The US government threatens tech companies to push censorship agendas. The elephant in the room with the ongoing debate about the Biden administration's push for more internet censorship is the fact that both the US government and the Silicon Valley tech companies who are being pushed to censor are acutely aware that those companies can be brought to their knees by antitrust cases and other regulation if they don't censor people's voices in accordance with the government's wishes. After Press Secretary Jen Psaki admitted on Thursday that the administration has given a list of accounts to ban for spreading disinformation about the COVID vaccine to Facebook, she has now doubled down, saying that people who circulate such materials online should be banned from not just one, but all social media platforms. You shouldn't be banned from one platform and not others for providing misinformation out there, Psaki told the press on Friday. When asked by the press for his thoughts on companies like Facebook, President Biden said the failure of those platforms to adequately censor posts about the vaccine makes them guilty of killing people. When confronted about the extremely serious implications of a US presidential administration telling social media platforms who to censor, Psaki said the administration wasn't censoring people but merely raising the issue with the tech companies. We don't take anything down said Psaki. We don't block anything. Facebook and any private sector company makes decisions about what information should be on their platform. Our point is that there is information that is leading to people not taking the vaccine and people are dying as a result and we have a responsibility as a public health matter to raise that issue. Psaki is not technically lying but she isn't telling the truth either. While it's true that the Biden administration is not directly blocking or taking down social media posts it is also making social media companies a godfather style offer they can't refuse. For years the US government has been making it abundantly clear to the giants of Silicon Valley that if they do not greatly escalate censorship of undesirable content per Washington's instructions there will be consequences. In 2017 Senator Dianne Feinstein threatened social media platforms that because of alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election they need to start utilizing more censorship or else face consequences saying you created these platforms and they are being misused and you have to be the ones to do something about it or we will. In 2019 Louisiana representative Cedric Richmond issued a similar threat saying social media platforms had better start regulating what he considers harmful content on their own or the government will take matters into its own hands. They better go do it because what they don't want is for us to do it because we're not going to get it right Richmond said. We're going to make it swift, we're going to make it strong and we're going to hold them very accountable. We have the First Amendment and we're very reluctant to pass speech laws House Judiciary Committee Chairman Gerald Nadler told the Washington Post in 2019 but there's a problem and we have to deal with it. Let's see what happens by just pressuring them first, Nadler added. I'm reluctant to have regulation of speech, it usually goes too far. I don't know we have to get there yet. As Glenn Greenwald noted on Twitter following the latest admissions from the Biden administration executives from these tech companies are being regularly hauled before Congress and threatened with legislative and regulatory retaliation if they don't conduct censorship in alignment with the will of the US government. We saw it in 2017 when representatives from top internet platforms were brought before Congress and told they needed to adopt a mission statement expressing their commitment to prevent the fomenting of discord and we continue to see it in 2021. The reasons change but the agenda remains the same. Sometimes it's foreign election meddling, sometimes it's the Capitol riot sometimes it's domestic extremism and white supremacy sometimes it's misinformation about a virus and vaccines but for every reason given the instruction is the same. Censor online communications in accordance with the wishes of the US government. Or else. These threats have been explicitly made but really they did not need to be. Everyone involved in this dance is acutely aware that the US government has the ability to make things much harder and far less lucrative for these Silicon Valley tech companies. This could mean actions ranging from fines and minor regulations all the way up to the revocation of Section 230 protections or full-scale antitrust cases which can go as far as breaking up online platforms in the same way Washington broke up AT&T and Standard Oil. The stage is already set for massive antitrust measures to be implemented with the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust finding last year that corporations like Facebook and Google are guilty of monopolistic practices and some less severe antitrust cases are already underway. So now we've got worldwide online speech being herded onto a few monopolistic platforms and the government forcing those platforms with increasing brazenness to censor that speech in alignment with its dictates under threat of total destruction. The effect being of course US government control of a vast swath of public speech not just within the US but around the world which means an ungodly amount of narrative control the ultimate prize for anyone who understands real power. The primary factor in determining what will happen in our world is not control of capital nor control of government nor control of resources nor control of weapons but control of narrative. All the others follow from narrative control. Control the narrative and you control where the weapons will go where the capital will go, where the resources will go what the government will do. Real power begins with narrative control. Understand this and you'll understand why governments, plutocrats and media behave the way they do. So while antitrust laws ostensibly exist to protect the citizenry from corporate power here they are being leveraged to ensure the union of corporate power and state power. Obviously the US government would prefer to simply use corporations voluntarily censoring content in accordance with government interests but for them the only thing worse than having no monopolistic companies serving the empire would be having monopolistic companies which refuse to serve the empire. So the threat being issued here is censor who we tell you to censor or your company will be broken down and replaced with one that will. And that's exactly what could easily happen. Facebook, Google slash YouTube or Twitter could easily be regulated into dysfunction into smaller companies and then some other more government aligned corporation could be allowed to take their place. Silicon Valley billionaires are hardly known for being the most principled people in existence to begin with so that threat is all it would take to ensure they conduct themselves in alignment with the will of the empire. This is just one of the many many types of glue that keeps power structures aligned with one another's interests within the US centralized empire. If you want to be a billionaire with little massive amounts of wealth you have to collaborate with existing power structures otherwise you won't be allowed in and if you are in you'll be kicked right out. It's always easier to move with power than against it that's why ambitious journalists promote the imperial narrative it's why new money plutocrats always wind up aligning with establishment interests and it's why so many other nations align with the US. In theory markets and government checks and balances are supposed to keep the big players competing against each other to our benefit. In practice the big players always wind up collaborating against us for their own benefit.


Next up, we have Julio speaking about GitHub's Survival Guide, Kubernetes Edition. I'm really curious of the stages yours. Thank you. That's very nice to be here my first time on this conference, and I work on the OpenShift team at Red Hat. Before that, I used to work at AWS. Before that, I was at Red Hat, so I'm a boomerang, as they call me. I went out and back. In this course of this decade, I've been working with automating software delivery, as it's usually called, GitOps these days. We're going to talk about why, and well, that's what I have the most experience and practice, so I thought I should talk about that. I don't really believe in best practices, so I'm not here to preach the correct way to do stuff. I'm just going to say some things that is the opposite. I think that if you don't do too bad, perhaps the okay practice is the right thing for you at the moment, or even the practice that's temporarily not so good, but you certainly can't do insecure things or unreliable things. And that's why I call it the survival guide, like what's the things that you absolutely must watch out for and what you can get away with, perhaps, and how to get away with some things. So my name is Julio, and that's Fairman J on Twitter. If you are seeing this afterwards or want to send some comments or feedback, I truly appreciate it. So let's go ahead. So as I mentioned, this is about the continuous delivery process, the process of getting the changes from the hands of developers to and transform that into value for customers. And ideally, that would be very simple and automatic. We would like to make that as fast as possible because as fast as those changes and that value gets to customers, we can get feedback and see if that sells more or if that sells less or if customers are happier or not, loop on changes. And that's pretty much the process behind many services and products at Amazon. Well, and how do we do this these days? How do we automate it? So we know that in the speed that we release changes to software these days, it's not possible to do it manually for most companies. So developers usually build on Git and the many flavors and services for Git, like GitHub or GitLab, and that would trigger events usually. Of course, that's not the only way we can have scheduled events such as nightly builds and things like that. But all in all, a pipeline of some sort, we're gonna talk about possible implementations of that. We'll build and test the artifacts that are going to be finally delivered to customers. That's usually involves provisioning resources on the cloud like on AWS services and things like that and roll out the changes like make the changes public and available at least to some users. And then also we must monitor and clean up and use it resources and things like this. So this sounds like very familiar and straightforward to many of us and I believe in the conceptual sense, it makes a lot of sense for any developer, but as we do it in practice, it's not so simple, right? We have to think how many clouds are we using and even what we are calling a cloud because we say things like multi-cloud, but what we mean by that is that like two clouds at the same time that are integrated or is it the possibility of changing the clouds if I ever change my mind, what does that actually means? And am I locked in by any API or any service that I use on this cloud and how many clusters or resources am I going to need? How I'm gonna build it, I'm gonna keep it secure and if that's well-architected or not or how to keep it safe. So this ends up being very challenging according to the size of your architecture, the application components that you use and so on and so forth, but I usually try to keep it simple and same, same by while you just have to think what's the next step in this automation, how you can make it better even if you can't make it fully automated or perfect what's the next thing we can automate and grow from there. So that's the usual process. So that's not all or nothing situation. I think it's very important to see the steps in the middle and try to keep in a way that you can evolve and progress. We're gonna talk a lot about this idea of evolving and progressing these automations. So as I said, a lot of this is going to be provisioning resources on the cloud. So the way we perceive and use cloud services matters a lot in this automations. So one thing that we clear see as cloud computing or main by cloud computing is things by like AWS computing services. So like EC2, pre-installed, ECS, ECS and so on and so forth, you name it. So that's clearly something known as cloud computing but what about all those servers that we have out there? So in corporate data centers, in startups, in service buildings, in antennas, is that all cloud, can we make that part of the cloud? Is it the same kind of thing? Can we use the same technology? Is this different? And what about going even further into what is now discussed as the edge? So for example, cell phone antennas like 5G antennas have a lot of software and hardware right in the installation itself. So it doesn't make sense to talk a lot about cloud 5G antennas but there is a service for that actually announced at last re-invent by AWS but for operators still using physical antennas they actually need that harder. And even projects like satellites that are becoming more common in startups, exploring space and even in education and not to mention self-driven vehicles and a lot of things that has computing on board. So is that what we understand and can bridge to cloud computing and to manage these resources in the same kind of tools? So that's the idea behind not only Kubernetes and as a compute platform but the flavor at Red Hat, the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform is very much focused in allowing installations that are different everywhere but then can be executed from your cloud provider to the antenna, to the car, to whatever you have a sufficient RAM and that's up to down to a Raspberry Pi these days and actually run a full stack OpenShift cluster on a Raspberry Pi 4. So the, and of course that extends to a lot of more traditional customers but in many different scenarios that we would call well-architected. Like there's a very famous case in Brazil about the nationwide payment network PIX that's built on top of Red Hat and things like that and technologies like we just saw on the previous talk and confidentiality and containers and everything still makes sense in that context, right? And the idea I'm trying to sell here is that you may want to run this literally everywhere. The service I use the most personally is Red Hat OpenShift on AWS. As I'm more familiar with the Red Hat security and operations but you could be using that on Azure with, if you prefer the Microsoft side of things or have a business relationship with that cloud provider or even with your VMware infrastructure for example. And I have to say even without touching Red Hat at all like we have OKD, the open source platform and distribution of Kubernetes whereas you can just run with pretty much similar set of features on your own hardware your own virtualization things like this. I'm not going to dive too much into which is better in each case. If you would like in depth comparison I recommend you check learnkates.io. They have excellent research training professionals doing and updating this kind of comparisons and discussions. But I hope it's pretty much the value proposition of Kubernetes and delivering applications in this way, right? But the problem is that after you get started and launch your first cluster when you jump in the water you quickly face, config maps, security, authentication, authorization, delivery and many things that will keep you thinking like is this well-architected? Is this secure, reliable, performant? Can I go to production with this? So it's especially if it's the first application or if you're just getting familiar with OpenShift and Kubernetes in general, this is very much true for us all. And because in the end you get in this balance between evolutionary, being evolutionary and starting from scratch and just building things up or trying to make it well-polished and demonstrably good, let's say with tests and so on and so forth. So what I want to say is just don't be the... What are the things that you should really care and you just can't let for later, let's say or think about what's the things that usually cause problems in this automation scenarios and the things that I suggest we absolutely don't sacrifice. So for us security as a shared responsibility and job zero, the security of those automations is very important. So that's what I'm gonna share some thoughts about in this talk, how to demonstrate the reliability and how to roll out changes reliably. And more importantly, how to keep collaboration because what I see is that when we get afraid to make changes, collaboration suffers a lot. So that's true in many senses and I'm gonna dive deeper into each of those topics and show you how to automate that. So we don't get this in the situation that if it's working, don't move it, don't change it, right? We get this pressure that on some things we want to change it as fast as possible and roll out new virtual machines with API calls. We know how easy that is, but on the other side we must keep changing things stable and compatible and tested. So how can we keep this without too much complexity? Let's say that's the whole point, like balancing this location. And the first thing you have to think is if you want just auto deployment or if you want to auto provision things. So the first thing, the first step in your automation journey is usually run the commands to deploy your code on infrastructure that already exists. So for example, you already have a cluster and you just have to push those changes. But as automation matures, we probably want to start provisioning new resources automatically. So just not create change, perhaps not change the existing server, but creating a new server with the image already in because this is a fundamental change in automation brought by cloud computing because before cloud you had the server and you don't have an option. You have to change its contents. So that's the way people use it to do things. Right now, if you use another server and flip the traffic instead of and just kill the old one, perhaps you have for a little while, you have two servers, but the end cost is pretty much the same. So why not provision a new one, right? So that's where we're trying to go. Of course, the first step is just going for this deployment and then trying to provision things with resources with the application already deployed. And that brings us to this immutable infrastructure idea and we have many projects around that at Red Hat. So the idea is instead of changing resources, provision a copy provision new resources and don't change it. So that's very good because it allows you to have more freedom in many senses. So let me tell you a few benefits. If you can do this approach, I'm not saying that everybody should or can, but if you can, it certainly makes things a lot easier. First, because you have a reduced need for authentication, authorization, auditing and things like that. What I mean is imagine that your server already boots up with an image with everything configured and ready to run a web server, let's say for a web application. So why would you need for SSH or logging or shell or anything that's not there? So if anything fails, you should debug in the automation and perhaps in a debug environment, you might have a login and access and identity management, identity providers, open ID, open ID connect, all that stuff. Perhaps you can cut that out just by automating the delivery of those artifacts, right? And that also makes it as reliable as before. There is not that case like, who changed this? Why does it stop working? Did someone deploy yesterday? So no things, you don't change resources like containers or servers or even functions, whatever that is, we publish new ones. And that makes it very simple to rollback. So as long as you keep the old version, perhaps it's just a matter of flipping the DNS traffic from official name to name one, to name two, they'll just do the C name swap on the DNS. That's one way to do it or change the target on the load balancers or anything like that. But you are safe that for example, if the new version has a bug or has a issue, you can rollback to the previous one, right? And that means you can push things or make changes from day one. So a problem we've seen many customers is that people take a long time to feel comfortable to push changes to production, where if you have this safety net of simple rollbacks, you can just let people push code to master on first day. Why not? If you have automation in this sense, it's pretty much safe. And also this lets you have that fast feedback loops and feedback about features, about things, new metrics, whatever is that we're launching. And that's not necessarily more expensive because if your application is using auto scaling and cloud computing in general, not wasting resources, like just keeping it to the resources it uses, as you change and roll out versions, one environment is drained out as the other grows. So the sum keeps pretty much the same in the end. So you do have an overhead because for a while, you may have both environments at the same time or things like that, but that's not too much more expensive. And it brings in the discussion of infrastructure as code, right? You don't roll out this manually. You can't do a new, you know, go to that web console, click twice, run this shell script, this kind of thing doesn't work. So we have to automate that through Git and through infrastructure as code, right? And again, it's not a one thing. It seems that it's just, well, build your infrastructure this way and you're done. It's not, it's a matter of evolving the software delivery process. First, you learn how to make immutable deployments and, you know, have new resources with everything deployed correctly using your favorite infrastructure as code tool. Then you acquire that blue-green capability, let's say to flip from one to the other and just release changes without the risk of not being able to quickly roll back. As I said, that's the first step. Then we go to this extensions of blue-green. First, you can have blue and other colors. It could be blue, green, red, yellow or canary releases, as they usually say. The first idea that comes to mind as well. So let's roll out, test the new environment, make sure it works for like 1% of the users, then scale it to 5%, then to 10%. Usually we've waited DNS, but again, it could be done by load balancing or other mechanisms. But slowly rolling out and ensuring the safety of operations and that's canary deployments. And further than that, you might opt in to classes of users such as internal or beta or just a city and circle your users and route them to different application versions or flags. So that's a way towards circle deployments. And again, this is not a matter of best or better. It's thinking what of those approaches is more suitable for a company, perhaps just having blue-green deployments with two environments that you can flip back and forth is all right. And I see many customers being successful with that. For example, in the AWS Elastic Bing Stock Service, that's just one click or also in Kubernetes, it's very easy, right? Well, I hope it's all right. Let me know I can repeat anything. My internet is not too bad. It's a good connection, but sometimes it may flip or no internet weather let's see. Feel free to drop in any question. Thanks for the heads up, yeah. And let's go towards the more specific advices. And again, you can automate this in pretty way you want. The one thing I usually say is don't move data around, try to avoid. This is the more expensive thing. Perhaps when you do it in your local development machine, copying a database may be real quick and no problem, but as the application grows and grows and grows and your database becomes a data lake, moving these things is extremely expensive. So that's the problem, for example, with Helm charts. Sometimes you don't want to make a very direct dependency between your application in your database because perhaps you want to update your application 10 times a day and change where it runs, but your database and data is probably a bit more difficult. So that's something we usually keep. So that's when I say, when you automate, when you build those scripts, don't try to build a single deploy.sh that deploys everything or a single GitHub action, but do this year by year. So, well, the database is something you don't want to execute every day. Let's say you have a weekly or monthly maintenance window for that because there are so many applications that depend on the data model. For the API, perhaps when they are released every hour, if they want, they can deploy. For the app, perhaps you want that with a different release cycle, for example, if you are published on the iOS app store or Google app store or any app store, they have the restrictions on release frequency you can do. Perhaps you want to do this differently. So all those automations, if you want to have like this master Helm chart or this master script that do it all, I think it's very hard to make it actually work because it will have so many failure modes and conditions. It's probably better to have a very simple automation for each of those cases. And some, you may not even automate at all. For example, the CDN tier, if you use Cloud, for example, or CloudFront from AWS, you probably, you can roll out that automatically for first structures code, but most customers just don't. And again, when you design for this, especially in the Kubernetes worlds, this means that must multi-cluster is a necessity, right? You don't want to run everything in the same cluster. And just one problem that arises from the many is updating the version, for example, of Kubernetes. Perhaps you don't want to, perhaps something impedes you to improve your database Kubernetes version, but you have your application in another cluster, so you can update that. So it doesn't make sense to lock in everything, everyone to the constraints of every system. That's how things get frozen up. So I suggest breaking down first by tier or purpose, like you mentioned, database, network, storage, compute. Also by grade or data, such as development, staging, pre-production, production. And again, this is like the data realm, the data that the application will see. And perhaps only on the application tier on the UI, for example, you may want different circles to have different versions, but again, this is mostly for products, tests, for startups, not so much for enterprises. So this depends a bit on your context. And here, thinking about it, there are so many different technologies and possibilities for building this that we usually end up in the paradox of choice. If you don't know this talk, that talk by Beres Schwartz, it's brilliant. And the idea is very simple, right? Anyone that's been to the Cloud Native Foundation website and List of Project C, like choice is a good thing. It's nice to have choices, but sometimes we have so many that we just get paralyzed by not being able to make the optimal choice. So I think that's a very critical problem. In automation and GitOps, we end up, oh, I need this, I can improve with that and try to draw it better and better and better. And the customer is there waiting for whatever is the new Cloud Native thing we're trying to bring into the project. So what I wanna say is for many, many projects, I've seen it work with just a small shell script with EMO processing. So if all you need is run a simple GitHub action that changes EMO and call Cloud CTL or OC, by all means, that's perfect. So in this sense, there is this awesome Kubernetes project. It's in the references or the links, don't worry, but this is a very nice one with tips of different tools and processors you can use to automate it. But very soon, you're gonna need infrastructure as code and something like Terraform, my favorite, or CloudFormation, or even and CloudFormation, like something that you can store and build on Git and store those templates and keep building on Git, that's declarative. So you don't have to try, catch exceptions in each of your commands because the infrastructure interpreter is going to do that, something that lets you repeat those deployments as often as you need and as clear as you want. So if you want to roll out red, blue, green, yellow, magenta environments, that's okay. Preferably, preferably something that's extensible, something that you have a way to plug in your own resources when you want. So in Terraform, that would be Terraform plugins and providers in CloudFormation. It would be modules and custom resources. On CDK, it would be constructs. Every platform should have this way. So you're not in the woods when you want to call your Creator API resource or something that only exists inside your company or your contacts or something like that. Something composable that you can build blocks and share preferably. So the application team can reuse the database that the database team built and things like that. And I see many options that are partially managed like you can, if you use Terraform, Terraform stores a state in the backend that can be anywhere you want. So you can use a simple S3 bucket and store your infrastructure data there. And that's something that you still have to manage, create an S3 bucket, but that's okay because everything is managed by AWS and that's fine. But of course, if you want it fully managed, you have Terraform Cloud or CloudFormation-based services on AWS that can manage all those resources for you. And finally, those are not some things that you can use one or the other. So always keep a look for integration opportunities, for example, and there's this resource mentioned here in this snippet called Formation Stack where you can call a CloudFormation Stack from your Terraform resource. So if by any reason, such as there is no plugging yet for a given service for Terraform and you need to bridge to CloudFormation, I don't know for whatever reason, you can't do this kind of thing. And again, you have the full power of getting the things like the branch name and putting your own tags and setting up the infrastructure the way you need it. And the most important part of that, of having that as code is being able to collaborate with branches, PRs, threads, and the same way we do on GitHub and make that part of our architecture. So if I want to add a new server, I add a line in that declarative file. And if I need approval, I can ask in the PR and use the same mechanisms and the same techniques we've been using for software. Now I've been able to use that for infrastructure. And here is GitHub Actions. That's what I use the most, but you have the same for any other platform. Here's the different events that can trigger actions. So you can have something that runs on a schedule every night, something that runs on a discussion comment if someone says approves and he's a manager that triggers the pipeline. I don't know. On a label that someone adds like a label that this is released or tested or something like this, or on a push on a new branch. So when a new branch, one that I do often is when a new branch with a given name comes in, such as live and a given branch name, that will actually deploy a new environment and push that version or testing and things like that. Or a release when there's a new release in your GitHub or even manually you can run those workflows. So if you have automation and this is a good one because remember that problem works on my machine like you have your version of Python, your dependencies and you forget to tell the customer they need that and you want your automation to run anywhere. So being able to run those manually and say, well, just log into the action list or in this case, the GitHub Actions and execute this and it's fixed. So that works, you can test that to work every time that's convenient, I believe. And a very important part, I think this is the one that most people struggles the most is where to manage configuration. So this is a very important part. Like how do I know the database URL, the which environment variables to set those values and so on and so forth. So one thing, this is like the order that I think about it, like first by naming conventions. So if the branch has a name like prod slash name of something, I'll provision an environment in the circle, prod like in and bind it to the prod namespaces or DNS names that will drive them to what we refer as prod and a new environment with that name. Or environment variables, most tools support that. So that's when we can't infer information, the configuration from the naming conventions check the environment variables. If that's something that is a long file such as I don't know a key file perhaps or a data file of some sort that you wouldn't put on an environment variable perhaps check the infrastructure, the repository content itself for that key where it will have a email file or whatever is a file under that name. And that's when you have the one delivery for your software just your app, let's say but when you have multiple deliveries of your software say like WordPress where you have one source but million deployments, you might want to host that deployment content in a separate repo. And that's what tools like Techtron and OpenShift CI CD in general works like you have your code deployment, your code source where from your container image is going to be built usually and a separate repository with your email descriptors for Kubernetes and things like that that are going to be pushed to production. And just remember to take a special care with secrets like GitHub has secrets mechanism, Hashicorp has vault and vault has integration with everything AWS has systems manager, parameter store and even if you're rich enough to pay for it as service called credentials manager which is a bit overpriced in my opinion. But all of that is to set and save credentials, secrets in a way that's secure and won't cause problems such as committing that key to a GitHub file or end up with that exposure that's something you really don't want to do especially if you're on a regulated situation which can have severe legal implications. And after that is just a matter of integrating with observability so it's not done, you still have to pick up metrics being the CPU memory, HTTP counts and things like that. The logs from the applications see if anything is throwing an exception or anything like that. Throwing alarms according to these conditions captured by logs and metrics in events and traces and you can do this on CloudWatch or Prometheus. There's many different tools for observability. I just added them so as a first as a reminder that something do this and mentioned this tools but to get into the importance of that. So this is a fault tolerance demonstration from this actual tool called Visero by Netflix that draws this simulations and it shows the kind of approach I'm trying to show here. So it starts with three environments say Netflix application in three different US regions and you can see in US East 1 the region starts increasing the error rates and when it gets to a high threshold of error rates it will start sending traffic to the other regions so that the other regions can scale and prepare to take over while this recovers and again just to remember by this day in prime hours Netflix occupies around 40% of US total US bandwidth. So it's a lot of data flowing around and you're watching your favorite series you don't even see a flick because of this kind of redundancy mechanism and then things get fixed and rolled back because again of that capability of rolling back and forth. Not saying everyone should have this kind of capability of visualization or failing over and failing back. Again, this is huge but just showing what kind of automation we can build towards, right? And on the Kubernetes world this is usually done by operators, right? This kind of automation and they're not going to build the dozens and dozens of scripts to roll things back and forth and automate and send these messages and control those things. On operators are Kubernetes applications that can basically create resources that are of whatever resource type you name it and trigger actions to create, read, delete and update them. So nothing too hard. There is SDK for building those but as OpenShift and this is important because OpenShift itself it's essentially in its core, a set of operators for Kubernetes with additional security, CICD, rollout and all these benefits I've been mentioning. So that's why it's cool. And when you build this operators you have this maturity model that guides you through the steps of starting with the basic install just getting code deployed and ran in the cluster how to upgrade versions how to influence the lifecycle of resources up to this autopilot level where things happen magically and operators can get really advanced and there are certainly examples such as the Helm Ansible and Go operators around that. So all in all it's basically using infrastructure as code and manage operations with resources declaratively and keep collaboration through Git and keep more than keeping it through Git is keeping it alive in a way that people is not afraid to touch infrastructure just because it's risky or it's not automated or we can do it only six months and et cetera. And a final thought is to separate and this is important in for continuous delivery is separate the idea of a release and a deployment, right? You can deploy a hundred times a day, right? But you may only release on Christmas, right? It's like when your favorite applications shows a Christmas a nice Christmas message that code was already there perhaps since spring, but it has a little check or a feature flag, as we say that that's going to be available only for prime users on Christmas. And there was a long while ago people use it to create new branches for new features and create hundreds of branches and merge them in a very complicated way for, usually known as Git flow and things like that. But since I think 2016 the state of DevOps report by puppet labs demonstrated pretty clearly that basically committing to master and using feature flags is way more sane and productive. And because of this you can create those feature flags and deploy that code hidden. And of course there's tools for that from open source to service is like launch darkly and things like this that allows you to deploy and release in different steps and ceremonies, right? If you wanna practice those concepts I just mentioned for all of that we have learn.openshift.com where you get a cluster and a tutorial and you can build and practice those automations. Here are the references for this talk. First I'm starting to write so it's a very small just to post at the moment but including these slides around this new dev to RedHex I've been building the awesome Kubernetes reference with lots of commands and cool stuff about automation. The learn.openshift.githops is specifically for our way of building those concepts and learn Kate's as a separate company but with cool courses and material. And finally my friend Mauricio Salatino is publishing a book continuous delivery for Kubernetes where you can also find great insights on bringing this to reality. And that's it for my talk. I think we have five minutes if you have any questions. An hour later it would be a great pleasure to keep in touch with you. Thank you so much for attending this talk and enjoy that count.


Did you know that this steering stick can launch you in the air so that you can get arrow time?  Not only can you use the steering stick on Lino's, but Glioc's too. Speaking of Glioc's, when Glioc starts to get up, you can also use rocket shields to get up in the air and shoot them. Also while we're up in the air, check this out. Key size can make your arrows go extremely far. It didn't take out the Glioc, but it definitely has a very far reach. Now here's something fun I wanted to do. So Bokoblins actually pick up your weapons if you take their weapons. So I have a bomb sword. I'm just going to drop this on the ground and then I'm going to just throw some shockfruit in order to have the enemies drop their weapons. Here we go. Grab their weapons. Now they can't pick that up and they're going to be forced to pick up the bomb sword. That's right, buddy.  All right, the boss Bokoblin gave the signal and they're all going to do their thing and yep. He just flew, he just blew away. Speaking of using weapons to raid enemies, this video is sponsored by Raid Shadow Legends and we've got their champion, Professor Death Knight to answer some questions. Hey professor, isn't Raid Shadow Legends a mobile game with over 650 unique champions, billions of customizations, tons of fun bosses, and even more incredible stuff coming out every month?  And aren't there endless ways to play with both PvP and PvE modes, casual and competitive experiences, and tons of different strategies? You really do your research, huh? Yes, definitely. And the best part is all the content is completely free. And in celebration of Raid Call of the Arbiter, if you get the game now, you'll be able to get the Mighty Orc Warlord R-Talk if you log in for seven days between now and July 24th. And if you're new to the game, if you use my link below or scan the QR code right here, then you'll get a free starter pack with tons of cool loot. So go down to the description and download Raid Shadow Legends and join the growing player base of over 80 million players today. And thank you to Raid Shadow Legends for sponsoring this video. Remember, all assignments are due on Wednesday. Now something else that you can do is when the Bokoblins start to charge up and get ready for their attacks, you can drop down bombs ahead of time, just like this. And boom! You can also do this with the other time bombs. So I'm just gonna go ahead to the zoning devices and select some of these time bombs, drop them, and back away. That's a lot of fun. Now this is a classic. Grabbing a bomb barrel is a great way to break enemy formation because when you protect yourself with a shield, oh man, you are very safe. And actually, some bomb barrels do more damage than other bomb barrels. And boom! Well, okay. That was a weaker bomb barrel, but there are stronger bomb barrels in the world. Something really cool that you can use against Linos are puff shrooms.  They have no idea you can see that question mark showing up. If you have powerful weapons, you can mount the Lino with no problem because you can see that popping up, get on top of it, beat it up completely, and you could hop off of it again and throw more puff shrooms. Not only can you use puff shrooms on Linos, but on enemies, you can use puff shrooms as well in their camps. And you're safe. The moment you throw puff shrooms down, enemies have no idea. And you can try to pull off some sneak strikes with the puff shrooms, so feel free to do that. Speaking of puff shrooms and sneak strikes, when it is raining, enemies have a harder time hearing you. And especially at nighttime, when some enemies are sleeping, you can just slowly approach them and go for a nice sneak strike doing over eight times damage. And if you have the eight-fold blade, it'll be doing times 16 damage on a sneak strike. So very cool thing to use.   Now, this is a really interesting one. If you're trying to do a challenge or trying to get to a chest and you don't care about drops for an enemy, you just want to nuke them, you can use the ancient blade. Literally, I'm doing the Lionel run and I'm just taking them out. It's a world record time to completely clear enemies. So here is the white Lionel and it's dead. So this is not a surprise to a lot of players, but it's just good to have this as a backup in case there's an enemy you don't want to deal with. I'm just chucking it at it. And yep, you can throw ancient blades too. If you're in this area in the Colosseum and have ancient blades, you would get Majora's Mask right here. By the way, don't think that you can throw the ancient blade at everything. Here is me attempting to use it on a Thunder Glyok. And yeah, it just does regular damage. Now, this is a fun one. These are the frocks that live in the depths. Now, frocks are really fun because we're going to be using a strategy that requires us to do the same thing over and over again. It's called the Bomb Strategy. I got its attention over here as you can see in the shot. Just shot a little cannon at it. And here we go. It's going to open its mouth and go for the Zuck. And as it starts to do that, I shot my cannon. It's chewing it up and cannons just act like bombs. And yeah, there's the explosion. So don't try to climb it while it does explode. So then after you knock it out, it's going to throw you up in the air just like this. Here we go.  So just go ahead as soon as you open the air and just again, more bombs in its mouth just like this. And you should be able to rinse and repeat this part over and over again until it's pretty much dead. This is a very interesting thing in the game. You can actually make yourself dual hybrid arrow. So I'm just going to throw a fireplace down over here and light it up. Okay. All right. Let's just hit the flip. There we go. And take out a shockfruit, for example, and you're going to light up the shockfruit on the fire. So run over the fire and then aim at the enemy and check this out. Look at the fire and electric at the same time. So if you want to experiment and figure out some things that you can do, if you leave it too long, the fruit will burn. So once you get the electric fire together, you're going to have to use it immediately. How practical this is? I don't know. But if people want to experiment and figure out other arrow combinations, let me know. Speaking of some combinations, what if you try to go with an ice slash electric combo? So I'm just throwing a dragon horn here, completely freezing up some enemies, seeing if there's any left on the ground. I killed off a bit. Here's a silver one. And then I'm going to go ahead and throw a shockfruit. Let me just get away a little bit and then we can see what the shockfruit does. And you can see, yeah, that's a big AOE around it. So when you shoot shock or an electric item at a frozen enemy, it's going to amplify the area. Now the reason I'm not getting frozen at all right here is because I'm wearing a completely resistant ice helmet. Now in our last video, there was an amazing comment that suggested that we use Psydon with Moldugas in order to get an amazing attack with arrows and bombs. So I'm like, yo, we need to try this out. So I see it approaching me. It has a question mark. I'm going to tap Psydon so that way I have the water bubble and it's going to knock me in the air. Now check this out. I back up and then I'm just going to switch to bomb mode. So you have a free arrow time in the air, thanks to the Molduga literally. And I'm just going to use my five shot lineable or three shot. I don't even know what you want I'm using. I'm just shooting bombs at it completely. And then when you drop down, look at that dead. And you can hear its little cry. That is one of the coolest things I've seen. And I'm mind blown by this. Okay, here's something really fun. If you pick up a rock and do ascension, you can go through that rock. Now what's the purpose of going through that rock? Well, you get yourself arrow time or bullet time and you can take out enemies. Do they see me? Oh, they see me. I'm going right through. I'm going to jump out. And there we go. Boom. And these guys are dead. Now a lot of people may know about this one, but I find it very important that when you use muddle buds, that you prioritize the strongest enemies in the camp. For example, in this one, we have a Silver Boss Bokalbin. And I want this one to be the one really affected by it because the Silver Boss Bokalbin is the strongest enemy here. And because of that, that Silver Boss Bokalbin is going to go after the armored enemies. And yep, there's the armor broken completely. And just start wrecking every single thing in the camp. And all the other smaller enemies are going to be attacking the Silver Boss Bokalbin. Oh, yep. Someone got a great shot on him. Speaking of muddle buds, when you're fighting a Lino and you shoot it at it, it actually delays them for a little bit of time and it slows down their animation.  And then you can shoot another muddle bud at it. And it kind of semi stuns them for a split second. So if you're in a good position, you should be able to keep delaying this Lino over and over again. There you go. See that stun? Now, this is something that a lot of people like to combo with in the game. And putting bombs on shields are very important. One, for giving you the height, two, for giving you arrow time. And a lot of people do a lot of crazy things where they add glide suits and they can do literally anime style attacks with these bombs. So let me know what crazy things you guys do when you put bombs on your shield and then just blow up in the air and what crazy combos can you do? I'm just so curious because I know we're going to be making a much more advanced guide later on as I get better at the game too. By the way, if you are enjoying this video, make sure to hit that subscribe button. You won't regret it. Just go ahead and do it so we can get more videos like this. These are really fun to make. I am extremely mad that I found out about this when I was like over 500 to 600 hours in the game.  And these boned enemies come to life when you get close to them.  You don't even have to make contact with them. How insane is that? I'm just going to throw this one at it. And it's dead. That's it. It's crazy. Now, this doesn't really work on stall knocks like the other enemies. So keep in mind it's going to be for all the weaker bone enemies and stall knocks is pretty much just just go for the explosive arrows and shoot at its head. But it's really easy stuff to take these things down. Now, there were a lot of questions about gloom weapons. Now, when you hit an enemy, you can see that gloom does take place. I'm holding a giant two handed gloom weapon right now. And you saw the heart disappear. But because we're on the above ground, it all worked out pretty well. So a big question is, what can you do with gloom weapons that doesn't drive you insane? I actually have a gloom spear over here attached to a rocket. Let me just break that off for you. And I'm going to fuse a gloom spear to a gloom club. And it's going to do 90 damage and it has durability up. We can go ahead and see, are we going to get double gloom effect or is it just the same exact one? And it doesn't look like I'm losing crazy amounts of health. So it seems that it does the exact same thing as having one gloom weapon. Now, something else a lot of people wanted to experiment with is what happens when you put a light dragon part on a gloom weapon, because the light dragon part is going to heal you while the gloom weapon is going to take you out. Now, here's what you've got to know. The gloom weapon is going to take out pretty much one heart every so often, while every single hit with the light dragon horn is going to heal one HP or one fourth of your heart. And we can see this over here when we approach these enemies. So here we go. Kind of healed up myself there. One gloom heart attacking the enemy again. Lost the heart. Then I'm going to approach it again. Gained a little bit of a heart as well. So it's a kind of a counterbalance. But I don't know. I don't really think it's too efficient or inefficient. It's weird. Now, something I suggest if you want to just deal with the gloom weapons and not lose any health is attach the gloom spear or whatever gloom weapon to a normal weapon. That way it's the extra piece on it. That's pretty much what you do. But you'll notice it breaks pretty quick. So that's a way to use gloom weapons without taking any damage. Attach them to a regular weapon as the base. Now, while we're on the topic of gloom stuff, let's take a look at gloom hands. And what I have in my hand is a contraption known as the quad cannon. Now, you don't need to be this extra. You can just use two. But sometimes this is a very efficient way of taking out gloom hands. And so what I do is I angle it at a certain angle just like this. And I start to just shoot the gloom hands because when they hit the thumb, it's going to just explode kind of stunned them. And you could take them out pretty quick. And you literally don't you can't even see gloom hands in the segment. It's already dead. Oh, by the way, I didn't mention this before with the gloom weapons. But when you attack a Lionel on the back with a gloom weapon, even when you're at full hearts, look at that, you do not lose any hearts. This is just good to know. It's a fun fact. And if you're, you know, it's a combat video. So you got to know things about weapons and fighting in the game. This is a really simple one. It's literally going to be throwing different elements at shoes so you can get yourself more elements of a certain choice. So here's some blue shoes coming at me. And I'm like, okay, let me throw a firefruit at it. And here we go. Didn't hit all of them. But look, I got some fire shoes. And here's an ice fruit. But throw it at this shoe and got an ice shoe. Here we go. Got my jelly. So there you go. That's that's how you get different elements stuff. Whoo. Now you guys know how to do that. Now these are one of the enemies I had the hardest time in the game with.  Oh, thank you, Silver Bokalbun, for helping us. But there's an indicator of when you're supposed to dodge or parry these enemies. And that's going to be when their eye glows. As we zoom in here, you'll see the eye. There it is. And boom, you can parry right when they do that. Or you can get ready for a flare. This Silver Bokalbun needs to go. We are trying to do an example here. Please go away. Here we go again. And boom, eye glows and we just parry it away. Okay, you got to go. And when it's getting ready to attack, let's go for a flurry rush this time. So we're gonna back up as soon as the eye glows red and we move in for that flurry rush kill. So it all comes down to the eyes with the constructs. Speaking of soldier constructs and captain constructs, hey, what about flux constructs? These things are actually really fun to just bully. I don't know why you could just remove parts of it. And it literally cannot do anything to you. So if you take out the arms just like that, grab the other arm, and it's going to attack you. And it literally cannot do anything to you. This works on flux construct ones. This works on flux construct twos and it works on flux construct threes. Okay, so there's things that you can do with your ultra hand, with your recall ability, and with your fusion, technically, because all these weapons I'm putting together are fused. But now I'm ultra handing them.  So it does a little death spin. Now you can make way better weapons than me. These are just some average weapons, nothing crazy. But it knocks out enemies. It literally pushes them. There you go. There's a bokoblin dead. Here's a group of bokoblins and I'm going to throw a frost gliocorn at them. Oh, I froze too, but it doesn't seem to do much damage to me. Let me just go ahead and throw another one here. And something cool that you should know is that when you hit an enemy that is frozen, it's going to do times three damage. Now, also something to note is that you can blow these enemies away into the water with your fan. And I know if you're using Tulen, Tulen, I don't know why I'm saying that name wrong. You could also do that. We did that in our sage video. But yeah, with a fan and not having a sage, these are the results that you can do. You could even blow away the silver boss bokoblin into the water. Now, something pretty broken. If you happen to freeze the water and you have these little square ice blocks showing up, you can actually fuse those to your weapon. I do this here with a broadsword and this is actually a really OP thing. It's a little bit chaotic here, but you can swing it and create ice platforms as well as creating wind. This silver boss bokoblin is going to be moving closer towards me. I'm going to get on a platform. And as I head up here, I'm just going to whack it and it gets blown away into the deep parts of the water. In the heat, it does melt. So keep that in mind. But just look how far it blows enemies. So cool. Now, when it does rain, enemies do get a little wet. And what happens when you shoot something electric at enemies that are wet? Yep, amplified electric damage. So whenever an enemy is wet or it's raining, you want to go in with electric items or attachments or just electric attacks. Hey, we're back to more Lionel stuff. Now, check this out.  Check this out. Ready? It's going to come over to me and then it's going to roar, which gives you an open opportunity to shoot it in the face. Okay, one more time. It's coming for the charge. It sees it, it yells, you shoot it. Speaking of zonai devices, check this one out. So if you go ahead and shoot a hoverstone in the air, you can go ahead and just ascend right up to it so you can have an advantage over many enemies. This is not going to just apply for a Lionel. This is going to apply for a lot of other monsters. Feel free to let me know and timestamp the video when you're in the comments. Exactly what monsters you would use this on. But for the Lionel example, I feel bad. We're torturing this Lionel this entire video. We're going to just shoot it in the face, get on top of it, ride it.  I'm going to go up and ascend right back up on this hoverstone. And I'm just going to wait for a good spot and then bullet time it again. And we just rinse and repeat. This one's pretty fun. If you have any ruby weapons or fire weapons and you approach a ice enemy, that's going to be pretty simple. I love putting rubies onto shields because one, it's keeping my character warm. And two, if an enemy goes ahead and attacks me, that's what happens in the ice areas. It just instantly dies. So that's something I like to do. Now there is another ice enemy over here. And I'm just going to go ahead and take my boomerang, going to attach a Fire Breath Lasoffal's horn to it. So another fire item. Views that. And throw it at it. There we go. And it just eviscerated midair. And I might as well show you the polar opposite. That is me with a Sapphire shield. And you just saw that red chew, chew, get destroyed and turn into a white chew chew. And here is a Fire Lasoffal's that sees me. I got my shield ready to go. All it has to do is just hit me and the counterattack. It's done. So another fire enemy destroyed. Now while we're on taking out enemies with different elementals, we're in the fire area. And water does pretty well here too. So I fuse an opal onto a sword.  And I got water balls coming out everywhere. And I just hit this talus. And the talus already just lost its main heat. And then I could go ahead and start to break or attack its little stone there. So just whack that. If it gets too hot, no worries. And then just hit the top. And it's going to drop again. It's gonna get weak. If it drops, no worries. I just have to back up. You can aim by throwing the weapon. So you can hit the exact spot. And just like that, the talus is going to go down. But this is a combat video and that's pretty boring. So I came up with another fun ways for you to take down these taluses. Now the first one was adding a fire hydrant to this robot over here. And I activated the bot and it just completely ran up on the talus. So this is just fun to watch here. That's it. It's going to drop the talus. It took it out. Yep. Pretty fun. And then you can go ahead and just whack it completely. Now something else I did was also add a fire hydrant to the hover stone that we talked about before. And once you activate it, you have the water coming out. And wherever you leave the stone, that's where it's going to stay. And while it drains your battery. But if you notice, it's not really eating my battery too much. So what I'm going to do over here is just place it above this talus. That way the water could just fall on top of it. And yep, there you go. The talus is like, oh man, I got water on me. Can't fight anymore. And it's dead. Yep. Those are some ways you can take down Igneo talus. Now this is a battle talus and they're really not that hard to deal with.  Now battle taluses are cool because you can collect some of the arrows from the bokoblins if you just dodge. It's obviously limited, but it's pretty cool. And then you just have to get on top and hit that rock. And that was a launch. And these bokoblins are like, what? They're just done. Now something else you can do with taluses, they throw their stones at you. You can just go ahead and rewind. And it'll go right back and hit the talus and also stun them on the floor. And you can go ahead and just beat them up as well with that. Also real quick, there is a blood moon happening just as I killed it.  Is it going to show back up on the floor after the blood moon? I don't know. Let's find out. And oh, no, it did not show back up and this one's dying. Okay. So the blood moon did not revive it. Okay. I just wanted to test that out. And now you know the results from my video. Now something really cool that you can do is add a glider to your shield because this can also give you some airtime.  You were in arrow time. Very nice. Very nice.  This one's by Satori Mountain. They always seem to be dropping sturdy thick stick and they have a very high durability that's kind of their passive. So what you want to do is go ahead and add some gems to these. So I went and added a ruby to one and I got my fire fireballs just like this. And here we go. Whoop, fireballs. And then I added the topaz to the other one to get ourselves some electric balls. You get some cool elementals coming out. You can do the same thing with ice. I actually think ice is the most broken one. I just wanted to show some fire and electric. I feel like I do a lot more ice stuff in this video. Something cool you can do is also, if you want to just play with all the elements, I got my sapphire shield here. I got my electric in the combo. So yeah, you just freeze enemies. You could use your fire ones in combination with them and add this to the electric ones.  Same thing with fire. Look at that, fireballs. Now something cool that I like to do is I like putting very hard materials onto some of my boomerangs because the armored enemies are really annoying. And I just like a separate weapon to be able to break them. So in this case, I'm using my silver orblin horn on the fusion here with a basic boomerang. And what I do is when I initiate a fight with a group of enemies, I am going right for the armored enemy to break them because they are so annoying. So just like that, boom. Silver vocablan armor is now done.  While we're on the boomerang subject, if you put something towards a boomerang and fuse it, here's all you have to do. You just have to throw this up all the way in the air. So face up to the sky, just like this. Look up, throw it, and just move a little straight and to the left. That's it. Just run straight to the left and your boomerang is going to be dancing around like this. But you have to move pretty quick in order to pull that off. Now I just wanted to show you some cool attachments on the boomerang with some Gliac weapons. So here is the Thunder Gliac horn. So that's going to go through and do a lot of damage because it is raining. So the enemies are are going to get wrecked with that one. And while the enemies are chasing me over here, I go ahead and try to attempt the same thing where I throw it up in the sky just like that. And I kind of run straight into the left and it looks like it triggered and hit me too. But you know what? It got the enemies. So that's pretty cool. Here's an example with the ice one.  The red vocablan is easy just go down right away. And just a great way to completely just not stop freeze enemies so they don't bother you. Here is an attempt with the ice boomerang in the sky and then I run straight and a little to the left and then the boomerang should rotate. Now this one is my favorite one by far and it's going to be summoning a death battle robot. This thing is going to destroy any enemy in your pathway. Oh, these are these are just amazing. Look at this. This thing is ready to go. It's got arms. It's got everything you need to power it up and it's going to just go ahead and destroy the enemies. It's got electric weapon. So if an enemy comes up to it, it's going to get shocked. Yep, that enemy is getting hit right now. Oh man, it's beaming down everything. There's a silver vocablan. The red ones are just getting nuked. The blue one's hiding over there and that. Yep, that's over. One's done for that silver one is going to be stuck in a shock loop until it's death. Horrible way to go down silver vocablan. I feel bad for you. Oh man. And the cool thing is if you want to know how to build a bunch of death robots like this, you can actually check out this video right over here. Seriously, go ahead and click this right now. You'll be able to build so many cool robots.


Is this uh the uh taxi uh me? Yeah, how can I help? Yes, so, um, I have a few inquires I uh first know what what do you put in the in the animal to make them stiff? Um, it depends what it is. Look, I specialize pretty much primarily in birds these days So what are you actually after? So it's a strange request.   So, uh, it's a no shock. It's a no shock that she dies soon. Okay And the kids they they said they don't want to never see My wife anymore. So, uh, I think I call I ask and I have money to pay Uh, would you consider a taxidermy on my wife and my my pig? No, I think that's actually interfering with the corpse. I think it's illegal What if uh, because I I I ask the funeral, uh, man, I say he asked me or you want a cremate You want berry? I say no, I uh call a taxidermy. He laughed too But uh, I uh would like to have my wife in her seat Looking out at the window down when the kids come home. I don't know. I don't know. I can't I only deal with fur and feathers Can you not to put same same stuff on you put in birth put in my wife If uh, if I check with the law after a funeral Even if you did it's not my area. I couldn't do that. I could not do that job for you You know how to do the taxidermy. Yes. I uh, you provide the service. I give you the money and No, I wouldn't do it. I wouldn't do it. Why uh, why not? I uh, I I pay you very uh, whatever you want to charge It means a lot to me and my Children to have my wife.  She always in bed So we'd like to have her stuffed and propped up in the lounge room looking out at the window No, no, I'm Look, my wife been sick for 10 years. Okay. She's sick for 10 years. We have talked about it. My wife My wife have no problem She does not want uh cremated. She doesn't want it. And my kids say they say papa Uh, where mommy dies. We never see her anymore. And uh, I think well, what if I Preserve her somehow and put her in her favorite lounge room chair and just have her in the house, huh? Yeah, look, I don't know how well human skin tans. I don't know. I don't know Would you another? I'm not your girl. Um, considering I work on like small birds Look, uh, what is little parrots and stuff? So it's not my What you normally what you normally charge for little bird little fluffy bird. What you normally charge Hey, look anyway, look, I've I've actually got to go and pick up my daughter.  I give you 20 000. I give you 20 000.   It's good to see you You understand it's uh, it's a strange thing. I know I know okay. We have a peak. We have a peak.  Look, uh, look, I give you 20 000.  Where can I stuff my wife? But nothing nothing comes up only uh, taxi Go google and go taxidermy near me and pick the next one on your list Yeah, it's not something. What do you you sell the stuff that you put in the bird. Do you sell it? Uh, no, I don't would what if I pay you to show me how to stuff my wife I don't know how to stuff your wife Well, how same thing with bird bird human same thing the bird walk on two leg the human work on two leg Feather skin the same thing Yeah, look, they're not look seriously. I've got a gun.  I begging you Please stuff my sick wife and uh put her in the lounge room for me under my kids Uh Or what about my pig?   Look, how about you check into the legalities of that? Okay. Yeah, I Okay, I call I call the police that question that it's actually illegal to do Okay.  Okay. I bring her round You available tomorrow, maybe 10 a.m. She wake up. Maybe 9 9 30. I give her some coffee Uh, yeah, no, I'm sorry. I'm not I bring her round. Yeah, I decide I bring her round I'm coming over tomorrow morning. Yes.  All right. Well, look, I'll see you then. Hey, who is this? Who is this? Look, I gotta go. Bye. I love you She sounded so chill. I like her.  Oh, that was the best online.   That's all right, but don't get it soft


Welcome to Sheboygan County government working for you my name is Adam Payne co-host of this program with county board chairman Bill Gehring and today we're very pleased to have a department head with us that has involvement with all 22 departments county wide Mr. Tim Finch our finance director Tim welcome. Thanks Adam glad to be here. Well good to have you here and as many of you I'm certain are aware if you've been following this program Tim generally joins us this time of year because we're in the midst of working on our 2008 budget process and so far so good in great part because of Tim Finch and his staff and the work that they do in the finance department. Tim please start by sharing a little bit about yourself and when you started as the Sheboygan County finance director. Sure glad to I've been in Sheboygan since the year 1999 and started in the finance department May 1st of 2000 and it's been a fun ride ever since never boring I can say every every day is a little bit different so very enjoyable. We do a lot of things in that department as you well know get into a lot of a lot of areas so it's it's always a challenge. So finance department as I mentioned you know a little bit about a lot you deal with every single department county wide and have the key role of making sure that the budget is prepared and that departments are working within budget parameters that Bill Gehring and the county board establishes who are very closely with the finance committee but for our viewers sake what are the what are the key roles and responsibilities of the finance department. Sure and then I'll tell you too what the most challenging department is to manage. Budgeting is a big thing for governments all government city county low more local level that's huge so that's probably the number one thing that we do we do external and internal financial reporting we're responsible for that counts payable counts receivable internal auditing debt management is a very interesting area internal controls financial forecasting financial policies procedures and something I do a lot is financial analysis giving you or Bill or county board or finance committee information on different things we might be considering and what's going to be the financial impact of doing those things. And with all that going on annually as I said the most important policy document that you help prepare is the annual county budget it's that time where we're right in the midst of developing the 2008 budget though it's 2007 we're preparing for 2008 and we really started that process back in February as you know we start rolling then but our our kickoff was just in June and and we're now meeting with departments what's the what's a general timetable what is the process for preparing the county budget. Sure it's it's always interesting because we really have three years going at one time we're looking at actual results for the prior year we're dealing with the current year and then we're looking ahead to the budget for the following year so it's quite a transition but as you said usually in February March you and Bill would get together start talking about what are some of the things we're looking at for the coming year usually I'll get involved somewhere in April or or thereabouts and talk about what are the challenges going to be in the past it's been health insurance has been one of our big challenges losses at the health care centers has been another one so those are things we'll kind of start to kick around you know you'll provide direction what we need to look at then we have our budget kickoff which is usually mid-June of every year at the kickoff County Board Chairman and yourself will give targets out to each department let them know this is what we're targeting as our goal for the upcoming budget year it's a very important part of the process gets all departments kind of on board and everyone's thinking the same thing we're shooting toward a target in a goal during July usually by July 6th usually we asked departments to kind of put their budget information together and then by July 13th they have to submit their information to the finance department we help them compile that July 2nd through August 10th they meet with yourself and myself we're kind of the first line of defense in the budgets to make sure that they meet that established target in goal and give them some advice maybe if there are things in their budget mechanically or wrong what they can do to correct that and then July 16th to the 24th would be when they go to their liaison committee get the approval of their committee that's the second line of defense to make sure that budget parameters have been followed and that goal is still out in front the liaison committee is really it's their it's their budget department heads prepare it's really their budget and they have to take ownership for it so this would be the time when they would do that August 13th at September 21st will be when the finance committee will meet with those committee members department heads go over each and every budget more questions will be asked at that point of course and then on October 30th the county board public hearing in line by line review the county board will go through every single budget and they'll go through by line item and they can ask any question they want they can make a recommendation to change a budget add something to a budget so that's the chance for the county board to have their say as a whole as one body and what they want to do with the budget also that's the point when the public could be involved and asking questions I think they can ask questions that I believe they have time to speak at the public hearing so if they have some comments on their budget process county government that's their opportunity to do that November 6th that would be the final adoption date of the budget for spoiling County so we get a little breather in the months of December in January and it really starts gearing up for the next year it's almost a year-on process you were kind in emphasizing the chairman Gearing and I have a role in establishing the goal and targets but certainly as you know and I want our viewers to appreciate that really it's a consensus building process because though Bill as chairman or the county board chair whoever he or she is in the future have a important leadership role there we work with the executive committee we work the finance committee and ultimately we have a county board leadership forum where we really try to get the full board behind establishing a goal Tim mentioned a goal a number of times and that's where the board establishes ultimately a goal that we're going to have a levy decrease or we're going to hold the line or a modest increase and I think that's helped position us for success the last few years you you did a nice summary going through the roles and responsibilities departments liaison committee as you know Tim right now we're meeting with those individual departments give me a sense or please give our viewers a sense of you know the role right now of the department the department head what is it that they're really doing to develop their budgets sure after the budget kickoff department heads have a responsibility to go back to their departments and start crafting that budget and they'll use usually the bigger departments will have a number of staff involved they have to look at their last year's budget what they see coming up in the future and start putting their their numbers together for presentation to their their committee so the department had really kicks it or they start the the initial work of actually putting that that budget together involved in that process you know as we mentioned before then as they come back and they review it with you and with myself to make sure it's going to meet that goal and target and if it doesn't talk about ways that we can tune it or make some adjustments so that will that will meet the established target now for 2008 the goal that the executive committee the finance committee and ultimately the county board established was to have a tax levy reduction first reduction in 21 years though all the targets were a modest increase so most departments most I must emphasize are going to receive a little over 3% so both a levy reduction but an increase for most departments which is a pretty nice situation to be in let's give our viewers a flavor for our total expenditures I know you brought some charts with you today just to first focus on the big picture what are the total expenditures for Sheboygan County sure glad to Adam I'm gonna hold the chart up here and hope that it stays fairly steady for 2008 this is our preliminary budget this is developed at the time that we set the targets for the departments these are the numbers that we began with to develop those targets so of course they'll change over time as we go along but you can see for total expenditures the the large departments in the county health and human services which is the kind of I'm not sure what color that is blue I must be colorblind sure what that is but $49 million in total expenditures that's that's our largest department by far and then just general governmental operations also very large at 29 million that would include register of deeds county clerk clerk of courts this attorney just a myriad of departments that do general government operations there's some of the beginners one I want to point out actually didn't come out too well in the graph we tried to blow it up we lost a number here but this is for the remaining facility at the health care center is rocking all that's 5.2 million and as I know you know Adam last year that was 6.1 million dollars for the health care center so there's been a reduction there as a result of the sales center and so expenses in total have come down as a result of that I think for 07 we're closer to 150 155 million correct and we're looking at 144 million so big picture total expenditures for 08 are anticipated to be about 144 145 million then what if you just turn to the property tax levy which is on the minds of a lot of citizens in Sheboygan County if we just focus on the tax levy the property tax levy how does that picture change who are big hitters now sure it's interesting because it is different the top department top tax levy department in the county right now is a sheriff's department which is the yellow one at the bottom about 13.3 million which actually surpassed human service department I think about two years ago it surpassed the human service department which is number two at about 12.7 million so the yellow and purple the two biggest tax levy departments in the county and also you know the other large hitters we have here we still have the health care centers at about five million dollars in tax levy there highway department 4.5 million debt service continues to be a large number however it is going down and that such situation is improving quite a bit and it is actually part of the reason for the being able to reduce the levy in 2008 as you know is because our debt services dropping so a total levy our total expenditure of about 145 million total property taxes out of that 145 million closer to 45 this is again anticipated for 08 and the big hitters if folks are wondering well who predominantly is drawing from that tax levy as you said the sheriff's department the health and human services department the health care centers even though we have now gone from two to one facility it's still about a five million dollar draw on the tax levy highway is in the big four then followed by debt service very good thank you Tim sure Tim as you know in 1999 the then county coordinator and county board changed the way we came about the budget a little bit differently they began to give targets and specific goals to committees how has that worked over the last five years how did that affect the levy sure glad to go actually I've got another chart here that I'll show which graphically show we'll show the viewers what's happened you can see it starts back in 1991 comes all the way out to 2008 and in 1991 we were about seven dollars per thousand for a rate and then it kind of started to slide and drop down in 1995 1996 then came back up strongly in 1999 2000 and 2000 was I believe was a time when the new budget process was established and one of the the goals of that I believe was to kind of stabilize the tax rate and if anything maybe have a slight downtrend but you know to eliminate those those swings as very successful as you can see from 2000 to 2004 we stabilized it began to drop a little bit but not in a kind of a wild pattern now from 04 on it's dropping fairly significantly due to a couple of things one would be the state mandated tax levy limits went into effect so that pretty much put us on a downward track plus some other good things have happened in shawing County to bring that rate down selling of Sunny Ridge has saved us a considerable amount of money we'll save more in the future debt services going down that's a very positive thing health insurance plan changes some of those have been seen dramatic effect on our budget so number of good things real very good policy things have happened to bring that down so the effect is in 2008 we're expecting right now a preliminary basis for the tax rate to be 525 okay that's really fantastic are there any external limits on what we can tax if we decided we needed to repave all the county roads in one year could we do that or does somebody tell us no we couldn't change the levy that yeah the short answer is no no we wouldn't want to do that and there there are still two limits in effect there's one limit that's been out there since 1993 which is a rate limit it's not really a factor for us right now because we're well above that rate limit but that is still an effect so if we would increase our level significantly enough we could bump into the rate limit but right now what's hitting what's limiting us right now is the levy limit and last for for this year it was 2.36 percent for 2008 it's 4 percent as state mandated or proposed state mandated limit we're of course gonna be below that's not a factor because we're actually gonna drop the levy or that's the plan to drop the levees so we're really not affected by those limits but we could be other counties will be okay we really have been doing well with the rate going down and next year perhaps the levy actually going down but what challenges do we face in the future what might have major effects down the road on but we need it to tax yeah we still in my opinion the long-term biggest challenge that we have and it's shared by many other governments is just the compounding of wage and benefit increases each year we're looking at between two and a half and three percent across the board increase plus we have normally we'll have step increases for for employees on top of the cross the board that's the biggest long-term challenge we have because that continues to compound every year the only way to address status to try to be is lean with your staff as you possibly can be and we've made some strides in that area rocking all will continue to be a challenge just as Sunny Ridge was a was a challenge for health care is very expensive to provide so that'll be an issue which we have to we have to address that unfunded mandates and reductions in federal programs such as the you know governmental transfer program which lost us a huge amount of money for support of our health care centers that's been a problem and just general unfunded mandates from the state level are more and more difficult to deal with so we have those challenges positive note health insurance is not as big an issue as it was a number of years ago so that's although it's still a long-term issue not nearly as much as it has one okay thank you Jim sir good news good news on the budget front good news with the trends we've seen the last five six years there's some real positives that certainly Chairman Gehring in the full County Board I think feel pretty good about but during this process of addressing this Sunny Ridge and that very emotional trying period and gut wrenching decision by the County Board some of the other reductions in programs and services that had to be made to either stay within the state levy cap requirements or just simply not have significant increases in the tax levy so but during that process of holding the line on the taxes we've also made some decisions to invest in this community some major capital projects have the County Board has invested in the benefit of the local economy and the quality of life in this community please share with our viewers what some of those capital improvements have been up late sure quite true number of good things continue to happen at the airport which we're able to develop considerable amount of federal and state funding so those projects have been very beneficial to the county and they've been pretty cost effective to do to runway and hangar expansion continues at the airport primarily right now the runway 321 extension is going to create the situation where they can do bring in larger aircraft plus they can fuel for longer flights so it's gonna give them capability a very nice enhancement to their capability out at the airport right here at UW Shabuigan the new information technology center is I believe complete or very close to being complete beautiful it's incredible I know you've been through it I haven't been through it yet but I hear it's amazing Shabuigan County funded funded that development and recently the science edition out here so UW Shabuigan has seen some of those good projects that have been funded by the by the county working on a phone system upgrade to get better technology in our phone system new software at Health and Human Services which is going to replace some aging software that really doesn't give them the capability that they need there it's been a big big project expansion of the Interurban Trail if you're a hiker bicycler you'd be real interested that they're trying to hook up with Ozark County and have the trail continue from there all the way up into Shabuigan so they're working on expanding that to be able to link up there ongoing roof replacement not real exciting but things that we we have to do in a number of county buildings the highway department they're not noticed unless there's a problem out on the road or folks aren't plowed out in time but they do some very important work and and they're investing in our infrastructure as well the tragic tragedy that happened in Minnesota with the bridge and recently there was some attention on our infrastructure here in Shabuigan County and it sounds like overall our bridges are in pretty good shape but the highway department and the county board also play an important role in the maintenance and upkeep of our infrastructure do they not? Oh absolutely yeah the highway department one big project they're going to be working on in the next year or two is Superior Avenue upgrading that road so yeah they do an amazing job five-year plan is a whole another budget process onto its own it's really a separate budgeting route than the normal budget so it's really kind of a another budget that we work on throughout the year and a number of folks have a hand in that and the executive committee kind of has the final say in what's going to happen and then the county board the ultimate say in what's going to be funded in those projects. The five-year plan that Tim just alluded to that's a capital improvement plan that the county board establishes Tim as a leadership role with pulling that together the finance committee executive committee pull that together and it's it's not just looking out six months or a year it's it's literally looking out five years and planning for those capital improvements and probably the most significant one you mentioned in addition to the airport the highway and some of those ongoing improvements is right here in the very facility we're in UW-Shabuigan has seen just tremendous attention the last three four years by the county board whether it's the new acuity technology center or the the science building and just beautiful facility and if you get a chance if you haven't been out here to UW recently we had the new dean Al Harderson just with us what last month bill come on out and take a look at this facility because this is the community's facility a lot of people don't recognize that it's a county building county building and grounds run and operated by the state but just a fantastic facility and would encourage you to take a look at it if you haven't with all this going on with 22 departments and and departments trying to work with budget constraints and specific targets and the infrastructure improvements that go on whether it's new phone system or putting a new roof on a building some of the things you just have to do how does the county board go about establishing priorities if they only have so much money to work with how did they decide where to spend it well the budget process is really where where it all begins and kind of supplementing that is the one thing that we had in the last few years is the Pepsi program which is where a program prioritization process that was hosted or implemented by the executive committee each chair of each standing committee was involved in took every program in the county threw it on the table and evaluated every single one and came out with a ranking system and departments have used that determining if they have to make cuts to the apartment they've used that process that ranking system to look at what are the top priorities and I think it's going to continue to be very effective so they use that five-year plan as we mentioned is another budget kind of within the overall county budget so within the normal budget the five-year plan and then the Pepsi process there's the prioritizing really goes on with the within those those documents you mentioned earlier the importance of the the public getting involved they can attend the hearings at the county board to have input on the budget process but you and I both know that because of the timetable and time and effort involved developing that process that budget the earlier you get involved the better and you mentioned that the budget you know it's developed predominantly by the department head and their staff presented to the liaison committee if you were what would be your advice to the citizenry of Sheboygan County if they wanted to get involved with the budget process what's probably the best vehicle for them to do so well the public hearing is where they could speak if they wanted to speak to the budget or county government that would that's going to be on October 31st 6 p.m. and the 5th floor of the courthouse they would come they could speak in the budget ask questions or they can hear they'll hear every single department will be reviewed as far as the budget process so that's probably the best place for them to have input and ask questions on the Sheboygan County budget but earlier in the process at the liaison committee level yes are those all open to the public and people attended individual committee meetings and discuss the budget or provide input at that time yeah absolutely any any of those meetings is open to the public and finance committee meetings as well those are open so if a citizen wanted to come and hear the department pitch their budget to the finance committee and see how that process works they could come to those are held in the administration building 508 New York Avenue usually in room 119 sometimes they'll go up to the third floor but yeah those are that's where the rubber really meets the road and you know a lot of the work and discussion about what's going to be in budget takes place so excellent thank you Tim we only have a couple of minutes remaining and I hope you got a nice snapshot or flavor for the overall budget process very nice overview Tim any last areas that you wanted to say a few words about or your finance department in particular the finance department the people are great my department I couldn't do what I do with without them so big big pat on the back to each and every one of them they're incredible just in general county budget process here this year has been very very positive I mean first have it tax-level reduction in 21 years quite amazing really when you think about it so it's this has been a little bit more fun to work on this budget I would agree now we just have to deliver that's right now we have to deliver then next year hope that we can meet the higher expectations the community yep deliver again right well Tim thank you for taking the time to join us today and putting together the charts and all the work you do we sure appreciate your leadership as finance director my pleasure thanks Adam and thank you for joining us on behalf of chairman Bill Gehring and the Sheboygan County Board we're pleased that you could join us today learn a little bit more about Sheboygan County government now it works if you have any questions or you want to get involved with the budget process don't hesitate to give us a call the county clerk's office Julie Glancy she's outstanding and she can tell you about the respective liaison committee meetings where they are when they meet you can go online we have Sheboygan County website to get additional information or don't hesitate to contact the county board chair of my office 459-3103 459-3103 if you'd like to get more information so again on behalf of Bill Gehring and myself thank you for joining us