We have been inviting many people out there to tweet or to go on Weibo and join the discussion here. And on Weibo we've actually had 280,000 tweets or Webos, whatever they're called. But that kind of level of intervention and I want to just show you the kind of things for this session which we've been receiving. We haven't ruled out a lot of stuff but we can't read 280,000 tweets or Weibo postings to you. This is the kind of thing. The internet is such a brilliant tool but it brings all the flaws and failings of humanity into sharper than comfortable focus. Technology is changing lives but unevenly due to the digital divide affecting the poorest of the poor. How do we change this? Notice there the hashtag W E F. So if you want to send us a message as well try because Mathias sitting down at the front is going to be working on whatever you receive and helping me to try and filter them. And finally at Davos technology has helped me improve communication skills which impacted my job and life. So I will come to questions from you or interventions from you but you can also intervene in 140 characters up there if you're able to get through and Mathias will handle that. Now we have six leading figures from the business of the new frontiers of technology and I'm not going to introduce them all six of them at this moment. I'm going to ask them to introduce themselves with literally I've given them 90 seconds to explain what they do what the frontier is that they're working on and where it's going. Science in 90 seconds that's what I'm that's the challenge I'm giving Matthew Prince chief executive office officer of Cloudflare welcome and the floor is yours for a minute and a half. Thank you. My name is Matthew Prince. I'm here from San Francisco in the United States. Cloudflare is a company that does a very simple thing. We make the Internet faster and we protect it from bad guys. We launched the public only a year ago and in that short amount of time hundreds of thousands of websites have signed up to be twice as fast and protected from a wide range of threats. In fact, we save so much time that and so many people pass through our network literally over 350 million people every single month that we save 50 lives worth of time that would have been otherwise spent waiting for websites to load. We in the same time one of the big challenges if you're an Internet commerce site is that you're under increasing attack by hackers and spammers and people who are trying to knock your site offline. And so Cloudflare is trying to take the tools that were previously reserved for only the Internet Giants only the largest sites out there and make them available for anyone online. And we do that by offering the service that is extremely easy to provision and configure but also more affordable. In fact, most of our users don't pay us a dime and the system we use those users in order to make the system faster and smarter for other people who are on it. So we were one of the 2012 technology pioneers really honored to be here and great to talk about technology. So that's the background of why Matthew's here. Let's move on with Vivek Kundra fellow at Harvard. Let me just say because you won't say it that you named one of the top 25 CTOs in the U.S. And Information Week has credited you for work to drive transparency, engage citizens and lower cost of government operations in 2009. What are you working on in this new frontier? Recently I was President Obama's Chief Information Officer and through that work what I'm doing now at Harvard is looking at disruptive technologies, especially network effects and how they're going to fundamentally change the way and shift power to people. So what does this mean in terms of toppling governments and regimes? What does this mean for industries like the media and fundamentally companies that are going to become extinct and more importantly the next generation billion-dollar companies that are going to be built as a result of these disruptions in the market? Justin, how are you working on it? I mean when you say that's the concept but what about how you're taking it forward quickly if you can Vivek? So part of it is engaging through forums like this one and also working with the European Union and the United States government to figure out how they're prepared to actually embrace these disruptions. And do they understand these disruptions at the moment? Do they even appreciate they're there? They understand them unevenly. Okay, thank you. We'll come back to that. Harrison Dillon, the floor is yours, President and Chief Technology Officer of Solizheim from the U.S. Thank you. I'm Harrison Dillon from Solizheim. We are based in San Francisco, California. We are a biotechnology company that manufactures crude oil through a renewable process. So the way that it works is depicted on the slide. We take any type of plant material, sugar cane, wood chips, grass clippings from a golf course. We take that biomass and we feed it to algae and the algae rapidly convert it directly into crude oil. And what we can do that is really a unique capability. This has never been done before in the history of the use of oil is we can actually design the oil molecules. So any oil is a heterogeneous collection of molecules. You take it from its natural source and you accommodate the worst parts of it. We make specifically designed oils for diesel fuel, plastics, polyester, high nutrition edible oils, even cosmetics. And as a result, our technology allows us to renewably manufacture virtually any products in society that's made from oil with a far reduced carbon footprint and what you would get if it was manufactured from petroleum. And today we're driving US Navy ships on this fuel. We're selling products in Sephora made from this technology. You can buy the oils in the supermarket in the United States. And we're also making bars of soap out of this technology. So literally anything made from oil we can make renewably using the technology. Harrison, great. Thanks. Tiger Tiarajaran. You got it right. I'm going to call you Tiger, which I'm allowed to do. President and Chief Executive Officer of Genpact based in India. We are a company that provides global business process management and technology services for large global corporations. Started off as a subsidiary of GE, now an independent company. And we deliver these services from 17 countries, 50 locations. The value proposition we have is very simple. Very few people teach process as a science. It's not taught at universities. It's not taught in organizations. We've built over the last 13 years, using our heritage of Lean and Six Sigma, a whole science around processes at enterprise levels. And we then use that to deploy them for our customers and clients and run processes for them to drive better outcomes from those processes. The other thing that we do is we take data, which we all know is plenty in organizations, and then troll through them and build intelligence and insights for our clients. We call that smart decision services. And really both those are the way we drive value for our clients. Now Nathan Wolfe, thank you Tiger. Nathan Wolfe, you are Chief Executive Officer and Founder for Global Viral Forecasting from the US. Yes, and what we do is we develop solutions for primary human problems by interrogating the unseen world of microbes. So here in the slide you see a virus. This is actually, believe it or not, the most common form of life on our planet. If you think about your bodies, you think of them as primarily human. Only about 10% of the cells in your body belong to you as a human. And the other 90% of them are actually microbial. And over 99% of the genetic information of your body is microbial. And yet we're only starting to see the technologies available to really allow us to explore solutions in this space. Some of the low-hanging fruit that we've focused on over the last 5 to 10 years has been pandemics. As we're increasingly hyper-connected as a planet, we're going to see more and more pandemics emerge. Historically the approaches to addressing these have been largely ineffective. They've been following and monitoring individuals. What we do is we target the points at which viruses enter into human populations and spread. And we're not afraid of using any sort of technology. We have a team that's basically focused on software engineers who are pulling together hundreds of thousands of data feeds in order to basically determine through natural language processing outbreaks and open-source intelligence and other systems all throughout the world. Among the sort of objectives that we have is if you think about the internet as the global nervous system, we really have a question out there which is what would the global immune system look like? What's the next generation of the way that we're really going to tackle some of these nasty microbes? And also on the other hand, how are we going to exploit things that are beneficial? Thanks Nathan. And finally, Jennifer Carrero who is co-founder and executive director of taking IT, taking IT global. Thank you for all being here. What we do is we empower young people to understand and act on the world's greatest challenges. And what we do can be described in our theory of change which is up on the screen. We're trying to help prepare educators to be able to inspire and develop the skills among their students to be prepared to engage in this globally connected world. Our education system is really out of date. We provide training and virtual classroom platforms. We also have an online community, a peer-to-peer community for youth. It's in 13 languages. And we have members from all around the world that are working on collaborative projects. We run e-courses to help support young leaders in lifting their ideas off the ground through creating solutions. And we work over the past decade, we've worked with over 10 UN agencies to help young people have a voice in policy processes at the local, national and international level. And finally in the last quadrant, we're reflecting on the role of youth in society. And I just was recently appointed as adjunct professor in the Faculty of Health at York University. And we're trying to conduct more studies and more research on the role of youth and how we can leverage the power of technology to really engage all aspects of society. And in my hat, as a young global leader, as an active member of that community, we've also launched the Youth Effect, which is a toolkit for decision makers on engaging with youth. Jennifer, thanks. So we've got three issues we want to try and address in the next 50 minutes about the social impact of the proliferation of technology. And that comes through from some of the tweets. Secondly, the unintended consequences. And thirdly, what you've identified here in the last few days and what else maybe we've missed, which we should have been thinking about. Let me ask you first. We've had one message via Weibo from the Asia Pacific Institute for Broadcasting Development, the AIBD. Will technology innovations bridge the digital divide so that all people can benefit? How can we make the most of power of digital media to transform lives and societies for good? Let's bear that in mind as we look at the first issue about the impact of ubiquitous and fast changing technology on society. Those consequences and how fast much of what you've just described to us is actually going to be felt by society. The last 10 years was about creating the first generation of information technology that really made information available to a significant part of the world. But it was very expensive to start a Yahoo or a Google or something that was doing that. I think the opportunity of the next 10 years, and one of the things that I really saw coming out in the conference, is that increasingly that technology is becoming more affordable and more accessible. And so I'm really optimistic that as it becomes more affordable to have the resources that you previously needed to be a giant to have, that that actually is helpful for bridging the digital divide and making the world more accessible and information more accessible. It's the same question to all of you, so please just jump in or if you want to disagree or something, let's pick up with a lot of traction. But what about the time scale? I'm just interested, you said 10 years. 10 years is now a long time in terms of expectations and the way timelines are being so foreshortened. I think the reason 10 years feels like an eternity now is because how quickly technology is percolating downward. The last time I was in China was in 2008 and to feel the difference in just three years in this country is remarkable. And so I think that that's actually evidence that technology is helping drive forward our conception of time itself and changing the way that that works. 10 years in the context of a billion people and impacting a billion people I think is not too long. When you think about countries like India and China and if you want to uplift people in rural areas who are not very well connected and 10 years back to get a landline in India used to take 25 years. Today if you go into any rural area, anywhere, people have either their own mobile phones or they have a mobile phone in the village where the village congregates and makes calls. What does that do? It allows you to transfer money directly to individuals cutting out everyone in the middle. And that's a huge problem when you have middlemen that transfers money that the government is trying to give the individual. So you can run social programs at a very micro individual level very dramatically differently once that technology penetrates which it is. I think that this is really sort of an incredibly profound moment. We do a lot of work in some of the most rural regions of the world where pandemics emerge. And so for example, one of these sites we work in, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, you can't get there during most of the year by anything other than a plane. And it's a place where there's no regular source of electricity and yet people have cell phones in their cell towers.  Now these are not just sort of active ways of communicating. These devices that all of us carry around in our pockets are sending off huge amounts of data about us, data that we can mine and understand to get a whole range of different features. For example, one of the things we're trying to do is to figure out if there is information that sort of can be passively acquired that tells us about illness. So our biggest limitation is right now we look out into this audience. I don't know who has a fever in this audience. Who has a fever in this audience? Can we have a show of hands? Anyone feeling ill?  They could potentially give us those heat maps. And once we have those heat maps, we'll be able to transform the way that we think about illness in a way that's completely profound and it'll be everywhere. It'll be everywhere from the most remote jungles in Central Africa to, you know, Dalian China, for example. But can the science keep up with the data? Well, I mean, I think it is doing that. I think it's absolutely amazing what's happened.  I sit there on Gmail and every message I look at, it's telling me specific things that I might be interested in in relation to the content in that email, the individuals who I'm linked with. You know, so I think that the engineering is certainly possible. It's just a matter of, you know, can we get our hands on the data? I think issues that we've been dealing with also as part of the YGL community, we've been thinking a lot about data sharing and how do we facilitate the sharing of information. I think that's one of the biggest challenges is humans sort of instinctually don't want to share information. And yet there's huge benefits to all individuals as well as certainly socially if we can convince people to share more and more information. Vivek? Well, I think it's actually not moving fast enough. If we look at the history of technology, you go back to the 1960s. The greatest technologies were being developed and deployed in most governments. Then you move to the 70s and 80s, that moved to the private sector in most enterprises. Then in 2005 something fundamental happened in terms of the shift in the consumer space. So I would agree that the cost of storage and processing power has led to amazing platforms and innovation that's enabled entrepreneurs to build killer applications. But if we think about it as a society overall, there are far too many people who are still disconnected. They may have a cell phone, but that cell phone doesn't necessarily mean that it's led to their condition being improved in life. Education hasn't fundamentally improved at the pace at which technology has. So I think as a global community, part of what we need to be able to do is to think through what are those disruptive technologies that are going to fundamentally change the lives of everyday people, not necessarily by making sure they have a cell phone and we're not necessarily just collecting the data, but how does it translate into actual action? Jennifer? Okay, so when I think about drivers of innovation, I don't think of technology alone, but I think of the power of the human imagination and how what technology has done through the ability to connect communities through social media and just through people being able to connect with one another is that our sense of possibility has been expanded. So it's tapping a different level of imagination and I think what's also critical, which kind of relates to your point, is the need for human empathy and compassion so that the type of innovation that we're driving is for a better world. When I think of all this data, and again I tend to think in terms of biotech, not Internet, but I see these ebbs and flows of data where you have a new technology that creates these enormous amounts of data and we saw this with the Human Genome Project where there was this enormous push to sequence the human genome. It took, I don't know, $10 billion in 15 years and it was just brute force and brute force but an entire industry developed around sequencing DNA and suddenly the cost of sequencing DNA dropped by orders of magnitude and now we've got this enormous amount of genetic information and it was done for human medicine but now it allows companies like mine and many others to mine that data and find ways to design biological function that just simply didn't exist anymore. I think you have the same thing whether it's social media where you get all these people all over the world saying things and at first you get this new technology, this new platform with a rush of information but very quickly innovative people figure out how to do something valuable with it. Is it clear when you develop what you've now described to us, what the impact, particularly the social impact and the benefit is going to be or not, Jennifer? I think the greatest potential impact is bringing people together but it also could be that technology divides people so it's either community or isolation and one driver that is important to think about are what are the values that people have in different societies when you're all part of one global community. One thing that we've come up with as the young global leaders is to have an underlying value of global dignity. So if people interact within a global system, it's not about controlling people but if people sort of self-regulate and interact with others from the perspective of trying to increase the dignity of those that you deal with then we have a really safe space for people to be hyper-connected otherwise I think the risks are explosives. Because we are moving into intended and unintended consequences and when we look at the text on our phones which you've all talked about as being absolutely profound in terms of its social impact, of course it wasn't developed to do what it's now doing but it's become an amazing explosion. What about the intended and unintended consequences, particularly those that are unintended? How much are you thinking about that? I think that one of the things that I think crystallizes a lot of what people have said is that access to information is becoming easier and that is proliferating but the ability to interpret information is actually going is because information is growing that interpretation of information is getting harder and harder and so my guess is what the next digital divide will be is that ability to actually process and interpret that information either whether you have the technological resources or the educational resources to be able to do that. I think that's one kind of unintended consequence of generating all this data is that now we have to get better at interpreting it and that's the next challenge. I think the other challenge is... Is that a processing problem? Again, I think it's both a technological problem in terms of just... So we deal with at Cloudflare literally billions of log lines every single day and the computational power that we have to build in order to do that is out of reach of a lot of organizations and that's only going to grow and grow and grow and that means that the people who are in front have an advantage and are able to sustain that advantage and that's a real challenge and I think it's going to be a challenge as we just continue to develop more data that the next step is how you then interpret that data and the next digital divide is... It's not going to be about access it's going to be about then using that data to do something and use that in one way or another. So there are two things happening when we deal with corporations and data to Matthew's point one is there is a lot of data so as a result people are saying how do I use this given computational powers are so high the challenge is two fold one in order to really build power out of the data you've got to find a way to build intelligence and all of that and the second you need to allow open source to happen what that really means is you need to allow that data to go out into the open that creates a whole set of unintended consequences I mean the fact that when you do a search on something out pops an advertisement that exactly addresses what you're searching for is actually very scary I love it because I can go and buy what I want but it's very scary because it's already got captured and it captures history what does that mean to privacy, what does that mean to security is a big question it's actually preventing corporations from leveraging that to drive value to their clients and customers unless we solve that problem we're actually not going to be able to really get the benefits of data and intelligence out of data Nathan Yeah, just a counterpoint to that we had this interesting conversation in a session on hyperconnectivity the other day and a lot of the anxiety that we have is just very common to when there's major transitions in technology when newspapers came out it was seen as a huge breakthrough but also a huge impediment to people's privacy and something that was going to be devastating and we're sort of experiencing a little bit of this anxiety I think in terms of unintended consequences and in some ways for some of us they may be quite positive is institutions, traditional institutions in the way they solve problems are going to be thrown on their heads if somebody 10 years ago said to you okay we've got this institution called the Library of Congress in the United States and it's going to revolutionize the world you'd look at them as if they were absolute lunatics but effectively that's what Google has done is it's taken the objective of something like the Library of Congress and made information freely available to everyone there's going to be radical different solutions the things that we rely on historically to solve our problems we're going to have to be open to complete and utter change and I think ultimately it's going to be a good thing for all of us but it's going to be very uncomfortable on individual levels, institutional levels there's going to be a lot of sort of debate within government about the need for traditional infrastructure I know you wanted to come in earlier but I wanted to hold you on this one because I thought the discussion would go in this way because one of the tweets we've had is should public sector information reuse by the private sector be encouraged by governments given where you've just been working and your responsibility is chief information officer what's your answer to that? so my view is that the public sector collects a whole host of data and by actually democratizing that data can help generate not just jobs but breakthroughs in entire sectors of the broader economy just think about certain sectors like healthcare there's very very little transparency when it comes to the healthcare sector and a big part of it is because organizations want to preserve the status quo therefore you don't have as much liquidity in the market or competition but at the same time you have to be very careful about what I call the mosaic effect as this information gets released all of a sudden whether it's the government or the private sector can begin to collect information or create mosaics that were totally unintended one of the things that we struggled with and worked very very hard around healthcare was that if you could release data at a state level when it comes to certain operations, near replacements but if you release it at the zip code level all of a sudden you may be in a role part of the country and you could begin to identify individuals who had that specific operation or condition and that becomes problematic but like any technology or shift there are always two phases of technology and we've got to make sure that we're actually balancing the opportunity with the risk that's posed but I'm a big believer that democratizing data and allowing third parties to innovate on top of that is going to be one of the ways we're actually going to be able to scale and solve some of these global problems that we're talking about You're saying that on a public platform here in China but what about the resistance you felt from the bureaucracy about that principle when you were in Washington? Well there's absolutely resistance I mean I remember not even just within when I was working at the White House but also in DC government where we were releasing data around murders and homicides and so forth and whether it was the police chief or the schools where people didn't want to release data because it would reflect on their performance but we've got to be able to end a culture of faceless accountability and to make sure that taxpayers who paid for these services have a right to know where their money is going and how government is actually working for them Nathan and Ty, given what you've just said I'll come to you in a moment Jennifer is that the kind of direction in which you believe we should be moving? Absolutely, I think sort of if anything we need to be prepared for the data deluge we're going to be in a situation where we're going to have so much data just to refer to genetic technologies so one of these questions is when we think about data and we think about information largely we'll think about linguistic information that's out there for really progressive perhaps we'll think about code as kind of an information most of the information on this planet is genetic information and biological entities and right now the sequencing of that information is increasingly becoming a commodity it's going to be something that's really simple and cheap and easy like in five or ten years we're all going to be producing a tremendous amount of genetic data it's going to tell us everything from sort of what exactly is causing us to be ill in terms of a GI illness to where our wine comes from what region it comes from there's going to be massive incredible amounts of data and we need to prepare the sort of infrastructures that are going to deal with this I mean we can sort of focus on a little bit of fear we have about some privacy issues but at the end of the day the world is transforming radically and I think we should just go with it There's no question that we have to break through the barrier how many of us can go back in the more developed parts of the world when credit bureaus didn't exist by the way credit bureaus don't exist in the emerging economies in many cases it makes a huge difference when you syndicate data and then you protect privacy or whatever but you still syndicate it and then use it to spread credit across the board now one can argue that that's part of the beginning of a big problem that happened much later but the reality is that that syndication of data has to be done the first step in that game is to recognize that there is a barrier you've got to break through so you've got to talk about that barrier Can I get to Jennifer first? Just a reflection on data what I think is so interesting is how it connects with our identity and our sense of identity and especially now if you think about from the age of birth you have so much data that can be collected about you as you grow up through the stage forming your sense of self your sense of place in the world your identity is no longer tied to where we live or religion or our culture necessarily we're globally connected and we have these sort of digital profiles with us as we grow up and so the question is how do you deal with the potential identity crisis that one might go through because you may be defined by how others see you with your digital data rather than how you see yourself so that's something that I think about Does anyone want to come in with a microphone? I have a couple of tweets which I'm going to read out in a moment I hope your hand on the microphone will come to you, Vivek One of the things to think about what does this end in terms of as you release this data, you democratize it think about what this could mean for the global economy and regulations all of a sudden you could start looking at algorithms that would actually adjust on a real-time basis and shift the regulatory regime based on what's going on right now our entire institutions when we talk about governance are very static and they operate in terms of years rather than on a real-time basis If anyone is feeling slightly uncomfortable in the audience I don't blame you Why do you think they would be uncomfortable? Everyone is going to have a different level of sensitivity to the release of your private information and one of the challenges is going to be if you are more willing to release your private information you're going to have cheaper credit you're going to have access to more information you're going to have a lot of things that there are going to be certain segments of society that are going to rapidly embrace that and it might actually be preto-optimal for people to actually embrace that but I think that it's important for us to step back and realize that not everyone is going to be comfortable at the same rate and so as a society we have to think through what are the real steps at which we can start to democratize this information without getting to the point that people get concerned and you have regulatory regimes that get put in place that just don't make sense so right now we deal with something like the European privacy laws in terms of placing cookies in browsers and things like that there are a lot of great reasons why that makes sense for security reasons and for the ability to provide internet services the law is written in a way that makes it very difficult for businesses even governments to comply with it and so we have to make sure that as technology marches forward we are still keeping in touch with what the people on the street really care about people on the street particularly now care about work jobs whatever you want to however you want to describe it here's a tweet from Lily Lapena in the room how can we use technology to make education more relevant and increase employment or the use of skills or whichever description you want to use for at least being occupied in a way to earn money any of you please how can we use technology it's actually happening today the fact that you can actually for example do customer service calls sitting at home with distributed workforce, distributed algorithms distributed everything you can work for three hours on one day and nine hours on another day you get work based on the quality you deliver all of which is algorithm based I think is a huge opportunity as an example distribution of e-learning and content into rural areas using broadband that is now proliferating is another massive opportunity it's going to sweep particularly the emerging parts of the world and re-skilling people in economies where unemployment rates are now 9% and seem to be very stubborn at 9% Jennifer a huge part of it is for those who are curious and who have access they can develop those skills and access content through so many different mediums but it also can create a sense of capability and a mindset for entrepreneurship so you're able to have a space to connect with others to create solutions to problems and to be able to promote yourself and I think that part of it also though depends not just on access to technology but a culture and a mindset of capability and the development of skills and communities that allow you to respond to the challenges that you see let me add to that particularly on re-skilling we're seeing entire industries that are changing at a pace that they haven't changed before and you have entire populations of people who simply they just can't do what they were trained to do the days of working for the same company for 30 years are over but at the same time the money it takes the money it takes to go to school again and people can't just go in mid-life back to school for three years or two years they can't afford the tuition if you can learn these things online you can get on something like Khan Academy or downloading books, you name it there's so much that people can learn through technology that actually makes them employable that simply wasn't available in the past and as a rapidly growing company one of my biggest problems is finding skilled people it's incredibly hard and if people could re-skill themselves out of pharma into clean tech or out of newspapers into online media faster the economy would simply all be better off Vivek, given where you've just been as chief information officer what about the mindsets we're dealing with here the kind of things you're talking about are for the next generation many of whom are not in this hall but the younger global leaders are of course but the next generation who grip this kind of technology very quickly but maybe don't understand where the new opportunities are but I'm trying to get to the issue of mindsets in government and the institutions which currently exist how out of date and out of sync are they with this new reality that you're now portraying I think a big part of what's happening in government and I've talked about what I call an IT cartel is that a lot of problems in the government historically when it comes to technology have been solved by hiring firms that do nothing more than figure out how to land and expand and continue to build as many hours as possible not necessarily improve the productivity because there isn't really an economic incentive because you would work yourself out of a contract so what's happening with this next generation of innovators is that they've grown up in a world where they didn't even know that the internet didn't exist or who invented it so what we're seeing is that these platforms that are created and the ability to innovate on top of them has unleashed this workforce that finds itself banging its head against the wall when it comes across people who are spending billions of dollars on information technology on IT projects that actually don't work and frankly one of the things that we did is we made sure that we were very very focused on attracting that talent and engaging them in the public sector one of the things that the president did very very effectively whether it was his campaign or when it came to governance was to make sure that he was directly engaging with the youth to attract them to public service and to talk about how some of these innovations that are being driven but I think it's going to take a fundamental change in terms of how the public sector actually procures technology which has to fundamentally change rather than the old model I think it's also one of the things that I see because I have this similar issue of how do you recruit talent and how do we cultivate sort of the next generation of talent and I think one of the things I see that's really exciting is we have a number of kids that come to our organization and they've done their summer working at some massive hedge fund and they have all sorts of potential and what they're saying is look we're going to demand a little bit more yes we want huge upside and there's nothing wrong with that we want to be a part of a successful company but we also want something intellectually hugely satisfying and a shot at changing the world in a really profound way and I think some of these technologies out there and if you look at some of the most successful companies out there they're doing all of those things they're changing the world in a way that's really profoundly better they're making tremendous value and they're also doing kick-ass science at the end of the day all of this data that we have it's going to lead to these fascinating sets of questions and ways of changing things and I think there's going to be sort of a next generation of companies things like the we're trying to build ourselves in my company that are going to try to capture that sort of talent and say you can do all these things you could be at the center of that Venn diagram where you're really nailing things it's surprising when I find myself a Luddite on the panel but it is I think that we still have to recognize that a lot of the challenges that we're having right now in developed world countries in terms of unemployment come from the fact that technology is displacing traditional traditional jobs in traditional roles and what we learned through a period of economic downturn was that we could cut back at companies and live without the people that were actually satisfying those roles and so while there is a huge opportunity and we suffer from trying to get great engineers that come to come to Cloudflare and it's impossible the Bay Area it's impossible to find people to work for you but again the rest of the world is there is still a real threat and this it is not necessarily going to be a smooth ride from point A to point B and the people who figure out how to make that as smooth as possible I mean that's a very important role for people to be really thinking through how technology and how education is going to make that happen I would say I would slightly disagree with that because I think Are you a Luddite too or not? I'm not my view is that if you look at the proliferation of technology my view is that it hasn't scaled fast enough but where it has been applied it has made a fundamental difference especially in the lives of those people that have access to the least resources if you think about India for example farmers when they're farming and selling into cities didn't really have access to how commodities were priced all of a sudden by building these platforms they could see how much should I be selling this fruit or vegetable for whereas before they were being cheated now all of a sudden their status and life improved because they're making fair share for their hard work I think across the board you're actually seeing the impact it's actually lifting people out of poverty but we need to do a lot more to make sure that we're training and investing those people We're here and we've got 20 minutes to run about mastering quality growth passing the test of technology the kind of thing you've just said about people generating income even if they're farmers and fishermen working out where the best price is in the market think towards the end of this session about where the next frontier is and the next frontier of challenge both for positives and negatives I'll come back to you in a moment please I'm Brian Gallagher CEO of United Way Worldwide this is a really role of market role of government role of media in terms of use or misuse of data there's a front page story in the China Daily today of a young woman who's been in the media in China for the last three months she posted on her Facebook that she was an executive with the Red Cross of the China Association Red Cross filmed with her luxury sports car she got pummeled by the Chinese bloggers the Chinese media it wasn't true charitable giving dropped 90% month over month after the story happened and whether it was that kind of data she was wrong obviously but what role does the marketplace and normative behavior change versus government versus media play in calibrating the productive use of all of this data or misuse of the data Tyga I'd go back to what Nathan said on newspapers I think it was a great example so there are censorship that you could have for newspapers just going back to that one you could have censorship that is at that extreme or you could have censorship at a much lower level which just becomes a libel or a suit and court you probably have to end up with some regulation but I would argue that the more regulation you have the more you're going to have someone who breaks the regulation you're going to have no progress I think one of the mistakes we should not make is assuming that we can't get to the other end to Matthew's point and two we also need to tell people that there's going to be pain in the short term what about that question though about normative behavior will normative behavior survive and I'm reinterpreting the question pretty crudely there well I think the deeper question is where does the power reside what's scarier if that individual made a choice a decision that's one thing versus if somebody else released that data for them my view is that we need to make sure that the power is shifted to the individual that it's not the government necessarily making the decision or private sector companies there are a lot of companies you may sign up for and you have no idea two days later how they're going to use that data that to me is one of the scariest things that's happening in that space so my solution will be to make sure that we're shifting the power to the end user so the person, the individual is making that decision especially in an era where we're leaving digital footprints and we have no idea where those digital footprints are going to end up 20 years from now Jennifer the reflection I have goes back to the values of those individuals and how they interact with one another and just the concern around what are the ethics if there is someone being attacked essentially on their digital profile is it based on something that is true or that's not true and how do you actually have a dialogue with people because you can't necessarily respond by just shutting everything down but also if you can't engage in a meaningful dialogue with people that are just attacking someone and who knows what their motives are I think that's what puts us into a difficult difficult position OK don't come in I think you're going to speak in Chinese so everyone will need a headset please just one moment who wanted to come in I was just going to say there's also a real asymmetry that's going on here where you have individuals that can broadcast information more quickly than the Red Cross or a government or a corporate entity and so that asymmetry will correct itself eventually but there's a bumpy time how will it correct itself I think that you're watching as people are getting much more comfortable even as corporate entities are disclosing information on Twitter in real time as it happens but it's changing the rules of the game so if you misstep or you do something wrong the expectation of the crowd is that you will disclose it and you'll be very transparent that's not the old rule the old rule was cover it up don't say anything, figure it out after the fact that's changed and I think it's going to take a while for big governments and corporate entities to adjust to how that rule works okay I'm from I'm from my company is in the education business my question is large companies usually occupy a big share of the market that means they usually have the largest source of information on the market so what if large companies do nothing about the information they do little with the information or do something wrong with the information while the little small players can do nothing about it will that impede the developmental market so my question is whether those large companies should make the core data available to the entire market in this new technological leap well my reflection on that relates to what a large company is accountable for in the idea of quality growth because when I think about quality growth it's not just about profit but also about human happiness and health gender equity environmental sustainability these types of ideas so if the use of data should not just be utilized for the purpose of profit but also for the purpose of bettering people so that's the responsibility I see coming from Silicon Valley there's a view of large companies that I think is maybe different from the view of large companies and a lot of other parts of the world I find large companies to be very slow moving they're not very nimble it's very difficult for them to innovate and frequently they get outflanked by new technologies so in particular you're talking about release of data a lot of large companies aren't even able to generate the data that they might misuse faster than an innovative company so my view is that large companies they serve a useful purpose they're good to partner with they have a lot of money they have market access but there are a lot of limitations to large companies in a free market in a huge way we've seen industry after industry new companies with new business models that are set up to gather data and use the data much better than the big competitors they compete with and they take the market they're just more intelligent on day one they're structured to be more intelligent on day one I think that actually the largest companies in the space are by far the most innovative and what I mean by that is from a technical perspective what they've done is they've moved towards and actually built a developer ecosystem where third parties can build off of their platforms so they're doing really really well actually because they've taken a platform approach those companies whose business models are built around closing off data are actually the losers of the century they're not doing that well but it does open up a question around the personal choices of individuals whereas you sign up for some of these services what's done with that data well and it's not true in every case that even the big companies I mean Cloudflare was founded out of the frustration that we were trying to accumulate security data from Yahoo and Google and companies and you go to Google and say tell us all of the times that you've been attacked so that we can help protect the rest of the internet and they'll tell you to get lost and so the idea was could you use security data to gather it together so I think that there's an opportunity to look at those places where big companies aren't sharing data and then find ways to collect smaller companies together to effectively form a co-op of data and that's a great way to then disrupt those bigger companies I just want to echo that point which is I do think it's one of these issues of how do we create environments that facilitate sharing because clearly there's huge value added for individuals, for corporations, for governments the more data that's shared probably the better it is and the problem is getting over that initial reluctance to share data and I think some of the role of perhaps creative regulation and some of the role that will be out there for innovative systems will be to create platforms with which we can share data more effectively and if you think about that some of the corporations we think about actually in fact are doing that, if you think about something like eBay part of what eBay is doing is encouraging people to share things that they have like basically create a repository of what are the items in my life that I might be willing to share with you or exchange with you for something and I think some of these creative mechanisms are going to allow people, people will find huge value in sharing it's just about creating the system that will let them do it We've got about 8 minutes to run let me offer you a couple of tweets here one from Twitter, what's your opinion can science keep up with technology and secondly how can technology promote fairness and justice not just growth I think it's up to people to use technology to promote fairness and justice and I think that also there can be systems that can be created to hold governments or companies accountable people can launch an audit of how their governments are living up to certain commitments so I think part of it is technology but unless the institutions with the resources apply that towards fairness and justice it will be very difficult because it will be those with little resources trying to create justice for all so we need commitment across institutions Vivek, given what you're now doing at Harvard and have been doing, are there metrics for measuring fairness and justice? That's a really, really difficult question That's why I asked it It's very relative depending on where you're asking that question but in terms of the role of technology for example I think part of a huge opportunity that I see before us is in terms of actually being able to fight corruption around the world in terms of being able to shine light on the resources that we've already are bringing to bear on problems that we face as a society whether it's around education whether it's around healthcare or the economy in terms of creating jobs because a lot of the money in many cases it's not a money question it's just the money is going in the hands of the wrong people and the ability to basically just shine and figure out where's that money going who got it, what did it produce for us can have a huge impact on making sure that we're creating a more equitable society Matthew, given that you're on the board of advisors for the Centre for Information Technology and Privacy Law what's your answer to the issue of fairness and justice? I was feeling good that Vivek got the question you know I think it is right that technology is a tool and it can be used for things that are highly unjust and it can be used for things that are highly just and I think that the challenge that we have as you know the leaders that are in this room the government organizations that are represented in this room is how do we make sure that again that technology is benefiting everyone and is continuing to move things forward and that you're not that you're not creating challenges that aren't worth the costs that we're giving up as a result of them so I think that's something that we just have to keep evaluating but technology isn't in and of itself good or bad it can be used for either of those things as we go forward and that other question quickly, can science keep up with technology? That's a tough one Another tough question Yeah, I mean basically there's this wonderful dance that occurs between technology and science I mean for me as a scientist when there's new technology out there it just opens up new niches where you can explore and find things I mean for me I think one of the interesting spaces is going to be sequence data I think we're going to have tremendous amounts of sequence data What is that? Sorry, genetic sequence data so we're going from a situation now that we referred to before during this dialogue it's going to be cheaper and cheaper to figure out the genetic information in our bodies from moment to moment in the water that we drink on our skin and there are these vast and complicated communities out there the technology is going to allow us to house that data so that the scientists can then interrogate the data sets and try to figure out the patterns which are really helping to dictate things I think the technology is just going to open up a space that will ultimately emerge there I actually think they play on each other so if technology does take the lead which it sometimes does it actually pulls science forward because technology creates demand on science that produces an economic reason for science investments to happen science will go forward which then technology leverages so I think the more one goes forward and the more differentiation that's created the other gets pulled forward and I'll just re-emphasize let's always keep in mind someone will always find a way to misuse it and that's just a fact of life and you can't mitigate against it well you have to you try and see you try and see down the field and see what someone might do but at the end of the day someone will always misuse technology and we just have to do our best to be prepared for that but I think one thing to point out is that there's nothing new about that that's always been the case with technology since 10,000 years ago when we started playing around with it our final question to you in a few seconds at the beginning you get 45 seconds this time the takeaway that you will have from this particularly on technology both of what you did here but also what may have been missing when it comes to how technology can generate growth Matthew I think the most inspiring panel that I was a part of was earlier today actually it was a group of about 50 young Chinese entrepreneurs there they were there and they were all starting companies and you know what was inspiring to me was I'd done a panel like this again in China about three years ago and the reason why entrepreneurs said that they wanted to start companies was because they said that it would make them rich the reason the entrepreneurs today said that they wanted to start companies is because they said that they wanted to change the world and there is no force that we have that is more powerful than entrepreneurship at solving the world's problems and the fact that these Chinese entrepreneurs were saying that that was what they wanted to do was really inspiring to me Vivek so I was in this one panel which I thought was really interesting and it was about the global economy and all the challenges that we are facing right now the economic crisis that countries around the world are going through but what is really interesting is how interconnected we are at the same time how countries are trying to disconnect in some ways so what that led me to think about is the role that technology can play and is playing today when it comes to the global economy building up on the entrepreneurship side there hasn't been a better time than now to be an entrepreneur if you think about how whether somebody is sitting here in Dalian or they are sitting in Washington or San Francisco the ability to use these platforms that have been built and fundamentally change the way the world works that wasn't structurally possible before Harrison I am in a very high growth company and I tend to spend a lot of time thinking about what our biotechnology can do and I don't spend a lot of time thinking about things like social media and what I gathered from being in a much more general environment and hearing about social media and software and IT and all the things that are happening made me realize how much of the growth that I am part of is actually driven to executive team meetings every week people are on four continents when we have them we promote our products with social media we benefit from the human genome project none of that was intended specifically to help us do what we do and yet we are a very very high growth company and we benefit from all types of technology not just our particular niche that we are really well known for We are in a company which serves a large part of the corporate world with services and for us searching for the next innovation that we can bring back to our client base is our business model you know one of the big learnings was you must throw your net really wide these days to gather that innovation it could be happening in a part of the world that actually you don't spend enough time in and the other one was get closer to your customer because the chances are you are going to co-innovate with them much better and breakthrough innovations happen when that happens Nathan so I, within the last couple of years I took a bit of time off of teaching and running my business to write a book which is coming out and one of the basic things that I found so interesting is I was interested in this question of why do we experience so many pandemics right now why are we experiencing this and the answer to it and the answer to really much of the history of the problem was connectivity between humans connectivity between animals and what sort of emerged was this really interesting sort of race between different kinds of connectivity in a world where we can move much more quickly goods, people, animals all these things everywhere around the world if you look at a map of sort of flight patterns and you look at a map of flight patterns 10 years ago you're looking at something even 10 years ago it was pretty minimal now you see this plate of spaghetti we're really sort of one massive metapopulation and the real question is will this sort of electronic and digital connectivity allow us to keep up with the threats that we face based on the sort of physical and transport connectivity and I will tell you the end of the book which is I'm bullish I do think the technology is going to get there and allow us to address this but in some ways I think we can just all be sort of amazed to live at this moment of history where we can experience sort of these sorts of things and change can happen at this speed I hope it's uncooked spaghetti in a straight line not cooked and wavy Jennifer put it out for me and also that I think even requires more attention is the intergenerational power conflict so even if you reflect on the Arab Spring and how young people are able to use technology to sort of have a certain level of voice they're not really integrated with the established leadership and so the existing established institutions need to learn how to engage youth meaningfully otherwise the gap between generations will grow and we face a serious crisis and the one thing I also want to commend is the World Economic Forum for this week launching a new community for young people in their 20s it's called the global shapers community it was just announced this week and I think it really will help to set an example for the world on how established institutions can engage with young people Jennifer thank you and thank you to you all I've just had one other tweet technology has made it possible for everyone on earth to live a dream hard work still pays off thank you all very much indeed to Robert Greenhill the managing director of the forum to close the meeting well thank you very much Nick and thank you all over three days 1500 leaders from 90 different countries have gotten together to discuss the issues to develop new ideas but perhaps even more important to develop new friendships so what's come out of all these different conversations well certainly one of the big themes was the focus on the global economic situation the challenges with the US fiscal situation the ongoing uncertainty in the Eurozone counterbalanced by the tremendous vitality here in China and other emerging markets and Premier Wan made it clear that China was prepared to do its part but actually that the rest of the global family needed to help as well and in fact one of the key themes that came out was this need for collaboration across countries but also one of the points made here in the last generations because many of the issues in terms of youth unemployment in terms of pensions in terms of health care actually requires intergenerational dialogue as well as intercontinental collaboration obviously a second big theme was the whole question of quality growth in all its different ways quality in terms of yes profitable but also making a difference to the employees to the individuals who consume the product actually contributing to a more equitable and just society and actually to the elements that also came in terms of the way to create quality growth was to actually have a quality society one that provided opportunities of education where everyone could participate where everyone could participate at different stages in their career and also a quality society where people could actually each have a fair share of the rewards that comes from that when we came up many of the conversations was well quality growth comes from high quality growth comes from high quality companies companies that actually have an ethical frame that have a leadership that's not corrupt that actually believes in its core not just in its CSR programs to actually make the world a better place and actually walks the talk from the CEO right down to the newest employee and therefore one of the themes that came out was yes the role of business but the role of business is people people who are employees people in society, people who are consumers and this broader sense of collaboration also came in the third element which we've seen so clearly here about the whole role of innovation technology, entrepreneurship because one of the themes or sub themes of this session was resource scarcity the fact that we are for the indefinite future going to be in a resource find out world if resources are fine at innovation, imagination is infinite and one of the most exciting elements of this fifth annual meeting of the new champions was the extent to which this innovation these ideas as entrepreneurship is coming from every corner of the globe and this whole sense that there's actually this new wave of entrepreneurship and innovation coming from new countries that haven't been involved and new generations was perhaps the most important overarching theme and I would like to finish with what Jennifer just mentioned the incredibly important symbolic launching of the global shapers community those people in their 20s to ensure they're fully engaged in this innovation, this entrepreneurship that will help us together deliver quality growth now I mentioned that collaboration and partnership is a core part of what the annual meeting of new champions is all about we've actually had a tremendous collaboration in partnership with Tianjin and with Dalian and I would like to on behalf of the forum and all of you thank the people in the leadership of Dalian for their extraordinary support over this this this fifth anniversary forum but also over the year leading up to it and I'd like to invite the vice mayor of Dalian Sao Iwa vice mayor of Dalian to address the podium just think if executive director Mr. Robert Greenhill and Ms. Schwab ladies and gentlemen together with more than 1,700 industrial elites from more than 90 countries we have been gathering here for days and nights at the end of the conclusion of this forum we have reached the consensus friendship, confidence, responsibility and collaboration these are the spirits of our discussion so mastering the quality growth it is not only the theme of this forum but also a topic that will never end and we also see the efforts people have made to achieve this and we also see the possibility of translate dream into translate this dream into reality and five years ago in September the first summer Davos forum came to China came to Dalian just like a premier win His Excellencies remark at the opening ceremony he said the forum has reached a consensus after five years of experience we are targeting the world targeting the future and targeting innovation and targeting the youth in the past five years the world economic forum has been developing by itself meanwhile WF impacted Dalian profoundly Professor Schwab's comments saying that Dalian the city gradually becoming a very good platform for economic development international collaboration as a person who's been here for so many years I'm convinced that this forum doesn't only last for three days it connects today's ending point to the next year's beginning point of this forum and it is not only the participants in this forum it is the whole world that is participating this forum a topic we're discussing is not only going to impact economy and social aspects it will impact the whole world as well so I really appreciate WF's efforts and Professor Schwab's dedication and I also would like to express my gratitude to the city of Tianjin for your support I also would like to thank all the volunteers for your actions and your behavior it's a showcase of quality of Dalian and you have sincerely passionately expressed Dalian people's devotion to this forum we're very much looking forward to the next gathering of 2013 in Dalian thank you well every end is also a beginning and with the end of the fifth annual meeting of new champions comes the beginning of the preparation for the sixth annual meeting of new champions and so it's now my great pleasure to ask the vice mayor of Tianjin Ren Shui Feng to address the group Robert Greenhill and respect Mr. Vice Mayor and Mrs. Schwab ladies and gentlemen at the moment of the summer powers 2011 coming to the end on behalf of Tianjin municipal government I would like to express my sincerest congratulations to this great success at the opening plenary premier Wenjiabao delivered speech with attractive attention and became highlight of this annual meeting the scene master quality growth helps us studying a new business model pursuing a new growth energy shaping future business policy embrace innovative and sustainable growth Tianjin delegation headed by the mayor of Huang Jinguo communicates with the public figures CEO's media leaders and our distinguished family members of the forum we are impressed our hostilities of Dalian thank you Dalian and thank you Vice Mayor Cao okay at the host city of the 2008 and 2010 annual meeting of the new champions we are more involved in a big family as we always see just the professor Schwab side we are the people of ours ladies and gentlemen the communication we will carry on and our friendship will last forever we sincerely invite you to come together again on a summer of 2012 in Tianjin let's celebrate our friendship and bring our hearts together for a better tomorrow welcome and you next year see you next year in Tianjin thank you very much in closing I would like to thank on behalf of the management team and the entire forum the people of Dalian for their hospitality and their engagement and the many volunteers who gave so generously of their time and their enthusiasm of the last few days I would like to also thank the staff of the world economic forum and Jeremy Jurgens who for the fifth year has been organizing this on our behalf and most of all we would like to thank you for the engagement of the participation that makes it such a special event and finally it's my pleasure to invite you to join us downstairs for a final reception and cocktail and say we look forward to seeing you all next year in Tianjin thank you


Hello, okay great. I'm gonna get started since it's 1140 So Hey, so welcome everyone to our presentation. Thanks for coming if you haven't guessed by the title We're gonna be spending some time today talking about how you can use Zool for your own systems And we're mainly gonna be going over Why we moved to Zool and some of the benefits that came with it especially compared to Jenkins Some fundamentals of Zool and how to onboard your own projects to Zool and a retrospective of our Zool journey so far So without further ado More introductions. I'm rich. This is Howard We're both engineers on the workday private cloud team, which we affectionately call WPC But more on that later So before we get into some of the technical weeds of How we use Zool we just want to set some context for what workday is for those of you who might not know so Workday provides cloud-based software for companies to manage their finance and HR more efficiently So it sounds simple on the surface, but as you can see we operate at quite a large scale Workday currently provides services to over half of the fortune 500 and this amounts to over 60 million workers And workday on top of this strives to maintain a customer satisfaction rating of over 95 percent Which we've successfully achieved for over a decade. So that's something that workday really prides itself on So how do we achieve this level of scale and reliability? It's such a high rate And of course we use open stack if you haven't guessed So we began our open stack journey many years ago starting with our first production clusters running ice house And since then we could you could say we've developed a bit of a bigger footprint We're a relatively small team inside of workday consisting of two development scum teams and one SRE team Together we run 87 clusters and growing each cluster contains up to 300 compute notes and all in all this amounts to 3.25 million cores 12 and a half petabytes of RAM and 85,000 concurrent VMs We also hold ourselves accountable to a 99% API success rate during workdays Several-hour weekly maintenance window where we basically destroy and recreate the entire workday stack So this amounts to 241,000 VMs recreated weekly and as you can imagine puts quite a lot of load on our control planes So given all this information you can kind of start to see why Zool and CI is so important to us It's imperative that our platform stays extremely reliable So that we don't produce any kinds of regressions either from performance or deployment We need to be accountable to our customers in our patch window So before we start talking about our current system I kind of want to just talk a little bit about what we dealt with before we had Zool in our older version of WPC and This should kind of help paint a picture of why we decided to transition to Zool so note that some of this obviously isn't ideal and We're putting it for the sake of comparison, but it's it's something that worked for us at the time and scaled well for us enough But obviously we used Jenkins to run our CI We shared this with other teams in workday. So there is another team that managed Jenkins for us It was great for maintenance overhead, but not great for flexibility and speed For instance, if you want to set up a new pipeline, you'd have to ask another team and wait several days To get back to you and you just generally didn't have a lot of power We had limited jobs pre-merge So basically a couple tests just to check a single patch and make sure that it seems okay And we relied on periodic jobs Entirely for post-merge to catch any regressions and the main part of this resulted in that all code was merged by hand So it doesn't matter how and when you got a plus one from your CI or from another person giving you a plus two on your View as long as you got it at some point you could merge so if someone Reviewed your code on Friday you could merge on Monday and Just pray that it works And also we use chef for our deployment so this was a weekly point-in-time snapshots of chef changes across multiple workday teams including our own so When we had to roll out changes, we'd roll out everyone's changes at once including workday infrastructure changes So feature and bug fix rollout was gated by config changes We didn't have any stable release branches and we couldn't really do this at the time So given all these problems with our old CI what kind of benefits to Zule bring us I can help So the first one as I mentioned before is stable releases So previously because we used point-in-time snapshots for releasing there wasn't really any need or even ability to branch But with Zule we can enable a job variance and actually use branching to create stable releases So this allows us to upgrade and roll back our code much more easily We can also release our own open-stack specific changes independently from company-wide changes So we're not at the mercy of this big blob of point-in-time snapshot of chef changes Portable jobs are great too This essentially refers to the idea that given any Zule job you can run the same job across any repo to ensure that all Changes are compatible So for example if you have repo a and repo b and they're both used to build WPC and we know that the same job works to test Both of them we can be much more confident that our changes Will not break our system in addition to testing cross-project dependencies, which we'll talk about a little more later Loggings another big thing It's hard to understate how much easier it is to look at logs and Zule compared to Jenkins You can kind of expand and collapse your pre and post ansible jobs get like nice color-coded Ansible hints for which tasks may have been skipped or passed or failed Whereas Jenkins is just like this huge blob of text that it just executes a thing and you have to manually search for errors In kind of this really not user-friendly way So even better We found it useful to create our own rr server at some point for further ansible logging, but we can talk about that a bit more later Gating is probably one of the most important parts of Zule As we mentioned before we kind of had like a semi-manual version of project gating in Jenkins Like we would allow our test suite to run first, but we still ended up merging the code by hand but now where we've gone past the days where We can have two incompatible changes that can break our CI because of Race conditions when changes were merged so for example and count out what I was getting at before if we have Two developers they get plus ones on like a Friday and their code looks good to them They merge on Monday and then suddenly those two changes break each other that doesn't happen to us anymore so it allows us to take advantage of a Parallel speculative execution of our tests and we move much quicker and we don't break things nearly as much Auto holds also really useful In Jenkins we kind of had pretty limited control over Our system due to not being the winners So if a job failed there usually wasn't really much we could do besides kind of just rerun the test or make some changes and see what happened again in Jenkins But with Zool you can actually auto hold your nodes in the event of a failure So this helps solve the age old riddle of well it works on my machine Why doesn't it work in the CI because you can actually pause the CI and look at it and See exactly what's happening and run the same commands And of course all this culminates in fewer blockages and happier developers, which is great and Anecdotally our on-call chips have seen much fewer breakages in our CI which is great And it's pretty noticeable. I don't have data to back that up, but you can hopefully take my word for it So I'll hand over to Yeah, so We kind of look at this as kind of a two-part conference talk last Last time in Berlin we talked quite a bit about our migration platform on how we converted our open stack CI part to To using Zool today the rest of the talk We wanted to kind of talk about how you can kind of use it and how you can make you know non-open stack projects and Zool as well So the the crux of this is you you ought to use Zool Now while we need to assume you have a Zool system I figured it'd be pretty good if I just kind of showed a simplified layout you notice that Zool has to use Garrett so you've got to have a Garrett system running because that's where it's going to pull it on and It's going to check out different changes and branches of each of your projects there And then it actually farms this off using Ansible out to Out to these ephemeral nodes we use VMs for ours They're just open stack VMs that we spin up for these kind of processes and then it you know Ansible calls it So let's show a few things that you need to know to kind of convert your existing job over to Zool so in your project Why is there? Okay, here we go. Sorry. There's a blank screen in your project You you create a Zool dot D directory and it has two files in it. There's a job The jobs file defines the jobs, you know linting unit tests Publishing anything that along those lines then there's a project file and this references those jobs for the various pipelines Like check gate post after merging that thing then Then you create the jobs now most these jobs are Ansible playbooks, but we'll talk about a nice talks layer that you can use Now this is an example project file I tried to make it interesting and I may have opened up more questions here I'm doing a release inside of a gate. This relies on delegating secrets Which I'm gonna talk about later. You should probably Trigger your releases for the post merge pipelines not during the gate here But keep in line the pipelines come in two flavors There are pre and post merge and some things like secrets are only available in post merge code pipelines you generally want to keep your pipelines as Similar to each other that eliminates some of the problems that you might have like there's an error And you don't know whether it's your code change or whether an environment change or whether something that's being integrated change So keep the pipelines or the jobs the similar Now this is an example project file Okay, there's the jobs file so here's my example jobs file The names are references from the pipe the project file and they each specify one or more playbooks Note that the playbooks run somewhat in isolation. So it's difficult to pass state from one Playbook to the next even if it's part of the same job Now a playbook called by Zool can do, you know, all the normal stuff that Ansible does Now note that you can't become root on local hosts because that as you saw in that initial architecture thing That's the executor. So most of these things you'll want to have as on the builder Rich you want to talk about talks? So if you're not using Ansible and you want to go with a pure Python project Talks is a great way to run tests for your project For those of you who don't know what talks is a quick summary is in general talks Is a framework that helps you to standardize your? Python testing environments. So for example, let's say you need to maintain your Python project for multiple versions of Python You can set up the test environment appropriately Based on each version so install dependencies particular to those Python versions and run your tests ensure that you haven't broken your project for Some other version of Python and as you can see it's pretty simple to set up talks Honestly, you pretty much just define a talks I and I file on your project and then you can call it using the talk CLI So in this example, notice that we set up a linter environment and a unit test environment for a Python three eight And note that even if your project is not pure Python You can still at least take advantage of using it as a linter especially in conjunction with Zool because it kind of sets it all up for you So for example, if you want to lint some Ansible playbooks, you can use talks for that, too So it's not limited to just Python even though that's probably its best use case Yeah, so This is pretty much all you do to set it up Once your talks I and I is done you just set up in your project yaml You call the talks linters and the talks Python environments, whichever ones you've set up and Zool kind of figures out the rest for you And this is what happens when you're able to leverage existing community-built jobs on Zool Which is really great for us. It's made ourselves a lot more efficient and we can like pick and choose what works for us from the community So if you're kind of wondering, you know, how this works Because I know I know I've kind of abstracted a lot of it and just said oh Yeah, just put this here and put this here and everything just works together We can talk a little bit about how it works under the hood just so you have an idea so how Zool generally works is that it has a set of Pre and post ansible jobs that set up and tear down the system So this kind of helps keep the logic of your tests separated from the Zool internals So you can have any number of pre and post jobs that get called in a hierarchy, which we show on the next slide but all jobs have some amount of privilege set up like Setting up SSH keys or getting the change ID from Garrett so you can see that's in step one And then in step two and three talks around its own Unprivileged pre post and base jobs to do its own set up and tear down and running the tests So it calls bind up to install the binary dependencies And then it actually does the job of installing Pippin talks and then it finally calls the test in the lenders And then finally after all that's done the privilege phase From the trusted base job Uploads the logs to Zool so again, it's all kind of done for you You can look at it and that the upstream jobs like I know like People send commits to the gate in the open dev repositories You can just honestly click on the Zool jobs there and see what it's doing and you can kind of mirror What's happening there to your own system? So it's a great example to follow So here kind of what I was alluding to before Here's like our Zool job hierarchy You can see every job has a parent job Which may have its own parent job, etc. And until it gets to the base which runs your actual tests So you can see the talks run dot yaml is basically where your actual tests are run But everything else is all the setup and tear down And again, each parent can have one or more of these pre and post jobs Notice how some of these jobs are trusted and I've kind of alluded it to before when I was mentioning privilege and Triple those jobs, but we'll get to that later So yeah, now that you've got your test set up in either Ansible or talks Let's say you want to test your inter-product dependencies. So one of the coolest parts of Zool. So All you do in is in your jobs.yaml you define your acquired projects So that's kind of in the bold in the towards the center of the slide In this case, we're requiring that we need to have the myprojrpm build dependent And then in your commit message for your separate change all you do is you literally put Depends on and then the actual Garrett URL of your change and then what this does is a Zool creates a directory for the running job and It checks out all of their acquired projects as instructed. So if you have a depends on defined It will check out that change specifically Otherwise, it'll just default to the main branch or pretty much any branch that you're setting and commit to So say you're just sending a commit to Stable a release branch for a bug fix it'll check out those branches too. So Yeah, the inter-product dependencies works great And Then as a bonus for those of you who use Kola This works seamlessly with Zool and it's it's designed to work this way, which is really great And it works great for our setup. So for those of you who may or may not know In Kola bill.com you have a specific syntax that you would use in order to install dependencies here images So it's kind of that crossed out thing there as an example So in that example, we're trying to install this myprojrpm to all heat images So you may be initially tempted to do what is in the crossed out version But note that this is actually terrible practice. You should not do this This is you're defeating the purpose of Zool if you do this You don't want to be tempted to directly install packages from a static source URL Instead what works really great for us is we have a Templated out Kola bill.com using ginger and then we loop over all of the source names that we've checked out in Zool on Any of our depends on commits and we install from disk instead and it's really important to install from disk Because this will actually properly test your cross-product dependencies. Whereas if you were just Testing from this URL, you're just gonna get the same thing every time and you're not actually testing the dependencies Zool will check out all of the required repos into a specific directory per job run to run the tests And in the past like we kind of had to like unlearn this huge clunky flow We had with Jenkins especially for repos that did generate packages and RPMs like we used to have an entire workflow where the job or the repo would generate the RPM we'd upload it to Repository package repository and then consume it later in our periodic jobs And this is just like a whole mess and it's something we actually had to unlearn how to do because it was bad practice And it defeated the purpose of Zool. So that's just kind of a quick bonus for Kola integration so Now unlike Jenkins Zool doesn't have a vault of shared secrets for all jobs And that's by design as often secrets in Jenkins would accidentally be you know leaked to the logs and Zools publicly available. So you don't want to have something like that So while these tools are available Zool kind of forces you to think through how you want to share secrets and Just use the secrets so As we talked about before some jobs There are trusted and some are not you see this in this screenshot of the just the last few projects on our Zool system Untrusted jobs are meant to be jobs that you test before merging The trusted config jobs, they're the opposite. They're tested after merging So don't worry too much about this, but just note that the Zool base jobs here The Zool base jobs here are Kind of the ones that can access encrypted data and make it available to other untrusted jobs But typically you put your secrets in the project that needs them So Let's do this the Zool client CLI. It's a lot like the Ansible vault command If you're familiar with that it allows you to kind of encrypt something into a yaml formatted data structure however, it uses a public key rather than symmetric encryption and Then we can take that output and just drop it into our secrets yaml file and then in our post or in our Playbooks we now have that stuff available, but only in the post merge pipeline That is the periodic jobs post tag pipelines those that happen after merging Now in our case, we actually wanted to have the same secrets available to all 200 plus projects that we had because some were publishing rpms to Our repository our repositories and things like that. So we had kind of a slightly different twist on this so Typically the Zool executor has access to those Collection of secrets we put it in the Zool based jobs and it can run these trusted playbooks from from this project Now if you run this playbook On a given worker node here the playbook can then issue a docker login or you know something equivalent to to establish a connection to the trust to a trust store and Then untrusted playbooks executing later than have access to this Now very similar to what we did before we can encrypt the secret, but this time we're going to put it in the the Zool based jobs and Then in the base jobs jobs yaml file We're going to reference that secret that we just added now No, when we run the untrusted playbook that secret won't be there anymore So what we need to do is use a delegate so And I'm afraid this is going to be a homework exercise for each of you because you're gonna have to use your own system and your Own trust stores to get to to put those secrets on those Those build nodes. It's kind of a risky procedure So best if you can kind of create a temporary short-lived password Or token with the longer one that you've stored in your in this the secret playbook so Summarize Yeah, so we'll leave you guys with a quick retrospective and summary of our journey with Zool so far So sorry So despite all the good we've experienced Migrating to Zool. It is worth highlighting some pitfalls and pain points You might have if you are considering this migration for yourself As you can tell and as I mentioned before we no longer have a dedicated team to manage our CI So the the automation for Deploying Zool itself is pretty minimal We kind of just threw something together really fast in like a month or two and it Surprisingly worked really well to the point where we actually it was so stable We actually didn't need to touch it again. Hence why some of our automation is actually kind of lacking It's something that we're trying to work on fixing but nonetheless, it's the current state of things for us As a result because our playbooks are not quite as good We don't upgrade as frequently as we would like so we are using a bit of an older version of Zool And that is something that we intend to fix at some point as well Also for us in particular We don't have a great Integration with company tools like JIRA slack confluence, etc Because we were just so focused on getting our open stack running in our own Zool running that like you know We we don't have time to figure this stuff out It's something that another team would be great at figuring out, but we just have too many things to do Another thing that we kind of noticed to and in part of how we're fast We're moving is a we're noticing we're having kind of some significant drift between Zool and our in-house bare metal Ansible orchestration tool so think basically ants will tower essentially to deploy our own clusters We noticed that most of our breakages were happening in our bare metal integration So like while Zool itself was great and the playbooks were stable They didn't match closely enough to what we did in bare metal Which meant that Zool and in-house ansible tool for ourselves. We're not entirely compatible And again, this is partially because of how fast you were able to move The these things kind of came out of sync with each other Again, this is something that we're working hard on correcting, but things are in a much better place than they are before Yeah, and workday also has many company specific steps Which we need to follow to set up our infrastructure So even simple things like calling col ansible within our own ansible let us to creating our own Rr server where we could more easily view logs and diagnose problems So even more things that we had to set up, but despite this I would say Zool is overall great So a pain point was we don't have a dedicated team to matter CI But a win is we don't have a dedicated team to matter CI. We get to do everything ourselves We have so much power and we can move really really fast If you want a new project, you don't have to wait for like a few days for another team to help set up things for you You just do it yourself. It takes five minutes, and it's amazing As I mentioned earlier, we manage concurrent stable releases using branches So we don't have this big chef blob of code anymore. We can actually release code in an intelligent and safe way and we can release changes that Not or we don't have to depend on other teams changes anymore and As I kind of alluded to before like some of the things we were fixing and working hard on fixing like we have done some pretty Major overhauls honestly of our release pipeline several times and we didn't block anybody Honestly, I feel like if we were doing this in Jenkins We would have broken things to the point where it's like it would have taken a while to fix But Zool made it really easy to refactor Some caveats of Zool that are worth noting if you do decide to uptake Zool for your own use case Again, it might not matter for you, but it's some things that affected us and are notable So Zool as you can kind of tell is really really good at CI It's great at that, but that means it's not great at executing ad hoc tasks For example, we did have some automation For example, if we want to onboard new teams to our cloud And we ran this by kicking off an ad hoc job in Jenkins Well, we still have to migrate this away from Jenkins Zool isn't really a logical place to put it because it's more of a CI and not for running ad hoc tasks So you still do need like Antsville tower or some other kind of Antsville executor to handle these situations Also note that Zool does have a fairly high barrier to entry in terms of resources The node pool is pretty expensive It creates a lot of VMs for us and offers quite a bit of churn in our clusters But note that we already had a pretty solid version of OpenStack running on WPC So we were able to just stick our node pool there and use our existing resources So that wasn't a problem for us And the Jenkins secret chestor isn't great But at least kind of provides you some infrastructure to manage your secrets Even though it's still not super secure. You could just log your secrets Zool kind of discourages you from following any of these sketchy patterns at all by not even giving you the option to do this So it tends to try to guide you towards setting up actual secure external trust stores instead So finally in the spirit of Canada we'll leaf you with some random lessons we learned A CI is no substitute for developer work flow Just because you're using Zool doesn't mean your system is magically going to be more resilient You still do have to write tests and configure Zool to use the correct patterns as we mentioned like installing from disk Every test you hook in the pipeline is an investment that will pay off later And if you have flaky and slow jobs you definitely want to chase those down Periodic tests are still useful despite the fact that we have gating now The check gate and periodic pipelines all work together to kind of isolate where a failure may have come from Either a developer's review, the environment, or from multiple incompatible changes And finally want to emphasize that the benefits of Zool far outweigh the initial learning curve It's still honestly kind of shocking how fast we were able to move Like we were able to create our own source control and CI without having to depend on another team in like a month or two And it almost seemed too ambitious, but we did it and you guys can do it too So the amount of time we spent setting up Zool has definitely been paid back in developer hours And confidence that our changes are more resilient And setting up new projects and jobs gets easier with practice as we've kind of shown you So yeah, that's it for us I don't know if we have too much time for questions, but thank you for joining our presentation I think it's time to run, but we can take questions out the hall


There, of course, is some fear of lightning. It is a very powerful force. If we can redirect that power, this could be a world-changing discovery. So I joined the Marines at the age of 18 because I was a person who was really committed to trying to better himself, and I heard it was most challenging. Getting to really learn how to focus, that was probably one of the luckier things that could have happened to me. Each time that I went out to the field to do training, I was getting a lesson in crazy weather patterns. This is something that has been with me since I was a boy. Growing up in the southeast, a lot of interesting electrical storms take place. Always interested in watching the weather channel and trying to understand what was happening above me. There's been many greats like Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, all of these scientists that were before me were fascinated with the sky, and often they had an experience. While I was on a new deployment, we were parked off of Iwo Jima. The Marines won Iwo Jima. I imagine that as the men planted the flag at the top of Mount Sarabaji, that lightning struck it because they had shortened the distance just enough to the charged cloud above to bring the ground to the sky. It was the exposure and being able to put together all of those pieces that helped me unlock this mystery of how to absorb lightning. After the Marine Corps, I wanted to work towards something that could benefit humanity and fully embody the core values. And so I started Project First Light. We started out as a think tank. The goal was to look for the more efficient battery, some of the processes that we've had to go through to try and acquire battery resources. It's been adversely impacting our environment. It's been literally creating global heat. The potential of lightning as a renewable energy source has been misunderstood for years. But the average strike that takes place these days can power 56 homes for a single day. The question is, how do you store lightning? Asteroids are comprised of the materials that we are searching for. Our technology will improve the quality of life for people across the planet and reduce toxic waste. I came over here to D.C. to meet with the Energy and Commerce Department and the Marines, the things that I learned, the core values on our courage and commitment. This project, it helps me embody those values in fight for the rights of others who aren't able to stand up for themselves.


Hello David Digger Hernandez here and I want you to join me on Thursday July 28th at the Trinity Broadcasting Network For a taping of praise the Lord seats are free You just need to register your seats and everybody who registers the seat Every single one in your group will get a free signed copy of Carriers of the Glory when they attend this event Also, I'll be going out and greeting you myself I want to meet you want to talk with you and I want to hand you a signed copy of my book for free again That's Thursday, July 28th more information can be found by clicking the link that just appeared overhead If you're not watching this on YouTube or a website, you can manually find the information by going to the link below on the screen I hope to see you there.