This week's episode is sponsored by Hair Replacement Glasgow. Men's non-surgical hair replacement. For exceptional value they use only the best ultra realistic non evasive men's hair systems. You can wash it, style it, play football, go to the gym and even swim with confidence. So if you are looking for an instant transformation with 100% human hair styled exactly the way you want it, contact Hair Replacement Glasgow for your free consultation. You've been shot over 20 times. I thought 50 cent was lucky getting shot 9 times but you're that's, I've never heard that. A story as heavy as that to being shot over 20 times and still here to tell the tale. We were running the back, one of them pulled out of peace and proceeded to shoot me. I was with my mate on the floor for a bit and then I had to get off. I had to take whatever was there out of the scene so the police didn't find it. Boom we're on. Today's guest we've got Manchester's Darryl Leacock. How are you brother? Good thank you. First of all big man thanks for coming on. You're welcome. You've got a very interesting story. We've got here 19 different prisons shot over 20 times. Crazy story mate. I've seen you and Sean Atwood podcast so shout out to Sean. It was a very interesting podcast, bit nuts. I've not watched it but... How do you know what's your own stuff? I don't know I just get a bit embarrassed and stuff.  So Manchester bad boy, let's go right back to the start Daza. Kind of where it all began for you. Obviously I'm from Moss side. Born in Ym. Born in Ym. Went to Manchester a year old. Moss side sorry not Manchester. Moss side which is like the overspel from Ym. Grew up in a house full of domestic violence. Dad beating mum on a regular basis. My mum left my dad. And got with another man for protection. Ended up having a kid with him. My brother Lawrence. Couple years down the line he was... His dad was African. He was kidnapped by his dad. His dad come and took him off the street and he wasn't seen for 30 years. Choken? So then... So my mum had a problem. Obviously she missed her son and things like that. There was a lot of drinking in the house. Mostly my dad. My dad would be drinking and that's when he'd be violent with my mum. But he would never violent with the kids.  So he was violent towards my mum. Mum put up with that for years and years. When I was young in primary school. I had to go see child psychologists because I hit somebody with a chair. Pretty bad. I was only 8 years old. It was like learnt behaviour so to speak. From there things just spiraled out of control. I used to go and see a child psychologist all the time. For years. Then one night I still drank involved. I can't say my dad was a bad person. He's done bad things to my mum that I've found out since they both passed over. But I can't say he was a bad person because when he was sober. He was mostly the nicest man you'd ever come across when he had a drink. He was like a devil. Jekkel en I so... It was bad seeing my mum go through what she went through. Do you know what your dad's upbringing was like? What was your dad's upbringing do you know? My dad was born in Jamaica and come over here part of the Windrush generation. Do you know? I know my dad seeing his dad beat my grand. Do you know my grand was beat until she was blinded. Or semi-blind but she's fully blind now. My grand outlived my mum and my dad and my grand dad. She's still alive. I don't know if it learnt behaviour. I ask because you tend to see it passes down from generation to generation. And that's where your violence probably comes from. The trauma that you've seen accepting maybe that it's okay if I do whatever the frustration. So that's when your life probably started spiralling. Like I was saying learnt behaviour was very violent, very angry as a child. I was very funny but I was angry. Obviously now looking back obviously it was trauma that I was dealing with. But I was dealing with it myself and lashing out with the people. So cut a long story short. I went to secondary school. After the second day of being in secondary school I was excluded for hitting a teacher. Because she put her hand on me so I just thought nobody puts her hand on me. So I excluded, cut a long story short, not long after that. My dad was still beating my mum. He was in and out of our lives, in and out of our lives. And he was still beating my mum and my mum ended up stabbing my dad.  Because I chose to do that kind of thing. So I went on the streets at early age 12, 13. I was selling crack and heroin at them ages. But everybody thought I was selling it as part of a gang and all that. I was, I had a cousin who was a smackhead and I was doing it with him first. And then I went on to the streets and it was like to escape what was happening at home. You know, seeing what was happening. What was happening there, the drink, the drink, the drink, the smoking, the smoking and so on. And I was on the streets with a group of friends. Some of them went through similar things, some of them went through nothing. But we all was on the estate. Some of the ages are 14 as well. You are giving a gun. Yes, some elder person, he was supposed to be the man.  And he gave me a gun, made me mind a gun. Asked me to use a gun at a specific time, a specific person. I didn't but he still left me with the gun. What were you to do with the gun? He asked me to shoot somebody. Somebody was going to come and meet him in a pub. And he asked me to shoot the person. Did the show up? No, they didn't show up. But I wouldn't have shot him anyways, not that person. So, you started selling crack on the streets. You started dabbling not just in drugs but guns. What age did you start really getting into the violence? When I was like 15, loads of fisticuffs. 16, knives, guns. 17. There had been a couple of murders when I was 17. My mate was killed in a bakery. I was with him and that's when I vowed to avenge's death. I'm not only the vowed to avenge's death. I pled me loyalty to him from a young age. Nowadays, you don't get the kind of loyalty that you had back then. People sell you out now. Nobody's old talk. Walk back, you open things like that. Then it started. Throughout the years, I lost over 30 friends and family. Over 60 people that have been murdered. Most people don't know. Six people that have died from natural causes. What have you been dealing with this all my life? Trauma, constant pain. Constant as worry as well.  It's a trauma in that what if it's me next door. You've got two ways.  Or you grow the conscience and try to stay. You try to change. You're doing massive things, we'll touch on that in a bit. To make the changes and make the sacrifices to change, it takes massive respect.  When your friend get murdered in the bakers, you were there that day? Yeah, yeah. What was that story? We went to get some food, some toasters. We seen some people from another estate that come towards us. We were running the back, one of them pulled out of peace and proceeded to shoot me. My mate, they left the scene. I was with my mate on the floor for a bit and then I had to get off. I had to get off because I had to remove, I had to take whatever was there out of the scene. So the police didn't find it. I'm not going to say you had it, whether I had it with my mate or somebody else. But I had to flee the scene. I left my mate with my other mate's mum. He was happened to pass him by and she stayed with him. But he was dead before I had left. What age were you then? I was 17. So after that, what was your head like? You know what, people say that you forget after time but you don't forget after time every day. But even up to now I think to myself if we would have went a different way to that place the dynamics of life would have been different. It might not have happened, it might have been me.  I still think about it. I've said that many times but they say times are here but it's not. You learn to adapt to what's happened and you'll repeat it. What if I went this way? What if I could save him?  Now you're speaking at schools, now you're helping other kids. Not to make the same mistakes that you've made or your friends have made. So you've got to give yourself credit.  So when your life after that, how did that affect your life? It just went hectic after that. Obviously there's been a couple of deaths before him and all that from opposing sides. And it just got hectic on site.  Obviously I can't say too much because the police might investigate. Because no case is ever closed, is it? But there was tip for tax shootings for years and years. Numerous murders to deal with the almost side issues. So was that a tough war for people fighting over postcodes? Nothing to do with postcodes. It's nothing to do with postcodes because for the simple reason we're all from the same postcode. We all went to school with each other. For nobody owns any property there either? Nah, it's definitely not postcodes but what it is, elder statesmen, elders was having beef and then everybody grew into it and followed, picked a side and so on. But back when we was young we all used to go to same schools, go round with each other, get on. But we listened to elder people and nowadays you get kids listening to elder people do this and do that. So I'd go round and tell them it's not worth it because the elder people at some point they run off and leave you and then they've caused all this chaos and they run off with whatever they've made to another city or another town and you're left trying to pick up the pieces.  So to speak, yeah. You've been shot over 20 times, I thought 50 cent was lucky getting shot 9 times but I've never heard a story as heavy as that to being shot over 20 times and still here to tell the tale.  I definitely feel blessed and I'm grateful everyday that I wake up. I might not have the most money, I might be going through a bit of depression I might not be feeling good but I'm thankful that I'm still alive. I thought that my mum would outlive me because of the circles I kept and the things I was doing. So I appreciate that I'm here and I do feel blessed because I'm not big-headed or anything but there's nobody been shot more times than me and survived so I believe that I was put on this earth for a reason. I was shot once one night I was riding through a park and the ironic thing is I'd had something come me earlier and I put it on and then about 10 minutes later I got to ride through this park when I say I had something come me I mean I was armed and dangerous and I put it away for the night. It was on my way somewhere and riding a bike through a dark park and I seen someone jump out from behind the tree so I let go of the bikes, turned around and started running I heard the shots and one of the shots caught me underneath my foot and come out the side of my leg. That was the first time.  So yeah, that's the first time I got shot. I've done some jail in between the four and a half year sentence. After I got shot I was arrested for a couple of attempted murders and a conspiracy to murder. Charge went to trial. I found not guilty. I found guilty of possession with intent and supply. Class A's was given four years for the class A's and for two bullets I got six months consecutive which is six months on top of the four years. Usually you get concurrent but obviously I was building up a bit of reputation and intelligence and so on. So yeah, I was in jail. Waas was in jail. Obviously it doesn't stop. People think you might go to jail and the beef doesn't stop so it was tick for tat fighting inside the jail. Because there was a ruling saying that people from my estate and other estates that I had conflict with wouldn't be on the same wing and they kind of kept it like that but they can't control the visits so you'd go to visits or you'd go to the gym not that I go to the gym nowadays but you'd bump into people. You'd bump into people and it'd go off. Obviously if you've lost friends to murder you're going to always have anger. A lot of people can control anger and think I'll wait till I get outside but I wasn't one of them people. Anytime I saw any of them in jail it was on. Most of them tried it with me but some people didn't. Because you know yourself some people ain't nothing without the tool without a blade or anything. It doesn't matter 10, 15 of them. From what I've seen that day when my mate was killed I would rush no matter how many. Not caring if you died. No this I'm talking about in jail I wouldn't care if I died I was always prepared for death. Did you ever go and see anybody in the jail psychologist or mental health? No because you know what it is as men pride you know that people say pride kills and it really does because we don't open up our feelings whereas now I will tell the people I was suffering but I had to this reputation to keep and so on. As with a girl I had this pub met her at the pub got drunk walking home got about I say about 300 meters from where I lived but you know the states and some people jumped out from behind the wall I was holding guns out to me and I walked towards him and said what obviously the drink made me brave the drink made me really brave and I shouldn't have done it but every time I've been shot I've been going towards the people so that's why it saved me so I say what what what the fuck and that's when I felt the bullets started hitting me my arms was peppered up my chest, my back I threw the girl on the floor shot in her chest and I lay on top of her and took some more bullets and that was that situation I managed to get up off the floor and get to my mate's dad's house he was just round the corner and he refused to let me in because he didn't want no repercussions at his house somebody come in a car and took me to the hospital gets to the hospital and they're rushing me down to theatre I'm responsible there by this time some cheeky cunt of a copper Darrell do me a favour what that gives you lottery numbers like to say I was lucky to be alive and that was that time that was not long after it had been released from a four and a half year sentence when I got shot that time after that went back to jail for a stabbing was charged with stabbing some kid and making him singing dance to Spice Girl music and went to trial I got not guilty under the air say evidence act law because he aired that I was called Darrell Lake or he didn't know I was called Darrell Lake or someone told him after the fact so my barrister who I'm still in touch with still great friends with now and brought loads of case files about air say evidence and the judge threw it out ordered the jury to find me not guilty get out back on the graft back doing what I did one night stood outside a club talking to some girls my mate was I thought my mate was shouting come here but he wasn't he was shouting go away but I started walking towards my mate and obviously he was near the people who shot me on the last occasions so they shot me once in my left leg and that done me bad that because all of the times I was only in a week two weeks when I got shot in my leg I got that thing called MRSA so I was in hospital for nine months with a leg shot and that was the end of the shootings it wasn't the end of the shootings people tried to shoot me after that have you ever think to yourself I'm just going to get to to fuck man do you know what I mean it's a hell of a lot of times to be somebody having a paw pat you was there ever a time to say right I'm out I'm off I don't know what it is because I always see my mate lay on the floor so it was always in my head I had to avenge his death when I tried plenty of times obviously throughout the years I was charged with numerous attempted murders as questioning loads of actual murders charged with a murder cleared of a murder and so on but it doesn't it doesn't make it right nowadays people ain't got the same loyalty that they had back then people saw you out and yeah I was charged with murder conspiracy to murder and things like that I never thought that I'd survive but that because I'm in loyalty I thought that was the way to go but nowadays I see I'm not that person it never ends does it if you go down that but just acting for revenge because you get shot in the head as well yeah when I got shot 27 times a bullet glanced off me head and that's the only one I was worried about to be honest it wasn't hurting as much of my arms and my shoulder and my back but when I was laying on the floor before I got up blood was rolling down my eye so that's what I was thinking that that would kill me that one did your girlfriend get shot as well I was with she got shot in her chest in her hand she want my girlfriend we was kind of like on a date kind of like going home to just shagging I didn't even get to get there so yeah she was shot in her she was shot in her chest in her hand but I let her throw her on the floor and lay on top of her did she survive though yeah I didn't know that I'd done that until afterwards because the mentality of people that back then would pull them on to you but I did it and she survived, I survived and I lived to tell the tale have you ever spoke to her sons about two years ago bumped into some girl and she was talking to me and I didn't even have a clue it was there to be honest then she just went I was talking to her about five minutes and I went no adult and she told me I was so ashamed how could you not remember so ashamed honestly but it is what it is because don't forget it's like 20 odd years and people change because back then she was also one of the best looking women ever and she changed trust me so that was me you fucking shot at the mansion your reputation as well with the ladies is pretty high down here assuming about ladies man was that because of the reputation you had down here you spent a lot of time in prison so you came out you made the most of it no I was a ladies man it was like a drug bad addiction I've got an ex mate who's doing life sentence now and he used to always say you're going to get killed going to a woman's house do you know because I was always women but women the greatest thing on the earth the planet and things like that but where they go about women women a lot of women are shallow a lot of women didn't want me for me didn't want me for my looks it was either my eyes because I've got particular colour eyes for a mixed race lad all because of the reputation do you know nobody wants a fat guy do you know being a fat guy saved me innit it's like when I got stabbed I got stabbed 7 times the doctor says you survived because you're fat because you got more blood more blood than anybody else so you've been saved that saved your life the wars you've been through so PTSD yeah PTSD I suffer I'm not going to say I suffer bad sometimes I suffer sometimes I'm alright for months it hits me what triggers that do you think memories back the brain can be a powerful thing I speak about it quite a lot when you think about trauma in the past the brain will release the chemical when you felt 10 or 20 years ago it will release that emotion the brain doesn't know what's real if it's fake it will bring back a lot of emotion it will release a lot of chemicals to the emotion you felt that day it doesn't really know but you can rewire the brain you can change for everything you've went through you ended up being involved in a BAFTA one in documentary I've done a lot of TV work over the years what's a documentary it's called gun number six it's like a docudrama and it won a BAFTA it won a BAFTA last year 2019 it's about a gun the journey of a gun in Birmingham the most deadliest gun in Birmingham where 11 people are doing life sentences for this gun it's killed three people and injured numerous others and it's never been recovered so there's people doing life sentences and the gun is still out there so I got involved in that because they used rehabilitated ex-offenders with gun convictions so me and a few other people was involved with it and it happened to win a BAFTA and it been nominated for loads of other stuff but it's not won no other stuff but I don't do what I do to win awards because I've won a few awards over the years but I do it to spare parents from burying the kids kids thinking their mates are going to die for them and go to jail for the rest of life so I kind of like go round and do work all over the country schools and so on to make people aware the reality of crime jail and so on because everything has that, I always say it with the ripple effect it's not just you, it feels the pain it's also the victims, everybody gets through the pain and they throw them in the post-traumatic stress through their life, do you know what I mean but everything you went through, you ended up in Buckingham Palace with Prince Charles sharing that table with him after coming out of jail and doing all that stuff getting stabbed I started working in the schools I wouldn't allow the Manchester when I come out of jail in 2011 Greater Manchester Police and Merse Side Police said I was the most dangerous person in the north west of England so I was putting one of them bail hostels for nine months where movements were restricted I wasn't allowed to associate with certain people and yeah but a lot of people think I shouldn't have been put there and it was wrong for me not being allowed in Manchester for two and a half years but I believe it was right because if I didn't get arrested and I didn't do what I'd done they wouldn't have been able to do that but the arrest come after I went to Liverpool in 2008 16th of August 2008 I was caught with 500 bullets so I would have got back to Manchester that was mostly the best thing to ever happen to me I would have got back to Manchester within 500 bullets people would have got killed there's no two ways about it not saying I would have killed them whoever I would have distributed them to might have killed somebody but 500 bullets on the streets of Merse Side Manchester there's bound to be death definitely getting through all that the stabins, the shootings, prison the trauma that you've been through from a young boy what was the catalyst for you to become a better person to try and help others I don't really go into it but something happened to a family member and I just believe and I promise the family member I promise my mum that I wouldn't go back to jail I can't really go into it because I don't want to bring it back up and for them to feel like they're being victimised of somebody but yeah I had to do it for my family because when you think about it and be killed for my friends and when I was in jail they didn't look after me do you know and I'd done a lot for people and I had to think to myself my family mean more to me than anything but when you're in that rigmarole of being on the road living the eye life and things like that you think everything's cushy and when you go to jail you'll know yourself you see your friends are on one hand do you know what's your circle link now my circle I don't really associate with many people because I just work around a country working with kids in schools 90% of it over 90% of it is mostly free I have some good friends good friends who support me the twins as you can see shout out to them we'll leave the link in the description for the clothing range they look after me they support anything that I do I've got a mate who's got a security company he supports what I do proper looks after me and so on but I don't really associate with many people now do you know because I don't really trust no more after going through all that a lot of people think they'll back up their mates and kill for their mates but whenever I got shot or stabbed nobody didn't back me up it was me that had to retaliate and do whatever do you know what I mean everyone claims to be this and claims to be that but they're not have you ever wrote a book no I'm about to I am I have started writing a book a few times and I've started writing one recently in the last couple of months get it done man that's a massive opportunity write your book tell your story turn maybe into a documentary or a film the amount of books I've got in my house Darryl sing books caught by fucking guests is next level master I could have a fucking library that's you though innit that's you but yeah I just want to get the I just want to get the record straight and put it out there this life ain't worth it because who else would get shot 27 times and survive and shot once and two occasions there's nobody I'm not being big edded or being bullish or anything but I must have been sent here to do what I do because I go in schools and I do make a difference sometimes it's cheesy but some people are chosen in life to go to the darkest places because if nobody went to the dark places then nobody would create change to try and better people's lives to try and understand that less than a life of crime is a fucking mugs game everybody who I've nu grew up are dead or in the jail and the majority are dead which is scary and it's a constant battle it's just ego it's just something that we create in one mind who we should be and if somebody kind of goes against that then the back can go up but for you to be through what you've went through is I've had many nut cases on this podcast if I'm honest as of at your stories is fucking up where is the craziest if I'm honest and I've heard some ground stories but to be through what you've went through and to be where you are now man again I said at the start I take my heart off to you brother I just try because I don't want to see mothers burying the kids I don't want to see kids burying the brothers burying the sisters I just want kids to live in peace because we go and celebrate when somebody dies saying rest in peace we should be celebrating the life when they're living do you know most kids go and visit the mates a couple of times after they die in a cemetery they never go on they don't know the things that have happened to me I could go on forever it's like I buried my mum I buried my mum five years ago not buried she got cremated by our funeral somebody was shot at my mum's funeral do you know but it's all it all starts from the beginning if you do bad bad things will happen karma definitely if you do good good things can happen since I've been doing good stuff you know what I've had an amazing life not necessarily amazing riches but I don't have to look over my shoulder no more do you know I can walk anywhere I want with no worry whatsoever the only thing that scares me in this world it's not a man with a gun I've never been scared of a man with a gun a man with a knife and that's not me being begetted it's just the way I was brought up that was a life I was either going to live or die the only thing that scares me is cats do you know cats and muffs for a man who likes to pussy I'm sure I'm surprised at that biggin yeah that's a different kind of pussy but yeah cats and muffs do you know so yeah like I said I've won a few awards I've been to Buckingham Palace but I don't do it all I do it to make a difference and show people that if you do bad bad will come back when you're lying on that hospital bed or you're not stretching you're getting put in a fridge you're there on your own you live on your own you're born on your own you're dying your own do you know my mum used to say Darryl you're never going to get killed and I used to think oh you're trying rubbish and she went I'm the person that brought you into this world so I'm the only one with the right to take you out of this world and it always stayed in my mind do you know you're feinting for change which is a great thing so when you were at your mum's funeral who got shot my friend my friend got shot was it planned or was it the after party it was just at the after party it definitely planned it was definitely planned I'm not going to go too much into it but you know it was planned and it happened I promise my mum and everybody I won't go back to jail and that thing called karma do you know karma caught upwards a couple of the people do you know was I cold my night do you know I mean not women colds went out the winter years ago colds went out the winter years ago backing 92 93 someone tried to shoot me outside my mum's house and ended up shooting through the window where my mum was sat with a friend do you know that's when colds went out the window not enough kids and girl friends were in the house yeah didn't add but the same person he was he was apprehended the next day not apprehended he was people seeked out retaliation and he was shot a few times in his chest he survived he survived because looking back then I don't want to have been the person to face his kids later on in life do you know anybody used died whether it's from my estate or the opposite estate I've known them pretty well at some point in our lives and I just don't want them when I go and pass a message to the school kids I tell them straight these guys never died in vain I'm keeping their name alive in order to help you but I've got blood on my hands still I feel guilty when the kids get stabbed in Manchester especially in my area I feel like I should have done more because if I didn't do what I done back in the day the dynamics of life you can't think that way because now you're trying to make the change and you've got to understand people bring it down from their grandparents father brothers it's not just you a whole bunch of boys there just trying to make a name for themselves and you tend to see a lot of people who aren't of you who are involved in a life of crime you tend to see the word bullied or abused when they were younger there's some sort of trauma that triggers that anger and frustration where they want to mask the pain they'll mask it where it's holding a gun or having a knife or going to fight because that gives them a sense of power that they've got some power but really it's a sense of insecurity they're out this man it's a privado so I just go round and doing trying to do my bit like I said I don't get no government funded or anything my mate who owns base security there he's so he's just basically plugging his pals so I'll just plug it so it's base security it's services at Manchester it's 0161 850 9616 we'll plug it what does this do? they support my day out fun but twins they're my principal sponsors we've put all the links to their stuff in that as well there Barrow because what you're doing mate is phenomenal should be proud of yourself so you should so see all your beef in the past is that squash with other people or do you still worry about that I don't worry about nothing I don't worry about nothing and to be honest I've seen I've seen people who shot me before and nothing's happened and people have seen me who have been accused of shooting and nothing's happened is what it is it's all played out in it people realise when they get old it's not worth it don't get me wrong somebody could try something at any point but I doubt they will because nobody wants to go jail for the rest of their life back in the day back in the night is you could go and kill somebody you won't even get a knock on the door you know what I mean but nowadays with the cameras and people out there you're going to go to jail nobody wants to go to jail because you know yourself everyone's a big man on the road but when they go to jail it's a different thing the strongest men become the weakest exactly and if you can't read and write you're in trouble we tend to see a lot of people and then you can't read and write I mean read and write about what I was going to say I spoke to a big guy in the jail and he couldn't read and write a lot of the people who were in the jail for the past couldn't read and write I know you were saying fight but you know saying that you're saying about people can't generally read and write when I was in Winston Green I used to teach people how to read and write do you know I don't know and you tend to see the figures are high in prison or the amount of people can't read and write in Winston Green going back to that time I ended up stabbing somebody in there some guy called me a screw boy I had been moved around all the jails and I thought to myself I'm going to calm down here so I got an education order his job I was collecting registered some guy called me a screw boy and so you know yourself fight calling somebody on nonce do you know I stuck a pen in his neck and in his cheek I had a time I was seeing it I was having an affair with a teacher there and she was teaching the class and prison so she stuck up for me when it come to me a duplication the guy called me a screw boy and he didn't expect me to retaliate like that but he phoned the police he got the jail to phone the police on me yet he's calling me a screw boy but I'm not going to glorify it just letting kids know that things like that do happen people do get stabbed in jail people get killed in jail people commit suicide in jail yeah there's a lot of deaths in jail that go I don't get spoke about enough in my eyes which are longest sentence prison sentence I got eight years sentence my DNA was found in a gun in Liverpool I live in Manchester bit bizarre but the gun apparently had some history to me but my DNA wasn't a full copy DNA it was called a LCN DNA low copy number whereas the people who did it all my bombing years ago had the same DNA and they was found not guilty but obviously because of your reputation your intelligence and so on but you know what I'm not going to act upon about guns and DNA and being innocent and all that because I've been guilty of many of things that got away with it do you know it's just an occupational hazard people might say exactly because if you get wrongly convicted of something you get wrongly convicted of something people will complain but I'm not one of them people to complain for the simple reason every night that I got away with a crime I didn't go and knock on the police station and say arrest me because I've done this did you eat feeten did you get a buzz from it when I used to carry my gun I used to lay it off I used to get an adrenaline rush the buzz I've been known I've been accused I've been alleged to have let off a gun quite a few times one time I was at a club in town I can't admit to anything I was at a club in town that singer Gabrielle was there it was called the X Club dreams came that's what she was singing it went off in there it became a bit of a nightmare it was a shoot out in a club and it was it's alleged that it was the first ever shoot out in a club between two gang members or two people from opposing sides it's alleged that I was an instigator but it's just an allegation and it's not it seems like something for the wild west that's that shit you hear about in the Bronx it's mad because when it was happening I remember it's clear it was people that sat there this is when you could smoke in clubs these people that sat there and these two people shooting at each other not moving, just stood there sat down on the stairs smoking so through all that Darrow everything you've went through the stories what's your plans for the future? where do you see yourself, what do you think you do? my plans for the future is just still doing what I do in schools, colleges, universities youth clubs trying to reduce these deaths on the streets because you know yourself youth violence has gone through the roof and if I don't do it nobody's going to do it so I think everybody has to come together people like me with a bad with a bad past lived experience need to go into schools and educate if they want to make money off it they can make money off it but I don't do it to make money I don't make a difference so I'm going back down the school route I do a lot of school work this week I've been in Carlisle I've been in Sanbach also there's talks about there's talks about doing my life story there's talks there's a publication company that's what I speak to me I'm also one of the biggest publication companies in the world but if I do publish a book I'm also going to publish it myself good on you if you need any publishers I can put you on to a few when you can speak to them you've got to be careful because there's people trying to fuck you left right in the centre a lot of times people want to do life story but not giving editorial rights to me do you know it's your story I've got something coming out on the 27th of January it's called crime and we tough enough part of as I do some work on TV with my barrister my ex barrister who used to defend me we're still very close so the future I'm not going to say the future is bright but I want to make a brighter future why were you around so many prisons why were you in 19 different prisons because of the trouble you were causing I was anti authoritarian fighting the screws not necessarily fighting the screws the screws was getting buckets of shit thrown over them and things like that nothing to do with me but it was alleged that I used to kind of like control certain aspects of the jail like the drug supply in certain jails and with drug supply come addicts willing to throw shit over people and piss yeah so fighting as well they just couldn't contain me they couldn't control me whatsoever but I thought I could beat the system the system system can't be beaten it's like I go into schools and I tell youngsters the system can't be beaten they are now unnamed because rules and regulations are there to keep us safe especially in school and some of them 19 times 19 jails I went to some of them 4 or 5 times going back and forth because they wouldn't have me staying in one 2 days 5 days but you know yourself that when you go to jail and you got a reputation you got people from other cities with reputations trying it but you've also got screws trying it try to test you most screws wouldn't but you always get the one when he's backed up with 20, 30 people Tom Hardley as well you met Buckingham Palace he was there as well how did they all treat you everyone was alright with me everybody was shocked at I survived what I've survived everyone was nice everybody was respectful things like that it's mad because we started obviously Clarence House is a Buckingham Palace it's the Queen Mothers the Queen Mothers residents won it and that was my mum's favourite Royal so I took some of my mum's locks of air and just dropped them all around around there so yeah it was good so your story Darrow is like I said before it's fucking nuts man it's nuts but you should be proud of yourself do you feel how do you look at yourself now do you feel proud of what you're doing I still put myself down sometimes I feel proud but sometimes I feel I've not done enough because I was willing to take people's lives I was accused of taking people's lives and do you go and see anybody now pardon do you go and see anybody now it's shameful I feel shameful of what I was willing to do in the past knowing what I do now do you know what the only way I get over it is because everything happens for a reason and the dynamics of my life has brought me to the place I am today if I didn't get shot on that day so that's how I come to terms with it but I'm not proud sometimes I get a little bit lifted about something but I think I need to do 100,000 people this year within 12 months 100,000 kids educate 100,000 kids and I think I might be proud after that you should be proud of anybody that makes the sacrifices and the changes especially the life you were in it's very hard to difficult to come out and anybody will tell you that it's been involved and a lot of people talk shit let's be honest a lot of people talk they talk but don't really walk it a lot of people talk shit I've had a lot of people on the show people have made changes but I can see yourself you want to make changes in your try not balance it out but if you've done wrong in your past you want to do good because like I say you do good then you will attract good it's like I've mostly done more bad than anybody in Manchester I don't offer anything but people hold it against me but I've mostly done more good than anybody in Manchester as well I've worked with over under 80,000 people in 8 years 9 years do you know so I try to look at the positives at what I've done what's your daily routine like now it's hectic no two days are the same I'm in a school kids home foster carers with social workers no one day is the same when I leave here now I'm going to go to a semi independent house and do some shifts there so I'll leave you and I'll go there and I'll be there till Sunday then I'll go to the boxing I've got some boxing I'm going to on Sunday afternoon do you know it's not so it's it's not a bed of roses if you've got to keep busy yeah I try to keep busy and then it keeps a mental health away so I try to keep busy but you're not always busy don't forget 90% of my work is done for free if it wasn't for the twins and base security I won't be able to get to these places you need to start valuing your work now putting a price on your knowledge putting your price on I know it's difficult if you want to do good then you feel as if maybe you're trying to help everyone but you still need to look after you as well and keep you right yeah I'm going to try and practice so what's your social media as well so in case anybody's got any books or documentaries that you want to get involved in what's your social media Instagram's is dweits nvr2l8 and it's the acronyms for d it's never too late to show people it's never too late to fix your life up and things like that my twitter is dpl2310 my linkedins darrel laycock yeah that's it you're going to start doing your own stuff on youtube? yeah I've got it what's your youtube channel I think it's called your life matters send me the links anyway and I'll put everything in the description for people to get involved you want to do interviews or just tell your own story not necessarily I want to do a bit of everything but more so it's about raising awareness so our youngsters can see that they can't believe they can't achieve they can't do this instead of having to follow people going and grafting and all obviously if there's a bad road there's a good road a lot of our kids they need empowering they need governance they need male role models darrel for coming on today big man and telling your story I'm grateful and I'm genuinely rooting for you to keep striving and making change would you like to finish up on anything? I just thank for having me and if you've got a longer spot next time I assure that we could do something again listen anything you want back on just let me know and it's done then I could do I could put a timeline of where everything went of where everything went because we were in Newcastle earlier we had a couple of guests then we drove straight here and you've got work so you need to shoot it's an absolute pleasure and I do I'm wishing you all the best God bless


It's been fantastic. Everybody's been incredibly welcoming, there's been a really good program prepared for us and it's just been exactly what we were all hoping for, I think. You had the chance to present our part of our teaching and part of our work to some very interesting and clever students. I have the opportunity to follow classes and to practice. It definitely helped to improve our teaching skills. I learned how to sort of engage and teach in a meaningful way at a Catalan language institution. We enjoyed the whole town, but also the university itself. I enjoyed the most, like, interaction with people at the department. I spent a lot of time with faculty members. I also realized how much Pompeu Fabria invests in innovation and teaching.


Hey everybody, if you are watching right now, we had a slight technical hiccup. So Victor and Nick will be with us very shortly. We apologize for that. So we'll just wait for them. As we're waiting, I'll just really quickly highlight crossplane. So crossplane is a Kubernetes add-on that basically enables your team to assemble infrastructure resources that may exist outside of your Kubernetes environment. Think like a cloud resource like Amazon, RDS, the AWS RDS, or ElastiCache, via kind of a declarative model in the Kubernetes realm. So you would, instead of going to the API or the console for AWS, you instead would, oh, he's made it, Victor's here. Okay, cool. I don't know. Hopefully no more issues, one more person. We'll wait for them. But I was just, Victor, I was just talking really quickly about what crossplane is. There he is, Nick is here. Okay, all right. So I think we're back on track. Thank you to everyone in the background doing all of the heavy lifting and making sure producing is going as it should. We apologize for the hiccups, let's continue. I'm gonna let Victor and Nick introduce themselves. Go ahead and take it away, Victor. So yeah, I'm Victor. I am principle of something, something in CodeFresh. I mean, I'm not sure what to do anymore, but I work for CodeFresh. We are a company behind a few products. And lately my major interest is around GitOps, huge fan of Fargo CD and similar products. And crossplane just happens to fit perfectly into that amusement, let's say. Awesome, thank you, Nick. Go ahead, why don't you tell us more about your background? Hey, folks, my name's Nick. I'm also a principle of something, something at UpBound where I've been leading crossplane engineering for the last two years from UpBound standpoint. UpBound, it was the company that originally open sourced and founded crossplane, as well as the Rook.io project for LNF. I am a steering committee member and pretty active contributor to crossplane. Definitely have a lot of architectural insight into how it's all put together. And my background's site reliability engineering. Same as you, I think Mario. So I was an SRA for about 10 years at places like Google and Spotify before I decided to go try and build my own infrastructure project. Very, very cool, yeah. Well, you both are higher levels than I am, so you have much more industry experience and much more of an idea of how to build something of this stature. So with that, it sounds like Victor has kind of a presentation or kind of a flow that he wants to, a scenario he wants to share with us. I'm gonna let him take the floor and go ahead and share his screen and get that going. And then Nick, being from UpBound, being the principle that he is, is going to provide insights and a lot of your questions will probably go Nickbound, I think, and if I can't answer them myself, which I won't be able to, I guarantee it.  And again, please use the chat facility in your platform that you are using to watch this and leave any questions that you have. We will get to them as we can throughout the hour here. And thank you for tuning in. And Victor, go ahead and take it away. Sure. Okay, so I'll try to keep it short so that we can discuss and talk about it and potentially answer questions instead of me just you staring at my screen. I hope that you see a black screen over there. That's my terminal. So what I didn't do, I didn't do much in advance. I created a very, I created a simple quick Kubernetes cluster. I installed crossplane and I installed GKE providers simply because I will be using GKE today, but basically whatever I'm doing applies to Azure, AWS, what so not. So let me just actually start creating a cluster using crossplane and then since that will take like five, six minutes, something like that, then I can talk about why I'm doing all this and why bothering the first place. So I'm using Kubernetes, right? So kubectl apply, filename and some Kubernetes definition in this case, GKE YAML. And that's about it. Now, there we are. Now, let me show you the, actually before I show you the definition, very quick. So I'm not the developer of crossplane, I'm just a user and I have certain motivations that led me to it that might not, you know, might not be the same for everybody. So I will speak more from personal experience, the reasons for it in the first place. And on one hand, you know, if you look at infrastructure as being something that we define as code, and then we apply those changes somehow and then infrastructure and services and what's or not happen automatically. Then from that perspective, Terraform, Pulumi, crossplane and many others are all the same. And we can just talk about how many libraries they provide and what's or not and the differences in the syntax, but I don't really care much about those things. What they do care about a lot is Kubernetes API, right? I do not really see Kubernetes as being a platform for running my containers. From my perspective, that is more like a first step towards something else. And that's something else is that Kubernetes is the closest thing we ever had in this industry towards having a single API through which we can do everything. And that everything can be scheduling containers or creating infrastructure or managing VMs or I don't know, like working with Mac machines or what's or not. Theoretically, it could be anything and it is designed to do that even though most of us are focused on containers at the moment. So going back to crossplane, I tend to lose the focus very often. The reason why I like it is because it allows me to use Kubernetes API to do absolutely everything. My application is running Kubernetes infrastructure being somewhere else and so on and so forth. And another thing that, and since it is used, it is based on CRDs basically Kubernetes CRDs essentially and Nick will correct me. That means that I can leverage the whole ecosystem that I have set up or we have set up around Kubernetes. If I like using customized, I can use customized to manage my crossplane definitions. If I like using Helm, that's also okay. If I want to use Flux to manage my GitOps processes or Argo CD, I can do that as well. So it's more about looking for something that is part of a broader ecosystem than evaluating the value of that something in isolation. And there is nothing that beats Kubernetes today. Anyways, those were kind of my main motivations. Now, let me go back to what they created, right? So I executed this definition here, which is the simplest possible I can have. And this says, hey, I want to create a Kubernetes resource that happens to be called GKE cluster and that has, you can probably guess from the names what it is, right? It's a GKE cluster and I want it to be in US East one. And then I want to create a node pool. And that node pool is based on GCP API. So obviously it will be node pool in G Cloud and a few other parameters. This is basically, if you look at this, if you're familiar with Terraform or Pulumi or what's the note, these are the same arguments, more or less same definitions that I would use there except that I can treat now this in the same way how I'm treating everything else. I'm almost everything else I'm doing today, how I'm treating my applications, creating stateful sets, deployments, K and ATIV, this or that, right? Everything putting in the same box using the same API or Kubernetes in this specific case. Now, Victor, really quick, this is great. I, we actually had a question. Someone wanted to see your GKE. Yes. And this is his GKE.yaml file, which he has counted out for you to view. He's showing you two different manifests in here. And these manifests are CRDs, right? You can see container gcp.crosspoint.io API version. Victor, can you get a little bit really quickly, just brush up on what CRDs are and what this actually means for people interfacing? Sure, so CRDs is short for custom resource definition. Basically you can, if you use plain words, you can say that Kubernetes comes with certain resources like this is a pod, this is replica set, this is deployment, this is this and that, right? So out of the box, Kubernetes comes with certain capability or certain resource types that you can use. But then Kubernetes was never supposed to be something that we use directly, at least from my perspective. Kubernetes from day one was designed to build platforms. And you're supposed to choose what you want to Kubernetes to do beyond what comes out of the box. And we do that by installing custom resource definitions. Basically, we are creating additional resource types that Kubernetes can consume. And that can be almost anything, right? Like right now you're seeing custom resources that were extended that extend Kubernetes capabilities by, and those resources are GKE cluster and node pool which were installed or defined when installed crossplane. Similarly, later on I will show you how I extended it further. For example, by adding even more CRDs to for Kubernetes to understand ArgoCity applications, which is, so with CRDs we are extending the capabilities of what Kubernetes can do. If that perfect, thank you so much for that. Yeah, no, that was wonderful. That was wonderful. Really quick, there's a question. Can you also interact with Azure ARM and the Kubernetes API using crossplane? My understanding is that you can do this. And I'm gonna lean on Nick. Yeah, I'm gonna lean on Nick a little bit later to talk more about providers and kind of like where they are in terms of versioning. What's ready, what's right? What can you use now versus what's kind of in progress and mileage may vary sort of providers, right? Because not everything is perfect, I don't think yet. So, all right, Victor, continue. Okay, so if I go back to, if I go to my browser, sorry, wrong browser, here, this one. I left the screen intact, right? This was before I did whatever I did in this demo and if I refresh the screen, here's my Kubernetes cluster, right? It was created because I sent a request to my Kubernetes. In this case, meaning you were even running locally. I'm cheap, right? Saying, hey, I want to create this and that and that happens to be a Kubernetes cluster that has one node pool. Here it is with only one node, right? The simplest possible Kubernetes cluster that I could come up with. And now, if you prefer, on the other hand, if you prefer to use CLI, that's at least my preference without doubt, you can just examine all that through CLI. You can do kubectl, get, GKE, clusters, right? This is that custom resource definition. This did not exist before I installed crossplane and I made the type over here, right? And you can see the, yes, that cluster that I created, it's ready, it's synced, right? It's showing me similar information what I see from Google Cloud console. And I can do the same thing with node pool. Now, before I go on, let me just confirm that my cluster is really running and I'm going to do that by fetching kube config and outputting the nodes and come on, there we are, right? Ooh, okay, that is really nice. And okay, I also want to verify this in my head. We got a question from John. Thank you, John. Just to confirm, you just provisioned GKE resource from Minicube CRD. Yes, I mean, from crossplane CRD running in Minicube, yes, yes, exactly. Yeah, perfect, okay, awesome. That is so cool. Like it's that double check in my mind of like, wait a second. Yeah, so you just did that? That's very cool. It's a chicken and egg, right? I need for crossplane and other tools that I will show later, I need the Kubernetes cluster. So I need that. And for me, for this demo, it was easier just Minicube start, right? I could have went to GKEs and created one. So I need that initial Kubernetes cluster. I need to install the initial tools I have. And basically what I'm trying to say here, the only tool I would ever install manually is Argo CD, but I'm getting there later, right? But yes, the short version from my Minicube, I send the request to my Minicube cluster and that request was create and manage my GKE cluster and then it happened. I could have created 57 GKE clusters and 17 Azure clusters, the result would be exactly the same. That is super cool. And for those of you locally that are looking at developing and using Kubernetes on your laptop, there's of course Docker for desktop, which includes a Kubernetes component. And there's also kind Kubernetes and Docker, which I've used and I love because of its flexibility. It's declared of nature. So there are ways of doing this beyond Minicube depending on your environment. So very cool. Victor, take us through this. It looks really awesome. Now, if I got to the node pool that was created for me, I created the regional cluster, but there is only one node. I'm supposed to have three nodes if I created my regional cluster correctly. And I obviously didn't. I made a mistake in my YAML definition and it didn't do what it should do. Now, if I go and edit here, and I'm now skipping cross-plane completely, right? I can see here that the mistake I made was that I created the node pool that uses one of the zones in that region, but I forgot to create to add additional two regions to, sorry, zones to that region. So that's a mistake I'm going to correct right now. And I'm doing it completely outside of the cross-plane. And I have a sinister reason for doing that. You will see soon, right? But anyway, I made a mistake. I created the cluster in the wrong way. I corrected that mistake by going to console. In this case, G-Cloud console and edit the missing zones over there, right? And if you look at my screen and be prepared with questions because this will take a couple of minutes, you will see soon that the number of nodes now will increase, right? The three nodes because I extended from one zone to three. So that will take a couple of minutes. If you have questions, this is a great time to ask them. If not, I will come up with something to talk about for three or four minutes. Yeah, there was a question for Nick, right? I just want to give Victor a pro tip for future. As someone who's been doing cross-plane demos for a long time, cloud SQL instances is where it's at. They come up super quick. Nice, nice. I'm a little worried because he's kind of out of band, right? And in my mind, he's out of band. He's in a console doing something, but he originally used cross-plane to create the resource. What is going to happen? I'm really interested. I'm also interested in if you were going to edit and right size or correct your configuration, what that looks like doing it from cross-plane. Right? We got three nodes. This was not done with cross-plane. Now, but that is the thing I know it's not nice at all. You will see in a second, right? Actually what will happen in a second will be or in a minute or two or five minutes will be nice. And so let me actually explain what will happen. And that's the reason why that's one of the things that cross-plane does and Kubernetes in general does and other tools don't. And that is that it is, there we are, right? Cross-plane through Kubernetes scheduler basically, just like when you define a deployment with two pods and if you change that, if you change it somehow manually, if you destroy a pod, Kubernetes will recreate it, right? Same thing is happening here. I defined that I want to have a cluster in one zone. And that's what was propagated to my cluster and that's what cross-plane did. It created a cluster with one zone. I went and changed the state of my cluster manually to three zones and additional nodes were created. But what is happening right now is that cross-plane is kicking in and saying, no, no, no, no, no, stop there, right? You said that you want one zone. And we made a contract, we made an agreement that I will do my best to make sure that it's always one zone. And basically it is rolling back my manual change, which sounds scary for many people, but for me that's exactly what I'm looking for, right? I want a tool that will make sure that whatever is my desired state and my desired state is what is starting it is always the same as the actual state, right? And if anybody wants to change the state of my infrastructure in this case or my applications, that change cannot be done manually by Hocus Pocus magic. It needs to be reflected in it, right? So if I would like to do what I just did in a proper way, right? Let's say the only way that is allowed is that I should actually do something like this. I should change the definition and I should have the zones in my manifest or to put it in different way. If I show you what this is what I had before and this is what I should have. And basically I'm changing my manifest to have three zones instead of one zone, right? The right way to do it. Now, the right way to do it, actually I'm going to copy it is not to interact at least from my perspective in my head. The right way to do it is not for me to interact directly with Kubernetes either. The right way to do it is to do something like this. Actually, let me go to the UI, right? What I have here, this is Argo CD and as simple as possible, right? And I told Argo CD that it should monitor this repository this repository over here and that it should monitor the directory production in that repository. So whatever is in that repository is what should be created in this cluster, right? So if I want to change the state of something of my applications or infrastructure, or what's it not the way how I would normally do it is I lost my thought, what did I want to do? Yes, I will take this manifest that I showed you here. I will put it into the directory production that my Argo CD instance is monitoring and I will add those changes. I will commit those changes with a creative message that says something and I will push those changes to get. I'm not interacting directly with my cluster. Everything stored as code, all the code is always in Git and what's not, right? And if I watch the notes, you will see that there is one node only there. The last remnant of my manual changes is being destroyed soon it will go back to the state. But what will happen here is since I committed some changes to the repository that Argo CD is listening to Argo CD from now on is managing my among other things. It is managing those definitions in this case of JK cluster and the node pool, right? So from now on Argo CD is making sure that whatever is defined in that cluster in that mini-cube in this case, the simplest possible one is exactly the same as what is in my Git repository. And then if some of those things managed by Argo CD happened to be resources controlled by cross-plane then cross-plane will take it over and do whatever needs to be done for that infrastructure in this case or services to be up and running, right? While for the rest of the things, I might be having a cube weird something or simply deployments or stateful sets. I don't care anymore because from now on basically my interaction goes only and exclusively with Git. Neither with Kubernetes nor with consoles or what's on it. So now this will take a few seconds. This is wonderful. Yeah, well, that's churning. I want to really quick take a step back, okay? So Argo, what is Argo doing? And can you explain a little bit more about the nature of how Argo works? Victor, just to give people who have never really heard of it or worked with it before an idea of what it's doing for us in this process. Absolutely. So let me actually, let me draw it for you, right? While you're watching my pod going, right? So what is happening is that we have a Git repository, right? That has, you can see this on my screen. Yes, it has some manifests.  And I as a person, I'm interacting only with Git, right? Whatever I want to do is define this code and my code is in Git. That's the only place we're not using SVN anymore, right? Now I have a Kubernetes cluster or it could have 1000 Kubernetes clusters. Doesn't matter, right? Now I don't need, I don't have access to that cluster. I don't need to have access to that cluster because I have installed Argo CD in that cluster which is monitoring this Git repository, right? And from that perspective, this Git repo is the desired state. Desired state, that's where my desires are defined. And Argo CD is making sure that whatever is in desired state there is exactly the same as what is the actual state which is in this case, my Kubernetes cluster. So if I define a deployment, deployment will be running here. If I define, for example, like in this case, GK cluster, Argo CD will make sure that whenever I push a definition of a GK cluster or anything else, that something is created in this cluster or maybe in some other cluster, whatever that, no matter how many clusters I have. And then since I have crossplane running here, crossplane, when I create that CRD, that the definition or resource which in this case is GKE will communicate with Google Cloud API and make sure that by cluster, my desires are propagated further. This is wonderful. I love live diagramming and apparently the demo gods are with you Victor because like this is perfect. There's no screw ups, everything's working as expected for the most part. I'm jinxing ourselves though. Okay, so to reiterate in maybe Layton's terms, so Argo CD is and what you saw Victor do in the UI there in the Argo UI is sink down changes in the Git repo into Argo. Argo then took it upon itself and agent running in Kubernetes in the cluster to ensure that state in the cluster was what was declared in the repo, right? And this is GitOps, this is when you hear the term GitOps, this is what we're talking about, right? And then in this case, one of the items was a GKE cluster definition which you saw earlier, Victor create that he submitted that he put in this repo. Argo is now making sure that exists in Kubernetes and then crossplane and it's associated CRDs and controllers is then taking it upon itself to talk to Google and create those resources for you via the API, right? Does that connect out? Perfect, yeah. That's correct. Now, one more thing that I would just like to say, right? There is alternative that we've been using for many years. I could have in this Git repo, I could have triggered a web hook that would go to some sort of CI CD pipeline that would create those things. I could have done that. The major difference between using some form of CI CD pipelines and Argo CD is that Argo CD is continuously monitoring my Git repo. So it's not one shot action that might actually, and the state, the live state, the real state might change. So it's continuously monitoring and seeking those two things. That's the major difference apart from me not needing access to my cluster. For sure, okay, got it. Okay, so yeah, this is what we talk about when we talk about GitOps. This is kind of the modern CD pattern that we're starting to see, right? And this is, as in the comments, many of you have said, this is really true infrastructure as code. And this is, I would say, this is so much more developer friendly as well. We don't have to worry about access. We have a very well-defined path for changes to get deployed. And there's a lot more that you can do, I'm sure. We're not gonna get into it in this session, but when you think dev staging, production, disparate environments, right? There's a lot more you can do in terms of PRs and testing in certain environments and things like that. So really quick, I don't wanna go too far without answering just one or two questions. So we have one question here. I think it's from John. Once a cluster is initially provisioned, can you force it to keep its state by deploying these CRDs to that cluster? Kind of like bootstrapping. Do you want to ask me, or shall I? Sorry, what was that? Can you repeat the question again? Sure, yeah. Once a cluster is initially provisioned, can you force it to keep its state by deploying these CRDs to that cluster? Kind of like bootstrapping. So I think what they're saying is after this new GKE cluster resource that you're creating is made, can I then use Kubernetes resources in that cluster to maintain its automated state? Yeah, to manage it. Yeah, you effectively, I think if what you're asking is, could you use cross-plane to make a cluster and then use cross-plane on that cluster? The answer is yes. We actually, we have the various cross-plane resources like the GKE one that you're seeing Victor demonstrate are installed by what we call providers. We have tons of providers for all kinds of different things. We wanna be providers for every API you can imagine. We have a Domino's Pizza provider, for example. One of the providers we have is Help. So you can use cross-plane to spin up a GKE cluster, use cross-plane to help install cross-plane on that cluster and then go drop stuff on that cluster and inception your cross-plane. Gotcha, gotcha. Okay, so there's another really good question as well here. It goes around, let me see. Oh, hold on, Hannah. What happens if you delete your management Kubernetes cluster? So this Minicube cluster that you created, what happens if you delete that? Does it change anything with any of the resources that were created? I'm guessing the answer is no. The answer is no. I mean, as long as you are capable of recreating that state in some other cluster, then you can let cross-plane continue working with the existing resources. Got it, okay. And there was another question too, what will happen if you stop your Minicube? So you will not be negatively impacted. The resources you created will still exist. You can still go and interact with them. Is there any provision where? If I destroy my Minicube in this case, that will not result in destruction of the resources that were created. If that's the question. Yep, yep. My GKE cluster will keep existing, yes. Gotcha, gotcha. Okay, cool. So somewhere else, and this is the last question for now, I wanna make sure we can continue here. What happens if Victor is part of a team? Does that person need access to his Minicube? So I can actually answer that one, Lars. Thanks for the question. I think the big thing here is Minicube is running locally on his own laptop. He is not, it's not another resource that the company has. It's a local Dev environment. And in that Dev environment, it's a Kubernetes cluster, right? It's a creation of a Kubernetes cluster, which he is using to then provision outside resources. And I think, and we can talk about it now or later, Victor's providing the authentication needed for the Google, for GCP, right? To his, as I said, I'm not sure how that is and what we can, you can get into that really quick. So that he has, so he has some access to create resources in GCP, right? I'll let you take it from there, Nick. Yeah, exactly, exactly. I have, it's Minicube, right? You cannot access my Minicube cluster. And in this context, it, even if you could access my Minicube cluster, I would never let you do that because you shouldn't. But what you can do right now, if you're brave, here's the repository. If you want to change my Diki cluster yourself, let's say that you work in a team with me, go to this repo, fork it, make a pull request and change anything in the, in here's the, let me see where they define it. Yeah, change the, I don't know, wrong directory. Let me fix it right away. Here. Go here and change this definition and it will be directly applied to my JK cluster. I will merge your pull request, I promise. That is wonderful. So DevOps, pyridox, cross-plane demo is the repo everybody. Definitely check this out. I would start, it's a great demo. This is something you can play with locally just like Victor is doing right now. All right, Victor, let us know what's, what's the status of things? What, how are things going? The things are going, let's double check. I'm surprised actually that nothing failed so far. Let's see, maybe it's not going. Maybe I messed up, demos always fail. Let's see my cluster. Yes, failed to load. I will blame it on Google if it doesn't work. Cluster creation can take five minutes or more, nodes. Okay, I messed up. At the very last step, something. Well, we can continue waiting for it. I know there is another, go ahead. Actually it's fine, it's fine. I keep three nodes over here. Yes, yes, it's fine. Three nodes over here or three instance groups and then Google is messed up with nodes. Doesn't matter. Imagine it's fine. Excellent, I love it. Yeah, let's just imagine everything's okay. We'll just sweep that under the rug. No big deal. Okay, is there anything else you wanted to share? Well, we're looking at this, Victor, about this process, what you've seen and other things that you really feel are really powerful and enable you to, either with your current team or that you've seen with other teams using cross-plane. No, that's about it. The rest is more, I mean there are many great features of cross-plane, the ones that I like personally the most, simply that it's a Kubernetes definition and it is syncing basically the desired state and the current state continuously. So I can, whatever happens will be corrected basically by cross-plane. So those are the things I like the most. Now there are composites that are awesome if you want to create your own definitions. Nick can speak much more about it than I am and probably he's eager to speak about it. From my perspective, what I'm most interested in always is how can that tool work within the ecosystem I have and the ecosystem I have is somehow related always with Kubernetes. And that's why I brought ArcoCity in this story today more to demonstrate the permutations we can create when we use a tool that is part of Kubernetes, one way or another. For sure. So there's a ton of questions and discussion. I love this. Thank you everyone who is chatting. We're seeing all the comments across all of the platforms that you are using. I think our producers will probably try to link the repo. That's the github.com slash devos paradox slash cross-plane-demo repo. And one of the questions here is around giving developers the ability to deploy only infrastructure that they're allowed to like Azure Corp Sentinel. How would we manage that access? I think that access would be managed and maybe we should kind of unpack access here on what that looks like. Access would be based on the, so let's say your developer is putting a change into Git and they push that change up as a PR. That developer isn't doing anything else at this point. Like that person has committed code. That code represents a desired state and cross-plane would exist inside of the environment that is getting that configuration applied to it and cross-plane would create those resources. Now, the question that becomes what kind of access does cross-plane, what is it configured for in that cluster that this declarative state will be deployed to or that Argo is picking this up from? In this case, in this specific case, since I'm using Google, I created a service account, Google service account. Nothing to do with Kubernetes service account. And I created a secret that tells cross-plane to use that service account. And in this specific case, since I'm lazy, I gave myself admin permissions to do whatever I want, but those permissions could be limited to something else, right? But now that's one level of, let's say control that you can have another one, which if you do use GitOps in one way or another, as you mentioned, the permissions are who can create a pull request and who can manage a pull request. That's basically how you control things and who can review that pull request. And finally, we could introduce OPA into the mix, open policy agent and say, hey, okay, even if somehow after all those pull requests and merges and confirmations and all those things, the resource gets created, does it comply with certain rules? We could say, hey, you can create a GKE cluster, right? And I will merge your pull request, but OPA can be defined that, for example, it doesn't allow you to create GKE resource that has more than 10 nodes, just to say something, right? Otherwise, if it's more than 10 nodes, then OPA can reject that request to create that resource in the first place. At least that's how I would approach it. I think of access here is having multiple layers that you can sort of opt into, I think as Victor touched on, at the very lowest layer there is what does your account for Google or Azure or AWS have, what does your service account have permission to the cloud? Then you tell a crossplane somehow to use that service account, which can either be using what we call a provider config, like Victor said, you basically give a secret that has a credentials in it. We also support IAM based authentication, so you can use the permissions that the pod that runs crossplane has instead of giving it a secret. Then once you're in the Kubernetes level, you've now got RBAC going on. So you can actually grant RBAC access. You could say, Mario has access to make GKE clusters, but Victor does not or vice versa at the Kubernetes role-based access control level, basically just describing verbs that people can do to resources. Then as Victor touched on before, we have what we call composition, which allows you to basically build your own APIs. We haven't touched on this much, but you could effectively say, I'm defining something called my great Acme corp, Kubernetes cluster that just doesn't have machine sizes of field that's always fixed. So that's a form of access control. Then you could have Gatekeeper and just OPA, anything in the Kubernetes ecosystem. And then on top of that, you can go up to your Git repo and use Git as a mechanism, and listen, people have access right. So as Victor points out, just the fact that this is all built in the Kubernetes ecosystem, just gives you so many different integration points and levels to do these things that it's super flexible. It's layering. There's layers by which you can choose your tool, you can choose your process and you can implement it in many different ways. That's what I love about Kubernetes in the community here. There's really quick, there's a quick question on GKE autopilot. Daniel Magnum, which I will talk a little bit more about him later on, actually did a live stream adding autopilot a week or two back. And I think we can probably link that possibly if we can find that. Nick, we can get that shared out. And then there was another question on what your preferred solution is for secrets. I don't want to go too much down right now. It's a little bit kind of tangentially related. I think everyone has different needs when it comes to handling secrets. There's, you know, vault. There's Bitnami's sealed secrets. There's Mozilla's SOPs, which I have had the pleasure of using and is not very developer friendly, but is definitely a solution. There's a lot of different things there. I don't think secrets are kind of the key thing we want to talk about right now, but thank you for bringing that up. Someone did ask though, and I think they just were getting confused. Is there Terraform going on? Is there other provisioning code going on here that is being used with Argo? How is Argo deployed? Things like that. Is what, how did you deploy Argo? How did you set up Argo, Victor? And what was the process for that? So Argo, I had to set up Argo myself manually. In this case, I used Customize to do it, right? But from there on, I'm not managing Argo anymore in that way. It's a similar thing like the answer to how, can you use cross-plane to manage a cluster where cross-plane is running? Same thing with Argo. So basically, my goal is that the only direct interaction I have, at least right interaction with Kubernetes clusters is to Argo. And tell Argo, this is the repository from where you manage yourself and everything else. And then I added to that repository cross-plane and cross-plane was installed. And whatever else I had there. So basically, Argo CD would be the only manual. Yep, for sure. Well, I'm sure you can install that with that. There's probably an Argo Helm chart. There's probably an operator CD and all that, right? Like that's kind of like of course you would, yeah, good. Yeah, there is a Helm chart. There is a customized, you know, all the GIFs, whatever it was. I wanna chime in here for a second with just a little agenda I've been pushing relating to Argo CD. I'm gonna keep saying this until someone from the community does it. So you're absolutely right. You know, we have a cross-plane Helm provider, as I mentioned before, that you could use to ask cross-plane to declaratively go install Argo on another cluster. And I really wish we had an Argo CD provider for cross-plane where you could have cross-plane resources that would talk to the Argo CD API and go tell it to like set things up. I'm gonna keep saying that until someone comes and builds an Argo CD provider. So if anyone's listening, talk to me. Wait, wait, wait, it's open source. Now it can be somebody else, so it could be you. Exactly. Everybody watching, we are telling you, you can do this. We're giving you the power. It is in your hands. So there's a few more kind of discussion here around secrets a little bit. One question, are we able to fully replace GitLab pipeline by Argo CD or Argo CD is dedicated for only deployment updates objects? So GitLab is kind of, so GitLab is Git, right? And so again, we can do this with any Git repository. Victor, do you have thoughts on this?  Right, exactly. Any Git repository. I mean, I haven't tried it with everything. I haven't tried it with the Git Air. So it might not really work with every, but it should. Definitely with GitLab. Yep, for sure. And that's what I'm thinking as well. Another really good question from John, what's the recommendation around provisioning the initial cluster for management? So should we say that we have a management cluster that these configs get deployed to and that management cluster then works on creating other clusters? I also wanna tell John here a little bit. I think, I'm not sure I would think about it as much from a management side of like I need a management cluster. I know there's a lot going on with cluster API and a lot of other abilities. When you think about how do we just manage an environment of clusters as cattle, not pets, right? I think in the environments that I've seen, of course there is like a dev and a sandbox and there might be like all of these five or six different environments. What I'm thinking more so cross-line being is a controller that exists in all of these environments that let's say we need a resource for the sandbox environment. The way we would create that resource is by this declarative Kubernetes resource that we're defining, right? And the object probably wouldn't be another cluster as much as it would be a developer who needs a Redis instance that is an AWS Redis instance, right? Elastic Cache would be an example or needs a bucket created, right? Or some other resource, a database, right? I think that would be probably the most common use case and Nick, I'm interested here. What other use cases have you seen customers have and do they kind of take a sense of like we're gonna have a management plane and we're gonna do everything there and that will manage other resources or do they do it more co-located? We see a bit of both. There's definitely many of the people who come to cross-plane are already enthusiastic about Kubernetes and have Kubernetes deployed. So it's relatively rare to have people come to cross-plane more and more these days but it's relatively rare historically to have people come to cross-plane and just not be Kubernetes users. So for a lot of people, the path of these resistances I'll help install cross-plane onto my existing cluster or clusters. But as Victor pointed out, Kubernetes isn't just about containers. Kubernetes set out to build the best container orchestration platform and accidentally built the best control plane platform. So you could just go and spin up a cluster that does nothing but run cross-plane separately and we see people doing that as well. Plug for my company, Upbound Cloud, Upbound Cloud has a great system to go and run your own cross-plates. You can just go to our cloud.upbound.io and click a button to get a cross-plane and start playing with this. And in that case, there's no deployments there or anything like that but you can go and spin up other clusters. You can just spin up your databases, your caches, et cetera. And some people do that just because they wanna try cross-plane and they don't wanna go put it on their production cluster. So it's just a nice safe way to go and deploy it. Absolutely, that makes a lot of sense. There's actually another quick question too that, is this similar to Rancher Fleet or Cluster API? Nick, I think you said you guys are working with the Cluster API folks, right? Yeah, Dan who was in the chat at least, Dan Mangum from my team is working, he's deeply involved in Kubernetes release management and whatnot and he's been working with the Cluster API guys folks. An interesting thing about composition in cross-plane is you can effectively define your own CRDs which we call XRDs, composite resource definitions. And they have any shape that you want. So in the Cluster API, you've got a bunch of CRDs that say, hey, please give me a Kubernetes cluster. Cross-plane can just satisfy one of those by saying, sure, I can make a GK cluster or any KS cluster or whatever or several node pools and VPCs and all the things that actually make up a cluster. So Dan is exploring the integration points that we can have there so that maybe the Cluster API could be optionally powered by a cross-plane because they're writing code to go and spin up VMs and things like that and that's cross-plane to bread and butter so we want to help out there. Right, right, absolutely, very cool. That's really exciting to hear. One other thing, this is a really solid question, I think, something I didn't even think about. What options does cross-plane provide to reference and enforce dependencies between different resources, i.e. IAM policies? So this feels like something that someone from the cross-plane community has asked because that's a very on-point, deep question. In Kubernetes, there's a big document called Kubernetes API conventions that sort of talks about how you build custom resources and one of the things that they recommend is if you need to refer to something else, use a reference and that's what we do. We call the cross-resource references. So quintessential is an example of this that was one of the first things we solved was Azure databases. Azure does this really cool thing where when you deploy a SQL database, it doesn't allow any traffic by default. You need to go and create the firewall rule to just use your database at all. And the firewall rule has to declare what database do I apply it to? So we support doing this three different ways for any reference to another resource. In this case, where the firewall rule needs to reference the database it applies to, you can either just give it the name of the database in Azure. Database doesn't even need to be managed by cross-plane. You can just say, hey, I told you there's a database, firewall rule, please go apply to this. You can give it a reference to the database in Kubernetes. So you can say, hey, I'm managing my database in Kubernetes using cross-plane. It's called Fubar, please go apply to Fubar. Or you can actually give it label selectors the same way that you might select what node your pod runs on. So you can firewalls a bit of a weird use case for this, but you could be like, please go apply to firewall rule, please go apply to a database that is big and on the east coast rather than specifically that database. And the nice thing here is that unlike other infrastructure as code tools that sort of build a giant graph of these things and do it all step by step, because we're continuously reconciling, we could just keep trying. So even if you say, hey, I refer to a thing that doesn't actually exist, doesn't matter when it does exist cross-plane or make all the reference gets resolved. Gotcha, okay. And then, yeah, I think, thank you, Magno. Magno's highlighting the fact that your dog is making himself comfortable in the background there. Just a side note, this is my friends who also SRE's dog without dog sitting and he is famous, Elon Musk tweeted about him recently. Wow, we'll have to share the link to that tweet. To stay semi on topic, do the XRPs and kind of what you just discussed kind of also work in the same plane for we need to get outputs. So instance URLs or resources and buckets and things like that. So like for instance, access and secret keys if we were creating an IAM resource. Yeah, so we handle this in a couple of places. In most Kubernetes resources, you have spec and status. So spec is the desired state, status is the observed state of the thing. So we tend to look at a cloud resource like a GKE cluster and usually in like the Google API, they'll be like, hey, these are the outputs of this thing. So we take those and we put them in the status. So that's interesting, but it's kind of hard to refer to the status of something you can't tell a deployment to go and easily read the status of an object. So you can look at it with your human eyes and see what region is in or whatever. So the other thing that we do is we optionally, for any resource, we have a field called write connection secret to ref. And that allows you to just name a secret and we'll output all the interesting connections he tells to that secret, which are kind of outputs in some of the Terraform sets. So that'll say it has this URL or it's credentials like this. That way your deployment or whatever you're, whatever's consuming a database, let's say could just go and read that and use it. Gotcha, that's most excellent. Another really good question. Thank you, Ether. What will the migration path look like once these CRDs graduate from v1, alpha one to v1, beta one and eventually v1? Will downstream cloud resources be affected or unaffected? What is upgrading look like? Yeah, so there's, we follow pretty closely the Kubernetes versioning semantics. So crossplane, crossplane is architected real quick as crossplane core, which supports composition and what we call a package manager, which is a quicker declarative way to install providers. Providers, what give you functionality for each thing? So if you only use Google, you can install the Google provider. You don't need to have AWS and CRD sitting around all that kind of stuff. So crossplane core is all actually already v1 CRDs. So you don't really have to worry about us making breaking changes there for a long time or they make backwards compatible changes until v2. The providers, mostly the providers, mostly a mix of alpha one and beta one resources. Like Kubernetes, when something hits beta one, it's a pretty serious contract for us. So we effectively don't make breaking changes for beta one resources unless there's some edge cases but we almost never make breaking changes to those things. We never have some farther response of our way. So you'll be able to go from those beta one to v1 and honestly, they'll probably be the same schema you'll probably be able to just change the beta one to v1 and you'll see it'll work. Alpha one is where the risk is. Folks should be aware that if you're going in and using alpha one resources that we don't offer a contract we might just make a breaking change on those on one day. If we need to, we've got a fairly, we've got our patterns established. So usually something lands in fact alpha one and there's no big breaking changes these days. If you did, there is a path that's a little bit painful but crossplane can adopt existing cloud resources. So what you can do is you can delete an alpha one resource and when you delete it you can set its deletion policy to orphan which means we'll delete the custom resource that'll be going for Kubernetes but the thing in the cloud will still exist. Then you can create a v1 replacement and you can tell the v1 the name of the thing in the cloud and the v1 replacement will just go and pick it up and start taking it off. So it's a little bit manual but there is a path that is possible. Sure, that is really good to hear. I didn't even think there was a path to do that. I thought you'd just be in the dark woods by yourself alone at night. It'd be scary. You wouldn't know what to do. Someone had a question around cross-referencing and enforcing dependencies between different resources i.e. an S3 bucket to route 53 record with Kubernetes objects in YAML deletion compared to something like Terraform. I don't want to get too much into Terraform here. There's another question too. Any plans to support Terraforms? HCL, the hazard code language to ease migration. Nick, what are your thoughts? Like what are we seeing in terms of customers and people that are trying to leverage this that literally have tons of Terraform, right? That's every organization I've ever been in. There's almost one engineer full-time writing Terraform. Are organizations thinking like, can you help me make migration easier? Are they starting from scratch? And so it's easy. What's the thought process? So there's a couple of different integration points for Terraform and I totally feel those people. As I said, I was necessary for a long time. I've written Terraform resources and added Go code to Terraform and used Terraform a lot. I love it. It's a great project. Terraform has Kubernetes provider. So one integration point is you can actually use Terraform as an interface to cross-plane. You can use Terraform. If you prefer HCL, let's say, you can write HCL that goes and outputs these cross-plane YAMLs and sort of get a Terraform-like interface to this sort of consistent, self-healing sort of reconcile process that cross-plane has. Another thing that we're doing is we actually have a couple of providers that are generated using Terraform. So you basically point a tool at a Terraform provider and we'll make a cross-plane provider from it. The first one that we've shipped recently that I think Dan and my other coworker Casey just did a live stream about is the VMware vSphere provider. That's actually the cross-plane provider is an abstraction on top of the Terraform provider. As for folks who want to write HCL in cross-plane, I will say watch this space. We have some really interesting ideas going on, but nothing that I can speak publicly about at the moment. Very nice. That's really exciting to hear. Go ahead, Victor. Correct me, Nicky, if I'm wrong, right? But both cross-plane, if you take, let's say GCP, same applies to AWS and Azure. Both cross-plane and Terraform have syntax that is based on the same API which is API of the provider. It's almost, I mean, at least I made my conversions just by changing the syntax. I took Terraform, changed few lines, and then replaced equals with colon because it's YAML and not the HCL anymore. I know it's not that simple, I know that, but basically almost all the fields are the same. There is very actually little difference in the field names. Right, they've taken, and a lot of folks do this, cloud formation is similar, they're very wise. And I think some of the people work here cross-plane. We call this high fidelity, right? You want to take the cloud provider API and you want to make your representation of that API as close as possible. You don't want to innovate, you don't want to have opinions because then anything someone can do with the cloud, they can do with your resource. And if people want to innovate and have opinions, they can use composition and cross-plane to build their own different thing on top of it that outputs what they needed that matches the cloud. So, and being in the infrastructure management game, we see people come to cross-plane to Slack who are like, I really am excited about cross-plane, but I hate YAML and I love HCL. We see the opposite as well. We see people coming and be like, I'm so happy. I hate this HCL thing, it's very subjective. So ideally, we'd like to support both, but YAML is sort of all the Franco of Kubernetes in the API server. Absolutely. We need another, this was fantastic. And we need another session on cross-plane. This is great. The questions are great. I think we did the best we could answering everything. We're at time. I just want to make one last mention. We mentioned Daniel Magnum. He is a driving force of at least myself and many others I know that are understanding what cross-plane does, getting involved. I'm looking at his Twitter right now. Cross-plane Community Day Europe is happening. It's I believe a day zero event May 4th with KubeCon EU that's coming up here in May. And I hope everyone has registered for that. That's going to be virtual. And then there is also a Kubernetes podcast, which if you're not tapping the Kubernetes podcast, you need to need to get in that. It's from Google. There was an interview of Daniel on cross-plane talking about a lot of these pieces that we've mentioned here today. I strongly urge everyone to check it out. I think we'll try to provide all of the links that we can. I want to thank Victor and Nick for joining us today. I want to thank the CNCF for putting this on. This was amazing. Cross-plane is for me, the way that we modernize and help developers, we help self-service them to allow them to get the things they need so they can keep moving without all the complexity in getting there, right? This is how SRE teams can move faster and it's just, it's wonderful. So thank you everybody for joining today. My name is Mario, signing off. Thank you to Victor and Nick and our producers as well. Everyone have a great rest of your day, rest of your week. We'll be talking about exciting cloud native topics again very, very soon next week. Talk to everybody later. Thanks so much. Bye.