May the 27th. It's Wednesday. It's 11 o'clock. It's Trump week. I'm Tim Apochella, your host. And welcome everyone. And the title of the show is Trump Calls Rig Election Making a Comeback for 2020. If you've been watching the news of late, we know that we're back to, vaguely, it's back to the future. It's 2016 again. And Donald Trump is now not only implying, but he's explicitly stating that the election is going to be rigged because many states are going to, hopefully, allow mail-in balloting, particularly in this environment of COVID-19. Mail-in balloting makes a lot of sense, particularly for those seniors that are frightened to go to the polling stations. But before we get into that, I'd like to say welcome to Winston Welch, Stephanie Dalton, and Cynthia Sinclair. Welcome, everybody. Aloha. Aloha. We got an election that's now five months away, give or take. We have basically a very virulent virus that's very infectious. The distancing is at least six feet away. The requirement of mass is in order. And a lot of people still don't feel comfortable with going to a polling place to be inside for minutes, hours. Who knows how long it takes for them to get their ballot and vote in a voting machine. So, rightly so, they would probably like to have the opportunity to do a mail-in balloting. However, Donald Trump has taken to Twitter and to the airwaves and said, it's so easy to defraud a mail-in ballot system, yet Donald Trump votes via mail ballot, via the mail system, a ballot mail. And he's setting the stage, as he did in 2016, for the quotation of a rigged election. Winston, do you find this of concern? Because I certainly do. I find that for those many followers, be it 45%, 48% of his followers, some of them are quite radical. And if they feel that Donald Trump has been cheated out of an election because potentially he lost, will they take to the streets? Will this be a basis for the incitement of violence or worse yet? Winston, what are your thoughts? Well, any person needs to be concerned when major candidates, months before any elections say it's going to be rigged. In this case, it's patently false. But it doesn't matter what you tell people. I've read today that 44% of Republicans think that the vaccine will carry something from bill dates, a carrier wave or something, so they can track you at any time. We're not dealing with people that are rationally thinking right now, but I think what we need to look at is hope that if Donald Trump were to lose the election, resoundingly, and with observers everywhere that say this is the case, that the formerly known as Republican Party, the folks that are supporting you right now, decide whether or not they want to have a future in this country and say, you know what, this was not a redilection, the people spoke, let's reclaim our party and move on. And that is, if that's the case, and you have a leadership that steps up into the void that's there now and says, no, this was fair. We are going to move on as a people. That is our only hope, I think at this point, or Donald Trump's saying, you know what, yeah, I just did this so I can get great ratings and good luck with the rest of the country as you move on. It's not going to happen. Well, Winston, you know, back in the first couple of years, we had Republicans who are now Trump-licans. They used to speak out and say, well, I don't agree with Donald Trump on this issue or that issue. And they actually would take to the airwaves and say, that's not representative of how we feel in the Senate or how we feel in the House of Representatives, or my constituents in my district, there's none of that anymore. We haven't seen those kind of comments at least a year and a half from from our Senate Republicans or our Senate House House representatives. It's whatever Donald Trump says goes. And the question is, to what degree does this gain traction? And without any filtering from the senators or the House representatives, or governors, or you know, even mayors of certain cities, is this a free pass for people to bring out their their arms and their second amendment rights and say, you stole the election from Donald Trump? Well, hopefully, hopefully not. Hopefully, we realize that we're not there. But you know, there was a really good article in the Washington Post called The Wages of Lick's Spital, Spitalry, and it was about Republicans that are being squashed by Donald Trump, so that if they he says he wants them on their knees, it's not enough just to grovel, they have to worship him. You have a party of which was formerly half the nation. Now it's essentially a party of one. So if that one person is not leading it anymore, there's a chance to regain. I don't know what they'll regain because they've sacrificed so much in bowing down to Donald Trump. I don't know how they are going to find their way again, but I wish that they will find their way again. I hope that they come back and say, you know what, we're all Americans, we have a different point of view. It's not insane. It's just a different point of view. It's a conservative point of view like we used to have in the olden days, say five years ago. So that's my hope is that we come together and realize this was a total aberration. He's still going to maintain an incredible amount of power after he leaves office. But hopefully the country will move on and we need to look at it post Donald Trump America, a reconstruction of the nation as we will and rehabilitation of our right. Thank you, Winston. Thank you. Hey, Stephanie, you know, Trump took to Twitter and basically, in very bold black and white text said, this is a fraud, the mail in ballots are fraud. He's going after states like Nevada, Wisconsin, California, all states that have mail in ballots. For the first time, Twitter said, okay, we're going to put under his text, a fact check disclaimer. That's the first time that's ever been done to Donald Trump. What you talked about that, and the fact that he's trying to change the narrative about a mail in ballot election, which of course, as you well know, Hawaii is part of now 100%. Yeah, very good, good point to bring up and discuss. First of all, the Twitter has been threatened by him for the close down for which there's no authority that he has to do that. He has to do that through the commissions and through the Congress, if he actually wants to pursue that. However, what I'm seeing is and hearing or reading is that the Twitter has done this one time and Twitter's kind of like now not really wanting to do it anymore and or holding back on other other places where they they need to fact check and correct and and cite the evidence. And the point for them is that once you do it, you're done, you're doing it. You've set the precedent. So I think that we're going to get more into that because Twitter now, you know, may be intimidated and concerned about regulation as is all of the Well, Jack Dempsey, Jack Dempsey has taken other people off Twitter completely without even fact checking them. They were just so offensive that he's violated, they violated their policies and on the air rules. And certainly Donald Trump has violated those policies. And finally, Twitter came to to his senses. And we'll talk a little bit later about what they didn't come through the rescue to when it comes to his comments about Joe Scarborough and some of those other nasty things he posted on Twitter. So you're right. Very important. So I'd like to see Twitter move ahead. In fact, as of last night, I removed my Twitter account in very silent protest. Very good. That's a very that's a good model. I may be, you know, that should be followed. If there's enough of that counter pressure on Twitter, they might get to balance them those advantages and disadvantages and and risk the intimidation continued in intimidation and threats from Trump. He can't really do anything for that industry at all. So but this is very frightening. And it's just again, Donald Trump being the tip of the iceberg, in other words, because all of those things that you said, they're ongoing because everything that he's doing is actually supported, I believe that research can be done to see that under each one of his moves, there's a huge effort to compel whatever it is he's saying that he wants done. It's either through the appointment of the judges through the Congress, or it's through his cases in the Supreme Court Texas being a particular one for the mail in that Supreme Court is going to rule on that. It's 9% of the nation's voters. So if they come down on that or or against it, it's a big effect. So he's he's on top. He's on top of this. This is not this is a strategy from Donald Trump. No two ways about it. Exactly. He is on it. And we're seeing it through this this silliness. Yeah. Well, on Trump week, Cynthia Sinclair, you've been shouting from the rooftops that Donald Trump is going to do something somewhere somehow before the election that either is going to imply that he's cheating, or he's going to try to gain the system so that there's a disenfranchisement of voters. And you know, from what state one never knows, but somehow some way, he was going to try to edge its way into the line so that he cuts people out from their ability to vote. I can't think of a better way than trying to indicate, or trying to give the impression that mail in balance is fraudulent. Cynthia, you have the air on this, you've been for a year, well over a year, you've been shouting on this one. Yes, I have. And now what I think he's doing is just gas lighting America. By putting into our brains that voting by mail is not safe. Most people, like the people here on our panel, we can look past that and see it for what it is. But his Trump lakens, and all of his base, they are so susceptible to this kind of gas lighting. And that's what makes it so dangerous. Now, because of what happened on Twitter, Trump has now launched a new website called is it called the truth over facts dot com. And if you go to it and watch it, you will be deeply disturbed that this kind of gas like an Alex Jones is like an Alex Jones conspiracy website. Definitely a conspiracy website. And it's all about the Democrats being in conspiracy against them. Right? So it's all about and the irony of the title is what just struck me is this, you know, the truth over facts. Wait a minute. The truth over facts. They're not separate things. And yet they're making them separate. So that when people like the people that are Trump lakens, the people who do support him are going to read this stuff. And they're going to go, Oh, okay, well, this is the truth. Those are the facts. But this is the truth. Now, wait, you can't separate those two things. And the title of this new website he's come out with, does that very thing. And that's the danger. Okay, let me ask you this then.  And what becomes of it? I mean, the the term incite riot comes to my mind or sedition comes to my mind. How does that proactively be addressed so that we don't find ourselves four months from now or five months from now in that environment? Well, we have DC Abrams out there just calling from the top of her lungs as loud as she can, you know, that this needs to change that we need to do something about this. And so that helps. There's people that are I wish they would put her on the news every single day, though, so she could talk about it. I think that the state, the state recorders and the people that the Secretary of State is not who does all of the voting in each state. Yeah, voting is the Secretary of State. So I think the Secretary of State in the states that are not being, you know, altered by all this misinformation. And I think those people need to stand up. All of those Secretary of States need to stand up and say something. Say this is the right way to do it. And then we've got people like the guy in Georgia, who's absolutely gerrymandered every district so bad, that it's all Republican. It's got to be Republican, even if it's predominantly Democratic. But because it's been gerrymandered so bad, we don't know that. So I think that those things are the most important that people that are on the ground in each state need to be out there every single day talking to their constituents. That's what Right. Thank you. Thank you very much, Cynthia. I'm going to switch here a little bit. You know, it's it's May the 27th and the SpaceX was this recently scrubbed due to bad weather. It did not launch. And it only too bad that bad weather didn't stop Donald Trump from launching on Twitter this Memorial Day weekend. Here we have the tale of two trumps. On one hand, we had Donald Trump very, very solemnly on a solemn basis at Fort McHenry, speaking about Memorial Day, the death of many veterans through military campaigns and wars. And although it was scripted, it was a subdued Donald Trump. Then minutes later, Donald Trump launches into Twitter. And now he does he launch into it, he takes it to the stratosphere. He attacks Hillary Clinton, he attacks Nancy Pelosi, he attacks Stacy Abrams, he's going after Joe Scarborough. I'm just going to read a couple of them because some of these things are have way, way across the bridge of decency. And one of them is the attack on Joe Scarborough, because he's bringing up once again, this notion that Joe Scarborough somehow was involved with the murder of one of his political aides back in 2001, I believe. And the bottom line is this individual young young lady had a heart event, and then she hit her head in the office. And they found her the next morning. She clearly had an undiagnosed heart event. And ever since then, since Joe Scarborough has taken issue with Donald Trump, Donald Trump has brought this this conspiracy that he's ginned up against him. And what finally happened is the husband of that young woman that died couldn't take anymore. He wrote a very poignant letter to Jack Dempsey, the CEO of Twitter. And I'm just going to read some of this because some of this is number one, it was very well written. But secondly, very heartfelt. I'm asking you to intervene in this instance, because the President of the United States has taken something that does not belong to him, the memory of my dead wife, and perverted it for a perceived political gain. I have more in my wife every day since her passing. I've tried to honor her memory and our marriage. As her husband, I feel that one of my marital obligations is to protect her memory, as I would have protected her in life. Twitter, although they apologized to the family, they're not taking it off. Now, tell it to Trump's Twitter, put on a fact check, because of Trump's claims of fraudulent mail-in ballots, yet he can spew this kind of venom out in the social media. And Twitter did not raise a finger other than a very, very shallow apology, and that they're working on policies that they haven't placed, but they haven't quite worked on them yet. They could take that quote off immediately, and remove it immediately, and they choose not to. This is the tale of two Trumps. This is the tale of Trump, this Memorial Day weekend, where not only did we honor fallen veterans, but we also take acknowledgment that there's 100,000 deaths in the United States of fellow Americans who have died from COVID-19. Not a mention, narrow word, but he certainly has enough time to attack Hillary Clinton by saying that she's not right. And then he attacks Nancy Pelosi by saying, what's up with her polygrip? And then he attacks Abraham, saying she's had a tough race and she kissed a lot of babies, visited a lot of restaurants in every state. And if Joe Biden doesn't hire her, he's a racist, we're not doing so. These are deplorable things. These are things, this is a bridge too far. Winston, any thoughts on what Donald Trump has done? And how can we shut him up? Well, there's no bridge too far. We thought that that was crossed months before the election, a year before the election, anyone who listened to Donald Trump over the years thought that is outrageous. It's been everything he says is a bridge too far. They're just extending the bridge, widening the road. I think like Stephanie says, that these are just the latest shiny objects, talking about Nancy Pelosi's polygrip. There's a pandemic going on. We need a president who acts presidential, if nothing else, just for himself. But that, you know, as you think about, what is the appeal of Donald Trump? I think that it goes back to this fundamental like three year old id type of thing where people just want to lash out and say whatever they want to do and do whatever they want to do. And that appeals to people who are angry and frustrated. And they may actually be horrified by what he's doing, but they're not going to say it because he's promoting whatever policy or that happens to be their niche thing. But normal human beings can't look at him and say, this is horrendous behavior. They're probably not going to say it. They're going to think it. I don't know if they're going to vote for him again. But that grounds for his support, it may evaporate after a while, and people go back to being normal and just saying, Yeah, that guy, he kind of gave us voice to all the horrible, awful things that that people want to say when they're feeling horrible and awful. But that's not who I am. That's not who I want to be. So I'm going to vote for a normal person that can normally run an age. This kind of ties into the mail in ballot fraud item that Donald Trump has brought up. In fact, we just got a question here. I want to thank the person who's submitted this question. I'll propose it to you, Winston. And that is, you know, Hawaii still has a mail in ballot process this year. And it's worked in all these other states. Why do people think that it's a fraud? Is this just again, the hypnosis that Donald Trump is able to apply to to those that are? Well, not everyone's a blind follower of Donald Trump yet. They're starting to question the fact that these might be fraudulent. Well, when the President of the United States says something, we have been trained all of our lives to listen. And if he says the World Health Organization is a fraud, is the World Health Organization a fraud, if he says that it doesn't really matter what he says, we have been trained to it's heat, but there's power in what he does and what he says, that's why the whole mask thing is an interesting thing. But if you look at at the voter fraud thing, this is something that's very convenient, easy, easy to cause chaos in the future, because he's sowing the seeds right now. As far as the mail in thing goes, you know, the voter system in our country is not the most secure, you've seen hacking of machines, you've seen, like Florida, the hanging Chad, it's sort of in our collective consciousness that there may be something going on, so he's playing off of that fear. But the reality is, is that mail in voting is being used successfully in Republican led states and Democrat led states, and it's a safe, convenient way to vote. There's safer ways to make it, I'm sure, but we don't have one system that goes across the country, we don't that the Congress has turned down money to ensure more safety in our voting system. So without some help, you know, this is a very easy thing to buy into, and I encourage people to turn on Fox News and America One and Rush Limbaugh and listen to that news cycle for 48 72 hours. And if you're not afraid, and you're not believing that the stuff that they're selling, they're not doing their job right. But once you start listening to it, you get the carrier wave, the hypnosis, the whatever is going on, and you start thinking, Whoa, is this really going on? So it's it's strange times a week that that is a great message. Thank you, Winston, for your thoughts on that and your your your analysis of that. Hey, Stephanie, does Twitter have an obligation to stop this kind of yellow journalism? I don't even know what you want to call it. Just this tripe. Does this Twitter have an obligation? I remember Facebook years ago actually hired an army of people to, you know, view in some of the comments. And if it doesn't adhere to their policies and and behavior online, then they're removed. Twitter's not doing that or hasn't been doing that. Should they? Well, we'll see. Like I said, they put their foot in the water. They've already done it once. Once in once once involved, you're going to be required to continue on. They're going to have to fight that that's what they're going to have to fight. So I don't know if there's any reg or anything like that to encourage them to do that. But we'll see how that goes. But I want to I want to say that there are two things which I still am proud to be an American. And I'm still proud of many of our leaders. And one one of them is that we are following the rule of law.  But because of our law, and our way of operating, we're, we're going with it until he finishes his term. So he's eroding the law. And inch by inch, yard by yard, he's eroding the rule of law. And he's getting away with more and more. We're not Tim, we're not the rule of law is he serves for years, he was duly elected. Okay, so that is a lesson that is a huge model of democracy. So that's in place. And I'm proud of that. We haven't gone to civil war. We've got time to go. But we haven't done the things you ordinarily do to assuage these these antagonisms and these tensions, and they are probably greater than they've ever been. And so the other the other thing I'm very proud of leadership for, which carried on down to us is that that nobody's using these nicknames. It's only Donald Trump. Okay, so I mean, I even call him an Ignoramus is what I wanted to use earlier and didn't use it. But I refrain from it because our leadership is not doing that of either side, you know, Republican or Democratic. So there are two really major models of, first, the rule of law, and then secondly, the appropriate Okay, good points. Orments. Good points, Stephanie, we're almost out of time. I want to give Cynthia the last word on this issue about the things that he's tweeted this weekend, Memorial Day weekend, a very solemn, solemn weekend, and the horrible things he's tweeted. But also, you know, the fact that he's now making wearing a mask or not wearing a mask, a matter of politics versus science and health. Cynthia, you have the last word. Well, you know, we are talking about how he has been gas lighting us with this, you know, it's not safe, or you don't need to wear a mask, you know, or be a real man, don't wear a mask. I believe he's not wearing a mask because he wears makeup and he's afraid his makeup is going to get smeared. I honestly believe that. You know, everybody, it's just he's trying to protect the makeup on his face. And it really hit me the other day when I came back from the store and I took off my mask and I had some makeup on my mask and I went, that's why he doesn't wear a face. I think it's very, very possible anyway. Alright, make a whole lot of sense. Otherwise, the thing is, in gas lighting and in everything, when you hear something enough times, you start to believe it. And even if it's just in the back of your mind, and it's not, you know, up ahead in your conscious mind, it still is there, this little inkling of mistrust or this little inkling of well, maybe it's true. And for people like us that I think are so far on the other side, and everything he says is suspect. But if you don't live in that place of everything he says being suspect, then you end up wondering people that aren't sure of stuff, you know, they're easily led one way or another.  So then at the end, when he has set the stage to be able to claim that he was really, you know, robbed of the election because of this fraudulent mail-in voting, then these people that have that in the back of their mind can go, oh yeah, he was robbed. Yeah, I remember. That's right. I've known so long time, but mail-in voting was like Donald Trump's whispering in every one's ear and someone will remember it, some won't. Alrighty, we have run out of time. Cynthia, I want to thank you very much for appearing on Trump week. Stephanie, you know I want to say thank you to you as well and I appreciate everything you bring to the table. And Winston, Winston Welch, thank you so much for your insightful comments. And until next week, Wednesday, 11 o'clock, I'm Tim Apatel, your host, Aloha.


Hi everybody, Dr. O. In this short video, we're going to talk about interferons. So the key things to note here are interferons are antiviral. They're going to slow the replication of viruses to slow the progression of viral infections. Notice I keep saying the word slow.  So these do not kill viruses.  They slow viral replication. Let's see how they do so. So they actually produce multiple different types of interferons. We have what are called the type one interferons are interferon alpha and beta. Their job is to signal their neighboring cells. This cell on the left is already a goner. It's already been taken over by a virus. It's trying to slow the progression of the virus to neighboring cells. So what it's doing here, these first two types of interferons are going to tell neighboring cells to destroy RNA, to slow down protein synthesis. What they're trying to do is to keep that virus that is, has turning these new cells into manufacturing plants is trying to slow the replication of new viruses. So the cell on the left is already a goner. The cells that are already infected with viruses are probably already goners too. You're just going to slow the replication of the virus. That's what interferon alpha is going to do. And then in the beta is going to signal these neighboring cells to undergo apoptosis. Another term you're going to hear several times in these videos, apoptosis is directed cell suicide.  So that's going to be the type one interferons, alpha and beta. Interferon gamma is going to send out these cytokines chemical messengers to the surrounding area to activate the immune system and to call it in to control the actual infection and potentially kill these virus infected cells. So interferon, just remember, a virus infected cells going to release them into the environment to slow the spread and progression of the viral infection. By asking neighboring cells to kill themselves, by asking neighboring cells to slow the replication of proteins, to slow viral replication, and then lastly, calling in the immune system to help mop up the mess. Okay, that's interferons. I hope that helps. Have a wonderful day. Be blessed.


Time to get started. Welcome to production-ready OpenStack in 12 Parsecs. This is a part of the evaluating OpenStack track. My name is Mark Williams. And I'll give you a little bit more of an introduction after we get the show started. So this should be familiar to you. This is the theme of my presentation here. Now you're all going to have to imagine the theme song playing right now. I couldn't get the rights to the music. I promise this will be brief. And if that went by too fast, I have it a little more legible at the very end. So everybody knows this character, this Han Solo. And he came as an inspiration to me one night, right before the deadline to submit abstracts, his legendary status in the galaxy. And so I'm certainly no legend compared to him. But I do have a lot of harrowing stories from my experience operating large clouds and in my current role helping other customers do that. Now certainly in Han's case, he had wild claims in the movies about being able to do the Kessel run in less than 12 Parsecs. And of course, that's supposed to be impossible because the distance through the Kessel run is 18 Parsecs. So how does this all work? Well, we'll get into that. But a little bit more about my background and how we'll draw corollaries between cloud and the whole Star Wars Kessel run problem is based on some of my experience. So I used to be the infrastructure operations VP at Zynga during its heyday, polluting all of your Facebook feeds with various game things. And in the beginning of my career there, I walked into an Equinex data center on day one with 70 servers. And within that first year, ended up exploding into Amazon, expanding our data centers, which were still not cloud at that time, still bare metal. In year two, exploding wildly into Amazon as Farmville became one of the most successful and 100 times beyond our predictions in terms of growth and infrastructure that it required. So all of these learnings in Amazon, kind of in my first two years at Zynga, translated into gosh, we know we can do this better in a private cloud. We know the performance, we know the reliability, we know that the exclusive tendency of a private cloud will be far superior, but we knew we couldn't do it the bare metal way we had done the first year. So in 2009, I evaluated Eucalyptus and Cloud Stack, and we ultimately chose Cloud Stack to be the core of our private cloud going into the data centers. And through 2011 and 12, we went in the process of exploding out 13 megawatts worth of data center space with two regional clouds comprised of 42,000 nodes. And in the course of about 18 months, we shifted 85% of our workload that was Amazon EC2 based into our private cloud. So all of this happened in crazy, wild times in terms of stress, in terms of also learning and collaborating with great teams. So I hope to share some of that experience with you today. Currently, I work for Redapt. Redapt was actually my vendor as I think it was exploding out into those data centers. Redapt is a systems integrator who helps, typically web and tech companies fabricate all of their integrated racks so that there can be consistency in every build, cabling, testing, firmware versions, everything that's important when you're running large infrastructure. And what Redapt was doing while I was drinking from the firehose at Zynga was putting these cloud solutions on top of that integrated hardware and really accelerating the pathway for customers to be able to deploy their own clouds. And so today we specialize in OpenStack, CloudStack, and a number of other infrastructures of service and platform as a service technology deployments. Okay, so what's this whole road to Kessel? What is the 12 parsec problem, right?  And kind of the secret that nobody's really letting you in on yet is that it's still extremely hard and what makes it hard is not so much consuming all of the defaults, but when you kind of venture out beyond some of those core, robust, well-adopted features and you get into the fringe of some of the things that might be solutions that are integrating with various foreign components that might be outside of OpenStack. And so you're led to believe that all of that works really well. And so what I want to equate for you here is this journey to the Kessel run and what it really took Han Solo to do how many times he had to go through that before he really got good at making the Kessel run, which is really the same thing as what it should take for you as cloud implementers to do in your cloud journey. And one way to kind of draw this corollary is with the cloud maturity model, which is a framework published by the Open Data Center Alliance. Show hands of anybody who's heard of the cloud maturity model. All right, a couple of people I work with and a couple others, great. I will educate you a little bit about this. So basically it's a five step or five level maturity process through which you really have to go regardless of whether you're doing public cloud or private cloud, you have to go through these steps before you're really able to kind of accelerate your journey. So if we look at this and perhaps how Han Solo was getting through his process and the Millennium Falcon, that first time he ordered his YT-1300 light freighter and tried to make the run, he probably didn't finish. So let's see if we can get this to work. I don't know if you've heard that. But first run probably didn't make it, right? It did not finish. But again, he probably didn't have a map, probably didn't have his hyperdrive configured, right? So again, he starts making successful runs, but it's supposed to take 18 parsecs. His first real attempt at it probably took 20. Same thing with the people starting your first journey on cloud. You're gonna make mistakes. You're gonna pick wrong technologies. You're gonna need backtrack. Same thing on this journey. And as you might imagine kind of iterating through it, Han and Chu, we are gonna get better at this. They're gonna start making optimizations to the hyperdrive. Finally, they get repeatable at step three, which is in the cloud world, where you've really got your tool sets defined.  You've now mastered that with cloud, whether it's private or public cloud. This is the step when you have workloads that make sense in terms of being able to take advantage of that automation. And you're beginning to take advantage of the efficiencies in that automation, those APIs and coding to that as opposed to doing everything manually. So at this point, things become far more predictable, but now what Han and Chu are doing is they're making modifications to the Millennium Falcon. They're tweaking the navigation computer and they're beginning to take a more dangerous route but there's safety in their route because their computer enhancements they've done prevent them from getting swept into the black hole that's nearby and the hyperdrive enhancements are certainly paying off. And finally, at the very end, they're able to super optimize their route, get those spices out for the smuggling trade and now become legendary status. So again, same in your cloud journey, you can't start with an optimized expectation around, oh, well, we're gonna deploy OpenStack tomorrow and begin saving money as soon as the project's over. Like that's the last step, typically. And you kinda have to go through these phases. All right, there he goes. Making the castle run, yay, all right. Okay, so here's a little bit more detail about the cloud maturity model. This is available, just Google Cloud Maturity Model. You'll find this document. It's been around for a few years. I wish this existed during Zynga time but all of this makes super sense in retrospect for me and it will be a great way for you to establish a framework and a mutual level of understanding with your management, your teams, aspects of your business, those who are consuming infrastructure from you. If you think about and measure the different elements of your business along these paths. So I've added some highlights here about the things that really stand out to me.  Level one, think of yourself as a, oops, wrong way. Think of yourself as a Jedi youngling, just beginning to gain some awareness of cloud computing, experimenting basically. You're being trained by doing. Similarly with level two, you've narrowed down your approaches.  Level three, as I said before, you've got a lot of that kind of expanse narrowed into the tools that you wanna use and that frame of reference. So again, thinking about some of the things I've heard at the keynotes as well. Gartner saying 31% of all OpenStack deployments or private cloud deployments fail because the operational model of the company is not well suited to consuming it. Thinking about and being fair and fairly assessing yourself and your peer groups with this kind of model is part of what will help you get on the right course as you start down this path. So let's see here. Again, obviously I'll draw all these other correlations. You get to be a Jedi master. You really got cloud aware applications at this point. You're beginning to introduce capabilities of self healing as different parts of the infrastructure may fail. You might be getting active active in multiple regions or at least multiple zones within regions. And finally, you get to become Grand Master Yoda. These would be the Netflix of the world who are like intentionally introducing thrash and chaos into their infrastructures and just really sitting back and watching and improving the automation to make sure things stay optimized. The cool thing about level four and five is that the people there and especially in the OpenStack community, they are the people that you hear from on stage like this and that are paying it forward by contributing code, sharing their lessons and really engaging and helping others. So that's one of the great spirits about OpenStack. So another dimension to which you should look at your organization and how you especially as an IT organization or as a consumer consuming it, what things are important to you when it comes to cloud. And I need to give credit to James Staten for Microsoft at the OpenStack Silicon Valley 2015. He had a great slide up there that again was something I wish I had seen back in my Zynga days, but it was definitely something that I felt resonated with me as he shared it. If you kind of just list out the common elements that you expect to be in your cloud, this is the list. Now, if you think about the parties that might have priority or care and influence about this, you might think about the Galactic Empire on the bottom in blue there and the Rebels. They might have different kind of value systems against what they expect out of cloud or what they would want to see prioritized. So as you might imagine, the IT organization is gonna be that nasty, dark side Galactic Empire. They don't wanna do anything that's good for you. But it's because infrastructure and capacity is their job. That's their history. That's where their core competencies lie. As for traditional IT people, as they get up into thinking about what self-services and automation and orchestration, those are far more foreign concepts and comfort zones that they just don't have. And so when they're talking to the Rebels, who all they want is give me an API. I just need self-service. I can do this myself. I don't care if your server node has high availability or not. I'll just spin up another one. Just give me access. So if you think about these opposing views on what's a priority and what's a core competency, this is where these battles happen. And again, this is a way to begin to introduce change and conversation there. If you think about, the diamond shape isn't important here, but just kind of rationalizing and communicating about the relative priorities and deficiencies in your organization and the capabilities of your tool set as it relates to cloud, this is what Obi-Wan wants for everyone, like thou shalt normalize and create DevOps. All right. So again, after I did this abstract and started researching it, I got super nerdy and spent a lot of time on the Star Wars Wiki. And if you go look up more about the Millennium Falcon, you find out that it is a YT-1300 light freighter, which is surprisingly, when you read it with open stack in mind, it has surprisingly similar attributes to it. So some of the main bullet points about the YT-1300 is it kind of comes as a stock minimalistic system, but it's intentionally capable of having add-ons and components connected to it. And that's its appeal, just like open stack. Open stack, you can kind of connect anything that you want to it. And its benefits are being able to modify it. It's kind of an open system, if you will. And in the same way, those core projects, the ones in blue there, Swift, Keystone, Nova, Neutron, Cinder, and Glantz, those are the ones that are, you can't survive without those. Well, Swift is kind of standalone, but for the most part, you can't really survive without those. But the attraction is the Big Tent, all those other widgets that you can do. But you need to be careful. The Big Tent is far more scary in terms of, and there's tools to help you understand this too. In the last year, the Foundation has released a maturity grading system on all the different projects that are in the Big Tent and in the core. And you can kind of figure out where there might be safety in consuming some of those projects. But even within those core projects, as I mentioned earlier, some of those fringe features, some of the things that might not be as heavily adopted, the things you need to worry about. And especially if this is your first attempt at consuming open stack specifically, and that you should be very concerned if you're thinking your need to going to consume some of these fringe features as a part of your first foray and automating anything related to cloud. Okay, so let's discuss kind of as a systems integrator, as a company and a group that helps customers implement open stack, well, why does it take, why should it take 18 bar stacks? If that's the standard reference we're gonna say, Kessel run and implementing open stacks should take, why does it take that long? And why can't it take longer? So I don't know if I can zoom in here, but. So it all begins with you gotta get together with the customer and the vendor to finalize and determine the statement of work. You gotta get your procurement and legal to review it. That just takes time, that's out of your control. You gotta schedule resources. So with a custom deployment, which is the typical traditional approach to implementing open stack, you have to define your architecture. You have to sit down with presumably that ISV, that commercial provider of a distribution or your consultancy and decide, okay, how are we going to implement this? It's a time where during this architectural design session, you're gonna learn a lot about what open stack is and what specific decisions you have to make in your infrastructure to make it successful. And in that process, it's gonna take you getting your team together with their team and that just takes time, right? Then you have that session, they got a vendor has to validate, quote it back to you, then you kind of get into this, well, we're gonna negotiate the price, right? So you might loop a few paths around, that might take a few parsecs of distance there. Then comes procurement. Once you've agreed and signed that, quote, we the SI or whoever's implementing this for you has to go by all the gear, right? Presumably you're doing this on new infrastructure, highly recommended. But inevitably, and I know Kent's over here, Kent works for us and deals with the customer asking for changes, all I have to have this. And you deal with kind of a potentially recurring loop of procurement and changes. What happens then is at least with the way that Redapt does cloud delivery is again, it's like making sausage. Nobody wants to see, you don't wanna do this in the field, open stack's hard enough. So we do all of our cloud implementations in our merge facility, it's where our teams are, both on the physical rack implementation side as well as our cloud engineering people. And that tight coupling of experts that do this over and over again is very effective for us to eliminate a lot of the ugliness and problems that would otherwise be seen in the field. So again, our approach is to do that in our factory. We validate it before we ship it. We deliver it to you as a full integrated rack. And then the last two pieces are okay, we need to do that last mile of validation and provisioning. Then we get to train you on it. Now you're ready to begin putting workloads on it. Okay, that's the traditional path and that could be, there could be a lot of issues with that. So imagine you're taking the test drive of the YT-1300 with the salesperson. And you're jumping out of hyperspace here. And this seems to be advancing itself, but now you're back in the showroom and he wants to show you all the trim line packages that are available for the YT-1300. So you can customize it to make your OpenStack implementation awesome. So there's several different options and a fundamental approaches that might help you shave that path. One is getting OpenStack hosted, dedicated and managed for you at your hosting provider's premises. That's one option. Another one is, I really want to have it on my premises but I do want somebody, I don't have the talent, I want somebody else to manage that for me. And they can do that remotely. There's the approach where you take a predefined appliance, whether that's proprietary hyper-converged or whether that's kind of stock components. There are a variety of options there. Or that traditional path which is custom built to suit my premises, I've got staff and I'm wanting to engage and invest in this process. So what are the relative kind of benefits here? So if we think about distance and how long this path might be with a managed hosted, you can do it in faster than 18 or it might take more. It depends on whether you're willing as a consumer of OpenStack to take those recommendations from that provider, follow that reference architecture. The less you deviate, the shorter your distance will be. Makes sense.  Makes sense. So certainly there's a number of providers across all of these trim lines and spectrums. I'm not going to enumerate them all. I'm going to give you a couple of examples. So Rackspace is a well-known example of a hosted managed private cloud provider. So another short path is through again your premises, but somebody's remotely managed infrastructure. Cisco Metapod is another example. Now what's cool about Metapod is that historically they used to manage any OpenStack that you would do yourself and they'd take it over. After Cisco acquired them, Cisco within that year, one of them a year of that, they said, look, to be efficient at operations we have to normalize all of these differences. We can't just have the wild west of different implementations going on, different distributions. Imagine how hard that is to manage N different snowflakes. So Cisco came out with a prescribed thou shalt have that these SKUs as a part of your infrastructure. No exceptions. You can make changes later, but again, we have to make a prescribed set of hardware and a prescribed set of OpenStack projects that you can consume. Otherwise we won't be successful at scaling this. Now there's an interesting vendor that's come, I think they announced in the Vancouver Summit, Platform 9, if you've heard of them. As a part of my research for this, I started to explore them. They're kind of right between your premises to manage remotely and your own and hosted managed infrastructure. What they do is they take just the control plane. Imagine three highly available OpenStack management nodes. They manage that for you.  And once you've installed that agent, you log into the remotely managed console and you can begin to extend the rest of your OpenStack. You can provide your own compute, but they do all of the upgrades, the monitoring and the troubleshooting of that management plane for you. And I think that's really interesting for, certainly if you self assess your cloud maturity level, kind of two or less, that's a great way to get started. How do you know that OpenStack is the right vehicle through which to try to expose those who would otherwise consume your infrastructure? This is a great way to try it out. I don't even have that many skills anymore, but I was able to do this in a couple of hours through the instructions on their website. So it was pretty easy to do. So again, that could be a really short path to getting something working with OpenStack. Again, as an operations person, I long term would be nervous about having that much complexity in a remotely managed control plane versus a on-premises compute node. But again, I'm choosing a shorter path over the ideal situation. And again, if I don't have the talent, I'm gonna depend on others. So appliances. So this is where Redapt and Mirantis have actually collaborated. And there's been a number of other offerings in this space. But for example, what Redapt and Mirantis have done have created a Dell Juniper-based, again, predefined prescribed rack that you can buy in certain quantities of compute and storage. And again, you don't have as much choice about what SKUs those are or what OpenStack configuration topology has been implemented. But again, it's predictable. There are known quantities of performance. There are known quantities of how to upgrade it. There are known quantities of exactly how long it should take to get it delivered. It's not a, you don't have to have an architectural design session to consume OpenStack in this way. It comes as a predefined solution, which is informed by all of the traditional deployments that Mirantis and Redapt have done in our past. We've normalized all of those best practices into one offering. So again, that's a great way, if you're starting out, to consume something that is well-known and let the rest of the way you do IT innovate with that, okay? So again, a shorter path, hopefully 14 parsecs. And then the traditional path, again, there's many ISVs that participate here and the custom build the suit. And they all have kind of great stories in the marketplace and many of their customers are telling you about their success here. But again, there are varying degrees of how much talent you need to have on your own staff to be able to operate these things once you have them on your premises. Again, the managed ones are obviously gonna be lower expectations on having internal talent. The ones on the right side, you need to have some to a lot to be able to be successful. And again, what I see a lot of customers do, especially in their first deployment, they spend far too much time thinking that they have to have all these bells and whistles in their first deployment when in many cases they aren't able to articulate what their workload is. And what the workload is is so important because that should be defining what special requirements you're introducing into what you're doing with OpenStack. If you don't have that, I strongly recommend you take something that's recommended generic best practice, see how your workloads perform on them and then as you iterate and making successive runs up to your own maturity, you'll be able to make those tweaks in successor implementations or upgrades to that stack. And again, reference architecture that could take 18 parsecs or if you're looping infinitely on these various changes and going on the fringe of these supported features, you'd take 30 or more parsecs. Gonna mention briefly, TCB Cloud. I have one customer who's taken a look at them. This customer I would put at a four on the CMM scale. They are the point where they wanna have control because they're contributing to OpenStack itself. They wanna be able to introduce change into their OpenStack in a very CICD controlled approach. TCB Cloud has a nice model for that. I kind of put it on the fringe because they're a newer, smaller company. They're based in the Czech Republic. I wouldn't recommend this for somebody who's just starting out necessarily. They are also a company that will manage it for you. So again, I haven't used it myself, but it's something that I would keep an eye on in terms of how they do in the market and how it might align with your requirements. And finally, if you get through the summit this week and you think, ah, you know, I can totally do this myself. I'm just gonna download source and do it myself. I got this. I don't know if you recognize what that planet is, but that's Alderaan. Y'all will remember what happened to Alderaan. Okay, so to illustrate as an example, how does that path, the Kessel, get shaved by using an appliance approach or a hosted managed? It's far more predictable. There aren't, the opportunity to introduce change and introduce chaos is far less. So instead of starting that with that ADA session that I had suggested in that other path, you can start with, hey, we're gonna be able to tell you what the performance characteristics, the behaviors, and project features are gonna be in this specific design. And here's an SLA around it, especially if you have a managed provider. And SLA is part of the story. And this is how we approach our appliance delivery in that way. Instead of kind of getting through that and having to validate everything, it really just becomes a schedule and a quote and a statement of work and goes through the rest of the process. Now what's interesting, especially with, I'm sure the hosting providers and certainly the way we do the automated implementations for Mirantis OpenStack on the unlocked appliance is because it's the same every time, the install installation, normally that would be fuel. So for those that have done DIY, Mirantis or a custom engagement with Mirantis, they have a great tool, Fuel, that is very good about doing that install. Now if you can do that same exact install on the same hardware, the same specs each time, you can automate fuel, you can script fuel. And that's what they've done with our collaboration. And at the same time, so that accelerates that, you don't have humans having to introduce configuration options in fuel. And at the same time on the other side, once you've built it, the validation can be far more automated. So that again helps shave that path and get us to doing the validation much, much faster. Okay, so ultimately at the end of the day, you need to make sure you have a master. Who is your master? So if you think about Anakin Skywalker, and he kind of got through those first three episodes and then kind of made some bad decisions, right? He thought he had this. He went rogue and look what happened. He lost his woman, he lost his kids and he ended up getting crispy fried on Mr. Far. So then he comes up for Darth Vader and you know the rest of the story, right? So it took him until the last minute of looking backwards in time and seeing the episodic thing with Luke that he finally realized he should have stayed on the good light side of the force with Yoda. So that's where I would encourage you all to make sure that you, and in the same way, especially with the open stack community, if you're gonna go down that traditional path and build a snowflake and make all these customizations and not contribute them back, that's contributing to the dark side of the force, right? So we want everybody to be kind of fulfilling the altruistic expectations of the open stack foundation contributing back and I think it's also part of that to not deviate and not go too far field into the nether regions, the dark regions of projects that are coming out unless you're very mature, I don't know why this is advancing on its own, unless you're very mature with your cloud capabilities and you have a process through which you can contribute that back. So as promised, here's the Star Wars crawl at the beginning. All I did is I took the beginning of the Force Awakens and changed a few things. So I hope you all enjoyed that and I don't know why this is advancing on its own. But I finished a little early, but I'm happy to take questions if you have questions, the microphones are there. Anything I can answer for anybody? Thank you all.


I'm glad that we have the opportunity to take this special afternoon to recognize you, congratulate you, and most importantly to say a profound thank you for the important role you play in the system in British Columbia. Fantastic honor to know that you're recognized for the job you do and end the long service time in and it's just a great honor to be here and you know be recognized for that. Thank you. Enough words for me to really describe how much you want to It's a very amazing feeling to be with all these people and the people who come before us. It's an incredible honor and it's an amazing event. You may be only one of the very few truly positive influences in a young person's life and that potentially lifelong impact is impressive. You ladies and gentlemen in the correction service are doing an amazing thing for our country which unfortunately too often goes unrecognized but we're going to correct that today.