Okay, we are going to get started. Hello and happy Friday to everyone. Thank you so much for joining us today for today's CNCF webinar 12 factors streaming data apps on Kubernetes. I am Jerry Fallon and I will be moderating today's webinar. We would like to welcome our work presenters today, Andrew Stevenson chief technology officer and co founder at lenses.io and Francisco Perez senior back and engineer at lenses.io. We just have a few housekeeping items before we get started. During the webinar you are not able to talk as an attendee. There is a Q&A box at the bottom of your screen. So please feel free to drop your questions in there and we'll get to as many as we can at the end. This is an official webinar of the CNCF and as such is subject to the CNCF code of conduct. So please do not add anything to the chatter questions that are in violation of the code of conduct. Please be respectful of all your fellow participants and presenters. Please also note that the recording and slides will be posted later today to the CNCF webinar page at CNCF.io slash webinars and with that I will hand it over to Andrew and Francisco for today's presentation. Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here. So we're going to talk about 12 factor streaming data apps on top of Kubernetes. So who am I? I'm Andrew Stevenson said I'm the CTO of lenses on the left looking there with two glasses, not just one pair of glasses.  Well, first, the agenda, right, I'm going to give a brief, a very, very brief overview of lenses and a high level overview of what we mean by a data ops streaming platform. I'll then follow that up by a quick demo just to show us deploying an application from lenses in the side of Kubernetes. I'll hand it over then to Fran who will walk through how we actually built the framework that we use to deploy their intensive applications. So if I start just what we're what we're doing at lenses.io. So every organization is actually now trying to become data driven. So what they're trying to do here is they're actually trying to then reach out to complicated open source technology. This could be Apache Kafka, it could be Apache Pulsar, it could be Kubernetes, right, but all these things are distributed and complex. So what we're trying to do at lenses.io is actually to reduce that pain and the cost and the complexity of it of using this technology to actually build up a modern data streaming platform. So these are some of the examples of what we do in the customs we have, right, we have Babylon Health, so Babylon Health is a unicorn startup in the UK where they're basically their goal is to provide affordable healthcare for everyone on the planet using AI as well. So they use lenses. In their data ops organization to actually focus on that normal deed, right, there's nothing more important than your health so they're using lenses in combination with Kafka and Kubernetes to provide that solution around the world. We also have in an analytical space for Texas, so based of their tracking seaborn freight, again over Kafka and the using lenses to actually get visibility into the application flows. And we also have the Aduno group, they were a customer and transaction payment system in the UK as well and they all want to go real time, and they're all looking towards this open source technology that is hard and painful to operate in some cases. So we do have a commercial offering that is lenses where we integrate with Kafka, these are some of our other clients that we have here who we're allowed to speak about, but we also have an open source contribution as well. So we have a number of open source tooling around mostly Kafka as well. So we have over a million downloads of our fast data dev Docker and this is an all in one Docker that helps developers become productive. And we have a lot of open source connectors to bring data in and out of Kafka, as well as other tooling there. If you want to try lenses, right, you can go to lenses.io to start and you can get the Docker and everything is set up for you, you get the brokers in there, schema registries, lenses, other bits and pieces so you can be productive and really get into building data intensive applications. Or you can head on over to our GitHub site and play around with our code. And if you want to contribute things by connectors, awesome, we'll always welcome pull requests. So what I want to talk about when I'm in a data platform at a very, very high level, right, you've got a source system, it could be your microservices deployed inside of Kubernetes, it could be a massive Oracle database, it could be a mainframe. And you want to get it somewhere so you can build a data product. So you will, but what you need is a buffer in between, which is where in this case Apache Kafka comes in. So it's a buffer that allows you to transport data around to your target system for whatever use case you want. It's actually basically central nervous system. But then you also have to actually deploy apps, right, you've got to deploy your intellectual property, the data landscape on top to actually make use of it otherwise it's just infrastructure that is burning dollars. So what is Kafka? Very, very high level. It's a distribute commit log. What does that mean? Well, when you write to Kafka, you write topics, that's the data set inside of Kafka topics are then split into partitions and distributed across the cluster. And as a producer, you produce data into a topic and each message has an offset. And then as a consumer, you can form consumer groups. And you can actually then just consume the latest records, or you can actually say I want to consume all the records from this offset in this particular partition as well. So that's a very, very high level overview of Kafka. I'm not trying to explain to you in depth what Kafka is just to get a brief, brief primer on it. So where does lenses fit on top of this? It's, or it's actually the part which I call data intensity. Building your data platform, going to get Kafka, I can go to AWS, MSK, I can go to Azure HD Insight. I can go to Ivan, various different providers to get Kafka. The same with Kubernetes. So that's why I called the tech intensity part, but to actually have a successful data platform and to scale that data platform out to get more tenants onto it so you can build data products. You need to have a layer on top, and this is what lenses actually then providing. So we have self service so we can administer all the data sets inside the underlying system such as Kafka or elastic search. We have the discovery of data. It's very important that you get the people with the business knowledge, access and visibility to the data. Let's take COVID, right? I'm not a doctor. I'm a technologist. And if I can't get visibility to the data to the right people, then we don't win. We don't take advantage of all this great open source technology that's out there. You also need a way to process it. Yes, I've got Kafka where my application is going to go, right? So that's where Kubernetes will come in. But then how do I deploy the app and how do I deploy the app and monitor it and be compliant as well? I have to have security and role based governance around all the data sets that I'm touching, especially if I'm working such as Babylon in a healthcare industry as well. So Kafka from let's say MSK or HD Insights, Kubernetes from AWS or Azure or Google, all great, providing me tech intensity, but we're trying to step it up a level and work at the data plane. So if we're not going to talk about deploying Kafka here because we're not talking about how do I deploy Kafka inside of Kubernetes, that's not what we want to focus on. What are we actually deploying, right? So we have things like the data entity, so creation of topics. And for example, data policies, maybe I need to mask that data so I'm in compliance with GDPR, right? I also need my alerting rules as well. But there's the applications and that's what we're focusing on here and that's what Fran's going to go into in details. How do we deploy that app? Which is your intellectual property. That's the bit that's driving the business value. That's your data product. How do you deploy that? Doesn't matter about the infrastructure. I want to swap out Kafka for Apache Pulsar, right? But my data application data is the protagonist. It remains constant. So this is how we do it at a high level with lenses, right? You know, this is a great thing that Kubernetes is actually giving it. If we have a docker and we have a config, right, and we have APIs, we have a UI, we can also do this by GitOps as well. And lenses will deploy that application and monitor it for you. Now, this is more focused this talk towards Kubernetes, but we also have to deploy to other frameworks. For example, we have a lot of clients that are on premise and don't have Kubernetes yet. So we allow people to deploy to Kafka Connect. What's important here as well is the notion that we abstract away connections because deploying applications is just one part of lenses. We also have the ability to fire SQL statements at lenses so you can debug and get that visibility into the systems. So connections are managed centrally and governed as well. Who's allowed to connect to this system is something you want to have above the technology and manage that for the data governance. So this is a more concrete example. This is just basically what I'm going to show you right in the demo now of lenses deploying our own SQL processor. So in this case, you know, we can join, we can filter, we can aggregate and we deploy and monitor them outside of lenses directly into Kubernetes as well. So what I would do is now I would just go to the demo. Let me just change my browser tab. So here it is. This is this lens is hopefully you can see it's right. I think the lenses is just a set of APIs. The UI is one of the clients. We can automate all this in GitOps as well if you want to. But what I want to build is actually my application landscape. This is my application landscape. This is important. But if it's on Kafka, if it's on Pulsar, is that really the interesting part? This is running in Kubernetes. Is it interesting to me as a, let's say a non technologist where it's running? Not really. This is my intellectual property. This is the bit that is generating value. So what we have here is different processes that are deployed. But what I'm going to do one now is quick demo is I'm just going to just refresh the browser because my internet's a little bit flaky today. SQL processes. I'm going to deploy a new one. I want to give it a name. Let's say Andrew demo. And I want, here's my SQL that I have. Right. I'm going to deploy into this Kubernetes cluster. Let's pick a names list. Let's put it in default. And I create the processor and it's now being created. I just need to start it. Start the SQL processor and we deployed our real time SQL processing inside of Kubernetes. You can see here's the pod name, right? And that's it. So I can do this actually as a non technical person. And I don't actually need to know anything about Kubernetes. And this is what we're trying to do as well. You know, for example, we could scale it up as well. Let's say we have a spike. We could scale it up. And now we're telling it to scale out this application. So that's it. Right. I've gone from having nothing to within five seconds deploying an app inside of Kubernetes or config driven. You can do this all by the API. You can put it in version control. You can have the lens of CLI actually apply your desired state. That's also GitOps as well. But more importantly, it's all bound by the role based security that we have inside of lenses. And this is building that data intensity. How do you scale out your platform as well? I couldn't, for example, deploy this if I didn't have the rights. I'm logged in as admin, right, as well. So I can do everything, but I also couldn't deploy SQL processor. Because maybe touching data sets, maybe a topic in Kafka that I'm not allowed to see. Because at the end of the day, it's all about building this topology. And at that point, that's my bit done. So it's quite quick. And I will hand over to Fran to take you through the actual how we built this application. There's my application. I just deployed that Andrew demo, right? Fran, over to you. Thank you, Andrew. Thanks, Andrew. I'm going to share this screen now. So, yeah, this one. Yeah, can you see the screen, right? So, yeah, when we are talking, we are working with streaming data. We have a unique set of new challenges that we need that are coming into the plate. We have an unbounded set of data we need to manage. We have many different sources we need to interact with. But more especially with our security model complicates a lot. And we need to put governance over the access to our data. It's very important to know who is accessing our data. And in the end, that's very, very important. The main difference between real-time applications and, let's say, regular applications or microservices is that when we are talking about microservices or regular applications, everything is self-contained. We have our MySQL instance deployed along our application. We can access it most probably from local hosts. But when we are talking about an streaming application, we need to interact with third-party services and we need to interact with the real world. Our data is out there. We need to bring it in. So, to put one more level of complexity in the game, we are talking about cloud native applications and that was one of our first priorities when we started to talk about this new component, the prior component. Well, is that we need to think on the platform as a new service? It's not that we are going to be full control over our platform. This is what the platform as a service is talking about. We think on this environment where our application is going to be running as an external service and we cannot rely on having specific files in that or having specific services running into that environment. And this concerns those beyond Kubernetes. As I said, this is more a concern about cloud native applications more than Kubernetes. And starting to look into this and trying to bring in best practices in the industry, we started to dig deeper into the 12-factor principles. And we tried to bring some of those principles into our company, into our implementation. If you don't know what these 12 factors are, here is a very brief introduction summary. Basically, it aims to cover all the different matters that you should care about when you are implementing and deploying applications that will run in a pass environment. And these principles, what these principles are coming from us, they were initially drafted by the Heroku team and what with the time it has became a well-known pattern. For the presentation that we are bringing today, we are going to focus on only four of them, even when we are being in some other principles. The main ones that we are going to be covering are the config, debugging services, processes, and especially the one that is very easy is the parity and capacity to move applications around different environments. So how are we approaching this issue in lenses? We split the problem into four different entities, secrets provider, connections, applications, and deployment targets. We are going to describe each of them in detail in the next slides. But before that, I want to introduce one more concept before beside these four entities, and this is the template, a templating system. We realized when we were starting to design the solution that there were some common concerns around those four entities. Additionally, at the end of the day, we realized that they were basically the same thing. They were basically descriptors, but with different meanings. And in addition to this fact or to this situation, we were also influenced by other technologies like help that users are already using templates. But we decided to be that we're on templating system, basically, or most importantly, because we as lenses are also using users of those entities. And we wanted to bring governance and control over them to the lenses users. So the user could control those entities and being security and governance on them. So we ended up having three different templates categories. Yeah, I'm saying three different templates that is in seat of four because at this moment, we are not modeling secrets provider with templates. We are considered considering moving them, but that's not the, that's not where we are at this moment. So we, what we currently have our templates for connections for applications and for deployments. So having these three categories, we can now model a connection with a template, we can model an application with a template. But most important is that we can model an application with a template that has an explicit reference to another template, which is in this case could be a connection. And in that way we can apply governance and control over the connection that those applications can use. And we are also one more detail is that we are also using this connection entities to build our data catalog. So moving forward, let's focus now on the secrets provider. I'm going to use the same diagram that Andrew showed at the beginning, but focusing on each of the different parts that our entities are modeling. As I said, let's start by the secrets provider. I'm starting from this basically the security was from the very beginning one of our top priorities, if not the very first one. We were wondering, where am I going to store my sensitive data. Why not allow cloud security providers to store my data. I don't know if our portal has to call people if our clients are already natural. Why wouldn't they be interested in installing their sensitive information there. So we ended up deciding that we wanted to allow this. Ideally, the way will be to that we would inject reference to references to the secrets. And those references will be resolved by the application at runtime to create the real connection. So in that way, we wouldn't be exposing any secrets all of them to the real application. So that matter about the resolving these secrets properties at runtime we we implemented the reference that reference as a custom protocol containing information around the secrets provider manager that that's a specific secret. More information around the template key and some other information like the data type if it was mounted or not that stuff. So that we still need to create a trusted relationship between the application and the secrets provider so it can application can fetch those details. But the good thing about this model is that either if we inject credentials specific credentials to the secrets provider, or rely on a service account. We won't be able to reject access to any secrets referring to to any of those services, just by restricting a single user account. So that was everything about secrets provider jumping into into connections, we are going to now see what connections are how connections and secrets provider are linked. So when we are talking about connections, what we are referring to is to to the actual details we need to open a connection between the third party service and our application. For instance, if we are talking about Kafka, we need to know the bootstrap server with we have to connect to. And we will consider each of these different properties as a sensitive pieces of information. So as we said before, our template, well, it's, it's, we are treating them as sensitive information basically because it's a, it's a detail that you are going to need to access to your data. So anything that is related to accessing your data, we are considering it as a, as a secret is not only about the user and password, but also about the sort of security protocol you will be using. Yeah, that's why we are treating that way. Well, as we said before, we are modeling these four entities or these three entities with with templates. The first thing is that these connections were the first entity we model with with templates, but we can now have, since it's a category itself, we can have multiple templates for connections, we can have a connection, a Kafka connection template, we can have a Redis connection template, MySQL connection template and so on. And as we can, as we can see in the diagram, we can then have different instances of the same Kafka or Redis connection. We can think of these templates as Java classes and then connections as instances of, and then the connection instances are as, as objects of these of these classes. In the diagram, we are seeing that we have production and development instances of Kafka connection template, but we also have production stain and instances of Redis connection template. In that, in that same diagram, we can see that we are the governance layer we were mentioned before, we are playing security and control over those entities and basically, that's why one of the aspects that the templates are are helping us to to be able to restrict access to full or the whole service just by restricting the access to any instance that was created from from a specific template. Let's see how how connections and secrets provider are are linked. And basically here we have the connection template, saying that for this connection type of connection I need to provide a bootstrap server. I need to provide a protocol, a key pass or all the properties I need to create a connection to Kafka or is just a set of them is an example. But basically, we have a list of properties that we need to to know to open that connection, and then we need to create instances of that template and to to in this case for connections. What we are doing is that we are providing or we are saying who is the secrets provider that is storing our secrets, our sensitive information here in this example we have two different secrets provider we have less and lenses itself, and we also have Azure people. So, for this example we have a Kafka instance of the Kafka for Kafka connection template for development, the name is Kafka depth, and we are saying that all the properties are stored in lenses. So what we are doing is we are creating. We are creating a new entity in an entry into the secrets provider, storing the real value of our of our connection. So, we have now linked both connections with secrets provider we know how we can store where we are storing our properties in a second way. Let's jump into the next entity. We have the applications and with applications. We, we are only referring to what the application itself needs to run with split the split out the application concern from the deployment concern because there are some. When we are talking about the application, we are not saying about what the, the, the underlying platform needs to run your application, we only care about which application, what are the input parameters for your application. And for this matter we have, for instance, in the example of the SQL processor, we have the SQL query we want to run, but also we have the input parameters to open the connection because in the end, the Kafka connection is, is also an input parameter that your application needs. For this matter, we have split it or we have make a difference between in the application templates between direct values and reference values. We were talking before, allows us to create to have references to, to, to other, to other templates so having our application manifest when we are describing an application, sorry, the connection, we're going to say that that specific property is not going to be provided by, by the user is very likely when creating the application, but that is going to come from an instance of a connection of a different template. So, let's say, let's see how we can provide these references I'm going to go through a, an example, and I think that is going to be understood. So, here, in this example, we have what we already saw before, the connections instances, where we have our properties stored. And here we have the Kafka connection templates, these instances having created from it, then we have the new element, which is the application template. The application templates again is exactly the same than the Kafka connection is just a set of properties that we need to fulfill to be able to run our application. But in this case, instead of providing the values for each of those properties, we are mapping the property of the application and which property coming from a different template is providing that value. So, once we have this and we want to create an instance of the application template, the only thing we need to provide is the SQL, which is a direct, let's say a direct property, and the name of the Kafka connection that is going to the Kafka connection instance, that is going to provide the references to all these links we did here. So, the important thing around this is that just by changing this Kafka connection reference here, we are going to be able to very easily change the source of the data we are reading from. So, we are going to be able to promote applications from one environment to another and bringing information from one place to another. And here, this is how it works in the end once we are creating the application, what we are sending, what we are really registering the same when we are creating the instance of the application is that we are fulfilling all the properties that our template application is defining, but the values are coming as a reference to the underlying system where that value is stored. So, when the application is running, at runtime it will be able to extract this value and get it at that moment. And finally, we are going to jump into the deployment entity. And as we said before, we extracted the concerns around application in two different ones, the application with the deployment, basically because this way, abstracting what the underlying platform needs to know to be able to run your application means that we will be able to reuse all the previous steps to deploy the same application with the same connections and with the same security model into many different targets, just moving them as a different entity with a different template. So, we could fulfill those details independently and make the application work and be able to run out there. And yes, as you mentioned, this is not only about Kubernetes, it's also about any possible deployment target. At this moment, we are focusing on Kubernetes and Kafka Connect. And bringing the final overview mixing. There are a couple of more diagrams, but let's say that here is how we are cooking everything, the four different entities at the same time. What we are doing, bringing in the deployment template is that basically we are building an ephemeral visual template, compounding it from two different templates, a deployment application. We have this relationship we already mentioned, the mapping between the application and the connection. We have different instances of those connections. And when we are creating the deployment unit, what we do is we mix the input, sorry, the input parameters coming from the user, we inject also the connection that we are going to use for our application. We validate that we have everything that our template is requiring that we have everything. Once we have validated that, we are able to deploy that application into Kubernetes. So, as soon as this step is done, we have the certainty that that is a deployable unit that we will be able to deploy at any time to Kubernetes. And then once the application is here, is when we are going to be, is when the application is going to really get the real details, the actual details that it's going to use to open the connection between the application and the third party service. Well, as we have been saying that in the almost the whole talk, this, this framework we are building is not only for SQL processors, our application, but it's, it escaped to any type of application. We just need to support new sorts of application. The only thing we need to do is create a new template, a custom template for up for our application. And then, if we want to connect to a set to a service that we don't already have a template, we can create a connection template for it as well. So we are able to create applications were able to create connections were able to model any possible application not only the SQL processors. And the last piece I want to mention is that we are not only focusing on the right side of the spectrum. We are also taking care of the application when once the application is running in the underlying system. So it's not only about deploying, it's also about knowing and monitoring what's happening there. So we have built a set of watches for each of these underlying platforms that we support, and then we translate the information we get from them into our own events via API, and then we are able to manage handle those events and create different views, materialization, start metrics and so on. And these are two very brief tips from our internal documentation. This is the general or the global overview, how we are linking the deployment side with the watchers or the read side, and how we are then creating an an output channel on a stream that contains events that we can use to materialize different views or to start metrics as we already said. Finally, this is just another thing. This is a very specific implementation detail on Kubernetes, how we are doing this injection and this resolution of the secrets properties at runtime. Basically, we are deploying the processor, we are creating an init container that is the one connecting to the third of the secrets provider. It's resolving the secrets and it's creating a file in a shared location between the init container and the main container that will be running the application. But everything is inside the same port, so it's a funeral in the end and won't be persisted anywhere. That's all I have. Andrea, anything you want to, sorry, or I have one more slide, sorry, I forgot about this one. Well, basically, that's the summary, what we are being meaning with all these stuff we have been talking about is that we are enabling deep ops, we are able to move applications around different environments. And especially we are being in governance and security control over the locations where your data is placed, this is stored. Now, yes, this is all I have. Andrea, if you want to add anything. Okay, so I think you covered everything there. I think the important point is that we separate out the connections because that gives us, from a governance point of view, a lot more control. So that's why we also didn't rely on specific Kubernetes technology just like Helm because it doesn't allow us to give us the governance over the connection framework that we need. And connections are also widely used outside of just deploying apps inside of lenses, for example, to build, to build the data catalog. And we are also not just deploying to Kubernetes, Kubernetes is great. But, you know, in five years time, I'm sure there'll be Kubernetes Mark two rights and a different version of it. And as I said at the start the application landscape is the important bit. So if you want to try lenses, you can go to lenses.io slash start, download the box, and we're always interested to hear your feedback. I think that's us now then so we can take any questions that we have. Okay, well thank you both for a wonderful presentation. We have about 15 plus minutes left for any questions so if you have anything you would like to inquire about please drop them into the q amp a box and we will get to as many as we can. Are you guys working. No. You read that. Yeah. No, so we don't so lenses will run across any Kafka it can be any distribution of Kafka on any cloud with any Kubernetes cluster as well. OpenShift for example, or AKS or EKS. The SQL engine we have is our own SQL engine, right you know there's some advantage to that we have the control but like I say, you know maybe you decide that Apache Kafka isn't for you and you want to go to portal, or you want to go to Redis streams for example we can, we have experimental support for that as well. We have anything else. Anyone else at all. Do you be able to elaborate a bit more on your own SQL processor. Yes, so the SQL processor. Basically takes the SQL and at the moment it boils down to a case for a map so case room is a Kafka Apache Kafka connect API for doing the joints and aggregates you can write the Java code if you want to. But our own SQL engine takes that and basically translates it down to a case for application that we then deploy. We can run it to Kubernetes we can deploy inside of Kafka connect. We can run actually inside of lenses as well but that's only one part of the SQL engine. And you know we want to swap Kafka out for other streaming technology. But we also have our own SQL engine that allows you to, we call it snapshot engine where you can take a relational database style query on top of Kafka itself and also on other systems we connect to as part of the log for elastic search for example let's say you want to do Redis so last year I was at the Redis keynote speech showing the SQL engine running on top of Redis streams. Okay. Would anybody else like to ask any questions. How are you enforcing security and governance. So lenses has a rule based security model. So when you log into lenses and you can log in via LDAP active directory. For example single sign on you into a group and then those groups have virtual namespaces in inside them and set of permissions on top of that so we're able for example to provide virtual multi tendency on top of Kafka and that's every API. There's one of that as well. So you can have example create topic permission or view data permission, for example, as well. And then when you're deploying an application, we respect those role based rules. So I can't deploy an application if I don't have the deploy SQL process of rule, and I can't create a processor on a topic that I'm not allowed to see as well. And everything then it is auditing. And it's it's we also have another thing in here because of data policies that we can actually mass the data from with SQL engine as well. So that allows, you know, we have advances with Spank so basically they come in role based security they allow the multi tendency. They have the auditing and they also have obfuscation and all done by the SQL as well. You mentioned data catalog. Can you elaborate on it. Yeah, so Kafka is one of the primary systems we connect to so we see all the topics inside of Kafka and any schemers associated with them as well. But there's more to your data platform than just Kafka right so you maybe want to bring data in and out of elastic search. So we also have the ability to see the data in elastic search, not only the schemers of the indexes, but we can also fire the SQL as well so you can query bound by the same role based security and governance we have with the auditing and the data policies as well. So we're extending that out. For example, what I post great support soon. The idea is that I've got a day catalog, I discovered data, and then I want to build data driven apps from that data catalog as well, really building up that data intensity above the tech intensity that Kubernetes providers. We are using flux with GitOps for our application development deployments. Can you explain for GitOps support about Kafka contact apps. Yes, so everything in lenses is an API. We have lenses CLI so that's for more of a traditional CICD process. But we are working on a GitOps operator in fact, a few weeks ago and even at the Kafka summit. We did a demonstration of this where there's effectively a lenses operator monitoring Git will speak to lenses and have applied the desired state as well. Because we will have the all the knowledge and the control inside of lenses to make sure that we're applying the governance as well. So that is coming it is being worked on. And we'll be available soon. Excellent. Just a quick reminder to everybody. If you have questions, please leave them in the Q&A box at the bottom of your screen and not the chat section, just so that this way I'll make sure that I'll see it when we're doing the questions. This next question here does lenses monitor the real time applications after deploying them. Yes, so this was part of what Fran was describing this. We also have a right in a read side so we're watching the deployments that we monitor to make sure that they remain healthy and you can scale them up and scale them down. If you want to and get the metrics on that as well and we also do that for Kafka connectors and with this framework allows us to actually add in and build that app catalog to go with the data catalog as well so we monitor deploy the whole life cycle with the governance as well. What is some other database from open source are supporting it. I'm not sure what that question is, but what we are doing is we're expanding the data catalog. Maybe I think it's around the data catalog to actually have the visibility into different systems such as Postgre. But also maybe it's moving beyond Kafka, which is certainly something that we're doing as well for example very streams. There's Apache Pulsar as well and we certainly want to bring the same data intensity that we did with the Kafka ecosystem on to those other systems as well. Does it work across any flavor of Kafka like MSK and any flavor of Kubernetes, etc. Yeah, so it's any Kafka. Obviously we want you to be on one of the more recent versions, but it could be MSK, it could be Azure HD Insight, it could be Kafka from Ivan, Instra Cluster, or your own on-premise Apache Kafka. It doesn't matter to us and it's the same with Kubernetes as well. And if you want to try us out in the AWS Marketplace or the HD Insight Marketplace, we're in there, there's CloudFormation templates as well. We also have a portal where we can actually hook and deploy lenses and hook in for example to MSK as well. So can I deploy my own Kafka stream application through your framework? The current version you can't, you can deploy it outside and you can use our SDKs or REST endpoints and register it with lenses and we will monitor it as well. But this framework that Fran has put in place will allow us to deploy anything effectively that's in a docker. Certainly when it comes to Kubernetes or for example maybe Nomad or Azure Container Instances of Fargate, right? Lenses could in theory deploy itself, so in this floor you write your own app, register the template with lenses, build the app catalog, and with a combination of the data catalog then we can deploy the relevant apps to do what you want to do. What's your business objective? Move data from A to B. That's normally it's not standing up applications, so it allows us to actually do this going forward. But you can register your own apps now. For Texas, for example, the example of a customer, they do this a lot. They registered all their Kafka stream applications with lenses and they suddenly got loads of visibility into their application landscape and was able to lift the lid on the black box of what was happening. We are using Flux with GitOps for our application deployments. Is there any plan for GitOps support about Kafka Connect applications? You mentioned Kubernetes mode and Connect mode for SQL processors. If I am correct, could you elaborate a bit more and explain which is more scalable? So you can actually, we're working on the GitOps operator for lenses. Now that operator could run inside of Kubernetes or outside of Kubernetes. What it's doing is it's telling lenses to deploy an application and lenses may be configured to deploy it into Kubernetes, so it may be configured to deploy it into Kafka Connect. It makes no difference, so it will work across them both. This is why we have the separate templates one for deployment as well. So Kubernetes is a deployment temporary Kafka Connect is a deployment temporary and we can choose now which is more scalable Kafka Connect or Kubernetes. Well, it's Kubernetes, right? Kafka Connect doesn't really handle multi-tenancy that well. By using Kafka Connect and Kubernetes, we can create a effectively Kafka Connect instance cluster per instance and get a lot more multi-tenancy in there. For example, that if you add another connector, you don't maybe disrupt the flow of another instance that's deployed there. So we see this quite a lot that with Connect, you have to have end up with a lot of clusters to manage and Kubernetes is a better way to scale it out. But we provide all the governance around that. So whether it's Kafka Connect or Kubernetes is your deployment targets, right? You can't deploy unless you have the correct permission models as well and we order all that. You mentioned a, excuse me, you mentioned a role-based access control system. Is there support for a single sign-on, for example, with Okta or any others? Yeah, so we support single sign-on and we have Okta, one login, key cloak, Azure, single sign-on as well. Then that's in addition to the basic auth that we have Kerberos, LDAP, Active Directory as well. Can I easily try out what you presented today on IE, my laptop? Yeah, so if you go to lenser.io slash start, right, you can download the Docker. We have fast data dev in the lenses box and you can download it all in one Docker. It has data generators in there, everything to get going and it's free for developers to use. Are you offering a managed solution? We will soon have a managed solution for lenses, but we don't do it for Kafka because there's great offerings out there already for Kafka and the same with Kubernetes, but we will hook into them as well. Okay. Is anybody else? I was just going to finish off really on that, so you can deploy lenses anywhere, so you can deploy it in the cloud, you can deploy it on an EC2 instant, you can deploy lenses inside of Kubernetes, so we have HelmChop for that as well. Or you can deploy it on-prem as well, that's not a problem. And we also have a portal as well, which gives you an aggregated view of all your different lenses, instances that are deployed. For example, we have some large retail clients in the US that have three to 350 deployments of lenses as well. Okay. What about distributed tracing for Kafka streaming apps? We don't have that at the moment, we're looking at how we can integrate it. Okay. Just another heads up everyone, if you have any questions, please drop them into the Q&A box just so we can keep all the questions in there separate from the chat, that'd be great. Does the application deployment work only with Java or Scala applications? Would it work with .NET apps, for example? So if you're deploying to Kafka Connect, it would have to be a JVM app because Kafka Connect is JVM. If you're deploying to Kubernetes as well, we've abstracted away, you know, you put an app inside a docker, it's docker plus config, and then lenses will be able to deploy and manage that bound by the security and governance, as Fran explained. So yes, you could write a Python app, you could write a .NET app, register the template with lenses, it's part of the app catalog, we can then deploy and manage those effectively docker instances, right? But it could be bash inside, right? Do we have anyone else who would like to ask a question? We've got one minute left. Alright, well, no one knows anything else they would like to ask, I guess we will wrap it up. I want to thank our presenters, Andrew and Fran for a wonderful presentation today and for a great Q&A facilitation, and I would like to thank everyone for joining us today. As I said before, the recording and slides will be posted later today to the CNCF webinar page at cncf.io slash webinars. And that being said, we will wrap it up. Thank you everyone for joining us, everyone take care, stay safe, have a wonderful weekend, and we will see you next time. Okay, thank you.


Hi, everyone. Welcome. We're going to get started in just a couple minutes because we want to have people have time that when just another minute and we'll get started once the shuffling settles down. Nothing like killing the discussion. So quiet down. But while we're waiting, happy Pi Day to everyone. Yeah. Happy Pi Day yet. It's an exciting day at MIT. Our admissions go out to students on Pi Day. Of course, that's how we do it at MIT. Our undergraduate admissions all go out on March 14. OK, I got a thumbs up. Hello, everyone, now it's taking me. My name is David Newman. I'm the Apollo program professor of Astronautics here at MIT. And I'm delighted to be with you and welcome you all to this session. We have an unbelievable session. We're going to talk about the future of exploration. 10 to maybe 50 years out and inventing, painting that picture of the future. So I'll do a quick introduction of our panelists. And they'll be followed by their own couple minute introductions. And then we're going to launch into some questions. My immediate, right? Dr. Leon Alkalai is at JPL, is a member of the International Academy of Astronautics and currently manages the JPL Office of Strategy. So I've had the great pleasure to work with Leon and take a look at the strategic plan for JPL, really looking out at decades. So I think we might hear some about that as well. Then Professor Sarah Seager, who's a colleague in our Earth Atmospheric Planetary Sciences Department. She's a class of 41 professor. And well, the guru of everything exoplanets, really the expert on exoplanets. She'll talk about tests. We can ask her questions about what it's like way beyond the solar system, way past my comfort zone. Sarah can take us out to all the extraordinary planetary finding missions and looking for that Earth. Are we going to find another Earth? Dr. Erica Wagner from Blue Origin is the payload sales director for Blue Origin and developer of vehicles and technologies to enable human space transportation. And I think we might want to ask her, who's going to launch this year? A whole bunch of payloads are already launching, but it's really ramping up to launch from suborbital to orbital. And I know I want to hear about Blue Moon and beyond. We paint that picture of millions of people in low Earth orbit and beyond. And we're very also fortunate to be joined by Yonatan Weintraub. Hopefully I didn't massacre that, Yonatan. I've been practicing. And the co-founder of SpaceIL, who doesn't know about SpaceIL, oh, you guys are so well informed. Anyhow, we have to hear about this amazing startup getting on route today in orbit, getting to the moon. So space really is democratized. It really is for everyone. SpaceIL today is $100 million investment. A few years ago, people would have said that science fiction. And now everyone's in. So we have the opportunity also to talk about the really interesting and opportunities for international collaboration, spaces for everyone. With that, I'm going to ask the colleagues to introduce themselves a little bit in more detail to tell us what's on there, maybe what's the most exciting thing that they're thinking about for the future of exploration in the coming decade. Leon, you want to start? So I'm Leon Alkalai. I've been at JPL for 30 years now. And I've had the unique experience at JPL to work with people like Maria Zuber here at MIT on the GRAIL mission, where we started with ideas, just the whiteboard sketching concepts on the whiteboard and then working to win the NASA competition and then taking my family to the launch of the GRAIL mission and then seeing it complete the gravity recovery at the moon. After that, I had also the good fortune to work on and lead the competition for insight. And again, see the landing on Mars just last year successfully. So those were just to share a little bit of my experience. And right now, I plan the future outlook for JPL in terms of strategy, working closely with NASA headquarters. And JPL, as you may have heard from Larry James earlier, we're really focused on enabling science, enabling science of Earth, of the solar system, of the universe, and understanding how we originated as a solar system that bears life, a planet that bears life, and so on. And looking at some of these early conditions that originated in life, so informing life. So my biggest sort of exciting thing for the future that I'm looking forward to in understanding better is understanding how life originated on Earth. So astrobiology, conditions on Earth, the beginning of how life formed on Earth, how life formed in the solar system and those early conditions, how life may exist outside our solar system. So exoplanets, imaging exoplanets. And just all of these themes, whether it's Earth, solar system, galaxy, and the universe, all have life connecting them, or our quest to understand life, and improve life and conditions for life on Earth. So I look forward to, at least in my lifetime, understanding a little bit better those dots and how to connect them between how life originated on Earth, how life may exist elsewhere in the solar system and in the universe, and how we can improve life on Earth. Fantastic. Thank you. We should be able to cover all that in the next half hour. Sarah, please. Thank you. Well, it turns out that every star is the sun, and it appears that, like our sun has planets, it seems that each of the stars out there have planets as well. And astronomers have found thousands of planets. There are millions, billions, trillions in our galaxy alone. But what we really want to do is get down to the level where we can find a true Earth, a planet like our own, around a very nearby star. And that's incredibly challenging. So we're doing the easy thing first. And even though it's easy, the TET NASA mission that's conceived of, built, and run here out of MIT, it still costs $300 million. So we do find planets literally on a daily basis. This afternoon, I have to rush back where the team is working on getting the next batch out of planet candidates out. So there's a lot going on. But TESS had no, nothing was new about it, actually. It was very well done, very special, four identical kind of glorified telephoto lenses. They're all custom, a thermal, no vignetting. TESS had one deployable, actually, just the solar panels. So that's kind of where we're at. We can turn things out like that. But to move to the next step is much harder. And there are kind of two different ways to do this problem. But our own Earth, the way that we want to find just a true Earth twin, is in reflected light. But our Earth is so faint, it is 10 billion times fainter than our Sun. So we have to be able to block out a nearby star to a level of one part in 10 billion. And I'll put the question out to all of you and you. Do you do anything in your job where you have to work to 10 decimal places? Well, actually, sometimes people say yes, believe it or not. People who work on LIGO, they do that. Some people in particle accelerators have to have to do that, but that's where our challenge lies. And I can answer more specific questions about the technology if needed. But I will say that even this new technology we in JPL and others are working to build and implement, that will let us study the nearest 100 or maybe few hundred Sun-like stars. But our galaxy has billions of stars. So to get to the next level after that, that would be more like 50 years out. And we'll need brand new paradigms there, space-based fabrication, space-assembly, and new things we haven't thought of yet. Thanks, Sarah. And every star we're seeing in this beautiful image, right? That's a planetary system, you tell me, right? Yes, I would see nearly all of them. I wouldn't say every single one, but pretty much all of them. Yeah. That's a mind-blowing. Amazing, amazing, yeah. Erica, please. Yeah, so I think that that's an interesting transition from this sort of vastness that is the entire cosmos and everything that could be to what we're doing at Blue Origin, which is sort of the heavy lift work of, how do we take this very next step? And we are looking towards a future of millions of people living and working in space. And that's not a job of one career or even one lifetime, but it's a job of generations. And how do we get from here to there one step at a time? We talk about being step by step ferociously. Great Atom Ferrociter is our motto. So my role as one of our payload sales directors is to help figure out how we open up space to more audiences, a lot like that democratization panel that we just heard from. Space doesn't grow if we are continually taking the same pie and just slicing it smaller and smaller. We need to figure out, on pie day of all things, how do we bring more pies to the table? How do we open up space to tourism, which is an industry that is very cost-elastic and risk-elastic unlike satellite launches? How do we open up space to art and humanities and all the other things that make us human so that we can start to see more of the lenses through which we view our own universe? And how do we open up space to being not just a place where we see as a location where we can bounce bits back and forth, but a place where we're creating new value, creating new things in space manufacturing and all the other kinds of value that are coming back? So I get the fun of being at that very bleeding edge of that next step and looking forward to raising my hand and going myself someday and hope to take all of you along with me. When? When are you going? When am I going? I don't know. Literally, I keep raising my hand. OK, I haven't figured that one out yet. I've only given you five years. All right, I'll take those off. I'll be up in five years. How about that? Yonatan, please. So hi, my name is Yonatan. I have a quite a diverse background from aerospace and I'm doing cancer imaging as well. But in this context, about eight and a half years ago, I sat down in a bar with two friends. And as the alcohol level in our blood rose, we became more and more determined to join a competition that was organized by Google called Google and our expires to send the first private interplanetary robotic mission. And we were joined by a lot of really talented engineers and supporters in the industry. And about a month ago, less than a month ago, we actually launched it. And it's on its way to the moon right now. This is a good shout out. All launches are good launches. Yeah, successful. So hopefully, Nakonwood is going to be on the moon in April 11th. That's a scheduled landing. We actually have a picture, if later, we can show it, of the first picture I was taking from the lander, first selfie for the lander. You can see actually Earth there. And I'll be happy to talk about that. There we go. There you go. Great. Excellent. So I'm going to push a little bit more. Let's get right to kind of big dreams, a little bit of beer, people socialize this. But let's talk a little bit more about the international cooperation and how you're using the deep space network and kind of how these all come together. So as you can see, we started a program in Israel. So that's a country which is way, way smaller than the United States or any of the other Soviet Union, China. These are the countries that the land is so far on the moon, soft land is on the moon. And this is a very small country. And this is a private endeavor. So that's not even sponsored by the government. And one of the key aspects of that mission is education.  They'd rather be on celebrities. And rock stars. And I got to admit, I watched The Real Housewives and I enjoy it. But we also need engineers and scientists. And it's so very important. And one of the key parts of SpaceIL is outreach. And we do outreach and reach over a million kids worldwide with our messaging with those programs. So this is one type of collaboration, which I think is very important because outreach and inspiration is something that is important worldwide as people shift their attention from sciences to other things. But also we have collaborations. For example, as you mentioned with NASA, we're taking a retroreflector, a laser retroreflector, with us to the moon. And they are helping us communicate with the spacecraft by using the Deep Space Network. So there's no country that can do this alone today, I think. And the fact that we can have those collaborations is quite amazing to make this first private mission to the moon. Great.  NASA perspective, but international perspective as well. Both for NASA and for JPL, international partnerships are essential. It is a huge part of what we do. In fact, I personally see this as an amazing way to spread goodwill across the world. I see this personally when I travel all over the world, how I'm received and people from NASA and JPL we basically carry a certain, I don't know, universal element of doing tough things, landing on Mars, it's not just for the United States, it's for the world. And I feel that we're kind of looked at as citizens of the world, at least that's what I feel when I travel. And I think that spirit is, to me, very important that we do more to enable robotic space exploration and human space exploration. And so for me, this is essential. I also am a naturalized US citizen. I was born in East Europe and came here as a young kid and so on. So I know what it is to be from a small country and come to the United States. And there are many, many other out there countries, people all over the world who dream of building a CubeSat or going into space themselves. So there's a huge opportunity to spread goodwill through space, science, engineering, exploration and I think we should all do that. Let's talk some details. Insight, we have three incredible instruments on, are we gonna, how is this gonna further our search for the evidence, past evidence of life? We're looking down, we're finally looking down into the structure of Mars. Insight is an amazing example. We often called it like a little United Nations, which wasn't really intended as a compliment, but it was, but we had French, German, UK, Spain, lots of countries involved and it was really a challenge to work with all the different cultures, work on a tight schedule. As you know, Insight actually slipped two years. I had a bit of fortune to be at NASA headquarters. This is NASA deputy administrator. That was one of those tough calls. Post bonnet for two years, 2016 we couldn't make it. So 2018, thank goodness we got it right. That's right. You all got it right. I thought it was interesting to mention at that turning point, JPL really, really, and NASA stepped up to help the French space agency and post landing. It was recognized that this was, we didn't pull out. Things were tough and we talked about this and it was very important at that time that both NASA and JPL step up and help a friendly agency like CNES and work together when they need help. We can help them and vice versa. So use it as an opportunity to build a partnership rather than pull back and kill a partnership. And I think that was a very smart decision. Great work. Sarah, we have to know more details. Tell us about these exoplanets. I just can't get my head around 3000 exoplanets and the Earth-like ones. So how's your science team? And tell us more about the results. What's really interesting about these planets is we have not found a solar system copy yet. So here we're talking about Mars and someone mentioned Venus and we have in our solar system the interterrestrial planets and we have the giant outer planets, not like that. It's maybe a tiny bit selection effect but on the whole, no. We see a giant planet for example where Mercury should be or where Earth should be. There are very small planets about the size of Earth that are so close to their star the surfaces would be melted like liquid lava rock. And close to the star by Kepler's third law means they orbit very rapidly.  And I could like go on, I could spend the whole time just mentioning all these crazy types of planets that are so different from one. Do we have any that slow down time? I need a longer year to get all the work done. Do we have any slow ones? Yeah, we do. There's also a growing list of slow ones. They're harder to find because most of the ways we find them rely on seeing the planet orbit more than one time. There's planets that are so slow, their orbits would be, I don't know, let's say tens of thousands or 100,000 years even. There's planets really far from the star that are big planets. They shine from their own luminosity from leftover energy from their formation. So pretty much anything you can conceive of, it's probably out there. And we may have even found it already. Exactly. We're going to try to get to the star shades better. No, I do want to say one more thing about it. The thing is right now we can find planets. We've got that down pretty much. We can in some cases measure their size and other cases measure their mass. Sometimes for very few of them we can measure the atmosphere, just a little tiny bit about what's in it. But on the whole, we're very limited. So we know there's lots of planets. We have lots of them. But the details aren't there yet because we need new telescopes, better technology. Better eyes. So if you're the technology, rip off of what kind of technology investments do we need to make? Well, we need to. There's an instrumentation, the precision of our instruments. It is the precision's really key. Let's see. Well, there's lots of things happening. There's the James Webb Space Telescope. We've all been waiting for that to launch. And that will be great for us.  And so I think we have things online. People have been working to get things ready. And then we can come back later if we have time to the starshade and other things. And a really important point, right? It's everything, right? It was Kepler first. And now Tess, when combining all of these amazing assets we have waiting for James Webb. We're not here to talk about ground-based astronomy, but there's armies of people and telescopes that started the whole field and continue to support it. OK, Erica, over to you. On exciting stuff, we have to cross, we want to cross the science, art, and engineering theme. But tell us more, when we do have something cued up for you as well. So I think it's an interesting question. Is where does science and commercial intersect? And it's something that I find personally very important, that as we're creating this future that is allowing us to grow what we can do in space by using these economic engines to drive an even bigger and bigger picture, that we use that as a sort of momentum wheel to carry science forward with us. We're doing a lot of that right now at Blue Origin with our payload flights on New Shepard. We're carrying microgravity experiments inside the capsule to study things like how you would measure the amount of fuel and the fluid in a fuel tank on a space mission or understand the collisions between dust particles and the rings of Saturn are all things we can do in these short microgravity missions. Yeah, we have a bit of a disconnect. We need to come back here in a few hundred years. Because if the dream comes true, that millions of people are going to be living in space, our very nearest star, although it's very far away, our nearest star appears to have an earth mass planet. And so sometime in the future, we may intersect. Absolutely. And so things like New Glenn that's coming down the pipeline, looking at a first launch in 2021, seven meter faring. For those who don't know the satellite world, five meters is the biggest thing you can get on the market today. So seven meters in diameter is twice the volume. It's one and a half times the size of the Shuttle payload bay, massive amount of space. So how do we use that for exploration, for bigger aerobraking systems at Mars, for larger apertures on space telescopes, for bigger constellations that we want to launch to do incredible scientific discovery. And then Blue Moon, we've got coming down the pipeline. I want to hear about Blue Moon. We are going to the moon, and commercial folks are helping us accelerate. We have exciting news signed MIT, Memorandum of Understanding with Blue Origin. You're going to succeed, right? We're pushing hard. Blue Moon's exciting. It's a limb-sized cargo lander. So we're talking about Apollo-class, multiple metric tons of usable payload to the lunar surface. And the reason we're doing this is because it's the infrastructure that you need to do anything else. And Blue Origin isn't about a particular destination or a way of traveling, but it's about laying down that base layer. You'll hear Jeff Bezos talk about doing the innovation of Amazon, that he couldn't have done it without interstate trucking and airplanes and the internet and credit cards, all these base layers that an entrepreneur could come and build on top of. So at Blue Origin, we're trying to lay that base layer that lets all the rest of you that have even bigger dreams than we do to achieve those. So I think that how we use the engines of commerce to underpin the growth of science to underpin the growth of exploration is probably the most important work we're doing. Excellent. Okay, we're gonna give you guys all a chance to ask some questions as well, because we just take advantage of this amazing panel that we have up here. The little mic is probably around somewhere. Hopefully, get that cued up, yes, no? Yep, there it is, thank you in the back. Okay, so be thinking about your questions. But I wanna, again, just chime in here to ask Mike a final question in terms of, it's the superpower technology you need. So it's the one word answer, I know it's a hard question. The next decade, what's your superpower technology that you need, Leon? An instrument for life detection. Sarah. I mean, in some ways, we don't really, we don't necessarily need a superpower technology. Continuing to reduce launch costs is very helpful for us. I'll just leave it at that. I think the superpower we need is imagination and the power of all the young people who are coming out. We are growing like crazy at Blue Origin. We're almost 2,000 employees now, which is a 10-fold growth since I started a few years ago. And we're looking for people who can come and help us envision that future. I'll join on the imagination part. We live in an area that technologies that were close to impossible a decade ago becoming something of a reality. So it's basically, technology would catch up to your dreams. And this is one of the messages that we're giving to the kids, is that you need to dare, you need to dare to dream, you need to dare to fail. And if you're doing this just right, you might reach the moon. We did see that selfie, right? We saw that selfie of Space IO looking at Earth. It's kind of the New Yorker's view of the world, right? The spacecraft looks really big. It's a little teeny spacecraft. And Earth looks kind of small, right? And I think we have another special treat. Erica, you want to talk about tell, inspiration and art? Yeah, absolutely. What you're doing up below? We've been working for a while now with the band OK Go, who's known for their really creative rock videos. You may have seen them jumping around on treadmills or doing giant Rube Goldberg devices. They did a video a couple of years ago where they were on a parabolic flight and smoring the power of microgravity. So we just recently, just this last week, launched a contest to inspire the youth of the world to join us in making art in space. So all artists, shout out, I think we have that cuter. Yeah, absolutely. If we've got folks who know 11 to 18-year-olds anywhere in the world, we're inviting them to come join us by creating their own art. It's not something NASA usually recommended. Flying paint around. So I think we've lost the audio here. Yeah, but that's OK. Look at hashtag art in space. Reach out to the 11 to 18-year-olds in your world. Encourage them to come and play. Students will get to make an art project that really goes into space. Thanks to our friends at Cognizant, Blue Origin is letting us send two real art projects into space. The winners will work with our friends at the Playful Learning Lab at the University of St. Thomas to get their projects ready. Then your project will be sent up as a payload on the new Shepard launch vehicle. So get your friends together, get your teachers together, come up with your best ideas, because we want to send your art project to space. It's open now, of course that's good music, but thank you. So it's open now, so we just had to do a shout out to really spread the word, please. Get the art submissions in from students. That would be awesome. And audience, we have plenty of time for questions from you. So let's start throwing that ball right up here in the front and in the middle, I see. Just maybe three rows ahead. Raise your hand again in the middle. I see your hand. There you go. Thank you. Tell us who you are and then ask a question to whoever you want. Hi, I'm Erin. I am a designer trying to launch a space tech company right now. I'm over at Harvard. And I wanted to know, I heard a lot about STEAM and STEM. And I think that sometimes design can actually bridge the gap between industry and scientists think very cross-disciplinary. How do you think designers can start playing in the space industry right now? We all start with it. Super the panel. So I call it STEAMed. I'm all about bringing in the arts, right? The artists or the visionaries tell our stories. They're 100% part of all my teams. D is the designers. They're the 3D makers. We have a generation of 3D makers there. So we're all in. We need to recruit everyone. Can't filter anyone out. New space is all about recruiting everyone in. And surely, we'll raise up STEM if we do that. But if we're inclusive, and count everyone. So I think we need a new message, frankly. And I call it changing the conversation to make sure we're talking it everywhere. There's a place for everyone. And all good ideas as an engineer. I need to be whacked on the side of the head. Did you think about it this way? What about this? Great. So I need to think about it differently, not just how I was trained. I was just trying, man. You guys are all passionate about it as well. Yeah. At Blue Origin, we have industrial designers. We have designers that we work with for developing the inside of our cabin, our spacesuits, all those kinds of things. But we also see the importance of design thinking more broadly and how that plays in to the way that we envision whole systems and systems architectures. So, yes, spot on. That's part of the reason we're engaging in this art and space is to bring that design and art into the conversation more broadly. We have artists. We have a studio at JPL. I was waiting to jump in. Go ahead. We're going to do rapid fire, because I want to. But tell us about the artist at JPL. About a decade ago, we realized that we can't just be engineers. We have to be human, too. So we hired Dan Goods, an artist and resident at JPL as a group of about 10 people or so. So we have in-house at JPL a group of designers, artists. We found that a lot of what we do requires both a human, emotional, and a communication element. So we do have a resident group. We work with designers outside. We also found that a lot of engineering can be improved through innovative, non-traditional engineering approaches to design. So we work with Autodesk and many other companies to improve the way we build the systems by innovative, non-traditional systems engineering approaches to our mission. So it's a very exciting time. Next question. I think there's a hand right here. Up in the front, yeah. Hi, I'm Charles Slotkin. And I've founded the Wonder Mission to find ways to substantially raise the bar in immersive high technology visualization experiences that excites young and old in terms of science and space exploration. So I'd like to ask the panel if you could briefly just tell us about a spark or a particular aha moment that ignited your interest in science and space. Good. Yeah, Sarah, please. Mine was simple, and it was not technology-based at all. It was just the beautiful night sky. And it's kind of the opposite of technology, because when do we, especially kids today, put your phone down, turn the TV off, just get away from stuff. And away from the city lights, if we can bring children and people out there to reconnect with nature and see the sky, I think it's very motivating.  How about you? I think, for me, the moment is you can actually do that kind of moment, because I was a student, and a science teacher kind of blew up something, or they did one of those experiments that does a lot of smoke. And to me, the idea is that can you actually do that as a human being? Is it accessible to you? And I think once you realize that yes, then why not other things? So I can definitely credit reading Isaac Asimov's book, Science Fiction, in early teen years. I was reading and buying everything that he wrote. I even, I won't say what I did, I went to libraries and I read the books, didn't take them. You tore out the pages. And so Isaac Asimov, when I was very, very early in my teens, was key to forming my future. We need those storytellers. We need those. Not just the science fiction books, but the science books. The popular science books inside the atom and so on were key. Erika, how about you? Yeah, I was so young when I started to love space, I don't know where it came from. We say it chose me. I didn't choose it. But I certainly give a lot of credit to teachers early on that were willing to let me run with that. Space Camp was another one for those who grew up in that generation to go and put yourself in those shoes. There is Space Camp for adults, for those who haven't ever thought about making the trip down to Huntsville and still have that childhood dream. I think that being there and really vividly imagining yourself in that world, whether it's virtually or personally, is a big part. Yeah, for me, it's Apollo. But we've talked about it yesterday and all throughout the week, Space Week at MIT. It's just Apollo taught us that we can pick the hardest, most audacious goal ever, and then achieve it. So for me, a young girl growing up in Montana in the night sky, looking at me and saying, wow. No, that's where we are. We're on the moon. That's pretty inspirational. We just need to get back soon. Back into the back? Yeah. Oh. Oh, OK. Hi. Hello. I'm Josh Weinberg with National Geographic. Thanks for this great panel and day. I'm wondering what you think about encouraging more folks like yourself and a lot of other people who are speaking to go into that dirty word politics. Because I don't know, maybe this is my personal feeling. But when we see Senator John Glenn, obviously, we have Mark Kelly who's running. What do you think about the idea of transferring all the things you guys are thinking about and trying to apply it into the policy realm in terms of inspiring people? So it's almost like the overview effect for problems down here. Or do you think that is a waste of time? I think you should answer that. Yeah. I'm going to stay away from politics, but I'd love to talk to you about policy. As an aerospace engineer at MIT, I ran our technology and policy program for a decade. And that's exactly it. Scientists and engineers, we need to do more. You have to be willing to step up. We can't live in our labs. If we want to truly have impact, if we want to inform, Sarah can probably say this, but we're just on fake science. We don't have fake science. You get kicked out of the academy for that. It just doesn't exist. And we have science. We have truth. But if we're not helping to shape the policy and if we're not willing to step up, so it's a call to everyone. Just even can be like a year in DC or in world governments. Because as a technical person and trained as an artist, whatever your background is, you can make a difference. But I actually think you do have to. We have to call on everyone to say, no, sorry. It's not just the lawyers or economists. No offense lawyers. But it has to be multidisciplinary. So maybe just back to that. So if everyone needs to step up and be willing to maybe get into that decision-making policy realm, I think we'd all be better off. I'll put in a plug for the AAAS Fellowship Program. For those of you who are doing PhD work, consider spending a year in DC and being a voice, a trained understanding voice in an office. That's made a difference for me as I've been up on the hill to be able to talk with someone on the other side of the table that understands that language and the process. Policy. Go ahead, please. Policy in Israel is a little different than here in the US. But we're very proud that we actually were able to join teams with the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Science in Israel. And a lot of the programming that we're doing for kids and sciences are joined. So these are ones that are distributed by the Ministry of Education or Ministry of Science. And you can see that effect throughout the board, all the way to teachers that sends us questions from their exams, like in statistics. I got that question from a teacher in statistic. What are the chances of one engine failing in a lot of five or something like this? And this is really exciting because you can see it across the board. And Sarah, I'm going to ask you to share what its policy, its impact decision-making, you're speaking all over the world on behalf of colleagues in the academy. I mean, Axel Planets is a little removed from policy and politics. It's sort of seen as a somewhat frivolous, but exciting endeavor. So I think it's really not part of the bigger scheme. But you're out there speaking. You're not just standing in your lab. You're out there speaking as a scientist who just kind of speak for the investments, right? Why is it so important to get the budgets and investments and back to even dreaming and then the data we get back? It's changed the world. Well, we do try to encourage people to go into STEM rather than I think we had a comment over here. We see a lot of the top students here at least want to go into video game programming or lucrative jobs and not necessarily stay in STEM fields. So part of the whole public speaking and going around, it's not necessarily to set policy, but really to motivate things from a more grassroots level. Yeah. Thanks for your work. Alina, your work at JPL is a lot about policy, right? It is. It's a lot about policy. My answer to this is that we at JPL entertain and host a lot of policy makers every day. And they're international and domestic. US ambassadors abroad would come to JPL. We host them, show them. And they all get so excited about space in general and then the communication power of the achievements in space. It really transcends borders. It transcends cultures and stimulates young people to go into science all over the world. And that's good for everybody. Exactly. So I'd say we all have a role to play, hopefully. Another question? We have time for a few more questions. Good. In the back, there's some hands. Hi. I'm Kayla Frank. So I guess my question is, what's next? After you build up space tourism, after you get to the moon, after you build the infrastructure to get millions of people living and working in space, what do you do then? We've been waiting 50 years to get back to the moon. What's next? OK, what's after millions of people? While everyone's thinking of their answer up here, I say, I usually get a question like that. I turn it back to you and all the younger people, who that will be for you. Because we're so fixated on just getting the thing done. We sometimes don't really think beyond. 50 years, OK, but I'm going to make it 50 years, guys, panelists, where will we be? Where do you want us to be? Yeah, so getting to the moon is hard enough. Thinking what's next is also interesting. One of the things that we say to kids is that our mission to the moon is the one way. Means that the spaceship is going to stay there. And it's their job to bring it back. Good. Erica. We talk about a time when Earth is zone residential. So that this is a planet, this is the best planet we're ever going to have. And how do we make sure that we preserve this one while we explore and use the resources that are out there to help us do that? All right. Sarah, still 50 years. We're all for 50 years. I would hope that we will have launched something, whether it's these tiny little, not that, but I mean, that's kind of a low bar. No, no, it's not. Wait, just wait. I was going to say, we hope to have launched something that is directed towards another star system with planets. There we go. All right. Those are very far, four light years away. And there are a lot of different things in the works. And that's what we anticipate will happen. 50 years, Leon. So I expect within those 50 years to have a permanent science station on the moon, on perhaps the far side of the moon, just like we have in the Antarctic, a international science station that is permanent science telescopes looking deep into the universe. And just a vibrant lunar economy. 50? OK. I'm hoping that happens in the next decade. We've got to speed things up. That's why your question is so important about 50 years. Personally, I hope we're living much more in balance here on space ship Earth. In the 50 years, we're running out of time. It's urgent. So I hope we really muster the will and change human behavior and really take care of our home planet again. I love Moon Mars, but another hand. We have probably time for one more question. Hi, Jeff Nunn with the Museum of Flight in Seattle. So there's been a lot of discussion up there about kind of international cooperation. But what about the other side in competition? We talk about we need cooperation to get to space. But the reason Apollo got the budgets and succeeded was it was framed as a space race against the Russians. In the dialogue, there's a lot about how the US needs to maintain leadership in space. And that implies leading against someone else and talking about new space races with China and the like. So where's the balance in terms of motivating the public and the budgets between competition and cooperation? So I can address that. So Google and our expires started as a competition between private organizations. Anyone could register a company or an organization to compete in the Google and our expires and to attempt landing on the Moon. And this is how we started. So competition is very good at facilitating the start. But very early on, you understand that you're not competing against others. You're actually competing against physics, which is a lot harder. Exactly. Because landing on the Moon is really, really hard. And the deeper you go into this, you see how surprising and amazing it is that Apollo landers actually did it. And recently, the Chinese in the Soviet Union with robotic missions. So I think that the competition is a very good way to start it. But in the end, you're not competing against other people. You're competing against science. Well, build on that by saying that we're not seeing, perhaps, competitions between nations, even with China's recent landing on the far side of the Moon. But competitions between private companies. I know you said that's not what you were saying, but government-funded contracts competing commercial private spaceflight companies. So I think that's where we'll see competition. Competition's good, right? It raises everyone's up, the bar up. But I want to make a quick note on soft diplomacy. The US and NASA are international space station partners. This is really important. What's going well, as far as I can tell, from the US and Russia is our soft diplomacy for decades and decades to work together. I hope we can do that with China going out. Again, we're talking civilian space. There's plenty of budgets in the Department of Defense to worry about really important, really important national defense and strategic awareness, things like that. That's all going on, and that's very well-funded. Yes, so we are out of time. First, a big round to our panel. And final announcement there is the launch. We are launching to NASA's Russian cosmonaut to international space station at 314, 314 Pi Day. 314, that'd be great. So you have to stay till 314. We'll see the launch going up, and our astronauts are going to kind of take you through that scary launch and entry and getting us into space successfully. Very exciting. Thanks, Katie. Okay, good. Just if everyone didn't hear across the way. They'll be here all afternoon and still talking about the successful launch over cocktails as well. Thanks, everyone. Really happy lunch and appreciate your contributions.


We're glad to know that you're still there. It is at the run-up and we promise you that we'll be bringing you a Conversation around the education bank bill for students and to have that conversation with us is theophilus a catch-up He's a media consultant a public affairs commentator. You're very welcome. Can you hear me? It's our catch-up. Are you there? Thank you All right So we would want to get like a background first off the student alone as you know I would want to call it in a very general term. How do you react to this a new development? We talked about What you call it we talked about ASU and the very many options that should be open to them And we had a long conversation now The federal government is already preparing itself for that future with the With this bill that has been passed with the assent of the president. It tells you that there is a preparation towards autonomy full autonomy for Nigerian universities in which The students who will be confronting the scenario of paying high fees we have the option of Borrowing from this back We know that there is this general idea that Student loans is old-fashioned and it's not working. The idea is this don't It is the best way forward for our tertiary education There is no other way and there can be other ways But this is the best way at this time as the universities are going to move into autonomy They will have to charge their own commercial fees and government will not allow his own student or his own citizens To be confronted with the situation where if your parents can't afford if you can't afford if your guardians can't afford me So a lot of Which is optional for those who need it is a preparation for that inevitable future which I'm very excited about But there are a lot of fears first of all, let me just start with a new development interest rate in Nigeria just moved from fifteen point five to sixteen point five and Before that bill is even accented to there's a possibility the interest rate will even go higher These students that will be taking this bill. What else is being done by the government to make sure that when they take these Loans they can pay back. How possible is it? Yes Yes I think the bill is proposing zero interest for student loans So there is no fear about interest for now Okay, let me let me put it differently Sometime ago not too long ago There was the scheme that the NYSC the youth coppers will have to when they finish their year They'll they can serve like for the next two years and be receiving like double of the money They were receiving what we call a la we don't receiving it and then inside those two years There will be working as extension officers teachers and all that so that when they finish They can have something doing but there was no plan by the federal government that wanted to bring the scheme For these same people after the two years to have a steady job Maybe empower them to do what they're supposed to do with the learning that I've had in the extra two years how Can these loans or scheme? How can these? Thing work when you're just taking loans and there is no Corresponding jobs that when you leave the university that you are taking so much loans to go and Elon is alone you will pay back whether with interest or not if I take a millionaire I'll pay millionaire back, but I'm out of school and I don't have a job. How will that work out? Yes Graduates that we produce That is a problem that company must continue to solve and they are all you know job creation is a factor of Something that is a business of everyone is a business of federal state government local government private individuals and organizations and then foreign direct investments and foreign investments But if you have a country you will have the level of insecurity that we are all talked about and we are experienced You'll notice that investment will be reduced if you look at the growth of corruption that is great or that business will be Meaning work as themselves who loves the business because of the idea from short so indeed There are not enough jobs, but the future of any country is always bright And so the government will continue to work towards a better future hoping that by the time they are able to improve on the general well-being of the country is infrastructure These are these electricity rules the rail network and reduce and increase the level of security jobs naturally will follow a vibrant and a bigger population You know that it's not enough to have a country of 200 million people They have to be employed and you've got to train there really for that future So we know it will impact on repayment But the government will factor that into the second fund because the government will guarantee these loans And so the government must look at it and see is a very difficult enough rising in the U.S It would divide his attempt to forgive student loan was rejected by the courts. The court said no He must pay because a lot of people are falling in 2014 in the U.S. Are rising from coffee and they have turned them to loss of jobs Occasion by many of the companies moving to China. So it's happening even in country like us that they have defaults So our government Have enough information to prepare for defaults in the future or delay repayments But that there are two things here with we have Training the people that will potentially come to do the jobs and then creating the jobs themselves Which one did you think do you think should have come first? Is it that they're putting the they cut before the horse by thinking about Churning out thousands upon thousands of students that will now come and wait for the government to try to create job remember Before this administration came the promise was that a million A hundred million jobs will be available and or at least a hundred million people will be removed from poverty now We have a hundred and thirty million people from the reports that we've had Fallen that are falling into poverty. So in a case where we see our government as I don't know whether to say bereft of ideas To create job for the people had which one do you think should have come first? Is it not trying to innovate ways to create jobs before you think about Making education easier for the people who will come and man these jobs. I Don't know your take place Anyone of them if you look at it Where the business of creating jobs has been an ongoing process, but you see that this issue of university autonomy You know, it's another area that we are not we are producing Unemployable graduates and the country is bleeding financially because of the kind of money that we spent in for in seeking foreign education So if government's able to resolve the investment situation What if we free the money that government spent in running the best is today? government will retain that money and put the money in the creation of jobs by improving infrastructure and security and Natural and the job creation will follow in beautiful country with good infrastructure Because companies and investors will come here We want to establish their businesses in the country and more of our people who finish Who are properly educated we create up the companies that we create where we're being So I think the government is attacking it because The business of population is not it's all but it has already established so many investors that he's unable to fund and on the Never-increasing level cost of funding messes continue to go Where resources are becoming late? So the government's consideration of course on what we see is that you have to stop depleting the cost of running Investments and allow the investors to run themselves and then save the whole citizens by channeling those monies into loans So that if they start paying back however small it's torment it will be a Very strategic and that's what we have done many years. Yeah, it's okay. Let's applaud the government But um, whatever the government in Nigeria, I mean say something about giving loans to the citizenry It's we kind of like look at it with a pinch of salt like okay. They talked about trader money. That was a direct Expenditure from a batch of loot as we call it of that year and we didn't see much of it and eventually it was on an election year and a lot of people said the money just Went down the drain in the name of trader money now. They're talking about loans that will be given to students What qualifies the students to become beneficiaries of these loans? We do not even know whether I will also have a Nigerian factor and all that do you think that? that Monitoring and everything that should make that project work can be hard, right? Or from the way you have seen they have already had it right that we can get To where we want that student loan thing to get to when it's it kicks off well What just as you said the main problem we have in our country It is not the tradition of the project that we develop or in event It is the cross in Motivation of those we implemented So the Nigerian factor you have said which is it in most cases is a negative factor I don't think the Nigerian factor is it said to be Nigerian factor for a positive purpose So if it is the Nigerian factor For for negative that that's how do we deal with it? We cannot Bring alien to run Nigeria So we all must be up and doing to ensure that the human Nigerian that is put in this place it Made to do what they should do because her country is be devil by Unpatriotic citizens who are holding various offices and taking advantage of those offices for their personal good That's a common phenomenon Which is sad? So my hope is that if this is developed We should make it work what qualifies a student according to the app He says academic and a minute you have gained admission and you desired the loan nothing else should be a condition Ability to pay back is not considered collateral is not requested. So you get admission and you want the law Because it will be on your record. I know a student you can affect your rating and affect your promotion You can affect a lot of things in the future So it's called once a person qualifies academic and a minute. He has been admitted into a university Okay, that person Submitting all that to the bank will get that low money disbursed And then you will think of repayment after graduation when I went to South Africa I was in the shopping in In a mall in a supermarket And I saw two young people a boy and a girl. They were selling a certain product So I stopped by to look at what they were selling and they asked me please buy sir Well, we're doing this to pay our loan A student loan is due so I had to do this quickly so that the next installment do not fall I've not gotten a regular job. Are you getting that picture? So this is somebody who finished when it's in South Africa by using the facility of the student loan and He's finished school and he decided to do a quick salesmanship in order to pay student loan So everyone of us will respond to it differently That one has not got a job and South Africa is not safe because everybody has not got a job Therefore, we don't do that in America. Not everyone gets a job And yet the student loan system is made to continue to work. So we must continue to do it Okay, well if there is anything that Nigerians have is fate. So we have fate that things will work out and Sometimes we experiment and then it works out for us. Sometimes it doesn't work out But we'll still have something to learn. Mr. Katubat. Thank you so much for coming on the show today to share your perspective I want to thank you. Let me remind you just now. I had there was a summit by the by the National assembly speaker of the House of Rem alright, honorable, but I'm here But I've been me but I've been a very difficult name to produce. He held a summit Our messenger was there It's a former vice chancellor of the University of Lagos Including the current ASU president. Do you know that none of them In the academia suggested autonomy for you this The shy away from that they kept digging into the current system of grabbing more getting more money We have all seen how our universities continue to dilapidate in In physical infrastructure and in academic implementation And we are not worried that most the country must free the federal government Continuously of the burning of the huge weight Is Today I buy petrol today Modern 309 is put in my pocket per liter everyone that buys petrol and we wanted to continue And all of this is from the same small cost of a federal government It just cannot sustain it and that's why in all aspects of our life We have problems and we're wondering how do we have problem We have problem because we don't have money to meet up all these needs at the same time So if we do this it will help and we will prefer my children take the loan and go to this school well and they do not strike Okay. Well, thank you so much. Mr. Akatubra for that addendum Okay, um now maybe anybody who doesn't step up to our responsibility will call them alien So Don't be alien Um, you know while he was talking something struck me. He mentioned how that even in america Uh, it's not very rosy I I can't really quote him, you know, I bet him right now But you know, he was trying to mention how that it's not easy anywhere in the world. We should just take responsibility Uh, you cannot compare because in america, they have a system that works There is so many ways to hold these people responsible like when they get the loan they just can't Run away or something get where I'm coming from you understand and then When you asked him the question about putting the cards before the horse um I feel like It's it's going to be a very long process. Please. I'm not trying to be negative I I like the idea, but and I would like to see it work But I don't think we have everything it needs You know, it requires to make it work. I guess that would be conversation for another day We'll keep talking about the education system in injera, but now we're going to take a quick break For the news to come up and when we return the run-up will continue. Stay with us