Today, I'll talk about just-in-time compiler for MRI or CRB, and I'm Takashi Kokubin, so let me introduce myself first. Last year of the RubyConf, there are some similar people from Japanese, and people are confused who is Matt or Koichi or me. They are wearing grasses or black foodies. So this year, I'm wearing very convenient t-shirt that has an icon. Yeah, nice to meet you. This is my icon, so please remember me with this. And like, even if I attended last year and I met some people and this year, some people said to me, nice to meet you, but some of you guys I met so before. Yeah, and so one of them, my project is the hamlet. It's the originally eight times faster version of Hamlet template language implementation. So I'm interested in template engine optimization. Then I joined Hamlet organization, and this year, I optimized Hamlet four times faster. And then joined the Ruby organization and ERB maintainer. Then I made ERB two times faster. This will be shifting to point five. So I have fast things and making things faster. And I love Ruby language. So why not I optimize Ruby? So it's time to introduce JIT Compile. I did this. The right one is the JIT Compile I made this year. So this talk focuses on how I achieve this. And before that, probably many of you have no experience to develop JIT Compile. So I introduced what's JIT Compile. JIT is the abbreviation of just in time. And JIT Compile optimizes the program by compiling the, compiling the program to native code. So probably many of you guys have no experience to compile to native code. So I will show the difference between native code and byte code. So example method is that this, just three, multiply three method, and it's by Ruby, it's passed to this kind of tree, and it's compared to this kind of thing. So and the right side one appears frequently. So please remember this. It means put three and put three again, and multiply operation, and then give means return. So it's very simple. And Ruby VM can understand the right side code as the byte code. Bite code means the not native and the VMs are language. So the, and Ruby VM is stack-based instruction, no, no, no, a stack-based VM. So when Ruby VM interprets the byte code, it's rows the instruction one by one, and it's pushed to stack when the put instruction is read. And then three is pushed to stack again. And when it reaches the operation of much, right, it's calculated to nine. And then it's returned in leave from the VM evaluation method returns the nine. So how is different? Is it different from JIT compiler's version? And with JIT compiler, normally, it has another thread in for JIT compiler. And for, from initial, it's interprets the, like the, above, the former way. And it's which is the core count, method core count is the increased. JIT compiler detects it as the hotspot, and JIT compiler compiles the hotspot to native code. Then VM switch to code, just call the native code, instead of dispatching instructions by their cell. So the byte code is the actual code of Ruby. And after JIT generates a native code from byte code, Ruby VM starts to call native code. So it's the basic of JIT compiler. So if the native code is faster than evaluating byte code one by one, it becomes faster. But why this kind of complex thing should be introduced to Ruby? So first of all, I want to make things faster. But the reason is, one of the reasons is money, because, because fast means that it requires less computing resources. So the, your number of server can be decreased by the, if the Ruby is optimized. And also any experience, if Ruby becomes two times faster, probably your application becomes two times faster. So if the application is faster, probably user experience is improved. And also to always use Ruby. This year, I developed distributed Q middleware with Java, because of the parallelism and the performance. But I want to use Ruby in ideal situation, because I just love Ruby. So then another criticism is that just in time versus ahead of time, the characteristics of the JIT compiler is that it compiles program during the execution of the method itself. And you may think currently, byte code is compiled before the execution, but JIT does not compile the program before execution. But the AOT compiles the method to native code before the execution. So why not AOT for this purpose? One of the reason is that keep boot time shorter, because the optimizing method to native code is very time consuming. And if the compilation is asynchronous, the compilation time can be skipped. So boot time or some one-shot task can be very fast. And another reason is that some optimization require the runtime information, because Ruby is very dynamic, so many things can't be known until it's executed. So we can use the runtime information for that kind of optimization. So then another reason is there is working kind of vacuuming implementations and that achieved better performance. So there are some promising candidates of the JIT compiles. And the right side one, MJIT is the Vladimir's JIT compiler. And the one left side that you have, MJIT is one I created. So they are very faster than Ruby 2.5. It's the current trunk, most of the trunk. And it's the two of the JIT compiles doubles the performance. So it's worth merging to the trunk maybe. So I want to explain the mechanisms as much as possible. There are three implementations I want to introduce here. Two of them are made by me. In half a year, I developed two different JIT compiles. First one, Eril Abbey. Ah, thank you. The original title of this talk was the Eril Abbey JIT compiler, but method JIT compiler. But after Ruby-Kaigi finishes, I developed another JIT compiler called FMJIT. So this talk title is changed. The middle one, MJIT is developed by Bradimo and introduced by Mats in the first keynote. So I'll introduce one of them. Oh, sorry, three of them. Okay, there. So Eril Abbey is motivated by the Ruby-Kaigi 2015 keynote. It's presented by Evan Phoenix. It's very impressive, and I very like the talk. And its essence was the converting the Ruby core by CRAN to Eril Abbey's code and generate Eril Abbey's byte code, then compare them all together. So if you do that, we can inline Ruby core's methods to Ruby's methods and very, very optimized. So, and I made it possible with Eril Abbey. Then I'll introduce how it works. So when it interprets the byte code frequently, Eril Abbey detects the hotspot by stack-prof-like profiler, and when it's detected as hotspot, JIT compiles the methods to Eril VMIR. Not good point is that it's not different thread. As it's experimental project, it compares the same in the same thread. And there is a pre-compiled Eril VMIR bit code from Ruby's core methods. So it's the, and the Eril VMIR uses both of the Eril VMIR, then it's optimized well with those Eril VMIRs to native code. Then switch to, from evaluating byte code to calling native code. So how was its performance? With this, well-designed for this implementation benchmark, was about five times faster. Why is it fast anyway? So it is the trick of the Eril VMIR optimization is called Eril VMIR pass. Eril VMIR pass is a kind of framework to analyze and optimize Eril VMIR. And any, many of the optimization of CRAN compiler is done in Eril VMIR pass. It's kind of rack and middlewares. So, and it takes Eril VMIR and outputs Eril VMIR. So we can organize many Eril VMIR pass you want. And then probably you can't read them, but they are the Eril VMIR pass used in Eril RB and affected their performance. But I could reproduce the same five times faster performance with only two passes. So let's see how they contribute to performance. So it would be the secret of Eril RB's optimization. The summary, just compiling the code to native code is not makes it faster because just comparing to native code means just removing the dispatch of instructions. Bite code dispatch was the go to, just go to, leaving a pointer of label from some array and go to some address in function. Some address of function, yeah, okay. So it's not so optimizing. Then if we add the function inlining pass to this pipeline, it's optimized well. And Eril CM pass is doob invariant code in motion is also has the major impact. But as you can see, inlining function is the very important thing for optimizing native code. So I learned that thing from this Eril RB project. But learnings from Eril RB is that Eril VM is hard to develop with. And also, Eril RB works with Eril VM 4.0, but it does not work with Eril VM 5.0. It's very breaking, yeah. And also, debugging is very important to maintain program for a long time, but Eril VM IR is, of course, it's not C language. So when we do debugging with GDB, we can see C code for native code because it's in Eril VM IR. So it will be harder to debug. So I wanted to tackle another version. It's built with C language. So yeah, important learnings from this is that main optimization target of Eril RB is Ruby cores methods. So directory generating the Eril VM IR was not important or didn't have major impact for optimization. So using CRAN would be enough for optimizing C language code of MRI. So I changed the approach. Then before I introduce another one, I want to introduce Mjits for the version of Matz keynotes. And Mjits is developed by Vladimir Makarov. He's GCC main term. And Mjits project consists of two components. It's just not JIT compiler. It has VM instruction replacement and also Mjits method JIT in compiler. VM instructions are kind of put object or leave, all of them were replaced in this project. And as you were seeing, YARB is currently stack-based VM like Java, but this project replaces it to register-based language instructions. And another point I want to notice is this dynamic bytecode specialization. It also does static bytecode specializations but also dynamic ones. When method is executed or evaluated in VM, it changes the bytecode to another instruction. Like this example is in the set. In the set is a RF reference as known set. And the set has the version of array version or under argument is integer version. So many specialized versions exist in Mjits and it's also, it will contribute to the JIT performance because if the code is where it can be smaller, integer version can be, of course, many optimized well. So it's good for JIT compiler. And background, the method difference between LARB and Mjit is that it's compared in background thread with pre-thread. So it's currently not portable to Windows, but the important thing is that it's compared as synchronously, so it's good performance. And it also has de-optimization. Probably you may not know, but during the intermediate states of JIT's calling, it can fall back to bytecode by restoring the state of original VM states. So let's see how it works. Here's original version, a current version of MRI and it's depressed like this. The right side's instructions are Mjits original out here instructions and VM has infinite number of registers. And Mjits reads the instruction and assigns the values to register instead of stack. And when during execution, it specializes the instruction by the receiver or arguments type. It's either be good for inlining the definitions for in the JIT compiler. Then register instruction returns the value from register. It's different from the current behavior. And Mjits interprets the, during the interprets bytecode on a thread, compiles the bytecode to C code. It's the very kind of invention in Mjits. It writes the C code to disk directory and it's let's GCC or CRAN, the C compiler, binary or the JIT compiler executes. X calls exec to execute the compiler and it's compiles to SO file. And the calling the LCA function allows us to roll the native code as a C function pointer. So we can call that C function from VM instead of evaluating the bytecode. So how is Mjits? Mjits achieved great performance, very great. It claims three times faster from Ruby 2.4. Actually it was not true in my machine but kind of very faster. And replacing, but also it replaces the compiler to generate the other instruction sets and also VM instruction. So replacing VM instruction at all might be very risky. So I thought I want to fix this. Then I focused this. Yeah, Mjits. Yeah, this is the focus of Mjits project and this project is currently I'm working on. And yeah, and the major characteristic is that it achieves JIT comparison without changing VM instructions at all. So it simulates stack on comparison and does not require register-based instructions. So let's see how your Mjits optimizes this. Ah, okay, okay, ah, oh, okay, I understood. So before seeing how Jits compiler optimizes the method, how would you optimize this method in VM level? You may think this can be possible, like just putting nine from initial, but consider this method. This is the definition allows us to do this kind of three, multiplied by three equals to three somehow. So this optimization can't be done in, it's not impossible, but it's hard. And currently YARB does not optimize in this way. But in YARB Mjits, during its interpretation, JIT compiler checks the code count and generates C code in like this. Probably it's hard to see, but just doing automata is called with three and three arguments. And also important thing is that it has the definition of automata. It is for inline in the future. Because I learned inlining is important in LRB, I made sure that it's inline in this version. So C compiler compiles this source code. And then if as the method definition of automata is included in this source code, it's inline in this way in C compiler. And then as three and three is provided in this source code, the three multiplied three is calculated beforehand in before execution. And also notable thing is that it checks the method of the definition properly. So it really works. And we can return the result, optimized result. It's optimized by C compiler. I want to say that this is not optimized by our work, but it's optimized by other C compiler's efforts. So optimizing code would be very complex thing, but we can delegate such hard work to see very good other things. Then it's loaded as so far and there seem to native code and call this one. So we can return the optimized nine, just nine, without calculating the multiply. Of course, it's probably such optimization wouldn't be needed if just it's a multiply calculation, but another very complex version of the optimization can be provided because we don't do some specific optimization in ourselves. So basic ideas to optimize MGIT is the inlining functions and skip unnecessary work and decrease in comparison time. And so I introduced secrets of MGIT optimizations. Many of the following slides are in only text, so you may be sleepy, but please ask me questions later. The first one is inlining function by having VM source code as header. MGIT originally do this by compiling VM.C beforehand and compiling not fully compiled, but just preprocessing header include or define or things like that. So by having those VM instructions, many of the frequently used methods in VM instructions, we can inline those methods. And then transform functions in header to static. As the VM.C compiled header can be dealt with by our script, we can modify the header by our Ruby script. And we MGIT adds the static to the non-static functions and if the function is static, C compiler can know it is not necessary to be compiled. So comparison is skipped for those static functions. And another technique is the skip set jump. Probably you may not know set jump, but it's used for implementing exception. Exception is implemented with set jump and jump. And of course it needs to store some states of the VM, so it's very slow. So MGIT skips it. If the method does not seem to raise exception. So of course we need to check it may not raise exception, but currently YavMGIT does not check it properly, so I'll fix it later. And about inline language function, it's there for just decreasing comparison time. When I developed YavMGIT in the first, its comparison is very slow, like 500 milliseconds for each method, but if it take 500 milliseconds for one method comparison, very limited number of methods can be compiled in during the benchmark. So Optical score was very small in that state. So VM search method is the function that searches the method. So it's very complex things because Ruby is very complex about Ruby methods. So it's very slow to compile. So YavMGIT just implements also implements the optimization to skip that execution. And then very complicated thing is the base pointer. I can't explain this precisely, but as the JIT code is executed frequently, only JIT compiler compiles hotspots. So all of the methods compiled one is the hotspot. So all of the very small task would have impact. And we can calculate the base pointer is needed to restore the state before the JIT run. Please ask this later, sorry. And our last two ones are inline external functions using VMS sessions. Some of the functions in instances.dev is the not static run and it's linked as the external functions. So as the JIT header is compiled from VM.C, functions not in VM.C are not available for VM compiler, JIT compiler. So I added some, put some of the methods definitions to header by many of some efforts. But MGIT does this by dynamic bytecode specialization. As it replaces the instructions to some specialist ones, specialist ones has the definitions. So MGIT can inline those things. So it's faster. And the last one is the inline set of methods code. This is the using runtime information and Ruby VM Yav has the call cache in bytecode. Bytecode has its inline cache. Core cache is used to implement inline methods cache. Inline methods cache is the only use for the one place. Mm, sorry. It's very hard to explain, but it has the definition of the method. And the cache is created during the execution. So we can use the core cache to detect which type is used for Ruby method. So there are many types of Ruby methods like implemented in Ruby and implemented in C function or alias or attribute reader or things like that. If we detect those types, we can inline the setup of the methods code.  Then with those techniques, Yav MGIT achieved this very good performance compared to current trunk. So future works of Yav MGIT optimizations are both more techniques from MGIT because it's folk. And removing unnecessary functions in per combined header is not implemented yet because it depends on some other limited code. Also, I think I can inline core methods defined with C function because we can detect the type in core cache. And we, probably we can know which function can be used for the Ruby C function method code. And probably we can inline a method defined with bytecode by using the detecting it by core cache. Oh, so no, no, no, no, no. It needs to save some last compiled some gted code. If we store some gted C functions, previous C functions, we can use it to refer to the method. So I think method defined with bytecode can be inline. Then the main part of this talk is the how can we realize JIT for MRI? Because this is conference. Yeah. So many people have failed to introduce JIT. There were some talks about JIT compiler in RubyKaigi. So LRV is very similar or uses that same technique with Yav to LRVM. It's very old project and we have failed from such old age. Also, there was promising JIT compiler, tracing-based JIT compiler, LRVJIT, but also it's not merged to RubyKaigi for now. And also, probably you may know, LRVJIT uses LRVM and it has JIT compiler. I believe so and I studied, I read the previous code before I implement LRV, but actually it didn't have JIT compiler in 3.0, because they said JIT compiler is hard to maintain and it has many bugs. So it's very difficult thing to introduce JIT. But we should solve those problems. Why did they fail? Yav to LRVM was the how to improve performance with MRL time, because probably it's very old, so the VM are different. And LRVJIT was the memory consuming, so it's not merged, but MGIT solved this part well. Also, LRVJIT was the how to fix bugs in JIT. So let's see one by one those problems. Can we solve improved performance? So MGIT achieved the performance and I did improved performance. And also, many of you good people, EndoSan and NoaGives made very good benchmarks, so thank you. And so it's very good for improving performance. And memory consuming, MGIT solved this problem too. And how to fix bugs is very large problem. So MGIT does not use LRVM directory. It can be used by a crank, but it doesn't use LRVM directory. And so no need to keep up with breaking changes. And we can debug using C code using GDB. So very easy, very so easier to debug in C code. Because as VM code is written in C, we can debug is only seeing C codes. But MGIT needs many changes for interaction. And the very normal thing is that the rest you change, the more unlikely it will be have bugs. So I want to reduce the changes. The, I want to say in this talk, make initial risk as safe as possible. Because we are using Ruby in production. And also my application in my company is very serious to want to be, I want to make it to be very stable. So I don't want to introduce very breaking change to Ruby. So don't solve many difficult problems at the same time. So MGIT does replacing VM instructions all of the instructions and into this compiler, but it's not portable. So we need to do two different very difficult problems. And I want to make it optional at first, but we can't turn off replacing VM instructions because byte code is compiled beforehand.  So if the only MGIT is introduced, we can turn off the JIT compiler by just stop to pass the option. So even if we found the problem in JIT compiler, we can turn off. So it's very safe. And also I want to change it gradually. So big band release is very risky and it's hard to develop, it's also hard to develop because releasing takes may face conflicts, many conflicts, I want to develop in gradually. So this is the current status of those JIT projects. MGIT is not slower than Ruby 2.0, but it's actually slower than current Ruby trunk. And but YARV-MGIT does not modify VM, so it's not slower. And another thing is that YARV-MGIT does not modify VM instructions, so it passes all the tests in Ruby core without JIT, but MGIT replaces instructions and it fails with current tests all and Ruby spec. So I think YARV-MGIT is very safer. So we need your help. Please try and report bugs to those repositories. Reporting bugs is very helpful to develop and one of the Ruby committers called Wanabe-san is reporting bugs to YARV-MGIT is very helpful. So I write this, how to use YARV-MGIT, so read this, I will publish this. So conclusion, method JIT compiler for MRA can gain good performance by inlining and YARV-MGIT is a safe migration path to realize JIT, realization. I want to realize JIT compiler. To realize JIT, bug reports using manually are very helpful. That's all, thank you.


We have often explored the many curious tales of a particular ancient global catastrophe, the Great Flood, a global deluge featured in countless ancient accounts. Yet additionally, we have also recently explored the compelling evidential corroboration to these ancient claims, supportive geological and scientific evidence, which intriguingly support their indeed once-being-such-a-flood, one of biblical proportions. The geological data supporting the change in sea levels are deserts, once-sea beds, submerged pyramids, ruins, and not to mention the tales of Atlantis. However, one area which is rarely, if ever mentioned in these same libraries of history, are the underground cities once built. All of them, found on nearly every continent, were each buried beneath the Earth in such a way as to avoid the land itself. The largest of these, Derinkuyu, discovered by a complete accident during a house renovation. It strongly suggests that many more may still be laying undiscovered, waiting to see light again, resting undisturbed in complete darkness for unknown millennia. Thousands of connected tunnels have already been found and explored all over Europe, thousands of miles of interlinking underground tunneling systems. All built as if those who created them found ground level either inhospitable or of a mortally perilous place to dwell, this for some unknown reason. Derinkuyu, as mentioned, a site we have explored in-depth before, not only has curious, multi-ton rolling door stoppers located at strategic locations, stone's modern man is incapable of moving. But was also reportedly lit by a natural gas pocket they tapped, tunneled a pipe through the complex with holes positioned along which, said a light as if a London Victorian street, ingenious if true, regardless of the genius that went into Derinkuyu itself. Modern corpses found within remains of the Hypogeum in Malta, it must be noted along with 7,000 other headless corpses, yet these complete bodies lay there alongside them. The oracle room within, just like the rumors of the natural light technology of Derinkuyu, also possessed, yet still possesses its own extraordinary example of ancient high technology. With an altar stone in the oracle room, placed in such a location, complemented by extraordinarily perfect architectural design, amplifies one's voice incredibly well and throughout the structure. Thousands of kilometers of groundwater-flooded caveways have recently been found in Belize, Honduras, El Salvador, along with many other locations, littered ancient ruins, remains and inhabitations. Once this flooding is dated, we believe it will push the currently held chronology of man and indeed these groups age back massively, a subject we will cover soon. However, these digressions merely scratch the surface of what we intend to explore further and indeed share with all of you. So, any support in this quest is greatly appreciated. To help us out, check the description for links. Why did ancient man seemingly hide underground? Why did they make such gargantuan efforts to dig, design, and then seemingly live in these places long term? These are questions we find highly compelling.


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Vice-president Professor Yemio Shibaju has called on AERCOIS region to be conscious of growing the population of its young people and the need to provide quality out-care education and nutrition for them at the presentation of the strategy document of the Human Capital Development Programme for AERCOIS in Nigeria, organized by the National Economic Council. Shibaju said Africa is the youngest and fastest growing continent, as West Africa is being projected to have 400 million young people by 2050. He insisted that the essence of the document was to buttress that the people were central to all that governments and private sector of civil society partners did. He also warned that an idle youthful population will pretend an increased risk of social instability.


from the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts. It's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. Hi everybody, welcome to this special CUBE conversation with a practitioner, a real world enterprise journey to the cloud. I'm here with Jake Burns, who's the Vice President of the Cloud Services at Live Nation Entertainment in from LA. Jake, thanks for coming into our Marlboro studio. Appreciate you having me. I'm glad to be here. So tell me about your role. So I'm ahead of Cloud Services for Live Nation and what that means is me and my team are in charge of infrastructure for IT, including cloud infrastructure, as well as the move to the cloud, which we completed early 2017. Enterprise messaging, which includes e-corporate email, DNS database services and storage management. So recent journey, how did it start? Was it a top-down push? Did you go to management and say, hey, we got to do this? You described that. Yeah, so it started off as kind of a bottom-up push. For a number of years, I've been really wanting to get us involved in public cloud, at least in some level. But it really didn't hit critical mass until our CEO late 2015 had a mandate that we're going to move 100% to cloud and modernize all of IT. And that's when we really hit the ground running. Why did, from a bottom-up standpoint, why did you guys want to do that? Was it because the cloud's cool? That's where all the action is? The developers want to be there? Or was it something else? You know, we spent a lot of time managing infrastructure and data centers and it's just not part of our core business. We wanted to focus more on satisfying the business and providing value to the business. And our time could be better spent really helping solve their problems rather than deal with hardware and systems. You know, another thing is just business agility in general, you know, if we want to stand up a new system, the typical life cycle could be three to six months just to get an application up and running. With cloud, we can do that in days, you know, weeks, worst case. So being able to respond quickly to business needs is something that's really important to us and we saw with public cloud that we could do that a lot more efficiently. And when you think about the early cloud days, the rhetoric was all about agility. And actually, that really was the main business benefit. You guys, of course, saved a lot of money too and want to get into that, but how did you get started? It must have been kind of a little nervous like the first time you jumped off a high cliff or something, right?  So how did you get started? Yeah, so for us, we realized very early on that this was a big technology change for us and it was going to require new skills that we didn't have. So the first thing we did was we really just got training across the board. We brought trainers from AWS to our offices and we did every training program that they offered, got the certifications and made sure that we really understood what we were dealing with before we got started. So that was really step number one. And how did that go? They were really supportive. I mean, everybody says AWS really not, you know, hands-on, they just sent me an email. How did that go?  Resistance from your guys? Oh yeah, yeah. Not the AWS people, they were. Oh, of course, right. No, no, our guys, you know, before they really understand the situation, it looks like we're being outsourced, right? We're moving all of our infrastructure. This is our job. We're managing hardware, we're managing servers, we're managing data centers and all that stuff's going to go away. So what are we going to do, right? So really, even before the training, the priority for me was to get people to understand that this is not something that's a danger for your career. Quite the contrary, this is going to make you more valuable. You know, you're going to get trained on this technology. You're going to get real world experience, moving Fortune 500 company to the cloud. And at the end of this, somebody's going to need to maintain it. So not only will you have job security, but you're probably not going to care about job security at the end of this, because you're going to be so valuable in the marketplace. So we're all in sales, aren't we? So you had to sell them a little bit on the concept, but then they responded positively, it sounds like. Yeah, and part of that is because it's the truth. You know, I was telling them the truth, so it was an easy sell. But it's a very important component of any cloud migration project like this. If you don't have support from your people, it's not going to succeed. Okay, so you get through the training, your guys are on board, you have alignment there. And then take us through, so the journey, how long did it take? What were some of the challenges that you faced? Yeah, so the target was 12 months to move everything. And we're talking about 668 servers, 118 applications, including Oracle, SAP, some really things that are not trivial to move to the cloud. We were able to move 90% of everything in 12 months. And then the long tail took an additional five months, so 17 months in total to move everything. And that long tail, was that the Oracle app? Yeah, so our strategy was to move the easy stuff first as we learned, because we learned along the way. We really didn't know what we were doing when we started. By the end of the project, we knew exactly how to do the project, right? Easy stuff like messaging? Like single server applications that are running supported software, where we have a business stakeholder that's cooperative and... Web stuff?  Things that were under the control of IT didn't involve a lot of politics. Exactly. Learn there. Okay. So the idea was get real world experience moving live production systems on the easy stuff, and it builds up our skill set. But at the same time, it builds forward momentum, which is critical for a project like this. There's a lot of people that are just waiting for the first failure to put a stop to the whole thing. And there's a lot of skepticism as to whether this can even be accomplished or not. So getting, I truly believe a key component for a project like this is to get momentum on your side early on. And the way you do that is by attacking the easy problems first, and then get progressively more difficult as you go along. And so at the end, you end up with the most difficult applications to move. But at that point, you have full buy-in from everyone because you've been successful so far, and you and your team are practiced and accomplished and have the skill sets necessary through moving all the more easy stuff before that. Okay, and just a quick aside, I have to ask. So Oracle's kind of using licensing as a weapon, especially in this, I call it urinary Olympics, sorry, with Oracle and AWS. You may not have visibility on it if you don't, we can move on, but was that a concern? Absolutely, yeah. So this is a major problem that we've had to deal with. And Oracle doesn't make it easy. They don't necessarily want their customers moving to AWS. So that was part of the challenge. Part of the challenge was how do we move this without having to pay more in licensing? And what it really comes down to is you have to make your Oracle databases run more efficiently in AWS in order to lower the core count, which is what the licensing is based on in order to keep your costs neutral because Oracle will charge you double for your database per processor in the cloud in AWS than it will on-prem. So really the only way around that besides negotiating with Oracle, if you're able to do that, if you're not able to do that, then your only option is to make it run twice as efficiently from a processor standpoint. Thank you for sharing that with our audience. We've written a lot about ways to reduce your core count, ways to make IO optimized. And if you can do that, you can actually save a lot of money. Maybe we'll have you back on at re-invent. We can talk more about that. But so back to your story here, you've got a huge budget to do this, right? Big pile of big bag of money to go move to AWS? Unfortunately, we didn't have that luxury. So we run very lean. And so we had essentially a flat budget 2016 when we did the majority of these moves. So we just had to find a way to do it without spending money. And so it was a bit of a juggling act. We were decommissioning systems in the data center and canceling support contracts. So we were able to kind of use some of that money and repurpose some of that money for moving to AWS. But we really didn't have a budget for hiring consultants or to buy expensive software or anything like that. So what we had to do was basically become the consultants to do the cloud migration. And so that's where that training comes into play. So by training the team and getting them up to speed and essentially creating cloud engineers, we were able to be internal consultants to the business, perform the move internally at a very low cost. All within that sort of 12 slash 17 month timeframe, we were able to affect that skills transition. Right. So we were simultaneously maintaining the old infrastructure, moving the infrastructure to AWS and maintaining the infrastructure in AWS. So there were a lot of long hours. I bet. Next weekends. We were enthusiastic about doing it. Everyone was very excited once we got going. And so people were willing to do it. You talked about the people challenges. I think we've addressed that a little bit anyway. What were some of the other challenges?  You got data.  What were some of the challenges that you faced and how did you address them? Yes, that's a great question. You know, one thing that people don't realize is that AWS isn't necessarily designed for enterprise applications. You know, it's getting a lot better, but there are some things where it just doesn't fit automatically. So one area where that's especially true is with storage. AWS has fantastic storage offering, especially with S3, their object storage. But unfortunately, most enterprise applications, they can't utilize legacy enterprise applications, won't utilize object storage, they want block storage. They don't want get put, they want block storage. Yeah, exactly. And then the block storage in AWS is different than the block storage than what you're used to in the data center, typically. So kind of allowing these applications like Oracle to work on AWS' block storage can be a challenge. It can be expensive and there can be some risk there just because of the way that it works. So this is where using a third party makes sense. This is one of the rare circumstances where I think using a third party makes sense. We found a company called Actifio that does virtual storage in AWS. And one of the great things about this product is it essentially mimics the way that the old storage worked in our old environment and our data center. So the application will continue to function. So we're able to take snapshots, we're able to clone environments, we're able to do all of these things that we are not able to do in AWS natively with the Actifio product. And it saved us a lot of money and allowed us to avoid a lot of having to change our workflows to get around some of the delays with doing snapshots and stuff natively. And is your strategy to have this sort of hybrid approach between on-prem and public cloud or multiple public clouds? Is that part of the strategy and how does this capability fit into that? Yeah, so great question. Our initial strategy was 100% go in all in with AWS and officially that's still our strategy. I am a proponent of multi-cloud in certain circumstances. For example, disaster recovery and backups, I think it makes sense if you're 100% in the cloud to have a second cloud provider to hold your backup data just so you don't have everything in one place. I think for the same reason hybrid cloud makes a lot of sense. And I think also hybrid cloud makes a lot of sense just because not all applications are a good fit for public cloud. And Oracle SAP would be two of those examples. Now we were forced to move everything to AWS and it was a fun challenge and we were able to accomplish that. But doing it over again, if we had the option of doing hybrid cloud, there may be a couple applications that I would say keep it on-prem because it just works better that way. And you double-click on the storage virtualization capability that you talked about. Kind of how does that work? And are there any kind of things that you had to do to prepare for that? Any sort of out-of-scope expectations that customers should be aware of? With Actifio, it's a pretty turnkey solution. So there's a little bit of a learning curve, but there's a learning curve with using AWS native tools as well. So I would say probably less of a learning curve if you use a product like Actifio because it's more familiar to the people that are already working on these systems. So if you have existing staff and they're used to doing things in the data center and they're used to doing things with traditional enterprise storage, the Actifio tool is gonna look a bit more familiar than the AWS tools. So there's a learning curve either way, and but I would say look at a product like Actifio if you're an enterprise trying to do this. So what was the business impact of using Actifio? I don't want to ask you about the whole move to AWS. Did it speed the time to deployment for AWS? Did it help you cut costs? What was the business impact? Unfortunately, we didn't become aware of this product until after we had moved. So we're in the process now of replacing some of our storage devices with virtual storage with Actifio, but I wish we had found this product sooner. I advise anyone who's new at this, anyone who's doing a migration to leverage something like this to actually move their data because it's a much more efficient way to do it. So if I could go back in time, I would do that. What would have been the business impact? Is this time and money? Yeah, time and money for sure. So the moving of the data is one of the biggest challenges that you're gonna have moving to cloud. We had a petabyte of data that we had to move and that's no small task to get that moved in 12 months. So any tool that you can use that can make that more efficient is going to shorten the amount of time you're gonna be doing the migration and consequently shorten the amount of money that you spend doing the migration. Also, it would have saved us a lot of time because now we're going back and having to change things and put things under Actifio. If we would have done it like that to begin with, we wouldn't have to spend that effort after the fact. Why does Actifio make it more efficient? Is it data reduction? Is it automation? So essentially, the biggest benefit is that it allows you to not have duplicates of your data. So if you have a dozen or so copies of your database for different types of environments, test, UIT, Dev, et cetera, and you're duplicating those and storing each one of those separately, you're gonna pay for each one of those separately, you have to manage each one of those separately. If you're able to use virtual storage, then you really have one copy of the data or however many copies of data you really need to be protected and the rest of those can be virtual copies and those don't cost you anything from a storage point of view. The other benefit is if you want to clone an environment or copy an environment or take a snapshot of an environment, it can happen instantaneously rather than wait for the hours or days that it would take to copy a large dataset. So it becomes the single point of control with the catalog and the visibility over all your data and your copies and all your management, is that correct? Yeah, and the management becomes a lot easier because you have a software that's keeping track of your snapshots and keeping track of all your copies of data rather than try to track that all manually. Okay, let's bring it back to the big AWS picture. So you move to the cloud, what was the business impact of that? You mean you mentioned agility, did you save money? You know, how much, give us some visibility on that. Yeah, so because we're so conscious, saving money was a priority. I don't think it's necessarily something to expect, especially initially if you're an enterprise moving to the cloud, cost shouldn't be the driver, agility should be the driver. But in our case, we were able to achieve 18% reduction in TCO on year one. And that's just because we were just very focused on cost. We're very cost sensitive and it's very important for us to be efficient and to not spend money unnecessarily. I know that's a priority for everyone, but it's a top priority for us. And so my point is it can be done. You can move to the cloud, you can move 100% to public cloud if you're an enterprise and you could make it cost neutral or even favorable, it is possible. So you hear a lot of stuff in the press about how the cloud is very expensive, you could actually do it cheaper on-prem based on your experience, you don't buy that. Well, I wouldn't say that's false. You can, in a lot of circumstances, do it cheaper on-prem. It really depends on the workload. So I mentioned earlier that I think hybrid is probably the right approach for most people. So just because we're saving money by going 100% cloud doesn't mean we wouldn't save more money if we went hybrid cloud and put the more expensive things that are to run on-prem. So because it's paid for what you use, the things that you very heavily utilize, those are good candidates to keep on-prem. The things that are more bursty, those are the things that are better candidates to put in the cloud. The easiest candidates to put in the cloud are disaster recovery and backups, those are no-brainers. DR because that's only something you need to scale up when you use it. So anything that you need to scale up when you use it or anything that scales up and down, those are the best candidates for cloud. Okay, now I understand you're kind of an expert at cutting the AWS utility bill. Maybe you could give us some advice on how to do that and how'd you learn how to do that? Yeah, so that's kind of my area of focus now is now that we're in the cloud, getting those costs reduced as much as possible. So there's a lot of ways to do this, but I like to keep it simple and attack the things that have the biggest impact first. So people like fancy solutions, but it's really simple. The biggest thing you can do is delete things you're not using. You're paying for consumption, so find things that are not being used and simply delete them. After that, then find things that are oversized and right size them. And then another big thing is, in the cloud, you have such an easy access to spin things up, to take snapshots of data, to copy data, and it's a classic problem in IT where everyone requests what they want and they never tell you when they're done with it. So it needs to be a full-time effort to be actively looking for resources that are unused, snapshots that are no longer needed, volumes that are no longer needed, instances that are no longer needed, and be cleaning those things up on a continuous basis. I find that that's a large percentage of what my team does now, and that's one of the things that keeps our costs in mind. That's interesting. I mean, we always talk here about GRS getting rid of stuff. Not only did you get rid of a bunch of stuff when you moved into the cloud, you said 600 servers, you got rid of unused capacity, you got rid of a bunch of data which must have made your general counsel happy, but you're now actively continuing to get rid of stuff. Like you said, it's volumes, it snaps, it's other things now that you're in the cloud, that's GRS mentality is sort of ingrained. It has to be. I think that anyone who's in the cloud for some time is going to realize this, you're going to have inflation of costs simply by doing nothing. So just to keep your costs neutral, you're going to have to be deleting things on a continuous basis. Now if you want your costs to go down, that's even more difficult. You have to be more aggressive with it, but just as it's easier to spin things up in the cloud, the good news is it's easier to keep track of what you have and find things that can be deleted in the cloud because you don't have to go in the data center and track things down. You know, everything is virtual, it's all can be automated, it's all done, it can be scripted. So everything's easier, spinning things up is easier, cleaning things up is easier. You just have to make it a priority and make sure it gets done. So some of the financial people in our audience might be listening to this and yeah, you know, okay, year one, roughly 20% savings, it's not that exciting. But we haven't quantified the sort of other business impacts in terms of agility and that's a harder thing to quantify, but it's early days for you still. Do you expect like to get on that S curve and really start to see a major business impact beyond that 17, 18%? That's a great question, you know, that 18% reduction in TCO, that's just infrastructure costs. So that's not taken into account, you know, things like how long does it take for us to spin up an application and what does that cost the business, that delay, we're not taking that into account. How about the opportunity cost of, you know, we wanna try something, but it's too expensive because we gotta buy servers and we gotta hire people to build the application and install the operating system, all that kind of stuff, you know, those opportunity costs, they're not captured either. Now we can try as many things as we want, very inexpensively and only keep the things that work. So I think there's a lot of hidden cost savings, a lot of hidden value that's very difficult to capture, but we certainly have those benefits. Even if we're not articulating it and counting it very well, the business feels it and you know, it's certainly a superior level of service. That's kind of like when we first got email, you know. Nobody really quantified about the productivity impact was in other words the first, you know, local area network that you ever installed and the collaboration that brought, it's one of those things that's, it's probably telephone numbers, but it's hard to quantify, right? Do you, you said the business people see it, do the finance people see it as well and are they supportive of this? Yeah, it takes a while I think for the non-technical teams to catch up and really get to where at in terms of understanding of what we're dealing with at this point. So they're starting to see it, but you know, all the financial models have to change, all the budgeting needs to change. There's a lot of things that beyond IT, this kind of transformation affects and those processes have to change and those processes generally change more slowly, so procurement needs to change, finance needs to change, security needs to change. Everything's really, it's a new world and once they catch up and kind of really grasp what we're dealing with, I think the whole business is gonna be transformed. So two last questions. You talked about maybe things you do differently, maybe some advice, but let's focus clearly on advice to your colleagues that are trying to do something similar, get to the cloud, what would you tell them? Invest in your people. Focus on cost savings, day one, don't look at doing that after the fact. And don't get too caught up in all the fancy methodologies and fancy tools, everybody's gonna try to sell you something, everybody's going to try to tell you they have the best way to do it, but in general, those things are just gonna add complexity to your project. I say keep it simple, keep it lean, leverage your own people because at the end of the day, somebody's gonna have to support this environment as well and if you're relying too much on outside help, then they're not gonna be there when it's all said and done. So consider the end game, consider the end state and how you're gonna support that because it's one thing to be successful migrating to the cloud but then you have a whole new set of challenges after that. You're gonna have to live with that moving forward and I'm not saying it's a bad thing, it's a great thing but it's something different and you're gonna have to be prepared for that. Own it. Own it.  You're just sort of getting started here, you've made a tremendous amount of progress in a year and a half. What's next, where you want to take this thing? Yeah, so like I said, right now we're really focused on cost optimization. I think that like you alluded to earlier, the cloud could be very expensive. The range of how much you can cost is amazing, right? So this is uncharted territory. We don't know how expensive it should be, how cheap it should be. We just know that we can affect that to a large degree. So I'm interested in seeing how, to what degree we can affect that and I want to see how efficient we can make this. 18% favorable TCO is one thing. Let's see if we can get 30% or 40%. So really I'm focused on optimizing for cost, security, which is a whole new world in the cloud and going from there.  Thanks very much for your insights. Really appreciate your time and thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante. We'll see you next time.


This is stock number 9895. We are here at Summit Automotive in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. You're new and used SUV headquarters. Today we are checking out this super clean 2013 Chevy Suburban. This vehicle has the 5.3 liter V8 motor and as from this HD video you will be able to tell that this Suburban is extremely clean all the way around inside and out. Black granite crystal is the color. We shoot all of our videos in 1080p so if you have HD capabilities turn them on right now because it's like you're right here looking at the vehicle with me. Factory running boards comes with the 20 inch polished aluminum rims. Bridgestone Duhler 275 55R 20 tires. These tires have probably about 50 to 60 percent of the tread left. Didn't see any denser dings on that front fender. I really like the black granite color. As opposed to the gloss black. Got a little bit of metal flake in it. Didn't see any denser dings on the hood. Passenger side fender is in nice shape. Front bumper. I didn't see any dense dings or cracks on that and it's in really nice shape. Passenger side rim didn't see any scuffs or scrapes on that and as you go down this side of the vehicle you can see just how clean that body is, how reflective and mirror like that paint is. We take these HD videos so if you are far away or even if you're close by and just cannot make the trip down you can still see the vehicle, hear the vehicle, and have confidence in what you're looking at before you even get here. Has the roof rack on it and on this side no dense or dings. Lower rockers all look really good and this back rim is in nice shape as well. Back tires have just as much tread as the front tires and of course on the suburbans it does have four-wheel disc brakes. Didn't see any denser dings on that rear quarter. As we come around to the back of the vehicle you'll notice it does have the full towing package and that the rear bumper is in really nice shape. You get a receiver hitch and seven pin wiring backup sensors. You get the power lift gate. So that lifts up like so. Back storage area is very clean. No rips or tears on the carpeting back here. That side window has the built-in antenna and those seats do come out pretty easy. So you have even more room. Press that button and it'll come on down for you. Didn't see any denser dings on that rear gate. And as we go around to this side of the vehicle just as clean as a passenger side, no denser dings on the rear quarter again. Very nice and clean and for full disclosure this back rim just about the same shape as the rest. Pretty nice. Didn't see any dense or dings on the doors and it does have the power folded mirrors with the built-in directional signals.  There are no rips. There are no tears on the seats. They're in really nice condition. Both these seats are heated and power. We have weather tech floor mats throughout. Power windows, power locks and power folding mirrors like so. Also power fold out and you do get memory driver seat. Factory brake controller, auto headlamps, and as we hop inside the vehicle here, you can see that this one has 42,879 miles instrument cluster is very nice and clean and it comes with a leather wrap steering wheel. No rips, tears, or scuffs on that. It has Bluetooth audio controls on the right and cruise controls on the left. Six-speed automatic transmission comes with the AM-FM and Sirius XM radio capabilities on the radio here.  You'll notice that the dash is in excellent shape. No cracks on that. Always something to look at with these Suburbans and Tahos with the black dash. A lot of times they will get really heated up in the summer and crack on you. So this one is in excellent shape on start capabilities and it does have the backup camera right there. You get your homelink system with your garage door security systems and lighting systems and then controls for your power sunroof. Headliners in really nice shape. Passenger seat, no rips or tears on that. That's in nice condition as well. That seat is also heated and you do get a weather tech format on that side. We will take a quick look at the back seats and then we'll check out under the hood. Back seats are just as clean as the front seats. These back seats are heated as well. No rips or tears on any of the seats back here. You do get rear air and audio controls to headphone jacks and they're your heated seat buttons. Weather tech formats covering just about every inch of the carpeting back here. These seats do fold up and then fold up like so to get to the third row. And speaking of that third row, no rips or tears back here. And in very nice condition. Smells very clean in this Suburban. I don't think it's ever been smoked in. And we'll take a quick look under the hood. I'd personally like to thank you for checking out the video today, hopefully from this HD video.  Under the hood we have the 5.3 liter V8 motor. Engine bay is very clean, runs very smooth. The Suburban has been fully safe and inspected by our service shop. Has a fresh oil and filter change. All the fluids have been checked and topped off. And it is 100% ready to go. To see more pictures of this Suburban or one of our other 450 new and used cars, trucks, SUVs, minivans, Wranglers, you name it we got it go to our website www.summitauto.com. Full pictures and descriptions of every single vehicle on our lot. Videos of every single used vehicle that we have all at summitauto.com. If you want to check out more HD videos you can go to youtube.com slash summit auto remember to like subscribe and share on this video and all the videos that you see there. In fact in a second you'll see a link to subscribe to our YouTube channel on your left. A link to more used inventory videos like this one on your right. And if you have not been to our website on the bottom link to this vehicle on our website click those check us out. We really look forward to helping you with this super clean 2013 Chevy Suburban. Thanks again.


A change of commander ceremony for Army recruitment took place in Brainerd today. During the ceremony, the outgoing commander hands the guide to the new commander who will take leadership of the soldiers. The military tradition includes physically passing the flag from one to the other representing a change in authority. Adam Rolick is the newest commanding officer in the Brainerd recruiting region. The Army has blessed me with so many opportunities. I'm a local to Minnesota, born and raised in St. Cloud and the Army has sent me back to northern Minnesota. I'm blessed with so many opportunities and now I get to share my experience up here. My recruiters are out there every day trying to share the Army experience and I'm just so blessed that I get to come back up north. The ceremony was held at Craigins Resort on Goal Lake. If you've enjoyed this segment of Lakeland News, please consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Lakeland Public Television.


I will now turn to the next item of business, which is a statement by Shirley-Anne Somerville on the implementation of best start grant. The cabinet secretary will take questions at the end of her statement, and I encourage all members who wish to ask a question to press their request to speak buttons as front as possible. Today I would like to provide a Parliament with an update on the introduction of the 7 – 7ramatic in scotland. I am delighted to say that the vast majority of carers allowing supplement payments were issued during September 2018 and all payments to carers, including those few that required special handling were processed by May-Deupctbull. I am also pleased to announce that being subject to the successful and timely transfer of data from the DWP, the next payment of carers allowance supplement will be made to the majority of qualifying carers on 14 December. Members of the Social Security Committee, who visited Social Security Scotland's headquarters in Dundee, saw the feedback wall with comments from those who had called in during September. I am sure that they will have been as touched as I was by some of those comments. I want to take this opportunity to tell Parliament about one woman who took the time to send in a card on receipt of her payment. She had given up her job to care for her daughter because her daughter was suffering from a long-term illness. As she says, she does this because she loves her daughter, but she also gets tired sometimes and that the payment had made her feel appreciated. We should all be proud of that, and I know that I speak on behalf of the chamber when I say that we all value and welcome what carers do for society. Today is International Children's Day, so I am particularly delighted to be able to tell you more about her progress to deliver the best start grant, which will support low-income families in the early years on such an appropriate day. I gave evidence on the best start grant regulations at the Social Security Committee at the start of October, and I am pleased that the committee and now Parliament have approved the regulations. They put in place a benefit that is fully in keeping with social security principles. It is an investment in the resilience of families, providing support at key points in their children's early years. It also respects the rights of the applicant and the rights of the child, ensuring the right to social security. BSG is deliberately designed to be accessible in terms of eligibility and the service that will support it, and we have improved access for BSG, giving families longer to apply both before and after their baby is born. In addition, BSG will foster dignity and respect, minimising intrusive questioning where possible by making the most of existing sources of information. Finally, BSG will have been built on modelling, research and collaboration with stakeholders, engagement with users to provide a sound evidence base for our decisions. This morning, I signed the commencement regulations for the relevant sections of the Social Security Scotland Act 2018, which gives Scottish ministers the powers to pay a form of early years assistance under the act. I am proud to announce that we will use our new powers to take applications for the best start pregnancy and baby grant from 10 December. I am delighted to say that that means that payments will be made before Christmas 2018. The best start grant will pay a £600 pregnancy and baby payment for the first child in a low-income family. That is £100 more than it would have got from the DWP Sure Start maternity grant that BSG replaces. Importantly, unlike the UK Government, the Government does not put a cap on children and payments will no longer be limited to the first child in the family. All second and subsequent children will also receive a payment of £300 each. Let me be clear that this is not just for second children born in the future. Our increase in window for applying means that, from 10 December, parents with a second or subsequent child who is not yet six months old can apply for the best start grant. Under the Scottish Government, those children will be eligible to receive up to £800 in the early years. They would, of course, have received nothing from the UK Government. In addition to the pregnancy and baby payments of £600, we are also committed to the introduction of two new additional payments for every child. Those payments will be introduced by summer 2019 and made at key transition points in a young child's life. That is £250 at around the time that a child can start nursery to support families with the costs of early learning and £250 around the time that a child can start school. Based on 2019-20 figures, when the early learning and school payments are added, we estimate that the total number of payments annually will be in the region of £39,000 at a cost of £12.1 million. That is a substantial investment to ensure that our under-fives get the best possible start in life and reflect this Government's emphasis on the early years. As outlined in our programme for government, I am delighted to be able to deliver the baby and pregnancy payments for BSG six months early, which of course means paying families on lower incomes more money more quickly, vital help at a time when they are seeking support through UK Government social security spending drastically reducing. While we are in the final stages of preparation and testing for the launch, that has not been without its challenges. As part of programme for government, the First Minister announced that, assuming DWP get the necessary systems in place, we would be accelerating delivery of the best start grant. Although I am pleased to have been able to confirm today that we will do that, the caveat about DWP activity proved to be well founded and, unfortunately, the DWP had not kept to schedule on its implementation plans. In the summer of 2017, the Scottish Government formally requested the use of the DWP's customer information system and a planning schedule for doing this was agreed in spring 2018. However, the dates for accessing the system have consistently slipped and, on 21 September, the DWP confirmed that it could no longer meet the most recently agreed dates. That has involved adjustments to our social security system to, in effect, unpick the computer code that had been put in place to speak to the DWP system. Despite the challenges arising from the DWP missing deadlines, Scottish Government officials have worked hard to put an alternative system in place due to our planning processes that implications of the delay to accessing the DWP's customer information system were recognised at an early stage. As a result of that, the impacts have been minimised. Under our contingency arrangements, it will take slightly longer to process applications, but that will not have any impact on parents or the delivery of payments. Our priority is to ensure that parents can access the best start grant, and, although we could wait for the DWP to catch up, I did not want parents to be affected by the DWP delay. Clearly, the DWP has its own challenges to grapple with right now. I have written to the new working pension secretary, Amber Rudd, to welcome her to her new role, and I have also taken the opportunity to reiterate the Scottish Government's call to halt the roll-out of universal credit, out of eight such letters in 18 months. I am committed to collaborating with the Secretary of State, however, to ensure that we develop the best possible systems and processes for our shared clients, and my officials have strong and effective relationships in place with their DWP counterparts. Where there can be a mismatch, however, is in the way that we prioritise this vital work on the devolution of social security benefits. I have and will continue to strongly urge that the devolution of benefits is given a higher priority within the DWP to ensure that such slippages are avoided and that we do not have a pattern developing. I am pleased to report the significant progress in building a new social security system for Scotland. As I have said, it is not without its challenges, but today marks another important milestone in the smooth transfer of benefits. However, our future success is only guaranteed if others also play their full part, primarily the DWP, if they do our programme will remain on track. I want to conclude by reassuring this chamber that we will never compromise on safety or security. Social Security Scotland is Scotland's first new public service in a generation. It has only been established for two and a half months, but we are already demonstrating what we can do with our social security powers when they are in our hands. Delivering a social security system that always treats people with the dignity and respect they deserve and ensuring that we support those on the lowest incomes. I look forward to reporting further progress in 2019. The cabinet secretary will now take questions. Can I thank the cabinet secretary for her advance sight of her statement? I am sure that this chamber and mothers across Scotland will welcome the roll-out before Christmas of the second of the devolved benefits that are coming to Social Security Scotland. Indeed, on the Social Security Committee's excellent visit to the Dundee HQ, we did indeed hear positive feedback from recipients of care that's allowance supplement. However, there was also some surprise from some recipients who were unaware that this new entitlement was coming. Can I therefore ask the cabinet secretary what actions will the Scottish Government be taking to publicise the best start grant and ensure that new mothers do not miss out on the grant because they are unaware of its existence? I think that that raises a very important point about encouraging take-up. I'll be frank, I would have liked to have been able to make this announcement to the Parliament earlier. However, because of the challenges that we have had around the contingency matters in Social Security Scotland, we needed to make sure, within the agency and the Government, that we were very confident about our start date. That is the earliest that it was possible to make the announcement because we have had to work a lot to ensure that the contingencies were in place. That therefore leaves us with a very important priority to ensure that people know what is happening. There have been a number of roadshows that have gone across the country that the agency has held to deal with those people who will be coming into contact with potentially eligible parents. We will also be ensuring that, as we did with the carers allowance supplement, there will be advertisements on local radio and in local papers. There has been a great deal of work dealing with professional bodies, including midwifery, nursing professions and local authorities, to ensure that the message has gone out to stakeholders, to those who will be in contact with potentially eligible parents and to ensure that we are trying to contact the eligible parents. We will make sure that the communications and marketing process goes on strongly and that we learn any lessons that we need to learn from that to encourage further take-up as the payments continue. Mark Griffin to be filled by Fulton MacGregor. I thank the cabinet secretary for the early sight of our statement and I am particularly grateful for the Government's willingness to use its powers to diverge from the two-child cap in Scotland and to provide support for families who have had a baby in these past six months. My daughter Eva turned three on Sunday and because of an in-service day yesterday started nursery this afternoon. She needed new trainers, new wellies, a bag, scarves and gloves, and she needed a change of clothes just as part of the list of things that she needed for starting nursery today. Those are things that we could afford, but for some of my daughter's new friends at nursery, families who face universal credit in North Lanarkshire, they could really do with that £250 payment just now. Will the cabinet secretary consider making payments to children turning three and starting nursery over the next six months to take pressure off struggling families on low incomes? Given that it is different to the school start term date at the end of the summer where children will be turning three gradually over the next six months and families will be under real pressure? Can I begin by wishing Eva a very happy birthday and sympathise with Mark Griffin that he is here listening to me rather than being there for the first day at nursery? You were there already. That is very impressive for your timekeeping as well. He raises a very important point about the money that is required. I am very reminded by a parent whom I spoke to when I was at One Parent Families Scotland, who were taking part in the stakeholder engagement around the best start grant, when they were telling me about a mother who could not afford to send the child to nursery because they could not afford to afford the plumsoles that they needed to be able to take part in that indoor play. I am very mindful of that and the importance of ensuring that we deliver the early learning payments and the school payments as quickly as possible. I will make further announcements to Parliament as soon as I am confident in when we can do that, but we expect to do that by the summer next year. I am also very mindful of the different timeframes that are involved in early learning and school, and I will look very seriously at that as with all those issues as we move forward with the second and third payments as part of the best start grant. How many families does the cabinet secretary anticipate will benefit by ensuring that there is no cap on children, and so second and subsequent children will be eligible for this small generous grant than the Decronyne UK Government scheme that it replaces? I am pleased to say that, out of our estimated total of 3,400 BSG pregnancy and baby payments, there are forecasts to be made by the end of this financial year. Around 2,000 are estimated to be for second or subsequent births. For the whole of the next financial year, 2019-20, we expect the number of second or subsequent births to benefit to be around 7,400. This is a substantial number of families that will get much needed financial support from the Scottish Government that is not available under the current DWP scheme and would not have been available had it not been for the devolution of powers. Alison Harris, to be filled by Pauline McNeill. I just asked the minister to please clarify, as Mark Griffin already asked, that if those children that are due to start nursery or school in 2019 will be eligible for or entitled to apply for these early year grants, or are you looking at something that perhaps might be backdated for them? I assure the member that, as I tried to do with Mark Griffin, I am very mindful of the different timetables that are available. Obviously, the Parliament and the committees will have an ability to look at what the Government is planning around our payments for this. If there are concerns around those aspects, I am happy to have that dialogue with me. We are keen to make sure that eligibility is as open and encouraging as possible. If there are lessons to learn, as I have said previously, and issues that we need to take on board, I am happy to look at that. Pauline McNeill, to be filled by George Adam. I would like to put on record that I welcome the Scottish Government's commitment that there will not be the two-child cap on this benefit. Former Cabinet Secretary, Jeane Freeman, supported the automation of certain benefits, where there is a qualifying benefit that can establish who is eligible for a West Art grant. Will the cabinet secretary give the same commitment to look at the provisions that we have already passed in the Social Security Act and in the Child Poverty Act, which promotes automated benefits to ensure that all those mothers and parents who are entitled to the best art grant can get it? I know Pauline McNeill, and a number of members have had a long running interest in it. I am determined to ensure that the Scottish Government looks at it very seriously. Our first priority has to be the implementation of the best art grant and ensuring that the payments and the processes are in place. I am also mindful of not simply looking at automation but also looking at ways in which we can encourage people to apply if we believe that they may be eligible for a payment. We are looking at automation very seriously. I know that there are a number of different schemes that are in different parts of the country, such as Glasgow, for example. I know that one of them is available for us to learn lessons from. We are also ensuring that we are using the information that we have as an agency to encourage people to apply for payments where we believe that they may be eligible. Those two different standards are aspects that I am very keen that the Scottish Government takes forward as stringently as possible. George Adam is to be followed by Patrick Harvie. I listened to the cabinet secretary's statement with interest and I was shocked to hear of the delays and slippages from the DWP impacting on the work plans and delivery of devolved benefits. With a new secretary of state for work and pensions now in post, does the cabinet secretary expect any change in the UK Government managing to keep to its actual agreed timetables? I hope that the new secretary of state takes the opportunity to ensure that we can have a shared understanding about the priorities for devolved benefits within the wider work that goes on within the DWP. As the member highlights, the delay with BSG has not been a one-off. I should also put on record, however, that my officials have a very strong relationship and strong working relationship with officials within the DWP. I stress again that this is about the prioritisation within the DWP and ensuring that we have a shared understanding of the importance and the fact that this is a shared project and a shared responsibility to ensure that we deliver it on time and effectively. I am grateful for the advance copy of the statement, and I am pleased that the Scottish Government is placing some emphasis on the goal of increasing uptake and setting some targets on that. Even if we reach those higher targets for uptake, there will still be a great many families who could be benefiting from this who will not be. I am keen to know what research the Government relies on to understand the reasons for low uptake. Awareness is obviously a critical one, but it is probably not the only factor that inhibits people from accessing the benefits to which they are entitled. Can the minister tell us what role income maximisation programmes such as healthier, wealthier children may have in helping to drive uptake even higher than the Government's targets? It is very important that we encourage uptake. I am also very mindful that we have to do a particular amount of work with particular groups that would not perhaps be encouraged normally to apply for payments or may indeed not know that those payments exist. I would hopefully give Patrick Harvey the reassurance that we are not just looking at take-up in the round, but we are also looking at the specific challenges that certain communities will face in ensuring that they know what is available to them. He mentioned, for example, the healthy, wealthier children, which is an important aspect, because it is trying to embed knowledge of the best start grant into pathways that already exist. That is indeed one of those. I am also mindful of the work that is being done within financial health checks for those on low incomes and building information on the best start grant to ready steady baby, which is another way to move that forward. The forecasting that goes on within the Government looks very seriously at the issue and the different types of challenges that different communities will face. We will, of course, uptake Parliament on our continued work around the take-up strategy in due course. I am grateful to the cabinet secretary for early sight of her statement and associate those benches with what her Government is doing here. I particularly welcome the provision being made for young parents, whereby parents under the age of 18 will not need a qualifying benefit to apply for a best start grant. What consideration would she give to extending that provision to people of care who are experienced up to the age of 25, given that such young people often do not have the support of parents to lean on, as most other new families do? Alex Cole-Hamilton will be very aware of the importance that the Government has on ensuring that we are delivering for care-experienced young people. The information that we have analysed as part of the best start grant regulation process will ensure that I am confident that the vast, vast majority of those who are care-experienced young people will be included within the eligibility framework that we already have in place through the regulations. I tie in to the point that Patrick Harvie made. It is therefore important that we link into the agencies that care-experienced young people trust to ensure that they have the information about best start grants so that they can get that information out directly. Taking that too-pronged approach, I am confident that we are delivering for young parents and for those with care-experienced in particular. I welcome the Government's commitment to extending eligibility in various ways to the best start grant. The additional payments that will be made is worth the length of time that we will now be given to apply for this grant. Can I ask you how many more children that the Cabinet Secretary estimates will benefit from the best start grant compared with the UK system of benefits that it replaces? Can you provide any additional information regarding those welcome extensions? The member is correct to point to the fact that the Government has extended eligibility and the application window. The focus of that is to ensure that we are making it easier for people to access and apply for the best start grant. We estimate that that will mean that around 400 additional pregnancy and baby payments could be made in 2019-20. On eligibility, for example, we have extended the qualifying benefits so that anyone on a tax credit or housing benefit can qualify. We have removed the requirement for a qualifying benefit for young mothers under 18, as Alex Cole-Hamilton has just alluded to. We have extended our responsibility test to kinship carers who have a DWP benefit for the child that they care for. The application window is extended so that BSG can be claimed from the 24th week of pregnancy as opposed to DWP's 29 weeks and increased to six months after birth, giving parents longer to apply. Annie Wells, to be followed by Jenny Gilruth. Thank you. I, too, welcome the announcements made in today's statement. Can I ask will the cabinet secretary consider using the best start grant application process as an opportunity to reach out to expectant and new mothers and provide information on wider issues such as perinatal mental health? As I mentioned in my previous answers, we will be ensuring that we are embedding the best start grant process into the pathways that are already there for expectant parents. We are ensuring that we are speaking to and encouraging midwives, for example, and those who are in contact with potentially eligible parents to encourage take-up of the process. At this point, we are also integrating the systems for delivering best start grants with best start foods. They will both be administered for Social Security Scotland so that clients will only be required to complete one application form in yet another attempt to ensure that we are making the process easier for parents at a very busy time of their lives. Jenny Gilruth, to be followed by Elaine Smith. Given that the DWP's Sure Start maternity grant has one of the lowest rates of take-up of any benefit, will the Scottish Government commit to ensuring that the best start grant is straightforward for claimants to access? I can testify to the fact that there is a very easy application process that has not gone through the online application process recently with officials as part of our go-live testing. Unlike the payment that it is replacing, this benefit can be applied for online in a very simple form, but it can also be undertaken by phone, as well as in a paper format. That includes, therefore, that we are encouraging a greater choice, depending on the needs of the client. That put together with the items that I have already discussed in previous answers, will I hope to give Jenny Gilruth reassurance that we are taking very seriously the challenge that the Sure Start maternity grant does, as she said, have one of the lowest rates of take-up of any benefit, and that is not something that we want to replicate in the slightest with the best start grant. Elaine Smith, to be followed by David Jones. I welcome today's statement, and particularly the fact that the best start grant very clearly opposes the despicable Tory child cap policy approach to social security. However, given the cross-cutting nature of poverty, will the cabinet secretary encourage her Government colleague, the Cabinet Secretary for Education, to consider changing the criteria for post-P3 free school meals to the same as the best start grant, so that the tip 2 applies to more families with children and not just those on the very lowest incomes? We started as a basis for the best start grant to ensure that those that were eligible for the Sure Start maternity grants were eligible for BSG and then looked to see whether further changes needed to be made for that. I do appreciate where Elaine Smith is coming from, that there are different eligibility for different payments with regard to different benefits that are available to those with young children. I am also mindful to ensure that it is not necessarily a bad thing that there are different eligibility, because where I do not want to see is any cliff edge where people either have the ability to apply for everything or they reach the point where they can apply for nothing. I am mindful of any cliff edges in terms of how we treat that. However, I take the point that those are two distinct eligibility, and we look very seriously at both our eligibility for the best start grant, as I am sure the cabinet secretary for education does for free school meals. Can the cabinet secretary confirm what plans the Government has placed for multi-birth families that face additional expenses by having twins or triplets? That is an area where we have specifically wanted to address the particular costs around a multiple birth, and that is why we have introduced a multiple birth supplement of £300 of anacheg addition of those additional costs. If it is a twin birth, which the majority are, the payment made would be £600 for the first birth, £200 for the second birth, as well as the £300 multiple pregnancy supplement, given a total of £1,200 in financial support. I stress again that we always recognise that subsequent children are born within our payments, as there will never be a cap on children under social security Scotland. Thank you very much, and that concludes our statement on the implementation of the best start grant. We will move now on to the next item of business, which is a debate in the name of Kate Forbes, on developing Scotland's digital industries for our economic future. We will just take a few moments for the cabinet ministers and members to change seats.


The Minnesota DNR has added several interactive experiences to its popular state fair exhibit. The new exhibits in the forestry wing are the second and last phase of a three-year project. They're located inside the Bain DNR building. This year's exhibit features a giant hiking boot that can be stepped into and crawled on for photo opportunities. We are inviting people to step into a Minnesota forest. To encourage people to do that we've created a giant boot and the best photo op this year at the state fair. People can crawl inside and get their photo taken with great fall color leaves behind them. The boot itself is about eight feet long and almost five feet tall at the top. Spending displays located on either side of the boot highlight the many recreational opportunities available in Minnesota's 59 state forests. Other interactive opportunities include a chance to explore a life-size white pine tree complete with the roots that a person can walk on and learn how forests create clean water. If you've enjoyed this segment of Lakeland News please consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Lakeland Public Television.