Felly, mae'n ystafell hwyllwch ar gyfer yr iawn cyfweld clyw, gyda'r lle hefyd yn gweithio arlau a cyfweld cyfweld cyfweld cyfweld cyfweld cynhyrchu a'i rhaglenol, sy'n meddwl ify attwch â'r mewn clywau ajw a'r dweud, oes yn wouldiol ar gyfer y cyfweld, yn y clywau dim sy'n ddufdyn nhw'n cael ei ysgrifennu yn gweithio. Rwy'n credu fydd dŷl i gy earnings, for brevity in questions and responses, and I call question number one, Claire Baker. Thank you. To ask the Scottish Government when the nationwide programme of inspection to assess the condition of an impact of climate change on some of Scotland's most significant heritage sites being undertaken by Historic Environment Scotland is expected to be completed. Minister Neil Gray. Thank you, Presiding Officer. The inspection programme continues to progress well. Tactile inspections have been carried out at 30 sites across Scotland since last May. Historic Environment Scotland has been able to reopen a number of sites in Claire Baker's region, including Dooncastle, Burleighcastle and Inchcomammie. There is full or partial access to over 80 per cent of the properties and care, and Historic Environment Scotland continues to assess the potential to reopen sites as soon as it is safe to do so, which I will continue to urge them to do as quickly as possible. Claire Baker. Although, of course, the safety of sites is paramount, it is unfortunate that the progress has made me quicker. The inspection programme has now moved on to level 2 sites. That does include Aberdare Castle in my region, which I was pleased to visit recently and met with Hess. In 2019, there were over 24,000 visitors to that castle, so I know that the minister recognises the impact on local businesses, and Aberdare does have much to offer, but part of its attraction is the importance of the castle, particularly for international visitors. I wonder if the Government is making any assessment of what additional support towns and villages such as Aberdare will need during this prolonged period of closure. I can attest to my own family's relationship with Aberdare. My children love Aberdare beach, but the site of Aberdare Castle is partially open. The wall gardens and driveway were made accessible in October last year. The inspection was completed in November, and work is on going to reopen the internal areas, with some restrictions of the date, to be confirmed with that. However, I would be happy to either meet Claire Baker myself or to ensure that Historic Environment Scotland is able to meet Claire Baker as well, because she is absolutely right. The importance of those sites as anchor organisations for local communities is well known. I want to make sure that she is aware of the progress that has been made. Last week, Historic Environment Scotland's chief executive informed a packed meeting organised by the Llanusco civic trust that the Llanusco palace is to partially reopen in May following necessary works. That is very welcome news, but bearing in mind the damage to the north range of the Llanusco palace and, indeed, many other properties still facing significant and continuing damage from the elements, will the minister consider a new and comprehensive ruins management strategy to ensure that our much-loved and valued ruins heritage can be managed into the future? I thank Fiona Hyslop for that question. I am pleased that she was able to have such a successful meeting with her local community and Historic Environment Scotland, which was able to give good news. Like her, I welcome the partial reopening of Llanusco palace coming in May and the work that has been undertaken by Historic Environment Scotland inspecting and repairing other properties and care. The properties and care represent some of Scotland's most iconic and culturally significant assets, including Llanusco palace. We recently consulted more broadly on a refreshed strategy for Scotland's historic environment, which seeks to prioritise activities such as that suggested by Fiona Hyslop that supports economic recovery and renewal. That strategy focuses on creating a more resilient and sustainable historic environment and helps to communicate the contribution that the historic environment makes to our nation. The core conservation cost for properties and care in 2021-22 was £7.7 million. That represents a 14 per cent reduction from 2017-18. The decline in the provision has been a consistent trend over the past five years. Given the impact of closed heritage sites on tourism and the local economy, can the minister tell me what discussions he has had with HES to ensure that funding for conservation and maintenance is maintained, if not increased, to ensure that no more sites close and those that are already reopened as quickly as possible? I thank Sharn Dowd for that question. Obviously, Historic Environment Scotland has its own decisions to make. I obviously meet with them regularly about their strategic priorities as I have already outlined to previous questioners. The Scottish Government has substantially increased resource to Historic Environment Scotland in recognition of the impact not just of the pandemic on HES's commercial income but also of the need to ensure that our properties and care are maintained. Over 2022-23, we will support Historic Environment Scotland with £60.6 million to main Scotland's heritage and historic environment, an 80 per cent increase on pre-pandemic levels of funding. HES is working hard to reopen our heritage sites as soon as it is safe to do so, and we continue to support them in that endeavour. Question 2 is withdrawn. Question 3, Clare Adamson, who joins us remotely. To ask the Scottish Government whether it will provide an update on any engagement that it has had with the UK Government regarding the potential impact in Scotland of the on-going negotiations over the Northern Ireland protocol bill. I welcome the progress announced this week on the Northern Ireland protocol. The Scottish Government consistently called for the UK Government to withdraw its irresponsible Northern Ireland protocol bill and to seek a sustainable negotiated solution to this entirely avoidable and deeply damaging dispute with our European neighbours. However, Scotland is still left with Brexit and all of the damage that comes with it. I urge the UK Government now to seize this opportunity to start the overdue work of repairing relations with our EU partners more widely and rebuilding closer co-operation and partnership across the many areas in which Scotland's interests have been harmed by Brexit. In addition, the UK Government must now clarify the policy on Northern Ireland to GB trade. That will be crucial to understand the impact on devolved responsibilities, including any physical checks on food safety and animal and plant health and any associated infrastructure required such as the border control post at Cairn Ryan. Clare Adamson, I thank the cabinet secretary for his answer, and it all being well, and this goes through, we look forward to a return to horizon funding. However, can it be right that Scotland, which voted overwhelmingly to remain within the EU, has been ignored and is feeling the full force of a hard Brexit, while Mr Sunach shamelessly boasts about the huge economic benefits that access to the EU signal market will bring for Northern Ireland? We have repeatedly called for the UK Government to find a negotiated solution to this entirely avoidable dispute with the European Union. The Scottish Government unequivocally supports the Good Friday agreement, and we welcome the new agreement that has been announced on the Northern Ireland protocol. However, Scotland did not vote for Brexit, and yet we continue to suffer from the consequences, including exacerbating the current cost of living crisis. While Northern Ireland has been given preferential access to the huge European signal market, Scotland, which voted overwhelmingly to remain in the EU, has been ignored by the UK Government and subjected to the full damage of disastrous hard Brexit. The Scottish Government is now carefully considering the deal and what it means for Scotland. Brexit has brought nothing but harm to people, to communities and businesses in Scotland, and the Scottish Government remains committed to realising Scotland's potential as an independent nation within the European Union. For decades, the troubles in Ireland have cost lives, ruined families and destroyed communities. It has required delicate, pragmatic, exhausting engagement and diplomacy by great leaders over many, many years. Forgive me if I get a little bit exasperated by politicians here who seek to exploit the developments in Northern Ireland to advance their own narrow agenda. Will the First Minister and the Minister here think again about drawing parallels between Northern Ireland and our Scotland? I do not think that we have enough time to do the question justice. As we have learned from the developments this week, it would have been perfectly possible to reach an agreement in principle before, but that was impossible given the confrontational approach of the last UK Prime Minister and notwithstanding his claim that he had an oven-ready deal. I think that it behoves all of us to understand that what will now happen with Northern Ireland remaining within the single European market is that Northern Ireland will have a competitive advantage relative to Scotland and to Scottish businesses. That is a statement of fact. I do not know if Willie Rennie disagrees with that. Regardless of where we stand on the question of whether Scotland should be a sovereign member state of the European Union, it is going to become ever more apparent that Northern Ireland is in an exceptionally privileged position, one that the Prime Minister himself described as being so and Scotland being as a disadvantage. I would hope that the Liberal Democrats and the fellow parties, which at one stage supported membership of the European Union but are now supporting Brexit, to think again and to stand up for Scotland's social, economic and political interests, at least for this. The cabinet secretary has already mentioned harm. Does he agree that the renegotiated NIP protocol could have a harmful impact on Scottish businesses that no longer have access to the EU market, as we have said already, while Northern Ireland businesses enjoy those benefits? I have already put on record that it is a good thing that Northern Ireland is able to remain within the single European market. It is something that the Scottish Government has supported, whilst at the same time saying that Scotland voted to remain in the European Union and that it is possible to find an arrangement for part of the United Kingdom to remain within the single European market. Surely it must be possible for another, namely Scotland. Unfortunately, the UK Government chose to ignore that. It would have been entirely possible to do so, so now we find ourselves in a situation where we are notwithstanding the fact that we think that it is a good thing that the solution has been found for Northern Ireland, is recognising that Scotland not having that status within the single European market puts Scotland at a competitive disadvantage when it comes to inward investment, when it comes to our exporting industries. Surely that should be obvious to everybody in this chamber, and no doubt we will be coming back to it over the months and the years ahead. Michael Marra To ask the Scottish Government what it is doing to support the work of Systema Scotland. Systema Scotland is a brilliant example of how lives can be changed and enriched through culture. Its work contributes to many Scottish Government policies outcomes, in particular our ambitions to tackle child poverty. The Scottish Government has supported Systema Scotland with annual funding since 2012, providing £1.1 million in 2022-23. In addition, we have established a cross portfolio reference group for Systema Scotland to understand where its excellent work aligns with priorities across Government, and the group's next meeting is due to take place in the spring. Michael Marra I thank the minister for that answer and for that support for this vital organisation. Last week, the SNP on Dundee City Council cut all financial support for Systema Scotland's Big Noise Douglas, and right now, the SNP Council in Aberdeen City is cutting all funding. Vital effective support, proven by research by the Glasgow Centre for Population Health, for 1,250 of the most disadvantaged children in Scotland, swept away. Yesterday, the world-renowned Gustavo Dudamel of the Los Angeles Philharmonic said that these programmes in Scotland have been an inspiration to the world and planted seeds with millions of children everywhere. What will the Government do now? Will it be true to its own words? Will it be culture only for the privileged few? We know that this works. Will you step forward where other SNP members have failed? Thank you very much indeed. We are already engaging with Systema Scotland. Indeed, the Deputy First Minister met them only a few weeks ago around how we can continue to support the work that they do. Obviously, we are aware of the proposed and decisions that have been taken at local authority level, which are concerning given the value of the work system that Scotland does in local authorities across Scotland, and we are working closely with the organisation to showcase the impact of their work. I must emphasise, though, that local authorities are accountable to the public who elect them, and they have the financial freedom to operate independently, taking account of local needs, which I know as a former councillor. Michael Marra will understand and agree with, and so we will continue to work with Systema, we will continue to work with our local authority partners, who we are providing nearly £13.5 billion to through the local government settlement in 2324. However, councils are autonomous, it is their responsibility to agree budgets, considering their statutory duties, local and national priorities. I share the minister's views on Systema and the good work that it does in our communities. That is why I am absolutely disgusted with the SNP Lib Dem Administration at Aberdeen City Council axing the budget for Big Noise Tory. It was something that I protected when I was council leader for four years, so will he now intervene to find a way to save Big Noise Tory? I do not think that this is an issue that is for our local authorities to determine. I do not think that it is for MSPs or Government ministers to intervene on local government decisions. I think that that is a general principle that most of us normally ascribe to. We will continue to work with Systema, we will continue to work with our local government partners to ensure that we are continuing to provide services that ensure that people continue to enjoy cultural experiences, and children in particular are able to enjoy the types of offerings that are provided by the likes of Systema to lift them out of poverty to ensure that they have aspiration to continue to contribute through culture, and I will ensure that those issues are continued to be reported in the work that we do. To ask the Scottish Government what gender-specific risk and safety planning is carried out to support Ukrainian refugees at the point of arrival in Scotland, as well as in the medium and long term? Ruth Maguire can be assured that ensuring the wellbeing and safety of Ukrainian people through early identification of risk and need is central to our response and has been from the very outset of our programme. Our welcome hubs conduct trauma-informed initial assessments to identify any immediate welfare or protection concerns, and that includes gender-specific risks. On-going support is tailored based on the needs of the individual and is delivered locally. The Scottish Government is working with various safeguarding partners to inform our approach, linked to equally safe, our strategy to prevent and eradicate violence against women and girls. I am grateful to the minister for that answer. We know that once it happens, it is very difficult to recover victims of trafficking. The CPG on human trafficking last week heard from experts that some of the things that increased people's vulnerability, some of the risks were insecure accommodation, relationship breakdown and complacency from authorities, and in saying that they were putting a challenge to all of us, would the minister agree with me that there is not only opportunity but imperative on us all to be awake to the threat and work together to prevent this heinous crime before it happens? I 100 per cent agree with Ruth Maguire's guidance for practitioners involved in safeguarding. People arriving from Ukraine to identify and respond to risk and need has been published and is regularly reviewed, and we are providing £622,000 to the Trafficking Awareness raising alliance in 2022-23 to support adult females' traffic for the purpose of commercial sexual exploitation. That is in addition to more than £2.5 million provided to migrant help during this financial year to support all other adult victims of human trafficking and exploitation in Scotland. Given her clear interest in long-standing work in this area, I would be more than happy to meet Ruth Maguire to talk about that in more detail. Serida Scotland recently launched its report on sexual and gender-based violence amongst refugees in Scotland. The report highlighted that urgent need for service in Scotland to focus on forced migrant survivors of sexual and gender-based violence, including a dedicated working group, to address specific needs of survivors. Given the continued influx of refugees currently coming to Scotland from Ukraine, will the minister advise what action the Scottish Government will take to consider the recommendation of the report? I would be more than happy to continue to consider that. In addition to the funding that I spoke about in answer to Ruth Maguire's question, the £622,000 for Trafficking Awareness and £2.5 million provided to migrant help, we are also funding and working directly with the Scottish Refugee Council. They provide initial support and are also helping us to ensure that, from a policy perspective, we are responding in the most effective way, but I would be more than happy to consider what Faisal Choudhury has raised and thank him for his support and work in this area. To ask the Scottish Government how it is ensuring that Scotland keeps us aligned as possible with European policy developments. The Scottish Government is committed to remaining close to the European Union and to building the strongest possible relationship between the EU and Scotland. Our alignment policy protects the wellbeing of people off Scotland by maintaining and advancing the standards that we share with the EU wherever it is practical and possible to do that under the current constitutional settlement. This policy was approved by this Parliament in June 2022 and has been delivered through evidence-based policymaking and stakeholder engagement. Our alignment policy helps to realise the vision that we share for the continent's future and its part in the world, from ensuring our people's prosperity to tackling the climate emergency and supporting the people of Ukraine and helps to pave the way for an independent Scotland's return to the European Union in the future. Can the cabinet secretary confirm that this work is properly resourced in order that Scotland, given the opportunity, can join the European Union as seamlessly as possible? With all the UK political parties, Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrats embracing Brexit with no intention of rejoining the EU, can he confirm that the only road to joining the European Union goes through independence for Scotland? Yes, and the Scottish Government's approach focuses on maintaining and advancing the high standards that we share with the European Union where that is possible and its consideration is integral to our approach to evidence-based policymaking across the full range of devolved policy areas. At the same time, the UK Government's retained EU law bill threatens these high standards and undermines devolution, which is why this Parliament has agreed not to give consent to that bill. The member also references other parties' policies in relation to the EU. Labour, of course, does not just now support Brexit, it supports the hard Brexit negotiated by Boris Johnson, which keeps Scotland and the UK out of the huge European single market and customs union despite all of the economic damage that it is causing. I'm brief supplementary from Sarah Boyack, who joins us online. Thank you, Presiding Officer. It will come as no surprise to the cabinet secretary that I'm wanting to raise transparency. I have raised this issue before. It's about the ability of MSP to scrutinise the Scottish Government on where it does decide to keep pace with the EU legislation and where it doesn't. It's severely constrained due to the lack of information, so can the cabinet secretary confirm whether the Scottish Government is still considering the SEAC Committee's proposal for a memorandum of understanding between the Scottish Government and the Scottish Parliament to provide information and scrutiny on the Government's approach to keeping pace with key pieces of EU legislation? I'm happy to confirm to Sarah Boyack that our officials are continuing to work with parliamentary officials on the question of European union alignment. It's not just with the historic issues, but it's also with the forthcoming challenge of the retained European union law process that we're going to have to go to. I'm absolutely seized of this matter. This will be no doubt a subject that Sarah Boyack and others in the chamber will wish to be reassured on. I am happy to again give the commitment to her that I want us to have the best transparency in place as we go forward, making sure that members understand the ways in which the Scottish Government intends for us to remain aligned with the European union law. To ask the Scottish Government what assessment it has made of its contributions to development in Malawi through its Malawi Development programme 2018-23. The Scottish Government committed £11.4 million for the current programme for projects that contribute to the achievement of the UN sustainable development goals. For example, our project establishing Malawi's first dental school, which now has more students enrolled than registered dentists in Malawi, with 50 per cent of the latest intake now female. We require six monthly progress reports before any grant payments are made, and those allow for an ongoing assessment of each project's contribution to development in Malawi. Grant holders are also required to provide an end project report with details of the project's achievements and any lessons learned. I thank the minister for his answer. I think that we would all agree in the chamber that the partnership between Malawi and Scotland remains important now, perhaps more than ever, as both countries face immense global challenges. How is the Scottish Government ensuring continued support from Malawi and other partner countries, like Rwanda and Zambia, beyond March 2023? I thank Christine Grahame for that question. It allows me to re-emphasise the importance and how proud I am of the incredible and durable relationship that there is between Scotland and Malawi and the incredible work that is done by our partners, including the Malawi-Scotland partnership and the Scotland-Malawi partnership, in ensuring that that can be continued and sustained. We are currently working on the design of our new programmes to implement the outcomes of our international development review. While that programming is under way, I have taken the decision to extend our existing cohort of projects until March 2024. This additional spend on those programmes will help ensure that the Scottish Government continues to support our partner countries, while ensuring that we utilise our international development fund in an efficient and effective manner. Across our whole programme, the Scottish Government remains in close contact with our partners in Malawi, Rwanda and Zambia and are aware of the immense challenges in those partner countries and continue to respond to them as we can. I thank the minister for his answer. Thank you, Presiding Officer. NHS Tayside developed the Scottish Emergency Medicine Malawi project, with the aim of delivering Malawi a national emergency and trauma network. Can I ask the minister what progress has been made on the project to date? I hope that the correspondence that I sent back to Mr Stewart will be of assistance in this regard. We are under the process, as I have already said, of reviewing and restarting some of our programmes, where there is an opportunity for groups and bids to be brought forward. I will be happy to continue to work with Mr Stewart and others who are looking to be part of that. Thank you very much, minister. That concludes portfolio questions on constitution, external affairs and culture. There will be a brief pause before we move to the next portfolio question. The next portfolio is justice and veterans. Again, if a member wishes to ask a supplementary, I invite them to press their request to speak buttons during the relevant question. We have quite a bit of interest again in this section, so brief questions and responses please. I call question number one, Jackie Dunbar. To ask the Scottish Government whether it will provide an update on the progress being made to ensure that domestic abuse legislation better reflects victims' experiences. We must treat domestic abuse survivors with compassion and availability of services that acknowledge the significant trauma that they have experienced. Our victim centre approach fund has awarded £48 million to provide support to victims, including £18.5 million for specialist advocacy support for survivors of gender-based violence. Research on the operation of our groundbreaking domestic abuse legislation found that it does better reflect victims' experiences. I am acutely aware, however, that more needs to be done and I am committed to working with our partners across the justice system to do so, including through legislative reform and rolling out of trauma-informed practice. I thank the minister for her answer. I, too, welcome the findings of the recent interim report into the ground-breaking domestic abuse legislation, which highlights the beneficial impact of including emotional and psychological abuse in this area of the law. Can the minister outline how the measures in the 2023-24 budget will support the on-going work to ensure that victims' rights and needs are at the centre of Scotland's criminal justice system going forward? We are strengthening how justice and wider public services support victims through our budget. That includes continuation of support to more than 20 organisations through the Victim Centred Approach Fund and support to victims of violent crime in Scotland through the criminal injuries compensation scheme. As part of our vision for justice and the commitment to support victims in their journey to healing and recovery, we must offer approaches and justice that place victims at the heart. A victims advisory board has been established by the victims task force to ensure that victims' experiences are directly informing our action and the actions of our justice partners. I know that Jackie Dimbar will welcome the establishment of the women's justice leadership panel, which I chair, which is looking at how we address gender inequality and improve women's experiences within the justice system. One of the ways that we can legislate to crack down on domestic abuse is to crack down on forced marriages involving young people. The minister will be aware of steps taken in England and Wales to raise the age of consent of marriage to 18. Can I ask the Scottish Government plans to do the same? This is something that the Scottish Government is actively looking at. A report published by the Scottish Government this month looked into the experience of families who have fallen victim to domestic abuse. Female victims of domestic abuse told interviews of their haramie experiences in the courtroom with their abusers exhibiting, intimidating and threatening behaviour towards them before and during the trial. In one case, I know of a complainer of rape alleges that her abuser solicit her turn to the galleries and pointed at her during sentencing. Does the minister believe that there should be clear protocols for behaviour within courtrooms as well that there should be enforced and clear ways of being able to complain about any incidents? In 2021, we, in consultation with the Victims Task Force, commissioned NHS education for Scotland to create a knowledge and skills framework specifically to support the development of a trauma-informed workforce in the justice sector. The framework was endorsed by the Victims Task Force on a meeting of 7 December 2022, so this is something that we are acutely aware of. A number of my constituents have advised me that their abusive ex-partners were able to continue to abuse them in ways that were difficult to evidence in court, despite the robust legislation in place, for example by using child contact arrangements to exert control over their ex-partner. Can the minister advise me of what action can be taken to increase understanding across the justice system of the often insidious nature, as we have just heard, of abuse to ensure that even less, obviously, examples of abuse are recognised as such? I fully appreciate the need to ensure that abuse is recognised across the justice system in both criminal and civil cases. In relation to child contact cases, the legislation requires the court to have regard to abuse and the risk of abuse. The Scottish Government is committed to preparing a discussion paper on the interaction between criminal and civil cases. A key part of that work will be to consider how all forms of abuse can be tackled to prevent the situations as clearly narrated by Fiona Hyslop. To ask the Scottish Government what steps it is taking to tackle cybercrime. The Scottish Government works closely with national and with UK partners, including Police Scotland, the National Cyber Security Centre and the Cyber and Fraud Centre Scotland, to tackle fraud and cybercrime and to reduce the harm it inflicts upon communities in Scotland. There is a range of advice to help people to improve their online safety found on cyberscotland.com, as well as from the National Cyber Security Centre, Cyber Aware, Take 5 and Get Safe. Victims of any crime should phone Police Scotland. I would highlight to the chamber that, currently, Cyber Scotland week, which I opened at the future Scottish Cyber Security Conference on Monday is on-going, there are over 100 events taking place across the country, raising awareness of being safe and secure online and promoting cyber security careers. Kenneth Gibson. I thank the cabinet secretary for that fulsome response. In recent years, there has been a huge shift in small firms moving their business online, yet BT research shows that thousands of Scotland's small firms could be open to cyber attack because of little or no business-grade cyber security in place, and almost half suffered cyber breaches last year. What measures are in place specifically to help our small businesses and other plans to step up the share of police resources dedicated to tackling cybercrime? A very important point that Kenneth Gibson raises is not least because the nature of some of the cybercrimes, in particular ransomware and so on, has now shown that smaller and smaller companies have been attacked whereas, in the past, it tended to be larger companies. However, for the part of the Scottish Government, we funded Cyber Scotland to partner Scotland IS to engage and support the Scottish IT managed services sector, as many small businesses rely on them for their security. We also support another partner, the Cyber and Fraud Centre Scotland, previously SBRC, the host of cyber incident response helpline, which aims at offering first-line incident support to small businesses. The allocation of other resources is a matter for Police Scotland. However, despite the UK Government austerity, the Scottish Government has increased police funding year on year since 2016-17, and in 2023-24, the service will receive additional resource funding of £80 million, a 6.3 per cent increase. The national crime agency has estimated that up to 850,000 people in the UK pose a sexual threat to children, which is a truly horrifying and terrifying statistic.  Given the constant online threat to children, can the cabinet secretary tell me whether there are any similar measures or initiatives that his Government might be taking? In the general area, we work closely with the UK Government and have done so in terms of its online crime bill—a number of provisions relating to the crimes that Russell Findlay is talking about. We do that with them. It is best that we work together on areas where there is no border online. It is not an effective mechanism to stop those crimes, so we do that in conjunction with the UK and with other partners. The Scottish Police Authority, through the series organised crime group, looks at a number of ways in which children, not just in terms of sexual abuse but in terms of human trafficking, can be victims through online activities. There is a great deal of work on going. I am happy to provide further information on other initiatives to Russell Findlay in writing. Question 3 is not lodged. Question 4 is from Natalie Donne, who joins us online. To ask the Scottish Government how the Victim Surcharge Fund is aiming to support women who are victims of domestic abuse. The Victim Surcharge Fund has opened three times to applications from organisations that provide support to victims of crime. So far, 11 organisations, including Victim Support Scotland, Dumbarton District Women's Aid, Edinburgh Women's Aid and Angus Women's Aid, have shared more than £917,000 grant funding to provide practical help directly to victims, including victims of domestic abuse. Examples of support provided by the fund include demeaning clothing and other essential expenses for those escaping domestic abuse and the installation of alarming video systems to help victims feel safe. Natalie Donne? I would like to thank the minister for that answer. The trauma and fear that victims of domestic abuse suffer is incomprehensible for many and the support required can vary. We have a whole range of organisations in Scotland. The ministers named a few who play a vital role in supporting women through the most difficult circumstances. Remasters Women's Aid, who operated in my constituency, offered tailored support to women who are experiencing domestic abuse. However, I note that they did not receive funding from the Victim Surcharge Fund. I ask the minister if and when there will be a fourth round of this funding and what other funding opportunities there are for organisations providing support for victims of domestic abuse. Victim Surcharge Fund will open to more applications once sufficient money has been collected. We anticipate that that will be towards the end of this year. So far, all organisations offering support to domestic abuse survivors that have applied have received funding. In the meantime, organisations supporting victims of domestic abuse that have not applied to the Victim Surcharge Fund can approach Victim Support Scotland on behalf of those who are supporting for help as Victim Support Scotland manages an emergency assistance fund partially funded through the Victim Support Surcharge Fund. I encourage Natalie Donne and all MSPs to make sure that that is well known. Given the context of increasing anti-immigrant sentiment in some parts of Scotland, what signposting and support is available to women survivors of domestic abuse who have no recourse to public funds? Like myself, I know that Maggie Chapman has a keen interest in this area. The Scottish Government is clear that women with no recourse to public funds should be offered the same level of support as other women in Scotland and not face disadvantage. We continue to urge the UK Government to ensure that all victims of domestic abuse are afforded, the same protections and support. Our ending destitution together strategy presses the UK Government to extend the destitution domestic violence concession to make it available to anyone who is in the UK as a dependent on someone else's visa or protection status, regardless of the timescales of that status. We will continue to make the case in the strongest of terms going forward. To ensure that the fund is fully utilised, will the Scottish Government make sure that it is available and well communicated across rural Scotland and island areas for the benefit of all women who are victims of domestic abuse? Absolutely. I can give Beatrice Wishart the assurance that we will seek to make sure that it is communicated effectively. To ask the Scottish Government whether all victims of crime are given notice in advance of their case going to court. The Victims and Witnesses Scotland Act 2014 provides that all victims of crime with the right to request and obtain information about their case. That includes information on the stage that any criminal proceedings have reached. In relation to victims in our most serious cases, including sexual, domestic abuse, stalking and hate crimes, and in relation to bereaved relatives who have lost a loved one through crime, the Crown provides notice without any request so long as the individual victim or bereaved relatives so wishes. I should make the point that the provision of information to victims was considered by this Parliament during the passage of the 2014 act and the enacted legislation reflects the decision of Parliament to enable victims to receive this information should they wish it. I thank the Lord Advocate for that answer. I am aware of examples in the Highlands where victims have not been notified in advance when the trial is going to court, sometimes reading the outcomes in the press. Can the Lord Advocate confirm whether this issue is widespread throughout Scotland? If so, how many victims have not received advance notifications of trials in the last year? I thank the Lord Advocate for the follow-up question. I should say to Mr Mountain that, before today, an inquiry was made of your office to ascertain if the question that was being posed today was prompted by any specific prosecution or any specific complaint. I was advised that the question posed today was simply one of a generic nature. What I would like to do is to request Mr Mountain to contact the Crown Office and Procate of Fiscal Service with the examples of the cases that he has given today. I will look at those and follow up the specific cases that he wishes to raise. That is the response that I am able to give today only as a follow-up to the question posed. If there are specific cases where there has been no notification or there has been difficulty communicated to Mr Mountain in his office, I am more than happy to hear about that and to respond to that in specific detail. To ask the Scottish Government what assessment it has made of the potential impact of the Scottish Courts and Tribunals Service capital budget for 2023-24 on the amount of maintenance work that is required in court buildings across the country. Prioritisation of maintenance work in Scotland's courts and tribunals is an operational matter for SCTS. Essential capital works are carried out on a priority basis informed by an on-going programme of condition surveys. The capital position is particularly challenging across a number of portfolios, including justice, but despite that, we have been able to increase the capital allocation to SCTS in 2023-24 by £4.7 million towards known capital pressures on top of the baseline £8 million annual capital allocation. Current levels of Scottish Government capital funding should ensure that programme of maintenance will continue. Last time SCTS faced such difficult financial circumstances, it closed 10 sheriff courts, including Arbroath and Stonehaven in my region. There is a £7.3 million maintenance backlog in our courts at the moment, and the spectre of 2013 is never far from the minds of those in local justice. Will the cabinet secretary provide them with the certainty that they need and say that there will be no more court closures in the lifetime of this Parliament? It is important to put some context in relation to what the member mentioned of the 10 sheriff courts that were closed in 2015. It is worth pointing out that context, and it necessarily includes what we received from the UK Government and what they spend on justice. The two are linked and extricably, and I am sure that the member will acknowledge that. In England and Wales, for example, there were 239 courts—I do not know if this is uncomfortable to hear, but if you could do me the courtesy of listening to the answer to the question that you have asked, if it is possible. We have had a good session so far, where questions have been asked and responses have been provided. Can we continue in a similar vein, Mr Kerr, cabinet secretary? 239 court closures in England and Wales since 2010 have closed, and with reference to the courts, this is a court from the Bar Council. Crumbling court buildings are not fit for purpose, including leaks, infestations and lack of basic facilities. The obvious link is that what they spend on justice in England and Wales has a direct consequence for what they spend in Scotland. Despite that, in response to the point that was made by Mr Kerr, we have no current plans to initiate further court closures in Scotland, despite the appalling funding from England and Wales and the UK Government. To ask the Scottish Government what action it is taking in partnership with the Scottish Prison Service, NHS boards and others to support the health and wellbeing of people in prison and prevent deaths by suicide. We recognise that people in prison often present with higher levels of risk and vulnerability than the general population as a whole. We are committed to ensuring that they can access healthcare that is, as a minimum, equal to that offered in the community. We are working with the Scottish Prison Service and NHS boards to improve health outcomes for people living in our prisons, including to prevent deaths by suicide. The work is informed by the Scottish Government's prison healthcare needs assessments, the mental welfare commission's report on prisoner mental health support and the independent review of the response to deaths in prison custody. Across the work, we will embed the principles of time, space and compassion to ensure that people are able to access high-quality, compassionate, appropriate and timely support that supports wellbeing and recovery. According to the University of Glasgow report, there has been a 42 per cent rise in lives lost to suicide in Scottish prisons since 2016. Last year's progress report on the independent review of the response to deaths in prison custody showed that the uptake of the review's recommendations has been disappointingly slow. Can the cabinet secretary provide reassurances that progress is being accelerated towards implementing all of the recommendations that were in that review? Just to say first of all that my thoughts are first and foremost with anyone who has lost a loved one in prison custody by suicide. Every death by suicide is a tragedy. We are committed to working with partners to implement the recommendations from the independent review into deaths in custody. Whether progress report in December recognises that some of the issues are complex and will take some time to resolve and implement further pace, as the member suggests, is needed. Following publication of the progress report, the Cabinet Secretary for Health and Social Care and I jointly wrote to the chief executive of the Scottish Prison Service and to all NHS Scotland chief executives and integration authorities, chief officers, requesting the greater priority given to timely implementation of the recommendations. Gillian Emery, the former chief inspector of Constabulary, will continue in her role as the external chair of the review into late 2023, providing support and leadership to implement the recommendations. A further update on progress will be published later this year. I welcome the commitment to improve provisions for people who live in our prisons. Can the cabinet secretary outline what steps are being taken ahead of the publication of the review to improve prisoner mental wellbeing? The Government in partnership with its stakeholders commissioned a comprehensive needs assessment of the prison population in relation to social care, substance use, mental health and physical health. We are working with senior leaders from across the Scottish Government, the prison service and the NHS boards, to provide additional oversight and to drive forward priority improvements. We are fully engaged with the SPS in the development of the Scottish Government's new mental health and wellbeing strategy. The Scottish Government also sits on the SPS mental health and wellbeing steering group. That close working is informing our collective approach to improving wellbeing and suicide prevention in all of our prisons. The minister will have heard deep concern from all sides of the chamber today about the high rates of suicide and also other deaths. Can he give us an indication about how quickly we are going to get this situation turned around? I have heard the detail of the answers that he has provided, but when are we going to see some returns on this investment? I have mentioned in my original substantive answer that we expect a further update from the chair of the review later this year, but already a lot of these actions have been implemented. For example, simply making sure that people are told, the family are told immediately, was something that was not done routinely previously, that is being done by Governors and associates now. Those are being implemented now, but as I say, a further update will happen this year to give more information to the member and the chamber. To ask the Scottish Government whether it will provide an update on the outcome of its investigation into the provision of reconviction statistics for the 2019-20 offender cohort. As noted in the response to a previous parliamentary question, that was S6W-13874. The heavy impact of the pandemic and subsequent court closures on reconvictions data means that user needs for information must be balanced against the provision of meaningful and informative statistics that carry minimal risk of misinterpretation. The investigation into what information we could helpfully provide to users and respect of reconvictions stats is still on-going. We plan to communicate the outcome of this investigation by the end of March. I thank the cabinet secretary for that answer, but I am sure that he will agree that third sector-run programmes offering pre- and post-discharge support to prisoners can play a hugely important role in reducing, re-offending and improving outcomes more generally. Given that the funding for such projects relies on being able to demonstrate their effectiveness with empirical data, does he agree that its vital data-like reconviction statistics is gathered, validated and published in a reasonable time frame? It is absolutely the case, as the member says. If we were to publish the data that we have, which will show a substantial drop, as the member will appreciate, in the year after—the first year of lockdowns, for example—it would show a dramatic reduction, but it would not be an accurate picture. There is more to it than that. In order to give meaningful information, we have to do the investigation that has been referred to, but we also have to make sure that the stats that are provided come up to a certain standard. They are at the gold standard now, they are accredited, they are vindicated and validated. We want to make sure that is the case. There is no reason for not providing this information other than to make sure that it is accurate as possible, and that is what we intend to do. I very much welcome the crime statistics released this week, which show a fall in the number of crimes recorded by police last year. The Scottish Government's vision for justice aims to shift the balance from short-term sentences to community-based interventions, which we know are more effective at reducing re-offending. How the bail and release bill will help to reduce re-offending, crime and future victimisation? It is a really important question. The member will know, of course, as the chair of the committee, that the bail and release bill will help to reduce re-offending in future victimisation by ensuring public safety and victim protection are at the heart of bail decision making and improving support for people leaving prison custody. The bill recognises the negative impact that short periods of imprisonment can have, particularly for those who have not been convicted of a crime, and the evidence that community-based interventions can be more effective at supporting rehabilitation. The bill supports the principle that those who do not pose a risk to public safety or, in certain circumstances, a risk to delivery of justice should be admitted to bail. Effective support for people leaving prison reduces their risk of re-offending, something that we all want to see. That is why the bill includes reforms to improve pre-release planning and the support provided to individuals on release. The bill should be seen alongside our ongoing investment in community-based alternatives to custody, as well as our continuing investment in the third sector of voluntary through-care services across Scotland. That concludes portfolio questions. There will be a brief pause for the front benches change before we move to the next item of business.


Hi everybody, Joe for jaspyscasebreaks.com. We did it. We knocked out the last filler break to unlock that football mixer So here's a break of a 2020 Daenerys Optic football blaster edition random team eight We're gonna do the break first and then in a different dice roll at the end of the video We'll see who's gonna win those mixer spots. Thanks everybody for getting in on the action. I appreciate it All 32 teams are in let's roll it. Let's randomize names and teams lucky seven times four and a three one two three four six and Seventh and final time seven times of the teams one two three and Seventh and final time What's going on here? My mouse being goofy got paid to being goofy My god, that's weird All right. There's the first half of the list and And there's the second half of the list. All right now, let's alphabetize By team And let's do the break. There's the final print out here. Thanks everyone For getting this last filler break going to knock out the mixer. I appreciate it See if there's any surprises here. We've got rookie phenoms Tyler Johnson For Sean and the Buccaneers, we got a Ben DiNucci pink Chase Claypool rated rookie hollow It's not bad for the Steelers. That's going to go to Raymond. The hollow parallels are nice Jalen reygor rated rookie pink Kind of saw the helmet that was gonna be Herbert for a second. No, there's Ray Lewis. There's T Higgins All right, let's flip back to this list here and let's grab everyone's names once again from Jackson down to Sean Oh, and let's see who's gonna win those mixers those final mixer spots Let's roll it and randomize that list Five and a six eleven times. It's gonna be top eight after eleven. Good luck two three nine Ten and eleven then final time after eleven times So it's gonna be top eight right so from nine on down It's gonna be sad times Thanks for trying though ladies and gentlemen. I appreciate it It's gonna be happy times though for the top eight you're in the football mixer happy times for Ryan Anthony Sean Oh Jackson Sean a Randy Sean a and Joe Christian Thanks for taking the risk. Congrats again for winning. I'm Joe. I'll see you in the next video for the mixer. Bye. Bye


I go through what some of the main themes are that helped us really fund and focus on OpenShift. The first theme that really hit this entire industry was this DevOps thing going on. And I'm not going to bore you with a speech on DevOps right now. For me, from a product point of view, we're looking for a programmable boundary, if you will, that still facilitates peace between these two warring camps, if you will. But when I see DevOps, I think of a person, personally. I think of a guy named Steve Hendricks, who was in one of my development teams. And whenever the build server would break down, people would call Steve. And Steve seemed to know how to fix the build server for some reason. He seemed to know how to get to the servers, how to log in, how to increase the memory heap size on applications and all this other stuff. So this was a developer that knew a little bit about operations. And that's what we wanted. That's what really moving forward as an industry, we want our engineers to be able to do to sort of blend between these two worlds. And we're looking for a product that helps establish that boundary and helps. The next theme was this willingness to give developers the king to the castle, the keys to the castle. It started probably, I would say, four years ago where we, as an industry, would allow more risk in what we were pushing to production. Because the markets were moving so quickly around software, around features, around touch points with customers, around CRM systems, around analytics. And we wanted to capitalize on that. We wanted to bring our own business and our own opportunity into that. And so we're looking for ways to allow developers to bring code to production a lot faster. And this became more of a mantra that we had in the departments. Software is eating the world. We hear this one quite a bit. If you take a step back, there's a lot of companies that weren't traditionally software companies. Look at GE. If GE was to rebrand itself as a software company, it would be the second largest software company in the world. There's a lot of people producing software. And it's because of a lot of things. It's because of a peer to peer economy. It's because of just where we have evolved to in global markets. It's where we have our mobile devices and we want to bring that into our business world. It's just the bleeding of all these technologies and software is becoming something that we can really protect ourselves and disrupt other markets, completely turn them on their head. Not only can we disrupt them directly in competition, but we can put something new into the pool and have a ripple cause of effects. Look at chewing gum sales of all things, right? Very, very classic example of a commodity product that you buy at the shop encounter when you're sitting there waiting for your checkouts. Now people are staring at their mobile phones and they're not looking up at the shelf at this chewing gum and chewing gum sales go down. So here is software rippling affecting into something that's completely unrelated and nobody thought there would be an effect. A lot of grandiose statements in those last three slides, right? So I'm more practical, I'm more of a Darwin believer. I think things evolve over time. And in my career, I've seen a lot of these things evolve. Who knows what an encapsulated root disk is? All right, did anybody ever have to break a mirror on a cluster? No? So when I started in my career, there was a lot of legacy vertical stacks. And what we did is we applied high availability to them. The applications themselves didn't have to have those qualities. And there were a lot of tricks and software around that. How about Y2K? Did anybody have to work midnight at Y2K? No? Nobody had to sit there and help people? So the biggest thing in operations with Y2K wasn't the fact that we had to install some libc patches and some kernel patches. It was the fact that we had to bring systems down that had been up for the last five years, and this was the first time they were being rebooted. So about 80% of the time didn't come back up.  And this was, again, this was because applications weren't spanning, they weren't horizontal, they just didn't have these driving factors. Then we had a lot of big iron suddenly being consolidated and thrown away. I remember sitting in a management meeting and we figured out that our product at the time could be unplugged. It was a large server, not even used.  Just literally not even try to fix them, just throw them away. And this was this new era coming in. And then we hit this large distributed system clusters. I remember there was a big one going in Texas, there was a big one going on Alaska, and one in China. And they were so big that they were taking over Intel's ability to ship their servers, just these three locations on planet Earth that were buying that many servers at the time. This, again, we needed this evolution of that programming and for those particular applications. At this time, we were also collecting data. People were sitting in front of computers and forms and putting data into computers and not necessarily doing the big data analytics side of things. And the next one, we moved into virtualization, right? And for me, the first virtualization to hit was actually the kernel virtualization with containers. And I flew all over the world and I helped people put their single kernel into many virtual, we call them zones at the time. But later in that same span, five years later, I went back to the same customers and I moved them to a hardware hypervisor. I moved them to an XVM, or KVM, ESX implementation. Because the applications themselves were not capable enough to span and have all your eggs in one basket on one kernel. DRS got popular, I was in Canary Wharf. And a customer was manipulating the financial market by bringing in a lot of resources at different times in the market. Another good use in that grid age. And then we went into a converged infrastructure and software defined everything in assemblies and big data. And at this time, everything else is happening, right? We have source code programs. We had the move from ANT to Maven to XML explosion. The infrastructure is code, all the runtime and programming languages. So everything's evolving. Everything's taking advantage of lessons learned in the previous time frames. And the result of what we have right now at Red Hat is an ability to really accelerate this next generation architecture that was born from all those lessons learned. At any point in our stack, you can come in and you can consume. There's nothing that's blocking you from just using the Kubernetes and the Docker implementation instead of getting into our build management services. There's nothing stopping you from using just enough operating system and maybe using somebody else's orchestration. So there's a lot of pieces that you can take advantage of. When you look at this slide, there's literally, there's probably 30 startups that we compete against in this. This is just a very hot market right now. And Red Hat is offering this to you over the counter in a nice package. So let's talk shop. Let's zoom in a little bit further and see where we are. This is our 2016 year. This is, we're right around February, but at the end of January, we had a pretty big release. Now we did some auto scaling. We made sure we were qualified to run on our just enough operating system or atomic host. And we got some dynamic provisioning of storage in that timeframe. We also revamped our dedicated offering, which now runs on Google Cloud and Amazon Cloud for anybody interested into that. But right now in February, we're spending a lot of attention on our multi-user credit card purchase environment called OpenShift.com. This is when you log in as an individual or a corporation and you want to build hourly based on a monthly credit card bill. So we're recording in a lot of features right now. We're going to code freeze that and we're going to launch a beta on that. Right now it's on the version two platform. We'll move it to version three and start a beta in that March timeframe. And then we'll take a cut of that code and we'll ship it into the data centers and we'll call it OpenShift version three dot two. Also the comic platform that comes out at the same time. And then we'll move into our summit releases, which is typically our biggest release of the year and we'll go through those features. At Summit this year, we're also going to introduce a standalone registry, a Docker registry for customers that are interested in just consuming from a registry and talking from their laptops with the Docker data. So when you look at that slide, a lot of things, all you have to remember is that there's important data around April and there's important data around June. And since I'm a product manager, we kind of like to just use the first half and second half in case we miss dates. So let's just go first half and second half. There's a couple of primary things, we're very focused on developer experience. That's what you see in the blue. We always want to make sure that we're catering to services, that's what you see in the red. The yellow is really the container into the Docker layers and then the green are the core pieces of the product. And I'll go through each one of those. So has anybody used our product in three dot one? Three dot one dot one, great. So we just released three dot one dot one and we added even more functionality into the user interface. When you do a revamp like we did with the three dot X product moving from the two dot X product, it takes a little time to bring the user interface, the browser specifically user interface up the par. And this three dot one one really brought it up the par. You have a really nice experience and everything that you want to see as a user of the platform. We're going to continue to build on that. We're going to allow you to load templates instead of just loading images. We're going to allow you to edit these templates. We're going to allow you to display a lot of information about persistent storage volumes. This is all being worked on right now in the user interface team. We also have a concept called service linking, which I'll talk about when we get into the Kubernetes section. With the developer experience, probably the biggest lesson we've learned since we shipped the product is as we start really penetrating into large development teams, they all carry with them large investments in lifecycle tooling. Whether that be the GitHub subversion team quest side of that story or that's the Jenkins, Bamboo, Atlassian type of conversation. Or maybe it's their do it yourself type thing that they've grown up over the years of pushing software out. But every customer, I'd say if I talk to 10 customers, I'll get three different integration situations that they want. Some people want to consume Docker files. Some people want to consume source code. Some people want to consume a war on jar still as they move across these life cycles. And we needed to really look at the product and become very versatile on our integration points. So what we're working on right now is to illustrate that to the developer.  And to have different integration points. Maybe you pull from Jenkins in one. Maybe you do a build, a source to build in another. Maybe you pull from an Artifactory in the last one. This should all be displayed for you and you should have different intersection points. That's a short term. We're gonna hit that this year. The second one is after you do all that work, it'd be nice to step back and call that alpha build, right? And then a month later, when I bring up another team, he or she will just select that alpha build. And that means it'll be four life cycles. It'll be Jenkins at the beginning, source to image in the middle. So you'll start to be able to play with that. A lot of features around building, like I said, people want to sometimes not give us source code. Sometimes they want to give us those binary pushes. So we're really working in those areas. When you start getting into build services, there's a lot of pre and post build actions that you can take. And we want to make sure with Jenkins in particular that we ship with modules for Jenkins where you can select them. They have OpenShift in the name and they make that connection back to us pretty fluently. Making Jenkins S2I compatible with all the runtimes that we offer. Putting more XML stanzas and JSON stanzas into the template so you know what you're looking at, so you know what you're doing. Right now, when we build, we'll push that same image that had some of the artifacts in it left into production. People want us to separate those two out. So that's another thing that's happening. Another one here is with when you give your credentials to something like GitHub or other services, you want to encrypt that. You want to use the secret framework that's in Kubernetes and we're not doing that today on the build pods. So we want to bring that into the product. When you talk about a developer, the developer typically will want to have some experience local to him or herself on their laptop. And so we have the CDK, the Container Development Kit coming out in 2016. Right now it's in beta, so we'll come out of beta. This allows you to bring up a bundle that offers you on a Windows or a Mac a very clean startup of a Docker image that brings up OpenShift that allows you to work with templates that connects directly to Eclipse for both the Docker file and the templates. So this is a great user experience for a single person that wants to test her code out. So let's get into some of these application services. As you know, we have the bulk of the Jboss middleware product line on the platform today. This is a great competitive advantage in our market as we can really produce some really complex applications. What's coming in in 2016 is the mobile application. The first part of that integration is to simply run the Node.js and the Redis components of those applications out on OpenShift. And then you'll still turn out to the public cloud or feed Henry acquisition and interact with it from that point of view. Then later in that 2016 year, we'll integrate more extensively with the user experience and the consoles. And we'll bring it into the on-premise product. The AP has a pretty big release coming up. The last one in this API man are really exciting. So as we have a lot of customers getting more and more into microservices, more and more of them find a need to authenticate APIs, to manage APIs in a more sophisticated manner than what the product provides. Bringing API man onto the platform and offering it as a service that runs on the platform for people developing is just a fluent. It's what you need to really exist in a microservices world. At the same time, this has always been a thorn in a lot of people's sides. How do I stand up an application and then offer authentication for the application that I stood up as a developer, bringing key clook and it's very easy APIs for developers. You can rapidly allow them to bring a single sign-on solution that integrates with the corporate identity management. Software collections is how we get our software, our runtimes, our application frameworks. And we do it this way because it allows our platform as a service to fully support everything that we offer. So a lot of the competitors in this market will support maybe four runtimes and application frameworks, but then they'll show you a list of 20 and they'll ask you to go out to those open source communities and maintain them and keep them up to date. We offer quite a breadth of application runtimes and frameworks and this is a huge competitive advantage as we can offer CBEs in a more fluent way. When you look at how we're offering updates, it's very easy for the platform to know what's deployed where. So in the YUM days, you would have a YUM server, you would go and push out your YUM and you would have to make sure that your application instances could tolerate one of them being down. Now the platform takes care of this for you. So when you have a new update, when Red Hat comes up with a new Node.js image, maybe there's a security fix in it, you put that image into the internal registry. There's policies that you manage, you can turn them on or off, but what we'll do is we'll figure out where Node.js is deployed and we'll go ahead and we'll roll it out in a rolling manner for all those applications, doing canaries and then if that deployment config fails, bring it back up. Now you can very granularly decide you don't want to do that or not. It's the same trigger function that we're using for developers code. So when a developer has a code commit and it goes back to build a new image, a new layer and it pushes that out, it's the same trigger, the same concept that we're using. We're just reusing it in an operations use case in this manner. So those all will get updates. The big one here is because of the mobile platform, we're moving over to the more fresh Node.js, the 4.x, right now we're on a .1. So let's go over the core components. This is where the bulk of the R&D is being spent in 2016. There's two major projects. The biggest one is our pipeline. It has some user interface, instrumentation built around it, but it also has some built config stuff we're manipulating. That's taking a lot of R&D. The other R&D one is service linking, which I'll get to in the Kubernetes section. So let's talk about the enterprise registry. People love some of the features that we're offering in the product with our internal registry. They like the fact that they can prune. They like the fact that they can say, every 30 days, go ahead and cut out some of the stuff that hasn't been deployed. If you're doing that, that means you can tell, you can ask the registry what has not been deployed. And a lot of commercial standalone offerings don't have those features yet. And we do, we have those in the product. So people have wanted us to expose that and push that out. We also have an image stream concept where I can do a lot of code commits back. It'll cause more and more Docker layers to be trapped. And then I can have somebody else partner with me. Like Grant Shipley can be policy connected to my image stream. So maybe he's in QE and I'm in development. So when I go and do a code commit, he gets the same layers of his images or his projects. These are all concepts that we had in our internal registry. And we wanna expose that. We wanna allow a customer to make that the first decision point. Just install the registry, start playing around with Docker on laptops. You need something to pull from. A single point at the customer site. To do that, we need a user interface. Somebody has to log into it. Somebody has to see his or her images. Somebody has to go ahead and have quota being displayed. Somebody has to see layer connections, little drop downs in children being displayed in that user interface. So there's a lot of work in those areas around importing and exporting the classic things that you would expect. Now, on the technical side, some of the hard things that happen, we wanna make sure that later you can make a decision to install atomic platform or open shift. So we have to be able to discover that and bring that into the fold in a very easy way. Storage is one of our competitive advantages because we offer stateful applications to do so. You need persistent storage. If you're doing that with containers, it has to be remote. And there's a lot of storage APIs out there, right? There's iSCSI, there's Fiber Channel, there's File, Block, there's all sorts of fun stuff. We offer this as a company and it's one of our golden features, if you will. One of the things that we're bringing into it, though, is dynamic provisioning across the board. Right now, with the bulk of these storage providers, you have to create volumes as a storage admin and then register those with Kubernetes. It'd be nice if you didn't have to create those volumes beforehand. If there was just an API where you could ask for them and build them on the fly. So that's what comes in now. The other thing here is a lot of labeling features are coming in and there's, I'd say, two major ones. The first one is when you're using persistent storage, think of Amazon Elastic Box Storage. It'd be nice to log into the Amazon interface and see tags on the elastic box storage that makes sense to the OpenShift environment. Then on the flip side, log into OpenShift and see tags on the PVs, the persistent volumes that tag back to something in the Amazon infrastructure. So we're starting to add that layering and that tagging in. Where we're using the same label concept is with the users. So sometimes the cloud provider could be an NFS. So somebody raises their hand and says, I want an NFS volume. But right now there's no way to say, I want an NFS volume on the 10 gigabit network and not one on the one gigabit network. So we want to be able to bring those labels in. This is a gold. This is a silver. This is a bronze level of storage. When you attach these persistent volumes to the actual running kernel, there's different things people would want to do. Some people want to FSEK the volume first. Some people don't. Some people want to grow a file system. Some people don't or doing an extensible interface down at that level. Unusual at Red Hat, our storage group is also born from a lot of engineers from the high performance group that used to also be at Red Hat. And we're asking them to really grab on to big data and to start looking at templates and concepts. And the first one that they chased out of the system was when you do persistent volumes, you want different functionality, depending on the application, on how things get mounted when the application grows. So if it's a Cassandra cluster of MySQL or Postgres, maybe when a new instance is added, I want a new persistent volume instead of sharing the same persistent volume. Or if it's an Oracle Rack database, maybe I want to share the same. So there's a lot of different storage mechanisms that come into play here and they're chasing those out of the system for us. This last one is a pretty exciting one. We're going to take Gluster FS and SEF and start running it on Kubernetes. The first one's going to be Gluster FS. I think they put out a container this month actually. So that's definitely in play. Now, when you start telling the platform to expose storage, that means you have to create a user experience around that. There has to be commands to register this storage, ask for the storage. So we have this group creating some of these interfaces. So this is hyperconverged. This is running storage instead of outside of the pass on the pass itself. Networking. We're asking a lot from our networking, but there's two main areas that they're working on. The first one is the router, right? In the 2.x concept, every application had its own HA proxy. People typically didn't like the implementation because it ended up with thousands of HA proxies. Now, when we moved to 3.0, we decided one routing tier, one HA proxy routing tier. It runs on Kubernetes and pods and containers. It's highly available. It has a floating VIP. It's really, really sexy. Now, the problem is in some industries, when you have a lot of tenants on the platform, due to regulatory assignments, you might not be able to run them through the same proxy through the same routing tier. Maybe you'd be forced legally to have different routing tiers for different tenants. So now we're back to this world of adding more of these HA proxies onto the platform. Right out of your head, you'd want to be able to have a proxy or a project and decide for that project, I want it to have its own routing tier instead of going through the platform routing tier. So that's one of the ones we're working on. In the same area, if you're in a project and you have different applications, which have different services, sometimes the timeout value is different. Sometimes how you want the HA proxy to handle that particular application is different. So we're annotating services and having those annotations cause the HA proxy layer to behave differently. So that's another thing that we're asking the work on. Another big one for our largest customers that have a lot of firewalls involved in their deployment. When they have tenants in projects, they want that tenant in that project to use the same IP addresses, the source IP address on their traffic outbound. This is so they can write very easy firewall rules to block that tenant or not block that tenant as they go out to Oracle databases and CRM systems and things of that nature. Right now we're exposing the source IP address from the virtual machine or from the bare metal hardware that we're in. So we want to stop doing that. And so that means we have to work on our egress and our ingress implementation. We want to enable non-standard ports, non-8433 off of the router for the projects and services that are running. This one is getting hot with the internet of things. Typically people are okay with us putting an SNI router on non-HCP TCP based traffic. But when you start talking to refrigerators and pencils and things of that nature, they don't typically understand SNI. And so we have to have a classic TCP router that can handle different protocols. This last one, the CNI, CoreOS implemented CNI into the Kubernetes communities grabbed on to it with their community. And so this is a interface for these plugins. When you're using Kubernetes, you're using a software-defined network. And whose software-defined network you use is up to you. We ship an open V-switch implementation right out of the box as we can't force our customers to go buy a software-defined network. But we have partners that are writing to that plugin interface. We have Nuage, we have Cisco, we have Juniper. There's just a lot of energy in this area, even in VMware. But it's difficult. It's very painful to write to this plugin interface that exists today. And this CNI APIs really make that an easier project. Oh, idling. So V2 was very popular with idling. In fact, idling is how we're able to keep the lights on and give every man, woman, and dog three free gears on the platform on the planet Earth. Because when you start these gears, when you start these containers today, you can walk away, right? And we'll idle them. We'll shut them down. We'll save on our Amazon Web Services bill. We don't have that yet in the 3.x platform. Because when you take a step back, what we've done to an application in 3.x is we sort of shattered it. And we allowed you to have routes and services and pods and containers. And a lot more control. We do that so you can make more complex topologies with microservices. But now when we wanna go and idle something, we got a lot of pieces to grab onto and idle and bring down at the same time. So it took a little while for us to get it. It'll come in in this timeframe. It'll be a great feature for us. I'd say that's the bulk of what they're working on. Logs and metrics. So this was another exciting thing that came in around November of last year. We offer a full elk stack. We use Fluent D instead of the other side of that. But what we're asking the engineers to do is move to a common logging installation. We have components of the elk stack and open stack. We have it in OpenShift. CloudForms wants to get into it. So we're pulling back as a company and creating a common logging solution that customers will be able to install. And then our platforms will be able to discover which ones and bring that in and pull from those consistent logging. In this area, we're gonna bring in a message bus instead of using Fluent D. So that's another evolution that you'll see. So a lot of excitement in those areas. On the metrics side, if you're unfamiliar with metrics and Kubernetes or OpenShift in general, what you end up doing is you take the lowest level C groups, right? C groups have been around for a while. You can get a lot of information from C groups. So you pull all this data from C groups. That goes into a CA advisor. This is running on the node. CA advisor goes up to Heapster. Heapster is an API that you can ask Kubernetes questions, but it's a live API. It doesn't store anything. So we had to implement a storage solution and we're using Hocular with Cassandra under the covers. And so now we have Cassandra storing all these metrics. We're gonna add in some more file system and networks for you to start pulling that out. Container enhancements, we're gonna clean up overlay file system implementation around this time. We'll have Docker 110. When you get 10, you get username spaces. This is your ability to run things as root and then map that back to a non-root user in the kernel. It's in R&D right now. So we don't know if it'll hit the 3.3, which is the second half of the year around the summit timeframe, but it's something we're definitely moving towards. The big one on the Kubernetes side are I would say the scheduling. We added over commitment to the platform. So with over commitment, you can have people oversubscribing to CPU and memory cycles out on the box. What isn't really clean right now is when you are in an over committed situation, we'll try to start the pod back on the same node. And it'd be nice if we weren't doing that if we were starting on a different node. So that comes into this timeframe. We also get some more auto scaling. Auto scaling is CPU and memory based right now. So it'll be in tech preview, but it'll allow you to pick anything that we're tracking through that metrics interface. The Petset is really another controller. There's a couple controllers in the product. There's a replication controller. There's a job controller. There's a daemon controller. There's now gonna be this Petset controller. This will stay in R&D probably for 2016, but it's eating up a lot of cycles. Where you would need this is if you have an application that depending on how it scales, it has to ask other instances questions. Maybe when I add another instance, that instance has to ask other instances what his identity or her identity is. Maybe it has to read from a shared file system. So a little nuances how different applications work. We want to be able to contain that and hold that in the controller. Service linking is config data. It's now called config map. The problem with the implementation right now is when you have a lot of variety in the runtime. So let's say you have EAP, Mongo, and maybe you have EAP and MySQL. Maybe you have Node.js and MySQL. You end up with a lot of combinations of templates.  And to do that with an immutable infrastructure is quite difficult. And so what we've done here with config data is all these environmental variables and config files that you would have to inject into the running immutable image. We're gonna hold that in the Kubernetes services layer and the secrets layer. And we'll inject that into the deployment has we're deploying. And Kubernetes will maintain that and hold that configuration data for us. Platform, the job controller, this is short-lived jobs. Kubernetes doesn't ever want to let anything die. If you launch an application on Kubernetes, it'll restart it. It will always want to restart. That's what it's doing in life. And sometimes you don't want that. Sometimes you want to just launch something and you expect it to die because it's a short batch job, right? Bring back the data. So you can launch that with the job controller instead of the replication controller. And that's a nice feature coming in. Whenever you want to use a cert, we ask you to use a secret. And to use a secret, you need to use a function of a service account. This is very confusing to people and they typically forget to create these service accounts. And we need a better path. We need things to happen by default as you select what you select from the catalog. So we're gonna start automating that a little bit better. People have wanted another logical grouping on top of projects. So maybe I have a department called finance and under finance I have a bunch of development projects. So that's another logical grouping layer that we'll have on top. The atomic registry, we have to discover it and bring it in and marry our authentication to it once it's in a standalone situation. Insulation will get rolling upgrades. We'll do that a little bit better than we are today. We released a containerized deployment a couple of weeks ago. So now the whole product is offered has containers. Our routing is a container. Our agents are containers. Everything is in a container. You can still use RPMs if you wanna go down that path. But now we have to change a little bit how we do our HA installer out of the box. We have to clean up that logging and that metrics. Ansible playbook, bring that back into the central install use case if you will. Scale, right now we're at about 500 nodes with around 50 pods on each node. So we'll go to 1,000 and probably with 100 to 150 pods on each node. And then we'll start putting out a lot of reference implementations that you see there. A lot with CloudForms. If you're unfamiliar with CloudForms, there's a lot of providers. You'll use a provider for AWS, a provider for OpenStack, a provider for OpenShift. The power of this is when you start getting these attributes from these providers and you start connecting them, right? You start seeing that the storages can actually connect it to this application. When you get the error in the storage, you can see that being brought up through that application layer. So what does it all mean, right? I mean, that was a lot of nuts and bolts and it's easy to forget why we originally wanted this. Has users of IT. For me, I realized what Platform has a service was about probably three years ago. I was looking at different implementations for a competitor and I hit OpenShift.com. And it was mind-boggling. Very quickly, I could get an application up. And as I was working for a different company at the time, it was like, holy cow, they figured it out, right? Those zealots over in open source land, you know, the only thing that was holding them back was the fact that, supposedly, it was harder to use open source technologies, right? It wasn't a clean user thing. You had to put more effort into it. But here you were.  And they had this application gallery that had just the most fantastic things that like 18-year-olds in China were doing and like seven-year-olds in Chicago. It was just, you got to see people just experiencing technology. And I walked out of my current job and I walked into Red Hat and I had to be a part of that. And why did I have to be a part of it was really what happens when you give a man or a woman the right tools at the right time, right? What happens? Art happens, right? Something, you see something that you've never, ever seen before. And this is the new artist, developers. And this is what platform as a service is, right? This is us giving a developer the right tool at the right time and we're able to see something we've never seen before. My name is Mike Barrett, it's been a pleasure. I have about three minutes. Does anybody have any questions? Yes. I've posted the open ship for public just out there in the room up there. Because I'm a developer. Yeah. I've been working for open ship because I'm a developer. I don't have my own servers. So I really like we do, it's a really different product. Right. I like to develop against open ship but there's no different product at the time. Yeah. So I mean you have two options today, right? And one option is V2. Another option is open ship dedicated. And open ship dedicated means you get a full open ship version three environment, four nodes, some high class storage. You're the only person on that. So it's just your tendency, if you will. And around March, the beginning of April, we'll start a beta program for the online with version three. Now what that means in beta is every 30 days we'll just blow away everybody's environment. So we'll allow a couple thousand people on the platform every 30 days, we'll blow it away, we'll let a different couple thousand people on the platform and we'll do that until we flush any imperfects out of our implementation and then we'll go live. The things that are connected to it when you look at a company like Red Hat is a financial system, right? These are credit card purchases. It goes through a different financial system and then our purchase ordering system. So we have to rewrite how that's been implemented. So it takes us a while to bring that over. Any other questions? Well, I hope you all grab on to these drops. About, you know, I gave you the milestones of April and June, about three weeks before then you'll pick up origin drops if you're in the open source community there. So we'll keep in touch out there. That's it, thanks. Get you to do the same thing. CZ, CZ, CZ, and 18, 18, 16. Yes, that would be lovely. Sorry. I'll run out of space. Yeah, you can be absurd if I move this way. No, no, go right ahead. Go right ahead. I thought... Yeah. Just watch the booth. I'll see what's happening, but I might get a little docker for the doll. See what? I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to do that. See what? Stop, stop. Hi. I'm session chair here. Is there room? Yeah. Yeah, do you need anything? Is there a clicker that will work for... What is this? I'm hoping. I'm hoping. Oh. Oh. Ah. It behaves as a keyboard, but only with a limited number of keys, so... Yeah. Well, awesome. This is really great. This should be the speaker prize.


It was great There said we do another shameless plug Brought it up on Saturday, we have to walk through the second we go in there and so I ran it up the Yes, and they said sure and And so the line like I said the game ended we won and they ran for over 100 yards So we went in there and had a beer Yeah, we had to win and we had to have over 100 I got it cleared and You know credit to them. It wasn't some Marketing boy it was it was led by them. It was organic and I thought it was it was fun