Hi everybody Hi lunch wake up good I know you're all gonna be in a food coma in a few minutes, so we have to go and we have to go fast There's no way we can possibly complete this talk in 30 minutes, but we're gonna try anyway Very quickly me Matt Stein They called me a principal software engineer or whatever that means I do a lot of stuff at Pivotal around Cloud Foundry in spring and I spend a lot of time on airplanes as it turns out Managed to get here on time, which is good I wrote a little book That you might have seen floating around if you don't have a print copy of this yet And you want one just to tack the fine people at the Pivotal booth and they should have some I think they have a few hundred of those so if you want to get a hold of that This is sort of my cloud native application architecture propaganda that you should all consume and believe and And go do So So Andrew Schaefer gave a talk yesterday who went to Andrew's talk Okay, so Andrew's talk was Without doing this on purpose a great setup for my presentation He actually helped me craft the abstract for this presentation and this is these are his words So he said now that you have Cloud Foundry. What are you going to do with it? It's kind of an important question, right? We have this platform How can we use the platform in a way that's actually going to give us Give us what we want and so the first thing that I would say is that if you're smart Don't try to do microservices on day one You should actually start with a monolith Actually if I could build everything I wanted to build as a monolith and do continuous delivery and and Be agile and innovate and get all that right I would because it would be a whole heck of a lot easier than doing microservices Microservices are hard stuff So start with a monolith while you're small while you can you're gonna build something new This is where you want to begin small teams small monolith Make it 12 factor If you have something small doesn't matter if it's a microservice or a monolith or anything else Making something 12 factor and and having that contract between your application and the platform So that such that they get along well with one another is Is relatively easy to do it's a lot harder to take something that's big and been around for a long time and Turn that into a 12 factor app, and I'm sure many folks in the room have felt that pain but we all know that eventually things get bigger and And We don't really have a good answer to at which at what point is it too big In fact microservices are a terrible. It's a terrible word When we talk about microservices, we see this micro thing and we start to think ooh something that I can count I can tell you how big it is and I can measure it and I can put a number on it like lines of code or number of operations or Things like that Don't do that. That's all wrong. Don't do that at all it's not Quantitative micro it's Qualitative micro role responsibility capability focus scope Those things are really hard to measure because every person in the room in every context that you come from You're gonna have a slightly different answer to the question of how big is too big that it's time to start decomposing this thing into something that we're calling microservices, so What are microservices? Microservices Has a lot of definitions They're floating around lots of hype. I like Adrian's definition best He says the dreaded word service-oriented architecture in His definition it's like I thought that microservices were different than so a we're not doing so anymore so a is bad Microservices are good now. Don't don't that's that's wrong Actually if you go read Wikipedia First five paragraphs or so of the service-oriented architecture article There's really great stuff in there and you read about what the focus of what we were trying to achieve with that was It's actually all very good stuff And then we went and implemented it and We got it kind of wrong Because we missed the two things on either side of it that that Adrian adds in his definition one the idea of loose coupling Because what do we do when we did so a well? We went and found something really big to couple ourselves to which was that ESB and we put all the Important stuff inside the ESB and then any time we needed to change something We had to go through the ESB and all the enterprise architects cling to the ESB like barnacles and Start to put up this barrier is to change Doesn't matter where your monolith is if it's an application or if it's a bus or We were talking about this morning about how how an f5 can load Load balancer can become a monolith as well Anytime you start putting all of your stuff in one place you can get into the situation So loose coupling means what it means that I can deploy my service anytime I want to and I don't have to ask you if it's okay Now that sounds hard and it is hard But if I can get there We would I think we would all agree that that would be very powerful and one of the ways that we can get there Is this idea of a bounded context? What's a bounded context? Eric Evans started writing about this in domain-driven design 12 years ago. Who's read the domain-driven design book? Okay, you don't have to read the whole thing Start about I think chapter 13. He starts talking about this thing called strategic design And you read about three chapters of that and you realize this is a textbook on how to do microservices Except he never uses the word microservices Because honestly what we're trying to do is just take principles and concepts that actually worked very well and Arguably are a set of the small part of the set of small things that we can say is true about software engineering Very few things that we can say are true versus false There are a handful of principles out there and these things start to feel like they're in that category but You look at a domain You know that if a domain gets too big you go from one side of it to the other and you take the same term and You try to understand. What does that term mean and all of the different contexts along the way from one side of the business to the other How many different definitions do you come up with if you come up with more than one You don't have a bounded context because the domain is not actually internally consistent across itself So pick whatever your central concept is I was working with an airline customer. We're talking about a reservation Said how many different definitions of reservation do you have probably 17? Okay, well if you've got 17 different definitions, can we all agree on one? Course not we can't we all have slightly different Connotation you go a different context whether it's an order or a movie or something else You have these central concepts that everyone treats a little bit differently And so what you do is you find context where if I keep the boundary here All the words mean the same thing from one side to the other That is the thing that Either is big or small or somewhere in between and you're gonna come up with a different answer For every context in your business and you're gonna come up with different answers across every business but if you can get that right and Then you can bound that thing with an API and you can say nobody gets to know what's going on inside the box You only get to know what's going on at the API level and you can create these bounded contexts That are loosely coupled. You don't know what's going on. You can't couple to details You've got this wall this barrier kind of keeping you from becoming too bound to the things that you're dependent upon and Maybe you can start to deploy services whenever you want to Now if that all sounded very complicated, it's because it is And there's a sense in which You can't just start doing this I Think the way Martin Described this this idea of you must be this tall to ride the microservices ride is probably one of the best ways that I've heard this explained So if you can't do these four basic things If you can't provision new environments in Seconds or minutes if you can't monitor things reasonably well if you can't deploy a new line of code very quickly and if you don't have Something that feels like a devops culture and and Andrew talked at length about that So I'll refer to his talk if you want to know what I mean by that then You probably need to come back next year Fix these things first and then maybe you can go do that Now as it turns out you start to look at cloud foundry and I talked about this last year There is a nice relationship between microservices and cloud foundry in that not just anything will run on cloud foundry well as it turns out the things that we Build that feel like microservices tend to run kind of well on cloud foundry and You have these issues that you have to deal with when you start deploying microservices Provisioning new environments provisioning new code. That's something we sort of know how to do in this world So there's a sense in which you bring these two things together one doesn't require the other But one can definitely help the other And so we have all these great features in cloud foundry that help us To deal with a lot of the concerns that we run into with microservices now I can provision code quickly repeatedly reliably I Can scale I can let the health manager or Diego whichever flavor we're on right now Take care of making sure that when things die that they come back I can deal with a lot of my routing and load balancing concerns and I can run all the data services that I want to run all the services You know Bosch all of the things and things are going to be Working pretty well in this microservices world, but that's not enough so So Dave sire who works on a spring cloud project that that I work on he made this statement at spring one last year that No microservices in island Doesn't matter if we can build small services It's good, but it's not enough Being able to build small services and deploy them is good But it's not enough being able to build them deploy them and run them and keep them running is good But it's not enough Because as soon as we start to decompose a monolith and as soon as we start to put network boundaries between the things that we're building we start to create these nasty things called distributed systems and Distributed systems are hard as Well, and so we start to run in to a lot of new challenges That maybe we didn't have when we were writing code inside of a monolith How do I get configuration? Information out to all of my microservices and then all of my scaled-out instances of my microservices Consistently and reliably. How do I discover where things are? How do I once I know where things are actually route traffic to them and do load balancing? called Cloud Foundry does some of this, but maybe we want to do things even more sophisticated with what Cloud Foundry can do today and Obviously I deploy more things. I have more things that can break So the more things you're running the more likely something in your system is going to fail if you don't actually think about that and Something does fail and failure doesn't mean it died failure might mean that the latency got to a point where I Have enough load on an upstream service that I fill up all of my thread pools Waiting on this thing to respond and then that thing does die and then something dependent upon it dies And we have this cascade effect. You don't run into that when you call a method That's running in process with you and you get an exception You do have failures, but they're very different types of failures a little bit easier to figure out what's going on and There's a sense in which monitoring becomes even more of a concern If you have one app, I can plug a monitoring tool into it and I can I can pretty well tell you what's going on If I have ten apps, I can plug a monitoring tool into ten apps I can pretty much say what's going on I have a hundred microservices deployed that are composing a distributed system and it's only the Composition of those things that gives me the behavior that I'm looking for where do I put the plug Into that system to find out what it's doing So that I can know how the system is behaving There's no physical thing that represents the system We have a bunch of little things that are running around and the behavior that emerges from that composition is the system How do you monitor that? These are the types of questions that we have to answer so we need some sort of a representation of the composite system and I started being involved in conversations about this several months ago And the first thing that we started working from was this idea of the big a app as opposed to The little a app, you know, what's the little a app? Those are the apps that we deployed a cloud foundry, but everybody's got Some set of apps that they deploy to cloud foundry that we put a user interface in front of and the customer knows that as an App, but there's actually lots of little cloud foundry apps that are that thing and We say, okay, I need a representation of that that I can manage and work with and so the first tool that we had To kind of deal with that was this was a manifest and a manifest can tell me a Lot to solve this problem I can name several applications and the code that produces those applications and I can say deploy this thing and buying this thing to these services and I can get something that looks like what I want The problem with this is that it's very static This is a point in time description of what the system should look like right now But if I need to change that I Need to go back to go and start again and I probably end up having to deploy this whole unit again and that's fine But when I get into the world of microservices, I want the ability to be a little bit more dynamic and I'll tell you why So then I start thinking well, what I really want is something like Bosch But for apps for Microsoft so Bosch is very good at taking one. I've got a cluster of things that happened to live on VMs and I can describe that thing as a system and tell Bosch go make this so and it will go make it so and As things change in that environment, it will keep it the way it ought to the way I described it It will converge to some desired state eventually and then I go into my manifest And I say make me a little bit more of this thing and apply it and it will do that and see it and cloud foundry manifest Will do that to an extent But even then Bosch Wants to own the whole thing right Here's a cluster make this thing exist But there's no concept of okay now I want to without redeploying anything split it into two things and have this manage The left half and this manage the right half But when you start to talk about microservices you have this This topic out there of it's not just about technology. It's about organization and people and you have this very strong idea of Decentralizing so you think about Bosch Bosch is Centralizing management of a cluster I want now decentralized management of a cluster and I want all the pieces that form my composite system to actually be able to Act autonomously meaning I want all the teams to be able to do what I want to be able to deploy my service whenever I want So if I have a change I can deploy it now. I don't have to wait on you. I can't really do that in that world So so Andrew, you know brought this up yesterday this idea that if you write it you run it If I write it and I run it that means I'm responsible for deploying it So again, I'm back to the square one of I have tens or hundreds of services and I have tens or hundreds of teams that are managing those services and Deploying them and somehow I need to get a system out of that But all of the tools that I've worked with to this point in the Cloud Foundry ecosystem aren't geared toward that So how do we create a composite system? So Netflix did this and Netflix started from exactly the principle that I just described We'll have multiple teams Multiple teams will own their own services owning them from Build to deploy to run to where the pager and everything in between But they still needed a way to compose that into a system And they wanted to compose it into a system in such a way that any of the components can fail at any time and the system should keep working and then they did us the service of Taking these components that they used to build a composite system battle testing them in production you know running You know, what is it two-thirds of the of the traffic in the evening on the internet through them and Then open sourcing that stuff So now not only do we get to hear about how they do things? Well, here's a lot of the code that we used to do it too. So go go use that and And you can go grab that and start using The Netflix code today, but you have to figure out how it works You have to figure out how to run it and and deploy it and manage it sort of on your own so in the spring team Several months ago. The idea was had well, what if we take these components and we take the spring programming model that already Huge number of Java developers know and understand and enjoy and are productive with and we apply that programming model to the Netflix components such that I Don't have to relearn how to write my app I can just say oh now I need these new distributed systems patterns that I've learned In my app if I just annotate things Appropriately and configure things appropriately then now I can go back to focusing on business code again and not worrying about all the Distributed system goodness is going to work the way that it should so we have all of these now not just deployment level patterns, but application and service composition patterns. It's this idea of deploying and running code That's kind of what cloud foundry does But it doesn't really have an opinion about what is the code that I'm building Now cloud foundry is very capable of what it's we could run a Composed fault tolerant distributed system on top of it, but cloud foundry doesn't really have an opinion about what that thing is And so what these patterns when we take spring cloud and we layer it on top of cloud foundry do is allow us to do exactly that So we have several components. I'm going to run through these quickly. I know that I'm running out of time already But we'll see what happens All of this also happens to work on lattice and all of my demos are going to be on lattice And by the way if I change slides really quickly, they're already on the internet and I'll tell you where they are So if you don't get your picture, I'm sorry I've seen a couple oh he changed, you know, it's it'll be fine so the config server is A way for us to put all of our configuration information in a central place in this case We chose get gets really good at doing what? Versioning things and making an audit trail of things and that's something that you really like to have for your configuration I want to know what changed. I want to know who changed it when did it change and I want to know Maybe a reason for that and gets very good at that. So why duplicate it? Let's just put a service in front of it that can distribute that to applications So we have a rest API in the config server and then we have a client binding inside of a spring application that knows how to take that information reconcile it with any configuration that's local and Create something that's Consistently configured across all of the system. So now in my get repository I have some description of what the configuration for the composite should it should be and then I can distribute that appropriately to all the individual pieces But then I want to update that in real time I don't want to go through a deployment what I'd really like to do is say this piece of Configuration should change and that's going to affect these small components in these apps I'd like that to happen right now and So we add a component called the cloud bus to make that happen the cloud bus is just a management backplane that happens to be backed right now by rabbit MQ and When I send a refresh event to something that participates in that bus What it will do is send a message to the bus so that all of the other participating applications receive it So let's see if we can make this work very quickly So you'll notice that I have a bunch of stuff. Oops. I just turned off mirroring again There we go bunch of stuff running on my lattice cluster here Let's make that big and Here's my config server And the important thing that I want you to notice is that there is a greeting property in here that happens to say right now Let's make sure that that's up to date. Okay, right now it says howdy because I'm from the south and I need to do that and I have another application here that says howdy world right now. So I want to do a couple of things First of all Let's make this big as well You will see that I have only one instance of this app that we're going to show off. Let's go ahead and scale that up to five instances and Then let's grab the logs for that once it's done While that scale is happening Wrong file. Let's go in a demo dot yaml. Let's change that greeting Well, what do we want to say? Oh, okay, we'll make it speak Spanish sounds good Let's commit that To our repository So that's out there If we go back to our configuration server, we will see that the greeting has in fact updated to say oh la But when we go to our application, it still says howdy So we've got another step and that is that we need to send a refresh event. So if we Say LTC logs Discs config And what I'm going to do is send a post event to this route Bus refresh Not bush. I make that mistake every time There we go So what you just saw and all those log events was each app received And here's app number four says received remote refresh request The result is that It now doesn't matter which of these apps I get routed to I now have that change distributed across the cluster Okay, let's keep moving So now we want to find out where things are Eureka is a service registry that allows us to do that and Very simple application registers Consumer looks up what it wants to find and is able to connect to it directly We have Eureka here and you'll see that I have a bunch of stuff registered right now And if I refresh that you'll see that I have the five instances of the producer going now We had a problem here in that You can argue whether it's a problem or not, but we have this thing called the router and The router wants all the traffic to go through that We don't have these things talking to each other So this idea of consumer talking straight to producer doesn't really happen And what we end up doing is registering the route for the producer in Eureka And then we can do this trip from ribbon that's capable fully of load balancing What's gonna load balance me to HA prox here whatever load balancer we have in front of this then through the go router and then down to the producer Well, we added in CF release 195 some environment variables that you automatically get in your app environment that tell you what's your DEA IP and port are There's an equivalent for Diego for cell IP and port and then also in 204 the ability to allow host access on The DEA so if I'm in a container I can actually talk to another container on the same DEA or cell that I'm living on So after 204 we're able to do this and Lattice has an equivalent setup that allows Consumers to talk straight to producers and this may end up being the last demo that we're able to get to but We will see So let's do an LTC list again, and let's take our producer And one thing I want you to note about the producer you see there's no route assigned So I can't even talk to this producer outside of the VPC in which this Lattice cluster is living But I do have a consumer service and the consumer is basically just going to tell me exactly what that What that producer is doing which is in this case is producing an increasing counter sequence So I only have one we keep going up a number every time. Let's scale the producer Out to say 10 instances and watch those start up So we're filling up our cluster nicely So once all these start up. I want you to pay attention to the logs right now. They're not that interesting just a bunch of startup stuff Very close to done here. Maybe I should have done five I'm flirting with the clock Well, we should start to see some of what we want so some of these are up and registered CC I've got right now for Four instances of the producer up So as that's happening now what I should see is as I'm hitting this You'll see that I'm actually load balancing across the instances of the producer But if you were to look in the logs and actually now we're in a good spot You look at the logs you see that We are in fact hitting the producer app, but you don't see any router logs. We're not going through the router at all So now we're able to do client side load balancing inside the app So I'm gonna have to get out of the way of the next presenter But very quickly There are some other patterns. I wasn't able to show you circuit breakers but circuit breakers a state machine that protects you from those cascading failures and Then Zool is a component that allows me to do intelligent routing You can learn more about those on the Netflix website. We have a lot of other things that are coming We want to be able to support alternative stacks like console zoo keeper at CD J Rugged is an interesting circuit breaker library that Comcast has produced. We want to do distributed request tracing in the vein of What Dapper and Zipkin are able to do Leader election locks state machine stateful patterns We really want to improve the developer workflow for microservices It's not great today, and then we also want to do a lot around switching patterns. If you want to learn more I put a bunch of links The most important link is you can get to this talk on github and and download a PDF It's also on slide share and then all of the demos that I was able to show are in that second Repository so like I said right after the talk I will tweet the links to all these things so that you can go get the slides and Thank you very much


Why Africans went silent on Gaddafi? Libyan revolutionary, politician, and political theorist Muammar Mohammed Abu Minyar al-Gaddafi from 1969 to 2011, he served as the de facto ruler of Libya. First as the revolutionary chairman of the Libyan Arab Republic from 1969 to 1977, and then as the brotherly leader of the great socialist people's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya from 1977 to 2011. One of the mistakes made by so many political analysts is to believe that their enemies should be our enemies, Nelson Mandela said. Take a moment to imagine what could happen if Nelson Mandela was president of South Africa when Gaddafi was deposed by NATO forces that invade Libya. Could South Africa intervene? Nelson Mandela's grandson is named Gaddafi, a sign of how popular and love the late Libyan leader once was in South Africa and in many other Africa countries. During his 42 years regime in Libya, Gaddafi went from revolutionary hero to international outcast, to valued strategic partner, and back to outcast again. Despite being seen as a pan-African who fought African unit, he was accused of backing notorious rebel groups in Liberia and Sierra Leone and much more. He was despised by the West, particularly France, Britain, Italy, and USA. He had several other enemies and was seen a treat from some African regimes. And this is possible explanation why the continent's organs, such as the African Union looked on silently during the invasion of his country in 2011. Either ways, an unmistakable sense of trauma makes the action of African countries to toward the fall of Gaddafi. Today, we are going to uncover the real reasons why Africa stayed silent when was removed from power. Welcome to Africa Reloaded. Please like and subscribe to the channel as we move on. In February 2011, Libyans held a nationwide strike against the regime of Gaddafi, which turned into an armed conflict between Gaddafi's forces and Western-backed rebels. Later in match, NATO forces intervened in the Civil War with promises to liberate the country. The operation helped overthrow Gaddafi and also left the country deeply unstable. Over the past 10 years, Libyans have been affected by political and economic collapse, inter-malicia and inter-tribal warfare, as well as humanitarian crisis, which fueled the refugee crisis in Europe and allowed the Islamic State to establish a Libyan heaven that the USA is trying to contain. Today, Libya has seen a positive state of development and a relative level of peace and planned presidential elections aimed to provide the country with legal and legitimate leadership that has been postponed many times to the end of the year. So far, a total of 98 candidates have registered to have the top seat, but there are disagreements about the election rules. Some Libyans are scared the dispute about the coming elections could trigger and spike more riots and crisis, like that of the 2014 failed elections, when Libya split between Western and Eastern factions with parallel administration in Tripoli and Bihazi. This election is crucial to Libya's future and a major geopolitical stake in the eyes of the international powers. So where Libya prospects always like this, before 2011, Libya has achieved economic independence with its own water, its own food, its own oil, its own money, and its own state-owned bank. It had risen under Gadhafi from one of the poorest countries in Africa to one of the richest. Gadhafi wanted to structure and model Hyrule on Pan-Arab leader of Egypt, Gamal Abdel Nasser. He even adopted the same military rank, promoting himself to Colonel from Captain when he took over. He started to tackle the unfair economic legacy of foreign domination by colonial powers. For Egypt's Gamal, it was the Suez Canal while for Gadhafi, it was oil. Libya has the largest reserve of oil in Africa, as well as natural gas creating foreign interest in the desert nation. Significant reserves were discovered in the late 1950, but the extraction was controlled by foreign companies and the country was only getting a tiny percentage of the revenue. He memorably challenged the foreign oil executives by telling them, people who have lived without oil for over 5,000 years can live without it again for a few years to in order to again their legitimate rights. This tough stance paid off and Libya became the first developing country to secure a majority share of the revenue from its oil production. Other nations followed him, which led to the 1970 Arab petrol boom with production level matching the Gulf States with one of the smallest population in Africa, less than 3 million at the time. The black gold made Libya wealthy quickly. By the early 2000s, education and medical treatment were free for all Libyan. Having a home was considered a fundamental human right and Libyans participated in an original system of local democracy. Despite claims of his popularity in Africa, Gaddafi started being viewed with widespread suspicion. No one wanted to be friends with someone who routinely sponsored the overthrow of governments. As a result, Libya became isolated within the organization of African Unity following his 1980 military intervention in the Enchad. In protest, most governments boycotted and OAU summit in Tripoli in 1982. He also sent troops to boast the brutal Ugandan dictator Idi Amin's regime between 1972 and 1979. He called for a jihad by Congolese Muslims against the autocratic Western backed regime of Mubutusi Siko. In the 1990s, he provided military training to vicious rebel groups in Liberia and Sierra Leone and backed Turk rebels in Mali. In the year 2000, widespread xenophobic attacks in Tripoli and Zawiya against thousands of black African workers led to several deaths damaging Gaddafi's pan-African image. Following religious related conflicts in Nigeria, he called and pushed for the dissolution of the country in a bit to partition Africa's most populous nation into the separate Muslim and Christian countries. His vision of a United State of Africa complete with an army and common currency was rejected by most African leaders. He later crowned himself and as the King of Kings and his ambitions often failed to match political realities on the ground. All integration plans that he attempted and Africa failed. The blunders he had made when pushing for a pan-Arab agenda through the Islamic agenda were now failing him during his pan-African agenda. While using his oil wealth to buy influence within the African Union, any governments happily took his money but did not support him and a combination of all these issues according to me make the best explanation for the abandonment of the self-proclaimed King of Kings by his African friends. Following his removal from office and the African country's state silent as the 10 years long conflict unfolded in Libya, the world's major countries have been meddling in Libya while the African Union found itself sidelined and frozen out of initiatives aimed at ending the conflict. Political analyst has blamed Africans for not solving the crisis in Libya. This crisis had led to the flow of weapons into the entire Africa through the crisis-stricken nation of Libya. Thanks for watching. Please make sure to like and subscribe to Africa Reloaded for more interesting and educative videos.


Good morning guys, welcome back to a week in my life vlog I've kind of gotten out of the habit of filming my mornings, but today It's gonna be the most exciting part of the vlog I know you guys probably really want to stay and watch, you know, I'm just like working with my home and stuff I need it's like 6 30 now. I think I need to wake up a little bit earlier because um Oh my gosh, I'm like really high. I needed to wake up a little bit earlier this morning Because I'm recording at 9 actually which is like pretty early and the Celsius in here right now And I love Celsius and this used to be the one I was obsessed with I really like kiwi guava and the Fiji apple one I'm about to take the dogs on a walk and then I'm going to Go do oh my gosh, and then I'm going downstairs to go do the 12 3 30 treadmill routine I started it yesterday Let me know if you guys want to see a 30 day video I don't know what to even like film or do for that video I've already started so probably be like I don't know but I really like the yesterday. I'm actually like not sore But normally it's a second day when you're really sore. Okay, it's 6 45. I'm actually going to Turn the fan on which honestly this fan doesn't do much when I'm on the treadmill you sweat like Crazy with this so I'm not gonna talk about this 24-7, but I will answer what the 12 3 30 is Lauren Geraldo I believe she made it up, but like she at least made it popular, but I'm pretty sure she like made it up Anyways, you want the treadmill for 30 minutes at a speed of 3 and then kind of 12 It's actually a lot harder than it sounds. I did bring the Celsius.  I'm soaked in sweat. It's so much harder than you would think. Oh My gosh, I need to go shower. I need to go shower like immediately All right guys it is showered and got ready I'm letting my hair air dry But it just took me the longest time to pay on an outfit and I'm still I'm like not obsessed with this one I wish I had different jeans because these are just not like my most kind of like flattering jeans I don't know, but I've had them forever and I still wear them all the time. So here. We are the top is revolve I love this little wrap Thing though. I do think that's super cute I'll have it linked down below and it's awesome when it's really hot because It's like just so open and I'm not wearing a bra with it for those who are gonna ask I think it's great. These are Levi's. They are at the same time So my favorite pair of jeans, but I find that they're more flattering obviously with different shoes or tops Whatever these my point is I have a pair of jeans that are dirty that would have been better with this outfit And then I just have these like black Sandal mule type things. I think This bag today. I do have errands to run later. So I think that this is gonna end up I don't know. Maybe I'll switch bags. I don't know about this. All right, honestly I'm not hungry at all right now. I did come downstairs to make some breakfast and do my divo, but I'm just not hungry Always play Frank ocean in my office. This thing makes me drink so much more water. I need my hair to dry I'm getting it cut this week because it's just way too long. Oh So I am recording a podcast this morning in eight minutes. Okay Docs Docs Docs I have just like the Apple keyboard which I really really like but it's not connecting to my iPad now And I've like reset it and everything and I think like there's like a little bit of stuff on the sensors But I like can't get it out So this is basically just like being used as a case, but I really want to figure it out I really miss using that keyboard if you all about like finances and shows like a very healthy approach If you guys haven't seen the new documentary outcry, it's really good Um, I actually am having Greg and his wife on which I'm so excited to recording that this week There's a lot of things that I've been doing I did a ton of outreach last week They're gonna say oh and this morning. It's Monday so this morning a new diva went up on the living room If you guys are interested in any faith content Subscribe to the living room. I have the living room, which is a like monthly faith continent subscription service I will have it linked down below. It's so fun. You guys don't know This is the outfit I decided I'm going with I'm in a rush. Good morning everyone. Sorry I'm not wearing a shirt.  I've been editing I've been trying to also get the dogs to cuddle with me and Coco literally she's always sitting next to me like Any given time this dog is like right next to me and then Fitz is normally just on the tile here is right now Okay, so this is my outfit the tag is showing here and that drives me insane But my favorite misguided crop tops. I'll have them linked down below guys I got this in a different color as well that I wore in my last weekend of my life vlog and They are the best quality and just like the best crop top tease I love them then I have my favorite outdoor voices like biker shorts Which I recently linked because they put them back on the site on my Instagram I'll see if I can link them they kind of go on and off the site But they're just like the best work ever especially for running then I have my Yeezys on I haven't worn my Yeezys in So long like these are so dirty, but It is what it is, you know, okay guys. I just recorded with all you Williams of Right up your alley, and it was everything I ever needed to hear more I was just really down and I've been So hard on myself recently, and I've just been comparing myself so much and like I don't know I'm like hyper emotional right now, and I'm just I don't know guys I'm really like truly all over the place And like my mental health has been a struggle this year for sure But that was literally everything I could have ever needed. I love her I'll have her Instagram down below, but also right now with you guys are in LA. She is starting this like really She is starting like a flower talk It's gonna be in a Bronco and it's like sell you sell flowers and you guys know me and flowers love them But if you guys live in LA you should check it out So I'm making sure this recording downloads and then I'm heading off to go to Ikea with Sav because Zoom I will send you a link You guys can probably just tell and how I'm talking right now that I'm in the much better Sav and I are back at Ikea. This guy looks really pretty This is quite the outing Very exciting everyone. Oh, yeah, we went to trick-flip. I forgot to vlog. Yeah, I just keep eating to fly This one really takes me back guys. I actually just remembered that I need to get more friends Okay, no, I only need one for this new print that I got me Wilson Maddie Yeah, see no, that's the problem Yes, no, literally I said never give up and I said they always said they have one sock, right? This is definitely it. Oh, yes. Oh my god. Yeah. No, it's for sure. There's four bill. What's it lies me? Let's see. Here we go heavy Is that it? Yeah, oh it is. Yeah, I'm positive because it's thicker on the bottom. Yeah Me and my mirror No, I can carry this. Are you sure? Yeah, I'm strong. I need 12 through 30 Do you know this? No, it's my trauma routine now. Another girl made it up and now I do it Here's the mirror Exciting things are happening I'm trying to see if this uh, oh Yeah, it's not gonna fit I'm gonna test out one big plant just to see how I feel about it. I know I need more green in the house, but uh I'm not sure yet because guys I found the real plants and they're actually cheaper so What do you think about this one's up because they're not broken off How do we show about this one? Yeah, not that we just moved into IKEA. All right guys. I'm getting a plant. We're just hoping for the best. Well, thank God Okay one. He's gonna be back I'm gonna show you guys a few things so I got a package from Queen. They have granola butter So this one is vanilla. There's chocolate blueberry and original.  I don't know how to pronounce this I'm actually having the founder on the podcast next month, which I'm really excited for but for the best things about this brand So I picked up some stuff. I have their superfood latte blend, which I'm really excited to try as well as their papaya Bright exfoliating face mask, which looks amazing love that and then I didn't even know this package was coming So I'm assuming they probably got my address to my management But we have a cow powder and then it could cow sweet names, which is looks actually like really really freaking good And then I also picked up two pairs of sweatshirts from the Mayfair group. I got the self-love club ones I want the matching crew. I want every set. I honestly if I had every single set That's probably all I would wear love these and then I think I have a black pair coming as well I'm pretty sure I ordered two but these are so comfortable and I cannot wait to just basically live in them guys Look at how big he is. I cannot get over it ready fits pound it pound it fits pound it Okay, well, he actually doesn't know how to do. Oh, he's giving me sass Do you want to go work out? Oh He loves the camera guys. He really truly does. He's so big though. I can't get over it and Coco is so small Okay, I'm off to do day three of 12 through 30 and then a shower talk to you guys soon All right, just finished a three guys. I literally just died.  Okay, so I showered self tan that worked out. We'd have really good zoom Bible study I do it asked a smoothie. I know we're all shocked guys. This is really like my 2020 thing I guess fits is just always found either on the tile or I leave their Like doors open so they can go back to like their beds and stuff and he's just in there But I'm like don't you want to hang out with me and he just says he's already too cool for me He's already breached his teenager phase where he's over me.   It's actually insane I just had to force Fitz to hang out with me And I just begged him to come up here and let's see if he actually does. Hi, boy You're so cute. Anyways, this is like my dream night. I have a smoothie I'm going to read for the next few hours and go to bed just of the dogs on a little walk and Oh, you were so cute. Good morning everyone. Happy Wednesday. Okay, it is 6 like 30. I just woke up and My face is puffy. I want to take you guys through kind of like my morning skincare routine And also show you some of the Dr. Jart products that I've been using and that I got from a week in my life Honestly, this stuff the tiger grass calming mist. I'm gonna put this on first thing that I normally don't This stuff is incredible. I've never had a mist be so moisturizing. It's so good Also, if you guys struggle with redness this line Will save you if you really want something to kind of cancel your redness get the jar I'll link that down below too But like so good. I've started with redness like my entire life and that like this line is the only thing that's ever helped me Normally the first thing I do I use the ordinary. This is their squalene. It is so hydrating. I Want to humidify your guys. Let me know if it's worth it Um, but I normally like two pumps There's a lot of oil honestly, and then bring it all over my face and then down my neck So now I will take guys. I never can remember how to pronounce this one. I'm filming So I should the G I'll have a link down below And I will just kind of like massage my face out. It makes the biggest difference. I start with my neck normally Sunscreen it because I always go and walk the dogs and I just love writing this day-to-day It's a super new glow screen as you know, it's like literally my top-favorite product of 2021. It really is So good and then I have my sunscreen on and it kind of just let the scent soak into my skin because Obviously, it's like really oily, but I always bring everything down My neck and to my chest What I do in the morning that I've really been liking I definitely notice a huge difference and just the way my face looks All right, so this is my outfit I just had this tank top from misguided on that is Way too rough and then I have my favorite skirt from after voices. This is our court skirt I court squirt sorry. I will have a link down below, but it is just so cute and flattering and like fun And just great. I'm just going on like an early morning coffee run like date with Q again today I got new cute sneak white sneakers that I love so much more, but I stained them When I was making bolognese the other night, so I need to clean those I just bleached them yesterday updates to come Guys, I'm going to do a taste test for the coconut cool again I got this in my last vlog. This is a probiotic coconut yogurt and the chocolate mousse This like little thing is ten dollars or it was If it has this bone, it's definitely like pricier My mom always tells me that I need to have probiotic. They use 16 potent probiotic strains It's organic coconut cream organic coconut nectar organic cacao custom probiotic blend So you're supposed to start with a couple tablespoons and then go from there Like actually really really good. That is incredible. Oh my gosh. It's so You love attention have no idea where you got that from Probably Quintin. That's my not me, right? Like I'm a mom getting my kids ready for school And also like what do I do because Fitz just gets his water bowl everywhere And he like puts his paw in the bowl and then now there's water all over the floors and I clean them every day Okay, anyways, I'm making toast and I'm going to use the Queen granola Butter I just did my diva same one as always And I am uploading doing some final touches on today's podcast episode for the living room You guys didn't know living room is this faith subscription service that I just recently started. Oh my gosh This lighting is like really something basically. It's like faith-centered content podcast out episodes Like videos devotionals Q&A like all that stuff Q&A did an episode together on that where we're like very open in that Which is like way more open. I think I'm already really open on the internet But we're way more open on the living room just because I feel more like safe there Then I need to do some final touches on the weekend of my life vlog that's going up today But now it's like not showing. Oh Resume upload Are you excited? Yeah.  So we're going to pick up keel and Fits is coming along for the ride. We took Coco last time. So it's his turn now Also, this podcast is so good This is what I needed because I always get really I think especially right now It's really hard to not get like really angry people. You don't believe I think specifically like just in the times that we're in right now, but This has given me a little bit better of a mind sign like how to deal with that I don't know. It's been really really good. We are on our way to Have you seen the Charlie's or whatever does it? Maybe in December? Yeah, that's just a West Village thing I'm uptown, but actually it's just an uptown thing. It's not even West Village, but anyways We are on our way We're on our way to law and Oakland because this is Quinton's favorite one. It's a new one and so Q at his way who was surprised, you know, I think The way she worded that she was like, what should we do in the morning? I was like, let's go to la la on Oakland. Okay, Oakland You said Oakland. I'll play it back. Let's go to la la on Okay, no, I promise No, I literally Raiders, I literally filmed this so Anyways, this corksicle thing guys by the way, I got it and I got one for a listen for a birthday because she loves corksicle and I really really like it also just being out in the morning and driving somewhere I'm like driving kind of close to my management's offices. It just like Makes me feel like I have purpose again like, you know like actually being able to do things and Live life and you know, not be like terrified of everything 24-7, you know It's your life. What you're gonna do the world is watching you Every day the choices you make guys. I wish that I Wish that as we were driving you guys could see around us Dallas is just so cute and pretty in it But at the same time I would like to keep it a secret gem, you know, he looks like an angel back there He's a stud.  He's a stud He is beautiful very proud of him and he's so unique to you because like does not make it on the floor I know his coat could be totally different though. Like it could be like super curly or like whatever I hope it's super. I hope it's I like the code. He has now. I don't even want about to change honestly It's you can do whatever you want buddy.  I love this mirror. It was a hundred dollars my Kia That's a really good price for a mirror. It is so cool. I'm sorry that it's shaky It's probably so annoying, but it's thinner up top and then it gets thicker on the bottom Which I think is so cool. Love that my plant is actually in my office Coco, how do you feel about this mirror? Huh? What do you think girl?  Oh?  Oh, yeah, look at that flexibility. Could you be a gymnast? Maybe it's Everybody say hi Where are we going?  This is a big day. Is she gonna come back with a Lot of dolly gear. I Own everything. I think dolly besides the kids books. So for a favor the guy she says this but I Would put a bet down that you're gonna come back with $400 pillow besides the This is a $400. Oh that dolly part in pillow. I fairly kind of 398 I saw on the website because I was linking stuff in my vlog. That's crazy Did you see yourself in the mirror, buddy? Come here my buddy Is that you in the mirror that's are you in the mirror, buddy that's Okay, we're off. I love you, buddy Mama way to favor the kind they were so nice, and they wanted me to come in today And they're gonna be a gift card just to do some shopping I'm realizing now as I'm driving that I'm definitely missing my turn I'm on my way to favor the kind and then after that I have to I have another podcast recording for actually tomorrow's episode It's a really quick Like turn around I'm so close to graduating and it has never been more apparent than in how I'm treating my summer classes like it is Awful, so I'm gonna sit down and do that and my friend Sydney is coming over tonight for dinner So I'm gonna make us dinner. I really want to make banana bread too because I Literally have it all quarantined and like we're not even technically in quarantine are we are we not? I know everyone made a banana bread, but I didn't and I'm just not getting on I just did a little Instagram story haul I had credit from them and then I also just kind of splurged a little bit Honestly, I just spent so much time favor the kind and I've been wanting these pieces So I was like why not first thing I got is this pause book. It's like a weekly reflection book I thought was cute and good for Sundays. So I really want to try To do this on Sunday nights and then I also think it's just really cute decor for just around the house Wherever and then I also got this perfume. She told me that this is likely Lobo It's just a cheaper alternative. Basically. She's like this sense are very very similar. So I cook this up I've been wanting a new set anyways, and it smells so good So I will have this linked down below because I'm really excited about it Then I got this set and this is from the brand Shoot, sorry sweet. Lovely. Yes, it's just a tie. I said and I'm honestly kind of over tide But here we are. I just got another set, but it's just so soft and I thought it would be great for like loungewear slash Honestly like pajamas just around the house I'm honestly gonna throw this on right now just because I want to be comfy and then guys This is what I'm the most excited for I have wanted these pajamas for the longest time Okay, I look at them every time I go in the store and I finally just did it Okay, I love matching pajama sets like any brand ever that has matching pajama sets hit me up Okay, love you forever really but these are just really cute and they're like exactly the kind of look I want For pajamas, I just think that they're the cutest things ever. This is the brand 80,000 and they're perfect for summer too because they're not warmer anything But I just think that these are like literally the cutest pajamas I've ever seen so that is what I picked up from them I will have everything linked down below. Also, I get asked all the time where the Dolly Parton mug is from That's also favorite of the kind and I'll link it down below again, but yeah, I'm really excited I have a podcast recording in a little bit over an hour So I think I'm gonna go eat some lunch some of the salad that I have in the fridge And then go upstairs and get kind of start prepping for that interview. I just want to say this is the best thing ever I grew up eating this all the time so I want me to make it But it is the best thing ever if you're working from home And you want to prep lunch because you can make one for like three days and it only gets better the longer it Sits I mean past three days don't eat it, but mozzarella balls Tomatoes, but you can do sugar plum as well But I just decided to chop some up and then cucumbers, but it is so freaking good and it's really refreshing Which is really nice as well. Alright guys. I just changed into the tie-dye set and it is so soft Oh my gosh, like Incredible oh freaking soft. I'm like so comfortable gonna go to this recording and then work as we know Okay, also this plant guys I just like potter day yesterday and I haven't I literally threw it in here because this is the only room that fits Doesn't really come into and he's gonna like kill this plant I beg him to come in my office with me and he just for some reason does not like this room comes in here the least Even when I beg him to so I put the plant in here Obviously, I'm gonna like move it and whatever but I just have it here for now I think it looks cute It's definitely not tall enough to put in my bedroom where I like originally wanted to But it's definitely a great plant guys. I'm finally going to try the stumptown coffee. It looks really good Nastia loves these and then I saw them at the store. So I picked one up. I'm gonna try it So it is coming over at seven So we'll do that. I'll probably start cooking around like six the stumptown coffee was actually like so good I just like really really loved it. Also. I'm really curious who people who watched my vlogs What are things that you think I could do to make the vlogs better? What are things that you think I do? Okay, this is driving me and saying that these are all messed up What are things that I don't know constructive criticism? I would love also Do you guys like just the all-white style because I feel like sometimes I watch my vlogs and I feel like Cluttered if that makes sense even though my house is clean just because there's like stuff going on I also do you have a lot of all-white as well? But or do you guys like find it boring do you know what I mean? Not that this matters because it's not I'm not gonna like change my house But I'm just wondering because I feel like people only ever want to stick really clean white things and then I don't actually feel Like that's always the case, but you guys let me know just a topic of discussion So I just finished the docu series. It was really really good I'm like kind of emotional, which I think I'm just emotional because it's one Sunday's coming over and I'm cooking her dinner She owns bullies because I haven't made it for her yet So I'm getting out the ingredients for it and I'm gonna listen to a podcast I've been to before I'll probably talk about it later in the vlog a little bit more But I feel like I've just been really struggling with like not feeling like I'm doing enough or becoming enough or like Just being really really hard on myself and then also comparing myself So it's just like not a good combination that we have going for me Anyways, I'm gonna listen to Lauren's new podcast episode and cook because both of those always put me in the better mood And then Cindy will probably be here in like 30 So then I'm gonna hang with her and then I walked outside to take the pups on a little walk And this was on at my doorstep, which is just the best thing ever. So this is the healthy kombucha booch pop I'm really excited. I think I'm gonna try I Think maybe the Palm Berry one tonight. We'll see but I'm Good morning guys, it's Thursday morning. I'm on my way to while and again Surprise surprise. I'm getting coffee with Liz I think I'm actually gonna get coffee and not even a strawberry fields this time. It's crazy I know. Anyways, I am supposed to recording tonight, but they're on hotel Wi-Fi. So I'm kind of expecting that to not work because Hotel Wi-Fi doesn't give them the strong normally. I have therapy and then like a list of to-dos and stuff But guys I decided this morning. I think I'm gonna take a break from social media this weekend and delete it off my phone and just have a really good relaxing Weekend, but I just like deeply deeply need this I've mentioned this before but I have just been like So hard on myself lately I listened to Lauren's podcast last night and I just finished it this morning on like shitting yourself So it's like should being yourself. I just put like a really heavy expectation I think I just walk around and feel kind of heavy because I feel like I should be doing more than I am or I Should be becoming more than I am or whatever and I just feel like Trapped and then I also am like comparing myself really bad and just like really down on myself And I think I kind of want to make an entire video on this But at the same time like as of right now I don't really know what to say because I feel like I've I have like Good tips and tricks to when like you start to compare yourself like how to stop But also this is like definitely the worst I've ever dealt with it And I just feel like I'm not ever doing enough and I'm like, I don't know if this Like I'm not ever doing enough and I feel like I want to do all these things But I can't because obviously COVID and like blah blah blah and that's totally fine, but it's just like I don't know I I miss when I was like way more focused on my own Lane and it's not even that I'm like envious of people or like want them to not succeed Like I'm so happy for other people. It's not that it's just that I feel like I should to be there I guess but I just miss one like this wasn't a big problem in my life and like I Just like really recognize it's like we all have our own lanes and like we're all gonna have different times We're like some of us are Popping off and then there's gonna be another time we're like another one's popping off or whatever, but I've just been like So unbelievably hard on myself, and it's just like really not good as we know I don't know. I'm just rambling and I don't want you guys to feel like I'm like being negative or complaining either I know there's like so much else going on in the world right now that like you probably just want to go to a YouTube video I'm like have a good time. I don't know But I have to do an Instagram live with year of ours tomorrow and daylight and then after that I think I'm just gonna delete all the social media apps my phone just for the weekend I used to do this regularly too, and I haven't been doing it But I just want to be a lot more focused on like who I'm becoming and myself without having to see like everything else around me and putting like pressure on myself that was like pressure that was never meant to be there This is like such a normal human thing experience. I know but it's just like not been The best I don't know and it's like really been affecting me I mean there's only so many things that have been affecting me, and I've just been so down lately, but That's definitely high on the list So I'm gonna do that and then I think I'm gonna like expedite through a Bible study or something this weekend too And just like really really chill and then hopefully there will be a vlog week next week if I'm feeling better So I just finished being a little florist over here. This one needs to be like fixed and so does this one I'm not the best okay, but I saw someone on Instagram put roses with hydrangeas, and I thought it was fun So that's what we have and then this will go upstairs in my room, which is perfect Currently making avocado pudding the one that Courtney Kardashian loves I just realized that honey might get stuck up there, but it's so easy I'm making an Instagram reel so if you guys want the recipe you guys can just go to my Instagram Just made avocado pudding. It's actually pretty good I had to use homo just for the integrity of the recipe, and I never use homo So I'm sure you can use a milk alternative I just wanted to like really test it out because that's what it said online But I made an Instagram reel of it so you guys can just check out my Instagram if you guys want to see how I make it Okay, guys, so I just recorded a divo for Monday for the living room So if you guys haven't joined the living room you need to link below I'm listening to a bunch of podcasts my recording actually did get pushed Which is actually nice because I have therapy at one on Thursdays And I normally don't like to like have to have human contact and like do an interview and be really on after that I think I'm gonna make banana bread and then get to my to-do list that I just like keep putting off


Inventory Marines have many tools and techniques they employ while executing their rigorous training. Amongst the newest is the Instrumented Tactical Engagement Simulation System, or ITAS, laser equipment. Today what happened, 1-2 came here and we acted as an op-4. So basically they did a clear and zone, they tried to enter the city. We set up some blocking positions and basically harassed them and acted as the enemy. You can see how they respond to our tactics and vice versa. This innovative gear allows Marines to safely engage each other by form of laser tag. If you look here, you'll see a laser device that's connected to the front of your barrel. And what this does, it shoots out a laser. And as far as when it shoots out the laser, we're all wearing these harnesses that are connected to our body armor as well as our Kevlar. And it'll shoot a laser and if you look here, you'll see these sensors, these things. Basically they collect the beams and once you shoot somebody, the vest will go off and it'll make a buzzing noise. That's how it works. With the support of this technology, Marines will be able to train much more efficiently and effectively. This training in my opinion was a success because we had two units here that both operated to the best of our abilities to defeat each other. So they came in and we did everything we could to stop them and they did everything they could to defeat us. Employments of new training gear such as the ITES ensures Marines have the most modern and up-to-date equipment and systems to learn from, giving them the edge in combat.


This is Witchspace news for Friday the 7th of July 2023, I'm CMDR Buur. In Elite Dangerous News this week, there's a player constructed Odyssey material gathering one stop shop in the bubble and while Frontier's Elite Engagement is a little quiet we look at what you can do in the galaxy right now. As always if you enjoy our videos please do hit the like button and if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and click the bell so you don't miss any of our Elite Dangerous content. You can also join our Patreon if you'd like to help directly support our work, links to that and everything else are below. With FDev's Elite Dangerous livestreams now being a once a month thing, the Discovery scanner forum posts an Elite Dangerous newsletter now going to a when it's needed schedule, Galnet News roundups being predominantly bi-weekly and whilst it's not been specifically stated it does appear that community goals are currently at least a bi-weekly affair it's fair to say that Frontier are quite quiet on the Elite Dangerous front. If you've missed it and are wondering what's going on at the Cambridge developers the vast majority of their internal but public facing resources certainly those concerned with Elite Dangerous anyway seem to be almost exclusively tasked towards the company's moderately eminent Warhammer action RTS game Age of Sigmar, Realms of Ruin. The public beta of which runs from today until the 10th of July, that beta should be available to download by the way by the time you see this video if you fancy trying it out. The company also has a lot at stake with the latest iteration of their Formula One management game F1 Manager 2023. They have a stand at the British Grand Prix which takes place over this weekend and the game itself is out at the end of this month so in summary it appears Fdev is currently primarily focused on these two expensive high profile licensed titles. The Galaxy of Elite Dangerous however carries on turning regardless and there's still plenty to do in the colossal live sandbox while you wait to see what update 16 brings at the start of August. As we reported last week the Thargoid War has seen significant progress from the home team with the invasion as things stand at least all but stopped in its tracks. Indeed again this week all alerts and invasions were cleared by community efforts and as a result there are no new invasion systems with 32 systems in a state of alert and 25 systems having been recaptured and in a state of recovery. All the affected systems will either have missions to eliminate the turgid tulips, all goods, equipment and commodities, perform medivac or evacuee transport as well as tissue sampling and power restoration challenges. Elsewhere we took a look at Fdev's own community calendar this morning and as at the time of recording at least there was nothing listed on there. There are normally 4 or 5 things each month from the community so we're not sure if this is a bug or if its curation has perhaps fallen off the frontier attention radar due to what we're calling here the Sigma Effect. If you're perhaps looking to get away from the encroaching horror from Beyond the Stars and Who Can Blame You then don't forget to check out the expedition pages of the Elite Dangerous Star Map website which I've linked below. There are always expeditions scheduled there or already on their way that you can join in with. The shenanigans around both the power play and the background simulation systems also continue unabated so there's wars to be fought, missions to be run and extensive leafleting campaigns to be executed. Even 1200 years in the future you can't escape leaflets. And if you've not yet earned the required credits to furnish your commander with their own mobile fleet carrier there's always cheddar to be made in mining them their rocks. Now is also a fantastic time to upgrade and engineer your on foot suits and weapons. Back around for our next story to find out why. If you're looking to continue with the engineering and upgrading of your odyssey equipment or perhaps you've struggled with what is undoubtedly one of odyssey's more challenging barriers to entry then you're going to want to hear what I have to tell you now. Settlement rating and the collection of materials for odyssey's tech upgrades is for me personally one of the most fun and rewarding features of the Elite Dangerous Space Fleet expansion and once you've done a fair bit of upgrading of that gear then the surface conflict zone experience is completely transformed as you become a much more difficult target for the enemy to unalive whilst yourself becoming altogether much more capable of unaliving them. A lot of the fun and reward from the experiences from my raiding did however stem from the use of anarchy faction settlements to perpetrate mayhem whilst also filling my backpack with very useful but nonetheless ill gotten gains. It's much easier and fun to raid anarchy based odyssey settlements when collecting on foot materials. The authorities don't care and won't incarcerate, tag or pursue you for murdering and stealing from folks who choose to live in a lawless society they knew the risk right. The unfortunate result of this was that in the early days of odyssey player owned anarchy factions were beaten senseless by the rest of the player base as they inevitably became a murdery material gathering equivalent of a Walmart trolley dash. However and this is where it gets interesting a very clever group of players decided to use the background simulation and odyssey's casually enforced trend towards anarchy for mat gathering in a constructive way. Many months ago very quietly they identified a system that contained a few of every flavour of odyssey settlement that's to say agriculture, high tech, industrial, military and tourism and that system also had an NPC anarchy faction present. They then began manipulating the background simulation performing missions for or against that faction as needed to get it to the point where the faction not only owns a number of these settlements in every flavour but also now the anarchy influence in the system is at 1% with all other factions significantly higher. If you're unfamiliar with how BGS shenanigans work the short version is that two factions come into conflict when their influence levels are the same the result of that conflict means that a faction can potentially lose control of a given settlement. A faction's influence will naturally and randomly ebb and flow as players pass through doing whatever takes their fancy but it's extremely unlikely that it will go down to 1% matching the anarchy faction meaning the anarchy faction in the system I'm referencing here will likely stay in control of its assets despite all the goings on around it. As players raid and assault the anarchy faction settlements throughout the system killing their people and stealing their stuff the faction will be constantly pushed towards 1%. BGS is beautiful and complicated stuff so here's what all this means. By deliberate play at effort a largely self sustaining NPC anarchy faction material farm has been established in the bubble. You can go there, murder and steal with consequence free impunity, fill your bag with life affirming odyssey materials and you're doing so should if the theory holds help maintain the material farm for others to use. The individuals responsible contacted us during the week and asked if we would tell the community about the farm and how to use it and so here we are. To put it even more succinctly if you're looking to murder and steal for on foot mats in odyssey go to the system CD-51 space 2650 and raid the settlements of the CD-51 2650 purple gang. If the theory holds you can gather just about anything you should need. It won't hurt any player factions at all, the anarchy faction won't lose control of anything they own and the popo won't care. The odyssey material shops are open and quite frankly there's a sale on. If it works this could be a genius solution to what has been a nagging problem since odyssey launched and our heartfelt congratulations go out to everyone involved. It'll be fascinating to see what happens to the ody mat farm from here on. Outside the game summer sales are still on right now on both steam and the frontier store until July the 13th with elite and odyssey purchasable for a total of 15 quid and there's a cosmetic sale on in the game itself right now as well extended until July the 10th with discounts between 30-40% if you fancy decking out your ship or perhaps your newly upgraded guns and suits with some nice new shinies. What are you doing in game while you wait for update 16? Are you escaping the thargoid war and exploring outside the bubble? Or are you planning on taking up on foot combat all in the name of shopping? Let us know in the comments below. That's it for now, thanks very much for watching, we'll be back later this week with more videos until then 07 commanders follow the greens on the way out and do keep clear of the toast rack, we very much look forward to seeing you next time.


From around the globe, it's The Cube, with digital coverage of AWS ReInvent 2020, sponsored by Intel, AWS, and our community partners. Hi, and welcome to The Cube Virtual and our coverage of AWS ReInvent 2020. We are The Cube Virtual and I'm your host, Justin Warren. And today my guest is Shauna Wolverton, Executive Vice President of Product at Zendesk. And she's coming to us from Oakland, California. Shauna, welcome to The Cube. Thanks so much for having me. It is lovely to be here. How's the weather over there in Oakland? We just suddenly went from summer to winter, which after the weather we've had is no complaints. Ah, right. Well, as a resident of Melbourne, where we have four seasons in one day, I am very familiar with rapid weather changes.  Absolutely. Now, Zendesk and Amazon have a pretty close relationship, is my understanding. And we know that Amazon is famous for its customer-centric attitude. Wonderful thing about customers, of course, is that they're never really happy with everything that we have. So how does Zendesk fit in with that relationship with Amazon and how's your approach to customers? Yeah, I mean, the relationship we have with Amazon really excites me. We really have gone all in on our move to the cloud there, our sole provider. And we run all of our services on AWS. And in addition, we have some great partnerships with Amazon Connect, which allows us to provide great telephony and call center services to our customers. We have a great partnership around EventBridge and as well as AppConnect. So I think there is a fantastic relationship that we have where we're able to deliver, not just our basic services, but to really take advantage of a lot of the services that Amazon and AWS provide so that we can sort of accelerate our own roadmap and deliver great new features to our customers. Now, a lot of people have gone through a pretty similar adoption of the cloud at the moment. Unfortunate reason for doing so, but it certainly has driven the adoption very, very quickly. Xenders, of course, as you say, has been doing this for quite some time. So what have you noticed that stayed the same so from last year to this year? What were you already doing that you're now noticing everyone else's discovering? Actually, this is pretty good. Well, I think the rumors of the call center and the telephone as a channel, they're demise and greatly exaggerating. I think for as much as we're all excited about chat and messaging and all of the different ways that we can connect with our customers, there's something about having a phone number and allowing people to pick up the phone and talk to a human that refuses to go out of style. And so I think our partnership with Amazon Connect has been hugely powerful. And even recently, when a lot of this sort of acceleration has picked up, we saw a customer who had a power failure, a kind of massive failure of their own phone system be able to come to us, get connect up and running incredibly quickly and start taking thousands of calls a day. And that kind of sort of quick time to value, fast start ability for our customers just is hugely important now, but really, that's always been true. Right, yeah. I mean, when people want to call you and they want to talk to you, then they're not really happy if they can't get through to that. And particularly right now, being able to make that human to human connection, for me, I know that that's been a really important part of getting through this. I work remotely most of the time. So actually speaking to humans as we're doing now is a really refreshing change from just seeing everything on a text screen. Yeah, so it's interesting that the phone has actually been so resilient, even though we hear from a lot of young people say, oh, we never answered the phone when someone calls. But a lot of people are actually calling into businesses when they want to make contact or when they don't see things on the website. So how does Zendesk help to integrate with what people are doing in their online and digital channels through to what they're doing with phone system? Yeah, but I think fundamentally, people want their questions answered. One of my favorite studies that we did was around our benchmark study and we talked to millennials. And they said, the first place they go to get help is to their phone. But when you push it a little deeper, it was clear that they actually didn't know that the phone was for making a phone call. I think it was just all of the other help centers. The first way that a lot of people today are looking for answers is, I wanna Google it. And for that, you need a really great help center that has all that information out there. And then you want to have communities where people can talk to each other and get help. And then more and more, we're seeing the rise of messaging as a channel, both through the social channels like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, as well as native messaging, kind of ongoing conversations. You ordered your dinner, it hasn't arrived. It's so great to be able to go into those applications and just message to the business and figure out what's going on and get that sort of instantaneous response as well. Right, and you shared some stats with us regarding how much has moved across to some of these phone-based messaging channels. So, I'd say tickets coming in has risen about 50% and compared to some gains on live chats. So, people are really embracing the idea of being able to message, not just individual talking to your friends in the group chat, but actually using that to engage with the companies that they would normally use websites or phone. It's like, text chat is a thing. Yeah, I mean, it was funny to me. I think we're still in the US not quite as far along as a lot of our international friends. When traveling was a thing that we did, you know, I was always, like it was cool to see that there were billboards and ads that had WhatsApp phone numbers on them as a real way that businesses were wanting to engage.  And today, so many of us do have, you know, WhatsApp and WeChat and Line and Vibra and they're all in our pocket and being able to provide all of those to businesses is a new way to engage. I think we're finding is hugely powerful. Right, so with all of these dynamic changes that have been happening and it sounds like it's actually just sort of riding the wave of what customers were already doing, we're just doing it just that little bit more. But have you noticed any other larger changes, possibly ones that aren't related to a pandemic, just general shifts that have been happening that you've seen in your customer base? Yeah, I mean, like I said, I think so much of what we're seeing is that people in general want answers quickly. And whether it's, you know, phone call is great and like I said, people are not gonna stop calling but I think people wanna make sure, less than like, I need a human to have a conversation. I want the answer quickly. And that's where we're really focused in both thinking about how we provide tools around automating some of getting those answers, using AI and ML so that people can come to us, ask questions and we can get them the best answer very quickly without having to engage a person. I think this idea of quick resolution is clearly becoming one of the most important things in customer sentiment. I think we know that more and more this idea of how quickly I can get my questions resolved or how easy it is for me to do business with you is a huge differentiator in how people make buying choices. And that automations long been an attractive idea. I mean, I'm old enough to remember expert systems and having a go at doing this kind of heavily automated way of resolving, particularly common issues. And I mean, we're familiar with call center chat scripts where there's here are the top three issues and or it will be in the IVR where it's like we're currently experiencing this particular problem. So that resolves your question quite quickly. But there's been a big rise in things like chatbots and the use of AI. How far advanced is that? Because I still remember some of the early forays into that were a little bit flaky and that could actually exacerbate the poor customer experience. I'm already having a problem and now your chatbots getting in the way. Have they gotten a lot better? Are they up to the challenge? Yeah, I mean, I think what's really critical when you're thinking about automation in the conversations you're having with customers, it's two things. One, don't try to hide that you're a computer, right? No, no, my name is Chad. I am a human. You're not- I am the Chad bought, yes. You're not telling anyone. So I think being really clear. And then, I think surfacing how to very easily opt out of those flows. I think, you know, automation is great, but it's not a way, you shouldn't think of it as a way to frustrate your users, to keep them tied up until you can get to them. It really is, give them some quick options and if those don't solve their problems, really make sure that you've got an escape valve, right? We were putting out a new sort of flow builder product at Zendesk and we have all of the different words that someone could say that are like, smashing the zero button that mean, please transfer me to a person, right? You're driving me crazy. Let me connect you to an agent. So we're really making sure that it's easy for customers to provide the solution where their customers can get the help they need rather than- I really like that. That's something I think that gets a little bit lost in the focus on computers and on automation is that the reason we do this is to help the humans. So when we have these AI systems, it's not actually to replace the human interaction, it's to make it better. It's to mean that we can then get to that genuine connection. Computers are fabulous when they work. It's when they don't, when they frustrate things that bothers us. And that's generally why we're calling is that something has already gone wrong and we're a bit frustrated. So adding more frustration doesn't sound like a good approach. It sounds like Zendesk's really got that dialed in very, very well. Is it something that you've always had? Is it something that you've refined over time?  We would love to teach it to other people. No, I think we have always thought about how the machines can help the humans. And I think one, it's how can they help the customers, of course. But the other side that I don't think people talk about quite as much is how can we use computers to help agents? So you're talking to a person and how can we take sort of the best answers that they've given to other customers and surface those when a new agent is coming on board? How do we suggest the different kinds of workflows that they might wanna use to solve this problem in a more dynamic way? So I really like to think of the computers never as a replacement, but really as a sort of hidden superpower that organizations have to make every agent one of their best agents. Right, yes. It is a kind of external cyborg thing. I mean, I can't remember anything these days. I constantly write lists and they all live in computers. But they are, that's the kind of society that we live with today. And I think we should remember to embrace that side of things that a lot of life has actually gotten a lot better through the use of these computing systems. It's not all terrible. And I think more companies could probably learn from Zendesk and the approach that you've taken to center the humans, both the customers and your internal staff, the call center and the people who are providing this service. No one enjoys it when things are breaking and things have gone wrong. Being able to resolve that quickly makes a better experience for everybody. Yeah, I mean, I think we find over and over again, sometimes if you can handle an issue that's gone wrong, well, you can actually induce more loyalty than if someone never contacted you at all. So if you can really take advantage of the times you have, unfortunately, maybe messed up and make those customers happy, you really do put so much in the sort of loyalty piggy bank for later. It's really great. So for some of the companies that have maybe struggled with this a little bit and particularly under very trying conditions, is there some advice that you could give to them as there's some places that they should start to investigate this when they want to improve the way that they handle customer service, perhaps with things like Zendesk? Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of what we're focused on right now is this channel that's coming. Like I said, we think a lot about social messaging, but also in native messaging and how you can have a sort of ongoing long-term conversation for a long-time customer service, the sort of Holy Grove was chat and you could have an agent online and a human online and you could solve their problem and then move on, right? And sometimes though those things take a little longer to solve or you might have a big issue and a whole bunch of people who have an issue and maybe not enough agents to solve them. And so with messaging, we've really changed the dynamic. So chat was this completely synchronous, almost like a phone call kind of experience and with messaging, you're able to live in this sort of duality where we can have a conversation if we're both here, but just like with your friends, right?  So bringing that paradigm into your customer support experience really allows you to take some of that fear out of handling the volume that might come from chat to be able to sort of have these ongoing sort of back and forth conversations over time. And also, and give that persistence so that we're always both in the same place when we share up a game together. Embracing what the technology does well and avoiding what it doesn't do well. That sounds like a plan. Yeah. Shauna, this has been fabulous. It is always very edifying for me to hear when companies are doing well and centering the humans to make the technology improve all of our lives. It has been wonderful to have you here on theCUBE. Thanks so much. It was a lot of fun. Great. And thank you for joining in and watching us here at theCUBE virtual and our special coverage of AWS Reinvent 2020. Do come back and look for more coverage of Reinvent 2020 right here on theCUBE next time. I've been your host, Justin Warren and we'll see you again soon.