Okay, IonMPI, this week brought to you by DigiKey, and it is from Sincerion, what is the IonMPI this week? Okay, we're back with another Sincerion one. This just popped up on the digikey.com slash new page, and I do love a good Sincerion sensor. We've featured them a lot, but ever since the SHT10, these people have been rocking out. They've been coming out with one great product after the other, and this week is no different. It's part of a new series. It's the first of the Sin5X, it's the Sin54. It looks just like a particulate sensor, and you might be like, hey, is this just another PM25 sensor? There are so many of those, and I'm like, yes, it does have a particulate sensor, but also has other sensors available. So this is the eval board version. There's basically two versions, one with the cables, one without. So the Sin54 or the Sin5X series, it's kind of a four in one. It is a particulate sensor, but it also has a temperature and humidity sensor built in, which most particulate sensors don't have. And on top of that, it also has VOC, and there's one model that has an NOX sensor as well. So two gas sensors, humidity and temperature, which is kind of nice. It's like all in one. It's got all the different data signals, because there's multiple PM signals. There could be multiple VOC signals, humidity and temperature, and it all comes out of one I2C or UART port for very quick calibration and usage. And I just love that it's like this little box. You have a cable, you plug it in, and it's like kind of all of your sensing is taken care of, and you're all sensing the same air at the same time. So that's also kind of a nicety with this all in one sensor platform. So there's a few of these. The Sin50 and the Sin55 don't exist quite yet. The Sin54 is what is currently available. It doesn't have the NOX sensor, but it does have the VOC, the Volatile Organic Compound Sensor, and it has the particulate matter and temperature and humidity. So just FYI, there's a family. We're only covering the Sin54.  There's a laser particulate sensor. There is the gas sensor is an SGP 31 or 41. Can't remember the exact part number. And sorry, the SGP, yeah, the SGP41 is the gas sensor. The SHT30 is the temperature and humidity sensor, or I could have those numbers reversed. Either way, basically they took existing sensor sensors and popped them into the body. And I can actually show that real fast on the overhead. Just autofocus here. So in this body, you can kind of see this is, I took it apart so you can see the laser here.  That's the SGP30 and that's the SHT40 or 41. And then this is the laser sensor. And then if you look also really carefully, you can see the little shiny square here. That's the particular sensor that looks for the reflections off of the laser to count and detect particles. Okay, so that's just a quick aside to show how it's put together. So it's in one box. You know, it's all, it's not fully enclosed. Of course, there's a fan that will pull air in, but you can kind of put it at the outlet of a box that you have protected so you can have air come in and then it gets ejected out the side.  It's just going to be that channel in the center there. There's also 3D modeling files that you can use if you want to model how this would fit into your HVAC system or your home air quality monitor or other indoor air quality monitoring. You will need a cable to connect to the sensor. There is power and ground that you need. So that's five volt power that's pretty usual for particular sensors because there's a fan, it's a five volt fan. And there's two data lines. The data lines can be either I squared C data and clock or they can be UART, RX and TX. And you actually get to pick because the fifth wire is the interface selection you pull ground for I squared C and pull high for UART. I don't use I squared C to be honest, but UART I'm imagining has very similar data output as most PM 2.5 sensors that kind of blast out once a second on the PM data encoded in this CRC binary hex data. There is lots of library code for this, which is really nice. So I was able to get this up and running very quickly because they wrote Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and generic embedded for whatever STM or NXP chip drivers and they just kind of work. So you don't have to bring up the boards and sensors by writing all that code yourself. They do have libraries and example codes way to go, which is quite nice. There's even a BLE gadget library example, which I thought was really cool because it uses an ESP32 and then you just load the example sketch onto your ESP32 wire up to the main I squared C port. And you've got this, you can use their app to read the sensor data. So let's go quickly to the overhead again. And I can show it. So this is the sensor. Now I'm not going to get proper readings, of course, because I've opened this up. And so it thinks that there's all this particular matter. And just because there's no, the light is being messed up here a little bit, the laser's got stuff in between it. But you do see up here humidity, 19%, temperature, 27 degrees, VOC 68. And if I breathe on it. It turns pink. Yeah, you'll see. The humidity starts going up quite a bit. And the temperature is going to cool a bit. And also probably the PM 2.5. The PM 2.5, by the way, is going to be all messed up because it's exposed. But it's a nice all in one sensor. I mean, it's convenient for if you need to have your humidity and temperature and VOC, you want to do air quality measurements. But you don't expose the entire body of your electronics. This kind of gives you this channel of exposure that is sort of separated from the rest of the electronics. And like I said, while there isn't a O-ring necessarily, it's going to give you better ceiling than you'd probably do yourself while still exposing the air channel, which is from the fan here. Air comes in through this channel and then gets ejected out. So all in one, very convenient. And it uses the sensors you know and love, the SHT40 and the SGP30. And their particular sensor, ready to go. You just need a cable, plug it in, and you can use their Arduino or... Available on Digi-Key, we have a link in the chat. And then also you can check out the short URL and the product number right there. There's also the eval kit that comes with cables. And you can buy it. There's a lot in stock, actually. Which is a great feature of products now. Yes. Being able to buy them. So pick one up and that is IonMPI this week.


creating accessible documents. I'm Cheryl Burgstahler at the University of Washington in Seattle. We on our campus, like other campuses, produce tons of documents to share with our students. Copies of PowerPoint presentations, of journal articles, of book chapters, you name it. It can be a massive amount of reading for any student. It's even more of a challenge for students with disabilities. Everybody creates documents and most people don't realize that all documents are not equal. That some are more accessible than others. Students who are blind use screen readers and speech synthesis to read the content allowed to them that appears on the screen. Students with dyslexia and other conditions that impact their reading, they use screen readers too. Even though they can see the content on the screen, the voice output helps them comprehend that content. But assistive technology benefits many other students as well. The most inaccessible documents are scanned in or photocopied. Because they're essentially images, screen readers can't access the text. A scanner, accompanied by optical character recognition or OCR, can turn a document into one that is accessible to a screen reader. It also benefits other students. For instance, somebody using a mobile device to access the content, or someone who wants to search through the content to find the content that they're interested in. In order for a document to be accessible to a person who's blind and using a screen reader, it's important that the heading structure be used. For example, in Microsoft Word, you should use the heading styles. Headings serve a couple of important functions for a screen reader user. One is that they can navigate through a document by its headings. So they can jump from heading to heading to heading. And their assistive technology will inform them that they're on a heading of a particular level. So they know this is a heading level two. That then is a subheading underneath a heading level one. And so that helps them to develop a kind of a mental outline of the structure of the document. For a few seconds, you skim through the document. You just want to know that what is in this document? It is built. What are the major components of this article that you are reading? This helps you to focus on the desired section that you would like to study further. Without that, you have to read from top to bottom because everything has the same weight. It's easier to build an accessibility when a document is being created than waiting until after the fact. And if you build an accessibility, it will diminish the need for accommodations for students with disabilities. For more information about IT accessibility, consult uw.edu.accessibility. This video presentation was created with funding from UW Information Technology. Copyright 2021, University of Washington. Permission is granted to copy these materials for educational, non-commercial purposes, provided the source is acknowledged.


My name is Hilary Lipzig. I am a principal site reliability engineer and team lead at Red Hat. So what does that mean? It means I use a lot of GitOps, but from like a very different side of things. Like Christian. Yes, so Christian Hernandez, senior principal technical marketing manager. I think we have like the longest titles at Red Hat, but and you know, I deal on the other side of GitOps, right, I'm in the BU and I always receive all the feedback, right, from from our customers. So she kind of deals with actually implementing a lot of the things being an SRE for, and so she has a different view than I do of GitOps. So, so yeah, we're both cartoons there. So as we see, it's not just the like the way we implement it, but then like supporting the infrastructure that has the implementations on it. So operating GitOps and using GitOps as a consumer. It's good times, folks. All right, so brief agenda today, which is a lot of white space on this big screen.  We're just gonna keep this all pretty high level conceptual. We're gonna talk about CICD. We're gonna talk about pipelines. We're gonna talk about non-linear pipelines and then we're gonna tie all of that back into GitOps. So how it started and how it's going. This is a real make file from 10 years ago. I picked this one because it's nice and clean and you can see everything. And I'm borrowing this meme format, right? Usually we use this how it started, how it's going and we're talking like things have gone terribly. The good news is with like GitOps and modern CICD, things are actually going pretty great. So who here has ever manually deployed code to production? Right, yeah. What did you do? Did I get an FTP, right? Right, you something like that? I've done it with FTP. I have. And then somebody went and logged in and ran a make file like this. Assuming it was this nice. I've seen some pretty gnarly make files. And then what did we do? We basically prayed, we hoped. And as an SRE, I'm gonna say the thing all SREs say, right, hope is not a strategy. No, no it's not. So what we basically did is we figured out ways to avoid hope. And so now we have, you know. Now we have like observable, provable methods of delivering production code. Delivering production applications. Delivering stuff that is good, tried, true, consistent. So a lot of the driver behind this was this methodology, right, CICD, continuous integration, continuous delivery. And the idea of being continuous means we're going to do it faster. That also means we're gonna fail a lot harder. So one of the things that immediately got kind of codified into this was that testing needed to be part of the way you delivered code. Test driven development, like CICD and test driven development came up around the same time. I spent 11 years in quality engineering, I promise you, that's how it went. So we had a lot of those things happening in concurrence and so a lot of original CICD pipelines that I worked on, it was not just how are we going to deliver our code consistently, but how are we going to guarantee our code? And that was, now we have infrastructure as code is one way of doing it. We have, of course, the unit tests, the integration tests, you have various different layers of things to deliver code. So I've actually like logically divided this by color, right?   And these two things must be separated. A lot of CI is actually about method, not just the technical implementation, because there's a lot of different ways to approach CI and there's a lot of different reasons why you would approach them differently. So your actual reality is gonna look more like that, right? And actually these are two different examples of potential CI CD pipelines. So in the first one I have, you have some concurrent processes, right? Like you might do a build and then especially like cloud native where you can spin up multiple instances of things with pods, you might be doing some tests, you might be doing some security verifications. All of these things by the way, apply to non-cloud native deployments because that is really where a lot of our reasons for best practices came from. It was when services were monolithic and they weren't broken up into microservices. And they weren't necessarily as easily observable again. So this is, I love observability, you're gonna hear me say it a lot, just get with it. So here are two examples of like real CI CD pipelines that I have built in the past, right? So we're doing some concurrent things. Where we're building, we've got some security checks that then check off at a separate workflow and then we've got our test release and deploy to stage. Now all of those things must be true and correct in order for you to progress past stage. That's why that ends there. I'm not like the best visual thinker, so my diagrams suck. And then once you go to stage, you test again. This is an interesting thing because with the infrastructure as code, with the pretty much guarantees we have that things will be the way we expect them, that last test thing is starting to get dropped off a little bit and then last just like kind of the one CD. But there really is like CD to stage and then CD like for real with the delivery versus deployment at last and had a great article on that a few years ago. I don't know if it's still up. And so you're going to have those steps. And so some times you're going to see it with or without the second deployment model. I always have that last set of tests. That's your just in case. That's your oh shoot button, if you will. Like that's the fail safe method. And then you're gonna have something like a notification, right? We've passed our last round of checks and things are gonna go off. So that's an example. The next one, this is a bit more of a microservice designed kind of pipeline. Like this is again another real pipeline. So if you would imagine something like a React stack, right? React Native, React just for web, you know it's all API driven. So you can actually use the same backend API to power both UIs, right? So realistically you're probably just gonna build that once. And then depending on what you need you're either going to build both your UI stacks or maybe just one. And so the reason for this logical split of things is one so that if you only need to rebuild your web, you can just rebuild your web. If you only need to rebuild your mobile, you can just rebuild your mobile, right? And if you want to rebuild your backend, realistically you're probably rebuilding everything but not necessarily. So moving on. So in these models I discussed sub tasks, right? And this is, you see these a lot sub tasks. What is that? It's this thing that you're doing, it's part of your task and your pipeline and it may or may not be blocking, right? A really good example of that is a notification sub task. If I am notifying you that something has happened or something has started and let's say I'm doing it through a Slack integration, right?   You can add some other fail saves or even attach pager-duty alerts if you want to some parts of your pipeline failing but I don't want my notifications failing blocking the continuous part of continuous. So it's kind of, then there's other things that would be very blocking, right? Let's say your unit tests fail. Well, yes, you're gonna stop there. Realistically that's a good place to stop if your unit tests are failing, you know. Ideally, I mean I've seen it done the other way just not to much success but you're gonna probably like we showed security text on the last page, you know. Those are types of things that you could run them as sub tasks or a pipeline of sub tasks but realistically that stuff fails.   So there's lots of different reasons why something may or may not. It also might be about your maturity model, right? If you're not actually going to production, right?   It's very like in the moment you can go ahead and make things that should be blocking, non-blocking and then update it as you go, right? Get more mature, get ready but the point of continuous integration again is that it is fast. So if you want something to be blocking or non-blocking maturity model, the maturity of your application, the maturity of what you're doing, these can be factors as well and so you basically should be continuously evaluating it.  The software development life cycle applies everywhere, I promise. Like really everywhere. Just apply it everywhere. You'll be fine. Am I doing good? Am I sticking to like two minutes of slide? Jump out, yeah. Perfect, great. Trying to run through this as fast as possible, right? And so the last part is keeping things maintainable, right? And I have like five stories I could tell about all this stuff but I'm trying to keep to our time here. I'll go back and tell them if we get that space. So again, like don't keep it too fancy, right? I showed you that slide with like two different pipeline models and one of them was kind of, like there was a lot more to it and the other one was kind of broken out more nicely. And basically the advice is find logical breakout spaces where you can do that because it makes your overall process of CI CD it's easier to debug when something goes wrong. It's easier to follow, it's easier to debug. You're going to be able to observe it a little bit better if you break it out into more logical spaces. And I mean, feel free to experiment with that and try and fail, right? And at the end of the day, there's like copy paste for a reason. You can just move stuff around. And so strive for dry code but like don't kill yourself with that. And really at the end of the day what are we doing when we're doing CI CD, right? Where did we start? We started with bash, right? It was bash. And now we've basically created tools to orchestrate bash. I was explaining this to one of the junior engineers on our team and I was like, look, everything we are doing in Python, you could do it in bash. It just wouldn't be object-oriented, it wouldn't be as dry. But at the end of the day, we're still just doing bash commands. We've made them faster, we've made them more reliable, we've made them more observable. And we've kind of regulated that environment, that infrastructure as code piece really does that as well. So dry code where possible but don't kill yourself, crawl, walk, run. Don't be afraid to mix and match the right tools, right? So we say, oh, CI CD, what am I going to use? What am I gonna do? My team uses a mix of GitLab and Jenkins. And you're like, whoa, why? Well, there's reasons why, right? Basically, I said this to Chris earlier, choose your technical debt wisely, right? Everything has some level of technical debt. And what did he say? He said, and Conway's law always applies. Yeah. So choose your technical debt wisely. You're going to get some. Guaranteed, everything you pick has technical debt. You have to decide what is the most sustainable technical debt for you. And you really need to be mindful of that. Really, I'm like a pessimist, honestly. I've seen everything that can go wrong, go wrong. So I'm never like, oh yeah, choose the advantages. No, choose your debt because you will pay it every single time. And again, iterate, start with good. Get your MVP, work your way up to better. Wow, we're doing great on time. I'm gonna tell one story then. Oh, there you go. I'm gonna tell one story. I earned it because I kept so good on time. By the way, just since we have time, that quote, choose, don't choose the best. Choose your debt. I think that I'm just gonna put that on the next get-up. Yeah, on the next t-shirt. That's just gonna be on the one in Detroit. I'm just gonna have that on the back. It's just, I love that quote.  Yeah, yeah, I'm gonna, yeah. All right. So this is a real story from about 10 years ago before all of this had really matured, right? This has come so far. CICD has come so far. We have tools to choose from. We did not used to have tools to choose from. We were like Daisy chaining Jenkins jobs and praying. So anybody, Daisy chained Jenkins jobs? Yeah, yeah, okay. So a lot of you make me feel very old and I'm not okay with that. You may leave. So way back in days of yore, we did not have some of the maturity, right? And we had to learn very painful lessons which is why we have today's maturity. And one such example of this and why infrastructure is code and GitOps and so forth is so important is real story. We, my company, right? We had this big monolithic application. We added this new feature. I was the head of quality assurance. I had spent like tons of time testing this six ways from Sunday. It worked. It did. Except. So it was a very memory intensive thing. And somebody, not me, because I was not the sysadmin. SRE is not your sysadmin, by the way. Just in case that wasn't clear. Throwing that out there. I say that every time I get a chance. So not me, because I was not the sysadmin. Somebody had decided that the staging cluster, or staging cluster, jeez. You can see how long I've been in here. The staging virtual machine could have double the amount of memory to it as production. Now does anybody know what the most, what is the most important thing about staging? Consistent with production. That part. Yeah, it's consistent with production. Staging should closely mirror production. It should be the same. So much so that when Christian and I worked together 10 years ago, the way that we promoted staging to production was by swapping DNS on the servers. That is how it was done. That's how old school we were. That was so old school. And Daisy changed Jenkins jobs. Yeah, Daisy changed jobs, yeah. So somebody had made that decision that it was okay for the environments not to match. And there was no R-back, right? VMs did not have R-back, no role-based access, no identity access management, none of that existed. It was just one person had the password. So we had to wait for this one person to go in and figure out why this much-awaited, very highly-lauded feature didn't work.  He finally finds that, right? And he's like, oh, I guess I should, maybe scale staging down. And I was like, no, no, you can't do that.  He's like, well, keep in mind this was 10 years ago. Does anybody know what happens when you need to increase memory on a VM roughly 10 years ago? Right.  We had to turn off production. That was not a good day, folks. It was not a good day. So, you know, these kind of, these lessons that we've learned, these stories, right? A lot of this applies to bare metal. A lot of it applies to VMs.   Keep in mind that these are like really hard lessons that we have had to learn. So, moving on. Yes, so thank you, by the way. You're welcome. So now, how do we tie all this to GitOps, right? And so the, I'm gonna take this language off because I'm proud of this shirt. Oh no, now you're all tangled. Look what you've done. It's like, the, how does all this to GitOps, right? So now we have, yeah, now I messed myself up. Now we have cloud-native architecture, right? We have a way to manage cloud-native architecture. And now that's even evolving even further with GitOps, right?  I'm part of the planning committee, by the way. So which is why I'm saying it makes me all happy. That all of you are here, I really appreciate it. And, but, you know, a lot of the times is like, how do we tie this into GitOps, right? And so, just like Hilary was saying, that a lot of this is gonna be conceptual and since I'm like on the business unit side, it's gonna be like a lot of the things that I've seen out there. So it's not gonna be as technical, maybe as you guys would like, if you wanna chat with me after or ask questions after I can get deeper technical. But for the purposes of this conversation, I'm gonna keep it like really high level and kind of like the three ways I've actually seen GitOps tie into CICD. So, but first, the, how does GitOps look like in your pipelines? From a high level, right? Traditionally, long time ago, CICD was considered like a thing, one thing, right? And a lot of it has to do with Jenkins, right? I mean, it's kind of like, it's the tool we had, right? We had the hammer and everything looked like a nail. And so we, Jenkins did everything with CICD. So Jenkins did the CI part, it also did the delivery part. But with GitOps, CICD are really kind of decoupled, right? Because they have their individual, the individual, I guess what I would like to say is the focus, right, of the aspect of it, right? And you mentioned the Atlassian article about like what CI is and what the two CDs are. And so, and they're kind of different, right? And so, think of CI as a synchronous process that happens. Whereas GitOps is really asynchronous, right? If you think about it like Flux, or if you're using Argo, there's a reconciliation loop. Yeah, you can use webhooks to kind of run the reconciliation maybe at commit time. But it's really asynchronous, right? Especially with like drift detection and things like that. You have to wait for that reconciliation loop to happen. And so, now you have this idea that GitOps controller doesn't necessarily know anything about your CI process, really, because now what you're trying to do is you're trying to integrate a synchronous process with the asynchronous process and try to make them work together. And that's kind of difficult, really, from what I've seen, right? So I've seen three solutions out there, right? And if my, did I press maybe? Uh-oh. It only liked me. That's it, it's done. Oh, there we go.  This is kind of more of the traditional CI CD, like with Jenkins or Bamboo or whatever, you know, one of those technologies are. Yeah, all of them. Yeah, like all of them, right? Like this is kind of fits more into that aspect where the CI tool basically owns the whole thing and really GitOps is kind of like the, it's kind of like a second thought. It's kind of like the last thing and they don't really know about each other. And this is kind of where I see people start because they use the floating tag, right? Aspect of it. CI does the whole thing when it's ready to deploy, it just tags that image to dev. Wait. Stage. Production. Use floating tags. Yeah, so the, yeah, floating tags not recommended, right? I put that there. And then also, if you guys were in the morning session with Dan, it doesn't really fit with like the GitOps principles as we've written them because. Or security principles. Well, yeah, and also the security implications. And just because it's like, because GitOps, you need to have your source of truth, right? And a floating tag isn't really a source of truth because someone can force push an image, you know, a bad actor can change an image. If you need to roll back, there's no really good way of rolling back without like force pushing a change. So yeah, so like, you know, the CI tags an image and it just tags an image and just assumes the CD went into place. But this is kind of like a good start, right? So it's kind of like a, where people start and kind of, because it feels familiar, right? I see them, it feels familiar. It's like, okay, it's kind of like, you know, I could still kind of use my CI process the way it is and kind of just put like that GitOps thing at the end. And then, and then this next one is kind of like the mid tier and it's probably like what the most, what I see most people use, right how we use ArgoCity. So if the flux people, if you see something different, I'd love to talk to you guys. So it's essentially the CI does the build and GitOps does the CD part, the GitOps controller, whatever it's continuous delivery or deployment. The CI builds the application just like it normally would do and the GitOps controller actually does that deployment and it handles and it hands back the process back to CI to do whatever testing it needs to do. You know, it's essentially, we're talking about multiple pipelines and the multiverse of madness, right?  So the CI process is more hands on, right? So it's kind of like the CI process is kind of managing the GitOps tool itself. And although GitOps is involved, right? This is a functioning asynchronous process because it's handing back and forth. The GitOps is kind of just waiting for that image change to happen and then it does something and it hands it back off and it's, you know, it's a little bit more linear, right? It's, you know, even though GitOps is there asynchronously, it functions a synchronous process. So, and this is things I've seen, which is pretty cool. CI triggered, but like the GitOps is completely owns that process, right? And so the CI builds only, it only builds the image and GitOps does like all the rest essentially. CI creates PRs, right? So it's like more intimately involved with that GitOps process. It'll create a PR, you know, it'll do gating that way, right, with PRs. And since GitOps controllers act on a branch or a tag or whatever, the CI process, that's how it interacts, right? With Git essentially with tag, sorry, with PRs. And someone, you know, can manually, either manually approve it or automatically approve it after test run or something. We have bots in our group and the bots do things unless you say slash cancel and then the bot will cancel it for you. Yeah, so yeah, slash retest slash cancel. Slash retest, yeah. SlackOps, your favorite. Slash cancel is my favorite. The CI and CD and this design, they're like literally decoupled, right? And so this is, you know, kind of what they were saying, you're using the best tool for the job, you're kind of building things with what CI is and you're deploying things with the best deployment tool and since they're decoupled, you can kind of, you know, pick and choose what the best tool for that. You can pick not necessarily the best tool for the job, I guess, the best tech debt. The best technical debt, yeah. And the kind of the drawback of this is no longer like a linear simple process, right? You know, this is the multiverse of madness sort of ideas, you know, you have different pipelines doing different things and it's not necessarily a linear anymore. So you kind of need a good management of that. So yeah, then this is kind of the idea, kind of like the nirvana, but there's kind of some drawbacks to it. And so kind of when you're, you know, integrating GitOps into your CI CD functions, right? You really need to do that kind of a paradigm shift, right? So first of all, it's CI CD should probably be decoupled in GitOps. Remember, GitOps code is not promoted. You're not promoting code anymore. What you're doing is you're promoting manifests really at that point, right? You're promoting YAML at that point, right? You're not really promoting code, right? So you're just building an image and then you're promoting the YAML from it that then just then deploys. So yeah, code update is just a trigger for a pipeline, right? And so you kind of just have to keep that in mind. It's some of these paradigm shifts, you know, we come from a background where you are promoting code. You're doing a Git clone onto either a production VM or Git clone and then FTPing that is old school. But now you're just promoting YAML through the process. So you kind of have to change your mindset there and do that paradigm shift, right?  We have these old processes and we're trying to see how that fits in this new world. But now like cloud-native architecture, immutable infrastructure, right? You're no longer building VMs to run code. You're building VMs to run containers and then at that point in the VM just can, all it's doing is just running containers. So you have to take care of less and have the Kubernetes take care of it more. So anyways, that's it, right? You can find us, I think we messed that up. Somewhere, I guess. You can't find us. We will disappear forever now. We just won't tell you where. So yeah, so if there are any questions. Oh, we got a question over here, Chris. There we go. How do you trigger the second pipeline or how's that triggered? Oh, so the second pipeline is triggered either. So at least with Argo, there's like a posting hook, right? So you can do things with hooks like a posting A when I sync and hit this endpoint. In the Argo world, there's other tools you can do like workflows, right? You can set, it does a workflow or an event or whatever you have an event listener somewhere, but usually that's how I've seen it done with like an event listener. Basically that, yeah. I mean, it depends on your tool a little bit. When we daisy change Jenkins and it's still like a valid model, you could just be like, okay, when I'm done here, then I'm gonna go like hit this and then that does the next thing, the next pipeline, the next job, whatever it is that your tool has.  Most most modern CICD tools have something like that in there. What's your experience in introducing like manual, you know, approvals on promotion to prod and automatic ones? Like. Okay. So this is like a really big topic, okay? I'm an SRE, right? So like promotions to prod, they're still part of my life, just like they were when I was in quality, right? And so there are, what was the word? I just used it earlier, models, something maturity models. Yes, maturity models. There are maturity models, right? So you're gonna wanna have minimum quality standards, right? You have certain amount of tests are definitely passing before certain things can promote this far, right? So you basically, you should always automate as much as possible. And then from that last point, it's really gonna be based on your organization and basically your faith in your own stuff. So there's a little bit of like hope, trust and pixie dust. I guess you would say, I'm all pop culture, all the time, but like 90% of them are for kids because I have children. So we're just, that's where we are today. So let me give you a really good example. We have some services in Red Hat in there, what's called a managed service. What does a managed service mean? A managed service means you buy it, you use it and we take care of all of the infrastructure and running it and making sure it's up, right? I'm an SRE for that. That's what I do, I manage other people's stuff and I don't know what they're doing with it, I just know how it works on OpenShift. So with our very like initial versions of things, we actually would basically say, all right, everything else is done, all of these things have, all these checks have passed and been met and we still decided we're gonna have this one last review on this and basically just says that the SRE team is ready for it to go, right? And so basically that means that if the team in AMIA, which is where the engineering team is, right, is done and it's like but at the end of AMIA day, then that means that the NASA North America, South America SRE team will do the LGTM, looks good to me, to kick off the deployment because we're fresh, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. And so we could also just wait and decide on that. We could also say, okay, we're gonna have this ready to go but we're gonna go do all these additional burn-in tests, right? Are you burn-in tests, everybody? Yes, no? I mean, I get it, I don't know, do you wanna- No, okay, geez, these are like not, this is not a short topic, right? Okay, so a burn-in is really, this is your longest-lived test and you can decide it's a period of 24 hours, you can decide it's a what- This is a test that will actually send off production-like alerts to your operations team, right? This is the operations team saying, hey, guess what, your stuff operates or not, depending, right? So there's lots of different little pieces like that that we have and then once we've had enough experience with how it fails, not how it runs, how it fails, then you can say, okay, we know how this fails, we've fixed as much as we can, we've pushed everything that we can push, we have just developed to do over time and experience a level of confidence in our ability to handle anything at any time of day, and that's when you go fully automated. So basically, as the operations team, right, that's kind of it, but there are some things that we might never fully automate because, and well, not Red Hat, but in general, right, a lot of companies, maybe smaller companies, without 24-7 SRE, you're probably not going to wanna fully get rid of that last, like manual check if you don't want deployments happening on the weekends, right? If you don't want anything to happen on the weekend, you're always going to leave that off because you're not going to try to remember to turn it off for the weekend. That is too many layers of human error that we're gonna go through. So it really is about maturity model of the product that you're supporting or releasing and it's maturity model of the team and the company and what you can realistically handle going wrong and when you can handle it going wrong. It's a personal decision, so that's the short answer. Any more questions? We do have to go, all of us need to go back downstairs. Well, that's right, you have a talk downstairs. So I've gotta get out of here. Yeah. All right, thank you very much Hilary and Christian. Thank you.


While most office laptops stick with integrated graphics, the Acer Aspire 7 isn't like most office laptops, offering you up to an RTX 3050 Ti. Other than that, the Aspire 7 feels like any other office device, with a very efficient Zen 3U series chip, which won't be a bottleneck for the GPU, while offering much higher efficiency, which is always important. To achieve a lower price point while offering this hardware, Acer has had to sacrifice some stuff, which results in a fully plastic chassis. On the other hand, plastic keeps the laptop relatively lightweight, with a weight and profile of 2.15 kg and 22.9 mm, respectively. The plastic seems to be pretty durable, with only the lid showing any noticeable flex. Still, it opens with one hand, showing off the goods on the base. Before we get to the base though, we have to mention the 720p shooter on the top bezel, which has software back temporal noise reduction. The base comes with a full-sized keyboard with a backlight. It's not perfect by any means, as the key travel can be longer, while the feedback isn't consistent. The touchpad has an average size, whilst having a fingerprint reader in the top left corner. What's rad about it is that it doesn't interfere with the experience at all, keeping the pad plenty responsive and accurate. Going down to the sides, most of the ports are on the left side, with two USB type A 3.2 generation 1 ports, one USB type C 3.2 generation 1 port, an HDMI connector, and a LAN port. As for the right, it keeps the audio jack as well as one USB 2.0 port. While the laptop in its configuration could be a great creator device, the display puts any chances of that happening at around zero. The full HD IPS unit comes with only 58% sRGB coverage, while the brightness is pretty average as well, peaking at 260 nits. On the other hand, the contrast ratio is pretty good at 1630 to 1, so you can expect pretty deep blacks. If you want to improve the work of your display, we recommend checking out our display profiles, which are linked down below. While the speakers do have deviations across all frequencies, the sound that comes from them is decent and has a good max volume. Only 2 per 100 people watching this video are subscribers. If you decide to just start following us, we'll be able to reinvest more in our laboratory thus making even more helpful videos for you. Thank you, you're awesome. For CPUs, you've got the Ryzen 5 5625U and the Ryzen 75825U, of which we tested the bigger Ryzen 7. It shows amazing performance inside this chassis, being super close to the Core i7-12 650H inside the TUF-F15 in Cinebench R23. As for the 3050 Ti, the 60W power limit doesn't seem that limiting, as the GPU scores well in benchmarks. In games, the GPU can handle triple A titles at 1080p, at good settings and frame rates, so we'd say that gaming is definitely enjoyable on the Aspire 7. Gaming also leaves the laptop comfortable, as there isn't a lot of noise coming from the cooling setup, which has two heat pipes and two fans. After our torture test, the base is left at 43 degrees Celsius. During the test itself, the CPU maintains high clock speeds of 3.33GHz during the first few seconds, running at 45W. In the later stages, the CPU runs at 25W, which is pretty good. As for the graphics, the 60W power limit allows for the GPU to run at 1.5GHz and more for more than 30 minutes. However, what does all of this mean for the battery life? Well, the 53Wh battery pack lasts for 10 hours and 40 minutes of web browsing, or 9 hours and 10 minutes of video playback. The upgradeability is also stellar, which is great to see from a more affordable device. On the inside, there are two Sodom slots for DDR4 memory, as well as one M.2 slot for PCIE generation 3 SSDs. In the description, you can find our teardown video, which shows how to access both the RAM and the SSD slots inside the Aspire 7. With every other gaming laptop getting more and more expensive, it's nice to see that Acer keeps the tradition of offering office slash gaming hybrid laptops that are cheaper and offer some benefits on their own. A single keyboard swap away and the Aspire 7A71543G will be able to compete with other members of the budget segment and do a pretty darn good job at it. For more information about the Acer Aspire 7A71543G, you can go over to our website and read our complete review.


What's going on guys? I'm working to my top picks for July of 2023. If you're looking for some in-demand and trending products to get started with as soon as possible and capitalize on the following few weeks, this is the video for you to help you get started and hit the ground running and make the most of the following few weeks.  So I'm going to be showing you the Google Trends information behind these products so you can see just how in-demand they are. I'm going to be showing you where you can source these products from as well. I'm going to be giving you a copy and paste product description for every single one of these products. I'm going to be showing you the recommended retail price for these products so you know exactly what to sell them for and what sort of profits to expect. I'm going to be giving you my recommended Facebook ads targeting strategy. I'm going to be giving you my recommended Shopify store strategy. I'm going to be giving you 20 different Shopify store names to choose from to sell each of these products under and I'm going to be showing you which countries these products are most in-demand so you know exactly where to sell them as well. With that being said, guys, thanks for tuning in. I hope you enjoy this one and let's jump straight into product number one. So product number one is this inflatable paddle board. Now I'm going to be upfront and honest about this. The reason I wanted to include this in the video is because I went paddle boarding last week for the first time and it is one of the best things I have ever done. Not only that, it's a super high profit margin product and it is super in demand as well. So I don't think you'll have any trouble selling this one. As we worked through this Google document and I show you the different supplier links, Google trends, information, product descriptions, all that good stuff. I want to give you guys a free copy of it as well. So if we can get this video to let's go for 75 likes, the previous video I did in June got 170 likes. So we should have no problem getting to 75. But the second we do, I will post a free link in the top comment below for you to get a free copy of this. So this is my UK based supplier. If you are watching this from anywhere else in the world, you do not need to worry. This product I've already checked is readily available from suppliers in Australia, from suppliers in America and supplies in Canada. These guys, however, are called Aversam and they specialize in stocking UK based products for drop shippers like us to take advantage of. So for example, in this case, we have this 10 foot infactable stand up paddle board that comes with all of the accessories, including a handy carry bag and it ships to the UK with a dispatch time of 48 hours. I know the reason why I really like Aversam, not to take away too much from the topic of the video is the imagery that they provide along with the products is usually a lot higher quality than the imagery you will find on typical websites like Aliexpress or CJ drop shipping, making it a lot quicker to get started with. Let's jump into the Google Trends information. Then we can see the paddle boarding was pretty much non-existent until this month here, so August of 2016. Since then we can see every single summer months, every time we come into summer is spikes massively in popularity, hitting its peak in sort of July, August time. Even in kind of like September, if I can get my curse on it, it's still fairly popular. But if we go to the very latest data we can see, June of 2023, we're at a 60. So expect this to continue to grow in popularity over the next six to eight weeks, meaning if you get started today, there's still a lot of potential to be had. Let's move down into the product descriptions. Then like I said, if we can get this video to 75 likes, I will put a free download link in the description below so you can come into here, copy and paste it into your own store, shop and change it to match to your own liking. So introducing the ultimate adventure companion. I won't read the entire thing. I just do the first paragraph. The 10-foot inflatable paddle board designed for explorers and water enthusiasts alike. This versatile and portable paddle board is ready to take your outdoor experiences to new heights. Let's keep going down there, moving on to the next piece of information, which is the profit margins. So the cost of this product, Abbasam, do sell a different range of them. Middle of the road is sort of £150. I'm going to do it in dollars, just so it accommodates for the majority of people. The going rate for a decent paddle board is in and around sort of $200 to $300. So I've gone middle of the road at $250, which leaves a very healthy profit margin of about $100. My Facebook and store strategy then for this product, obviously when it comes to interests, anything kind of outdoorsy related, so outdoor water sports, camping, water skiing, paddleboarding, kayaking, hiking, adventures, all that sort of thing. I would also recommend trying out Google ads for products like this as well. Given the price of this product, you may struggle to convert people on that very first impression on Facebook because people aren't necessarily looking for a product to buy on Facebook, unless of course they're in the marketplace. So you could potentially just narrow down to that one single placement. However, where the true money to be made, my own opinion is on Google ads because that is where people go to look for things to buy. So you can put yours at the top of the list. As long as you've got a really decent and slick website, then I think you're on to a winner. As for the sort of brand I recommend for this product, go for an outdoor water sports store. So there's lots and lots of other products you can add to your store, like kayaks and bags, that sort of thing. And as for the names, then here's 20 different names you can choose from. So Aqua Ventures, Water Wonder, Wave Rider, Paddle Pro, I really like that, Paddle Pro, Aqua Adventures, Paddle Adventures, all these good names that you can take your pick from. Just remember though to check the availability for all of these domain names before finalizing your choice, before making any design choices. As for my recommended countries to target, then go for the places that are currently experiencing really nice weather. So include the United States, the UK and Australia in your tag team. Run some tests, see which ones you get the best results from and then narrow down and double down on the most profitable areas. Moving on to product number two is we have this Baby Float. So the reason I wanted to include this is because I actually have one of these things myself, not obviously for myself, but I do actually have one of these things and they are pretty good. Like they legitimately do what they say they're gonna do and they are handy to have as well in the fact that they keep the sun off of the person using it, which is super important for young children and they also are pretty safe as well.  It needs to be used with parental supervision of course. However, the way it kind of secures itself or attaches itself to the person using it, as you can see there with the different straps, they are a pretty good product. Given the time of year as well, if we just jump on to Google Trends, we can see Baby Float is currently on a breakout approaching the most popular it has been since 2004 in the last 19 years or so. So I think it's pretty safe to say that lots and lots of people are looking for a product like this one. Let's move down into the product description then. So introducing the Baby Float with Canopy and SBF 50 protection. That's a key mark in angle, something that you should point out in your ad creative. The perfect companion for your little ones and aquatic adventures. Designed with your baby's safety and comfort in mind, this inflatable float ensures a fun and protected experience in the water. A really well worded introductory paragraph in my opinion. As we move down into the perfect margins then so we saw we can get this thing delivered for 1991 but recommended retail price would be in and around sort of $40. Even a decent profit margin of $20.08. Strategies for this product then. So when it comes to interests, obviously parents with children of a certain age and you can target things like pools, swimming, beach, holiday, vacation, all those sorts of things which are related to positions in which people would need a products like this. Go with supply content to begin with. I've just shown you a video ad which is pretty decent. You could chop that up, put your own spin on it, put some subtype tools on it to certainly make it worthwhile testing. Once you've validated and it works, then progress onto UGC, original UGC. As for the brand, I would recommend a baby products store for swimming and travel with a specialism in that. So as for some names that you could put to that, we have Baby Float Haven, Tiny Splash. I really like that, Tiny Splash. Floaty Babies, Baby Boy. I really like that as well because it's kind of like a spin on words. And Aqua Bubbs, Floaty Tarts, Baby Splash. Aqua Babies, Floaty Fun. Some pretty decent names in there for you to pick from. Of course, remember to check availability. And as for my recommended countries, you can pretty much target anyone for this one because it also includes people going on vacation. So we have US, Canada, UK, and Australia. Moving on to product number three is this dry bag. Again, what gave me the idea and inspiration for this was when I went paddleboarding last week. This is a must-have product. The clue is in the name. It's a waterproof bag. You can flip full of all your wet gear to keep it separate from all of your dry gear because once your dry gear gets wet, you are in trouble. Here's game over. What we can see from this though is it's super small, super lightweight, and it can act as a buoyancy aid as well should you need it to do that. And this is, again, quite a nice video which you could use to advertise the products with just to show the different features of how it works, how it folds up, that sort of thing, how it keeps whatever's inside dry or how it keeps whatever's inside wet and keeps it inside from leaking out. It's also a relatively cheap product. You can go kind of at the smallest for two litres, all the way up to a 30 litre, which is 788, and that does include the free shipping with a 15 day on time guarantee. Google Trends wise then for this product. No surprise, it's a pretty consistent seller all year round because even in the summer months in the UK, we are prone to a bit of rain. Hence why you can see it's always in and around a 50 which is actually a good sign because this could be a product which even through the winter months and all year round, you can sell consistently. But we can see, obviously as we come into the summer months when people are getting in the lakes, people are getting in the pools, that sort of thing, this is when the demand grows for this product. As a product description, then introducing the camp dry bag, your ultimate companion for outdoor adventures whether you're embarking on a thrilling hike, camping trip or kayaking expedition is durable and reliable dry bag is designed to keep your gear safe and protected from the elements. That's one of the beauties with this product as well. So many different niches and applications in which it applies to fishing, kayaking, paddle boarding, camping, hiking, all of those sorts of things. There's lots and lots of different audiences for you to test with this. As a profit margins in, we see even for the bigger one we can get that for about $8. I recommend a retail price for this is gonna be $30 which I think is slightly on the cheap end. That decent camping gear is not cheap, it's quite expensive. So even at this kind of bottom end, it was still left with a pretty healthy profit margin in my opinion of about $22. Moving on to my Facebook and store strategy. Obviously when it comes to interest, anything kind of outdoor activity related. Those niches I mentioned a minute ago, so camping, hiking, water sports, et cetera. As for my recommended platforms and creatives when it comes to Facebook, stick to carousel image ads. You could also use that supplier ads. You could split test the two and see which performs better and then again narrow and double down on what's working. And I would also try some Google ads too because again you're gonna be tagged in. You can put your products in front of those people that are looking for this exact thing. As for product names then, so we have Dry Guard, Aqua Shield, I really like that. Dry Haven, Dry Safeguard, Aqua Fortress. I really like that for a name as well. We have Dry Pro, again another nice name. Dry Vault, Aqua Guard, Dry Haven, Aqua Armor. Lots of cool names in there for you guys to choose from. As for my recommended, again you could pretty much go global with this. However, I typically start with the big four. So I always recommend that UK, US, Canada, Australia. Any country that has water sports is potentially a customer base for you. Moving into product number four then. So this is more of a brand idea rather than an actual product idea. So I'm just gonna open up the Google Trans information for this. And one thing I found when I was doing my product research is there's so many different types of flip flops and sandals out there. And I think it goes without saying. So this obviously is a proven product. We've all seen this before. It's done the rounds, a really good seller. Same for these as well. There's a big known brand called Coddies. I think they're called Coddies. They built a pretty decent sized brand in around selling these products. This was something I also found on AliExpress. So I think there's definitely room for a company to come in and sell these like wacky flip flops. And the name I actually come up with was Funky Flip Flops which I think is a great opportunity for somebody who has an eye and a passion for this sort of thing. I'll show you the Google Trans information. It's not really too relevant. I mean, it's pretty obvious as we come into summer, UK, 2004 to present. We're approaching peak popularity because more people wear flip flops during the summer than they do in the winter. Pretty self-explanatory, pretty obvious, right? As for a brand description then, so I went with Funky Flops. Welcome to Funky Flops where footwear meets wild imagination. Our brand is all about adding a playful twist to your step with our collection of funky flip flops in the shape of different animals and styles.  So it's the kind of website or brand someone would go to and have a look and go to to find something that they've never seen before, something interesting and away from the kind of traditional flip flop. Let's go down into my recommended Facebook and store strategy then. So when it comes to interest on Facebook, again, pretty kind of obvious, beach, pool, vacation, animals, outdoors, summer, all that sort of thing. Stick with Carousel ads. There's no real reason to have a video ad for products like this in the beginning. Test it the cheapest and quickest way possible. Prove to yourself that the idea works. Validate the idea. A single image shows you exactly what this product is. And once you've done that, you could then progress into original and UGC content. As for names for this store then, so we have Flip Flop, Fiesta, Funky Feet, Flop Frenzy, Flip Stereo, Funky Flip, Souls of Fun, Flip Flopping, so on and so forth. You get the just Funky Fun names for Funky Fun, Flip Flops. Ads for the countries anywhere with warm weather. Really, like I mentioned before, I like the big four. You can obviously always double check or double cross reference this against Google Trends in the country that you want to sell it in. So again, UK, US and Australia. Let's move down into product number five. Then we have Camping Bed. This is a camping bed that's kind of out of the ordinary. It's not a typical kind of style of camping bed that you'll see in many shops. And that is why I also wanted to include it. Let's open up the supplier link so you can see exactly where I'm sourcing this thing from. Let's show you the Google Trends information as well. We'll start with the Google Trends information so you can see just how in demand products like this is. We can see people go camping in the summer here in the UK. So this is where most people start looking for camping beds and buying camping beds. Let's jump on to Avacam then. So this is another Avacam products meaning we can get it delivered to our customers in 48 hours. It does include tracking and it does include free shipping as well. So it allows us to take advantage of that and offer a real good service to our customers. What I really like about this is this foldable design. So this is it in its full glory. It has a cup holder, a magazine holder, that sort of thing. But it folds up into this one tidy, neat and tidy package which trust me is not to be underestimated. This is super important when you go and camp in because one of the biggest hurdles is having space for all of your gear. Let's take a look at the product description then that I put together for this. So introducing a camp bed, a revolution in camping comfort. Say goodbye to uncomfortable nights spent tossing and turning on hard services. Our innovative camping bed combines the style and function of a camping chair with the ultimate comfort of a bed providing you with the perfect sleeping solution for your outdoor adventures. A really nice introducing paragraph in my opinion. Let's go down into the profit margins then. So we're looking at about 46, 34. Camping gear, good quality camping gear is not cheap. I definitely think you can sell this for about $80. I think you'll probably get a bit more flat depending on how well received it is and how high your quality is. Even towards this lower end, you're still left with a pretty decent profit margin of $33.65. As for my recommended strategy then. So interests are pretty self-explanatory, outdoor camping, hiking, fishing, paddle boarding, all that sort of thing. Anything which requires people to be outside and stay outside overnight. They're gonna be your target market. I would definitely stick with your supplier content. Again, Amazon has some nice images to show how well it folds up, that sort of thing. And once you've validated that idea, you can then move on to original UGC. Get some camping enthusiasts and influencers on board to create some really nice content for you. Ford, the store then, definitely go with a branded camping product store. Here's some names for you then. So Campscape, Outdoor Oasis, I really like that one. And Wild Wunderer, Camp Venture, Trailblaze, Happy Campers, Camp Haven, Nature Hook, Camp Bound, Adventure Rise, Camp Masters. Again, you get the point lots and lots of different names for you guys to choose from. Trail Shrekker is personally one of my favorites there. As for the country then, just to finish off, UK, US, Canada, and Australia would be my go-to ones. Pretty much anywhere where camping at the moment is high in demand or high in popularity. And obviously you can use Google Trends to check that. And so with that being said guys, that's my top five picks for July of 2023. If you have stuck with me with this long, I just wanna say a personal thank you. I really do appreciate the support on the channel. So like I mentioned earlier in the video, if you wanna get yourself a copy of this Google document, make sure you hit that like button. The second we get to 75 likes, I will post a link where you can get yourself a free copy of what I've just worked through in this video. If you have any comments, questions, videos, suggestions, any of that sort of thing, post it down below. I read every single comment. So if there is something you need help with, make sure you make the most of the comment section while we don't get many people interacting because I read every single one and I will get back to you. Thanks for watching guys. I hope this video helps you out. I'll see you in the next one on Friday. Cheers.