Good morning everybody and welcome to a panel entitled ESG Metrics for a Sustainable Future. It could be subtitled how auditors and accountants suddenly became wildly trendy and jumped into the climate change debate big time. Because what is becoming clear is that as the world looks to scurry to create ways to create a more sustainable future, the role of measurement, the role of tracking what companies are doing, the question of what kind of metrics investors are using is becoming incredibly important. And over the last year, there has been a tremendous amount of activity in this space, whether it's a type of reforms introduced by the European Union in relation to the green taxonomy, or whether it's a flurry of measures that came out of the COP26 climate talks in Glasgow with all these acronyms like G-Bands, ISB, etc, etc. And in fact, the World Economic Forum has also been pushing ahead rapidly on this front. In fact, this time last year, I was chatting with Brian Moynihan, one of the key protagonists in this initiative about what the web is doing in this respect and attempt to try bring this alphabet soup of different acronyms together. But what we're going to be talking about today is what is actually happening on the ground, how anybody can make sense of this very, very confusing alphabet soup. And most importantly, whether the scale of change is fast enough to avert a climate disaster, social upheaval, and all the other problems that we're grappling with. And we have a terrific panel to talk about this. We've got on the one hand Brian Moynihan, who's Chairman, Chief Executive Officer of Bank of America and Head of the Economic, World Economic Forum's International Business Council that's been trying to push ahead with some type of consolidation of these accounting standards. We have Julie Sweet, who's the Chair and Chief Executive Officer of Accenture, and also a member of the Warden Trustees of the World Economic Forum. And then we have two private sector company representatives from the corporate world, the real world, Franz Van Houten, CEO of Royal Philips, and also Alain Bejani, who's CEO of Magine Alpha Tuim from the UAE. So a diverse group of perspectives that's going to be trying to make sense of what this all means on the ground, or in practice, or in boardrooms. So I'd like to start with you, Brian, and ask you, this time last year, you were explaining how the big four accountancy groups and the World Economic Forum were trying to pull together this really confusing mix of accounting standards that were emerging. What we were hearing at the Financial Times, both in our day-to-day reporting, but also on the moral money platform that's focused on ESG issues, what we were hearing from investors was that most of them simply could not make sense of what was going on in practical terms. So can you give us a very quick snapshot of what exactly is happening on the metrics funds right now, and whether it's any less confusing than it was this time last year? Well, I think, thank you, Joanne. I think if you think, since last year we talked, just to start, we have to go back to what are the metrics? The metrics were designed in an effort by the International Business Council with the big four accounting firms, with the World Economic Forum team to basically take a look across all the metrics that existed out there, consolidate them into a platform, which importantly aligned to two basic things. One was to the Sustainable Development Goals, which is what the world wants development to be like. And then secondly, frankly, to define and measure what stakeholder capitalism is because the debate had begun. Well, you all talk about it, but how do we know you're doing it? And the answer was here's a set of metrics. And then they have those go across industry and across types of people, investors, operators, et cetera. So since that time, I think last year we probably had 30, 40 companies in. Now we have 140 plus companies who are committed in reporting on these metrics. And France and Julie and myself, we all have them in our annual reports and our reports that are official sector. And that's across the country, across the world, all different types of companies, all different industries reporting, which is important. It's two other major pillars that have taken place over the last year, where part of this process was not only with the companies and what I cannot inform, but beyond, was to educate much broader. And so with the big four accounting firms who've been terrific at this with various bodies, we've talked to thousands and thousands and thousands of directors of companies that are not quite as big as the companies that are in the IBC, talk to them about how you can adopt them, how to think about that and what it would take. So that's been going on. And then the other thing that's been going on, frankly, is the convergence. And there's two parts of convergence. There's a formal convergence that resulted in ultimately the ISSB being formed, which the ISRA community, represented by us, the new things have been pushing to get done so we could get to a formal set of standard metrics. And then there's a lot of work that went on with our colleagues in GRI and SASB and others on informal conversions, which was the standard setters were created by interested people and have a great history and have done a lot of great things, bringing them together as they realized the multiplicity was making it difficult. Those convergences have taken place, the ISSB being the sort of receiving big catcher's mitt for all that coming into them and we'll announce it. And then even formally on the U.S. side, you're seeing the SEC promulgate, potentially promulgate in the relatively near future, a rule on environmental disclosure and probably one on human capital disclosure, and that's two of the four pillars that are embedded in the SDG-based IBC metrics. So we are actively engaged with, you know, business roundtable, the Chamber of Commerce and all the people talking about this on all and equivalents across the world. But the idea, as you get these things standardized, then investors won't be confused, then society won't be confused, then people will be able to be held accountable in a consistent fashion, and that's the goal we have. Well, many years ago when I was a reporter writing about the world of credit derivatives, I used to joke to my colleagues that I couldn't imagine a sector which had more acronyms than credit derivatives. And now I've discovered there is one, it's called the world of ESG and sustainability, which is just drowning in all these acronyms. But I'd like to ask you, Julie, you're paid to reassure companies about what's happening and to help them make sense of complexity. Do the companies that you speak to understand what this confusing sort of blitz of acronyms actually mean, and are they managing to turn it into tangible action steps to try and conform with them? Great question, Jillian. And really building off where you started is to sort of the discussions we've been having at the World Economic Forum, the work that Brian and the IBC has done, is there's a parallel sort of underlying momentum that's been built by the shift in thinking about sustainability by companies as compliance, then it was corporate responsibility. We all remember being at the World Economic Forum talking about this is the right thing to do, and now it's competitiveness. And it is competitiveness from an investor perspective, a customer perspective, and a talent perspective. And that has really given momentum to companies embracing sustainability from reporting and the work that has now been done to make that easier. But as important is embedding it in actual business strategies. And you see that across industry. In beauty, you've got Shiseido talking about sustainability at the center of their skincare. You've got in retail a Best Buy who's announcing not only creating jobs, but commitments to diversity. You have a number of financial services companies who are building out their own platforms to both look at investing, scope three emissions on the climate side, but how they're operating. And so the shift in the momentum around the metrics and understanding the metrics starts with the shift in the business environment. And what I would say is that the work to make it more easy and understanding is important, but it really just starts with commitment that you're going to measure it and use the data. And we're actually releasing a study today that says that only about 26% of companies actually have the full set of data that they're measuring. Now the good news is, and all of us on this panel are great examples of that, that this is not rocket science. It's a decision to measure and then to take the steps. And so we just had our fiscal year end and we launched that we now report against every single one of the different frameworks publicly. And I think that's important that we all take that step and you see that momentum, but I think it's tied to competitiveness. And I'll just end with a few changes because I think we're a good proxy for what we're seeing companies do. And when we announced our results this year, we said we're measuring our success by our broad sustained, the way we create 360 degree value, which is what we call sustainability. So I started my earnings script with how where we are in meeting our diversity goals, where we are with meeting our climate goals, how we've upskilled our people, then I turned to the financials. I have my top 500 leaders are measured by not only financials, but how we're meeting all of those goals, sustainability at large. And then our investment priorities reflect investing in this on behalf of our clients, whether it's building algorithms to see child labor and supply chains or to measure the reduction of carbon emissions. And it's that shift that's as important as seeing the reporting that's table stakes. It's the shift in really embedding sustainability in your core business strategy and in how you measure your performance. Right. I mean, I take your point about the fact it's really about a shift in mentality as much as the actual numbers. And that's obviously very striking. But before I turn to France now, I'd like to ask both Brian and Julie this, you know, obviously this all sounds very sensible. Obviously, everyone's racing. And at COP26, there was this really quite remarkable announcement from the IFRS that what you call the IISB Brian, I call the ISB because easy to pronounce this new accounting framework to try and get companies to report on their environmental emissions with a kind of scope three mentality that is supposedly coming down the tracks within a couple of years. And for the first time in history, the IFRS is not only trying to change the reporting system is trying to change the audit system as well in just a year or two. Nothing on this scale and speed has been seen before in accounting history. You know, accountants are not known for their propensity to race anywhere. So I'm really curious, Julie or Brian, is this remotely practical as far as the ambitions that are laid out? And can companies actually make sense? Can the C-suite actually make sense and conform to this fast enough? Maybe, Julie, you can come in first and then give Brian time to think about it. Well, Brian's the expert on the accounting industry. I'm happy to say because of the amazing work that he's done in really helping converge. And then I would say in terms of the C-suite, this is about a decision. Again, this is not rocket science. For us, it took us 15 months to go from where we were doing three frameworks to all six to get all the level of assurance and data. And we did that now. And we're doing it against, we're reporting against six frameworks. We have great support from our accountants. We have great methodology because a lot of this is non-financial data. So this is absolutely doable and it starts with the decision and your seeing companies make that decision. But Brian, over to you. Yeah, Brian, can it work? By the way, I should say the reason I say the ISB, not the ISB is because it's easy to pronounce. And because it was created by the G-fans, the financial body, I like the idea of the G-fans meeting the ISB, which sounds like two Korean boy bands. But Brian. I'll leave that to you. The need to make part of the official sector is the only way to actually stop the proliferation because there's nothing that stops another one from developing, another one from developing, another one from developing. And so that's why, frankly, the biggest obvious isn't the pace at which we're going to move. The biggest obvious is the issue in the community is saying, please do this. Please put a set of rules that we can actually understand and live by because in absence of that, there's self-appointed authorities that just keep developing and everyone has the same right as the one before and if they can get the momentum behind them. So the idea of doing that, now, will they move as fast as they say, we don't know, but they're just announcing that they're going to try, actually causes people to focus on that in you. The GRI and SASB, which have done a wonderful job over the years, of getting this done. But remember, going to Julie's point, GRI, SASB, TSCD, PCAF, I can go on and on. This is what we report on today and what we're trying to do is consolidate that to make it simpler because if you go look in our end report on pages 44 to 47 or whatever it is, there are the metrics that align to the SDGs and likewise Julie Frantz and Allen would say the same thing. And so we can do this, but having an endorser is the way to do it then just like accounting and just like all their things makes it easier. And then frankly, the energy which goes into the multiplicity of reporting and the difficulty getting it all straight can be turned to actually doing things that will make these things move in the right direction. And that's what we've got to remember is we can't debate how to measure anymore. We got to go out and make a step tomorrow and a step the next day and step the next day towards environmental change, a step tomorrow in terms of human capital metrics and diverse disclosure. And that's what's going on. So it's terrific they're doing it. The U.S. will come out differently because the ESCC will lead it, but the ESCC is a disclosure organization. Ultimately, FASB will have to settle in here at some point and make a decision whether they're going to pursue this and then likewise other accounting bodies across the other parts of the world. But if it doesn't move to the accounting into the official sector on that side, then you're still subject to basically a broad disclosure mandate in the ESCC, whereas accounting says this is a way to count one and one equals two. And that can help standardize the practice. Right. Well, I'm going to come back later on and ask you about the ESCC in a moment. But before I do, I want to ask you, friends, from the perspective of Phillips, how doable is this settle or are these set of reforms? I would say very doable. And let's for the sake of the audience say Phillips is a health technology company, about 20 billion in revenue size. We have already implemented the IBC set of standards for ESG reporting. As a company, we believe this is very important. I mean, if you zoom out for a moment and say, the world has a lot of big challenges, whether social equity or sustainability and climate or companies have a role to play in it. That's why we talk about a state called the capitalism. But there's also a big trust deficit. And the only way to tackle both the big challenges and create a level of trust is transparency on what we are doing. So we were immediately leaning in to say, we want to publish all these ESG metrics. And we have in our 2020 report published 21 of them. Now, I agree with Julie that it's all about doing, right? And the great benefit of implementing a set of metrics is that you can deploy it through your entire organization. So all our leaders allow people are familiar about their task to achieve our ESG metrics, whether that's on climate or on diversity, or on lives improved with our technology or access to healthcare. And it puts all the noses in the same direction. And then we have year on year improvement objectives. And compensation is tied to it. So we have already moved beyond only measuring and rewarding on financial metrics. And we have embraced this wider set of metrics. I see it as a learning curve for society. We have early adopters like our companies that are fully in. And the benefit of getting the standards bodies now to say, here is a common set of metrics will force the laggards to adopt as well. And as Julie said, it takes you one or two years to get a metric fully embedded in your operation. It's not that difficult. So I would like to exude confidence that this is eminently doable. We just need to get on the bandwagon on the learning curve so that you make progress. And there's no time to lose because if you think about the whole climate debate, then we're going way too slow to get to carbon neutrality. We have become carbon neutral in five years just because we measured it and we helped our people accountable. So that is how you get progress. And I'm curious before I turn to Alan, can you find the people, the talent you need to actually do this? I mean, because I'm hearing there's a real shortage of green auditors out there or people who are actually trained in these different disciplines that can bring them together. Well, I mean, the first you need to have the data yourself as a company, right? And that is in your own hands. And that's not so difficult. We have been able to collate and collect the data globally. We are in 150 countries. We have standardized the measurement across the entire Philips universe. Our external accountant provides assurance on these numbers. There are controls in place that we offer so that the assurance review is easier for the accountant. We have been getting assurance already for over five years. So again, we should not over complicate this topic. I think it's quite doable and setting standards like IBC and now the big four and then IFRS are doing or ISP is exactly the way to go. Right, right. Well, I'd like to turn to you, Alan, because it's great to have you on this group because so much of the debate initially was dominated by European companies, latterly American companies, but really has been in European companies and American companies that really dominated discussions around these accounting standards. So I'm very curious for a group like Majid Al-Fatim, which is one of the largest holding companies in the UAE. How does this play out in practice? How easy is it to actually implement these new metrics? And does it worry you that many of your counterparts, your rivals, your competitors in the region may not be going down the same path at quite the same speed? Well, the short answer is no. It doesn't worry me. I really hope that they actually follow suit and a lot of what we do, whether it's in the context of our region presence in the MENA-wide region or what we do in the context of the IBC and WEF, is really to actually present an alternative of how actually things can be done for a private sector company in this region where we can contribute. Because the reality is we live in emerging markets and in a region that has a lot of endowment from nature.  As Fran said, it's really about there is the issue of measuring, but there is actually the issue of doing, which is what really matters is the impact that we drive. And of course, it's important that we measure it, but what the impact that we actually drive. So what we have been doing as Majid Al-Fatim one, we've been on this journey for 10 years. So we've been reporting, so declaring, reporting and externally audited on this for more than 10 years now. So before the issue of which frameworks are we going to use and before ESG at the time of compliance and CSR and then move into where we are currently. So that's one. Definitely, there is a big need to to unify and converge everything in one place. As Majid Al-Fatim in the Middle East and in the UAE, all of our colleagues in the region need for sustainable growth to actually tap the markets, whether it's public debt or whether it's actually equities. So we have public debt and we have shown the world that actually there is a huge demand when it gets to actually sustainability link loans, when it's actually green bonds or green Islamic bonds, Sukuk, et cetera, et cetera, because we've issued the benchmarks on green Sukuk, for example, in 2019, et cetera. So the need exists. Everyone is in a special interest on the short term because of their funding capacity, because of their investors, because of broadening their investor base to do it. But you also need to do it because there is an imperative, which is basically how much we are using, I would say, just to put it simply, like Al Gore does, using the I would say the air as an open sewer. And this is why a company like us have pledged to be net positive by 2030 on water and carbon. In addition, of course, to all what we're doing to measuring all of that and how are we getting to actually there by then. So it is possible, it's not difficult. We have one of the largest indoor ski slopes in the world, Skidubai. And actually, people think that it's a huge generator of actually pollution. In reality, this is elite certified building. And actually, it consumes very little to almost nothing compared to anything of its size. So it is possible technically, practically on the ground. It is possible to measure it. It is possible to drive to drive the cultural transformation organizations in terms of driving ownership and giving people tools to do it. And it is possible to transparently report into it. And I want to say, just to emphasize the work that we're doing in the context of the IBC, the importance and the CEO for climate, the leaders for climate change, the importance of actually disclosing not just what you're doing, but actually what you're promising to do. We have to be transparent on the full spectrum. We cannot just choose to be transparent on one end and not the other. Right. Well, I mean, a lot of green activists would pay. Sorry. Yeah, just to be broad about something here, we're getting so caught up in the technicalities of the alphabet soup and the measurement. Remember what's really going on here is aligning in Duly in France. Now, and the point in our play is to line the whole company against a task as opposed to charity, as opposed to CSR, as opposed to that thing. That then changes the amount of money that comes to any of these elements. Right. And so when people say there's not enough money to do the environmental transition, people are thinking that is discrete pieces that they've heard given by charities, which are wonderful or given by, which is not close to what we need. What we need is the entire alignment of companies towards achieving that goal, how they consume, how they make their products, how their supply chain works. When you do that, you go from our charity of years, $500 million, which is fantastic, our operating expense base is $60 billion. If you align that $60 billion, that's a lot more money you're causing activity. In France and Duly and Allen have the same thing. And so that distinction and that alignment is what brings trillions to the task in a given year. Right. That's about the same thing. Instead of having an ESG fund, which is interesting, by using a common set of metrics, they can align all their investments. So you go away from $25, $30 billion we've raised in ESG funds and the Merrill platform and the private bank platform, which is terrific, to $3.8 trillion a lot. And that difference people miss when they get caught up in accounting is what we're doing is aligning the entire of capitalism towards the tasks that people want capitalism to do. So it's really about a shift in mentality as much as anything else and making sure it's no longer just ring banks in a separate department, but at the core of the operations. Well, that's the I could give an example to that Gillian, perhaps I think it speaks to the imagination. So after, let's say we became carbon neutral in our operation, we said now we need to address the so-called scope three of CO2 emissions, which brings you to your supply chain and also to the products that your customers use. And we have chosen to adopt the concept of circular economy in our business model, which basically means that we will take back the products that we sell, recuperate the materials and or repurpose the products and give them another life to back away from using virgin materials, which are bad for, let's say the scarce resources of earth. And you don't want that to end up in landfill for the oceans. The adoption of circular economy was not easy. And by now we are approaching 15% of revenue and we are making progress every year. But it is an integral part of our business model. And actually it doesn't raise cost and it doesn't reduce profitability. And it actually improves the retention of our customer base. Customers want to be part of it. And the loyalty of our customer base has gone up as a consequence. So if you fully embedded into your operation, this is not a obligation or like CSR was, but it's a fundamental different way of running your end to end supply chain. Right. Well, that's fascinating. I think we've been bombarded with questions from the audience watching. I mean, really a lot of very detailed questions, a lot of pretty geeky questions. Clearly a lot of people watching this, a lot of the West community really care about this or else they are grappling for some clarity with the confusion. But let me start with one quick question, which is at the moment, almost all the focus has been on publicly listed companies. There's been less way to implement this in private companies. I'd like to ask you, Alain, whether that worries you because you are operating in a region where there are obviously a number of big privately held entities that are not subject to the same pressures as publicly listed companies. Yes, absolutely. I think there is a big, I would say emphasis on publicly publicly traded companies and where actually most of the money is and naturally people, I would say, rely on the quantum. So this is where most of the money is and naturally the impact is driven by that, which is true.  And if you're not actually part of the solution, you're part of the problem. And privately owned businesses have less pressure, I would say, to move in that direction other than their own conscience and because it's their own money, which is true. But at the end of the day, the impact on the planet is the same if not bigger compared to others. And I think that there are two things. One is an awareness issue of the importance of this matter and why it's important. It's not an issue of being able to sustainably fund yourself, whether it's this way or that way on equity markets, but also on the other side. This part of the world, especially emerging markets in general, if we want to really grow sustainably, we need to get more sustainable sources of funding. And naturally, sooner rather than later, we're going to have to tap into the global community and these companies have part of their own sustainability to actually ready themselves from an ASG standpoint and really report on them so they actually improve their transparency. I think when you look at the privately owned business, I would say, verse, you would see that there is a large part, especially in the past few years of maturity that's happening in terms of best practices and making sure that they're all moving towards transparency. I think some, like Majid Al-Futayim and others who are doing that have an important role to play in actually showing others that it's possible. It's not that actually you actually make more money, you don't lose money, you do the right thing, and your business is more sustainable. So your bottom line as well, because unfortunately for some, it may override some other consideration, would, will suffer from that rather sooner, I mean sooner rather than later and there is a possibility to do it. So I really want on this one to thank the work that, I mean, what we do in the context of the WEF and the IBC because it shows other privately owned companies that this is possible and actually it is something that does not threaten neither the privacy that they want to have around their business, nor the actual performance of their business, but it gives them more sustainability on the medium to long term. Right. Well, we've got a question from the audience that's been actually very popular with the people watching this, which is this. Corporate ESG reporting is a first step, but getting carbon footprints on the products, consumer products, is what's going to really change, behavioral change. Do you think that's fair that what you guys are doing is just the first step at best? And in fact, the real issue at stake is not getting investors to understand what's going on, but to get consumers to understand what's going on with some kind of metrics for them. Julie, do you sort of work, you know, you're looking at this all front? Yes. So maybe just to start, you know, it's exact, it's a great question. And it's also really at the heart of the question is, where else do we need to make sure we've got consistency as well as standards and transparency. And there's a large group of consumer goods companies that are now working together. Some of that work actually started at the World Economic Forum among the industry workers, because what we know is consumers really care about sustainability and particularly the carbon footprint. And yet they're confused because there aren't common standards. And so that work we did, we helped the WEF do with a number of companies. And now there's a group that's publicly coming together to do that. And these are competitors are coming together and say, this is the right answer to get the standards. You also see in other places like the circular economy, you just heard Franz talk about how important that is and how an important piece of his business strategy is and their standards that we need to measure. What does that mean?  And so I think it goes back to measuring performance and having this be at the heart of your business strategy. And in order to be the heart of your business strategy, you have to understand what do your customers need? You have to be able to measure to know what to measure. And I think it's very important that this is about competitiveness. And the reason the private companies are going to come along is because this is how they're going to win. And everything that we've seen the research we've done says that the trillion dollar question is, how do you operate sustainably and make money? And those companies who have embraced sustainability are more profitable. They have a higher total return to shareholders. And so measuring just like you do every other business strategy is critical and seeing this for what it is, it is the right thing to do. It is critical for the future. And it is how you're going to win in the market. The early adopters of the consumers, they are involved and they care. They are interested in sustainability. The fast part of the market and the consumers are not aware and not so involved and they buy on price. And eventually, once we have transparency on ESG and metrics, there needs to be a cost to not being sustainable. A cost to being wasteful, a cost to carbon emissions, carbon priced pricing should then make their way into the cost prices of the products. And that will, I think, help then the consumers who are less involved around making the right choices. You could apply that to electronics, but you can certainly also apply it to food and meat and other highly wasteful areas. So I think there's a lot of education to be done. But aligning on metrics is the start because that creates a measurement and an opportunity to encourage, but also penalize by putting a cost to the waste. So way to go. Just to give you a thought on this. Last time the Weff met in person, we launched Prince Charles, launched the Sustainable Marks, and I've been the co-chair of that. Interestingly enough, we have the fashion industry group on that. And so they've developed labeling which allows you to see the providence of a good and will allow it to be transferred over time and this providence maintained. So think of this QR code. We can instantaneously see the sustainability all the way back to the point of cotton being grown or the wool being grown at shorn and et cetera. And then that enables us to have a problem. So that industry is taking on its waste by thinking through where the goods come from to make it. They're also thinking through the resale market, its fashion industry working with the resale market, thinking about how you sustain brand across time and think about that. And on top of that, the repair market, which is the reality is if you can really understand that that was a 2016 wool scarf that needs to be repaired, they can do it faster and therefore at less cost and therefore enable the circular part, the fronds going that that scarf then lasted a few more years. So those great companies are doing it in that area. In the plastics area, the same type of thing, which is ultimately trying to do the recycling and everything else, but also labeling the context and type of plastic and even the great companies that produce the goods that go into plastic, trying to change how they actually constitute it. These are amazing things going on, but they do come back to this idea of the disclosure by the operating companies that work into the supply chain to get those supply chains to change, whether private or public frankly. And then also their awareness that the consumer brand is being built or not built, ultimately, if the end consumer on these factors in it, probably the most stark example, that's electric vehicle market. Think about the difference evaluations of companies and the impact on companies as they made decisions to push. That is a consumer driven idea that there's people that want more demand for that thing. So I think the consumers are driving this, whether it's specifically disclosed in content of 0.7% X or not, they're driving the activity in the big companies recognize that the brands recognize that the suppliers recognize that and that's why it's moving that pace. Right, we've got several questions to go back to the issue about the ESG metrics and the companies. Several questions on raising the issue of whether the ISSP or ISP standards are applying an EU center plans that's going to be punitive in the short term for emerging market economies. Ella, I'm curious about to hear from you. Do you think the way these metrics are being created essentially penalizes emerging market companies? It does at times, but at the end of the day, we've had that with the debate on GDPR, and it was a very, very sensitive conversation across the globe. But at the end of the day, going always with the most, I would say, restrictive approach is the best thing to do because it's a matter of you getting ready, getting prepared to it, because ultimately, the world is going to converge on the ones that make most sense. And usually, the one that makes more sense in a world where the consumer are so empowered. And in a world of instantaneity is naturally the ones that are the most restrictive. So, we don't look at it from our standpoint of this being territorial driven. We look at it from this being really common sense driven and how much of it makes sense or not. But then the readiness is the issue. Like the question before on the issue of traceability and being able to really tell the customer how much it has cost from a carbon impact to get to point A to point B. The real issue is an issue of being able to use blockchain and modern technology in order to really have proper traceability and then measure the impact of that in a way that actually means the same thing for everyone, which is something, for example, that you're doing with IBM, but we need to integrate the whole very fragmented supply chain. And this is in the context of consumer good or consumer retailing and consumer goods industry, but you have it also in other industries. Now, moving into what you were talking about, it's not so much outside the framework. It's actually the implementation that's needed. What do you need to be able to implement the framework that actually makes sense when you operate in an environment that is not as mature as other environments? This is, to a large extent, an issue that's not really tackled. And it's not coming from, I would say, the fact that people don't see it. It's coming from the fact that there is no real engagement with the emerging markets on these issues. It is sometimes developed. It makes sense, but it makes sense within the confines of four walls, but it's not that there is no real engagement into the conversation, simply because the representation of, I would say, the developed market is higher. They have a higher share of voice and they have a higher, simply higher presence. And people just speak among those who are around them. Right. Jillian, can I add one thing here? It's important to remember that these are global companies who are leading, who are operating in emerging markets. And so you take the consumer goods companies that I mentioned earlier that are leading, L'Oreal, P&G, Unilever, the ones that are coming together around standards, they're operating in the emerging markets. They have to be able to deliver on their commitments in the emerging markets. And so I think we have an opportunity here. And I think, Alana, that's where you were going with, yes, we learned some things in GDPR. And at the same time, sustainability is a reality. And it's important to consumers around the world, to economies around the world. And you have a lot of companies who have their future based in the emerging markets, who are standing up and saying, we are going to deliver there, as well as in the countries where it's easier because of the technology and the regulation and so on. And I think it's important to make sure that we're baselining the commitments here are not just European and US-focused market companies. That's a very, very good point. We're almost out of time. Just quickly, I agree with Julie. I think it makes a lot of sense and it helps others to actually learn from. But I just want to say that I think it's about 60% of the output in terms of retailing that happens in the emerging markets actually is locally produced, not by the big, I would say, organizations. It makes a lot of sense because the small one learned from them. But that is this gap, this delay in time that we have to bridge. That's a great point. We're almost out of time. I just want to quickly pick up one of the questions we're getting asked a lot of, which is about regulatory convergence. Brian, do you think the SEC is going to adopt the IFRS, is the framework? I think they have a different charter. And that has to be understood is that IFRS is an accounting group that's developing sustainability standards, the SEC's disclosure charter. And they are going to promulgate rules. The chair has been clear on the environment, the disclosure rules and environment, and disclosure rules on human capital to standardize that disclosure. But in order to get the same impact to the US, you'd actually have to get FASV to actually operate and develop it. Likewise, the value of getting through the official accounting thing is applies to all companies, really to Alan's point, because nobody can hide from an accounting standard because it applies to everybody's audit financials. And so that's the difference. And so, yes, the SEC will come in, but ultimately there has to be an equivalent act off the backs of the FASV or something similar. Right. Well, if the SEC is going to come out with the reports quite soon, it's certainly going to be interesting to look at. Sadly, very sadly, given how many questions we have from the audience on this, we are out of time. I think that given the audience's demand, we could easily go on for another hour, but we are sadly cannot. From my perspective, as someone who's tracking this at the Financial Times and at the Financial Times, this moral money platform, I'd say that there's really three or four key conclusions. One, there is a frenzy of activity happening around this space right now. Two, much of it is still pretty confusing to anyone who's not at the very center of these debates because of this alphabet soup. But some sense of consolidation may now be emerging slowly. Three, the perhaps the most interesting thing about this whole great frenzy of discussion is not, as you say, the acronyms, the fact that it is potentially leading to a bigger mindset shift as companies not only take on board issues that they've ignored in the past with sustainability, but are forced to go from a kind of tunnel vision perspective, looking just at shareholders to a lateral vision perspective, looking at their wider footprint in the world. And fourth, if any of you've got kids who want job security in the future, I think training as a green auditor right now is going to be one surefire bet, but there's certainly is going to be a lot of demand for people who can make sense of this. We're trying to do that at the Financial Times. I'm sure most of you are trying to do it in everyday jobs, but it's still not easy at all. So best of luck in forging a path in this very fast-changing landscape. And I look forward to next year's Wealth Event, where hopefully it will become even clearer and more clearly embedded. So thank you all very much indeed.


Hey there, it's Sandy and I am going to transform a non-winter stamp into a winter card inspired by Haley's card. She sent this in the summer in my call for cards and I love the background colors. I love the outfit colors and I'm going to transform a stamp doing that. These are the markers. This is the aftermath of the markers that I used. I decided not to put them on the screen because there were just too many as you can see. But the whole point is not to share the colors necessarily but it is to talk about the process of changing an outfit from one season into another. This girl is wearing a sweat jacket so I have a leg up on trying to transform her into a winter outfit. If you have a stamp that you're using and you're inking it up like a clear stamp or a rubber stamp or something, you can wipe the areas off that you want to transform. If you have a digital image and you have Photoshop and Photoshop skills, you can take that into Photoshop and erase some of those areas that you want to transform. I decided to show you how to do it when you don't do either one of those because you can. It's just a matter of thinking creatively and finding a gel pen or paint that's going to work for white paint because when you're talking about winter cards, if you put fur on any outfit, it's going to immediately transform it into something that looks wintry. It just is. That's the way life goes. And yes, I'm using my dark blue violets again for skin tones. It's going to look really dark right now but when it's done, I challenge you to look at it and tell me that it's the wrong colors, that she's too dark skinned. She's still going to be very pale when it's all said and done. All right, let's get to the jacket. So fortunately, as I said, she's wearing a sweat jacket so all I have to do is add the fur. If you have something with short sleeves, you're going to have to figure out how to cover that. Maybe make it a dark jacket so you don't see the sleeve lines and then you can put fur around the wrists of them. But I'm not coloring really necessarily around the areas. I'm going to put the fur. But I realized what I wanted to do was to create something underneath that's going to hide the fact that there are lines there when I go to put the white in because a lot of times, white's going to show what's underneath. If you've used gel pens at all, which is what I use when I do white stuff, it sometimes will show through. And it'll pick up color that's underneath. So I thought, let me just put some gray down there. And that's going to help to at least have some kind of unified thing rather than just that black line being the only part that shows up through it. I am going to do something at the end that's going to make this more white. But I wanted to see how white it remains by the time I get to the end and how much more work it needs. But I'm really just scribbling right over top of the area that I made in the gray. I just made fur, just lots of little furry edges to it. Make the inside, the interior part of it, more dense, excuse me, and the outside more linear with those scribbly lines and you'll be good to go. Here I'm going around her elbow so that pulls her elbow in front of the fur on the bottom of the jacket. Really simple way to transform any kind of an outfit. If you don't have a hood on it, you can add a hood to most outfits. If you can see the area where a hood would be. You could also put a scarf on, a fuzzy scarf onto a character and be able to transform it that way by putting some other elements of fuzziness. If you can put any kind of a hat on or a hair band, that's another option for giving a character some sort of winterized outfit. Now this girl is wearing a mini skirt and sandals. So we're going to have a little bit of a challenge trying to figure out what to do here. So I'm going to give her really tall black boots. And I'm going to use the buckles that are already there. Just color over the whole thing and making it black is one of those other ways that you can transform an outfit that didn't quite work.  And that's what I'm basically doing here with the boots. So I'm using a dark gray and then a really, really dark gray or you can use a black for the shadow areas. I'm putting some fur around the top of the boots and then I'm going to add some highlights onto the boots. So again, it's easier to add things to a stamp to make it wintery than it is to take a wintery stamp and put a bikini on it. I suppose you could put a bikini over top of the jacket. I'm not really sure that that would work on a beachy card. But nonetheless, at least we can transform stamps this way. I decided she was going to be wearing skinny jeans instead of having her poor legs bared because that just seemed like it would be a little bit too much in the cold winter for her to have nothing at all on her legs. I was considering doing some kind of striped red and white stockings. But I didn't want her to look as though she was some sort of an elf either. Once I finished the background, yes, I did do the background without you. Sorry about that. I did do another layer on top of the white. So that allowed it to get a little bit brighter because the first layer had dried. You know how the color picks up from underneath that dries and then you can go over top of that again. So if you're going over top of red sometimes try a second layer and see if that works. There are a thousand different ways to do snow. I love doing big chunky snow because one, it goes faster. But two, it just looks more magical to me in some ways. Notice I did leave some glow around her phone. If you ever have a phone, that's a really great way to draw attention to it. I decided at the last minute to add some snow here at the bottom so that there would be an anchor for the bottom of the picture. And I suddenly realized that blue was not going to work. There's nothing else blue in the picture. How could I pull them back in? Well, I switched over to a B6-0 that has a little purplish tint. And then I added some pinks into the blue as well. So that I would end up getting purple in there that kind of goes with the background a little bit better. For the finished card, I trimmed down my panel so that it would be a little smaller than my card base and popped it on some dimensionals and I left some space that I can put a sentiment when I decide what it's gonna be for. Is this gonna be a Christmas card? A winter card, a hello card or whatever? And I challenge you to go do this. Go take a stamp that's not a winter stamp and turn it into one and tag me on social media. I would love to see how you approach a project like this. Talk to you guys later, bye-bye.


All right. Mike works. Hello, everyone, and welcome. Thanks for joining in on this session on the STO Maintain a Track session, where we're going to discuss the future of STO, whether it's sidecar, sidecarless, or both. It's been an exciting week so far for us. Those who are in the STO community to see so much enthusiasm for everyone, talking about STO, discussing where it's heading, and more importantly, seeing the amazing adoption we have in the community. I know it's late. It's 4.30, and probably this is the last session of the day, so all of you will be going out for drinks. And Lynn just told me this is the most comfortable chair in the conference hall. So it's fine. If you want to fall asleep, at least you're falling asleep on the comfortable chairs, all right? So just two quick questions, if I can know by show of hands. How many of you are using STO in production? Oh my God, that's a lot of people. All right, we should have taken a picture. All right, sorry. I have to repeat the first question again. How many of you are using STO in production? Awesome, fantastic. Second question, which I won't repeat again, maybe. How many of you are STO contributors? Hold on, don't raise your hands. By contributions, I mean a Slack message, a GitHub comment, a Discuss comment, a GitHub PR. I know you are. All right, how many? Raise your hands. All right, awesome. For the rest, we'll try to get you into the community after today, okay? All right, so let's get started. First off, I am Neeraj Poddar. I'm head of engineering from Solo. I've been a long time leader in the STO community. I'm an STO technical oversight committee member. I'm a former STO steering member. You can find me on LinkedIn and you can find me on Twitter. So please reach out, happy to chat about anything and everything related to STO service meshes, cloud native community. So today what we are gonna do is look at the adoption of service meshes, focus in on STO. I was amazed to see so many STO production users here. Then we are gonna look at some of the roadmap that we have laid out for 2023. We had a session earlier which talked about it. Then we are gonna try to answer the question which is the title of this session, which is whether the future of STO is Sidecar, Sidecarless or both. And then we also gonna look at the growth of the STO community in general, how many contributions have happened over the last year, so on and so forth. I'm very excited to have you all here. So with that, let's get started. All right, so these are the only two slides you will see which are marketing slides taken from the CNCF survey, right? So this is the survey done last year in May, I think, 2022, which tells what are the growth areas in Kubernetes, what are the technologies which are constantly growing, people want to adopt, and people want to put in production. As you can see, service mesh has been growing year over year, 33%, right? And it's truly remarkable to see just from the people here that how many of you are using STO in production. Another graphics from the same survey is how much is the actual production usage? And this verbiage in the top is actually taken from that blog, which was surprising to me where it says technology adoption is much greater than previously thought. You hope so, right? That's why we're making a technology. So if you see in this graphics, it clearly says that in 2022, we have 47% of the users who are currently saying that they have service mesh in some form factor in their production environments, right? And this is critical. The service mesh technology was built to make sure we can give decoupling to developers and operators. It's an infrastructure layer to solve communication between microservices, allowing both developers and operators to be successful at their jobs. Developers can add business logic to the applications. Operations team can provide security, resiliency, visibility into the traffic that goes between microservices. So really great to see that the technology itself is getting so much adoption. And with that, if you look at STO, STO is by far the most adopted service mesh platform, right? The number of production users you have, the thriving community we have, and it's all thanks to the amazing maintainers, contributors who are day in and day out working with us to make sure that STO is the best product service mesh platform out there. So these are just some of the numbers. So if you look at the community right now, we have 412 active members and this number keeps on growing. We have 59 maintainers. And this list actually is a lot longer. We just sometimes have to prune the list and it sometimes shrinks, but there's a good core of maintainers who are making sure that STO community is healthy. The project has good standards for code, for security. We have 13 working group leads. These leads are functional experts in various domains, making sure we are technically going in the right direction. The TOC members, along with me, we have three other TOC members sitting over here, Mitch, Eric, Lynn. If I say something wrong, they're gonna come and correct me. But these are from four different organizations, right? So we have a lot of diversity in the TOC community. If you look at the steering committee, we have members from eight organizations, right? So when people look at what makes a thriving community, for me, it is not just how many contributions are there from lots of different people, but also a lot of contributions from different organizations. Because we want the diversity to keep the community growing and be as neutral as possible. And then this is the stat that I got from the CNCF site again. If you look at just last year, it says 410 contributing companies. And again, contributions here mean anything and everything with Istio, a PR comment or a GitHub issue open. So lots of participation, lots of adoption across the board. And this is just a quick, quick snapshot, again, taken from the Istio docs. If you go there, you can find a massive list of Istio users, right? This is not the entire list. This is just the smallest screenshot I could take. So if you are an Istio user in production, I will highly recommend submit a PR to Istio IO doc where you can add your company logo. You get some visibility. We get more information on how Istio is being used. It helps us improve the Istio project. All right. Oh, this also happened last year, right? I think I have had so many conversations over the year where people have asked me, why is Istio not in CNCF? One of the best thing this has done is nobody asks me anymore. Istio is now part of CNCF. Even though Istio project and the Istio community was always neutral, the Istio project was very well adopted, lots of diversity like we showed. Putting it in CNCF, just make sure in future it continues to remain so. We are all very excited as part of CNCF, right? So we are really glad this happened. We are gonna go through the maturity, graduation phases, whatever it is, even though we have lots of Istio production users already, and we'll make sure we become a graduation project whenever all the various qualifications are met. All right, let's see, right? 10 minutes then. All right, so this is taken from the roadmap session that Lynn and Louie did, I think it was two days ago. So when we set out for any planning in Istio, we can't come up with a concrete roadmap, right? We have contributions from various companies, some independent people working on Istio. We can't really tell them to specifically work on this or don't work on that. So what we try to do is come up with themes so that we can align the various efforts as organically as we can to make sure we're all heading in the same direction, right? And over the years, the themes for the Istio project have gone in only one direction, which is to make Istio boring and predictable, right? I think many of you must have used Istio in early days where it was unpredictable and exciting. I don't think we want our infrastructure to be that, right? How many of yous Istio before 1.0?  All right, so that's why we put some concerted effort towards making it boring, making it predictable, making it more stable so that all the burden of managing and maintaining Istio is as less as possible. So themes for this year were, can we accelerate the time to value the service mesh? Can we make the value that customers and users get out of service mesh and Istio, which is, can most of the users want MTLS? Can we make the transition from zero security to MTLS as easy as possible? Can we make that adoption seamless? The total cost of ownership. Typically, Istio has been tagged with having a lot of higher cost of ownership. We want to make sure it's significantly reduced and the value that organizations realize from Istio is very high. And again, some of these technologies are evolving as we are learning from your users, right? You're giving us feedback and we're improving the community. And the open community growth, this is fantastic to see so many users here and the community is just fantastic. It continues to grow with us being in CNC. If I don't think there's anything stopping us. And then the last being continue to be boring and predictable. So with these themes, what we do is we identify certain focus areas on which we try to concentrate most of the effort of the maintainers in the community. So a big drive for us in 2023 is to get ambient mesh to production. I'm gonna go over the basics of the ambient mesh architecture. I think you all have heard a lot about ambient mesh throughout the week and before, but it's good to understand again the fundamentals and then answer the question, what's the future of Istio? Whether it's Sidecar, Sidecarless or both, right? So the gateway API in Kubernetes is maturing. We want to make sure we continue to participate and be the leader in that API in those conversations. The gamma API is another initiative to make sure the gateway API conforms well to the mesh architecture in the mesh needs. Many of us from the community are involved in that effort. And again, we want to continue the stability in future promotions. There's a long laundry list of features and APIs that are currently in alpha or beta state and want to continue to promote it. And then the last thing is really important for a thriving open source community which is how can we integrate natively with other cloud native projects? How can we integrate with other standards? We want to be a good citizen in this community and play well with projects like Spire. We saw some native integration last year with Spire. We want to integrate open telemetry. We are already working with Prometheus, Yeager. So what I would recommend is, please go and look at the session recording that Lynn and Louie did if you didn't attend the roadmap session. It has details on each of these topics which I can't go over in a half an hour I have. But if you can't look at the recording, please look at the slides because it will tell you what we are planning to do in 2023. All right. So let me lay out the groundwork of why Istio went from sidecar proxies to the ambient architecture. And again, this is based on the learnings from our users and customers. Many of us, whether in the open source capacity or in our own organizations, have been working constantly with customers, getting feedback of what are the challenges of adopting Istio, right? So three areas that we often see customers struggle with the Istio sidecar proxy architecture. So one is operational complexity. So in Istio, the sidecar proxy is added as another container in the same pod in which your application is running. And we create IP table rules to make sure the traffic is intercepted and sent from the application to the sidecar container, right? So the operational complexity involved with this approach is to add the sidecar proxy, you have to restart your container. You have to restart your pod. So the application onboarding here itself sometimes presents a challenge for the operator who wants to make the Istio service mesh as transparent as possible, right? I mean, you have to go to your applications team and ask them, can I restart my application? You don't know, maybe they're saying they do stateless things, but how many of you are doing stateful things in the back, right? So none of the operations team want to do that. When you have to upgrade your proxy, you have to again go and restart. If you have 20,000 pods, you restart 20,000 pods. That's a lot of pods to restart an orchestrate. So that created an operational complexity for our adopters, right? And you want to make sure the proxy is as transparent and application should not be aware of it, right? The second thing is the overhead that adding proxies in the sidecar containers, a sidecar containers, how much is the overhead in terms of resource utilization? So the way Istio by default is configured. If you have a large cluster, we are going to discover everything and configure the sidecar proxy so that it can reach to each and every service in your cluster. Now you can add sidecar scoping resources to make sure the onboard proxies are as efficiently configured as possible, but many times many organizations are not doing it and it's difficult for them to do it. And what ends up happening is the memory consumption and the footprint of that proxy is pretty high. When you add it on every side, when you add it on every pod as a sidecar, that can grow exponentially. In fact, just today, I was chatting with a customer and he was like 40% of our resource utilization right now is onboard proxies, right? So we wanted to think about this problem. We want to give the same benefits that we are providing to our users. How can we do it in a much more resource-efficient way? And the third is as the packets are traversing through this multiple proxies here, all of them which are doing layer seven parsing by default, we have seen that the latency that is added by the proxy can build a little bit more. We also wanted to optimize that piece and see how can we reduce the latency by coming up with some better architectural additions and architectural patterns here. So these are the problems we're trying to solve. And if you look at the history of Istio, it's not very uncommon for us to change things, right? So we started off with telemetry architecture. How many of you have used Mixer? All right. We started, that was the telemetry V1 architecture where we are sending attributes to a centralized service called Mixer, which was used for decision-making, for policies, and also transforming it for metric generation, right? The architecture itself was pretty good, but many customers and users were giving us the feedback that the operational aspect of it was not as efficient as it could be. We also went from a microservices-based control chain where we had galley, I think there was a citadel. I can't even remember now, it has been so long. And all of these components, which all did very little things, scoped things from a security point of view, it made a lot of sense, but again added a lot of operational complexity to our users. So now we combine all of them and call IstioD. So the point I'm trying to make is a good thriving community is always looking for ways to improve our experience for the users, listen, and change things as it needed. So in my opinion, ambient architecture, the sidecarless architecture, is this next step in the journey of evolving Istio. So last year around, I think middle last year, we announced Ambient Mesh. So Istio Ambient Mesh is a new architectural pattern in Istio where you can get the same benefits that Istio provided, but in a sidecarless data plane. And the aims were basically to solve the three problems that are listed before. So you want to simplify operations, you want to make sure the cost and the TCO for running Istio service mesh is less. And then if we can get some performance benefits, we should be able to pass that all along to our customers also. So you can read this blog where it was announced, it goes into details of these motivations. But here what I'm gonna cover is what is this architectural shift, what does Ambient Mesh mean for you and how it is providing these benefits. So there are two key components of Ambient Mesh architecture. So first is called Zeternal. This is a per node proxy. This proxy is added on every node as a demon said, instead of a proxy added as the sidecar proxy container. This proxy is a very small proxy built to do only one thing. And it's job is to do layer four transport. It is not going to do layer seven parsing. So you have a reduced surface attack vector here. And then the next thing it does is encrypts the packets that comes from any port within the node when it is going out of the node. The Zeternal on the other node will decrypt it and send it along to the pods on that node, right? The same thing happens the other way. So in this architecture also, the pods that are leaving the node on which the traffic that is leaving the node on which your pods are running, it's never unencrypted. They're always encrypted. Another important distinction to think about is what is the certificate? What are the certificates used by Zeternal when it is encrypting the traffic, right? You don't want a generic certificate because you want to do policy enforcement on these identities that you have created. So for that, we are still using the pod spiffy identities. So when the traffic from app A talks, when app A talks to app B, the mutual TLS certificate that will be used by the Zeternals will have the spiffy ID of A and B. It won't be a generic Zeternal spiffy ID. So that's something that's very important for everyone of you to understand how encryption works. The second part of this is waypoint proxies. So if you're doing layer seven policy enforcement, you want to do layer seven traffic routing or you have to open the packets for whatever else you want from the service mesh, that is done in the waypoint proxies. These waypoint proxies can be created anywhere in your infrastructure. It can be on the same node in your application is running. It can be outside. It doesn't matter. These are tied to the service accounts for each application. And you can scale them depending on how your consumption pattern is for that application. And these can be on demand. You don't have to provision them if you are not using layer seven primitives. So this is a very, very flexible architecture. And now if you think about it, how did we get the three benefits that I wanted to say? So first is operational simplification. So Zeternals are running on your node. They are not running as sidecars. So you don't have to restart to inject. As part of the operations team, as part of the infrastructure team, I can just add the Zeternal in the node and the application is not even aware of it. We still use IP tables for traffic interception between the pods on that node and send the traffic to the Zeternal. But the CNI, which is responsible for configuring those IP tables, is no longer working in the pod networking namespace. It's actually working in the node namespace, node networking namespace. And that's very significant because that allows you to add these rules before the fact, right? When the sidecar and the application were coupled together, the CNI itself can only add rules to send the traffic and the sidecar proxy has to run. So it used to create coupling between those two things. That's no longer needed. So it's a big operational simplification to make sure these sidecar proxies are no longer needed. And you have Zeternals doing mutual TLS. Secondly, the Zeternal proxy itself is in Rust. It's very lightweight. So in the initial testing we have done, we are seeing a significant reduction in memory consumption compared to the sidecar proxies. Yeah, so that's gonna lead to your cost reduction in terms of performance. Another interesting thing what we are seeing is instead of having two layer seven parsing done in two on-way proxies, a sidecar, when you are doing L4 transports, which are very optimized, I'm gonna talk about how the L4 transports are gonna configure here and one layer seven proxy with a waypoint, you're still gonna get performance benefits. It might be counterintuitive because there are three proxies instead of two, but it depends on how much work each proxy is doing. So that's some testing we are still doing in the community and we'll publish results as we know more, but the initial results show promise. So very quickly again, if app A is talking to app B and you don't have any layer seven requirements, it will just go through Z-tunnel. H-bone is the HTTP based overlay network encapsulation. This is an H2 tunnel that we create to make sure we can encrypt and every packet that goes over two nodes is always encrypted using mutual TLS. It's not a new fancy protocol that we have created. It's still just using H2 tunneling, but we like to make name names, right? So we create a new name for it, H-bone. And then if you are going through the waypoint proxy, so for example here, app A talking to app B, you might have some layer seven authorization policies written here, then the Z-tunnel will talk to the waypoint still through the H-bone encapsulation. So the basic paradigm that you all have to remember is any time a traffic leaves the pod or if it has to reach to a pod, it has to go through Z-tunnel, right? So many times people are getting confused when is Z-tunnel used, when it's not. In Istio Ambient, for every traffic leg going in and out of the pod, it has to go through Z-tunnel, all right? So one important thing that I wanna cover is, a lot of you folks are asking is, is Istio Ambient Mesh Secure, right? So there was an excellent talk done by, I think John and Christian yesterday in which they covered various aspects of Ambient Mesh Security, right? And when we are doing security analysis for Ambient Mesh, we have to cover various aspects. When you're looking at threat modeling, what happens if the application is vulnerable? So if the application can bypass the sidecar proxy, it actually can bypass all your policies. But if you look at the Ambient because the enforcements are happening at the node level, if your application is compromised, it's still hard for it to break out and bypass the proxy. So you actually get a security benefit out of it. There are various other modeling that we have done and believe me, we won't be recommending the Istio Ambient architecture wasn't as secure. Again, it's very less time to go over all the aspects of it. I'll highly recommend to look at Christians and John's session here. It goes into the nuances of why Ambient is as secure as sidecar. And the last thing is what we all want to understand, right? Where is Istio heading? What's the future? Can sidecar and Ambient coexist? Well, the answer is yes. And actually there is a requirement for both to coexist. So waypoint proxies are currently added only on the server side. So if you have client side L7 requirements, so if you want to do some client side rate limiting, for example, or client side L7 persistence, you will currently need to have sidecars on them. So this is not a functional gap as per se. This is an architectural decision we made. In terms of requirements and use cases that users have from a service mesh and especially like Istio, mutual TLS is by far the most important thing that people get out of it, right? So that's why many of you will be running Z tunnels and get mutual TLS. And if you need, you can have L4 access policy enforcement, authorization policy enforcement through it. Then next comes, if you want layer seven authorization policies and some chart enforcement for your services, that can be achieved through waypoint proxies because these are enforced on the server side. But if you have more requirements for client side layer seven policy, that's where you still need sidecars. And the architecture was built to make sure both can coexist. It also provides you a migration path, right? You don't have to have everything moved over at once. And we have done fair amount of testing and migrated people off. So this is a very good architecture for you to have. You can have some on sidecar, some on sidecar less. You can decide depending on your use cases how you want to run. And the key here is you are still getting the operational flexibility. It depends on your use case. You get the performance benefit and you get the cost flexibility. All right, I think I'm on time, more or less. All right, so last thing I'm gonna say is how can you get involved with the community? How can you help us make it better? Please join Istio Slack. Lots of conversations are happening if you just need help with your production environment or you help stuck in your Istio configuration. You can always reach out for help. There are various conferences and webinars that we are doing on Istio. So please attend those events. You can report bugs, security vulnerabilities, and obviously, if you are a code contributor, you're welcome. We love people who file bugs, then fix them. And then please participate in the working groups and TOC meetings. I think the TOC cadence is now once a month. So there's a lot of technical decisions and the project directions being shared there. So please attend them. And lastly, what I would say is any good session nowadays should end with some chat GPT on it, right? Otherwise, it's not a good session. So any guesses what I did? It's not as exciting as you all think. So I went to chat GPT and said, create me a poem on service mesh. And it actually did a pretty damn good job. Remember, chat GPT is still serialed by data from 2021, I think. So it might not have all the new shiny nuggets, but it's pretty accurate. I can't wrap, so I won't try it. Thanks, everyone. And I'm happy to stay here. If you have any questions, please reach out. We have more TOC members, Lynn, Mitch, Eric, you wanna come up, we can answer questions together. Thank you. And amazing to see you all here. Please give feedback.


Welcome, everyone. This is the Magnum 101 introduction to Magnum. My name is Adrian Otto, and I am the project team lead for the Magnum project. So Magnum is an OpenStack service that allows you to create container clusters. It lets you use the same credentials you would use to interact with your OpenStack cloud in order to create those clusters and to manage them.  It has a full multi-tenancy solution that works all the way from the control plane all the way down into the data plane. And it allows you to create those clusters quickly and easily using advanced features such as multi-master. So if any of you have ever created a container orchestration cluster on your own, maybe you set up Kubernetes, getting all of the security configuration right, getting the multi-master configuration right, can be very difficult. And so using a tool like Magnum to simplify that can make your life a lot easier. Now before I get too far into it, I need to define a couple of terms that I'm going to use during this talk. The first is COE. A COE is a container orchestration engine. Magnum supports a variety of these today, including Docker Swarm, Kubernetes, Apache MISOS, and DCOS. The next thing I'm going to talk about is a Magnum cluster. So a cluster is an API resource represented in Magnum that represents a grouping of NOVA instances and other cloud services that are used in order to deploy the COE. So you can think of this as this is the cloud assembly that runs your COE. So the basis of this is a NOVA instance. There are a lot of other resources that are not pictured here. But the COE would be like your Kubernetes cluster. The Magnum cluster would be all of the resources that are necessary in order to run that. The cluster itself can be scaled. It can be created and destroyed. But container clusters or Magnum clusters don't actually run containers. The thing that runs containers is the COE. You with me so far? All right. Next piece of terminology is cluster template. So within Magnum, there's another cloud resource called a cluster template. And you can think of this like a rubber stamp for creating Magnum clusters. And this has all of the settings in it that you need in order to create that cluster. Like it's DNS settings, what network it's gonna be connected to, what key pairs it should use, everything that you would set up at runtime would be either specified at the time that you create the cluster or built into the cluster template itself. So cluster templates are just a way for operators to make it really easy for end users to make Magnum clusters. And then the last piece of terminology is native client. Now when I say native client, what I mean is the tool that is native to the COE. So when I say native client, I'm not talking about an open stack tool. I'm talking about whatever the upstream open source container management tool is. So if you are creating Magnum clusters that are Kubernetes clusters, then your native client is kubectl or kubectl. If you are deploying Docker swarm clusters, then your native client is Docker. So you get the idea. Magnum is designed so that end users interact with the native client rather than with open stack tools. So you can have open stack users, Magnum consumers that are open stack users, and you can also have another set of users who knew nothing about your open stack cloud at all and just interact directly with the container orchestration environment. Now when I talk about Magnum and I get questions, people ask what is the difference between running open stack with Magnum with Kubernetes on top or open stack with Magnum and swarm on top or any of these other COEs versus me just setting up a bunch of instances and putting the tool on myself. And there are a number of differences. So I'm gonna go into four of them right now. The first is multi-tenant, which is what I mentioned earlier. Multi-tenancy means you run workloads that belong to potentially hostile neighbors. So customer one, customer two are not related in any way. They're sharing some resource. You wanna be sure that there's a security isolation barrier between these things, okay? With a properly designed multi-tenant system, there are high degrees of isolation between them. If you just took a bunch of cloud resources and put a container orchestration system on top and started running containers in it, you would end up with hostile workloads neighboring with nothing between them besides the definition of the container namespaces. Unless you are using a lot of additional security features, that can be risky. So what Magnum does is it groups these clusters using NOVA resources such that each cluster is only for one tenant at a time. So it's a way to achieve multi-tenancy with clusters that are really fast and easy to create in a way that does not share the same host kernel between neighboring tenants, which makes it fundamentally more secure than trying to do a massively multi-tenant single installation of a COE. The next is Magnum is giving you the choice of what COE to run. So when we conceived of running Magnum, the first driver that we built, the first implementation was Docker. And at the time it seemed that Docker was ruling the world and that there would never be any other choice, but times changed. And now Kubernetes is the new hotness. Now, wouldn't it be nice if you didn't have to retool your entire cloud environment every single time you made a change in terms of what was your favorite in-style COE? So if Kubernetes is the winner from now on, great, nothing lost. But if it changes, and down the road there's another one, and you'd like to have a driver for that, this system gives you a place to plug that in. You might also choose a different COE depending on what kind of workload you're running. So if you're running a cloud native workload, it would make sense to run that in Kubernetes. If you're running maybe a workload that's just forklifting a legacy application, it might make sense to run it in Kubernetes, but you might not be getting a lot of additional value. And maybe you just want a simpler system, right? So maybe it makes more sense to run that in a Docker environment than it does to run it in a Kubernetes environment. And if that's what you believe, then great. You have the choice. You can run Docker clusters and Kubernetes clusters side by side on the same infrastructure, all managed with the same tools. The third differentiator is you can choose what kind of servers Nova gives you by changing your vert driver. And Magnum doesn't care. It will let you deploy clusters that are composed of bare metal servers or clusters that are composed of virtual machines or if your cloud is configured for this, clusters made of containers. So containers within containers. Magnum is fundamentally designed to support this. Now I will say that it supports the VMs first because that's the default that most people are running a KVM vert driver in their open stack clouds and it works well with that. It may not work as well with the other server types but it's designed to accommodate it. And then the fourth differentiator is that it's integrated with open stack. So if you've already got an open stack cloud and you've got users that have keystone credentials that they're using to interact with that cloud, they use those same exact credentials in order to create Magnum clusters. They don't need something new. So why Magnum at all? So the first is it gives you the choice. You can decide what container orchestration tool works best for you. Second, it allows you to create those clusters with a degree of speed and simplicity that is unmatched. And third, it will allow your developers to iterate on your software, the things that add value to your business more quickly and more easily than trying to do this by hand. When learning about Magnum for the first time, a lot of people think, what's really the difference between just running Kubernetes on top of the cloud and running Magnum? And I want to make the point that your container orchestration environment is about managing your application cluster and Magnum is about managing your infrastructure cluster which are two distinctly different things. You need an infrastructure in order to run your application cluster. You want to be able to manage it. It's lifecycle, it's scale, right? You want to be able to create new ones that are of newer versions of it. You want to be able to do that easily. There is a small overlap if you saw the previous session or two sessions describing the interaction between, for example, Kubernetes through its cloud provider interface to OpenStack. Okay, so there is some interaction that occurs between those systems. But that overlap is relatively narrow. Kubernetes is focusing mainly on the application, deploying it and managing it, and Magnum is focusing entirely on the infrastructure and managing that. So it's an enabler. So next I'm going to give you an idea of what the different kinds of consumers experience when they use Magnum. So the first is for a cloud operator, for those of you that are owners of clouds, you're going to be able to create something called a cluster template which I mentioned before. And this is what a create command would look like for a cluster template. This one says it's based on the Fedora Atomic image. It specifies a key pair, what network to use, what the DNS settings are, how big the servers should be based on their flavor, how much storage should be attached to them, what networking driver they should use, which container orchestration engine is running inside of it, and what volume driver to use. And this one also has a public flag which means after I create this template, it won't only be visible to me, it will be available to everyone. So my users will all see this when they list templates. So if I switch over to using Magnum from the users perspective, the cloud end users perspective, they use this command called cluster create. So cluster create takes an argument of a name, this one's named K8S. It uses the template called Kubernetes. It's gonna make an eight node cluster with three masters. So a total of 11 nodes. Once I create that cluster, I can run a command to automatically take the TLS configuration that was created at the time the Magnum cluster was created and copy that into the local environment so that I can use the native client without fooling around. So I don't do any security configuration. I don't share any security credentials from one cluster to the next, right? Every single one is unique. Everyone's got its own CA and certificates are signed against that CA. So I don't need to worry about a user of one cluster having access to another. And then once I have that environment set up, I can use the native tool directly. So in the case of Kubernetes, I would use kubectl and begin interacting with it. This is gonna create a pod. And alternatively, I'll give you the same experience, but if you were creating a swarm cluster, for example, again, you provide a name, you indicate what template to use, and the size of how many nodes and how many masters. The same thing again with using cluster config to pull in the TLS certificates and necessary to interact with the cluster, and then you can use the native client directly against it. So this is gonna run a Docker container within the swarm. New in the last release. So in the last release, we added encryption to the XCD cluster. So now by default, all interaction between the XCD clusters and the COE are encrypted using these credentials that I'm talking about. There's also a new parameter in the cluster create that lets you specify what key pair to use. We also built in OS profile or support so you can do request tracing. There's a new endpoint for quotas. Before, so when you create, when you use Magnum to interact with your cloud, right? It's going to respect all of the existing quotas for things like neutron networks and volumes and Nova instances.  All of those quotas still apply. The ones that are in the context of your current operating tenant. But there wasn't an instrument to say, look, I wanna limit the number of Magnum clusters that you can create or how big they can be or these sort of things, okay? So now there's an API endpoint for defining quotas that are unique to Magnum. So above and beyond all of the quotas that apply to all of your constituent cloud resources, we now have the ability to do quotas based on the Magnum resources as well. There's also a new stats endpoint that gives you statistics about the usage of your Magnum service. We now support rotation of the certificate authority. And this is important because if you have a cluster that's in production and you've shared these TLS credentials, right? With an actor and that actor for whatever reason is no longer employed with you. You wanna have the ability to make sure that those credentials that may still be in his or her possession are no longer valid to interact with the cluster, okay? So if we rotate the CA, it invalidates any existing certificates and then they just run cluster config. Any surviving users would do cluster config again to refresh their environment and continue accessing the system. And then we also updated the version of Swarm and Swarm Driver. In addition, in the last release, we also added, or the community I should say, added two new cluster drivers. One is a Kubernetes driver that runs on Susie Linux and the other is a DCOS driver. And both of these are newly contributed so they'll exist in our contrib directory. And if we see a lot of adoption of these, drivers will pull them into the main tree as well. So if you care about these, we wanna hear about it. Next, we're gonna be focusing on extensions to the Magnum API that allow it to do more complicated clusters. So we have this concept of a node group. Today, when you create a Magnum cluster, it's all just one, it's actually two groups. It's a group of masters and a group of slaves or nodes. With node groups, you can create an arbitrary number of these. So you can do things like have a group that's in one region and a group that's in another. Or a group that's in one availability zone and a group that's in another availability zone. So as you create clusters, they can be more diverse geographically and more highly available. It also allows you to do things like defining different groups for different types of hardware. So say you've got an application that requires a GPU resource. You might wanna have that defined as a separate node group. So you can treat it differently in the way that you tag it in your COE. We're also working on additional security features that make it safer to do things like having your COE interact directly with your infrastructure. I'll give you an example of this. So today, there's a Kubernetes extension, or what do we call these, Tom? Module, plugin. Okay, Kubernetes plugin that allows you to create volumes in Cinder. Which requires that there's a credential, an open stack trust, a Keystone trust that exists on the cluster node in order to be able to create those volumes. Now that credential might be abused and used for other things besides creating and destroying clusters through Kubernetes. Maybe it's used to destroy volumes that had nothing to do with Kubernetes. That would be an escalation of privileges that would be undesirable. But it is possible to configure an arrangement of services where this is controlled through a policy where this would not be allowed. So this is an area that we're working on today to try to make that even more secure. And if you'd like to get involved with the development of the project, we are in the open stack containers channel in FreeNode and we meet on Tuesdays, I think alternating Tuesdays at 1600 UTC in the open stack meeting channel. So if you have questions, the microphones are here in the aisles. I'll take them now. You mentioned security. And I was wondering since security is involved in pretty much defining what you want the system to do, who you want to let in and what you want it to never do. How do you validate that you've properly configured your security with your frameworks here? I don't think we have features that are designed to do that yet. So we would be open to hearing your ideas on how best to do it. Oh, thank you. A question on how Magnum keeps up with underlying changes to the COEs. So when, you know, new versions of Kubernetes and Swarm and things like that, they change something. Do you guys have to constantly keep up with those changes? If it's something that changes the driver, the way that the driver interacts with the COE, then yes, we would need to make a change in order to support that. If it's something that does not change the interaction between the driver and the COE, then all you need to do is build a new image. So I mentioned the concept of cluster templates. One of the things that is in the cluster template is an indication of what glance ID to use to build the cluster nodes. So you can update that glance image with a new version of the COE without changing Magnum at all. So most changes wouldn't require changing Magnum. The ones that do would require a bump of the driver. And like I said before, the driver is not only is it versioned, but it's pluggable and it's Python code. So it's relatively easy to change. About the network connectivity issue, when we provide the virtual machine and the container that's just like K-Bytes to Magnum, so how could we make the network connectivity between virtual machine and the container for maintenance? So let me see if I understand the question properly. You're asking about how do we support having your containers interact with existing machines that are VMs that are on the same cloud? Okay, so the idea for how this should be supported, and I don't think we actually allow this today except going through the public interface, but the way this is supposed to work by design is that you specify the ID of the neutron network at the time of cluster creation. So if you have cloud resources that are already on a neutron network and you create a Magnum cluster, you can specify that ID and it will then create all of the Magnum resources on that same network, and that would allow for the communication that you're talking about. If we do on K-Bytes on top of Open State without Magnum, then we could not make the virtual machine and the container for which we are, right? It's hard to do that securely, I'll say that. Yeah. Does Magnum do life cycle management of the cluster that it creates? So suppose a node fails in that cluster that I created. What does Magnum do? That depends. What we would like to do is to have the monitoring solution automatically detect that it's a failed node and replace it. Today what it requires is that the operator can do a delete of that one node and then grow the cluster by one. So you can do that. In terms of life cycle management, though, there's a feature that's in development right now for doing an in-place upgrade of the COE.  We're working on that right now, so that would do a rolling up grade of the COE in place. So in terms of handling node failures, your COE has some capability already to, like in your, for example, Kubernetes has this cluster rebalancing capability that it can already do. Magnum doesn't need to be involved in that. It's only if you wanted to take the failed node out of the Magnum cluster and rebuild it. There's a command to do that. Magnum will add the new node back to the, I mean it will also configure the Kubernetes to add that node to the cluster. Yeah, I didn't show an example of scaling, but for example, that would be the same thing as scaling a cluster. So you would say, okay, I'm gonna take this eight node and I'm gonna make it a 10 node. Magnum would automatically grow that heat stack by two additional nodes and it would configure them in the same way that it did the original set. So yes, you can adjust the size of the cluster up or down for both masters and slaves. Is there any additional features to do multi-tenancy other than your spawning your COE in your own open stack tenant? Do you guys do anything in Magnum to give extra kind of isolation? Great question. No, we don't, that's out of scope. But when we talk about isolation and multi-tenancy, that's how we're doing it because of the open stack kind of project or tenant architecture. Yeah, when you create a Magnum cluster, in turn it creates a heat stack. And that heat stack is a grouping of cloud resources that are owned by your same tenant. So for an individual tenant, although you can put a lot of applications into the same cluster, when another actor creates a cluster of his own, it's not gonna share any hosts with yours. That's the guarantee you're getting. All right, looks like no more questions. Thank you everyone for attending.


Marines and guests gathered to raise money and awareness for the injured Marine Semper Five Bund at the Broken Yule Cafe, Oceanside, California, April 13th. San Diego Radio Station 105.3 FM challenged approximately 15 Marines to go up against radio show host Mike Costa in the 12-Egg Ironman Challenge. It looks so much smaller on TV. We got a call from the owner of the Broken Yoke in Oceanside, Randy Corrigan, and he said, hey, I want to give back. I want to honor the military. We're having an egg omelette eating contest. And can you just put the word out there on base? We'd like to invite some of our injured service members to show a little appreciation. I decided to come out to support Semper Five Bund. I pretty much do anything for these guys. Reporting from Camp Pendleton, California, I'm Corporal Jennifer Peronte.