Appreciate you here. If you're here for the open cost session, then you're in the right place. The title of the session was changed, or at least should have been changed. We introduced open cost a couple of weeks ago. And the abstracts for all of the sessions were due long ago. So that's why there's a little bit of a change in the title there. If you are interested in using open source tooling to help manage your cloud costs and Kubernetes specifically within that, then I think we'll have a good session. My name is Jesse Goodyear. I'm from KubeCost. My friend and colleague is not Sean who's listed on the agenda. But yeah. Hello. There we go. Sorry. I'm still Matt Ray, still a senior success manager. And if you have questions, I'm going to be like Jesse Sidekick. Take it away, Jesse. Thanks, Matt. So I'm the Solutions Engineer at KubeCost, which means I'm a technical pre-sales person, just to be very honest with you all. That said, I'm doing quite a bit of documentation for open cost and trying to make that experience better. One of the people that's most responsible for more of the documentation just joined us. So if you need any help, hopefully she can assist. I came from NGINX, where I was working a lot on the Kubernetes Ingress Controller, and it leads us to here. My friend Matt is from Australia, and we were joking around the other day about this map that I'm fond of, about how we measure temperature across the world. And it turns out that there's one country that has both, does not use Celsius and has sent people to the moon. So this conversation is all about measuring costs, though, so let's get to the agenda. First thing I have in this presentation will be uploaded to the site, since we're done, is resources. So we obviously have a GitHub repository with all the other code that supports open cost. The website generally has a few links that are good for our FAQs, as well as a Slack link to join. That's pretty active. A couple of people a day ask questions, typically about the API. And so I added some of the API calls to the session. And then I'll post them on our GitHub to give everyone that access going forward. The other cool open source utility that we'll be using later today, or later in the presentation, is kubectl cost. It is a plug-in for kubectl based on Crew, K-R-E-W. That, I think, is a much easier way to see your costs within Kubernetes. And so that'll be probably the highlight of the demo. What is open cost? It is, and where did it come from? It is what kubectl cost, the primary tool out there for measuring Kubernetes costs, has always used for getting its base cost model from Kubernetes. kubectl cost just builds upon that cost model by adding enterprise features that enable some scale, as well as some visualizations that everyone wants. It is a community open cost, is a community driven project. We've got many collaborators on the project. We even have a new pull request in our repo for, do you remember the name of the cloud provider? Scale, right? Scaleway. So it's community driven, really trying to simplify the process of getting costs for Kubernetes out of the cloud providers. We do also support on-prem via CSV files where you can open costs, your cost per CPU hour, cost per memory hour. And so it's really useful, even if you don't have. Or if you want to run it on a mini cube setup, for example, that works. So it helps us answer the question, how much does this namespace cost? And that's primarily the thing that, when I'm talking to users, that they're interested in seeing first. Your Kubernetes forces this abstract term for grouping all of your resources into a namespace. So we can aggregate by all of the controllers in a namespace, and damonsets, deployments, pods, whatever is in there. And ultimately, we're looking at the containers and some network metrics in order to build that cost. And we'll get into how those costs are done just so we run a level playing field here. So the two main drivers of those costs within a Kubernetes environment are the nodes. And the nodes are truly CPU and memory. And we're looking at the marginal cost of the CPU and memory in order to find how much a given container is using of those resources. Beyond that, it's relatively straightforward to say, if you've got a persistent volume on general purpose storage versus fast storage, we know exactly what those prices are in GCP, AWS, and Azure. And so that's a straight calculation. And the other side of that is network egress traffic and looking at whether the traffic is going cross zone or bound to the internet, and that will drive costs as well. You put them together, and you've got a pretty reasonable way of getting the total costs. Now, if you look at a deployment, it's got five pods. And then you look at a pod, and it's got a container. The container's actually driving the resource costs within the node. And so this is a really good slide to show how we are accounting for it. And we call it allocation. And that is measuring the difference of the container's requests versus how much it's using. And so if your container in the first graph here is requesting more than it's using, it's inefficient, but it has room for burst capacity. Versus if it's using more than it's requested, it potentially needs that capacity. And if the node runs out, it's just going to run slow. In either case, the greater of the two is what open cost is going to use for that cost calculation. The great thing there is we also can start measuring efficiency, and that is very much a part of the tools I'll be showing in a minute. So you take that allocation cost or that allocation of CPU and memory, and then you multiply it by the cost of the resource. And so like I said, we have the marginal cost of a CPU hour. And we multiply that by the hours of time that CPU has been used on average by the container, and then start doing aggregation all the way up to a cluster level. And so open costs can show you costs, again, from the entire cluster all the way down to the containers running on it at the smallest level. Another concept that you need to keep in mind when looking at the output of these tools is idle cost. That is resources that aren't being consumed on the nodes what you're paying for. And it's really common when a user installs open costs and coob costs to see 80% idle capacity not being used across their entire environment. And for some customers, this is hundreds of thousands of dollars a month of unused capacity that they may or may not have good visibility into. And when you start putting a dollar figure on that idle space, if you will, then it's like, well, I could save 30% of my cloud bill, potentially. Yeah. Yeah.  So it's not just, you know, we're being polite and saying, well, that's idle. And a lot of the financial documentation, that is waste because you've paid for it and you're not using it. And of course, it's really good strategies for reducing the amount of idle resources you've got with auto scalers. That said, there's many customers aren't using them effectively. And this is still driving visibility into what's going on there. OK. From a high level architectural perspective, and this is, you know, aren't exactly accurate, but it gives you the idea of the resources that open cost uses in order to come up with that cost model. We do rely on Prometheus. You can use other Prometheus-like tools. We don't ship with anything specifically. So, you know, in the demo later, we'll show you using the Prometheus Helm chart to install. We're using the metrics provided from Prometheus and the node exporter, Kupstate metrics, container advisor. And then we're also a scrape target for Prometheus. That is critical. That Prometheus is scraping open costs. Otherwise, we will not have accurate cost information. And you'll see negative idle costs. So it'll be your first tip that Prometheus isn't working. And I'll show you some other troubleshooting steps in a second here. You know, we're looking at the Kubernetes API to get all of the constructs that we need. Everything from labels on your containers and namespaces that we can do aggregations by, as well as just the names of the pods and just how much they've requested and how much they're consuming. So those are all the metrics that we're using to drive the cost model. Any questions on the high-level architecture before we dive into some demos? Cool. All right, so I apologize. The screen is in 100 inches. I don't know how big that is, but we probably need bigger for some of the terminal-based stuff that we're going to be doing. It is recorded. I've seen some of the other ones previously. So hopefully, if something comes up in here, you can reference the recording. And I can make this bigger if you need anything. First, installing open cost. Very simple. Two or three lines of terminal code here. And then we'll get into the Prometheus GUI and finally get the data out with Curl, which I'm actually going to use Postman because they're API calls. And it's a nicer way to look at it. And COOP CTL costs at the end, which I think is going to be the coolest tool to watch this with. OK, let me find my right window. And the documentation that I'm showing you right now, which hopefully you can read, it will be published on the open cost GitHub repository as soon as I create a pull request and someone approved it. Just to point out, from people in the back of the room, we're first adding the repo for the Prometheus Community Helm Chart and then installing it. I've already created or I've already added the repo, so if I just copy the second line here. And I'll go to a new cluster. I've spun up a GKE cluster, I should say, a little while ago. And I will switch to it. And if I do a COOP CTL get pods dash capital A, you can see that there is just basic pods that the Google is providing for cluster management running right now. So if I go ahead and install my Prometheus Helm release in the prom namespace, as well as this extra scrape configs, which I'm not in the right directory. I'll even show you what that scrape config looks like. But again, this is probably the main thing that is missed when users do the install, is to add this scrape config to Prometheus. Once that's done, the next step is to actually install the open cost pod. And we're going to put that in the cost model namespace. You can call this wherever you want. I'm probably going to update this in the future. Assuming it doesn't break anything to be actually just calling it the open cost namespace and then change the pod to that. And I need to change directory here. Or just add a couple of dots. And then apply all of the files. Oops. Oh, I did create the namespace. That's good. And to show you what's going on there, it's a very standard deployment here where we've got a service account that we're giving rights to open costs in order to read the Kubernetes API. You can look at the cluster role bindings to see what we're asking for. Basically, just get in a whole bunch of resources. And this is up on GitHub and the open cost repo. I think one of the things to point out is open cost is relatively new. It was contributed to the CNCF sandbox about a month ago. And so there's still some polishing happening in the GitHub. But we're getting there. And you'll see links to Kube cost, which is still recommended for the majority of users who aren't at the open source summit. I assume a lot of you in the room are very good with open source tools and able to modify them to your needs. And so we want to make that very easy.  Generally, it's going to be a lot smoother path for most of those consumers. The big thing inside of this Kubernetes manifest is this line 33 that I'm on, which is pointing to that Prometheus server. And this can be some, if you already have Prometheus running in the environment, go ahead and use that. That's my point here. So you just update this value to the service name and namespace of the running Prometheus server. And that would work great. So switching over to checking to see if Prometheus is running now. And we'll go with an environment that I had from earlier, because I don't feel like doing the port forward and waiting for that. The easiest way to see what's going on with Prometheus is under status and targets. And you can see that everything in here is green. As soon as something's not, that means you're going to have inaccurate cost data in Kube costs. And we're completely dependent on this. There's some variables for setting timeouts or on queries that can help if this Prometheus database was very busy. But generally, if you're running in the same cluster, it's going to perform well. And we're not pushing a tremendous amount of data. The open cost model is it's only scraping the cloud every, I think it hits the cloud API like every hour. And it's the Kubernetes every minute. So it's not a lot of data. No. And the cloud APIs that we're calling are looking at, I should have mentioned this earlier, but the marginal cost information for the nodes. And so if you look at a M4 extra large in AWS, you can see that it costs $1.59 per hour, something like that. Don't quote me on it. And then that is what we're using to do the math on the container costs. So that's why open cost is making external calls to the cloud provider. OK, so the number one thing you want to see here is this Kube cost target. That's not out of the box Prometheus stuff. That was enabled when we passed that extra scrape config to the Prometheus Helm install. And Prometheus in itself has this nice graphing tool so that we can see this starting to gather data. There's a couple test queries that we've got on the GitHub repository for getting some basic open cost information. This one is looking at both the CPU and memory of the containers out there and actually showing the top five by cost of that query. And so you can see this top one here is $2.75 an hour. And it's a DNS mass service on the Kube system namespace. OK, so let's look at Postman. And I don't know how big this is going to be. But you can see this returning query here. The first query that I'm showing you is using the endpoint for the cost data model. And we've got a couple of parameters. The first one is the window of time that we're looking at. And I've just done one day, but you could say one hour. Or you could actually put in a start and end window. So you could say, and you'd have to get that time and date format that's specific. But there's an example out there that you could use. And it's just a comma separated. And I'm filtering to a specific namespace. And so this is the costs of the Prometheus namespace over the past day. Another endpoint we have is allocation slash summary. This one I think gives you a little cleaner output for this demo purpose here. This is aggregating all of the costs for the cluster in this single JSON output. And so if you just wanted that number, there's where you got, right? How much money that cluster costs for that day. That said, you want to do namespace instead. So you can see which namespaces are driving the cost of that cluster. And you just change the aggregation to namespace. And now you can see I've got that cost model namespace. It's doing most of the work. So that's why it's at the top of the list. And then we've got the Prometheus namespace. And it's resources as well. Finally, there is allocation slash compute. And this is giving us some totals, as well as more detailed data on what is driving the costs within that cluster. And the CPU cost adjustment, you want to talk about things like that? Yeah, so you can edit the JSON files for the cloud provider in order to give open cost rights to read from your AWS environment to get any changes in node prices that you have that are in addition to whatever the cloud provider is. I mean, typically, if you're running in any sort of scale, you've negotiated a better rate than the list price. And so we can pick up those adjustments to your cost. They don't kick in immediately, because Amazon, depending on your cloud provider and how you're using, consuming it, some of those discounts don't kick in for 24 hours, 36 hours. They don't kick in until you've used 200 CPU hours a month. I mean, there are just all sorts of weird discounts. So your results actually change over time as they get adjusted based off the discounting from your cloud provider. Exactly. So the cool tool that is also open source that I'll show you now is kubectl-cost. There will be a link to how to install that on your command line. And what this is doing is creating a port, its own port forward to the open cost service in the open cost namespace. You can see this whole command line here. I'm suggesting that that's an awfully long command. It says, basically, the open cost is running on port 9003. It's in the cost model namespace. And it's called the cost model service. And so if you were to use this against kubectl-cost, if you just follow the standard kubectl-cost installation method, it works out of the box. It just has those defaults. Because we're not using the same defaults as kubectl-cost. We've just got to override those things. So I like aliases. I even have a utility on my ZSH shell that when I type in kubectl-git-pods, it says alias-tip KGP, kubectl-git-pods. I love that ZSH tool. I'll sell it up here while I'm at it. So this kubectl-cost utility basically just installs another verb here for kubectl, which is the verb is cost. And then we're just passing some parameters to get the information we want. This first query, and you can see why I like it better than the JSON output that we were showing earlier, is showing a nice table of the cost of these namespaces for the past five days. And we're showing CPU memory persistent volumes, just because I think those are the most common things that people look at. But you look at network and GPU, if you're concerned about those things as well. It just makes this window harder to read, so I just ignored them. The other cool thing is that we can also do a query for what the estimated monthly costs would be if everything stayed like it was for the past two hours. So this window parameter here. You want to point it? Oh, yeah, there you go. I don't know how bright it's going to be. That window parameter, you can change that to whatever you want to model what the monthly costs will be for that given namespace, that given cluster, whatever you're going to do your aggregation by, and then get the totals. The last example is using this alias that we just created and querying open costs for a label app. So a very common label in Kubernetes is app. This is obviously a demo cluster, and you've only got a few namespaces here. But you can see the applications that do adhere to the app label. And let's just say you required cost center as a label within your deployments. That would be a really good label to do a query for kubectl cost time. The unallocated are things that are not adhering to the label strategy. And so if that was a big number, we'll yell at people for not following rules. It is our biggest number. I mean, it's the most granular. So the problem if you're doing namespaces is your aggregation layer, that there may be multiple namespaces that go together with the service that you really want to report on. And if you use the label on all of those services, all those containers that really go with that service, then you can get an accurate cost information for that particular label. But it just takes some discipline in order for people to adhere to it. And if your companies aren't very good at it, I can tell you there's very few that are. I guess it's policy agents, open policy agent policies where we can say we don't allow that on the cluster unless you have a label. That's the best way to mitigate that. But not everyone's big on policies like that. So that wraps up the talk. I'm happy to answer any questions you have. And I appreciate everyone coming. Any questions? Yeah, so we'll repeat the question. And so the question is, if open costs will give you recommendations for reducing costs and, in general, vital costs, is that someone? Yeah. So open cost is the open source core of the KubeCost product. So the KubeCost commercial product does have those recommendations. So there's definitely a lot of documentation out there that says, if you see this, you should do that. In the KubeCost application, we actually have recommendations that show things like, hey, you're only 9% efficient. Maybe you should look into reducing the pod definitions for lower memory footprints or lower CPU. We also make recommendations for things like reserved instances, spot instances. It's got about a dozen or so recommendations that it makes as suggestions for you to save money. Open cost doesn't do that. It's the raw numbers available to you. But also, going into commercial mode, KubeCost is free for single clusters. So if you're not running a large deployment, check it out. Yeah. It will say free for a single cluster per organization. So put it on your largest cluster with the most nose and see what KubeCost can do for you if you're interested in the savings recommendations that it can give you. That said, open cost is what we're using in order to find that information in order to make those recommendations. So you can develop your own algorithms against the information that open cost is providing you. Thank you. Any other questions? Yeah? Open cost is open source. You can deploy it as many times as you want to. Yeah, yeah. I mean, open cost is Apache licensed. Go crazy. Yeah, I mean, we want feedback. I mean, it's the open source community. You can get it. But yeah, you can do whatever you want with open costs. Including make enhancements. There is a reference CUI within the GitHub repository as well. I'm doing some work on that to make it a little easier to get running. But we do have quite a few of our users that just want that cost data inside of another business intelligence tool. So just getting that data out of the API and not forcing your users to use a new GUI, I think that's pretty valuable too. Yeah. I mean, you could do this as the input to an autoscaler or something like that even. Right. Yeah, you can go nuts. Yeah. Any other questions? Well, thank you everyone for coming. Have a great rest of the conference and happy Friday. Thanks a lot.


In the last video, we talked about the concept of maintaining your authority file and making sure it's up-to-date. And as you can see, this does take a fair amount of time and effort at the time of part of library staff. So some libraries have chosen to outsource these tasks. There are a number of vendors who do authority work, meaning you're monitoring changes in things like name authority hangings and subject headings, and they will send you a new batch of authority records when these changes take place. Markhive is one of them. Library Technologies, Inc. You may call them abbreviated LTI. And Backstage Library Works. Those are three of the most prominent. There are many others, so I would not consider this an exhaustive list, but these are some places to start with if you're thinking of having this done. I definitely recommend talking to other people at other libraries and seeing who they recommend, what their experiences are. And so when others are doing that, if you're not at that point yet deciding on a vendor, you're just trying to decide, should you outsource? There's the pros and cons. Nothing will work for every library exactly the same. The advantage is that it saves yourself time, and you'll probably have a cleaner database because this is what they do. They're not stretched thin between other duties. The disadvantage is that it does cost money, and you would have to talk to the individual vendors about how much it costs. And you can have some errors if their one size fits all, hey, an authority of record change may not necessarily mesh totally with local practices in your catalog. That's just something to look out for. So though there's some pros and cons of the decision to outsource your authority.


هذا وما كنا لنهتد لولان هدان الله الحمد لله الذي انزل الفرخان على عبده ليكون لعالمين نذيره والصوات والسلام على خير خلق ونور عرشه أفضل الأنبياء والمرسلين حبيبنا وسيدنا وسندنا وشفيعنا ومولانا أب القاسم محمد وعلى آله التيبين الطاهرين المعسمين المظلومين أما بعد فقد قل الله سبحانه وتعالى في كتاب المجيد وقوله الحق وهو أستق الصادقين بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم إنما المؤمنين الذين آمنوا بالله ورسولي ثم لم يرتابوا وجاهدوا بأموالين وأنفسهم في سبيل الله أولئك هم الصادقون صدق الله العلي العديم سلوات أنا محمد وآل محمد أولئك يبقى بالله سبحانه وتعالى وانأ شكرا لك لنا هذه الحياة and this ability to recognize his greatness and to be able to participate in it and to be able to sustain the onslaught of trials and tribulations that come towards us due to the ignorance and foolishness of mankind and of course we seek refuge with Allah from our own foolishness and our own ignorance for many a times we've done things that we shouldn't have done and we cause other people harm and we seek protection and forgiveness for that at the same time we ask Allah سبحانه وتعالى to protect us from interactions that may lead to all kinds of problems in life as you know people who are going through divorces in child custodies and so on it's a very painful experience and I was just meeting different people having such problems and you listen to the stories of what's causing these destructions and you realize it's so stupid it's so dumb there's such benign issues that on a grander scheme of things it's so childish but unfortunately that's the reality that we live in and we have to deal with it and of course we have to ask Allah سبحانه وتعالى to make us wiser and to make us more patient as Luqman says to his son be patient you know with what will come towards you and it is a difficult task this world is short lived and while we have children and we have future and our generations we wonder what our responsibilities are Allah سبحانه وتعالى reckons everything and he will bring everything to equity and give reward beyond a measure for those who struggle and those who suffer as you know tonight my respected sisters and brothers is my last lecture here I'm going to miss you all it's been a wonderful electric Ramadan for the last two weeks and I would like to sincerely thank our respected شيخ بحريني and his family and the community for all the kindness and of course my respected brother مسلحات was been a wonderful host in ensuring that we're comfortable with my parents here living in the house next door and it's such a blessing and we appreciate that we appreciate your kind words you appreciate your patience with us and we appreciate your diligence and your good spirits it's nothing but a blessing but that's a testament for while this world is a difficult place to live the consolation and the you know the the pleasantries of life meeting good people gives everything good hope in the future and it also enables us to stand upright and do what we do in tonight's lecture I'd like to and as you know by the way just a quick note tomorrow is the ولاد of إمام حسن ابن علي عليه صلاة والسلام صلاة الله محمد والمحمد and I would insha'Allah tomorrow somebody else will be presenting but in the sense of celebration in this blessed month of ramadan and as you know on the 17th of ramadan is when the famous battle of bather took place which was the first battle fought by the holy prophet against the mckens who came to destroy the prophet but the prophet succeeded in defeating the mckens and the ratio was three times the army size versus the holy prophets was one-third but Allah is showing us that when you are resolute and then you have a firm belief you will destroy the enemy even though they are larger and the verse that I started with tonight which is is also in حجرات الله the previous verse as I mentioned yesterday in قالة العراب أمنه ولم تؤمنه ولكن قولوا أسلمنا ولم يدخل الإيمان في قلوبكم here الله سبحانه وتعالى says وإن تطيع الله ورسوله لا يلتكم من أعمالكم شيئاً إن الله غفور الرحيم the desert dwellers say that they believe قالة العراب now the desert dwellers they were quite ignorant in many ways and they were rough on the edges but nonetheless they had become believers and they claimed that they believe and Allah is telling us that the religion of islam is a verb more than a noun although it is a noun it is a verb it's a transactional religion it's a religion where the value of an individual's faith is based on what they do so I can declare my islam I can claim to be a muslim but if I'm not a proactive muslim if I do not promote good and demote evil then I'm not a good muslim now sadly nifaq which is hypocrisy comes within islam if we were to address islam is the true religion then those who don't practice it within it and who are actually destructive in promoting good and and demoting evil meaning they're promoting evil and demoting good then such people are known as منافقين in fidelity in islam in its highest form is not christians jews atheists in fidelity in islam in its highest form are the hypocrites they are the most dangerous they are the biggest infidels ever while those who attack islam from outside as christians jews if they attack being christian being jew jewish being hindu being buddhist being an atheist being an agnostic is not an attack on islam please understand that there's a big difference when somebody proclaims a different faith but they don't attack you islam does not consider them to be infidels infidelity is are those who attack the religion of allah especially within islam when they fabricate ideologies that were not brought by god when they fabricate hadith that is untrue when they take the quran and mistranslate it in order to suit their whimsical notions those are the people who are in infidels according to islam here allah in the quran he says do not say you believe rather say we submit because the religion of allah is action based when we teach our children we not only tell them you're a muslim but you're muslim based on action the more action you do the better the muslim you are and inshallah if you continue to be good and inshallah if you continue to purify yourselves then you will be considered among the god conscious the pious ones the chosen the the zahid you know the متقي right and of course شوهداء and one needs not die to become a shahid you can be alive and become shahid that's a very very high level of existence when you're a shahid when you're alive you would think that you're a shahid meaning you're a martyr when you're killed no martyrdom is also when you're alive because now you've given totality of submission to god صلاة الله محمد وعالي محمد so allah gives us a condition that say you submit وإن تطيئ الله ورسوله and if you obey allah and his messenger then your deeds are intact now we as a muslim population need to encourage each other as allah in sot al-asr says بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم والعصر إن الانسان لفيخصر you know by time mankind is at a loss by time meaning we have finite time on this earth and we're quickly getting older and if we do not move towards a positive lifestyle then time will have eaten away this gift of god so god is saying well asr إن الانسان لفيخصر by time mankind is at a loss except I mean there's an exception and one quick footnote and I always mentioned this when the Quran gives a negation followed by an exception it's a very powerful verse it's a wake-up call whenever god negates followed by an exception it's a powerful call لا إله إلا الله is a powerful call there is no god but Allah it's negation followed by an exception it's powerful meaning pay attention and if you look at the logic of such a sentence what Allah is doing is he's cancelling all possibilities and focusing on the reality hence the cancellation when the Quran cancels something followed by an exception it's putting focus قل لا أسألكم عليه أجرا say I want no reward from you إلا المودة في القربة except that I want you to have mutual love with my near ones meaning the إمة and the family of the prophet that was chosen to represent after the prophet it's powerful so the Quran is saying focus on that that's important okay you find وما أسألكم عليه من أجرا you know when prophet say we want no reward from you our reward is from Allah but you'll find the negation followed by an exception is powerful so here Allah says by time man is at a loss it's a negation except إلا الذين أامنوا وعملوا الصالحات وطواصه بالحق وطواصه بالصب so the conditions are who will not be a failure one who believes one who does good promotes justice and promotes patience so our obligation is proactivity you cannot just claim to be a muslim now let me make a quick point here as a side note because it's important you will notice that when we become muslims and do شهاده تين it's a blessing but to think that because we put a stamp on ourselves by doing شهاده تين i've become a muslim or muslim meaning now i'm exonerated i am immunized for any further scrutiny is the furthest from the truth what we end up doing is if we think that the religion of islam is a noun it causes a paralysis in us we feel i've become a member of this club i've been given the id card i'm now stamped muslim that's it i don't have to do anything and that's why the quran is saying they stamped it god says no no no no faith has not entered you when does faith enter us when we do transactions when we pray faith may not have entered but it's amazing when you pray sometimes you feel the presence of god and that's a transaction it connects you when you give charity sometimes we give it because others are doing it but then it touches you and faith starts to enter you when you start doing good deeds faith starts to enter what ends up happening is when faith starts to increase الله says it is who puts tranquility into the hearts of believers he increases their faith upon their faith pay attention to this increasing of faith upon faith but many of us say no i already have faith i did my share of the time i'm muslim notice the quran is challenging that if i already have faith then how is god increasing my faith upon my faith if faith is a zero sum argument where you cross the red line and it's a noun and i've become muslim then why should god increase my faith upon my faith know that what allah implies is that iman is transaction based it's a verb it's action based it's constant where you're constantly looking to do good deeds you're constantly looking to eradicate evil that transaction is where iman is built on now here's what ends up happening as a result and some of you may not like it but it's the truth and i stand to be challenged on this matter is we have a habit if it's a noun i'm muslim therefore whoever's not done shahadateen is none muslim and we name them kaffir generally oh they're kaffireen قليا يول كافرين you know قليا يول كافرون قليا يول كافرون لا عبدوا ما تعبدوا i don't worship that mature this i قليا يول كافرون الله سبحانه وتعالى is addressing those who are attacking islam those who had animosity to islam kaffir has many forms i want to introduce it briefly tonight for us to understand our muslim obligation first and foremost islam as a religion has been named appropriately it's not named after a person or an object christianity is named after a person جودا يزم is named after a person as you know christians are named after christ and the word christ is actually a greek word christos so when you're a christian it means you're a follower of christ when you are a jew you are a follower of juda the son of jacob juda ism when you're a buddhist when you're a buddhist you're following buddha now following a person is not wrong but notice the nomenclature the naming convention in islam would you not say then logically we should be muhammadans right well we're not we're not muhammadans we're muslims الله says اليوم اكملت لكم دينكم و اتممتوا عليكم نعمتي و رضيت لكم الاسلام الدينة today i perfected for you your religion and completed my favor and i call it the religion islam الله says سماكم المسلمين من قبل و في هذا we named you muslims before and we name you muslims now you say you follow this religion islam but الاسلام while it's a noun in its proper form its action is all verb so i advise us all let us not be quick in drawing a red line that i'm muslim therefore you're not muslim and because you're christian you're jew you are a non-believer and suddenly now we plaster them with condemnations and the sad thing on the reverse is that we've got criminals in islam and we protect them with all the crimes and sometimes we say رضي الله أن they burn the kaba رضي الله أن they kill the prophet's family رضي الله أن they cheated the prophet رضي الله أن they disobeyed the prophet رضي الله أن يجب أن نعتقد أن الاسلام is a noun and we give entitlement to each other and therefore even if you become a horrible muslim it's better than an honest just non-muslim this is not the religion of god sadly even in indonesia you find we have this myopic idea that when you have a christian governor but he's just and he's fighting corruption but because he's not muslim we cannot follow him because we've entitled each other but we'd rather have a corrupt muslim a thief a liar a cheater you look in pakistan you've got leaders that have amassed the majority of the wealth of pakistan they're muslim leaders corrupt to the core but it's okay go to the umayyad history and see how corrupt the umayyads were see how corrupt the abbasids were they were the most corrupt people on earth but does anyone condemn them people revere haroun al-rashid when he was a murderer he was a genocidal killer why he's muslim he did shahadatein let's protect him but he's a murderer he's a thief he's a liar he's a cheater yeah but immunity immunity let's be vigilant about it and let's go condemn the other non-muslims this is why the sickness of society has come because we haven't seen what the quran is telling us quran is saying you have hijacked this religion this is not the religion of allah you have given yourselves entitlement and it's not only within islam christians do it jews do it buddhists do it hindus do it they all have the same disease where they entitle themselves and condemn the other side whereas allah says كل حز من بما لديهم فارحون every army fights for its own cause but who allowed us such ideology this is beyond me and i look around us and i see why we as a human race have gone so astray because we want to protect our own interests and use the name of god as validation صلاة الله محمد والمحمد how do we gauge society i have christians friend christian friends jewish friends eighties friends i gauge them on that achlaq but do i say it's okay you don't believe in god no we encourage them to believe in god when i go to christians i don't condemn them because they believe in christ as a son of god i encourage them to come to the oneness of god oh people of the book do not say three come let's have a dialogue no condemnation but i've seen christians who are more honest more giving more loving more caring i've seen jews who've stood in front of caripillars and gotten killed because of the occupation in palestine there are jewish people you might say all jews are bad no anybody who says all anything it's suspect it's a stereotypical broad brush that has nothing to do with truth you should never say that it's conditional what is the achlaq what is the behavior now now quran addresses people of the book addresses christians and says there are among them you give them a heap of gold they will return it to you now why is the quran staying there why does Allah says indeed the believers the jews the christians the sabians provided you believe in one god in the day of judgment and you do good deeds don't worry for you there's a good place for you you would say this is bold for god to tell me this should i not be promoting islam exactly that is islam when we look at each other with the eyes of grace and we look at people of other faiths and when we talk to them and someone says i don't believe in god it's okay let's talk about it how can i convince you am i going to hell i said i'm not the master of the judgment atheists asked me that sunain am i going to hell i said listen i'm not the day of i'm not the master of the day of judgment god is but i'll tell you he loves you because he created you and he sustains you and he feeds you whether you reject him or accept him it's irrelevant he's too merciful now it's up to you to accept you on destiny you don't want to accept it don't there is no compulsion in religion and you will answer your lord on judgment day but my obligation is to invite you the way my lord said invite them to the way of your lord with kind exhortation and wisdom wisdom and kind exhortation kind words come talk here when we have christians coming in our community they were serving us two days ago some of them are leaders who run multiple churches they were not arrogant walking around i'm a big shot they were wearing gloves in the kitchen toiling and sweating and serving they felt empowered in the eyes of allah what is that character versus those who are claiming to be muslims holding guns today and only because you love ali ابنابي طالب they're going to behead you and they're going to shoot you and allahu akbar and they shoot you tell me افا من كان مؤمنا كما كان فاصقا لا يستون you cannot compare but when you look at such people and say subhanallah this is what humanity needs we need to uprise at this level where we look at humanity at a different level but many of us can't handle that diversity of opinion because we ourselves don't know what our religion is we're afraid to talk about islam because we're afraid to expose our اجنرنس we don't want to talk about it we change our names even we just want to assimilate we want to hide i advise us all don't be afraid of truth fear me i'm the one who gave you all this grace stand up for the truth be unafraid and welcome people why is it and i ask this question all the time there are almost eight billion people on earth majority of the world has been outside of the fold of islam in terms of its name why honestly why is it الله's design is it the design that Allah has dictated that the minority should be believers no that defies the mercy of Allah the reason the minority okay is because if you look at us as a minority we have not reached out to the majority often we're silent or when we do there are forces of minorities that silence us but never stop reaching out الله سبحانه وتعالى on judgment day will hold us libel and says i made you representatives on this earth as you know in سوت الحج الله سبحانه وتعالى verse 78 says so that the messenger is a witness over you and you are a witness over the people therefore uphold prayer you see and give charity because that's your obligation prayer all of these factors islam is a wonderful gift given to humanity but you know istala fasting what we do in ramadan حج these are transactional basis that give us a template of what we should be doing we think that when we pray we have done god's work now we should act what we say in prayer otherwise the prayer is little meaning it's like giving oath to something and then when you're done giving oath you go back to your satanic ways الله سبحانه وتعالى يقول you just give an oath when we say صرات المستقيم صرات الذين انا امت عليهم غير المغضوب عليهم ولا الله ليم you say that you ask god okay then follow the ones who god has chosen are you are you following their path this is islam to me honestly with all due respect i find our muslim communities and christian communities jewish communities everybody in general feels entitled to be in their religion but if we come out of this cocoon and say come to the common platform let us find the truth what do we need to do do we foster wars do we foster bigotry do we foster misogynism do we foster crazy ideologies that cause harm to societies and الله says that's islam if you look at the essence of islam it is to promote justice and peace in this world one quick transactional point i want to make the messenger says افضل العبادة this is in consonants with this conversation افضل العبادة انتظار المهدي one of the best forms of عبادة is to have the انتظار meaning to have a desire for the مهدي for the imam of the time الله says in quran and sot isra يوم ندعو كل اناس بإمامهم فمن اوتي كتابه بيميني here allamata whatabai describes يوم ندعو on that day the day of judgment everybody will be raised with their imam كل اناس بإمامهم here by the way you will notice that the imam is a practical present individual because كرانيكلي you will see when Allah in verse 59 says the two we know Allah in the prophet who are the ones vested with authority the quran says today that verse stands as it stood then meaning there is somebody among us who has vested authority over us because it's a present tense منكم so Allah declares that leadership is an essential component to humanity whether you know them or not and i give some quick examples you notice even corporations founders of corporations people like steve jobs who founded apple when he died no one says well we've got enough of a vision of steve you know steve jobs we understand his mission it's all encoded his work is already prevalent in all the ipads and the iphone so we don't need a ceo thank you will just live on the spirit of steve jobs everybody will tell you you're out of your mind in fact the whole stock will take a nose dive so i say why not well because you always need a living ceo not a dead one so you find although our prophets and imams are not dead none of them are dead do not say those who died in the way of god are dead nay they are alive but you do not see them but a living representative of earth is a command of Allah from the time adam was put on this earth we understand that so the prophet has said that the Imam of the time will be your witness even if you don't see him same when the prophet was the prophet in مكر مدينة there were people in china who didn't see him but he was still their witness because he was spreading the message so Allah swt has laid out imam as the living representative this انتظار is very profound i haven't seen the imam a person says i haven't seen the imam how should i follow him i said look at his essence his principles and understand that god has a talk about him he's not some fictitious person he has come history has it but reflect on such personalities you have a collection of them meaning all the 12 imams are the holy prophet they are just reflections of the holy prophet they don't bring new laws انتظار is very psychological if our children if we have انتظار of imam we have انتظار of رسول الله who is the center of all who is the leader of all you have انتظار of imam حسن امام حسين فاتمه عليه السلام زيناب عليه انتظار meaning you will now want to be like them it's like a friend i have a desire to be with this friend today our children have desires to be with the superstars of hollywood and sports industries because they are very good in doing whatever they do but on a moral platform on a holistic platform no one is better than the prophets in the imams انتظار so انتظار المحدي so الله has put our imam in hiding so ask why is the imam in hiding why couldn't god just keep him among us as you know he's about 1184 years old in lunar years 1184 lunar years since he was born so how old is he over a thousand years old why is he around us how can he be around us who can be alive for a thousand years scientists will tell you that the human body can live for thousands of years just our arteries and our the flexibility that lies within us is capable of very long life it's the carcinogens and the poisons that we take and the stress and all of these other attacks that we get in our environments that age us but otherwise our bodies are unique even those manufactured heart transplants and arteries and veins that are replaced in any form or fashion cannot compete with the natural ones natural has a long term capability very very flexible in its own ways so to argue how can الله says you didn't exist they're asking the question you know how will god bring us back once we turn to dust and the argument of law says in the Quran you didn't exist before you were nothing i made you something isn't that a bigger deal so don't worry about that so to ask the question how can an imam live for a thousand years or 15 this is a moot question let's put it on the side second question to ask is why did Allah put him in hiding now there are many reasons as you know our communities we would call prophets we would call imams and Quran states that you would pray for me to send you help and then when we send them you kill them you torture them you imprison them you ignore them historical every prophet that has come has had their nemesis in society karbala is a great example they call imam saying to kufa then they're the same ones who hold a sword to kill imam saying in karbala same scenario what happens is there comes a time when humanity has been given enough information enough substance by transaction by design by example that imams and prophets have had enough of a lesson for us the Quran is filled with examples of prophets on what they did how did yusuf behave how did ibrahim behave how did mousa alaihi salam behave how did you know khidr how did يقوب how did uh iyoub every prophet in the Quran الله calls him as ذكر ذكر رحمة ربك عبده وذكر في الكتاب have ذكر وذكر في الكتاب مريم remember mary how great she was Quran says when you remember prophets is ذكر so examples are plenty Quran is filled with them by any standard and their successes have been shown without any hesitation beyond any doubt we have religion if you and i just do a little تدبور we do a little اتهاد within ourselves and we refer to the scholars and we refer to the books and we refer to the imams and the prophets what they have left us there's enough guidance in this world today الله has taken the imam among us by the way he's on earth he's among us he transacts with us but we just don't know who he is الله has put him in that state of hidden state now you might say what function does he form well let's give quick answers before time it's in a way this conversation you find that hiding the imam among us forces us to think deeper it's like you're alone your mom and dad always took care of you now you're alone now you have to figure things out you have to be independent you have to stand on your two feet so you take what was given to you as a model so you stand on your feet if the imams were constantly present they would eclipse اتهاد we would all be looking at one answer whereas now you have مراج who differ on different issues and they have different rulings on same issues and we wonder why are they so different it's proof اتهاد is alive they're coming from different angles understanding the Quran and the sunnah of رسول الله and the حديث and they're coming to conclusions based on their understanding and examples and experience i think that's very healthy difference of opinion is healthy it's proof اتهاد is alive الله will not punish us because we're different الله will punish us if we are complacent if we are reticent if we're silent we don't move to find the truth if we're lazy he will punish us but if we're proactive he will reward us even if it's wrong even if it's wrong if the only thing we know think about it 500 years ago spontaneous generation was a scientific theory that life spontaneously generates Louis Pasteur recently disproved it that in fact we have bacteria and all kinds of organisms floating in the air that cause what happens when you know life pops out out of meat that's rotting we thought that he just spontaneously generates would you say that the scientists 500 years ago were wrong we would say yes based on the evidence now they were wrong but you would you say that they were liars no what they had that's a cliff لا يكليف الله و نفسه what they knew at that time is what they did but we have been given enough knowledge today to be able to understand the foundation of the dean which is what's going to be judged on judgment day there's no arguments in that you and i can never go astray though the imam is in hiding because the foundation of the religion has been established when the prophet says ان تاركن فيكم اثقالين كتاب الله و اترتي عهل البيت i leave you two heavy things my book and my أهل البيت these two shall not separate forever forever and they will meet me at the pool of calther meaning they are one and the same they're two dimensions one is the written the other is the transactional follow them and you will never go astray did the prophet say no tomorrow you know when your imam is in hiding you'll almost no no but here's a simple example if we're muslims and we doubt the hidden nature of the imam that every muslim believes that shaytan iblis the devil fools us الله says انا محادي ليكم يا بني آدما لا تعبو الشيطان إنه لكم عدو ون مبين have we not warned you that do not follow shaytan he's your great enemy we all agree with that i would like to ask the whole human race how many of you have seen shaytan we all believe in the devil oh the devil made me do that you know there's this devil who's whispering in my ears have you seen him how does he look what's his shape we haven't seen it but we have no problem believing it he's hidden but yet he affects us negatively so why can something hidden and not affect us positively it's silly this argument doesn't hold any water number one so the idea that the imam is hidden and therefore he has no effect on me is a moot idea once again because if that which is hidden can also affect us let me conclude what is the function of the imam today he guides i believe what's happening in the world today and especially what's happening in the middle east today and that force that's rising today that's causing even presidents not to have sleep at night and president and and the leaders in israel who can't sleep at night the imam is doing his work don't be fooled trust me the trajectory of humanity is filled with evil but what's coming out of it due to the the transactions of the the indomitable people who understand the message of الله who have understood the message of أهل البيت and they stand firm though the enemy is at the border lines and they don't lose and they kick them out and they are afraid and they don't know what to do and they start to make smarter bombs and they start to make smarter guns but none of that will work because nothing is smarter than the heart nothing is smarter than faith when you rise with faith nothing can touch you this is why it's so important in this month of ramadan let's strengthen our faith do not lose hope in الله oh no الله guarantees i guarantee you victory الله says to the prophet you've signed this agreement of khudabia don't worry get you are guaranteed victory you will they will do and don't worry you signed this agreement i promise you we promise you it is the desire of god that you shall be the inheritors or you have been oppressed even biblically it says the meek shall inherit the earth this is nothing new i conclude tonight in transaction our Imam is among us he's a witness and he is moving the world the question is what side are we are i end with this story right or wrong doesn't matter the essence of the story is deep رجب ليخيات in his book elixir of love makes a beautiful point and i want to point that he says there was a man who wants to meet him i'm aahdi he says i want to go meet him i've heard the حديث that if you go to masjid the Sahla you read 40 nights you know there's many rewayat not true i mean not untrue it's true even if you read sure when israel for 40 nights but how you will meet الله because he's in غayba the Imam is in hiding you find what is interesting is he goes he does 40 nights on the 40th night he gets a dream so you want to meet the Imam okay go to this city it was in iran he gets on the bus it was a very place wasn't nearby he travels for a whole day tired he gets there doesn't know what to do suddenly some another premonition says to him okay now go to the bazar go to the trading place and go to a locksmith and wait there you want to meet the Imam you can meet him there's a moral to this story and i think it seals the deal in my opinion on everything we talk about we as a community it'd be cognizant of transactions our our deals الله says the last part of the verse of is god sees what you do and god does not disconnect us he's always guiding us always so he's sitting at this he arrives he goes into the locksmith and then there was a handsome young person sitting on the opposite side he doesn't realize who is this maybe maybe now an old woman walks in with a lock and she's selling the lock she goes to the locksmith and says i want to sell this i want some money for it how much will he give me and according to رجبالي خيات he says he offers her i think six or seven تمان at that time seven تمان was a lot of money says i gave you seven تمان she says all day i've been trying to sell this no one wants to give me more than four تمان you're giving me almost double how is that possible the man looks at her and says lady with all due respect this lock is what seven تمان if i give you four i'd be cheating you and i can't do that she takes the seven تمان and leaves and that young man looks at him he says you don't need to go too much to the salah to do 40 nights of zikr to see the Imam you need to be like him and the Imam visits him meaning that man was the Imam and he says you don't have to zikr is good but the greatest zikr is action transaction be honest be trustworthy be giving be caring be sharing be forgiving if you do that the Imam says we visit you so tonight i end that i ask الله سبحانه وتعالى in the in the knowledge of this great Imam that he brings justice and equity and he gives us the توفيق he gives us the strength to be wise to be upright not to be whimsical and foolish and to be patient that while injustice is so prevalent so many people today are being killed as we speak so many people are being butchered children are being made into orphans as we speak hunger is incredibly high while there's a disparity where people who are obese has even risen in society because there's a there's a there's a mixture here of confusion in society we ask الله سبحانه وتعالى to make us wise to solve the problems for ourselves and those around us to make us good leaders to make us patient individuals loving and caring and to open up these doors there are billions of people out there who have not who don't even know what islam is until you and i welcome them talk to them الحمدلله today with the geopolitics that karbala imams shia is mentioned sunna is mentioned islam is being mentioned الحمدلله on the global front and of course post 9 11 no book was more read on earth than the holy quran the rewired says the holy prophet says before my grandson who will have my name محمد when he comes the whole world will have read the quran صلى الله عليه وسلم محمد والمحمد let's recite together this دعا في مام صاحب الزمان اجل الله تعالى فرجك that we ask him we ask الله سبحانه وتعالى to make his reappearance soon while he's among us to guide us to take this darkness away from us and to bring good leadership among us so that we bring peace equity and to prevent all this carnage and the war that's taking place the bombings the indiscriminate bombing that's taking place even in yemen and in syria and in all these other places may Allah you know remove this inshallah اللهم صلى على محمد وقال محمد let's recite together وعينها حتى تسكنه وردك توعى وتمتعوا فيها طويلة برحمتك يا أرحم الراحمين وسلى الله عليه وسلم محمد وقال الطيبين الطاهرين صلى الله عليه وسلم محمد وقال محمد