Welcome everybody. So bourgeois analysts, reformists and postmodern academics alike are all talking about this supposed culture war that apparently dominates politics today. And as Carla said in her introduction, they describe phenomena like Brexit and also the recent resurgence of that life's matter amongst other things as evidence of a clash between this socially conservative older layer of society on one side. And socially liberal younger woke layers on the other. And as she also said this view sidelines economic class as the main dividing line in society in favor of cultural values, and the culture war is presented as a novel way of dealing with politics in a new era. But in actual fact this is age old denial of class struggle reheated and resold in the language of identity politics, because the truth is class struggle is on the agenda today like never before. In the last year, you had back to back insurrectionary movements and revolution in one country after another too many for me to list. And now the deepest crisis in capitalism's history has been triggered by the coronavirus pandemic, which has brutally exposed class antagonisms. You've got the poor dying in droves or having their lives ruined their livelihoods destroyed, while the rich get even richer. There's been billions of people to question a system that shamelessly puts profits before human lives, and the workers and youth are increasingly open to socialism and revolution and revolutionary ideas, even in the USA the belly of the beast as we all heard in the wonderful plenary last night, according to a few polls, nearly half the population would vote for a socialist president and the majority of young people would vote for socialist president and a third would vote for a communist president. The mood of anger and desire for radical change in society hasn't resulted in an explosion of class conflict already. That's only because of the bankruptcy of the leadership of the workers movement who have utterly failed at every step to give the working class any sort of lead. So I'd say forget culture war class war will define the 21st century, provided bold leadership comes to the fore, only the Marxist theory of class struggle can make sense of the current period and offer a road out of the nightmare the capitalism has conjured up. So culture war. The term was actually coined by a US sociologist called James Davidson Hunter, and he adapted it from Otto von Bismarck's cultural comp, which was his persecution of Catholics during German unification in the 1870s that exploited religious divisions to divert the attention of the masses away from political struggle and important democratic tasks at that time. So Hunter published his main book, culture wars the struggle to define America in 1991, the same year that Francis Fukuyama famously declared the end of history. And it's no coincidence that these two analyses came together, because with the collapse of the USSR, the beginning of the 90s, bourgeois commentators were tripping over themselves to declare socialism and class struggle tried and failed. And Hunter argue that the fall of the Soviet Union had caused the axis of political conflict in the USA to shift from left versus rights to traditional versus progressive, in other words, conservative religious Republicans versus progressive Democrats. And this culture war was a continuation of the social divisions over women and gay liberation movements of the 80s, anti war protests and civil rights struggles in the 60s and 70s. And of course this analysis divorces all these movements from class content reducing them to just a battle of differing values and subsequent writers have argued that the culture wars increasingly played out online in the 2000s, with the anonymity of the internet giving people freedom to express more and more extreme reactionary views openly, leading to these massive battles between right wing trolls and so called social justice warriors on social media or message boards and so on. And by 2020 the analysis holds that conservative authoritarians have now entrenched their grip on political power assisted by an online army of reactionaries and also mainstream right wing media moguls like Robert Rupert Murdoch. The analysis points to demagogues like Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, winning power by appealing to nationalism to racism, blaming migrants minority groups or social problems and so on. He also argues that traditionalists in the manner that was previously described teamed up with right wing libertarians to attack politically correct progressives for controlling what people are allowed to say and think, all while authoritarian politicians curtailed democratic and political rights for oppressed groups. These authoritarians distract the population by creating bogeymen out of groups like anti fair and black lives matter for threatening peace and security, while at the same time supporting far right vigilante to attack and kill them in defense of private property. We also have movements like the so called alt rights which contains clear fascist overtones with shock jocks like Steve Bannon Ben Shapiro spinning conspiracy theories about cultural Marxist undermining Western civilization and the COVID-19 pandemic has also been dragged into the culture war, as we've seen by the likes of Donald Trump exploiting the anxiety of precarious lower class lower middle class. By suggesting that the virus is exaggerated by liberals or by China to undermine personal freedoms. Now, none of this is actually particularly new. We've seen these processes unfold before. Many times in history, the bourgeoisie have divided the population on cultural lines, creating situations where opportunistic demagogues can advance themselves. And I would say that all this recent culture war actually describes is the fall out from the collapse of the liberal center ground in the last couple of decades after the capitalist system it upholds provided nothing but years of rising inequality and misery. The liberal wing of the establishment actually had nothing to do with winning advances for workers for youth for minority groups in the first place, all of this was accomplished by class struggle from below. The system granted concessions in times of relative stability, but that's a thing of the past, we're now in a period of crisis, and the bourgeoisie have to squeeze workers and youth through pay cuts, layoffs, reduction of rights and rising living costs to preserved profits. And when the liberals and the reformists have been in charge in the last period, they've carried out these tasks of the ruling class dutifully attacking workers, while at the same time preaching the values of inclusion and political correctness which has totally changed and amongst some layers those values themselves. After the 2008 crisis, the ruling class was forced to divert rising anger over cuts and austerity towards scapegoats, particularly migrant workers, and now they've lost control over the ugly forces that they put into the surface. And the most degenerate layer of the ruling class is now in the driver's seat people who are happy to exploit the worst instincts of the most backwards and reactionary layers of society, and trample all over the bourgeoisie's own democratic institutions to pursue their narrow interests. Now you see Donald Trump, right now threatening to mobilize the far right proud boys to contest the election result in the USA if he loses. There was a conscious plan by some cabal of authoritarians in the way the hunter suggests these are symptoms of capitalist degeneration and resulting social polarization. That's what's destroyed the basis for the centergrounds. The big bourgeois serious wing of the bourgeois and their mouthpieces are desperate for stability, but their only solution is to promote a democratic establishment that is hated and discredited. And they sometimes try to fight the culture war themselves by disingenuously pandering the diversity like when Disney donated chump change to the NAACP or Sony put a BLM theme on the PlayStation five or Democratic speaker Nancy Pelosi war West African can take a lot in solidarity with BLM this disgusting hypocrisy by agents of the very same exploitative oppressive capitalist system and the reformists for their part. Can't see any way else. They're despairing at a lack of results from class struggle. And as a result sections of them have fully embraced the culture war, and this also has precedence. In the 1960s, for example, the Euro communist splits from the Stalinist Communist Party in Britain, influenced by a very selective reading of the weakest side of Gramsci declared that the old class struggle methods were outdated. This was a particularly common view amongst their student wing and more petty bourgeois wing, and instead they turned towards so called cultural politics as they put it, chasing after feminist movements environmentalism community support groups and so on. Basically, activism identity politics divorced from class struggle. They were hunting for shortcuts in effect because they were frustrated with the lack of results from the working class, and the same basic idea prevails today. And having abandoned real class analysis and methods. All the reformists can do is mirror the liberal wing of the bourgeois, you know, tutting about the nasty political climate, fighting back with impotent identity politics, calling on workers and youth to support lesser evil bourgeois candidates and elections, while offering no hope and no plan for tangible improvements. And this class collaboration and tokenism actually empowers the right wing of the so called culture war, because it makes them look like a radical representative to the despised status quo that the reformists and liberals are propping up. You know, Johnson exploited this mood over Brexit, when he was proging parliament and so on, and taking on the courts. He presented himself as standing up from the for the common man and speaking truth to power. Another thing to understand, I would say, is that society is polarizing drastically under a crisis that has hit workers and the middle classes as well, with the worst decline in living standards in 200 years. And in the absence of bold leadership from the left. It's the demagogic rights that has been able to profit from this by appealing in a distorted way to sections of society that are fed up with the status quo, and they get away with it because the left haven't explained the truth. They haven't drawn out the class issues. They haven't pointed their fingers at the bankers and the bosses are failing to invest for creating more job failing to create more jobs and so on. When Nigel Farage was blaming migrants for taking jobs off British workers in 2010 and 2015. What was Labour doing, Labour was agreeing with him and putting anti migrant slogans on its mugs. When progressive Scottish workers and youth voted to leave the UK to stick it to Westminster, what did Labour do? They joined the Tories on their platform defending the Union of the UK. And where there have been political leaders offering consistent opposition from the left, like Jeremy Corbyn, at least until the Blair rights destroyed him, they've proved very popular. Because the class struggle hasn't been overtaken by the culture war. What's happened is capitalism in its state of seen our decay has dredged scum up to the surface, and nobody is offering workers and youth a class based alternative. There's a clear influence of postmodernism and identity politics on the theory of culture war. We've got lots of articles and videos about these topics on on on marxist.com to flesh this out. I just recently called the new working class by Claire Ainslie, who's just recently been taken on as a circus Dharma leader of the Labour Party's new policy advisor. And she starts by saying the following social class is not a fixed concept, but a construct with a purpose dependent on context. Ainslie and postmodern writers that she draws on mainly people like Pierre Bourdeau class is something you identify as alongside race, gender, sexuality, and so on. And from this idealist perspective, the old view of class is out of touch, and she further writes in the days when the working class was politically organized in the form of trade unions, easy to address as a mass in factories and would respond to working class. Democratic representation and communication had a more linear path. Today, any party wanting to appeal to the new working class needs to have a firsthand understanding of the Democrat demographics, pardon me, affiliations and identities of the diverse peoples who comprise this large constituency. As previously noted, the fact that this group doesn't identify as a coherent whole doesn't mean it doesn't exist, but it cannot be tied into a convenient identity group. I'll apologize in advance I'll be quoting a lot of nonsense over the course of this talk. But we should say at least the working class exists for Ainslie, which is better than some of her ilk, but it's splintered into different identities, the traditional working class, the new working class, the precariat and so on. She further says, picturing a typical working class person in Britain 30 or 40 years ago, would probably have brought to mind a worker employed in a large workplace, like a factory doing partly skilled manual work. Most likely a man and most likely whites. That has all changed. The new working class undertake hundreds of different types of jobs in today's economy, employed as cleaners, shop workers, bartenders, cooks, carers, teaching assistants, secretaries, delivery workers, and so on. I'm pretty sure all those jobs have existed for more than 30 to 40 years, but there we go. Her analysis is actually every bit as rigid and dogmatic as the old view of class she mischaracterizes. All it does is replace the working class as one static homogenous group with four or five static homogenous groups. And as a matter of fact, Marxist aren't trying to tidy class into an entity group as you suggest. We've never said the working class is one that unitary mass. There are different kinds of work, different backgrounds, different traditions, different levels of class consciousness. There are more advanced and backward layers, more and less exploited and deprived layers within the working class. But nevertheless, we argue that class is an objective social relation to the means of production.  You can identify as whatever you like, but that is a material facts, and there's no new working class. There's just one that is more thoroughly exploited than in the past, as a result of the crisis of capitalism. It is true that the trade union movement has been weakened over the course of years by the portrayals of its leaders. And it's also true that industrial working class communities have been decimated by deindustrialization and by austerity. And all of this has an effect on the class struggle, on the confidence and consciousness of layers of the working class, but class remains a material fact, and it's still in the interests of the entire working class to fight collectively for its shared interests. The journalist, economist, self-described Marxist and now seemingly circused arm's biggest fan, Paul Mason, who I'm sure you've heard of, also embraces the culture war, and he explicitly attacks the orthodox Marx's view of class. He says that the 2019 general election shattered a theory of class struggle that no longer describes reality in which any cultural disconnect between workers in the left can be overcome with left-wing economic policies. And so on. The working class is bifurcating into two distinct and sometimes culturally hostile groups. This is evidenced by the collapse of labour support in small town, ex-industrial communities, simultaneously with its loss of support amongst young educated workers in the cities to the regions, Lib Dems and nationalists. But if we go back just two years to the 2017 election, labour running on a left-wing programme under the same left-wing leader won the majority in all working layers of society. The Tories only beat them amongst retirees. So when the left leaders are for actual opposition on class lines, surface level divisions can be overcome. Of course, eventually Corbyn was driven to defeat, and there are reasons for that that I won't describe here. But the point is, Mason and Ainsley ignore this point. And in fact, incredibly, Ainsley's book came out just after the 2017 general election. She must have been writing it while it was happening. And it barely mentions the fact that Corbyn won Labour's best results since 1945. I can't imagine why. Perhaps it would undermine her conclusions. Okay, so the working class has changed and class struggle is a thing of the past. Why is this? Well, according to Mason and to Ainsley, the period of so-called neoliberalism since the 1980s has destroyed the old basis for an organised working class. These large communities based around full-time work in industrial production. What's certainly true that after the Second World War, the capitalists increasingly went after profitable short-term speculation rather than investing in real production and sold off big sections of industry, and that of course accelerated in the past year. It's also true that the crisis of overproduction has led to an epidemic of unemployment and underemployments. Millions of people are now in part-time work compared to the past and bogus self-employment as well in the gig economy and so on. But rather than offering any resistance to this, the Labour movement leaders rolled over and accepted the new normal, the Blair acts in the Labour Party in particular becoming enthusiastic agents of the capitalist system. This so-called period of neoliberalism is just symptomatic of the capitalist crisis of overproduction being dumped on the shoulders of the working class following the end of the post-war boom, which saw a 30-year relative increase in prosperity. And Mason goes one further, arguing that the experience of neoliberalism has changed the consciousness of the working class for the worse. He asks why, for instance, despite plenty of provocations and consistent attacks on wages and living standards, workers in Britain haven't revolted in the neoliberal period. And he explains, fear of change, political consumerism. How long, sorry? That's fine. Fear of change, political consumerism, weak organisational loyalty and psychological insecurity coupled with multi-generational experience of defeats and four decades of market atomisation have made workers more conservative, basically because they're afraid of losing what they've got. Now, of course, the most oppressed layers of the working class, with the least to lose, can often be the most radical. Look at the Russian Revolution, look at the revolution in Sudan last year. And consciousness, we accept, has always been and will always be fundamentally very conservative. It takes a lot for people to risk pay, to risk their livelihoods and homes, to go out and fight. And more to the point, why would they bother when there's nobody leading the way or inspiring confidence? Again, the rotten role of the workers' leadership over the last few decades has far more to do with this situation than any neoliberal ideology on workers' part. Mason also says that the capitalists have started exploiting workers in new ways. No longer just work, but interest payments, rents, gambling profits, overpricing of goods, services provided by unchallengeable monopolies, the commercialisation and privatisation of previously public goods, services and spaces, and the enclosure of the commons. So, capitalists exploit workers through rents, interest, monopolisation and privatisation. These are hardly new developments. This has been going on for quite a while, like long preceding the so-called neoliberal period. But nevertheless, all of this tots up to an identity that Mason calls the neoliberal self, which is based on individualism, hedonism, fatalism, and where people are defined by what they have consumed, not where they work, almost premised on the idea that the market is an intelligent machine that knows better than any individual human brain. Now, once again, this is not a new idea. And those of you who attended Daniel's talk on academic Marxism will remember his analysis at the Frankfurt School, where you have these petty bourgeois pseudo-Marxist academics in the 1920s, who were basically incredibly pessimistic of what they saw as a lull in the workers' movements, and drew the conclusion that consumerism, pop culture, and so on, had turned the working class into mindless, apathetic zombies incapable of struggle, and actually kind of in love with authoritarianism. Well, I think it's fair to say that a bit more class struggle went on in the 20th century after that. I mean, these were similar to the conclusions that sections of the left and so-called Marxists were making of the French working class. They said they were bourgeois-rified and stupefied by washing machines and hoovers, before they launched one of the greatest revolutions and revolutionary movements in living memory at the time. But nevertheless, Mason goes on to describe the so-called traditional working class, which he characterizes as older people in the north of England's, the Midlands and Wales, who he defines as hopelessly brainwashed and conservative. He says, the former industrial working class in the Midlands and the north has detached itself from the values that are now core to our party. We are now fighting a strong and virulent nativism, the assumption by older white workers that their family history entitles them to go to the front of the cube, public services, and veto over who can live and work in their community. Pardon me. By contrast, he says, the new diverse network workforce of the big cities and their struggles over wages, rents, zero hours, women's rights, migration rights, LGBTQ plus issues and above all the climate is the strongest agent of change we have. Now, if there's a grain of truth in this analysis, there has been a massive and widening economic generational divide opening up in the last period with younger workers bearing the brunt of the crisis of capitalism in the form of under employment and debt. It's also true that compared to the past, the youth and students are increasingly proletarian eyes and radicalizing to the left, but all Mason's analysis really shows is his contempt is really quite toxic contempt for a whole swath of the working class who as far as he is concerned, is concerned, are beyond help. And to be clear, do Marxist think that workers can't have racist views of course we don't think that's course workers can have racist views we don't we don't prettify or or fetishize the working class. But the shared interest in fighting collectively against common exploitation can cut across these prejudices, you see this in any strike, and the unified working class in struggle is the only force that's capable of ultimately eradicating racism and oppression at their source which is the capitalist system itself. And as far as the, you know, the inoculated racist northern working class goes right now with Johnson's election promises abandoned in the north. And with northern towns and cities placed under onerous lockdowns. So is he a rising class anger amongst the so called traditional working class that could be exploited and directed in a positive progressive direction by left leadership if one existed that was willing to take on that task. Accepting all of this, for the sake of argument, how does the left fight this culture war. Ainsley tells us that because the working class is more disparate more atomized and occupies multiple social identities we need, I quote, a shift towards new organizing principles away from social class based on national identity, or progressive values. So basically it's not so much a case of what you're selling as much as how you sell it. This is post modern idealism in a nutshell, the idea that you can change political reality by playing around with words. But okay, what sort of values do we need. Well, Keir Starmer's new head of policy after much thought and research concludes the values the voters rates highest across all social classes in Britain today are family, fairness, hard work and decency, followed by equality and freedom. I mean, this is hardly earth shattering stuff is it. These are completely hollow phrases that could be filled with any content that you like. And then surprisingly she fills it with reformist content, advocating mixed economy of states market and individual responsibility, but we've had that for decades in various forms and looks where it's brought us to precisely the problems she's trying to solve. Jason agrees with Ainsley's diagnosis in the main, but he actually doubles down on the cultural or even harder. He says British politics, and now primarily influenced by values, not single class identities or raw economic interests. We can't reverse our way out of that situation or ignore it. We have to fight our way through it to a more advantageous situation. Now, Marxist accept that culture tradition and so on. We have an effect on politics. We're not vulgar economic determinists, but economic interests are the determining factor in the last analysis, even comparatively inactive layers of the working class can be and are pulled into collective struggle in which really comes to shove. Look at the suburban commuters who triggered the Gilles Jean protest in France recently, for example. And again, this deeply fractured value orientated working class that makes and describes and criticizes voted on mass for labor in 2017. And it wasn't Corbyn's ability to tell nice convincing stories that led to his popularity was his anti austerity program that was presented as a genuine alternative to the triangulation and betrayals of new labor and the Liberals, and also the the the brute austerity of the Tory party in the coalition government. The culture war boils down in the last analysis to reactionary identity politics, abandoning class struggle and fighting on the basis of the same divide and rule created by the bosses in the first place. These are the conclusions of pessimistic solipsistic petty bourgeois renegades who don't understand politics anything but the very surface level. They can't handle the contradiction of workers voting against their interests.  So unsurprisingly Mason in particular sees the Brexit votes as strong evidence of his arguments. He thinks that the vote to leave the EU by millions of traditional working class people showed that they embraced reactionary nationalism and abandoned left wing politics, although many of them voted for Corbyn's left wing program in 2017, being won over from parties like UKIP in parts, because later promised to accept the results of the referendum. And these same layers are now rapidly turning against Johnson. Now, we've spoken about this at length and written about it as well. There are lots of reasons to the Brexit votes and racism and anti migrant sentiments were definitely a part of it. There's no question about that. But it was also seen as a chance to give Westminster a kicking after communities in the so called red wall were hit by decades of cuts on austerity, usually carried out by Labour councils as a matter of fact. Brexit was in part a protest against an establishment that was correctly felt to have ignored these people. By accepting a second referendum position, which Mason by the way pushed very hard for Labour became indelibly identified with this hated establishments, and that coupled with Corbyn's weakness and resisting the Blairites who were undermining him is ultimately the reason why they lost in 15 minutes gone. Thank you. So Mason and Ainsley both conclude that Brexit shows that class based economic arguments have failed, and their values based alternative boils down to moving to the right. Basically, it's a case if you can't beat them join them. Ainsley says that legitimate concerns, always a popular phrase over immigration means that a points based system for migration should be introduced, which meets the needs of employers and the public alike. In other words, she advocates reactionary attacks on migrants in her view because the working class don't like migrants. Mason goes a lot further. He says that not only should Labour accept the limits on immigration, but also, I quotes, reassure traditional working class communities that we support NATO, the nuclear deterrence, a well equipped military rooted in civil society, a police force that cares about the victims of crime, and an intelligence service that can fight terrorism effectively. So, in addition to accepting attacks on immigrants, we also need to get behind British imperialism and the oppressive capitalist states at a time when thousands of progressive youth in particular, and workers as well, have recently hit the streets to protest racist police violence, although looking at Labour's abstention on the war crimes bill and the spy cuts bill it does seem that Starmer has been taking Mason's advice to heart. On top of all this, Mason advocates meeting, as he says, the combined force of the right and far right with a class collaboration is packed at the left and the centre, in other words, lining up with the Liberals. This kind of popular frontism has never worked once in history. Every single time this strategy has been attempted, the Liberals have betrayed the working class because their material interests ultimately align with the capitalist system and not with the working class. And that's not a question of values. That's a fact. It's especially absurd as a conclusion to draw, looking at the last five years in which the Blairites and Liberals have led a relentless dirty war against the left. While Corbyn bent over backwards to win them over, to no avail. And now Starmer is kicking all left wingers out of positions of authority in the Labour Party to the likes of the hedge fund managers who financed his campaign. The centre has no interest in allying with the left. Meanwhile, Starmer is fighting the culture war as it were by embracing patriotism, which flows from the empirical logic of the Labour right wing. Well, Corbyn was rejected because he wasn't seen as loyal enough to the country. He seems to be more interested in people who are suffering very, very far away than watching the Queen's speech and bowing to the centre taff. Therefore, Labour needs to outtory the Tories on patriotism, pandering the socially conservative so-called blue Labour values of Queen and country. This opportunism, I don't think it's going to work. All it'll do is push Johnson the Tories even further to the right. But Mason defends this move in terms of the culture war, in terms of talking to patriotic workers in language they understand to sneak left wing policies into the system. Now, first of all, these policies are nowhere to be seen from Labour under Keir Starmer, as a matter of fact, their policy programme so far has been very right wing. And moreover, abandoning the language of class in favour of chauvinism and nationalism won't change the class content of that language. All it does is provide a left cover for these poisonous ideas, allowing them to more effectively distract and disarm the workers. In reality, if Labour did win a general election on the basis of subordinating itself to the interests of the capitalists and their language, that will just mean it will have to obey the logic of the capitalist system from government and carry out cuts in attacks on workers. So, Mason's pragmatism amounts to less than nothing. All it will see, at best, is Labour discredited from within power. There are so many social democratic parties across the world. Marxists have been having similar arguments with opportunists in the labour movements for decades, for centuries even. I was reading Lenin's polemics against the Mensheviks and social chauvinists like Kautsky, who advocated class collaboration and defence of the fatherland during the First World War. Likewise, advocacy of class collaboration, abandonment of the idea of socialist revolution and revolutionary methods of struggle, adaptation to bourgeois nationalism, losing sight of the fact that the borderlines of nationality and country are historically transient, making a fetish of bourgeois legality, renunciation of the class viewpoint and the class struggle for fear of repelling the broad masses of the population. And these, without doubt, are the ideological foundations of opportunism. Now this was written in 1914, but it could have been written about Paul Mason in 2020, although at the very least Kautsky and his ilk, you could argue had heads to lose, unlike Paul Mason. And then goes on, it is from such soil of opportunism that the present chauvinist and patriotic frame of mind of most second international leaders has developed the war has merely brought out rapidly and saliently the true measure of this prevalence. The parallels today with the crisis triggered by the Coronavirus pandemic, which is often spoken about in terms of a war, then as now, the opportunists in the labour movement couldn't see under the surface. Far from being hypnotised by nationalism and defence of the fatherland during the First World War, the experience of that brutal conflict pushed workers to the brink of world revolution. Today, we're on the precipice of the biggest crisis in the history of capitalism, a slump that will dwarf as already dwarfed 2008, that will dwarf 1929. You'll see double digits wiped off the GDPs of the richest countries, tens of millions of jobs to be lost. The status quo turned upside down for billions. The way the ruling class has bungled the crisis in one country after another is creating a huge groundswell of radicalisation and discontent. This won't be expressed right away or all at once. There's always a lag between consciousness and action, but it will inevitably come to the surface. So while Mason Ainsley and the cultural analysts are worrying about how far right they have to move on patriotism and immigration to win the next election, over in the USA, 10% of the population participated in the insurrectionary Black Lives Matter movement, which sent shockwaves worldwide where we saw kids throwing statues of slave owners in Britain, in Bristol, into rivers. And on top of that, you've had a second revolutionary movements in Lebanon. The red October we saw last year in Latin America is starting to heat up again. We've seen workers revolting in Thailand, Indonesia and Nigeria. And in Britain, the reactionary incompetent Tory government has presided over the worst death toll from COVID-19 in Europe, and is now literally stealing food from children's mouths, all while rewarding themselves with pay rises. This will absolutely antagonise people on class basis. It will absolutely draw starker and starker class lines in society. And in my view, this culture war will be cut across very quickly in the next few years. It's already being cut across. I frankly think this kind of language is rather outdated right now. Because the working class won't accept the destruction of their livelihoods, well-being and conditions, just because the bosses and labour bureaucrats wave the national flag. This process won't be a straight line. We will see radicalisation both to the left and to the right in the next period, but class collaboration and nationalist pandering will get us nowhere. This liberal post-modern obsession with values and narrative, all it does is artificially divide workers against one another. It's an admission of defeat and despair by people with absolutely no understanding of the working class whose values they claim to accommodate. So I say, let's let the clever academics keep their culture war. We'll stand on the firm foundation of the Marxist theory of class struggle, which calls for nothing less than the entire working class to unite and overthrow this rotten system. And I'll end with Lenin who wrote that the working class cannot play its world revolutionary role unless it wages a ruthless struggle against this backsliding, spinelessness, subservience to opportunism and unparalleled vulgarisation of the theories of Marxism. And this ruthless struggle is precisely what the international Marxist tendency and socialist appeal must wage. It's the importance of all of the theoretical discussions we've been having today and over the course of this school. We have to arm ourselves with the real ideas of class struggle, take them into the movement, cut through the nonsense and win the best layers of the workers and youth to our banner so we can build a revolutionary organisation capable of transforming society for the better. And that task, especially in the midst of this terrible pandemic, has never been more urgent. Thank you comrades.


I'm proud to be one of the backers of the Aotearoa Free Speech Coalition. It's probably fair to say I don't have a hell of a lot in common with the likes of Don Brash or even Chris Trotter or any other members of the Coalition. I'm not famous, I'm not particularly accomplished. Honestly, I'm just pretty much a random who's turned up here.  If our three governing parties all got together for drinks, I'm pretty sure they'd find something to argue about. But, something's obviously uniting them, as is the case with the Free Speech Coalition. Activists often say this is something that affects all of us, but I don't think it could be any more true than when it comes to freedom of speech. I would consider myself to be a progressive. And when I see other self-described progressives wanting to place limits on and make exceptions for freedom of speech, I would like to remind them that more often than not, progress starts with dissent. Just because you're sitting comfortably with the majority today doesn't mean you will be tomorrow. And anyone who studied their history will know there had been many times when the majority had gotten it wrong. For action against the Auckland Council, because I don't believe a public servant like Bill Gough should be able to pick and choose who is allowed a platform and who is not in order to satisfy the mainstream political attitude of the day. The Council's justification for the decision was that a so-called peace action was threatening to a tenner at the event was to go ahead. So it was in everybody's best interest just to shut it down. That is a cowardly and dangerous precedent. Controversy comes with freedom to think. It is an essential part of how we communicate, learn and grow. Sharing our thoughts with other human beings like I'm sharing my review now and receiving feedback on those thoughts is how we develop our ideas and beliefs. It is how we self-reflect. We voice our thoughts, we find out what others think of them and then we can analyse, re-evaluate them and change our minds accordingly. Freedom of speech is the fundamental means by which a civil society settles its differences of opinion. It is what gives us the ability to question, challenge and oppose the powers that be. Without freedom of speech, there would be no civil rights movement. There would be no liberation of marginalised groups or recalling of archaic laws. There would be no change, no progress. Protecting freedom of speech sometimes means defending the rights of people you disagree with to express views you may personally find apparent. But objectionable speech is to be debated, reasoned and argued with, not censored or banned. It is not up to the government to decide which speech divides and which unites. We all know, if it ever looks back kindly on those who try to eliminate dissent and thought, the word Nazi has been thrown around very casually with regard to these speakers, in my opinion disingenuously. What the people who would ban them are forgetting is that the real Nazis came to power by suppressing free speech. Their hideous ideology took root in part because they banned any ideas they deemed subversive. They silenced their political opponents. They censored art and they burned books. Suppression of free speech led to unimaginable atrocities. And sufficient of freedom of speech as it pertains to this situation may also have unintended side effects. Attempting to silence a certain sector of society can sometimes have the opposite effects. If people with truly dangerous ideas are not able to express them in public, they will be driven underground where their ignorance and hatred can fester and thrive. That process of feedback and self-reflection is removed when you put people into an eco-chain. Sunlight is the best disinfectant. Daylight, not hidden in darkness. The price of freedom of speech is that each and every one of us will inevitably be exposed to opinions we disagree with or words we find offensive. This is the cost of living in a free society and it's a very fair price to pay. We cannot afford to trade our freedom of for freedom from a flood of art, culture and creativity. Without it no one could push boundaries or challenge the status quo. Without freedom of expression there would be no subversive literature, music, comedy or theatre. As an artist I cannot condone censorship, political or cultural. That is why I am speaking out and why I support the Aotearoa Free Speech Coalition. My city values include the diversity of thought and opinion. I believe in freedom of speech for all, not only those who share my personal worldview. Because without freedom of speech there is no freedom at all. Namahee, thank you very much.


Hi, I'm Peter Burris, and welcome to another Cube conversation, where we go in depth with thought leaders from around the industry to bring you the best ideas and insights about how to improve your business with technology. One of the many things that CIOs and business leaders have to think about is how are they going to execute digital transformations? What will be the priorities? We all know the relationship between digital transformation and the use of data differently, but different technologies assert themselves in a different way, and very important, different relationships, especially with cloud vendors, assert themselves in different ways. And that's one of the many challenges that CIOs have to deal with today. Serve the business, better attend to those relationships, and drive the company forward to achieve its own outcomes and objectives. So to have that conversation today, we've got a great guest. Thor Wallace is the Senior Vice President and CIO at NetScout. Thor, welcome to the Cube. Thank you. So tell us a little bit about what the CIO at NetScout does. So let me start by telling you a little bit about NetScout. So NetScout is a network monitoring and a service assurance company. As the CIO, I'm obviously responsible for providing the tools and the environment for running the company. I'm also heavily involved in, for example, understanding the applications and the business direction that we're taking. We're also working on improving our customer relationships and experiences. For example, we have a customer portal that we're sort of reevaluating and sort of improving. And we're also obviously trying to drive user productivity worldwide. We have very briefly about 33 locations worldwide. We're headquartered here outside of Boston and have large offices both in Texas and California. So you're a traditional supplier of technology services that's trying to make a transition to this new world. And as part of that, NetScout itself is going through digital transformation so that it can better support its customers' digital transformations. We got that right? Exactly. So let me tell you a little bit about sort of what we're trying to achieve, what some of the whys are and sort of where we are at this moment. Yeah, so we as a company are being challenged by the same sort of environment that everyone else is being challenged with, which is to be able to move as quickly as we can and provide as much of an impact to our customers as possible. So how I've read that sort of mandate and that remit is to really focus on improving our customer experiences, as I said, working with a new sort of new platform and re-platforming and refactoring our application, our customer service application, but also really focusing on how best to improve user productivity. So those are the areas that we've been focusing on, driving IT productivity is important to me. So that's a fairly substantial argument for moving operations to the cloud. And we're also part of that is transforming sort of a hardware-based environment to a much more of a virtualized and software-based environment. So that includes cloud, that includes virtualization, which we've obviously taken a lot of ground on. And for example, what we've already done is virtualized all of our operations in the data center. Over the years, we've also moved a lot of workloads to cloud, we're, you know, cloud agnostic, but, you know, we have a fairly large environment. It was salesforce.com, we use Office 365, which are obviously major applications on the cloud. So we have a workload that's quite mixed for today. We maintain on-prem data centers. We have a fairly large engineering footprint as well. So we kind of live in all of the worlds. So we live obviously on-prem, we have cloud. And one of the things that I think we've learned over the years is that in order to continue the journey of cloud, we need to really worry about a couple things. One is we want to make sure that we keep our operations in an excellent place. So, and I can talk more about that in a few minutes. And as I said, we want to continue to maintain our ability to execute in really what I call velocity to be able to add value. And so cloud actually presents some of those opportunities for us, but it also obviously makes things quite complicated in that we have multiple environments. We have to make sure that people still get the services and the applications they need to do their job and provide those in a very productive way, in a cost-effective way, so that we can maintain that as an IT organization. So you've got Salesforce.com, you've got Office 365, you've got some other objectives of moving some other applications up into the cloud. Each of those applications though, has been historically associated with a general purpose network that you get to control. So that you can give different quality of service to different classes of workload or applications. How is that changing? And what pressures is that putting on your network as you move to more cloud-based operations? Well, I think that's a huge challenge for us and I think, frankly, for most people, I think you have to rethink how your network is designed fundamentally from the ground up. And if you think about networks in the past, you know, in mainly an on-prem world, you basically had a backhaul, a lot of traffic in our case, 33 locations worldwide, a lot of backhauling of services and transactions back to wherever that application exists. So for example, historically, we've had Office, excuse me, the Microsoft mail system or exchange on-prem. We have, you know, other services that are on-prem, for example, Oracle and our ERP system, et cetera. And the challenge was to move all that traffic back to basically our core data center. And as you move to the cloud, you have an opportunity actually to rethink that. So what we've been in the process of doing over the last, say, year has been to redesign our network from the ground up and moving away from sort of the central monolithic network to more of a cloud slash edge-based network. So with that, we've also moved from hardware, basically a fairly heavy investment in hardware in each of the offices, for example. And we're now, we've actually been in the process very far along in the process of converting all that hardware into a software-defined network that allows us to do some things that we have never been able to do operationally. For example, we can make deployments sort of from one central location worldwide, both for security and patching, et cetera. And so what we've also done is we've moved, as I said, we have a lot of our workloads already in the cloud and we continue to put more in the cloud. One of the things that's becoming important is we've got to maintain and create actually a low-latency environment. So for example, ultimately putting our unified communication systems and technologies in the cloud, to me, worries me without having a low-latency environment and a low-latency network so that we can actually provide dial-to worldwide without worrying about performance. So what we've already done is we've transitioned from the centralized network into an edge-based network. We've actually have now a partner that we now are putting in services into a local presence idea worldwide into three locations for equinex. And with that comes the software-based network and allows us to move traffic directly to the edge. And therefore, once we're at the edge, we can go very quickly at backbone speeds into whatever cloud service we need, whether it's Azure, AWS, or Salesforce, or any other provider, Office 365. We can get that sort of speed and low-latency. That has created a new environment for us, which is now virtual, software-based. Gives us a tremendous amount of flexibility in moving what I consider fairly heavy and significant workloads that remain on-prem. It gives us the option of moving that to the cloud. So with that, one of the key things that comes with that is holding, making sure that we can hold our vendors very accountable for performance. So for example, if we experience an issue with Office 365 performance, whether it's in Pune or in Westford or wherever it is, we wanna be able to make sure that we have the information and the data that says to Microsoft in this case, hey, you know, we're actually, the performance isn't great from wherever those users are, wherever that office is. So we wanna provide them information and to basically prove that our network or our internal sort of capabilities and network are performing very well, but maybe that there's an issue with something and performance on their side. So without this sort of fact-based information, it's really hard to have those discussions with vendors. So one of the things I think is important for everyone to consider when you move more to the cloud is you've gotta have the ability to troubleshoot and make sure that you can actually maintain a very complicated environment. So one of the things we have done is we continue to do is use our own products, actually, to give greater visibility than we've ever had before in this new sort of multi, this multi sort of cloud, multi-prem environment. So which is a very powerful thing for us and the team that is using this technology is sort of seeing visibility, things that they've never really been able to see before. So that's been quite exciting, but I think that's sort of, frankly, table stakes moving forward into a deeper, more cloud or sort of workload independent model that we're seeking. Well, so one of the, let me build on this because I have conversations like this all the time and I don't think people realize the degree to which some of these changes are really gonna change the way that they actually get work done. When you have control of the network and the application and the endpoints, if there's an issue, you can turn to someone who works for you and say, here's the deal, fix this or I'll find somebody else that can fix it. So you have an employment based almost model of coercion. You can get people to do what you want to do, but when you move into the cloud, you find yourself having to use a contracting approach to actually get crucial things done and problems crop up either way. Doesn't matter if you own it all or somebody else owns it all, you're gonna encounter problems and so you have to accelerate and diminish the amount of back and forth haggling that goes on and as you said, the best way to do that is to have fact-based, evidence-based visibility into what's actually happening so that you can pinpoint and avoid the back and forth about whose issue it really is. Exactly, I mean, at the end of the day, IT is still responsible for user productivity. So whether somebody's having an application issue in terms of availability or frankly, if it's not performing up to what it should be, you're still accountable as an organization and regardless of where the workloads are, it could be as you point out, back in the day, you could always go to your data center and do a lot of investigation and really do a lot of troubleshooting within the four walls. Today, you just don't have that visibility, you don't have that luxury, call it. And so it was a whole new world and we all are relying increasingly on vendors. Which means a contracting style of coordinating and getting things done. Which presents an issue and sort of having these conversations with a vendor or a contractor, regardless of your relationship with them, you're still, again, you're on the hook for doing this. So you've got to have some facts, you've got to have some story to have to show in terms of, hey, we're good on this side. The issue really is on you and we've actually had situations, whether it was performance issues or service interruptions or bugs from different vendors where they've impacted the Netscout organization. And without deep understanding of what's going on, you really don't have anywhere to go. You really have to have this sort of greater visibility. And this is one of the things that is a lesson learned from at least from the journey that we're taking. And so I think that's part of the story of the cloud and sort of migration and virtualization story is you really have to have this new found visibility. So I think that's been really important for us. So I'm gonna see if I can't generalize that a little bit because I think it's a great point. As you go into a network redesign to support good operations, excellent operations in a cloud, you have to also go into a sourcing and information redesign so that you can be assured that you're getting the information you need to sustain the degree of control or approximate the control that you had before. Otherwise, you've got great technology but no way to deal with problems when they arise. Exactly. And as I said, we've seen this movie and without having what we have, I think we would have struggle as an organization actually to resolve the issue. And that's not good for the company because IT part of the mandate and the remit for us is to make sure that people are as productive as it can be. And so not having the ability to provide that environment is actually a huge problem for I think a lot of people. And one of the ways we are working with it is to have that sort of visibility. It also means upgrading the team skills which we've done a lot of work on. So you take folks that are in IT that may have had a certain set of skills sort of in the on-prem environment, call it. Those skills are quite different in that in the sort of cloud or the mixed exposure environment. So I think upskilling, having more information, better information is really part of the story that we're learning and that part of that part of it. Because at the end of the day, it's not about upgrading the network, it's about upgrading the network capabilities. Exactly, yeah. And you can't do that, especially in the new world if you don't upgrade your ability to get information about how the whole thing is working together. Exactly. All right, Thor Wallace, Senior Vice President, CIO at Netscout, thanks very much for being on theCUBE. Thank you. And once again, I want to thank you for participating in today's conversation. Until next time.


Well, hi there Good afternoon I'd like to start with the question someone of you ever set up a cloud infrastructure. Have you ever set up a cloud infrastructure? No, not so far. Okay. Have you ever set up a cloud infrastructure? Can you tell us one or two sentences about this? Yeah, okay, those are exactly the key features. Well Welcome to my talk. My name is Neitz-Marclos I'm here with some kind of a split brain. I work for Inovacs in Germany I live in Munich and we actually do something like you told us we plan we design consult and actually from time to time implement scalable data center infrastructures clouds kind of I'm also a member of the board and the program chair of Linux dark the conference and takes place annually in Berlin in Germany as well and Well, the obvious disclaimers if you are aware of virtualization configuration management and all this fancy stuff we hire and if you also aware of those stuff and Like to talk about this. Please take place. I take part in our core for papers next time of Linux tag will be most probably in June 2013 well as my title already suggested I'm here to Tell you about ten ways how to ruin your your cloud computing experience. I Did a couple of cloud projects so far and this is my way to share my experience Have a view and I'd really love To share also the way the way back So if you have some comments or if you have questions don't hesitate to ask Don't hesitate to comment what I talked about So we can well have a better experience and maybe enhance our experience to avoid Well disappointment about cloud computing speak about cloud computing. Anyway, what is cloud computing?  Okay, quite a few who knows about own cloud Also sugar CRM Yeah All of these three projects. They are obviously a couple of others Which are the like this is just an example like Apache stack we've seen there we've seen open nebula You've seen several other storage components. You've seen obviously a couple of other so there's a service project SRS frameworks which of these is Cloud computing all of them or just one of them. It's for me. It's very confusing especially if you talk to other people Especially if you talk to the with management management usually has heard about cloud computing, but Very often they have no precise idea about What they're talking what they're actually looking for are they're looking for some Infrastructure as a service deck are they looking for some Storage solution are they're looking for a software as a service solution and this becomes difficult if you talk to engineers because engineers tend to Talk with very precise terms and therefore I prefer At least what I am doing most of my time is infrastructure as a service Which is the most to my opinion a technical part or at least it's in the stack the lowest Virtualizing Yeah, the infrastructure like We knew in the past to install servers and now install Virtual machines on top on some virtualization holes so actually there's no need to confuse your engineers and I try to avoid the term cloud computing and During the rest of my talk, please let me know if I violated this rule Well, if you are planning to set up a new Cloud computing infrastructure as a service System if you plan a new data center and you set up a new private cloud you name it If you have Five engineers in the room. They have usually about six to seven opinions about Which operating system to use which? established solution to use which hypervisor to use and so on and You often hear something I heard Ubuntu server does not work with virtualization the sister of my brother-in-law's Uncle taught me it did not work for him. So this must be broken and to my opinion, it's a very Shaky ground to make decision on based on feelings. So It's very important to define a specification or something. What do you actually want to accomplish and Based on this specification, which is hard work actually try to evaluate the potential options and evaluate them I Talked about just today earlier today. I talked with some storage guys What to actually use for for the shared storage somewhere you have to store your VM images somewhere and Wow I've I got a couple of new ideas and Suggestions about how to implement this and If you talk to the people to the marketing people or to the the developers, they often very excited Obviously about their solutions, but take your time do some testing do some test that up and evaluate the options idea number three environments and how to Set them up At the moment I work for for a client whose business is Actually to run a surface a service Yeah product He has implemented the software system based on Java running in a VM and at the moment they have a 100 about 100 clients and each of the the in each instance of the software runs in a separate VM and Each of these 100 Instances have been handicrafted by hand by the system administrators themselves. So They edited the hypervisor configuration files edit copy and paste a new virtual machine Edited and decided about wow should we give this four CPUs or should we give this six CPUs and They decided on on memory and so on and so on after this they Inserted the CDs. They exported the CD images to the VMs They booted them. They configured the operating system. This does simply not scale This is the first problem. The second problem is it is very error-prone because They showed me actually that they're wiki they had for each of their clients Vicky pages and each page consisted of printed on on paper something like three or four pieces of paper and It's very easy to make one mistake in all those steps. So Don't even think about Doing all these steps by hand if you are planning to set up a scalable IS platform and often it's Most people know this and those people use actually something like a configuration Management system or whatever but there are The small pitfalls like Okay We forgot in the script to set up or configure an additional IP address on this Specific interface for example. It's a very simple task to do on a command line But if you do this Manually you have to remember this very step for the next time and the next time and the next time and it's Very likely that you forget it sooner or later or at least once in the future So take this extra time try to make this right But don't overdo the whole thing down over engineer I also seen situations when colleagues try to Deal with every potential situation that might come up For them for other people or in ten years in the future whatever It's not an easy task to to to find the balance between the two of them but nevertheless if you If you're sure that a specific task needs to be repeated twice or at least three times It's always a good idea to to use your configuration system to implement this within your puppet chef Salt stack whatever you name it next Subject Stunt me at the first time and I experienced it. I was working for another client and the client insisted on Buying Some wow some cloud computers some infrastructure as a service Services from third-party running an enterprise level operating system on Enterprise level contract and they paid quite a Lot of money for that. We said well, it's always a good idea to have commercial support as a backup You have to decide if you actually need this But if you decide that you need this commercial support, that's fine But after After that we set up the cloud infrastructure and some of my colleagues took over for the actual day-to-day operating of this cloud infrastructure we earlier set up and It appeared they had some problems with I Don't remember something that the storage was very slow in Certain situations and they complain and they complain and I said, okay You have this very expensive support contract with your service provider. Please call them and open open the bug and Insist on on have this fixed or at least have this investigated But yeah, well, we could we could try to give it more memory or we could try to set up another machine or We could try Rebooting several times without saving all or data or something like that But they Were not willing actually to do to call and insist on the SLAs well so my opinion to High money Service level agreements is a little bit split because It's often a decision to well trade off fear with money or something like that. So We pay you this amount of money and if something goes wrong, we May blame some someone else and I'm not sure if this is a very good Basis for infrastructure as a service or in all a technical a technical project so Think about what you actually want and what your personal service level agreements are This I think it's number five Yeah the eternal battle between developers and operations operations teams It's Someone of you are working as a developer Who is actually writing code? Oh, yeah, quite a few and Who of you is is responsible of actually running Running some infrastructure some servers, whatever Okay, I think the admins are slightly in the majority and Who of you have experienced either as an as an admin as a system engineer as a Ops guy that the developer sent you some broken code or some poorly documented stuff Something that was difficult to run or was error-prone or something like that. So Yeah, okay and who of you developers complained about the the nosy and arrogant Admins they just don't do what they're supposed to and Have their own way. Please raise your hand. Okay Very polite very polite audience today. Yeah, wow Obviously there are two There are two groups and there are two sets of duties that still have to be done, but Working together and talking together is probably most of the time a very good idea and we tried several Several approaches to overcome a little bit this this this gap of the two groups so a colleague recently told me that they Invited there. He was also an administrator. They invited one of the development Guys to join the team and actually do one of their software deployments or something like that for for a week or for for a new release I think and that was very helpful because at that point the developer learned the problem that comes with running and administrating a Server system and the the problems with Undocumented log files and and stuff on like that and on the other hand they sent one of their administrators to actually do some pair programming together with the Development team and that was also very helpful how it looks like to do coding without proper permissions without a route account for example and They learned a lot from each other there are a couple of new ideas like scrum and Kanban and Agile Agile methods Which are very or are quite common at least in the in the developer community these days who is actually Using some of these methods like scrum or Kanban Please raise your hand and who has never heard of any of these methods Okay, well, that's less than I expected so my impression it is that the whole idea of scrum and Kanban Is not that widespread widespread in the Operating community compared to the Development community, but it's it's still rising the number is rising and There might be some good ideas in there to my opinion, there's also Some kind of voodoo stuff involved with this as well, but if you seriously go and try these methods to to work together and work as a team and Sometimes they call it a deaf ops I made some good experience from that And it helps in your day-to-day job to understand What the others are doing? Yeah, if you set up a Cloud infrastructure There are a couple of components involved usually there is the virtualization engine. There is the Configuration management, there's the storage layer There are deployment tools and so on and so on and For example a friend of mine Was not satisfied with the existing deployment tools for example, we had a look into puppet for example and And Puppet is written underneath and I think in ruby is that true? Yeah But he did not like Ruby He was a per guy and he said well, okay, I can do better. I write my own a configuration management system in Per And well, this is actually quite a task and to be honest he wrote a rather decent system, but it's very hard to maintain something like that like that Don't underestimate The work that is necessary to support and Enhance and to debug and to maintain such such a system the same applies to writing small shell scripts here and there and writing a share script that automates the Initialization of the virtual machines and another script that pushes the configuration on there and another share script that Roles out the software and so on It's very difficult to maintain these small scripts and the key point is Standardization here Standardization is a very strong weapon if it's used right because there's so many other people You can talk about this you can Google Problems you can most of the time even Google the answers which is even More useful and if you join forces with with other developers with other admins It's much easier To set up something Which is easier to maintain Yeah, well We invent we and it's also Sometimes it's a little bit about Not invented here. You probably know this because we wrote is This small tour we actually Want to use it even if we know there's something Which does more or less the same job But has some other features. Well, however, you may your mileage may vary in this situation Okay, I I'm interested in your opinion about this experience when I set up a load infrastructure And not again for for client We we finished that project and after that we we set up an extensive set of Monitoring hooks and did a lot of monitoring and Spend some time doing or lock TV or watching and look for the fancy fancy graphs and so on and Pointed out. Wow. Look at this machine It's utilized More than 60 percent. I think we have to throw in more CPU on this or was it memory? I don't remember But it's my opinion that especially in the virtualized cloud infrastructure this is kind of Waste of resources Because if you run a proper cloud infrastructure everything or at least the key Parameters should be elastic should be Adaptable so if your application actually needs more more memory it should get more memory and that's What is get you less for? if you see you reach a certain Freshholes, you should just and most probably automatically Raise the assigned amount of memory same applies to To displace and to CPU utilization, but having a virtual machine idling 40% of its time. It's just waste of resources It's obviously not that easy In reality because you always have peak times and depending on your On your business and depending on what you what you actually do You won't have a flat line of resources over a day over 24 hours period or during During week or whatever But if you look closely to your graphs, and I hope you have a monitoring system in place you can use this very good for that You should look for Ways to adapt the necessary resources to your need For just to give you an example One of my clients was in a was a big TV station and Their web servers has been very To a big degree utilized during the the evening when the people Looked the TV shows and looked up something they had on the screen or whatever and So they needed more CPU and especially memory during that period on the other hand The developers themselves coding this website always Demanded more memory because of their tests and their optimizations and stuff so We decided and set up a scheduling task that assigned during the morning and the early afternoon To shift the memory more to the development and staging clusters and in the evening when the Developers left the office at five o'clock or something we shifted back the memory and the CPU To the web servers again So if you go for cloud you should also use the feature that Comes with it. I already talked about environments I Think it's pretty common practice nowadays to have one production environment and at least one Testing or staging environment Who of you uses something like that with a multi-level okay, most of them and I am interested in how many different environments do you actually run do you run with two environments, please Free five are free, okay Yeah, okay interesting I Seen all of those Setups if you have Just two environments, it's sometimes difficult to test for well different groups of developers But on the other hand if you have five Testing environments or or five environments in total Are they actually all looking like the production environments? No, it's the answer Okay, the plan is having a plan is always a good idea. Yeah, okay The key point about majority environments is to have them as close as The production environment is because that's the whole point of it if You check for something that is simply not Mapping to the reality It's going to run after the the rear the live deployment Why did you Make all the effort in the first place so it's important to have a configuration system that Has its sources in a single place I think this is a good best practice so We tried to Refactor our configuration system for example To have as much as possible from from a single source we actually put all our configurations into Software control system depending on the client a subversion or get a repository and We don't use the configuration files directly, but we pull it from the repository and We try to have as much common configuration code as possible and have a very lean a layer of Things like the actual names and the actual numbers of virtual machines That get applied to this set of configurations This is really hard work to do but It saved us a lot of work in the long run It's always a battle especially if you talk to management To assign the proper resources especially in terms of Developers of admins of end of time on and for fair especially on that time But if you convince them to give you these resources to my opinion it usually pays off rather quickly after a couple of weeks or Or at least months To enhance your configuration and and other components as well scalability Scalability is a nice feature if you have it, but it's also expensive But it's even more expensive if you don't plan it and Forget to implement so if you have ever hard-coded in your code that there is just one database and I don't know several The the database is reference from the code in 20 different locations. It's very hard to set up That changes that so you can scale that up for example At more Breed slaves for a database Well, well, you name it it depends obviously on the on the architecture you set up but Scalability planned in the beginning is always something that pays off in a long run This is number 10 the 10th way to ruin your cloud experience. It's a non-technical Experience I made There are so many Problems that actually don't need a technical solution I bait a lot of people come up with very Fancy and enhanced ideas To work around and to model this apparent problem I said it's a little bit Exaggerated, but I experienced something like that. How would you how should we implement the SSD bagged hot fail over high ability enhanced LW driven role-based user management For just you and me for example Isn't it Enough to in this case share the root password which might be easier to implement Not that I'm a big fan of shared passwords to the lease but it is Well, we just failed at this situation to think about is this necessary for business case or the use case or whatever and There are so many situations I hope that the people who actually implemented that Had Thought about this in the first place. So less is more some times because if you have a simpler Architecture, it's easier to maintain. It's easier for you to enhance the important parts of it and To have more stable overall installation. Well these have been my 10 ways how to ruin your cloud experience and I hoped that I actually gave you some ideas where to Where to start in your day-to-day work This is my contract information if you like to Ask me something or have a suggestion if you're free to contact me or just ask right now and Give some suggestions some some opinions However, thank you very much for coming here and for attending the session are there questions or Remarks I Yeah, wow Usually That's necessary most of them think about scalability anyway, but Not all the time in all situations and I think that's that's fine and actually that's what we are for So If you have a special mindset and if you have set up An application stack before you obviously think about the problems that have been Arisen in the past and it's our job doing some consulting and find out which might Become a bottleneck in the future Well, if it comes to to the conclusions, well, it depends obviously because Someone who is actually running one server with Free directly attached Terabyte drivers is hardly convinced to pay for a high scalable Geo Delocated storage solution, whatever. So It's just necessary to do to find the right balance. I think But talking about takes place. Yeah Yeah over there Pardon Yeah Yeah, I do some I do see some patterns One of the the patterns I see is that The whole idea of cloud computing the list is this DT and stuff It's often underestimated most of my clients are Still stuck with virtualization and they don't think About the idea that goes beyond virtualization, but scaling and Automatization and and stuff like that and that is at the moment Most of our work has to do with something like that and And We have to try to explain the advantages of the good cloud computing Without sticking just to the marketing blah blah, you know and Trying to show them the Actual advantages they have so your system administrator at the moment needs About one day to set up a new client after You set up the proposed changes It should be possible to set up a new client for him within one hour. So It's an advantage So he gets eight times fast or something like that And Wow But it's hard to generalize have you Have you made different experiences? Yeah, well, they are obvious advantages money-wise for example if you Look for the numbers to run Say 50 machines 50 servers which can be depending on the setup the five six seven eight virtualization holes and Setting up some configuration management on top of this This makes sense Not only for the very big organizations, but today and both are most of our clients Medium-sized Companies who just want to save money save save power save workforce Yeah, well the local governments. I have no clients Within public administrations a couple of friends on actually on the on the other side of the table and they consider this Cloud computing is at least to my opinion for public administration still something they Carefully well evaluate Maybe it takes another year or two. I don't know I Follow rather closely as far as I understand it what the what the Guys from current development actually do It comes to facilities monitoring of Data from the Linux kernel and so on but this is usually not Not to the least the problem We are we had a problem so I Talked about the example the service provider that hosted the the private cloud for our client and To set up a new VM for example took them Under the SLA two days two days and Actually, it took them usually about three days because they Edited the configuration files. They did copy and paste they had a complex process involved and so on and I said, whoa, this is cloud computing. You should be able To point your browser to a website and click on add a new virtual machine but They did not do it this way and these kinds of problems are much more common Non-working c-groups in a in a corner subsystem or something like that because well It's comes to two real technical problems He usually Easily come to technical solutions if you talk to the right people There is Any last question I I've been Showing that we have only a few minutes left Yes Things answered. Thank you again one