Good afternoon, everyone. I am Kalpana Kanan. I'm the project coordinator for the education services for outreach at scale project at IIT Bombay. I welcome all the participants to this live session. I hope you and your family are safe during this pandemic. In this session, we will try to answer your queries. So we will address some general queries and then we will also address some subject-related queries. So I encourage you to send your queries through the YouTube live chat and we have people who will answer your queries. We will also take some of the queries live. So if you have any queries, you send it through the live chat. I hope you didn't have any major issues while registering for these courses. I know some of you would have faced some problems while paying the money because we are facing some payment gateway problem, especially using the UPI payment. So please if you think if your money has been detected from your account, then please be sure that your registration is confirmed and even if you get the failure notice, your name will appear in the participants' list after some time. So therefore please wait and watch because there is some delay in reconciliation. That's why we are facing this problem. We have also mentioned it on our lecture website, this issue. So this problem we are trying to solve but we don't know when it will get resolved. So after you register on Lakshya website, you have to also register on IT Bombay X website using the same email ID. In fact, my colleague Mr. Mahendra Prabhupada will after me, he will give a presentation where he will explain the whole process of registration. So I hope after he explains everything will be clear. So once you register on IT Bombay X website, the course content will be visible to you and it will appear on your dashboard. So the courses have already started. So these courses are in a self-paced MOOC, what we call it as self-paced MOOC. That means all the course content is available to you in the very first day. But you can take your own time to finish all these courses. So it depends on you. So that's why it's called self-paced. So you can finish the course even in a couple of weeks or you can take, so within the window of four months, you have to finish all your course requirement. So unless you finish the graded quizzes, you will not get the certificate. And for each course, there is a grading policy.  So in some courses, it says that you have to secure minimum 50% to get the certificate. Minimum 50% doesn't mean that in each quiz, you have to get 50%. For grading, we always take the weighted average. That means in all the graded quizzes throughout the course, after you finish the course, after you finish the graded quiz, your average score should be more than 50%. Then only you will get the certificate. In some courses, it is 40%. So you have to see what the grading policy is in the course in which you have registered. I also want all of you, if you are a first-time user and if you don't know how to navigate through the MOOC course, I want all of you to register in the demo course. It is available free of cost and it will hardly take 30 minutes to finish the demo course. So once you register in the demo course, you will know how to navigate through your course. So there are various tabs on the course. It is home and then you have the course tab, then you have discussion, you have progress, then you have other tabs. In each course, there will be some extra tabs. So you have to make use of those tabs and you will know how to navigate once you go through the demo course. So as I said, all these courses in which you have registered, they are available for a month, for four-month period. So it was open on July 15th and it will be kept open till 15th of November. So within this four-month period, you can access the course and you can, whenever you have time, you can access the course and you can attempt the quizzes. There are some practice quizzes also in all the courses, but those practice quizzes will not be counted towards your grades. So it is very important that you answer the graded quiz and you have to submit the answers. And only after the course finishes, that is only after 15th of November, you will get the certificate. The certificate will be available on your dashboard if you have secured more than 50% marks. So the certificate will be e-certificate. That is, you can download it and you can show it to your employers or you can also share it with your friends and relatives through social media. So it is an e-certificate. And we request you to follow the modules, weekly modules in the same fashion in which it appears. Supposing you have, in week one you have some topics, so I want all of you to follow the schedule which is there in the course, even though the whole course material is available to you, but I suggest that you follow it exactly the way it is presented. Then only your understanding will be better and you will not miss out any important topics or portion. So if you have any doubts in the course, I suggest you post it in the discussion forum. So if you have, and while posting in the discussion forum, you should always check if somebody else has raised whatever question you want to ask. If he or she has, if somebody has raised that question and it has been already answered, then please don't ask the same question again because it will waste everybody's time. And there are certain rules when you post your questions on the discussion forum. So I want you to follow those rules. Please don't start a new thread. If there is a thread already, if there is a discussion thread for any topic, please post your question if, and your question is related to that topic, please post your question in that thread only. Please don't post it, start a new thread and start posting your questions in a new thread. That will confuse the people who are answering and it will be difficult for any learner to search. So it is always better to follow the thread in the proper manner. So after the course ends on November 15th, the course will be archived. That means you will not be able to attempt any quiz after the deadline. So after November 15th, you will not be able to answer any graded quiz. So I request that you finish all your quizzes before the deadline of November 15. After November 15th, the course content will be available on your dashboard. So you don't have to worry about it. So it will always be there on your dashboard even after the course gets over. But only thing is you will not be able to attempt any quiz and we will generate the certificate maybe after two or three days after the course finishes. And for English course, because the assignments are going to be graded manually, so we will need more time. So maybe around November 30th or so, the certificates will be generated for both the English courses. So for other courses where there is no manual grading, the certificates will be generated as soon as maybe after two days after the course gets over. So I suggest each of you to go through the demo course and read the grading policy before you proceed to your course. So there are also practice quizzes but please note that practice quizzes are only meant for practice. There this thing will not be added to your grades. Some of you have registered for only English for oral communication and not for written communication and vice versa. So I suggest that if you are weak in English, it will be better for you to register for both these courses and usually you should do the English for oral communication before you do the English for written communication. So in case you are weak in English, I request you to register for both these courses to take full benefit of the course. And similarly for soft skills and workplace, in case you are going to apply for a new job assisting, these two courses are very useful. So if you are interested in going for a new job or career change, I request that you register for both these courses, soft skills as well as workplace communication. And latex course is very useful for those who are going to write big reports or thesis because it is a very good software to learn especially when you have to produce good documentation and it makes your life very easy. So in fact I wrote my PhD thesis using latex and I request that many of you after learning latex, I don't like to use word at all because it is so much easier to do many things using latex. So in case you are in a profession, especially for writing research papers, for publishing many articles where you have to refer many references, it is a very useful tool to learn. So I want people who are in such research kind of environment, for them latex is a very useful tool. So I request you to learn this properly and make use of it. So these courses were initially designed mainly for the college students, but some of these courses like English course and soft skill and workplace communication, I'm sure it can be many people from high schools and school students can also benefit. So in case you know any of your close friends or relatives who are in school and want to learn these courses, they are welcome to join. So I urge that you spread these words about these courses among your friends and the relatives and ask them to also register for these courses. And please remember that you have to use the discussion forum for any subject related queries. And for any administrative related queries, we are always there and you can always send email to co-support.itbombayx.in or eoutreach.it.itb. You can always send us an email and we will be happy to answer your questions. So I now request my colleague, so if you have any questions, you please post it on the chat and we will try to answer. And now I request my colleague Mahendra to take over and he will explain the registration process. Thank you and we have other people, Ritika, Rama and Feroza. They will be answering subject related questions after Mahendra. So thank you all for joining. Thank you ma'am. Hello everyone. My name is Mahendra Parmal and I hope most of the things are already cleared and but I have been getting some phone calls related to registrations as people are getting confused between the two websites of Lakshya and IIT Bombayx. So I just made a small presentation for you all so that it's become easy for you to how to register for the course. So whenever if you are somebody to register now, so there is a Lakshya website. In this if you see this is a sign up page. Okay in the sign up page you have to fill your personal details and then the organization name or your institute. If you are from school still you have to choose the institute and fill the details and then click on the submit button after filling the capture. Once you submit it successfully then this on-screen message will pop up and your when email will go to your account your given email address. You can either click here or you can directly go to your inbox. So this is sound like your message will come. This link you have to click to activate your account. Okay so once this email is verified it seems that my presentation is not visible to you all. Let me just repeat it one more time. So maybe Rishika can you? Yeah sure. Okay hi. So I'll be starting by addressing the questions for the workplace communication course. The first question that we got is by Babeli Seshagiri Rao who's asked what are the benefits of this course. So you learn the basics of communicating at the workplace and skills that will enable you to face the transition from being a student to working in a corporate setup where the communication is very different and this course is designed to help you learn the basic tenets of communication and social behavior that a workplace demands and a workplace brings together people from varied backgrounds and interests and so it demands a certain kind of communication. Factors like dressing sense, body language, your language while writing emails and other aspects that you might not give much importance to will be brought to your notice and based on certain seemingly small actions like you glancing at your phone during a meeting or your eye movements you may give off the wrong message of being inattentive or disinterested whereas that may not be the case and your hard work may not be recognized because of these factors and so there's always a risk of being misunderstood. So this course aims to help you learn the communication skills that a workplace demands so that you can express yourself in the right manner and be effective. The second question that we've got is from Mohammed Amir Malik who's asked why is the concept of workplace communication initiated when we are experiencing lockdown. How will it be beneficial at this point in time? So firstly this course was designed and executed long ago. It's been a continuous process of getting experts on board and asking them to give their opinion and state their experiences and the lockdown is a recent and unexpected phenomenon. However at this point the rerun of this course will help you work on skills that will be required when the lockdown period is over. As I mentioned for the previous answer the skill of workplace communication is very important as you'll be faced with various situations where you want to get your message across effectively and usually you might not have spent time on this because we jump from college to our workplace without giving much thought to the transition. So this lockdown in fact is the best time to perfect your workplace communication skills and be ready to face the corporate world once the lockdown is over. Now moving on to the course on written communication English for written communication. We have a question by Raghuram Bhattini who has asked what are the skills needed for effective written communication in English? So our course deals with this very question and through the course of the four modules we've tried to incorporate all the skills required to help you communicate effectively through writing. The basis of effective written communication in English is good grammar and a lot of practice. Inculcating the habit of reading is also imperative to make your written communication effective and it's a habit that most of us often tend to overlook. So I feel that working on your reading skills is as important as practicing your writing skills because it gives you exposure to the various kinds of writing and if you read a lot of well written texts you'll automatically be exposed to examples of effective written communication that you can keep in mind while writing. So do go through all the modules and attempt all the graded quizzes and all the practice quizzes and at the end of it we hope you'll imbibe the skills required to be effective in your English written communication. Then we have a question from M Muthumina who said how should I develop the skill of written English without grammatical error? Firstly you must work on perfecting your grammar skills which forms the basis of written communication. One has to be mindful of several details when it comes to writing in English which is why it's a little more complex than oral communication. Like just the misuse of a simple punctuation can change the entire meaning of what you're trying to convey. So through this course we've tried to make you aware of all these little details that are essential when it comes to written communication. There's also a video on common errors which points out the errors that one commonly makes and just being aware of these errors is the first step to minimizing your grammatical mistakes. Another thing that we keep stressing on is practice. Read more, write more no matter how challenging it can seem at the start. Make sure you attempt all the tests and practice will really help you refine your writing skills and in no time you'll find yourself writing without any errors. Do watch all the videos and feel free to raise doubts on the discussion forum if you face any difficulties. Now Rama will answer your questions on oral communication. Thank you. Hello, good afternoon all. It was nice to see that you've been doing well with your course and listening to all the lectures attentively. We were really very glad to have questions raised from your side and because of which of course we could answer your questions. Now as far as oral communication is concerned I had some three four questions that were raised. One of them was by Shaini Palder and he says how to initiate a conversation with anyone on any topic if not have proper knowledge about the subject. See as far as proper knowledge about the subject is concerned I would strongly suggest one should not initiate the conversation as such. In fact if caught in a situation like that okay where you're not really very sure as to what is to be said you would rather show your amazement and encourage the listener to do all the talking and you can find some more such ways to not embarrass yourself. Again not having proper knowledge is not a limitation if you know how to turn it around so that you can save the situation as such. Another thing is from what I understand when it comes to your question you seem to be worried about the language delivery the confidence and convincing the listener. It is not more so about the fact that you're not prepared but you're probably not in a position to deliver your thoughts correctly to the listener. So in that case well what I would suggest is you can overcome this period this fear over a period of time you know you as you gain knowledge you read more you listen to more news or whatever and you will also have to train your eyes and ears to pick up words while you're reading or when you're listening and if you consistently think in a particular language say for example English okay so sentence construction just happens you know when you're thinking more so in the sense that see every language whichever has a sentence structure for example you have a subject verb object and compliment this is just to give you an example so once you understand this link right there can be variations made okay and the sentence can be constructed constructed so one should not be so worried about how will I present once you understand the thoughts that you have to basically present it will come the time you'll have to be a little patient with yourself rather okay I hope that satisfies your question if you have any further doubts please let us know on the discussion forum again okay the next question comes from Sukrut Atkari he has a couple of doubts he says doubt one whenever I come across new words while reading I find its meaning in a dictionary that's a very good habit I must say we really appreciate students who follow the instructions that are given in the videos but in most cases he says I forget the meaning with time do you have any suggestions so that I can remember a word lifelong now that word lifelong is okay something that I would really want to focus on you can't really hold on anything lifelong as such should I say now on a serious note what I would suggest is the best way to overcome this situation this fear of yours is to refer to a thesaurus okay thesaurus gives you more options all right multiple options rather of the same word the only thing is that the context you'll have to remember so the only catch here is of course you have to know the context in which a particular word is used in the videos we have highlighted on brevity and how to make your language rich while presenting it be it either orally or written and another point you know to answer your same doubt I honestly feel that you cannot really forget your words if you use them consistently in your language you know so it will come do not you I don't expect you to lose hope or get frustrated so soon rather you train yourself with a larger vocabulary so to give you an example here let's take let's say a word like learn all right so learn will have multiple options in the thesaurus depending upon multiple situations for example learn will have education erudite knowledge teachings so these are several words related to learning all right now once you know these words rather well in that case it will be easy for you not to stick on to one particular word word lifelong as as you said okay so what is essential is to train yourself as to when to use the correct word out of this in the given context okay your second doubt was about how can I practice using these newly encountered words in my daily usage okay encountered well do you really encounter or you imbibe these words I again leave it to you to find out and decide for yourself but to answer your question okay it is more or less the same I would rather say that you should focus on a wider vocabulary and you need not hold on to a single word that you have already looked up in the dictionary so now I can say that I'm helping you with your doubts all right now the same activity can have other words used for example assist or guidance or aid or advice okay so these are just examples to make you understand that when you imbibe on these words you would know how to make use of them okay without losing the context in which they should be used okay so practice is the only key should I say and keep continuously speaking and writing and listening to English lectures or videos or tech talks I mean these are these are good enough to expose you to good language okay I hope that satisfies your doubts if there are any please let us know on the discuss forum the next question says I have a problem in the usage of prepositions okay which I think will be resolved by the end of the course definitely you are right now on the oral communication as such when you move on to the written communication part okay we have dealt prepositions in details okay so of course prepositions are nothing but they are linking words okay between a verb and the common noun all right it tells you about the position or you know whatever is required so in that case I would suggest that you hang on for a while as you come to written communication there is a whole module dedicated to prepositions and hopefully your doubts will be cleared by them okay moving on to the next question it says how to pronounce phonetic alphabets correctly and he says of course please add a video session containing pronunciation if possible please provide PDF modes containing whatever now this notes well we cannot really provide notes as such but the extra reading material has definitely been given in the additional notes part so you could look up to that you're also requested so as far as your problem about the phonetics of the alphabets is concerned okay what you need to do is you should listen to the digital dictionary okay the digital dictionary there's a small icon of which speaks out the word for you actually so once you hear it all right you will know how to pronounce the word correctly in that case so the digital dictionary of course will help you to learn the pronunciation of the words in the correct way and of course as I said the additional reference section also has further links to reading on phonetics thank you so much for your response moving on to the next question Mr Prashant Mali has said he finds it difficult to identify the same wobble sound and stress syllable how do I deal with it is what he says now let us understand one thing every letter and here what I mean is a consonant all right has a distinct sound that is attributed to it so when you say a wobble there are only five wobbles that is AEIOU you will have to train your ears to catch them as they are used again of course a digital dictionary is the best option I would say the best way to learn these sound patterns is with the help of your dictionary where they also give you I mean apart from the digital dictionary your your own copy of a dictionary will give you beyond the word there is something called transcription and they give those signs and symbols okay as to how the word has to be spelled the phonetics of every word is given in the dictionary the symbol that it stands for that letter that stands for and this would be a good way to start off plus online dictionary spells out the thing for you okay another thing is a language also follows a particular rhythm in that sense well one may say you know English is a funny language or it's a very irregular or a strange language but if you know the rules it really gets very interesting in the sense so if you are used to a particular letter and you use it the same way supposing to say that I did not take pauses I said everything in a monotone for example all right what will happen is it will sound very jarring to the ears one would not be in a position to appreciate the speaker all right again holding your attention while a person is speaking in monotone may may may lose your interest okay so in that case of course you know it becomes a little difficult for you know the initial in the initial learning process okay so just make sure that you listen more more and more okay that will probably help you as far as the you know picking up the words the stresses all right so depending on the given situation all right when I say you will have to now my stress here is on half all right because I'm asking you to focus on something so but then otherwise if I say the word half it doesn't come so forcefully right so by speaking as in when you lay force on certain words as of now okay rather than breaking them into consonants and vowels and trying to understand how to stress them right now just keep in mind that as we speak depending upon the situation this stress will happen except for the fact say that this is my daughter all right so if you understand that when you say daughter all right typically people would look into it as d-a-u-g-h-t-a so d-a becomes da and otter so they call it as data and not daughter but then because of that you sound there your there's a rounding of your mouth of the lips and so it becomes daughter and not daughter so once you understand these small small things all right learning would be of course fun okay so to avoid monotony should I say again okay to avoid monotony it is it is essential that we have different kind of stresses different at a given situation as such okay okay so in fact in the native world itself native English speaking world itself you can you can notice okay a change in the dialect amongst the the Londoners the Irish the Scottish the Welsh and so on and so forth okay in fact the Americans speak English in a very different way than the British are speaking okay so of course the Indians have our own flavor of the language mind you I'm not talking about English but yeah so each of us we come with our own flavor we add our own flavor to the language and so that is how this stresses so you cannot really define define as such you know as to how to deal with these sound vowels and stresses okay it changes according to the situation so my strongest recommendation would be to listen to TED talks and train your ears okay because there are variety of TED talks on a variety of subjects and they have variety of people giving these talks all right including of course certain Indian speakers also well so happy listening and trying to understand the vowel sounds and the stresses I hope that satisfies your question thank you so much for your response on this I end my answering session I hand it over to Piroja so hello everybody welcome to this live session so thank you for joining the course and there were some responses like the questions which are asked using the google form so the technical questions I request all of you to ask on the discussion forum because it will be easier to address over there because it involves coding you can post a screenshot of any error or off your code so sometimes you may feel that my code is perfect but it is not generating my PDF file as what it you as what you want to be you know all these things all this kind of things would require us to examine your code so it will be better if you could post a screenshot of your code or you can share with the over leaf link on the discussion forum we will get we will read your code and you will get back as to what the problem is one common problem which I would like to address over here is that people are trying having issues with mixtec so an other alternative is tech life which you can download there should not be any problems with integration or as such but we'll put up some steps as to how you can download tech life and get working with tech studio so mixtec or tech life are nothing but latex compilers where you're actually latex code is actually built and run whereas tech studio is an idea just you know like notepad or emacs or nowadays programmers are quite familiar with sublime atom visual studio code etc so latex tech studio is nothing but a latex IDE so other latex ideas like time tech works and so on another good alternative to an online ID is overly it is completely free like you can use it for n number of projects and we use it very frequently over here I would just like to address a few questions which have been raised so archana has asked how do we maintain latex for education school purposes so I would like to answer is that programming languages are being talked to small kids so if you if you actually have if you actually teach latex in the school it will be quite beneficial to the students as well as teachers I mean they will write their project reports using latex so you could have a standard template and students can just directly use that template so all the project reports would you know be quite uniform and quite easy to read right now teachers actually sometimes find it quite difficult where in students will write in some somewhere I did big font somewhere I didn't small font you know all these kind of issues can be just overseeing if you use latex so I guess it is a very good idea if you use latex in schools the other one is so somebody has so my sanghita has written saying that I'm very very conversant with word and can use all its features for creating table of contents list of tables figures use mentally so what is something different which I can achieve using latex then you can achieve this and much more with ease and without thinking much so you know latex is powerful it's open source you can run it on any operating system be it windows or linux or mac and it will produce the exact same result without even missing a comma or a full stop or any space so it has facilities it has numerous facilities for automating typesetting of complex documents mathematics auto numbering of sections of sections or right or if you are moving a particular subsection of word to another place what will happen to the numbering you know it the complex I mean you will run into numerous problems well in latex you will not run into the problem to such type of issues latex will handle auto numbering of even your actual sections in the document and off table of contents you can manage your cross references you can switch between different bibliography style by just changing one word whereas in word or in some other idea I mean some other softwares you would actually have to do a lot of more things whereas in latex if you would like just change the bibliography style say instead of id repellent running you write something else for acm or for say any other journal you just write the actual keyword which they provide and your bibliography style is changed it's like in a click of button so also the best part is that you do not think about how you will format you just write your content and latex will take care of your aesthetics and the beautiful way of rendering it also the latex community is very active there are various packages not only for just normal project reports but if you are in chemistry you are in bioinformatics you are in music you are in literature well there are packages for all sorts of things so I guess if you explore latex it would be very useful so I guess this is what I have to tell something I hope this answers your question Venkata Subramani Mana has asked whether there is any negative marking no there is no negative marking for any of the questions so you can just refer to the number of attempts that are been assigned to every question so usually a multiple choice question with a single answer that is around the button the radio button may have one attempt whereas if you have multiple answers correct so which is having a checkbox that is a box which you have to take when that would have say two or three attempts depending on how complex the question is and there's another question by Raju who is asking what is the level of the course the course is at a beginner's level so there's nothing much you need to know before you join into this course some basic text editing operations are more than sufficient for you to join this course yes I guess that's fine with I guess I'm done with the basic general questions which have been asked I just would like to reiterate please post your technical queries on the discussion forum we'll be happy to answer them yes that's it from my side should we switch thank you Spiroza so let me just see if I can give my presentation for registration so I'll just make it little big so everybody can see it properly so like I was trying to talk about the process of registration I hope everybody is able to see the registration at this presentation file in this we will talk about the sites which we are using for registration one is this Lakshya website which is this one and IIT Bombay X site so for registration you need to do the registration on Lakshya website first this is where all the payment related things will be handled and in IIT Bombay X where I'm scrolling my mouse here you will find all the course content okay so the first step for this website is if you are first timer in this website you have to sign up on this page click on the sign up button then you have to enter your email id create your own password personal details your institute details after filling the writing the capture don't forget to click on this checkbox because it's a safe declaration from your end once you successfully submit the sign up page you will get a message like this this is a on-screen message which says that you have initiated the registration on the website Lakshya website now you have to verify your account so for verification you will get an email in your inbox in this inbox you have to validate the email id once it is done this is how you will go back and your account will be verified once it is verified you have to login with the same email id which you have used for your sign up and password after login you will see the course announcements all these pages okay so I'm just trying to show you what if I want to participate in soft skills I say this and then I click on click here for registration form once I click there I will see this registration form my name and my institute name will appear as it is whatever I have filled during my sign up process and in the bottom I will see the breakup of the amount which I have to pay the course phase 275 and GST which we have to pay to the government and these are the two check boxes which you have to click once you do that you click on the pay now button once you click on the pay now button you will be routed to the payment gateway side you select the appropriate pay you payment gateway option it will ask you like this okay and then make payment once you make payment you can choose any of these options credit debit card net banking upi google pay scan and pay it seems that we are facing some difficulty in this google pay or upi payments though in the initial transaction it says that some of you have got transaction failure emails but please be reassured like Coltna madam has already informed you we are considering your registration if amount is debited from your bank okay you can choose your appropriate bank whatever is like your account and I'm just giving you the screenshot of the net banking once you complete make the payment you will get a message like this you have successfully paid and registered for soft skill and your registration status is confirmed in this I'll just go back yeah so you will be asked to enroll on IIT Bombay excite so we will be mapping you to the course but we expect you to register on the IIT Bombay excite before that so this is the provisional receipt which we are sharing with you that you have made the payment yeah so once you click on this IIT Bombay switch like this I was talking about here you have to register yourself and the registration in this page is very similar you just have to write your email id your full name public username is something which many people are confused with so you have to give the unique username okay so if it does not take then you have to try some other options okay and the password state so you can leave whatever is optional okay year of birth is optional other id card is optional even why highest level of education completed is optional and once you fill all the appropriate details you click on this button create an account you again have to make sure that you click on the checkbox once you do that you will get a verification email like you have got it for lecture site you have to then click on again verify your account like this you will get a message you have to click on this particular link so that your account will get activated this is how the message will come once you successfully verify your account and after you verified and you see after the login you will see the course name automatically appearing in your dashboard if it doesn't appear you may inform the IT Bombay team or wait for one or two working days generally we do thrice a day like we are registering all of you whoever has registered in their appropriate course relevant courses okay and this is how you will see the home page this is the course info page where all the details are given I would also like to show you how IT Bombay X like what all things you have to do when you are in IT Bombay X let me just jump to soft skills course okay yeah in this course after this course info page home page I will go to the course this is where all the videos it is are available even the grade quiz and not graded quiz are available on this particular thing okay as if you have internet or bandwidth issue I would recommend that you reduce the video quality size to 144 kbps so that your video doesn't buffer okay so in this if you click on the next next next you will get all the relevant information you fill appropriately like whatever is required so I wish you all best of luck and happy learning with us thank you so much I'll get back the control to Dr. Kalpana and I would request her to if she can close closing remarks thank you Mahendra thank you Mahendra so I'm happy that the presentation was you are able to present well so I want to thank all the participants for joining us for this live session so in case you have any other query which was not answered during this session so I request all of you to post it in the respective subject or discussion forum because otherwise we will not be able to handle your queries so I 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All right, we've got all three mics, so I think we'll go ahead and get started. Welcome everybody. My name is Mitch Connors. I'm a software engineer at Google and a TOC member of the Istio project. And I'm gonna be moderating this session, so I'd like my panelists to introduce themselves if they would. Is this working? Okay. I'm Netia, Danish Buddy, and I'm a software engineer on the console service mesh team. I'm Keith Maddox. I'm a senior engineering lead on the open service mesh project at Microsoft. I'm John Howard. I'm a software engineer at Google, working on Istio. Hi, I'm William Morgan, one of the creators of LinkerD and CEO of Boyant. Thanks. So our talk today is titled, service mesh maturity. Are we there yet? So if each of you could weigh in on one way that you see kind of service mesh as an industry maturing and also on one way that maybe you see that we still need to grow. Whoever wants in? All right, I'll go, I guess.  Are we fully there yet? No. One of the ways I've seen that we've matured is that it's not so hard to just go install a service mesh now and at least get started on something, right? If you look years past, like even just that hurdle was quite a bit for some people. There's still a lot of effort to reduce the cost of operations though, especially beyond day zero install. But I think one of the other areas of maturity is kind of the ecosystem. Even once you get your service mesh up and running, largely that provides a lot of building blocks, right?  So there's some tools, some users are building their own things, but I think the ecosystem around like just simply creating a deployment and having the automatically canary things of that nature has a lot of room for growth. Yeah, I'll say from our, from kind of the Linkerdee perspective, we've been saying the word service mesh since like 2016 or something. One thing that's really changed for us over the past year or two has been kind of the nature of those conversations where a lot of the early conversations were very open source, heavy and like enthusiastic audience members and like excited about the technology and wanting to really dive in. And that at least what I've seen has changed a bit to, there's still some of that, but a lot of the hype has kind of died off a little bit and the conversations we're having now are with companies that are trying to adopt a service mesh and they kind of know they need one and they know they need help in a lot of ways in adopting one. So it's shifted from an audience of people who are enthusiastic and want to do it themselves to people who maybe are not enthusiastic, but they see it as inevitable and they know they can't really do it themselves. And so that's been maybe in maturity more of the audience and of the technology. I think in the, are we there yet? No, I don't think so. I think there's a lot of maturity still ahead of us. I think especially when it comes to, kind of to John's point, it's really hard to get a functioning service mesh.  And I think if this whole system is gonna work it needs to be not significantly harder than adopting Kubernetes itself. Like it needs to be kind of like the next natural consequence and not like a whole new team and a whole new project. And so I've seen movement in that direction but I wouldn't say we're there yet. Yeah, so I think in general a lot of like the core traffic management APIs and stuff are kind of starting to show some maturity because we kind of see that implemented across most of the service meshes and now we're starting to standardize on APIs and stuff there. And then I was kind of just thinking about console specifically and where it's mature and where it needs to grow. And it has kind of, so console has existed as a service discovery tool kind of even before the concept of service mesh. And so it was kind of built with like heterogeneous environments in mind. And so I think like that's kind of an area where console kind of has been battle tested over time. And so I think as we kind of build these things and over time improve on them like we'll start to see maturity there. And then I think kind of a place where we're still growing. I guess I'll speak for console but maybe other service meshes also feel that way. But I think making it easier to use is still one of our biggest focuses. Yeah, I agree with a lot of what's been said. I think for me, one of the ways I've seen service meshes mature is that we've got it in the hands of more people. We've got more years under the belts of this word service mesh. And so because of that, I think that what we're seeing is a lot of validation of some of the problems that service mesh started off trying to solve. But we've also seen some areas where we anticipate as mesh being around, five, six years, we anticipate certain problems that would exist. And we haven't seen, or not that we haven't seen users have those problems, but they actually said, hey, what we really need is XYZ. One of the areas that comes to my mind in my work on open service mesh is around advanced use cases of PKI infrastructure, handling CA requirements, compliance, service meshes entering into those conversations. And now we're seeing customers come to us saying, hey, we know mesh is how we solve these compliances. If we know mesh is how we get there now to kind of the William's point, help us do that. And that's where I think we need to mature. I think we need to give customers an easy button in order for it to just work. Nice, so speaking of an easy button, one of the things that we've heard a lot about at this conference and has a lot of press releases recently is the Gateway API and now the Gamma Initiative, which I think you guys represent four service meshes. And I think all of them are doing something with Gamma Initiative and Gateway API. So it's cool to see that. I think we call it co-opetition, very neat. But what does it mean for a user that they can write a Gateway API for any of our service meshes? Why should that be important to them? I've got the mic, so I'll start. I am really excited at the work what we've been able to do in Gateway API and Gamma because here's what that means. Right now, if you're a user coming into Kubernetes and you learn, okay, I see the ingress resource exists. In fact, you were telling me earlier about your journey trying to use something besides STO. You're like, okay, ingress is there, it's been mature. And so they go towards ingress and then, okay, now I've got my mesh and I've got to learn, okay, instead of ingress, I've got to use this resource and then I've got to set this config and then I've got to that, this, that or the other. If we're all for traffic routing, we're not even talking about multi-cluster, we're talking about getting traffic into your Kubernetes cluster, which should be one of the more basic things that you're able to do when you sign on. And so with Gateway API, we're, you know, the people behind who start at that are reimagining the ways that we ingress traffic into your cluster. And then what we're doing with Gamma is we're looking to use those same APIs, those same primitives, those same concepts, the same models and use those for service mesh. So that way, there's not that gap, there's not that jump from this resource to that resource to this resource. It's one set of resources, one set of configuration for traffic routing for we're exploring policy, all the relation policy. And that can be consistent across Gateway or across ingress and mesh use cases. And so from a user experience perspective and an education perspective, that's very exciting to me. Yeah, one thing I wanted to highlight, I mean, I see people, you know, looking at a neutral standard and thinking like, oh, that's great, I can move between service meshes or run two service meshes, but I don't actually care about that because like almost everyone else, I only run one service mesh, right? So I'm fine with just using their APIs. But I think that actually, there's still a lot of benefits of the Gateway API for those types of users, right? There's still a huge ecosystem around APIs. So that's everything from documentation, tutorials, YouTube videos, that's integrations that are doing things like cert manager or external DNS or Rgo CD or all these types of things, right? You know, some of those integrations, they may happen to integrate with your mesh, they may integrate with 15 meshes and have a huge maintenance overhead so they can't actually work on features. You know, now there's just one API that's common for ingress, for mesh to integrate across the board. So I think we'll see a lot more integrations which will allow kind of what I mentioned earlier, like actually expanding, take the service mesh and get the building blocks actually used for something useful. So we'll see a lot of product offerings and we're already starting to see that on top of the Gateway API.  Well, no, I wouldn't say I hate them, but I personally am not a believer in standards for their own sake and I think for LinkerD especially, we've taken a very focused decision which is we are going to do what's right for our users, kind of regardless of any, and everything, not regardless of anything else, but everything else has got to be secondary to that. And yet, despite that, you know, we did adopt the Gateway API in our most recent release for one very important reason, which is, well, A, it was really well designed, so kudos to everyone involved, and B, it solved a really important problem for us which is that we needed mechanisms for LinkerD users to configure some of LinkerD's behavior, especially some of the newer stuff around route-based policies where you need ways of describing classes of HTTP traffic, and that's not an easy thing to do. And the Gateway API had done that in a really elegant way, in a really powerful way, and in a way that even though it wasn't designed for the service mesh kind of from the outset, it really worked for our use case. So we had to adopt it in kind of like a slightly funky way, which I hope to correct in the future, but it really solved an immediate problem for LinkerD, and that's why as soon as Keith and all the gamma stuff kicked off, I was like, you know, even though I hate standards, or you know, don't care about them, or you know, maybe at best I'm wary of them, because I've seen them webinarized, and I wrote a long blog post complaining about this. You know, we're getting involved in this because I think it's really good for LinkerD. So, you know, I guess I'm saying kudos, and like keep up the good work, and if you mess up, then you know, we're gone, we're out. Cool, yeah, I think I'm gonna end up plus oneing a lot of what people have said. So yeah, it's exciting that hopefully users of service mesh will be able to focus less on the UX because that will be consistent and documented kind of across multiple meshes and stuff, and care more about their more advanced use cases and stuff. And I think, I'm especially excited to see how the APIs will evolve for kind of east-west traffic and also for multi-cluster and multi-platform, so yeah. Yeah, no, I think that's a really good point too, is that, you know, I think there is a nice world in the future where we can think about configuring our ingress traffic with the same, you know, with the same kind of core building blocks as our mesh traffic and configure the policies in the same way, and that wasn't something that I had thought was really gonna be a possibility, but it seems like it is a possibility, you know, and I think that would be really great for users because at least from my experience, like one of the hardest parts of Kubernetes is just the fact that you have all these configuration objects that all have their own semantics and you have to like figure out how to, you know, make that work, and this is why people complain about like, oh, I'm spending all my life in YAML now, you know, it's not really YAML's fault, it's just like this is the mechanism by which we, you know, you have Kubernetes' power at your disposal, right? And so getting that right and having an API that, you know, can both span the full breadth of use cases that you need, plus it makes sense and like kind of has these logical building blocks really, really, really important, yeah, and yeah, again, I think Gateway API is awesome as an example of that. Nice, so one of the trend that we've heard at the conference this year, and we heard about it at Service MeshCon Europe, is sort of the side carless model for service meshes. I think actually just before this, we heard from Isovalent about Cilium and the way that they're doing side carless. We've also had a few sessions on Istio's new ambient mode that is side carless. So what's the motivation behind these models and is it really still a service mesh without side cars? I'm sure I can take this. I'll let William answer, is it a service mesh? I think he's the expert there, but yeah, so on side carless, I mean, really it's kind of a weird name but you know, we've ran into a lot of issues with running inside cars around operations. It's hard to upgrade, it's hard to scale, it's hard to onboard and off-board dynamically, you need to restart your pods to upgrade. That's one huge trend we see with Istio users is that they really see the fixes and then users don't actually upgrade because it's too painful, right? That's not something that you see as often with say your Ingress Gateway because you can do a rolling restart and kind of gradually deploy it out, it doesn't impact their applications at all. Some other things that cost every pod now has this side car process running which even if it happened to be using almost no resources, you certainly have to request some resources for it which has some overhead. So we often see a lot of if not CPU usage, CPU and memory requests that are just burning through users budgets. I mean, the list goes on, right? There's all sorts of issues we've uncovered with side cars. There's also plenty of benefits but we saw that a lot of users don't want to take on that cost of deploying a side car everywhere and they still want to engage in service mesh features whether that's using MTLS, telemetry or kind of more rich features like L7 traffic routing, load balancing, right? So that's kind of where the origins of moving away from side cars or offering alternatives to side cars I guess would be more accurate description come from. No. No, no, I mean, I don't think it seems right. Like, you know, so this is another thing I've written a long blog post, outlining all my complaints and opinions but side cars have a lot of problems and there's a lot of kind of annoyances that you have to go through to navigate them of which you mentioned a couple. The fact that pods are immutable in Kubernetes if you want to upgrade your side car well, you gotta roll the whole pod and so on. I believe that the side car model is still the best model from the perspective that I am most interested in which is kind of the operational simplicity one because it's the one that is really understandable. It's the one where it's very clear what component maps to what and especially as you start getting into the world of like zero trust security and all that stuff where you're trying to enforce everything at the most granular level, you have a very clear model. It's like, here is the side car. It enforces policy and TLS for this pod. It contains the secret for that pod and everything is very straightforward from there. So, I don't want to discount the utility of non-side car approach at least from the ambient perspective which I believe preserves the security things that I like about the side car model but I think given the simplicity and given the fact that these warts will largely be, maybe it's me being optimistic. I think a lot of these warts will be fixed by Kubernetes at some point. We'll figure out how to do startup ordering and like all that other stuff. I've looked at the options and I continue to be a fan of the side car model and we continue to push that forward with kind of the underlying difference maybe being that we've been spending all this time trying to make our side car as small as fast as possible to reduce the impact of the extra resource usage and so on. I think this is a, I think it's an interesting conversation to have because it's a, there are a set of engineering and security trade-offs that you're making at every step here and I don't, as much as I'd like to say that you're wrong and I'm right because that's what I'd love to say. I don't think that's really the case. I think it's a lot more nuanced than that. The side car API has been coming in the next Kubernetes release, right? For the last three, four years. I think it's going to happen at some point. Maybe not that specific, Kepp. So William, I saw on Twitter that you had a novel approach to a side carless model for Linkerdee. Did you want to walk us through that? Oh, you really want to hear about this? Okay.  So like, I can give you a kube cuddle. If you want side carless Linkerdee, I can deliver a kube cuddle. You know, that just like removes Linkerdee from the output. And in fact, we can use EBPF to do this, and then you get the best of both worlds. So we can have kube cuddle, you know, do the string manipulation in kernel land, which is credibly fast and efficient and bypasses all the network ops. And we can harness the true power of EBPF. And then you get the best of both worlds. You have the side car model under the hood, but you never have to see the fact that you have a side car. You missed wazam on my buzzword bingo. Oh, yeah. Okay, I'll take another crash. Did you consider adding S-bombs on there? Get the... Oh, yeah. See, I think we're on to something here. If there's any VCs in the audience, just know, you know, seed startup, pre-seed coming soon. But yeah, thinking about side cars and side carless, I actually have kind of this vision I'd like to see for service mesh, where things are even more transparent.  You know, service mesh took off as being a kind of transparent proxy.  You got traffic splitting, you get metrics, and it's just, it just works. But you know, at Open Service Mesh, when we were talking to a lot of our customers, what we're actually seeing is that a lot of the, and you know, we often hear the term like ownership, cost, cost of ownership. A lot of our users, our customers are saying, even still, like we just want NTLS, you know, we just want encryption. And we've striven to try to make OSM as simple as possible, but I can't help but feel that there is an easy, an easy button to sell out there. And you know, I've had a lot of conversations here talking about side carless ambient model and it's something that we're taking a look at, we're evaluating. But you know, I would love to be in a reality to where if you want encrypted traffic between your services, you can just spin up a Kubernetes cluster in your cloud provider of choice and it's just there. No, you know, the identity can come from something hosted, the, you know, something in your cluster takes care of all that, and you don't have to see it. You don't have to worry about your application container restarting. And like I said, side carless is attractive to me because of how it aligns with that vision. But you know, there's so many different ways to skin the proverbial cat. And I'm just looking forward to, you know, doing more research and seeing if we can't make that vision a reality someday. Yeah, I think on console we also, we see the potential of these side carless architectures and kind of the issues that people have been running into with side cars. And yeah, so I think we're just kind of looking into it and seeing where it might make sense to incorporate. Okay, I just want to respond to Keith's point because, you know, we also see that, right? We see a lot of people who are coming to Linkertie and they're like, you know, what, you know, I'm like, why are you doing this? Oh, okay, because we want MTLS, you know, we need encryption of traffic and transit.  They're like, you know, I know Linkertie has all this other cool stuff, but like this is all we need.  If you dig in, what we find is often, you know, they're using encryption and kind of like this very loose word where like, well, we don't just want encryption, we want like policy, right? And we want policy at like the layer seven level and stuff. And so like once you start unwinding what they actually want, it gets much closer to, oh, this is something that we're gonna have to solve in layer seven one way or another than just like, oh, we can slap IPsec on it and like, hey, everything's encrypted, the regulators are happy or whatever. So, you know, often I find we have to kind of educate, you know, some of the would be adopters, like MTL, if all you really care about is encryption and like that's it, like MTLS is total overkill for that. There's no reason, you know, it's really only once you start caring about workload identity and, you know, policy enforcement, zero trust and blah, blah, blah, that starts making a lot more sense.  How should users be thinking about the total cost of ownership of a service mesh? Not just onboarding, but all through the life cycle of their adoption. How do they compare and contrast? How do they prepare for total cost of ownership? And what do you all do to help mitigate the total cost of ownership for your users? Yeah, so I think when I think about total cost of ownership that includes things like operating your service mesh scale upgrades. How does it fit with how your organization is structured? And so I guess one example of that is that when you install a service mesh, you have a bunch of secrets and certificates that are associated with it. And I guess the default kind of thing for managing those secrets now is is to use Kubernetes secrets. And maybe if you're in like a multicluster setup or something or you're federating those, then you're copying Kubernetes secrets from one cluster to the other. And I guess one way that that console kind of helps with that problem of secrets management is just by having a tight integration with Vault, which is an open source tool for managing your credentials securely. So console can offload to Vault a lot of the operational things with secrets management. So storing those secrets securely, authorizing access to them and also like managing operations like rotation of your control plane certs. So yeah, so that's kind of a way that console tries to reduce that part of the cost of ownership. Then I think another thing we're kind of seeing is kind of the rise of managed service meshes to help manage the cost of operating that control plane. And yeah, I guess what else are we doing on console? Like we've also been working on kind of reducing the complexity of just like a console deployment so that there's less components to upgrade and less times that you need to do an upgrade by making more of the versions compatible with each other. So yeah. Yeah, total cost of ownership is a, I like the term, but I don't feel like it completely encompasses the nuance in the conversation. So if you want to use a service mesh and you want canary deployments, there are lots of ways to do that wrong. Not necessarily wrong, but lots of ways to do that that aren't up to say quote unquote industry standard. I did a talk a couple of months ago walking through kind of the evolution of networking and Kubernetes and one of the points that I made that I think is applicable here is that organizations have to make decisions based on their problems, based on the things they're trying to accomplish, whatever it is they're trying to solve. Now, nowadays, if you want a production ready service in the cloud that looks very much like the way that giant cloud providers, giant companies deploy their software. And that means you've got the complexity of those giant companies. But you might not have the resources for that. And so for a service mesh, this is all a long way to say that service meshes are very powerful pieces of technology. They can do a lot of really cool things. And of course, people are going to point to it and say, yes, I want that because it claims to do it simply. But at the end of the day, you are basically running another layer of networking through your cluster. And at that point, you are as an organization accepting, unless your mesh is managed, you're accepting some responsibility for understanding what's happening, for responding to incidents. Again, unless you get managed support from somebody, you don't get to just call someone and say, hey, something's not working. It requires relatively deep understanding to be able to debug into operationalized. So I say all that to say that the total cost of ownership of a service mesh, if you're writing it yourself, is probably more than you think. If you are fortunate enough to be at a company where you've got a dedicated platform team, then excellent, that's great growth opportunity to learn what's going on, to be involved in open source, which I'm always an advocate of, having come from a backend, from an end user company. But I would just say kind of beware. And as much as all of us and our respective projects can try to simplify things, there is an inherent cost to running something and getting some of these features.  Yeah, in a lot of ways, I think software sucks.  Yeah, I mean, obviously from our perspective as developers of service meshes, we try and chip away at the friction points that users hit, small issues to big issues like Kubernetes cap, Gateway API, Ambient, those types of things. But there's also the burden on the user. There's never going to be a service mesh, I would imagine, that you just press a button and you never have to think about anything at all about how a service mesh runs or what it does, right? You have to have some level of knowledge of what's going on in the system, just like you do with Kubernetes or even Linux or whatever you look at that you're running. So my recommendation would be to digest this slowly, right? There's no need to go use all 14 Istio custom resources on your first day, right? Most users are adopting a service mesh for some particular reason, maybe they want Ingress. Start with Ingress, add sidecars later as you need them, or maybe they want MTLS. Just do MTLS first, worry about canary deployments later once you've got experience and time to learn and onboard your team and that sort of thing. Yeah, I'm all on the managed service mesh train. I think that the number one cheapest way to actually operate a service mesh in production is to use a managed solution. Not coincidentally, I also sell a managed LinkerD solution which I highly recommend that you adopt immediately and come see me after this talk and I'll tell you, it's extremely expensive, but it's awesome. It's funny because we pick on Istio all day and we talk about, hey, LinkerD's faster and LinkerD's lighter and latency's lower and I like doing that just because I'm a mean person and also because it's true. But at the end of the day, what we find is that that stuff doesn't really matter to the people who are adopting LinkerD. Really, an extra millisecond here, there. Like their database takes like 500 milliseconds. Their application takes like 700 milliseconds. They've got much bigger fish to fry than like these tiny, tiny little millisecond here and there and the resource consumption, the same thing. Like it's much easier for them to throw more memory at the problem than to pay the really expensive cost, which is the human beings that they have to pay to operate this thing. So we find again and again that like the expense of the real cost driver, number one, like biggest factor in here is the humans that you have to dedicate to that. And of course we try and make LinkerD as simple as possible and as simplicity for me is this like really long conversation about simple versus easy and rich hickey and like all this stuff. And a lot of how LinkerD has been designed is with that philosophy kind of consciously and mine is also why we're adopting Gateway API. Like those CRDs are gonna be on your cluster anyways. Okay, well now you don't have to learn, we don't have to introduce anything new. So like you're kind of like sticking to Kubernetes as surface area as much as possible. But at the end of the day, like human beings are like the expensive and horrible parts of this. So reducing the amount of humans involved is in my opinion best way to reduce your TCO for a service mesh. Put everyone in this room out of a job as rapidly as possible, that's my advice. I've lost track. So each of you touched on in terms of total cost of ownership sort of power and simplicity of service mesh across the board regardless of which product you're talking about. How do you go about balancing those things for your users, giving them something that is powerful but simple enough that they maybe can't shoot themselves in the foot with it, hopefully? Yeah, sure. Yeah, I mean, in the beginning of the studio. Start with the worst offender. Go ahead, John. We're ready, we're listening. If this was three years ago, I would say it's all shifted to power, right?  We've actually, in many ways, actually reduced the number of features over the past few years rather than added to them, right? You know, as we found out what was important to users, what belonged in the core project versus integrations, that sort of thing, trying to simplify the offering. But you know, today and moving forward, I think it's really about layering. So, you know, once you have a proxy, there is a tendency to want to put everything that you could possibly ever want to do there, right? It's like, oh, why not? I just compile my entire application of Wasm and put it in the proxy, right? As an extreme.  Like, do we want to be a full-fledged API gateway? Probably not, but someone out there does and they should do that and then we should integrate with them, right? You know, we've done similar things with ambient mesh where we're splitting out like the L4 encryption layer from the L7 processing, those sort of things. So it's really not about like restricting, you know, features and that sort of thing to provide simplicity, but having different layers that users can choose, like at what layer they need to solve their problem at so that they don't need to, they just, everything at once and, you know, one product. Big plus one on the layering. That's one of the reasons I love open source so much. And it's awesome to see a conference like this with people working often in the open to provide accessibility points so that software can layer on top of software. When you are talking about balancing power and simplicity for those of us who like to use Envoy as a proxy, it's pretty darn complicated. It's pretty difficult to go and program, why meshes do that for you, at least Envoy based meshes do that for you. And so I think that's a model to think about moving forward. If meshes, Kubernetes provides one level, one layer of functionality, then maybe Envoy provides another, but then mesh is an interface for that. And by doing this work out in the open, by creating extensible, flexible APIs, I think we pave the way forward for people to come after us into more layers on top of that. Gateway API, Gamma is one area where I think that happens. It was often to be part of SMI as well and see things like Argo rollouts and Flagger build on top of that to provide progressive delivery. I think I saw Flagger announced Gateway API support moving in that direction, that's awesome. I think we end up creating a better ecosystem for everybody when we can provide those accessibility points, provide those layers and help users strike their own balance for power versus simplicity. Because there's no one answer.  And the challenge of software is to try to provide a product or a project with enough knobs to where it works for both. Yeah, I think, yeah, when I was thinking about power and simplicity, I feel like, yeah, across many meshes, we're seeing this kind of shift and focus on making it easier to use. Like a lot of them have really powerful features at this point. And so I think a lot of it will just be like continuing to look back at the models that we've built and rethink them and iterate on them. And so, yeah, like, I guess an example of this in console is that we had kind of a model of federations, so connecting services across clusters that existed for a really long time. And we kind of rethought about it from the ground up. And the reasons for that were because the old model of federation wasn't really suited towards how organizations kind of managed their infrastructure today. So we see a lot more of teams managing their own infrastructure. So like, team A is gonna own a couple of Cates clusters and that's where they're deploying stuff and team B might be deploying stuff on another set of clusters. So, yeah, so the kind of original model didn't fit so well with that. And so we rethought it, kind of made it so that, you know, things could be more decoupled. And yeah, so I think just kind of rethinking models as we kind of mature over time will kind of help bring that simplicity back. And then the other thing I think is still just like, yeah, managed service meshes. I think, you know, taking the cost of operating the control plane out of the user's hands is just, it does make it a lot easier to still be able to have the power of all these service meshes. But without needing to operate it. So the question was, how do you balance features and simplicity, yeah, so I think it's probably one of the core questions of any kind of software, not just the service mesh, you know, or like you don't want to end up with, like the worst is you end up with like a leaky abstraction where, you know, you're describing this beautiful model but if you use it in this one way, you actually, you know, have all these other unintended consequences, like performance is way worse than if you use it in this other way. You know, and I think for LinkerD, you know, we think about this every time we add features and this was part of why we were, you know, really reluctant until Gateway API came up to add things like path-based routing was, you know, I just envisioned the poor like Kubernetes SRE who's like, you know, just been tasked with adopting Kubernetes and now it's trying to learn a service mesh and like they've just absorbed like 200 CRDs and you know, this whole model of, you know, you put the code goes in the, you know, goes in the container which becomes an image which goes in the pod which goes behind the replica set which goes behind the deployment which goes behind the ingress and, you know, what I like about Kubernetes is like that stuff makes sense like they're all, they're logical and the pieces fit together but there's a lot, there's a lot there to absorb and you think of that poor person who's just, you know, had to come up to speed with all that and then you're introducing a service mesh and now there's like 70 more CRDs so a lot of our focus has been, how do we make this, you know, feel and smell as much like Kubernetes as possible, so when you're learning it, you can at least kind of relate it to all these other things that you've just absorbed and you know, there's like so many nuances in how you do that but I think for us that's been kind of the principle is make this, you know, stick as tightly as possible to the surface area of Kubernetes, make it feel and smell like the rest of Kubernetes and of course, you know, as soon as you get outside of Kubernetes and like things start breaking down, right? And then, you know, like you don't really necessarily have that to rely on so it only takes you so far but at least within the context of the cluster we can give it to you in like familiar terms so that's kind of like the configuration side and then there's also the operational side which is like, okay, now I'm running 10,000, you know, Linkardee Proxies or 10,000 Envoy's, you know, what is that like? How much tuning am I doing and how much, you know, how much do I have to become an Envoy expert to do this versus an Istio expert and how much do I have to become a Linkardee proxy expert versus a Linkardee expert and that, you know, I don't know that there's a good solution there, you know, I think that's just like, how do you write software that's really predictable to do and to run and when you run it, you know, you can build a mental model of what it's gonna do and if it violates that model, then you can be like, oh, that's weird as opposed to like, oh, it's just a magical thing and like, I don't really know what's going on here because that's when you get into like the dark territory of like, I don't know, we'll just try rebooting it and see if it works any better, right? And like, yes, that's an approach but it's not like the good approach. So it's all to say, I don't know, man, this is really hard, the really hard problem is one that we struggle with and I think that one that anyone who is trying to develop software meant to be consumed by other human beings has to struggle with on a regular basis. That makes sense. Well, we're out of time for today, so let's hear a round of applause for our panelists.


Hey everybody, this is Christian Buckley with another MVP buzz chat and talking today with Sarah. Hello. Hi Christian, how you doing? I'm doing well. And for folks that don't know you at all, who are you? Where are you? What do you do? So yeah, I'm a techie based in Scotland. I'm now a Microsoft MVP. I think that's the first time I've used that title.  That's my background. I've been in IT for about 17 odd years now. I'm now working at Octopus Deploy, working on their community team as a senior solutions architect. And the other thing that I always say is I'm the founder of the Glasgow Azure user group here in Scotland as well. So that's a rough intro to my personal or professional life. How has the user group activities been going? Are you guys kind of ramping back up kind of as we're getting to the end hopefully of pandemic? Yeah, so we've been running virtually on and off during the pandemic. Our next meetup should be at the end of April. I'm still debating whether we do that in person and figuring out the logistics. All of our kind of mass mandates and limits to people meeting should be finished by then, but I believe today we've just had the mass mandate reintroduced because of spikes. So it's an ever changing situation and I guess it's trying to balance a meeting people in person because we all want to do that again.  So yeah, it's an awkward situation. I think it was, was it February originally there was the Scottish summit that was supposed to happen. And that got moved to June. And so yeah, so hopefully that all happens. Yeah, I'm going to be over in that part of the world in June as well for a different event for commsverse. But yeah, I hope to spend a little time and get out and see so many friends that I've not seen for two and a half years. In fact, I was I was in London in December of 2019. So the European SharePoint conference which happened in Prague. And then I spent a few days over in London with family and then having been back. So tell me about like your role and so what do you what do you do for people that want to know what it like a solution architect what's that all about. So it's an interesting job title that octopus have chosen to label us with and other and other people would call us the developer relations or dev rail or advocates and because we've made the conscious decision not to use that title and because we find it a bit exclusive because we don't just talk to developers. And we talked to everybody in the IT department whether it's IT pros developers the CEO, you know the whole whole space so we didn't want to restrict ourselves by calling us developer relations. And certainly that's what the department is though. And so we use the job title senior solutions architect but really I'm an advocate for octopus. So, yeah. Have you said let's talk to the title but what so what's the actual day to day look like. I'm helping the community figure out how to use octopus solve the problems find the gaps in our documentation potentially in our product and and just engage with the community at the moment that means a lot of presentations and speaking at virtual meetups and user groups and I'm also working on a blog post series and different things on the YouTube channel so there's lots of content switching lots of trying to engage with the community trying to find people on Twitter and talk to people on Slack and discord. So yeah there's a wide variety of things that I do and so yeah it's always interesting never two days or the same. So what I'm going to have to say is that so I know that you've been in doing it for for many years and and I've been in this for my entire career since the early 90s and and it's so great to see so much more focus on the community of it not just like you're saying oh yeah we support the community and do things other but actually for organizations to recognize that active participation in the community as a company, as well as allowing making room for individuals to go in and say in different ways in the community are it's a strategy for companies and it's it's a I think it's in a very important strategy I think it's it's the way that your companies that are more plugged in the community will have a competitive advantage of those that refuse to be Yeah, I think so yeah I think people buy from people they don't necessarily buy a product sometimes so I think, like you say it's it's key for companies to get in the community and have and have some interaction there because that's ultimately what it really is like I sound like a marketer I guess I'm a marketer to a certain degree but you know people buy from people. It's a Disney program right yeah. Well it's true like if you think about the decisions you've made even when it's like you're buying a car or something you buy from a salesman who is engaging or a saleswoman who is really engaging you don't buy from the person that's not interested in and, you know, being passionate and excited about their product that they're selling ultimately so yeah it's that's really what it is. How do you divide or how do you separate kind of the the neutral MVP hat from the company official representative hat. And I don't think it's necessarily come up because octopus and is in all areas so it's not only just Microsoft that they can, they can work with. It's like a multi legged creature out there. Yeah, it's we have that multi cloud support and we also talk to various different audiences so yes there is a little overlap but there's also lots of new things that I can explore that can be completely work related, and then I can do my MVP and kind of activities or community activities, and without having a crossover and have any conflict there, hopefully. I know that some people struggle with that to understand well what's the difference I'm doing a lot of community related things but yeah when you go and you look at them like I do a ton of stuff that's community related, but is directly part of my job. You know, and so I don't add those items into my list of contributions that I submit to be renewed every year with Microsoft. I, the things that I submit are the things which are completely separate from my company, they may have paid for me to travel like that's great to do that but it's my time my weekend, you know the articles that I write that are out for for a third party site that participation. Some people have a difficult time kind of separating those two some companies have a difficult time separating those two. Yeah, I think there's things I learned on the job like for example I have been having fun with GitHub actions and making it interact with Azure and things like that. And one of the things that I found that I needed to make notes of and have written notes myself around was creating the service principle for have been able to connect with GitHub actions. So I will write a blog post about that now it's not appropriate for the work blog or documentation because we already have some documentation about that. So I have some notes to refer to next time I have to do that because I'm going to forget plus sharing that with the community will help other people potentially find that and help and engage them. So there's there's separation there where I've learned something from my job, but I can actually reuse that potentially without it being conflicting, if that makes sense. And hopefully that's the right definition of non conflicting. But that's something that I mean I had an interesting conversation with senior executive at Microsoft a few years back who I was trying to be very careful with making sure that you know information that that was being shared with me that was under NDA is an MVP. I wasn't even sharing it with my product team. I was being so careful. And this VP is just like, no Christian you're doing it wrong and we were assuming that you're taking that knowledge.  That's one of those advantages, but that's one of those things where, again, I was trying to figure out what is the line what what can I do. Where am I truly neutral. I always looked at it as a badge of honor where I would get done with the presentation of something and somebody go and say, I have no idea what your company does like right because I didn't talk about my company at all I was presenting on SharePoint or teams or whatever that is and and it's like so what does your company do and you know you don't have to hammer people over the head. There's a usually a natural progression. I said if you're engaging they like the content that you shared your opinion around that that that next step is they'll ask well what do you do what does your company do and there's that opportunity. Yep, yep. So what was your path to becoming the MVP. So it's, it's a kind of long and winding one. So I probably started blogging about maybe 2015 2016 around that kind of maybe even earlier than that to be honest. And at that time I was working for another big company here in Scotland, and I was actually talking to the MVP program about being an MVP because at the same time I was also involved in running the Glasgow Azure user group and starting that up. And then I ended up becoming a Microsoft employee so I had to stop the conversation around being an MVP. And I worked for Microsoft for three, three and a half years and and then recently left and reignited that conversation around MVP nomination so yeah it's been round about. And like you're saying, a lot of my job at Microsoft was community focused I was getting paid to do a lot of community activities but I also did a lot of activities myself and kept that very separate because that was something that was mine wasn't Microsoft associated I did it in my personal time because I wanted to because I enjoyed it and I got a lot from it. So yeah, I was doing a lot of activities simultaneous lesbian and Microsoft employee but as I'm sure you know when your listeners know you can't be an MVP and a Microsoft employee at the same time so it's nice to get that award finally after after kind of looking at it for a few years so yeah I've kind of taken a long and windy path to get that award so. You know, I think there are two that I know of that are MVPs that became an MVP within a month or two after leaving Microsoft, some people say well how could you do that like it has to be because these were people like, like you were doing you're still doing community part of your job. Yeah, but there's a lot of us that, regardless of the day job, we're doing a lot of other sometimes unrelated activities I my last two years at Microsoft. I was over in the advertising area and some advertising operations, and yet I was still participating in the user groups I was on the board there in Seattle, I was still involved in that that part of community. But I of course amped that up did much more as soon as I had left Microsoft, but these were these two other former Microsoft people had been doing such major things out there podcast and shows and things which were unrelated to their day jobs that it just was a natural when they left and Microsoft team figured out somebody submitted their name and like well of course these people have been doing stuff all along and so it. Yeah, it there's not a I say this again and again, as you probably know to there's not a like a black it's a black box mean there's there's not like a checklist of oh if you do these 10 things you will become an MVP. But it's it all rooted it it's all rooted in that community activity. Yeah, so very cool well so what else what are you speaking on now what are your kind of the passion projects or topics. And so I'm actually learning Azure bicep so ironic I had to leave Microsoft before I learned it or found the time to learn it. But yeah, I'm kind of dialing into Azure bicep and having a look at that and it kind of ties in obviously with where I'm going with the job as well about automation and deployments. So it's nice to have that kind of passion project and be able to use it work and again trying to keep things separate. But yeah, so Azure bicep is one of the things I'm passionate about and I'm also passionate about Windows package manager and I wrote a learn module about that just before I left Microsoft and got that published and I still think it's a great tool so I'm trying to submit some talks to conferences around package managers and things like that because I think it's an underrated tool that I'm not a lot of people use and there's definitely lots of things you can use it for and so yeah that's my kind of two passion areas right now. That's a you just that's a great strategy for people that want to kind of stand out as well as just to go and dig through the list of there's so many different products so many different things and there are there are some really cool tools which are not as is you know as visual as as you know out out in front as other major announcements things are out there so you can actually go and always tell people talk about share what you know what you're working with so if you've discovered some tools or scripts or or package some solution out there that you've just not heard that much about right about it talk about it and it could be a pathway to becoming an MVP. Yeah, my colleague on Thomas at Microsoft always talks about filling the gap fill the gaps it's there with you know find that find that gap and then fill it and so I'm always always mindful of doing that as well. Which is not to say you shouldn't write about talk about things that others have written and talked about it well because you have your perspective your your background on that as well but but yeah that's a finding those gaps and fill those gaps is always a great strategy. Well Sarah will thanks so much for taking the time for folks that want to find out more about you or find you what are the best ways to reach you and someone Twitter as techie lass and or my blog is techie lass.com. Thank you.