It's a blessing to have, you know, the Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi, and the child running from room to room. Yes, multiple rooms. I know, it's amazing, we have, this is amazing, and he's actually reading a book right now which is a blessing. I'm Susan Lori Parks and we've been doing this show for 11 years and first in the lobby of the Public Theater and then HowlRound came on board and we started live streaming from the lobby of the Public Theater and now we're live streaming from our homes. So thank you to the Public Theater and thank you to HowlRound for making this possible. This is all about you and encouraging you to do your work. If it's creative work, great, if it's writing, awesome, but if it's, you know, woodworking or you want to work on your water ballet or whatever, you know, we're here to encourage you because in my experience, and I've been a creative person for a long, long time, in my experience, the questions about how do I keep going? How do I stop? How do I encourage myself? How do I get those not-helpful voices out of my head? Those waft through all aspects of all our endeavors, creative or non-creative. And we gather together to encourage each other as it should be. So if you have, what we're going to do is we work together for 20 minutes and then we talk about your creative process. We don't have time to read, to have you read to me specific works, but we do have time to talk generally to keep everybody involved. And should you have a question about your creative process, Audrey will tell you how to get in touch. Go. Thanks, SLP. If you're inside of the Zoom, all you need to do is click on the participant button, likely at the bottom of your screen on a laptop or the top of your iPad or tablet, and there's a raise your hand button in that tab that you can click on. And if you're watching on HowlRound.tv, you can tweet at us at Watch Me Work SLP with the hashtag HowlRound, H-O-W-L-R-O-U-N-D, and if you, you can also tweet at the public theaters, Twitter, which is at public theater NY, or right to the public theaters, Instagram. And those are all the ways. Here we go. We're going to work for 20 minutes. Okay. And. Great.  The time just flew. That's a nice feeling. So anybody have any questions? We actually have a question from social media. Oh, hi. Yeah, I'm going to read it to you right now. Here we go. This person is, their name is Kay Boy. SLP, you are saving my writing life. I create cross-genre essays mixing nonfiction, poetry, sound art, and other forms. My question is, what can I do when the writing process is haunted by memories of having work dismissed entirely on the basis of irrelevant stereotypes about me? Gender, identity, youth background, et cetera, rather than on critique of the work itself. Sorry, I'm having trouble reading. Even absurd moments like being told I should be, I should write in more typical, typical for my gender, keep resurfacing. On one level, I feel silly asking this, given how many writers and artists struggle with internalizing this kind of reductiveness, but I'm doing a bad job fielding it right now. For my last piece, I spiraled the torment into the subject. That worked, but I can't do it here because the current piece must be tightly focused on its topic, the act of translation. Do you have any suggestions about how I can protect the writing process in the face of these co-arising hauntings? Thank you. Wow. That's a great question. I would say it was written out on social media and very beautifully written also. So win-win for you, K-boy.  So a lot of times when people, we do our best efforts. We're working honestly and fullheartedly, fullheartedly, not fullheartedly.  I just say use it for fuel.  I would just say, prove them wrong, keep writing. You can write about whatever you want and I have, for my entire writing career, people in telling me how not to write and what I should and shouldn't be writing about. If I'm political, they say I shouldn't be political. If I'm poetic, they say I shouldn't be poetic. If I'm angry, they say I shouldn't be angry. If I'm not angry, they say I shouldn't be, it's always something. There are people out there who make it their life's work to try to shut down the honest and beautiful efforts of other people.  Because they have, if they're giving you an honest critique about your work, perhaps this needs to be great.  You need to keep writing and you can use this community as your resource. Again, we're here to encourage you. Sometimes we take it a task and hold your feet to the fire to keep you going. But it comes from a desire to love you and encourage you and encourage you to love the creative person that is living so beautifully inside you. So keep on keeping on. Ain't nobody going to turn me around. These are the mantras of the movement in the 60s, civil rights movement, 50s and 60s. Ain't nobody, I'm doing this. Mantras are mind vaccines and whether you're an anti-vaxxer or not, I don't really care but these really work and it doesn't involve sticking something in your arm. Ain't nobody going to turn me around. That's a great one. Each one, teach one. That's another great one. Lift others as you climb. This little light of mine, I'm going to let it shine. That's a really good one too. If it worked for folks, black folks and other folks in the 60s and 50s and all through history, it will work for you today. Thank you, I saw Pee. And I'm angry at those people on your behalf. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Those guys.  Right? We can say that. We can say that.  Hi. Yeah. Thank you. All right. Kim, you are up next. Hi, Kim. Hi. Hi, Audrey. Thank you so much. You're so adorable. I just see you every day. And Susan, Laurie, moving from California to stalk you, I'm going to sit outside your house because I love you so much. I just came in 3,000 miles away. So I'm working on a piece that I've never written a television script before. So there's multi-layers, there's a lot of characters. I've been studying the scripts of The Best Wing and a lot of Aaron Sorkin's work because he's so brilliant and John Rimes with Grey's Anatomy to try to figure things out. And I noticed that they use teasers a lot. How important is the teaser? Is it essential? Is it a prelude to the rest of the show or is it just a little link in the side so the credits can roll?  Right? Right? So my knowledge of TV writing, I mean, and this is what I know, I mean, perhaps Aaron Sorkin or Shonda Rhimes, two brilliant TV writers will say differently, but in my experience when I write a TV script, a teleplay, the teaser is the shape of things to come, you know, like Orna Colbin's album, it holds some major seeds for the rest of the episode. I mean, teaser, it's interesting.   Hey, thank you so much. You're so adorable. Yes. Yes. So you put the ball on the golf tee and tease it up. So you're actually the teaser, I don't know if that's a real way to look at the thing, but in my poetic mind, that's how I just thought of it just now, like, huh. So I would say it should hold the seeds of the episode, you know, out, start, you know, tickled out the major themes or story points or what you're going to unfold in your episode. Thank you very much. I really appreciate that because I'm, and yesterday helped too, because I'm very overwhelmed with the minority of the project and it continuing, it's not a play where I can go the end move on. So this is also new to me. It's an all dog learning new trick. And so yesterday was helpful too, when you were talking about, like, just a prelude to the rest of the show, where's it just a little vignette. So I can look at each scene as a little tiny vignette and spend 10 or 20 minutes just working on that and do it in part acts as opposed to feeling so overwhelmed or just sitting down and writing a whole episode of the first, you know, first shitty draft. Exactly. Exactly. The fun thing about TV shows, you know, sorry, go ahead. No, that was it. Okay. Okay. That's great. And the cool thing about also a teleplay is, you know, it's short for it's the 30 minute one or the hour one, which is only like 42, five pages, you know, so it's awesome.  Thank you, Kim. And fun to make. Yes. Thanks, SLP. Thanks, Kim. All right. Raza, I am going to unmute you. Are you there? Hi. Can you hear me? Yes. Hi. Hi. Thank you, Audrey. Thank you, Susan. Wonderful. My question I have, I guess almost maybe eight or maybe 10 short stories that I've been working on or seems like many, many years and takes me a long time to move it from first draft to a place where I feel, you know, that I like it like the form it's in and I feel like it's, you know, something I would even hope to get published. So like this particular story I'm working on right now and it's thing I started it like almost six years ago and then I put it away and then this past year I started working on it and but almost now like maybe even today or this week I feel like, okay, I think I'm done with this story. So my question is, yeah, my process seems really, really long and I give up some time. So is there, do you have any suggestions for sort of speeding it up? I love your question, Raza.  There's nothing wrong or bad about that or unprofessional or whatever. But since you add to that, I would like to speed it up. We can talk about things you can do. Is it, do you find yourself, are you a perfectionist? Does it have to be perfect before you send it out? What do you think? I think it takes you so long, right? I know, it's a good question. I asked myself that too. I want to say that these stories seem to come from a place of drama or trauma where there's something that really I feel strongly about. And then the story comes out of that and then it's very raw and I go back to it and try and make it into a story. Maybe it's just a scene initially and I'm trying to make it build it into a short story. They're all short stories. And that process seems to take a long time. And then I'm going to be really honest here. It's not like I'm putting myself down. I feel like I have things to say, but my writing is really, you know, I read a lot and some writings are really beautiful and lyrical. And that's not my writing, which is fine. I've accepted it. But I also don't want it to be to get in the way of people wanting to read what I have to say. So, you know, like now recently I've started recording, like reading my story out loud to myself. And that's been helpful. Like I read a sentence and I'm like, oh, OK, then I change it immediately. Right. That's been helpful to get it like flow to flow better. How what is your writing practice like, Rasa, your daily writing practice? What does it look like? I am pretty erratic, I would say. I would go for a great number of weeks where I write regularly. And then I could fall off for a few months and I could take it up depending on what else is going on in my life. OK, so this is where SLP goes out on a limb and makes a guess. So my guess, my feeling, and again, this is because you do want to, you know, speed up the process a little bit. You don't have that much more time, yeah. Well, well, we have as much time as we do and it's not how much time we have but how we use it, right, how we spend it, right? So what we want to do is spend it beautifully and generously, lavishly, to accomplish the things that we want to accomplish. So I would suggest that you get yourself a daily writing practice. So do you have a relationship or a pet or do you have anything, anyone in your life like a pet or a mouse? OK, so you have a sweetheart person. Great, OK, so if you only saw your sweetheart once a month, right, they might not feel like you're really into them, right? The muse is the same way. The muse needs to be attended to, courted, engaged with, you know, right? So if we had a dog, folks, and you only walked it like once every week, once a week maybe, the dog would be a mess, right, and would be making messes. It wouldn't be, you wouldn't have that great relationship that you hoped to have. So what you might want to do, Rasa, is actively develop a better relationship with your muse, OK? Even though you are writing about things you say that come from trauma, your muse, the spirit, the great spirit that's bringing you these stories, these short stories, these beautiful short stories, they're saying, but I would deliver every day, but you're only home like once a month, right? Is it possible, Rasa, that you could develop a writing practice that is a daily writing practice of no more than 15 minutes? Is that possible? Does it sound like a lot? What do you think? Tell the truth. No, no, it doesn't sound like a lot at all. I feel like often it's, especially like now when I want to work on it and edit it and bring it to a place where I'm satisfied with it, it's better. It's almost like I don't know how to do it, you know, like I look at the same line over and over, I look at the same paragraph and I'm like, what should I do here? You know? I am confident that the muse, the spirit's going to tell you, okay? I have, I'm 57 years old, I've been writing, you know, since I was like eight, you know? The spirit never fails you, but you have to show up, which is part of this experience we're having right now. We make a commitment to show up for each other and for ourselves and for our work. And we make a commitment to listen to the spirit, to the higher power, however you want to call it, whatever it is, the energetic force field is running around, you know, whatever, right? And the spirit will show up for you. If you don't know how to rewrite and you sit with your work for 15 minutes a day, and I keep, when I say time, I keep holding up a timer. I do not hold up the crack vial, the crack pipe, right? I'm holding up the timer because all it does is tell time, all it does is count down time. These are really great to get. And if you show up every day for 15 minutes or 10 minutes a day sitting in your writing area with your work in front of you, and if you sit there for 10 minutes and say, I don't know how to rewrite this, I really don't know how, every day, answers will come to you. Okay. Because I believe you do know how. Okay.  I'm very good at this. How long more are you doing this? Let's say forever. Let's just start. Well, we're going to be here tomorrow. We're taking it one day at a time. We're going to be here tomorrow. We've been doing it for 11 years, not every day like this, but I intend to do it because again, HowlRound and the Public Theater make it easy because they do all the background infrastructure, web, online, facility stuff, and all we have to do, all of us is, you know, click the link, sign up and click the link. So okay, but again, it's not about how much time we have together, but how we're going to use that time. So hear me today, Rasa, and say, set up a writing practice for yourself 10, 15 minutes a day. Okay, show up for yourself starting today. Okay. And try doing it tomorrow. Come to watch me work tomorrow. I've been coming for several weeks. There you go. See, you got it in the bag already. You got this. Keep asking questions. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. I'm very proud of you. You sound like you're writing about really difficult stuff. So your power to you. Thank you. Welcome. Thank you. Nice to see you. All right. Heather, you are up next. Do my mouse work? No. No mouse. Did that work? There. I have unmuted me. Thank you. Okay. Sorry. Hi. Thank you so much for being here. I've been kind of lurking, watching from the HowlRound Theater Commons webpage for a while.  But this is about you. I'm shaking. This is about you. I'm shaking. This is about you. I know. I know. I heard you many times say that. It's been a while. So here's the situation with me. I'm a theater practitioner, director, teacher. I just got back from a pretty large grant opportunity working in France doing applied theater as a Fulbright scholar. And it was like an incredible opportunity. And I get back and COVID hits. And I haven't been. Thank you for the clapping. I saw so many clapping. Thank you. So I get back early February and COVID hits. And we're all in quarantine. And I haven't been in my community very much at all, like in the embodied experience. And I have thousands and thousands of notes of my Fulbright experience that I've been sitting on almost six months now. And meanwhile, I'm trying to process those experiences I had over there. And for academic publication, which I've actually never been able to do yet in my entire academic career.  Then there's this other beast project where I'm hearing voices that want stories to be told. And these are experiences from my own life that I've been kind of holding only in journals and diaries and in experiences that have been, they've shaped me. But it's more than that. It's like, as a theater dramatist, to a certain extent, I see everyone as kind of a character anyway. But the first call, and I don't want to really repeat what she said, but the fact that I did write something recently, I didn't name names, but people kind of figured out who I was talking about in a bit that I had published. And I got into a lot of trouble with my family about this. And to the point where I don't think I can talk to them for a while. But I feel better that I said what I said. I feel actually really, really good about what I said because it was my truth. And I pointed out some real toxic dysfunction.  Like I'm literally writing in journals and diaries wondering, do I write what I want to write as a pseudonym? Do I make this into a play or a novel and hide it? Because I've never actually given myself the privilege to think that I'm a fiction writer of any sort. I have written plays, but they've been adaptations. And I have, of course, written tons of academic work. When I was younger, like a teenager, I was writing all the time, stories and poetry. And I've lost that. I'm in my mid-40s now. And so I guess I just don't know where to... At what point does one make a decision? This is going to be a play, or this is going to be a novel, or this is going to be a screenplay because I see it in all these forms. And I just, I feel really out of practice and scared right now. And not quite sure how to be gentle with myself in the process because of how much kind of I've been criticized by peers and colleagues and whatnot. So both in academia and as a writer wanting to speak what I believe to be my truce. Your question's really cool, Heather. It's also, there's a lot of pieces to it, which give me an indication, a sort of like a mirroring of your heart and your mind about the kinds of things you're going, they're going on right now. The first thing you started talking about was that you have many, many, many pages of notes that you have a desire to turn into a piece of writing for academic purposes. You said for which you've never done, is that right? I'm sorry, I hope not. I've never been published in an academic journal in my life. Many of my peers have. So it's very daunting to me and I can't explain that. I don't know why. But you would like to be, is that correct? Yes. So there's that project, right? I mean, sometimes it helps me when we sort of separate out things. Not to say that they're separate, but just for the purposes of, so that we can see them more clearly, right? So you have the academic project for which you have many, many pages of notes. You have the voices that are speaking to you that move you to tell some kind of story, right? Whether it's a play or a screenplay or a teleplay or a radio play or a novel or whatever. A short story, yeah. Exactly, something. That is that the last time you did that, it created a great amount of friction between you and your family members. And then there's what kind of shape will this thing I'm writing take? So those are three separate, okay. Okay. I think the best way to do this is do the last one first, not to worry about that right this second. Okay. What kind of shape will this writing take? Let's not worry about that right now. It's going to take shape, it's going to take. We'll get to that in a sec. Okay. Now the other two projects, the academic writing project and then the more personal, right? I'm just characterizing it, the more personal project. My feeling is that you should work on both. And I say this because both are daunting and I think they're connected. I have a feeling they're connected. And to work on both, you're going to need to move very mindfully. With again, I hold this up a lot. I don't get any money.   But get a timer and create time chunks. I'll be talking to Jacob the other day creating time chunks in your day. And maybe an hour a day, you're going to work on the, let's just call it the academic project. Okay. And then an hour a day, you're going to work on the more personal project. Work on both. They're connected. I feel like energetically, I feel sort of they're kind of, they're not conjoined twins. It's interesting. They're twins. I mean, yeah, it's definitely ethnographic writing. A lot of the notes that I took in France. Okay. Okay. I don't know. Subject wise, I don't know. Yeah, energetically, they feel connected because they're both daunting. And there's a lot of pushback on both. I've never published it in an academic journal.  There's a lot of push. So we're going to push forward small increments of time, an hour on the academic stuff a day, then do other things during the day. I don't know, clean your apartment, walk the dog, go for a run, whatever, bake some bread, and then come back after a couple of hours and work for an hour on the more personal work. The form that it takes for right now, that more personal work, that is a distraction. You keep you from working on it. If you have a story, if you can tell yourself the story, using pseudonyms or however you need to get it out, I think pseudonyms are great, not to name specific people. I think braving the anger of your family in order to tell your truth is very important. And I think it sounds like that's something that you need to do because the alternative is to eat your pain. And we're over that. You know what I mean? It's 2020 folks, eating our pain, look where we are. So guess what? And I'm not saying go after it and intentionally shame and harm people. I'm saying to speak your truth in a way that does it in such a way where you're not naming names but only your family members know. It's time to speak your truth. Okay? So I would say an hour on that project a day, inch them both along, try it for a couple of weeks. Someone's texting bird by bird, sure.  I want you to stay on track though. So I just really want you to do your work, you know? Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks, Heather. Keep coming back, Heather, okay? And well, thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. All right, we've got about six minutes left. Maybe really five. We're going to go to Beth. Hi. Hi. I'm really grateful to have the opportunity to ask you my question. So thank you very much. I love to write. I don't have a hard time sitting down and writing. It's just something that I do to, it's actually freeing for me. My question is that I've written so much.  I look at it and I reread it and reread it and I fix it and I fix it and I put it away and I look at it again. I have my daughter read it, my son read it, my friend read it, but I never have, and I get the names of publishers. I get myself ready, but I always have that excuse not to send it in because it's not really yet perfect enough. And that's the stumbling block that sits in front of me. And so when or how do you say to yourself, listen, it's never going to really be perfect, even though in my head I know this, but I think I can get it perfect enough that I'll send it to an editor. They're not going to have to make any changes. They'll be just so perfect. Or my fear that they'll look at it and say, this is so horrible, so poorly written, I can't even believe she had the gall to send us into it. I love your question. I love your question, Beth. Okay, so we've all heard God is good, right?  So the perfection thing is not something that I, I have many problems as an artist, but the perfection thing is not something I experienced, but I do experience fear and concern and anxiety and all those kinds of things. So in Brazil, right? I've never been there, but you've seen it. I can't do it. Christ the Redeemer, his arms are like this. You know, right? Bring it on. What can they do, Beth? Send it to them. And if they say, it sucks, what? You're still alive? The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Here they come. This is what it means to be an artist, to stand up there and say, this is my heart. What do you think? Does it beat like yours? Right? Artists, it's, it's, it's, you have the kind of courage that is necessary for their artistic process, which is you sit down and do the work, which takes a huge amount of courage. Some of us have difficulty with that kind of courage. There's another kind of courage, which is you sit down and rewrite the work. You have that kind of courage. Great. And there's a third kind of courage, right? You show the work, you put it out there. And this is a great opportunity to develop that kind of courage. Okay. So what, what can, what can they do but tell you? I mean, it's interesting that you started by saying they might tell them they'll love it so much that I won't have to fix it at all. I'm sorry. I've won many prizes. I've never had a work that anybody said, Oh, it's perfect. Don't change a word. You know, I'm, I'm working with, gee, famous, fabulous, wealthy Hollywood types. Every time I turn something in, they want me to change like 97, bazillion words. Do I think less of myself as an artist? No. I show them how flexible I am, how I can stay on course, right? And change words to make it more of the thing that, you know, we're working on, right? You see what I mean? Yeah. So getting notes to change something is not an indication that it sucks, but you, you got to work on that courage of sending your work out there. If you want to, you don't have to send your work out. Okay. But since you have expressed that desire, um, a lot, also a lot of things, sending it to an editor, um, a lot of, maybe we're missing a step. Maybe you need to get some kind of representation or something. Because agents are really wonderful. A lot of magazines and stuff only take submissions from agents. So it's very, it might be very helpful for you to get some kind of representation, which would be really helpful. Um, in the meantime, you can also have fun with your friends.  You can have zoom calls where you have people read their works aloud, like writing groups. Are you part of a writing group? I'm not. That could be fun. Right. Cause everybody's kind of equal footing. Everybody's submitting a piece of work to the group and you read it and talk about it. That could be a wonderful way to get accustomed to, uh, getting feedback. Most of it positive. Sometimes not so positive, you know. So you start getting in the flow, right? Thank you. Thank you very much. Thanks. Thanks, Beth. It's six o'clock. Sorry, I was very shrill. How'd that happen? No, how'd that happen? I always try to mute myself. Anyway, how'd that happen? How'd that happen? What is it? It's Tuesday. Oh my goodness. Tomorrow's Wednesday. We'll be back here again, six p.m. Eastern. If you sign up three p.m. Eastern, I'll send you a link between three and four thirty p.m. Eastern. And that's it. We love you. We love you. Thank you. Be happy, be safe. Be happy, be safe. Keep washing your hands. Wear your masks. Wash your hands. Wash your hands. We love you. We'll see you tomorrow. Thanks, Audrey. Thanks, S.L.P.


Yo, what up? Welcome back to another episode. Well, call me Willy Wonka because today we're gonna be reviewing this chocolate filter That and I'm the last person you want to be alone in the tunnel with Today's episode is sponsored by Squarespace Warming filters and color film if you're like me, which you're not you might think that filters are the foreplay to photography as of late I've been very interested in Injecting more warmth into my photos ever since I passed a very important milestone in my own personal life That's right. I watched dune for the 700th time I recently read an interview about the coloring and cinematography on dune where the cinematographer Greg Frazier talked about how they worked really really hard to kill the color blue on any scenes that took place on the desert planet Arrakis for example, they killed the blue skies killed the blue reflected shadows killed Duke Lado Atreides Etc. I thought that this was an interesting concept when I shoot film I do tend to lean my photos warmer because I like the overall look a bit better It feels more antique, but what if there was a way to do that more effectively from the ground up? Sure, I could just use an orange filter like the 81 B That would just add straight orange to my image the color I think I really wanted was brown not like brown, but like a nice dark and desaturated log Well long story short I came across the Tiffin chocolate one filter But was too scared to pull the trigger on it because the price is quite frightening That and there wasn't a ton of information online about it much less real-world examples that weren't anecdotal or renderings Then completely out of the blue and to my own surprise because usually when I get DMs from companies I just assume I'm in trouble Tiffin the filter company reached out and wanted to collaborate So I pitched them on the chocolate one and they're on board The chocolate one is a very nice soft brown color and I was hoping it would help accentuate tones like wood Coffee beans for or maybe even literally just chocolate itself Can we all just take two seconds real quick and agree that these are total ass not these beauties these? Additionally, I was pretty determined to try the chocolate one filter on a myriad of different stocks So in this video, I test it with portrait 400 synestil 800 t and of course ectochrome e 100 With that all in mind my platonic boyfriend Caleb and I headed out to a nearby neighborhood I loaded up some portrait 400 in my Makina 670 and firmly affixed that beautiful chocolate filter to the lens This filter requires a sacrifice. It cuts out about one stop of light There are mixed reports online some saying that it cuts out about one and one third stop of light But in all my tests, it was pretty much just one stop Of course, the best thing you can do for yourself is just use a TTL meter if at all possible Which I didn't do in this video So can you really trust anything I say ever the Makina 670 doesn't have TTL metering So I just rated the portrait 400 at 200 to account for the one stop of light lost due to the filter I know that might all be kind of confusing, but get used to it life is confusing As we climbed upwards not only were my calves finally becoming more sculpted because I'm pretty out of shape and have no future Plans to start working out, but the light was getting good Here's a quick comparison of the same shot with and without the filter So what's the consensus on the chocolate one slash portrait 400 combo? Honestly, the difference seems incredibly minute almost imperceptible in this comparison We can see a slight shift in the warmth of the shadows killing off some of the blue, but it's very small Here's what I think is happening color negative film is very much so open to interpretation Specifically portrait 400 has so much range that any color filter balance might be somewhat corrected out by the software You're using to invert the negative. I guess the AI is already out to destroy my tones if the vibes aren't even sacred then what's next? So the chocolate one filters weren't actually used to shoot dune as far as I know However, the chocolate line of filters were used by Gordon Willis when he shot the godfather more specifically the scenes that take place in Sicily For reference Willis did shoot the exterior scenes with a heavier filter than the interior scenes Apparently David Lynch's lost highway was also shot mostly with a chocolate one filter Chocolate filters come in three levels of intensity with three being maximum effect and one being minimum effect Anyway, I was a bit more curious about the results with Cinestelle 800 T a famously tungsten balanced film stock Shooting a tungsten film stock in daylight will result in a overall cooler and more blue image With the chocolate one attached. I want to see how much of that blue is actually baked out Turns out quite a bit The tungsten blues on Cinestelle 800 T seem to go more purple slash brown, which is just shaggadalic, baby This is more of the effect that I had in mind when I was researching the filter You do Yeah, you're right if I turn off the arsonist slash pathological liar inside of me for once I'd say that this shot almost kind of looks like Fuji Pro 400 H a little the dead giveaway Of course being the halations. Here's a comparison of Caleb and also Caleb without the chocolate one See how he's a little sadder. Anyway, the chocolate one seemed to inject a good amount of warmth comparatively Looking back, I would definitely have to say that this filter has a pronounced effect on Cinestelle 800 T I really dig it and if it means I can shoot more Cinestelle 800 T in daylight without the dreaded 85 B Then catch me at B&H buying up all their inventory Anyway, enough color negative interpretation bullcrap. It was time for the big leagues. No more baby I want to see what the chocolate one looked like with the stakes at maximum when there's no room for error And a mistake could cost you big time. I wanted the truth So I nervously loaded up some fresh Kodak flex to Chrome e100. Why am I calling Ektochrome flex to Chrome? Well, because paying for a role that nowadays is sadly kind of a flex Anyway, Caleb and I climbed this mountain that overlooks LA and took some pretty photos at this point Our calves were looking downright chiseled, but I'll save those photos for our patrons over at onlycavs.com It looks like there's like a beam of light shining down on you right now Here's a comparison of raw Ektochrome and of course Ektochrome with the chocolate one filter Admittedly, I was a little disappointed. I would have thought the effect would have been more substantial It's kind of like when you get a dog and you're excited to play fetch all day long at the park But then you find out that your dog is actually really lazy and just wants to try and eat all your food instead E100 is a beautifully rich color positive film, but in my own findings It seems like it leans pretty hard into cooler tones, which is something I've been trying to avoid a lot lately And finally this shot it's perfection now. I remember why Ektochrome is daddy I think the chocolate filter balance this image out quite nicely, especially that sunset light peeking into the left of the frame I can honestly say I think the filter made this frame look more normal if that makes sense There's a very solid balance of colors here and for sure it's going into my portfolio But on the topic of photography portfolios I'd like to thank today's sponsor Squarespace if you're a photographer looking for work or simply to dunk on your other photography buddies chances Are you'll need a sleek and stylish photography portfolio that exudes not only confidence But a strong sense of modernism encapsulated in a professional looking design luckily for you That's never been easier with Squarespace Squarespace is an all-in-one website building platform that allows you to customize your own Corner of the internet with ease building up from Squarespace's hundreds of template options has never been easier with Squarespace's promise to never Require any downloads plugins patches or updates if building a website isn't your thing and you run into any trouble Squarespace even offers 24-7 award-winning customer support to get you going So what are you waiting for if you're ready to build a website? You can start a free trial today at Squarespace comm slash grainy days and if you use the code grainy days at checkout You can get 10% off your first purchase so I'll be the first to admit it my calves are still sore and I still have no plans to go to the gym that and I thought that the Chocolate one filter would have a greater overall impact on the photos But with the chocolate one being the least dense filter in the set Maybe it's time I level up to a chocolate two or a chocolate three which have a heavier effect But also cut out more light so with that and the fact that a lot of paintings have the color brown as an undertone I'm definitely gonna keep shooting the chocolate series of filters because I'm a total whore for making my photos look like paintings And this feels like a step in the right direction as well If you yourself are tired of pounding the ever-loving out of the warmth slider And then just giving up because lightroom doesn't understand your artistic vision and maybe this filters for you Anyway, that's a wrap on this video. I guess the only thing to do now is see what this filter looks like with lomo purple


OpenStack as a service, and if you want to start by telling us why OpenStack at InterNAP. Sure, so definitely. Sorry. Can you hear me? Great. Okay, so at InterNAP, we were actually one of the first. It's on. Maybe. There we go. So at InterNAP, we were actually one of the first, if not the first. Next we have Sound. I'll just hold it like this. Alright, so at InterNAP, we were actually the first. Out. Alright. Okay, let's try this one more time. So at InterNAP was actually one of the first, if not the first company to employ OpenStack back in 2011. And at the time it was really immature, so it was kind of an adventure for us. But the thing that we were always attracted to by InterNAP is just the idea of a fast-moving open-source project, which allows us to concentrate our development resources and all the cool stuff that we're trying to do above and around the plumbing orchestration platform. We really have no interest in developing the core orchestration platform. So just like Linux, just like Apache, it's all about writing coattails.  We're 700 people, but we're still a speck in the face of companies like AWS from a resource standpoint. So from our perspective, OpenStack is really attractive because it allows us to build on top of, extend upon, kind of use to provide our vision of infrastructure to our customers and essentially time to market. That's really at a nutshell.  So given that you're using essentially a standard orchestration platform, how do you differentiate what you do from what other cloud IIS providers do? Sure. So we definitely offer a public cloud. There's a few things that we do, given who our customers are and sort of our approach to infrastructure in the market. So a few things. We have a lot of co-location customers. These customers are generally struggling with trying to make their infrastructure more agile. They're kind of enamored by all the promise of the cloud holes, but they're restricted because they want control. They want to spend the capex. They're basically server huggers, right? So they want to keep their servers under their own lock and key. So one of the things we're using OpenStack for is essentially allowing those customers to call it private cloud, call it like an enhanced managed colo, but essentially bring agility to a more traditional service offering. Other things that we're doing, you know, one of our most popular products is a bare metal server, which is basically a, you know, no hypervisor, no virtualization, but just a raw server with an OS. And we basically use OpenStack and have extended OpenStack to essentially be able to provide bare metal service on demand, you know, just as another flavor. So our customers can basically, you know, provision both virtualized and non-virtualized resources. So those are some of the things that we're doing. We're also doing things, you know, related to networking. We allow people to extend their layer to networks. It's kind of about bridging the old school and the new fangle, right? Because it's really, this transition is really interesting. We actually think the most interesting opportunity isn't on the extreme cloud-only side of things, but it's actually helping, you know, these two worlds that are colliding. So what's the typical use case you see amongst your customers for OpenStack? It really, you know, as a service provider, it really, you know, runs the gamut. You know, anything from, I mean, key verticals for us would be things like ad tech, gaming.  Really, you know, any customer who was running infrastructure at scale, they're interested in OpenStack in one way or another. Even if they're not interested in using OpenStack specifically, they're interested in the advantages that it can bring.  Here's an example. You know, we have co-location customers that have deployed a lot of VMware. And I think Ken was talking about something similar to this, but it's really common for these guys to have such a long provisioning time, even though they're fully virtualized, to the point where the network department and the application owners are in two different worlds, right? And the application owner doesn't really care. They just want their server. And from their perspective, it's a commodity service. They're able to swipe their credit card on Amazon. So why is it so damn hard for them to get capacity internally? And oftentimes, you know, they'll put in a request for the server. The server will be all automated, but yet it goes to the internal network people, and they sit on it for days because, you know, assigning IP addresses and VLANs are so complicated, I guess, right? So basically they're interested in, you know, more agility, more automation, and the things that OpenStack enable, the value that OpenStack provides are in those areas. They're not necessarily looking for OpenStack in and of itself. You mentioned developers swiping their credit cards on Amazon. What pulls them back into an OpenStack ecosystem? I think we have a term for it that our salespeople use. I'm not sure if I'm a fan of it or not, but we call them the Amazon graduates, right? It's very easy to start on Amazon, but costs can spiral out of control. And that's not a... It's not meant to be disparaging against Amazon. I think the same thing can be said for just about any public cloud provider. Our sales included probably, right? So a lot of it is cost, whereby they realize that if they have a baseline workload that's always on 24-7, you know, no matter what study or benchmark public cloud providers publish, it's not cheaper than doing it in-house. So that's probably one of the big drivers. So, of course, you're saying they're not doing it in-house, but they're still doing it with you. Yes. So you're running the OpenStack-based cloud. Correct. Why do you think it's substantially cheaper to get a cloud from you rather than getting it from someone like an Amazon? A few things. One is bare metal. You know, I think the dedicated server industry has different pricing dynamics as the cloud industry. There's no virtualization tax. There's no noisy neighbor issue. There's no co-tenancy at all. So that's one. And then two is just the ability to leverage OpenStack on infrastructure that the customer owns. So essentially helping them, you know, build a more automated, agile co-location infrastructure or similar to a private cloud. And how many of your customers have tried to do things on OpenStack to build their own OpenStack-based private cloud before coming to you? I think a fair bit have.  But I think people assume it's a product or assume that it's more productized than it is. So their first attempt to kind of stand the whole thing up and, you know, get a proof of concept going, especially if they're doing it themselves and they don't have really sharp systems people and network people and DevOps people, it doesn't tend to go well. They get in over their heads.  But I think that's going to change over time, you know, as the whole stack matures, as the installers get better, as the distributions get better. You know, but for now it's, I think it's a pretty high bar for someone, especially if they're not a technology company to implement it themselves. Tell us a little bit about how difficult has it been for you to implement OpenStack as a service provider at scale? It's been fairly challenging.    I don't think even the most, you know, perhaps only the most optimistic OpenStack developers would have called Cactus or Diablo production ready. But, you know, we kind of got going with it. We also just acquired a company called iWeb at the end of last year, and they're completely punching above their weight. They're already in production with a public OpenStack cloud in Canada. So now our development teams are combined with iWeb. So we're kind of, if anything, doubling down on our commitment to OpenStack. We've also got our own beta as internet for a next generation cloud that we launched last year. So a couple of disparate efforts are hopefully going to culminate in a major new release for us in the first half of this year.  So we're building a lot of things around OpenStack, but we're definitely relying on OpenStack for all the core capabilities that it, you know, provides.   But we're definitely consuming it, you know, in full, and we're extending it sort of to, you know, put our vision of infrastructure, you know, and expose that to our customers. But, you know, 100% of our forward infrastructure platform is OpenStack-powered. And for you and your customers, who is important in your ecosystem that's related to OpenStack?  So we're not really using too many vendors, you know, from a distribution to a consulting standpoint. But we are certainly using vendors who are playing in the OpenStack community, you know, and that's definitely an advantage to us if they have integrations or if they have some sort of commitment to the project. You know, so vendors like SolidFire or Orista or, you know, some of these other vendors are definitely interesting to us. But, you know, while we are using specific, you know, commercial vendors and partners, let's not forget that one of the most attractive things about OpenStack is the fact that it doesn't lock us into anything, right? I mean, every single component, whether it's storage or network or, you know, the underlying servers or, you know, just about anything can be swapped out. So the fact that it, you know, basically avoids lock-in for us as a service provider, aside from the fact that it avoids lock-in for our customers is hugely appealing. And in terms of, you know, who your customers are using, what are some of them? Some of them are, for sure. And what we've really, you know, kind of been pleased about over the last couple of years is the ecosystem of tools that actually integrate with OpenStack has really blossomed, you know, over the last couple of years in particular. I think when we first launched our first version of the cloud back in 2011, just about every tool that claimed to integrate with OpenStack actually integrated with the EC2 compatibility API, you know, from a different perspective. But at this point, our customers, while they don't necessarily have a tool that is OpenStack only, their ecosystem, whether it's right scale or scale extreme or, you know, even fog or chef or puppet or whatever, these tools are all fully supporting OpenStack now. So it's like a checkbox for them, you know, rather than some home-brewed system. How big is your typical customer in terms of the size of their OpenStack deployment? Definitely people at scale, meaning they have hundreds and hundreds of physical servers. You know, we certainly have customers that only have a single VM, but that's definitely not our sweet spot.  You know, they're sitting there banging against the table that Intel only, you know, increased the performance by 20% this year. So yeah, I mean, it's people who are scaling out rather than scaling up. No worries. You want to move? Yeah. So tell us what eBay is doing with OpenStack. So I can start a bit. So in 2008, we started developing our own private cloud and the main driver was Agility.  And when OpenStack started to mature, we looked at all our options and we started adopting an open source cloud to replace our in-house custom cloud management system because it gave us many advantages compared to a proprietary in-house solution. So we are using it in three main categories of projects. We have developer projects, developer cloud if you want. We have QA and analytics. And then we have also production in some area. So what's your role in eBay at all? So my role, I'm chief architect for the global cloud services that is developing cloud across eBay Inc. Hello. I'm the architect for storage and PayPal, but our teams are now merged together. So we're developing the PayPal side of the question was eBay is doing OpenStack deployment and PayPal, before I started this year, wanted to go faster. So they made their own OpenStack deployment and we had the advantage of not having as many legacy things to deal with. So we could start Greenfield and do whatever we wanted. So now that we've succeeded in that, we're combining back together and trying to reimplement everything together. So my focus is on storage and mostly center and object storage. So when you're looking at these use cases, what made you decide to use OpenStack? What else did you consider using? So I can talk a bit about that. Around like two or three years ago we tried to find partners to develop our cloud. We talked to many software vendors or vectorization vendors and we also looked at cloud.com before they were acquired by Citrix. So the main reason why we selected OpenStack was first the architecture which was very distributed. The language is also a plus because we can find developers much more easily than Java even though we are a Java, we are even Java developers at eBay. The community I think at large is more attracted by languages like Python than Java and also the size of the community as a result of all those benefits. So for us the main decision point between the two was who is going to win at the end and that was the indicator was the size of the community and the ecosystem that was started to build around OpenStack. Same thing for you? I was brought in actually as an OpenStack developer specifically because they had already chosen OpenStack. For me that's the focus. Tell us about the initial experience of deploying OpenStack. What was that like? What were the challenges that you saw? What went well? What didn't? Pretty much everything first it's nice and friendly and then you get to a certain size and you find a lot of issues. So our experience has been successful finding solutions to those issues and then trying to work with the community to find out if our solutions are the best or going to be supported in the future. So in that sense we try and stay close to the community trunk and not fragment off our own fork because we're trying to leverage that and I think that's a big piece of not going with a vendor solution completely is having something that's supported by the community and not supported everything ourselves. So you're not using a vendor distribution at all? No. What were the challenges that you encountered more specifically? Well I think as you mentioned earlier a lot of the vendors say they inter-operate and they don't really. Things of running out of resources and systems that were scaled to maybe go to a hundred instances we go to a thousand or ten thousand devices and things don't work so well. For example in the architecture I don't know if we want to get so technical but in the queuing system all of the hypervisors are sending updates of their statuses and how much availability they have. When you get to thousand ten thousand hypervisors all going through the same queue things get overloaded and things can't happen in the time they need to and we end up with strange errors because the code isn't designed to catch something that you end up with a lot of limbo sort of thing. So that's sort of just when things get big enough to burst at the seams that's where we're running into trouble. You're running a solution at scale. How big is your solution today? I think we can answer in partly. Our bigger open stack deployment is the 500 hypervisors on virtual networks using Quantum. So that's one deployment we have in other data centers multiple of deployments that are running different use case and we are looking at consolidating those deployments. The size is multiple thousands hypervisors more or less distributed across multiple data centers. So how much operational effort does it take to keep this open stack cloud up and running happily? So it depends if you are just talking about the operations of the open stack components. At the last summit one of my colleagues did a presentation that open stack is not cloud. Open stack is just the automation system or the framework that allows you to operate a cloud. But there's many other things that are going around open stack like monitoring like all your processes around capacity management fulfillment, all of that. And for us this is something that we used to do before because we were running our cloud, our original cloud. So we have a system for example for onboarding full racks of compute servers automatically and converting that into open stack compute. So for us this was not a gap it allows us to very quickly add capacity for example to open stack cloud. But I can imagine that someone without those capabilities would have much more effort to spend on this type of activities. So the answer is it depends it depends on your existing capabilities. So adding some open stack to already mature processes and operations is not so much of a stretch but if you are starting from scratch I think that there's a lot of things to look at and it can be overwhelming. What have you found to be the most effective way to engage with the community? Which community? The open stack community. We actually have employees who are on the various teams. We attend the summits we're involved a lot. You actually work directly on some of the communities. Right so we I'm part of the user community. We have tried to foster new projects participating into existing projects following very closely either directly or through some of the vendors that we are using so we have multiple ways to contribute back to the community. But the main recommendation is that someone that deploys a cloud should make sure that if there's any customization or anything that they quite rapidly push back to the community because otherwise they kind of develop this technical depth that accumulates and every upgrade is going to be more and more complex because of all those customizations. So right now we don't have like a metric to know how many changes we keep in house versus what we push to the community but we have no more than 10 changes that we did in OpenStack for our own use cases. So that's the range that you want to look at if you go much higher than that upgrades are going to be nightmare. And how do your users interact with OpenStack? Are you using the Horizon Portal? Have you built things yourself? Developers using a lot of the API? Sure that's kind of interesting because at first people think of it as Horizon, the GUI and then you may know about Asgard the Netflix's version PayPal supported that to control OpenStack. It's an interesting thing. But the command line tools, the CLIs are also if you're really going to do anything you can't click 100 times to launch these things. It's just crazy. So you quickly end up going to that but we've gone beyond that to where we're integrating in with the APIs directly we have a tooling system that was used to run with our old virtual provider that would make what we call stages, which is PayPal in a box and the developer pushes a button because they need a new dev environment and they push the button in like a day or so later they get their development environment with the OpenStack we've moved that down to like 10 minutes or so and so that's a big win for everybody and they can make as many stages as they like and they just use the same tool that they used before because the API calls go to Horizon and Nova and such instead of to whatever it was So your developers don't have to mess with that? They don't know. We have two type of users though we have users that are looking at efficiency, they don't want to deal with infrastructure and they are going to use platform as a service tools that we have and those tools are integrated with the OpenStack APIs but there are some developers that are trying to innovate and want to be more agile by trying to figure out new ways of doing things and they will develop their own like pass layer almost on top of the existing OpenStack API or they'll use the UI that is provided either Horizon or another custom one and we have like there's a legacy kind of developer we'll be used to using bare metal and storage services in an old style versus the newer companies that are being acquired that use all Amazon services so they're used to using S3 using EC2 and Elastic Block Store I think over the next couple of years that will be the standard all the new stuff will be all the kids coming from school use Amazon and they'll know that will be what people are asking for right now we're more pushing to the architects that are really bright guys that develop the applications the company is using they don't know about Amazon it's just some sort of thing and now the company is asking them to use it so we're trying to show them why it's faster better they can do more experience of people on board because cloud is just a bunch of buzzwords to them so So, Sarendra from Park, would you come up? You all moved there? Yeah, let's take out It's like a Carson shirt So could you tell us a little bit about what your organization is doing with OpenStack and what your role in that is? So I work for a company called Mock I think most of you are better Can you hear me? Yeah, there you go Can you hear me? I work for Park Same problem Simon is a bunch of researchers at Park who are on the big data side so we have a requirement to run the parallel algorithms at a very large set of data so we look at different solutions like Amazon Web Services we looked at joint we also looked at VMware and our researchers are not programmers guys I don't have any engineers to do this automation layer we need something, we roll it in we should be able to start working without any programming effort so we went to Nibbla guys which provides the OpenStack distribution that's where we started back in early 2012 the first time with the SX distribution of it so our use case is primarily for big data applications getting a lot of sensor data a lot of algorithms at a very large scale hundreds and thousands of models automatically score them, pick the right model and then give that to the actual business analyst to really find you on it so we do a lot of automation frameworks through the rendering visualization so we need lightweight containers which we can execute without really taking a lot of deployment time and also zero administration zero DevOps, zero programming and no system admin I only have six people in our support team to support 250 PhDs so that's where OpenStack really helped us a lot to automate some other layers through some sort of Chef scripts or Puppet scripts and give that tool to the researchers to really focus on their primary research and so what's your role? I'm a CTO for cloud and big data research at PARC and I manage a bunch of PhDs around high performance analytics and also high performance computing and big data and also looking at a lot of sensor data that comes in through a lot of Xerox projects so you've built in a bunch of additional tooling on top of OpenStack? Yeah we've built the whole framework to enable the researchers to with one push button I should be able to deploy we call it disposable Hadoop cluster I can launch a 10 terabyte Hadoop cluster or Hayu or take Spark cluster or any of the big data tools we can really deploy it in less than two to three minutes today and then run our experiments and tear it down when we are done so that's not possible doing either in Amazon or any other cloud services So you're still using the Nebula solution? Which one? You're still using the Nebula solution? Yes so we have three controllers total we have 15 oz in production so we started the project it's a long journey actually nothing worked in the beginning but at the end of the 12 months everything turned out to be very nice we started in 2012 April then we went production in 2012 in November so a pretty short journey then we upgraded that to be the Palsum early 2013 so now pretty much on Palsum right now we're looking to migrate to the next version so Nebula has been an amazing job for us to put some people on site to help us really find some of those things fixing some of those core capabilities for example, CNIMA assignment a pretty simple thing changing the passwords security groups some basic terminology problem people came from Amazon using Amazon Web Services how do I really use this with a new lingo and new tools and new terminology aligning all these things is really a big challenge for us so you're still on the Palsum release which means that you're almost three releases behind now as we go from Havana into the Ice House timeframe in April are you finding the pace of OpenStack in the next six months to be challenging in your organization or what's causing that? yeah it's really a big pain in the neck to upgrade them when we upgrade from Essex to Palsum we lost all our images we had to redo everything because there's a format change and the glance doesn't work the way it's supposed to work so those transitions are really painful so with the Palsum we stay on Palsum because that can do 90% of our work we're not really chasing out all the new features coming in in OpenStack we're allowed to go with all the virtualization network virtualization techniques but for now I think it's good for us to do all the big data research it does my work so why should I go with the versions? so you mentioned that the initial implementation was very challenging what made it challenging? a lot of things first of all you know rolling that in is the security groups especially and some of the APIs are the hard wire parameters for example I can only create 10 security groups a lot of our automation scripts create hundreds and thousands of security groups to really partition those parallel running processes so we really hit those hard limits and I cannot change those variables I need to call some of the vendors to can you change those variables? oh no you can't change there's a hard wire in the system so we don't want any of those hard wires and I want those things to be controlled by the higher level application layer services think of that as a TCP IP right so how much of code is hardwired in the TCP IP layer provide the higher level and application level does all the magic so that's what we want the OpenStack to be you give me the control to program it the way I want it to be programmed but then give me all the flexibility to turn all apps so what are you most want out of OpenStack or probably perhaps a question would be what would be compelling enough to cause you to want to go through the upgrade cycle pain can you repeat the question again? you mentioned that there wasn't anything really in the subsequent releases that you really felt you needed what could OpenStack do that would be compelling enough to want you to for you to go through an upgrade cycle zero loss upgrade just roll it in the new version it works seamlessly without redoing anything for me to rebuild for example we also work with SAP HANA so our the OpenStack the base deployment is very complex one I have 50 node clustered all together out of which I have 27 node Hadoop cluster which runs 2.5 petabytes of data analytics platform and I have 4 terabytes of SAP HANA sit next to that and then I have computational framework which is basically OpenStack based if I make any changes to any of these things I can't really roll these images hundreds and thousands of them and upgrade them within a short period of time I need a zero downtime zero maintenance risk free if you can do it I can take it if I can't do it I can live with existing version it does my job all right so what is the ongoing operational experience with OpenStack been so once you've gotten through the sort of initial hurdles in the upgrade what's the day to day like it's pretty good now earlier there's a maximum half life of my cluster was 7 days after 7 days everything disappears then all my images gone everything lost the story start all over again now actually we're not even looking into that no one knows there's an Ebola running there it is so seamless people go and ask if it's available to them and just punch a bunch of commands and they're operational they do their job and just go and what's going to be necessary to get you to adopt OpenStack more broadly in your organization for more than those analytics workloads yeah we're looking at the next big step is you know we're working with a couple of hardware vendors to create the innovation center open innovation lab by basically democratizing the data centric algorithmic research by bringing even all the Xerox researchers into that you know we have around 700 plus PhDs across the globe how do we really bring them to use all these they don't want to spend time really dishing out the VM who wants to really disher the VM I wanted to really a service provisioning I don't need to spend my time typical our data you know data research applications you know it's very complex hierarchical applications and I need to spin out maybe 200 HPCC application agents to process the data in parallel and that has to scale out automatically without really me adding a note to that so that will save a lot of time to our researchers so our next step is to take this expanded to the much higher level so that even our researchers in other labs and the second thing is we're also trying to bring the customers into that it's a secure cloud we have two regions in the cloud one is the public cloud other is the secure cloud so what we do all the edge computing is done in the public cloud so it's a private public cloud surprisingly it's on our own VPN so and then the internal cloud that's where all the data fusion takes place so that's very secure and we built around the ring of security controls we do all the data processing we have customers to connect their sensors connect their the devices into this network and use the park researchers we have 250 PHDs in Palo Alto and as backdoor research can do a lot of interesting algorithmic research can really take it to the market to commercialize or productize or democratize those innovations that's our next goal for OpenStack and to do that are you going to be continuing to write your own tools for the past vendors recently I invited scholar guys to come and try and connect us with the Google computing engine also Amazon Web Services to kind of a bustable computing mode and also cumulogic guys brought in their past to try it out with the Nebula so basically I'm opening up for people to come and try your applications see if that is something help our researchers our customers our vendors as well as no because a lot of security requirements we do a lot of applied research for our customers so a lot of data governance requirements if you read the Amazon 50 page terms of use document it will never pass through Xerox legal so I don't want to spend two months reviewing the document instead focus on solving the problem so bring the data into the park lab then our researchers can focus on finding solutions with the data governance pain and everything is contained in the park lab so that's easy for us to manage so going back to the group as a whole if each of you were to give one piece of advice to other companies who are looking and adopting an open stack based solution what would it be can I start start set our expectations correctly don't promise boil the version kind of thing pick the use case well defined use case with the R.O.I. that's what we did at park we're doing a massive project for L.A. basically doing the dynamic parking assignment very complex project so they were actually setting up their missions taking two to three months to set up a mission configure it and show the demo to the customer so we went to them your lead time is two months can I reduce that to two hours that's a compelling value proposition so at that point in the mall we are giving reducing the two months to two hours or three hours whatever that is then they get aha that's really exciting let's go to next project next project so you can set those expectations and keep progressing because there's so many unknowns in the open stack you don't know what you are getting into you don't want to expose yourself unnecessarily with all the risk factors by promising too much there's a big lesson we learned in park so I think I have to the first one build a private cloud versus using a public cloud I think that if it's like you said before just an extension of a virtualization platform with self-service maybe the value is not worth the pain if you want but if you you understand the value proposition that a private cloud is going to bring to your organization I think that it's better and you understand a bit more what features we need is to hire the right the right persons because traditionally in enterprise system administrators are not used to the type of components that open stack is using it requires a lot more application on the code that they are used to do and a different mindset and we found that we had to almost like train people to this new world and hire the right mindset up front I'd continue that and say that in the past you've been able to hire people that are specialized in network or compute or storage and they all have to understand a lot more about how it all fits together because it's all running in the same machine but further open stack isn't a package you just buy and turn on it's more like a set of tools for craftsmen who know what they're doing to use you have to have software I think it's really important that companies deploying open stack figure out the process and the cultural implications of what they're doing before and kind of get that scoped out really well and understand what changes they're going to need to make internally to support that kind of installation and then from a technical side we've seen some people attempt to stand up open stack and use a very reactive manual systems administration approach they're not treating their infrastructure as code they're not using configuration management they're treating it like one-offs just like they're doing with the rest of their infrastructure and if they're doing that they're just in for a world of hurt because things are just going to get inconsistent and fall fall over very very quickly so questions from the audience and networking as it stands right now do you just use flat networking because of the scale or do you have to use additional software? so on our case for networking we have two models we are using VMware NSX so most of our networks are virtual networks and we have production networks that are bridge network so our networking model is maybe where we spent most of the time on open stack we were one of the early adopters of quantum now renamed Neutron so I would say that this is maybe one of the component of open stack that is the most challenging because out of the box it's difficult to have a production deployment without additional components okay we've got one in the back my name is Udin private call thank you for the insights we've heard about many obstacles and challenges that relates to network in other aspects skills, expertise I wonder I haven't heard anything about security especially knowing that in the open stack world compromising a node could compromise the whole stack what can you share with us about security considerations so we can take that do you want to talk about the paypal side you know paypal of course security is very very important everything is vetted by our security teams and they're in agreement everything's kosher we do tenant networks we do lots of firewalls and things to segregate our data and our traffic and things like that we haven't really run into specifics no so I think that open stack by itself is not solving any security or adding more security edX that you would have otherwise I think it's maybe what is missing in open stack is a blueprint on how to deploy open stack in various compliance environment and kind of a reference implementation if you want but otherwise we didn't find specific issues besides HTTPS support missing in some components and so on but otherwise it more goes to what I was saying before it's not a package you just install you have to know what you're doing it's very easy you can install it totally wrong and be very secure there's nothing within open stack that'll make that inherently more secure or less secure at the end of the day your virtualization layer is not secure or you have problems with individual servers or hypervisors those problems are still going to exist under open stack and open stack problems are still you know very much there and are left as an exercise to the reader sort of speaking okay we've got some additional questions over here also for those of you that are online please go ahead and enter your questions into twitter OE forum is the hashtag and we'll make sure we get them answered for you I've got a question open stack storage performance have you ever run into any storage bottlenecks and what do you have different performing storage elements in your infrastructure I'm not yeah okay generally the problem that some of the architects say developer architects would have a question about his performance because it's virtualized so there's extra layers of hops one of the specific examples would be say Cinder with its block storage it maps it through the hypervisor if you're using an iSCSI target map through the hypervisor to your VM wouldn't it be faster to connect directly with your iSCSI we've done some measurements and we don't see any significant one, two percent perhaps because the VM the hypervisor is not doing that much but I really need to see more measurements and I haven't seen any white papers or anything maybe other people know more in general the benefits of having the automation of the storage deployments and the abilities of flexibility you get outweigh any sort of performance impact for the day intensive applications we did notice significant difference when we run the Hadoop applications on the open stack with the virtualization on the storage side and we saw actually almost 40 percent degradation in the performance for example we did run the Terrasart algorithm to see how it runs on the bare metal versus the open stack we saw at least a good percentage of degradation so we saw guys to see if we can able to mount those volumes directly as the data node so which can really accelerate I don't need to really do the pass through to the virtualization also other alternative we are exploring is the single root Ivo virtualization to see if we can directly attach through the pass through into the device so when you have the mix of these workloads actually we have research team focusing on the diagnostics what they do is they go and measure your workload characteristics and see how can I really optimize placing of these jobs so that the compute intensive job will not go into the hypervisor where it's contending for the network and storage resources we got pretty good the hypervisor so that I can distribute the jobs with the dynamically through the algorithmic way versus randomly distributing it we did a lot of optimizations at that layer the earlier version of OpenStack all jobs first goes and fill in everything first and then goes to the next hypervisor that's pretty random up it doesn't really work very well for the complex job scenarios we want that to be kind of a system then you have the random mix the first experiment we did second thing we took the algorithmic optimizations I can place the jobs based on the work characterization I think storage is really a major pain point on the public cloud particularly network attached storage and it's not just bad performance it's inconsistent performance and performance that varies over time of day or what day it is from an internet standpoint there are additional vendor landscape for people who sell sands there are very few people thinking about how to enforce QoS on a per lawn or per tenant basis solid fire is one of the few companies that are doing this most enterprise sands don't address that at all the other thing we're doing is we offer bare metal so essentially the SSDs or the disks on that storage and consistency of storage performance is a huge problem on just about every public cloud I think you also have to take into account the architecture we use bonded 10 gigabit networks off the hyper visors to pairs of 10 gigs which is everything's 10 gig if you're doing this with one gig networking you don't want network attached storage it's just going to be a bottleneck that would make a total difference if you've got a traditional you know all of your 10 gig networking that would totally change your plans on how you're going to allocate your space but that said 10 gig networking is getting much much cheaper copper SFP plus Cable 8 is really cheap it's definitely the way to go we're going 40 gig networking bonded soon so network storage is I think the I'm biased I'm in storage but network storage is the future of storage a couple more questions that we want to get answered so being here two hours so far I still have no clue what is the state of OpenStack could you guys offer us you know one single slogan like let us know what is OpenStack trying to accomplish you know like Linux we all know Linux is open source Unix Chrome what is OpenStack you know I'm not sure where the people to answer that but my quick answer is it's an open source virtualization API specification what's it trying to accomplish so for us I can answer what OpenStack is doing OpenStack is the cloud management system that we are using for implementing either private or public clouds for example PayPal, eBay and other companies that I've worked at we've had deployments of the data center we shut down the data center and do an audit of the machines and find some of the machines have never been used they were allocated very carefully in projects but five years later no one ever even logged into them no one ever pushed code to it but they got lost so we end up with 10, 20% of the machines never used if we could use that allocation for other projects before we found out that they were not used we'd save millions of dollars a quarter so this OpenStack source code is the way that the company is implementing that virtualization instead of going to a vendor and being locked into that virtualization I think you can also I think you can also look at OpenStack as the open source vehicle that has the potential to knock many billions of dollars off the market caps of companies like VMware and Amazon I mean that's not a I don't mean to be provocative about it but I mean that's really I think the expectation is it's a democratizing open source thing right I mean framework it gives you options it keeps the vendors honest right and also it offers the great programmability right that's one of the things you can you program the hardware Microsoft did it through the HAL to make the windows work with all the drivers but after that there's no innovation available openly for to program the network switches programming the routing philosophies are you know able to partition the hardware into slices there's OpenStack I see it at the TCP for the cloud and then you can build nice applications on top of it the same lingua frank that you know what Amazon is doing or other cloud service providers are doing it provides a uniform language and syntax and semantics to talk to the hardware I'm wondering do you guys use Chargeback do you do Chargeback on your OpenStack environment and if yes what do you use and are you happy with it so I know where the question is coming from so I'm sure the others will have different depending if you are a service provider or if you are an enterprise but what we do is we cannot do Chargeback the way a service provider would do because of the way our finance system is built so what we do is almost like prepaid plan for cell phones organizations are transferring budget to our organization at the beginning of the year so for example like the MyEbay group we have that much CAPEX for the year for new projects and so on so they would transfer that money to us at the beginning of the year and then we would provide capacity instead of providing like previously instances of server instances we would provide just the capacity on demand so we pull this those resource into one large common infrastructure and we then offer it on demand so we we don't do directly the typical Chargeback but we do a showback to show how much they consumed out of their allocation so we are not doing cellometer right now because we used to have so is 90% on our legacy cloud software and we have our own mechanisms to do capacity management showback and these type of activities but we will definitely look at for the capacity that is an open stack using cellometer for tracking the fine grain usage which our other software is not doing for this cloud you are a very popular audience channel so we are going to squeeze one more in thank you my question is how do you back up the huge data in eBay sorry how do you back up the data in the cloud so what we do is we bring compute to the data so we have very large clusters that are holding most of our data warehouse and we a bit like kind of a placement trick we provision capacity closer to where the data exist on the networks where the data is located basically we ask the NSA for a copy of whatever we lose we also use a cluster to mount those datasets closer to the compute node so that you don't need to do any kind of moving the data around okay big round of applause for this panel very many thanks okay thank you all just to get everything