross cluster synchronization needed by the MCS API. This includes synchronizing a number of Kubernetes API objects across the cluster set, some of which are unique to the MCS API such as service exports and service imports, and some of which are in the core Kubernetes API, like endpoints and endpoint slices. So let's talk about some of those API objects, especially the ones that are new in the MCS API. A service export is a really simple API object, pretty much just name and namespace. But the point of it is to mark a service for export. Basically, by creating a service export with the name and namespace of a service, you tell the controller that you want that service to be accessible in that same namespace across the cluster set. This is the main interaction point for a user or administrator with the MCS API. You create these service exports. The MCS controller just consumes them. So what does the MCS controller do with these service exports? To synchronize the information, the MCS controller makes service import objects, transporting the metadata of the exported service and to each namespace same cluster in the cluster set. It includes information like the type of service and the ports and protocols of the originating service. This information is used to create endpoint slices, which is part of the Kubernetes API. So we are back in core API territory which we left behind at the service stage. These are all resources that the MCS controller makes for you as part of its role synchronizing the information across the cluster set. So all together it's like this. A service in one cluster can be marked for export by creating a matching service exports in that cluster. The MCS controller will watch those service exports and when it sees one will create the corresponding service import in all clusters in the cluster set that have the same namespace. The MCS controller will also create the endpoint slices in each consuming cluster as well. As you can see the MCS controller is acting like a cargo ship, transporting the information from a service export into new service imports in all ports of call. We hope you'll agree the MCS doesn't add much to achieve its goal from Kubernetes native services on the left. Back to Kubernetes native endpoint slices on the right. So we mentioned earlier that another goal of Sigma Cluster was to minimize the amount of change required in client applications. This leads us to the magic ingredient, which as you might have guessed is DNS. Multi-cluster services come with a multi-cluster DNS. This resolves A and SRV queries for the cluster set.local domain so that consuming applications can determine what IP address is to use to connect to multi-cluster services simply by changing your classic.cluster.local to.clusterset.local. There is a detailed spec with all the different DNS forms required but for MCS consumers there's two main kinds we expect people to interact with which we put on the slide here. So for cluster set IP services, there's one main name, the service name followed by the name space and then that.svc.clusterset.local. This is a variant on the cluster local service name continuing the practice of extending the standard core behaviors. For headless services, each pod hosting the service in each cluster exposing the service gets a DNS entry using its pod name and a cluster identifier which we'll revisit at the end of this presentation. The service name format is also supported and resolves to all active IP addresses on which the service is available and on top of that SRV records on the service name allow consumers to enumerate the available pods and you'll actually see that in action later in the Submariner demo. Let's see how all this works out in practice. Look at the architecture of Submariner, an open source project which happens to implement most of the MCS API. I'll also demo it later in the presentation so you'll get to see in practice. The first component in Submariner is its data repository where Submariner calls the broker. This is just a bunch of CRDs which are used to store the list of connected clusters, how to connect to them, and any other information which needs to be synchronized. The CRs using these CRDs are accessed using a Kubernetes API endpoint. This is typically provided by a full blown Kubernetes cluster, but it doesn't have to be. It can also be hosted in one of the connected clusters instead of a dedicated broker cluster. Now we know how to store information about clusters, how do we go about connecting them. In the simple case, each cluster has distinct siders so every pod and service has an IP address which is unique across the cluster set. To connect clusters, Submariner expects the administrator or an infrastructure support tool to provide at least one gateway node in each cluster. Submariner then opens tunnels between each gateway pair and sets up networking roles in each node to route non-local traffic through the gateway nodes to the other clusters. The situation is a bit more complex if any of the clusters have overlapping siders. In this case, Submariner sets up an overlay network to end up in a scenario close to the simple case. Each pod and service ends up with a unique address port combination in the cluster set. We add ports to the mix to reduce the IP address based requirements. Now that we have connectivity, we can start sharing services following the model we described earlier. In Submariner, this is handled by a component called Lighthouse. Inside the cluster where the shared service is hosted, the Lighthouse agent watches for service exports. When a service export is created, it produces the corresponding service import and stores it in the broker. In other clusters, the Lighthouse agent watches for service imports in the broker and copies them locally. It also creates the corresponding endpoint slices, which we'll see in the demo later on. Once a service import is present in a cluster, the corresponding service can be resolved using Lighthouse's DNS server. Submariner configures each cluster's DNS resolver to forward MCS queries in the cluster set.local domain to the Lighthouse DNS resolver. This checks for service imports and returns the appropriate IP addresses. Those addresses are accessible directly thanks to the connectivity provided by Submariner. All right, we're going to switch over to some demos now. I'm going to let Laura share her screen because she's going to show us how this works on GKE first. All right, thank you, Steven. So what I want to show you here is how this works on GKE. So first, let me mention some of the setup. So I have a terminal running over here. And I'm going to run this command to show you that I have these two clusters, GKE 1 and GKE 2. They're there, GKE 1, GKE 2. And they're also both registered in the same cluster set. So how we do that in GKE is by being members of the same GKE hub. So that's our version of a cluster registry. We can check this out with this G-Cloud command G-Cloud container hub memberships list. So there they both are. This is what the app looks like, but this is that they're both, they both have membership in the same cluster set. And then the last thing I want to point out here for the setup is that they both have the same namespace kube. So the setup is two clusters. They're in the same cluster set and they have the same namespace kube. So let's look over here to the CML that I've got. This is the CML we're working with. So on the left is the service object. I already deployed this in my cluster along with the deployment back in it. And the important part here is that we have this namespace kube con and this name where am I? And later in this demo, I'm going to deploy the service export. And this is the one with this exact same namespace kube con and name where am I? So that's the whole opt-in process for you as a user which I'm going to demonstrate. If you want to make sure that the service gets exported across your cluster set, then you create a service export that matches its name and namespace exactly. So let's start here with my two clusters. I've labeled my islands here, GK1 and GK2. And GK1 is one where we have the service deployed on it. But I haven't made that service export yet. So I cannot access anything from GK1. The service from GK1 from GK2. Nothing has been connected yet. And I'm going to prove that over here. I have another pod running in GK2, which I have a shell open in this terminal here. And I'm going to try and curl the multi-cluster DNS name for the service over in GK1. But we're going to get no response here. In fact, it doesn't even know what hosts we're talking about because no multi-cluster DNS has been set up right. So there's no connectivity setup between the two of them yet. But what we're going to do here back over in this view is we are going to create the service export now. And this is going to kick off the whole process that's going to make the service import end point slices and everything else happen in GK2. So I'll just cut that out real quick. So we can just double check. We're talking about this KubeCon RAMI1. That's what we're going to do to mark our service for export. And then I'm going to go ahead and apply this in GK1. So I'm making the service export here in GK1. So once we have that service export, the magic starts to begin. So the controller here, it's going to take all the metadata it needs from GK1 about the service and any back ends behind it. And it's going to carry that over and replicate that in GK2 in the form of the service import. So let's check out what that service import looks like. So over in GK2, got a command here where I'm going to look in GK2 for service imports in this namespace. So this can take a second to get set up, right? Our ferry is still checking along across the ocean here. So we're going to just check a couple of times until it shows up. And if necessary, use some moving magic to speed this up. Okay, great. There it is, right? Let me clear this out so we can see it beautifully. All right. So here is what the service import looks like, right? So we can see there's some information here from the original service. So like what ports it's exposing, what type it is, et cetera. And then we also have this, the spec.ip. So this is the VIP assigned to this multi cluster service from GK2. So this is how GK2 knows how to get to back ends elsewhere in this case to GK1. So we can check to make sure that DNS has gotten programmed to and just generally approve the connectivity between the two of these. Over in our DNS window section, I'm going to take this VIP with me. And first we're going to curl this VIP, right? So we get a response back and the response for this application that I have deployed in GK1 conveniently tells us the cluster name that it's responding from, right? So we are successfully getting this response back from GK1, even though, again, this pod that I'm curling from is in GK2. And then to see that DNS is working as well. We can curl this, where am I? We're getting the back end from GK1, even though I'm making this request from GK2. So this is the fun part, right? Everything connected together. The DNS is really easy to switch out. We just put this like set at the end, cluster set.local instead of cluster. So that's kind of the basic setup. But I'm also going to export the service from GK2 as well, so that we can see a little bit more going on. So I'm going to go ahead and apply some YAML that has my actual application in here into GK2. So I'm creating the service and this deployment, right? The same one that I have put into GK1. And if I just left it as that, then it's just a cluster local service. But if I also create a service export that matches it, right? So the same one with the same, we can double check it one more time. That has this namespace cube con and this name, where am I? Which is going to match our service that we just made GK2. Then this is going to take information the other way, right? So we're going to be taking, getting our ferry to take some metadata from GK2. Bring it over to GK1, make service imports over there, make endpoints over there. Technically, it will actually make this information available in GK2 as well. So we'll actually take a look at that in a second. But the point here is that because of namespace sameness, we're going to consider every service that has this name and namespace, if it's been exported to be safe to respond to requests for that service, regardless of where the request originates from in the cluster set. So this means that any cluster can access any backend for the service, regardless of cluster origin, as long as it's exported everywhere. So I'm going to run some acute cuddle command over here and we're going to watch it for a while to see when the endpoints actually get associated fully from GK2 with GK1 all in one, the multi-cluster service. It takes a little second to come up. So I'm going to kind of explain the details and maybe talk a little slower too. But what we're looking at over here in the terminal is the endpoints slices inside GK2. And you'll see for the skew command namespace. And you'll see that there's two instances here. This first one here is the cluster local service. I just deployed the service in GK2, right? So this is the endpoint slices for that. But then this, 77 seconds ago, right? But this one here is our multi-cluster service. So this is more of an implementation detail on GKE, but the way we actually hold multi-cluster service endpoints is by making a new service object. And then that also creates new endpoints or endpoint slices in the consuming cluster. So that's what this sort of prefix here, GK-MCS, this other name is here because that's how we implemented that in GKE. But the important part here is that right now this multi-cluster service has the endpoint for GK1, and I'm expecting the endpoint for GK2 to also get added in here. And that's going to be evidence that all the connections kind of connected together. And that over in GK1 and in GKE2, which is what I'm watching right now, the endpoint slices are representing all the back ends of the multi-cluster service. So the reason this takes a second, oh, it already happened. Here we go. Sorry. I talked too slow, maybe. So now we have the back ends for both of them in this endpoint object, right? I'll make it a little bit more clear, clear this out and take off my watch just so we can see the full current state, right? So we have the cluster local service that's always going to exist here as long as I deploy the service in this cluster. And then here is the multi-cluster service that now knows both endpoints.  So you'll see sometimes I'm getting GK2 back, sometimes I'm getting GK1 back, even though I'm using the same DNS name, right? We can do this a couple more times. More GK1, now GK2, now GK1, right? So because these services are considered the same to us, they have the same name and namespace deployed across the cluster, then they can be load balanced across just like the cluster IP services, but in this case we call it cluster 7IP. So there you have it. That's your basic cluster IP type service in a multi-cluster world. And I'm going to hand it over to Steven to show us how this works in Submariner and also with a headless service instead. Yep. Thank you, Laura. So as Laura said, I'll go pretty much over the same grounds but on Submariner. So I've set up two clusters, cluster 1 and cluster 2. I'm using only Submariner on Kubernetes with no fancy management tool, so there's no gear to show. But this guarantees that you'll be able to reproduce this in your own environment should you wish to do so. And assuming that your environment is supported by Submariner. I've already set up a broker on cluster 1. So cluster 1 effectively represents both islands on the left. And both clusters are joined in a cluster set. The same where am I service that Laura used is set up on cluster 2, but this time as a headless service, as you can see here from the cluster IP setting. So let's start by taking a look at the services in the KubeCon namespace on cluster 2. And there we can see where am I and it is a headless service. We can look up its IP address from inside the cluster. And there we have two addresses for it. And we can contact one either one to see its output. And so if I repeat that eventually there, I've got the two different IP addresses, 10.2.96 and 10.2.128. So this is on cluster 2 and from cluster 1, the service is unknown, whether I use the cluster domain or the cluster set domain as you might expect. But thanks to the connectivity that's provided by Submariner, we can access it from cluster 1 using one of the pod IPs. So I'll get one of the pod addresses and contact it from cluster 1 directly. And we can see we get a response from 10.2. So let's actually export the service properly. With Submariner, we could do this using a Submariner tool called SubCuttle, but I'll show you how it's done using a service export CR. So that's it created. And now the service can be discovered from cluster 1. There we have both addresses again. And this was indeed from cluster 1. And we can contact it using the cluster set address. And same again, eventually I'll get a response from a different IP address. But you might just have to trust me on that one. And I remember this is ahead of the service. And without cheating by looking at the cluster 2 pods and the cluster 2 cluster directly, we can find the endpoints by looking up the SRV records. So this is from cluster 1 again. I'm going to look for the SRV records and we get back the two different host names here for the two pods. And we also get back the port number. So this way we can figure out how to contact the endpoints directly. And so I'll do that right now. So here we're just querying the SRV records again to get one of the host names. So that's it here. Where am I? 5C, 5D, et cetera. And we're contacting it on port 8 to 80. And we get the response back. So let's take a look at the underlying data structures. First, the service imports on both clusters. So I'll start by cluster 2. So we have here one service import for where am I? And on cluster 1, we have 2. This shows how Subrainer shares the data. The entries in the Subrainer operator namespace are the cluster local copies. And the entry in the Subrainer case broker namespace is the broker copy. So that's the shared copy that's copied everywhere. And the imports are used to produce endpoint sizes. So let's take a look at those. On cluster 1 this time. So we have just the one endpoint slice corresponding to the remote endpoints for the cluster sets. And on cluster 2, we get both, we get two back, one that's the cluster set endpoint slice and the other one that's the cluster local. And to finish off, let's take a look at service availability. I'll set up where am I on cluster 1. Here we go. And I'll export it. So this is the same as previously, but on cluster 1. And now if we take a look at the SRV records, we'll eventually see four pods. So there's just two for now. And that's it for. And they're on the different clusters. Anyone of those can answer. So if I query from cluster 1, I'm still getting back and a response from cluster 2. And now I've got one back from cluster 1, cluster 2 again. And if I drop the cluster 2 deployment, the endpoints are immediately updated. And so I'll do a combined command that deletes and queries the SRV records again, just to show you that it is actually immediate. That's it dropped. And we're back down to just two entries for the SRV records. And if I redeploy where am I on cluster 2, the endpoints will be restored. So I'll deploy it again. And now if I query again from cluster 1, that's it. We've got four responses back. And so that concludes the summer in your demo. And I'll hand back to Laura for the rest of the presentation. So thanks. So hopefully everybody got a good taste of how this all works in practice today. Let's talk a little bit about what the future is for the MCS API. So as we've alluded to in this presentation, there's parts of the MCS API that each individual implementation is not fully supporting yet. So as the standard becomes closer and closer to its final form GA, each implementation is working to converge towards the specification so that it can be considered fully MCS API compliant. For GK, for example, our implementation of multi cluster headless services doesn't yet create endpoint slices in the consuming clusters and doesn't provide SRV records yet either. For Submariner, cluster set IP services aren't allocated to stable virtual IP that clients could actually use. Everything is handled through DNS instead. But I point this out because this is one of the interesting things about working on the MCS API right now. The spec and the real world implementations are developing together. So as a multi cluster debates points to include in the spec, we can try them out in the real world and come back and provide insights. This has been particularly helpful to distinguish between things that must belong in the standards and things that are just implementation details. This has been a really successful way to create a standard retail component is useful to everyone and is agnostic to different technical stacks. Great segue because the best future for MCS would include even more implementations of the MCS API. As mentioned, this is the best time to try more approaches and get more feedback while the standard is still in development. That being said, there are a few other pieces still moving as well. That cluster ID that we need to make DNS records for the MCS API is a cluster ID that is implemented in the multi cluster headless services that is represented. That is represented in a separate cap and the CRD is just recently an offer and is called cluster property. Getting that cluster property CRD implemented in each of the current implementations and moving it to beta and then GA is part of the process of getting the MCS API to GA as well. Besides just pure MCS API implementations like sub and sub, we also wanted to see other community projects standardized on top of the MCS API to make it easier to build more complex solutions using the same MCS API we all now know and love. The gateway API, the new ingress solution from SIG network, supports using service imports as back end references for ingress routes. Istio itself is also implementing parts of the MCS API to make it easy for you to use MCS API first, and then you can use it as an upgrade. Upgrade with very little changes to your application configuration.  We invite you to install this yourself either using OpenShift or GKE as then with today, or installing the CRDs in Subrainer.io in your own clusters. Subrainer has a series of quick start guides on how to deploy this MCS controller yourself using clusters running on your own. Finally, SIG multi-cluster would love for you all to get involved in the development of the MCS API and all the other good multi-cluster projects we have going on. We meet bi-weekly on Tuesdays over Zoom, and there was also a maintainer track talk published a few days ago with even more details about all the projects we're working on. So hopefully we can see you there. Thank you, everyone, and we will see you at the Q&A.


Why would anybody want to be in this market as a chop sideways, and it's extremely boring, and nothing really happens right now? And for this timeframe, it is not the most exciting, I will tell you that. But for me, it is exciting. And we're going to talk about today of why I am bullish long term, not so much in the very, very near term, and what I'm buying and why. So let's just jump into it because time is money. So this is what I bought. So there's been over time, we've talked about the different things in my portfolio, but these things evolve and they change. And that is just the reality of the situation. But I just want to give everybody like a peek into what I'm doing and why I'm doing it. Now, some people don't want to buy Alts. Some people don't want to buy Bitcoin. Some people don't want to buy anything. But for me, I kind of feel like, and this has happened to me back in 2018, 2019. And now it's happening again in this cycle where I just see that everything is kind of repeats and repeats. So why don't I take advantage of these low prices? Now, there's a lot of people that say that we are heading much, much lower and they could be right. But you never know. And this is what's happening. So as we can see in this little graph that I put together this morning, this is what I bought. And what I want to do was I want to take a look at it was, of course, what I buy every day. And then there's a couple of ones that are in asterisks here. That's what I buy once a week. And in the blue is what I bought, kind of like the percentage as it pertains to the different other cryptos that I bought. But in this lime green shade, this is the percentage from its all time high. So today, I bought equal amounts of Bitcoin and Ethereum. Now, a lot of people will say, well, Rob, you should just buy Bitcoin only. Sure. Or some people should say Rob, you should buy a little bit more Bitcoin than anything else. Sure. For me, I take a look at it and it's all about dynamic DCA and if you don't know what this is, we've talked about this extensively. There's a video on it. I'll try to link in the description. But in all honesty, if you just go to danteachescrypto.com, it's 100% free. Everything that I do that I feel is important, it's going to help people to make some sort of analysis of what is best for them. I put it in Dan teaches crypto. So just check that out again, 100% free. So we take a look at this. So today, I bought and these all happen without me thinking about it because I have problems sometimes with getting up and just going, I'm going to buy this, this, this, this or I'm going to buy this specifically. I'm going to dump this lump amount. What I do is I just set it in forget it. I put it on Coinbase. There is a DCA tab where you can buy it either daily, weekly or monthly. You set it in amount, boom off it goes. And then this isn't a nice affiliate promotion for Coinbase. I have no affiliation with them. I don't have an affiliate link for them. But I use them because so far I trust them. Do I trust them to leave everything on it? Absolutely not. And that's why once a week, which is usually Sunday, I transfer everything over to my ledger device or my LAPAL and hopefully want to get my tangent for the same thing. So it happens without me really thinking about it. And then I sign up for this thing called Coinbase 1 where I do it for a year's timeframe. I get a discount. It's like 19 bucks a month, and it waives all the fees up to $10,000. So that's what I do. So Bitcoin, Ethereum, I bought Salon and Polygon, and that's like my next tier. So Bitcoin, Ethereum, I have the most conviction in. I believe they're going to do quite well in the next bull market. And I will tell you this, I didn't make all my revenue, all my gains just by putting everything into Bitcoin. There are some altcoin plays and some people may call those S-coins, but they do pretty good in the bull market. I'm going to show you exactly what I'm talking about. So Salon and Polygon are kind of like neck and neck. And then we've got Nir on the next tier. I've got Cosmos. I like Cosmos. If you don't follow a YouTuber by his name of Cryptocito, he knows a lot about what's going on with Cosmos and what's happening. What I do like about Cosmos and Tendermint and everything they've done there is that everyone, Luna collapsed. It collapsed totally. And it was built on Cosmos as it's layer zero, not layer one or layer two. And nothing happened. There was no blip, no problems. Cosmos did pretty well. Now they're having a little bit of a shake up and some things are happening over there. Go watch Cryptocito, but I still think I could do pretty good. But again, if you take a look at the rules below me, the first rule is it's all gone. Never invest more. You can afford to lose. But I think, hey, you might do pretty well. Who knows? The next tier is Chainlink. And none of the very lowest tier, I bought a little Dogecoin today. And we actually talked about Dogecoin. Actually, I haven't done a video in like three days. I've been very, very busy doing other stuff. But of course, our grandson was here, so I was taking care of him.  I know some people love Dogecoin, some people hate it. But I lay it out and essentially just goes like this. Elon loves Dogecoin. And it doesn't matter what we think or what we believe, the masses pump that price so much. And who knows, it might become part of X or what was formerly known as Twitter. And then on top of that, there was a little piece that I'd like to share with everybody. But just going back here, just so you know, this is what I bought today. And then I also do on a weekly basis, Cardano, because I have a boatload of it, Stax, which is a Layer 2 solution for like a smart contract functionality for Bitcoin, Algorand, Avalanche, and Polkadot. And I buy those sporadically. I got a bunch of those actually. So going back to this whole Dogecoin thing, and actually Solana, what you want to take a look at in this one is that the percentage from its all-time highs, you see that Bitcoin's not too far off. It's like 57% away from its all-time high it dropped. Ethereum 62% roughly. Yeah, 62% actually. Solana is 90% down from its all-time high. I think you got a bad shake with FTX and it's going on. I know some people will say, but Rob, it's down all the time and it's awful and it's centralized and the wallets and look, yes, it's gone down. Has it gone down recently? Not that I have heard because I know everybody likes to tell me how often it goes down, but not lately. And they're doing some pretty cool things in gaming and we'll get to that in a second. So yeah, I think you could do pretty decent. Maybe I'm wrong. And that's just how it goes. Polygon Layer 2 solution on Ethereum, they're doing quite well. We're going to build our project on it. So I like, I've been dollar-crossed every now and then since 2022. So we'll see how it goes. Neoprotocol did fantastically well. They did their token generation event with Sweatcoin, which is the number one app in the world. And they had the largest TGE globally and it went off without a hitch. There was no downtime, no problems, no issues. They're doing really great things with onboarding customers. Cosmos like I talked about, Chainlink, I think everything needs an Oracle and it's one of the few that's out there that actually has notoriety, but we'll see if it works out and Dogecoin. So again, from its all-time highs, Polygon is looking at like almost 75%. Near is down massively. Cosmos, gosh, we're at. Cosmos is down 79%. Wow. Chainlink is down 85%, Dogecoin 89, and then 90% for Cardano. So when you take a look at this, for me, I can't tell you what to do, not just your dad, not a financial advisor, but sometimes you want to balance risk with safety and what will be considered safety returns. For some people, Bitcoin is the most risky asset they possibly have. For me, that is the safest. Well, that's not true. The safest assets I have is real estate, quite honestly, but in investing for, I mean, I don't really deal too much with equities, but as far as investing in crypto, Bitcoin is the least volatile and one of the most volatile markets. But if we take a look at it, for me, I think that's a decent balance of risk versus reward. And who knows, all of these can get wiped out, but it's okay, because I don't need everything to be a winner. Just need one or two to make it and off I go. And then lastly, what I want to talk about before we get into the news section is a DCA simulation. This is a much better upgrade than the website I used to use at DCA-CC. And this is Ben's website. He's having a sale. There's a link in the description to get 10% off the first month. And this part right here, if you sign up, there's like a free tier, you can use this. And it's pretty cool. And what I like about this is like, well, I'm just going to show you something. So this is boring time, right? It's boring, just boring. It's what it is boring, right? So I want to take the initial asset of Solana, just for example, right? Actually, it doesn't really matter. I'll just use Bitcoin. Let's use Bitcoin. And let's say I want to put in $100 per week, and I want to start on 2020, April 10th. I can't go, actually, I can't go before that. Let me see. Let me start here. 2018, January, January 1st. And I'm going to put in $100 per week. Okay. Some people, that's a lot. I get you. I trust me. I get you. Some people, that's not that much. But whatever. Round numbers, let's just go with that. So you can see down here, as far as like what you invested in Bitcoin. And for some reason, this thing says lump sum Bitcoin, but I got to get rid of that. But just ignore the lump sum Bitcoin. We're not putting in $20,400 right now. We're just putting in $100 a week. And you can see over here, if you put in $100 a week, 2018, 19, 2020. So for four years, and we've talked about this at large, you invested almost $12,000. And you get back $83,000. That's if you sell at the very top. Good luck. And then of course, over here, actually, top, top, you invested $15,000, $95,000. All right. So, you know, 6X, whatever it is. Then of course, if you held all the way down, you're not doing so hot. Congratulations. You've held for five years and didn't do too much. That's why it's important to sell at some point, if you want to. Again, whatever you want to do. What I like about Ben's is that I can do this, compare the assets. Let's compare this to Ripple, Cardano, Solana, Avalanche, Polkadot, Dogecoin, Matic, Cosmos. And I want you to be very aware of which ones I'm picking. I'm picking the ones that I own. You know why I'm doing that? Because I'm super biased. A lot of people won't say, oh, I'm just doing this for the random stuff of it. No, it's because they're biased. I'm super biased too. Chainlink, Nier, let's throw an Algorand, and da-da-da.  That's just, that's what we have. So, let's see. So, now let me change the date, because for some reason I won't do it right. 2020, May, ba-ba-ba-ba. That very much, I'm right. Let's say June 1st. Okay. And the reason why I had to pick, the reason why I had to go forward in time to June 1st, 2020 is because some of these didn't even exist. Solana didn't exist till May 1st, 2020. This is why. So, let's take a look at how we would do. I mean, look, investing in Bitcoin is pretty good, right? But as we compare this against it, and it, let's be honest, it's risky. It's risky. The farther down you go in that rabbit hole, as far as market cap, the more likely to lose all your funds. Actually, you're more likely to lose your funds if you're left on FTX or Voyager or Celsius, but neither you're here nor there. So, moving forward, how do we do here? Let's see. So, again, ignore the lump sum Bitcoin. So, if I invested here, let's go back. You can see that there's not really too much going on. You're investing $100 per week, and you can see that over time, your total investment, as of today, would be $13,000. But coming over here, you can see that nothing really happens until the almighty bull run. Let me take, let me take one of these off. Let's take out Algorand and Dot. Try that again. And let's take, let's put this May first. Now, let's refresh this. Ah, shoot. Let me X this out. Let's compare it to, again, Cardano, Solana, Avalanche, Dogecoin, and Chainlink. Let's just go that. Okay. So, this will clean it up just a little bit. How about that? So, here, there we go. See how it says what you invested? So, we started out back in May, $100 a week, which is a lot, putting in all these different ones. You're not doing too hot for a while. Nothing's really happening. You're kind of flatlining, just like what we're doing right now, right? But then, as things, as we start to do a little blip, look at this one. February 2021, which is roughly nine, 10 months after the last halving. You invested $4,000, and if you invested into Dogecoin, $100,000, lump sum of Bitcoin, just putting it all in at the very beginning, you had a $58,000. Pretty good. ADA, Solana, not too bad. And we take a look at here. Again, Dogecoin, jeez, three quarters of a million. And of course, you invested only $5,400. Solana, $138,000. ADA, $69,000, $27,000. That's on 2021. That's just a very short amount of time. Again, in the spore year cycles, this is looking pretty good. Of course, now we go down a little bit. Let's go back to November. November 8th, the tippy top of everything. Now, look how things, oh, how the turntables. And we see that Doge is actually still doing great, 342,000. But look at Solana, $791,000. But again, you have to understand, you were accumulating some massive amounts on low prices when Solana was absolutely nothing. Nothing, because it just came out of May. Who times those perfectly? Very few people, usually insiders, usually VCs, actually. But if we can see over here, we can see over time that actually Solana and Dogecoin did pretty well. And one thing that always impressed me about Dogecoin, and I talked about this in the video, was that we took a look, because Dogecoin came around in 2014. And you can see that over the time frame, and it's about a long time frame, 2014, 2014, 15, 16, 17, 18, 9 years. Dogecoin has been in the top 40 all of those years, as much as people make fun of it. So I took a look at that, I'm like, holy smokes, maybe there's something to it, maybe if Elon gets to it. Now I'm not telling you to go and buy it, I'm just telling you that's just what we see. And we can see that through, you know, Ben's site here, take a look at just dollar cost averaging how things go. So let me just think about that in the comments section, I'll just be a little bit controversial, but hey, don't get mad at me, get mad at the data. And that's all we got. And then lastly, before we move on, just so you know, all the stuff I'm going to talk about today, it's all on this site. So the thing that I was saying, like the dynamic dollar cost averaging video, all my screw up and lessons are right there. Here's that dynamic DCA. And another one you're probably going to want to watch is, you know, when I'm planning to sell at 80% of my crypto with these specific indicators and so on and so forth. Okay, so that takes care of that. Let's talk about some bullish stuff, because for some reason people say I'm very bearish. I understand why, because I sound very bearish, but you have to understand right now, I don't think we have a blow off top. I think we're going in the right direction. I think that we have a lot of rocky road to come up. And especially if we hit some form of a recession, whether it be a rolling recession or jobless growth or whatever else is happening around that bin. But I see the light at the end of the tunnel. And it all starts with the Bitcoin halving coming up in April 2024. So it's not just me that knows it. It's people like the whales that are starting to accumulate. It's amazing to me that we've been stuck around $30,000, like it seems like forever. So this is from CryptoQuantz. And they came out and said there was three data points I'd take a look at. Exchange well ratio, exchange inflow coin days destroyed and unspent transaction output concluded that Bitcoin whales, I'm not going to say they're smart money. I'm just going to say they're big money. Those are the ones that hold between $1,000 and $10,000 Bitcoin have been accumulating more Bitcoin this month at price levels of around $30,000. Usually those guys don't usually accumulate too much when they see something negative coming massively in. So if they're accumulating, not a bad time to accumulate. So there's some bullish news for everybody. I like that also. Some of the traditional finance people are getting into the game. As Bitcoin futures, they hit a yearly high. And states here, despite doing only volumes across crypto trading venues, that's true. We've seen a little bit of a reduction volume. CME Group clocked its highest monthly volumes of the year in July. Volumes from July top its previous high in April, $53 billion with one day left in the month. In April, the firm saw $53.06 billion worth of contracts trade hands. That's a lot of Bitcoin futures. So I need someone much smarter than me to explain to me why these Bitcoin futures and these futures ETF are not wrought with manipulation and no problems. But yeah, we can't get a spot Bitcoin ETF. So there's a case right now going on against the SEC. And I still don't understand what the, I understand what the difference is with the spot ETF. You have to hold the underlying asset and get it in the futures you don't.  And essentially you're manipulating, you can manipulate the market. I think I'm a little bit easier in the futures market. I think I could be wrong, but that's all we got, which leads me to that my bearish story of the day as everybody groans, but this is true. Gensler raises concerns about fraud manipulation when asked about the Bitcoin ETFs. Now look, I don't think it's going to get approved. And I know I'm very, very, very much in the minority, but this is all we got. Gary Gensler expressed skepticism about the crypto market when asked about pending apps for a spot ETF. He made clear he didn't make a direct statement to the full five-member commission could consider the recent wave of filings as there's multi-plude. I'm going to talk to you about those deadlines, which are going to come up. But Gensler again raised concerns about general fraud and manipulation of the crypto industry when asked for his thoughts about the ETF applications. He's like a recording. There's a lot of non-compliance in this field. The platforms themselves where trading is occurring of various crypto tokens, though some of it comes under the securities laws, currently they're not necessarily compliant with those time-tested protections against fraud and manipulation. And again, all of the people that have applied for the spot Bitcoin ETF, they have used Coinbase as their custody partner. The SEC is suing Coinbase, although it is a different company under the umbrella of Coinbase, a publicly traded company. I just feel like Gary is going to use this excuse to push the members and say, no, we're going to not approve it. Now, I hope I'm wrong, but I kind of see that's how it's working out moving forward. Let me just think about that in the comments section. Just as a reminder, this is something to watch out for. Here's all of the deadlines for all of these ETFs have been filed. ARC, 21 shares, Bitcoin ETF, they've already missed, not they've already missed, the deadlines already passed. You have within 45 days, which is weird to me about the SEC, like, well, we've got a first deadline, a second deadline, a third deadline, and a final deadline.  You can go to bed at 9 o'clock or maybe 9.30 or 10 or 10.30, but the final one's 11. I don't know. I don't understand the process. That's really what it comes down to. But anyhow, ARC 21 shares, the first deadline, they've already blown through that. The second one's going to come up in August. iShares, which is the company, which is BlackRock, which everybody believes is going to be approved, actually all of them, iShares, Bitwise, Vanaq, Wisentree and Vesco, Wise Origin and Valkyrie, they're all in their first deadline in September. We got about a month. If it doesn't happen in a month and they blow through that first deadline, we got problems. But maybe they approve it, but it's just odd that they go to the first, second, third, the final deadline for all these guys. It's March 15, 2024, which would be quite interesting how that kind of lines up when they could say, they could push, push, push, push to the final deadline, but then say no, haha. And then guess what happens the next month, Bitcoin halving. Great. I don't really care if they deny it or not, because the whole thing is all of these Treadfy companies have come out and go, we want Bitcoin. We've got a lot of people who have a lot of money who want Bitcoin. Give us that Bitcoin spot ETF. People are going to understand that. They're going to look at that and go, there's something to this Bitcoin, which we didn't understand before, but these smart people do. The cat's out of the bag and then people get into it. And then you're going to have the narrative of the Bitcoin halving, which let me just pop forward. There we go. That's not it. Oh, sorry. Like this one, this was on MSNBC and they just out of the blue to start talking about Bitcoin halving. It's about two minutes long. I'm not going to play it. I'll link in the description. You can, you can watch it, but we're going to keep halving. These types of narratives come out with this Bitcoin halving is going to come up and people are going to talk about, oh, the supply is going to be even more limited because the halving happens every four years. And of course, because of supply and demand, the price will go up. Now, some people don't believe in that. Bob Lucas, who I like his videos, and maybe we see the all time high in 2024. I'm not for sure. But he's one of those guys that does not believe that the Bitcoin halving has anything to do with the price of Bitcoin going up. And he's got some pretty fantastic reasons. I will, I have a link. You can watch, Bob, what he talks about, but it doesn't matter. Like I said, because I just think that we're going to get this. People are going to talk about it and off we go. Anyhow, on that note, here's some good news. Even though the SEC talks a big game and everybody respects them, I think they're unbeatable. Well, remember Mark Q and beat them when they accused him of insider trading? And the SEC, this little snippet here, had no, almost no impact on Ripple's talks with central banks. This is from Ripple's execs. Ripple's long legal saga with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Committee and SEC, it almost no impact for our firm's vice president, central bank engagement, told Coin Desk. James Wallace said his decision that Ripple's sale of XRP did not constitute investment contracts was a major victory, not just for Ripple, but everybody. And he says, we've had no countries say we don't want to talk to you because of it. I think people see through that shroud and they can say, you know what, even though the SEC came down hard, they still lost that case, even though they won on TV instead of they won. And honestly, they did lose, and there's some more losses coming about. So that is good news. I can definitely say that. Now let's shift gears a little bit and talk about the metaverse NFT and gaming. I know we think about this sector as dead, but I think it's going to be the next big narrative moving forward. So just saw this on decrypts. British Museum will enter the metaverse via the sandbox. The sandbox is a funny thing because we had talked about how like digital lambs are going to be the next big thing. And then all of a sudden it just kind of just dried up and nobody really goes to it. Now all of a sudden you've got Adidas and Snoop Dogg and all these different people. Well, that's a little bit older coming into it. Now you've got the British Museum coming in. Here's what we have. So sandbox, Ethereum based metaverse game, they're going to create a range of NFT digital collectibles. According to a press, it's going to reflect the breadth and depth of the British Museum's collections, offering new immersive experiences, putting alongside modern cultural icons like Snoop Dogg, McDonald's, Adidas, and Gucci. This is a great opportunity for the sandbox players, regardless of where they are, to learn about the amazing wealth of human history, art, and culture that the British Museum has to offer. I know some people are going, who cares? That's very boring. I got you. I mean, I'm old, so I like to go to museums. That's pretty, that's kind of fun for me. But it doesn't matter. We're talking about just the advancements and things that are happening as far as like with NFTs. It really comes down to digital property. And there's this video I'd like you guys to watch. This is me and Yatsu. He's he's the co-founder of Anamoka Brands, got over 400 different investments, big stuff like OpenSea and Sandbox and Axie and stuff like that. And when he talks about as far as digital property, that is the next, and he makes Web 3, the way that he explains it, I can't do a good job, is just something to watch to know where we're going. And one of his quotes, or one of the quotes actually George Washington, which is pretty good, and he said, freedom and property rights are inseparable. You can't have one without the other. And when he talks about the property rights that you have for the physical items that you own, your house, your car, closing your back, shoes, makes a lot of sense as we talk about the digital properties that we don't have control of our data or collectibles, things that we use in games, things we use online. So I see where things are going and it's just interesting that they're doing, you know, all the different things that Anamoka is doing on top of this thing called Open Campus.   Or anybody that you know that has something to say and something to teach, they're funding this process right now, I should apply. I got too much going on. So again, if you want to find this video or this this website, everything else on the website, if you go to gaming, it's like the first video. Yeah, first video there. And then there's Anamoka Brands, Open Camps, it's in the TED talk. So there's a good one with the crypto stash, you want to check that one out. So that's what we have. And then lastly, just to talk about, because it's going kind of long, sorry, gaming. So we talked about empty and property rights, gaming is interesting. There's a great stat, it's from Statista. I was gonna rattle this information off, but I'll make it very quick. There's roughly 7.8 billion people in the world. Out of the 7.8 billion people, there's like roughly, there's 3.1 billion people who are gamers, excuse me, 3.22 billion people, billion people, billion people who are gamers, gamers, mobile devices mostly. And out of those, 63% of those gamers are hyper casual gamers. So when we talk about the new narrative is moving forward, I think it's gaming, I think Solana gets it. So Solana, I know this is a very Solana heavy video more so than I have ever done before. But I mean, they are doing things. And like I talk about the people that those in the bear will crush it in the bull. And that's the tweet today or yesterday, I forgot. They had a two day play Gigi events in San Diego, the jewel venue streamers G2 eSports talent developers and gamers together to celebrate and play 50 plus games built on Solana. Hold on. I don't know if they've actually, I think you can play them there. But when I took the took a peek at the link that they shared, they're not all playable. So just be aware about that. But there are some good stuff like this, this one blade rights. I know people some of them are, we're not bunch of gamers, but it looks pretty interesting. I don't know if this would be considered like a triple a rank game. I don't think so. But you can download it right now and play it, you can play it on your computer. I don't think it is for mobile, but you know, for looks like it's for Mac and PC. That's pretty good. And then on top of that, this one, Gino pets is available right now to play. So it's a web three game that you can actually play right now. It's a goofy little game. But what's pretty cool about this is that just like this app that I've been talking about quite a bit, sweat coin, where you download the app and they reward you sweat tokens for walking coming to America, September 12. Right now it's only global, just not us and I ran for some reason. But Gino pets, the same thing and you can get paid in your steps. So I just did it right now, Apple or Google and you can play and it's actually functional. Other ones, like this one, I don't know what this is earth from another son, the game is enclosed alpha, which means some of you can play it. If you got a some special pass star Atlas, one of their bigger games. I just watched crypto stashes interview with the CEO and founder, they laid off like 100. I think it's like 100 some people, which is good.  If you want to stay alive, it's a crappy way to say it, but it is true. And that's what's going on and hopefully they can make it.  I don't think it's actually playable. And the rest of the ones that didn't see were playable. So I could be wrong, but that's what we have. And then to finish up, I'll give a shout out to Neville for making us aware that if you have the Voyager app, you need to take off all your funds or the 35% that they graciously gave us after they made that 640 million uncoadalized loan of three hours capital. Anyhow, if you have the app, make sure to take off whatever they give you before 11th of August because they're going to shut it down. Okay. And then I'll we already talked about this, the narrative moving forward, I think is, is pretty good. But I don't think, I know people think I'm bearish right now, but I'm not super bearish. It's just right now in this time.  That's it for today. So look, went 30 minutes, that's way too long. If you like today's video, give it a thumbs up, consider subscribing. You're going to talk about his time sensitive. But right now, we'll go over Q&A, answer the questions to my best of my abilities, and we'll go from there. If not, have a good day. Thank you guys. Show and go. Rob's buying slander and buying that.


With an outside Africa now, European nation's foreign office says German ambassador to China, Jan Hecker, has died, barely two weeks into the job. Hecker, who was a foreign policy advisor to Chancellor Angela Merkel, had just taken up his post on the 24th of August. The embassy in Chinese capital said, in a posting on its social media WeChat account, the cause of death is yet to be confirmed. An embassy spokesperson declined further comments to newsmen.