Good evening, everybody, and a very good morning to our North American friends. I am Romi, your Charm Logic Charm Coach, and today I'm very, very excited to introduce to you all. I think the lady that's coming up won't need much introduction as she is quite well known in these circles in the investment side of things, and very, very charismatic and beautiful and very, very knowledgeable too. But today we are in a collaboration into talking about live streaming and also the media stocks that are related to it. But I would like to formally welcome our featured speaker, Chloe, our Arigato investor, welcome.  Thank you, thank you. You need it when you are as good looking as you, so definitely I need the setup to help out. But no, today I guess we've prepared something that's pretty awesome for everyone here to take a look at. I'm definitely more on the creator side in terms of media generation. There are a lot of really cool companies and brands that I get to use every day in my setups and also make my life a lot easier in terms of the media creation space and sharing communication with people. But you definitely have a very, very different perspective in terms of how these companies kind of shape our future in social media but also in media creation. But yeah, I guess what is your current perspective in terms of the media side and live streaming? I totally believe that from an investor point of view, it's very good to start with something that you're familiar with, it's within your circle of competence. So I feel that that's why I think this conversation is going to be very insightful to investors out there because you are the user, you're the end user of so many wonderful companies, products and services. And I think in fact, your insights will help us understand these companies way better rather than just from the financial statement, the statistics point of view, but really from a user perspective. So I'm really looking forward to our conversation later. That's fantastic. Yeah, totally. My perspective usually isn't a number's one, so very thankful that you're here to take a look at it. And welcome everyone again, please put in comments where you're watching this. I know that some people are already sharing their greetings. Hello, handsome and hello, pretty. Thank you. Hello, hello, hello from Taiwan, but yes, so I guess we can jump straight into, we do have some slides prepared for people. But yes, three live stream stocks or actually I wouldn't say specifically live stream, but they're all related to live stream because yeah, so I guess I can I can start off by talking about the importance of utilizing live in your personal branding. As a personal charm and charisma coach, I talk about presence a lot and kind of that first impression you need to help people connect with you and gain trust with you right away without you even having to try it. Like the reason that I have so much set up and all these lighting and great audio is so that when people hear and see me right away, I don't even have to talk about things too much and they naturally feel like they would like to connect with me. And obviously it's up to me to decide if I want to be a nice person and connect back, but of course I think I'm a nice person too, so I'll definitely connect back with people. And hence Chloe would like to connect with me, but I think the first very popular live platform that people can utilize right now is Facebook. I'm sure people already know Facebook in the investment world too. It's it's pretty big right now too. And they've kind of shifted their brand recently. I'm sure people know about that too. But Chloe, don't mind diving into kind of more the behind the scenes of the company itself. What does that look like? Yeah, I totally think that Facebook is a very interesting company by itself already generating so much money from its advertisement space, but at the same time, I'm actually very excited for its future, which is the meta future, right? The AR and BAR. Yeah, so so I think the reason why you want to talk about this thought is also because right now we are doing Facebook Live. Romy has been really like in your opinion, is this one of the easiest platform for people to get started if they want to do Facebook Live? Totally, totally. I think there there might be an initial, I think, intimidation of what live is to people because it's so easy now that it literally is a button away after you get into to Facebook.  And the importance of that right now is like towards branding is that you can connect with your audience almost immediately and see the feedback of the audience members too. And this establishes, I think, a reachability of people that you're trying to sell your services to or share your message to and connect really, really quickly without you having any sort of delay. And another cool thing is the forgiveness of the audience members to do situation life. You don't have to have it produced like what I do. I'm obviously doing this as a service. So I want to make sure that things are pretty. But people are very forgiving when you're, let's say, walking outside, going grocery shopping and just talking about, wow, there's a sale today. You know, you guys can check out all these cabbages and stuff.  But yeah, I think Facebook Live gives people the power to have their own channel, you know, like any anything you want to sell, you can go go with Facebook Live. So maybe we can also ask the audience, like, how many of you actually done Facebook Live before? Maybe you can type Facebook Live in the chat. Or maybe if you invested in Facebook already or you intend to invest in Facebook, maybe you can type FB, you know, just the difference between the ticker symbol and Facebook Live. Let us know, what are you doing currently? I can say, I love to do both. We do both. I do both as well. Don't learn it's here. Hello, Metapas. And if you look at Facebook as a company, I think, like I mentioned earlier, one thing I think is super impressive is the number of users using Facebook services, you know, not just Facebook as a platform, but including your Instagram, including your WhatsApp and all this, it's like 3.58 billion. And if you think about the overall population in the world, that's almost half of it. You know, I really find that this is a very impressive figure, right? Like 50% market share, something like that. And at the same time, the Facebook revenue, you know, in terms of average revenue per user, just keep on growing, even though we know that the growth is not super fast, but I think it's consistent. At the same time, it's still growing in a very healthy way. So I do feel Facebook itself as a business model. It's a solid business model, but what gets me really excited? It's the metaverse, right? That's where the future lies, which I think Facebook does have a competitive advantage to become a leader in this space. How about you? What do you think, Romy, like in terms of Facebook as a company, do you think it has more age in this space? Oh, definitely. I think it's so powerful, it's hard to deny what they're doing right now. As much as there is, you know, certain negativity potentially towards the brand at times, what they're doing is so innovative and trying to stay in front of everything. And brands can't help to kind of be... Oh, it's mine now. What, OK? You're good, you're good. Hold on. No problem, no problem. Yeah, OK. It can't, I think the different brands that are related to Facebook can't help to but be attracted to this new energy too and get people excited. And I think probably in a company standpoint too and kind of the foresight the company has, I think it's something that people would want to invest into. It's not just a current time. It's like, what are they looking to in the future that I think it's powerful? Yeah, I think it's going to be so powerful. And I think there's also very interesting statistics that I want the audience to make a guess. Like, since we're talking about live streaming, right? Maybe you guys can make a guess how much this live streaming industry that we're going to talk about tonight has grown in just one year, right? From 2019 to 2020, 2020, how many percent growth? Maybe you guys can make a guess. Just put in the random number, all right? Maybe you can make a guess as well. Well, I think I know the end. I've seen the slides, but I forgot the numbers. But I know that I remember that it's a lot. I was super impressed too in terms of the growth. But I think another big part, probably the pandemic, was definitely a catalyst into creating this explosion of numbers too. But yes, everyone, please make your guess. People that are watching it currently live, but also people that are watching the replay. Yeah, it's quite a high number. It's a double digit, I assume, right? Double digit, and it's a high double digit. Actually, I was very, very impressed as well when I saw the figure. It was like 99 percent. It's like almost 100 percent growth in just one year time. It's like, wow. And then in terms of the streaming hours, it's like from 1,900 billion to 3,900 billion. I think it's just really amazing. And that's why this growth is not going to stop, right? In fact, it's only going to continue to compound. And that is why this industry itself, it's a billion, multi-billion dollar industry that investors who really want to know 10X your portfolio, I think this is something that you definitely should start looking at as well. That's amazing. Like, I haven't really thought of like those billion numbers. What is that in hours and days and years? Yeah, it's like in a few people's like, I don't know, lifetimes. No, that's fantastic. I think people also won't sense that certain amount of number. It's so hard to fathom, too. That just know that people are using live streaming a lot right now to get to this next level for your personal branding. But yeah, let's dive into it a little deeper in terms of the back end, because I know you've prepared some fantastic numbers. Yes, yes. I think like why we are also choosing Facebook is also because I personally feel that it's really undervalued. Okay, I mean Meta as a company, if you look at the PE ratio versus the five-year average, right now it's pretty fairly priced. And in fact, it's actually pretty undervalued, in my opinion. So if you have not taken any positions in Facebook itself, it's already a wonderful business. And right now with the Metaverse growth in the next 10 years or so, I do feel this could be a very good time to enter. But once again, this is not a buy or sell recommendation. We should do our due diligence regardless. So, Romi, are you an investor of Facebook? Not yet, definitely want to. I've also put myself into kind of a training platform to gain more knowledge and investment, because my attachment to money has been quite loose since I was born. So that's why I became an artist. But yeah, like I've heard definitely a lot about the undervaluation of Facebook. But that, you know, do your own due diligence is definitely a very important thing. I think in terms of everything in life, not just stocks, but specifically stocks and finances.  If you're not too sure, like go research. But there are some great companies, especially in Singapore too, that are awesome in the education side and the mentorship side of how do you actually properly use your money to extend the longevity of it and making sure that you're putting it in the right place. So, but yes, I'm planning to invest really soon. Awesome. Awesome. I think this is like really a good price because the stock price has dropped a little bit. And in fact, right now the market is pretty volatile. So you can consider entering maybe your first batch. Yeah, nice. How much like $10? No, no, it's kidding. No, just kidding. I know we need a little bit more, but definitely. So Chloe is a go-to person for me. The first time that I remember just a little story back when I first met Chloe, I was like, wow, this very, you know, very young, you know, good looking lady that has so much knowledge is also willing to share her knowledge in terms of the investment world. Because I never knew that there was platforms like this that people can actually share this information out. And stocks, I've found like stock and options, especially, I find there's a complexity in this kind of content where there's a fear attached to it too. It's not just you putting money in a bank, you know, you need to know kind of the value of the company and kind of where it's going towards to.  And it's not just the numbers, because when you look at the numbers, yes, you can, you know, see the track record of it. But if you truly experience like what is Facebook doing, I think you'll understand like why the numbers are certain ways too. But yeah. Yeah, and Nick even helped us to calculate. 1,971 billion hours is 225 million years. Oh, my God. That's so long. I guess in the span of universe, that's quite short, so. But yeah, 225. Thanks for the calculation. No, awesome, awesome. But yeah. So I guess the shift into Meta, was it a big change in the stock market world? I think the shift in Meta has created quite a good hype amount in the market. And that's why the market recently went up quite a fair bit. But lately there's a pullback. But I think this is definitely going to be a very long-term thing. Even Mark Zuckerberg said that currently the technology is definitely not there yet. But they have been really investing a lot of money every single year. Actually have been doing AR and VR. And subsequently they're definitely going to use a lot of free cash flow that they generate from their ad space to pump into their Metaverse project. So it's going to be, I hope like in the next five years, there's going to be some transformation in our life. I'm really looking forward to that. As long as we're not always wearing goggles and walking around, I think we'll run into things. But yeah, I always imagine like Metaverse and then you're like wearing a goggle and walking around and just pointing at things. But definitely I think life will be for the better. Hopefully, hopefully fingers crossed. But no, let's dive into it a bit more, I guess. Or wait, I think we are jumping to kind of the next phase in terms of a creator. Another very, very popular brand is the fruit logo people probably know about, which is Apple. Apple is such a fantastic brand in terms of how they've shaped kind of people's lives. I know for a lot of people that aren't Apple loyalists and fans, they're really against it. If you're Apple, you either love it so much to death or you're against it. But for me personally, I've used the Apple brand for over 15 years now. And as a creator, how they've shaped kind of the meaning of the brand. When you buy the brand, you get sucked in into kind of the polish and the sleekness of what Apple stands for. And as a creator too, when you open the box, even the whole experience of unboxing, like let's say a new MacBook Pro that I have right now.  And then you open it up and then it says the hello right away when you open it up. And you're like, wow, I'm welcome into this universe of creativity that you can connect all your devices together, but also to the world. I think Apple has done such a fantastic job. But yeah, I guess, do you use Apple too, Chloe? I do, like right now I'm using MacBook, but I mainly use MacBook for work and because I don't do a lot of creative. But for yourself, what products do you use? I hope you integrate the whole Apple ecosystem together. Wow, so I think I have almost all the devices at least once. MacBook Pro, right now I do have the M1 Max, the 15 inch. Prior to this, I had the MacBook Pro 15. Oh, sorry, it's a 16 right now. I had the 15 before. They had the touch bar, which I actually really didn't like. They started making everything a little too simple. They wanted to use only the USB-C connection. So they took out the SD card slot, HDMI. And all those quite important connecting ports for creators to use. So this year when they introduced the 16, they brought back the SD card reader, but also the HD. Yeah, which it's fantastic. They also have the magnet charger now, like before. It seems like it's such a new innovation, but they're the ones who took it away. So the way they sold it was like, oh, everything's here now. And you don't need this extra dongles, because that was the problem before where when we bought a laptop, you have to buy all these different. Yeah, which is so annoying. But now it's like, okay, I have that one device. You can still plug in the dongles if you want. So it's not gone. So that's my main device. Of course, the iPhone is such a huge part of my life, connecting with social media, but emailing, doing work, and also enjoying and consuming kind of content too is a big piece. Now I've invested into an iPad mini and also a regular iPad in terms of overlays where I can write stuff right on the live, because that's what I want the power to connect to people. And I think writing is such an organic method of sharing information. It will just directly appear on your live. Yeah, so I can definitely just share. I can share the screen of the iPad, basically. So I can share the message of what I want to write, or you can let's say with Zoom, there's a whiteboard feature. So you can definitely bring that into and just write directly on it.  So I'm trying to spell out words, and it's ridiculous. Whereas when you have the Apple Pencil, for example, you can write directly on. And the last but not least, a very important piece is the wearable technology. Like Apple Watch has, well, you have it right here in the main photo here, and it tracks my health kind of routines in terms of fitness, gives me reminders, but not so much that I have to constantly be looking at my watch. It's truly a very soft extension of your other devices, and it's a very good kind of tie in the knot in the last part of all the devices together. But you feel that you can pick up any device, once you have that many devices, that you're just doing the work directly from that specific device. You don't feel like it's a choppiness to it. So if I pick up my phone, I feel like I'm doing the work from the laptop. Right away. So there's this great ecosystem that I can definitely connect to. I think that's the moat that Apple has built up, that really makes everything so inclusive within the ecosystem, so convenient to connect. And I think because recently, because the new M1 chip has really made things so much faster, so much more efficient, and the battery also lasts so much longer as well, right? So Romy, ever since you changed to a new MacBook, what's the difference between the old one and the new M1 chip? It is literally night and day. In terms of, I'm not too concerned about the battery life. The old one was not bad already. It's only when you do a lot of compression type work, after you've done video recording. Video is definitely a lot more consuming than photos, for example. But it's always that export in the end that either takes time or takes a lot of energy. So with the new M1 chip, which was, I think, a year and a half ago that they introduced it, because Apple had this whole plan from shifting from the Intel chips to their own Apple Silicon, which I think was an amazing move. But always thinking about how to bring it home and own that part of it, for me, I was like, holy crap, how are they going to shift people from all the old branding to the old chips to the new chips? Because they did mention that it was going to be a two-year process in terms of the shift. And I think they're on an amazing track of it. This year, they just introduced, as I've mentioned, the M1 Pro and the M1 Max. Because the M1, which I've used to before, it was a little more challenging in terms of a big load of media export. So for the everyday stuff, the M1 chip was amazing. And what they've done is they've included the M1 chip in not only the MacBooks, the IMAX, but also the iPads. So they've shifted a lot of these devices to have a very similar back-end structure under the hood so that it makes it very, again, that sync that you have of all the devices is very in unison so that you don't feel like you're holding something else when you're holding one of those devices. But just to answer your question, the MacBook Pro has been fantastic. Before, when I plugged in multiple screens, I have about five screens here. The computer would seize up. The computer couldn't handle when there's a lot of things plugged into it or the output of it. But now, seriously, the fan of the MacBook Pro 16 hasn't turned on since I've owned it. So it's so powerful that it's only using a percentage of the power. I think if we look at the technological back-end, I'm not very good at this. But when I search online, I kind of realize that, oh, why is it so powerful?  In the past, it's all different components. And that's why things become faster, become smoother, become more efficient. And I think it's just one of the breakthroughs. But of course, the manufacturer of this M1 chip is still TSM. So they designed it. But TSM is the one manufacturer that I think both companies are worth looking at. Yeah, what do you think? Totally. I think being from Taiwan to super proud of TSM, but yes, jumping quickly into TSM as a stock, how good is that stock? Because I've heard that name so much that it's crazy. Totally. Yeah, I really think TSM is a very strong company in terms of its technology. It's very advanced. But I think at the end of the day, because I am not too savvy in these aspects, I can't comment much. But I think Apple as a more consumer-oriented kind of companies, I think the mode is stronger in terms of the branding. Totally. Yeah, I guess when you go into the silicon and the whole icy board type of things, the users don't experience that as much. And yeah, it's a cool marketing tactic that Apple does too when they show under the hood of the devices. But as users, we just want it to work when we pull it out of the box. It's not like, oh, cool. I have all these chips that I can use. But it does feel that way when you're seeing this photo over here. Everything is unified right now. And it's so smart right now in terms of the software. Like that's why it's so powerful because Apple does their own software and hardware. So the seam is very, very tight. Whereas if you use other devices, it's quite separated where there's this choppiness to things. But yeah, I think Apple does this fantastically. So let's take a look at more the numbers side of things. Yes. Sales, I mean, it has been growing consistently as well. Different products has been growing. I think it's definitely a good sign on different regions as well. But of course, in terms of the valuation-wise, Apple may not be super undervalued. In fact, I think right now it's about slightly, just slightly overvalued. Maybe I can also ask the audience over here, how many of you own Apple Shops? Okay, if you own Apple, maybe you can type Apple in the chat. Romain, do you personally own Apple Shops? These are all things I want to own. But my mentor in investment has told me to do my own two diligence first. So I'm going to try to do all that before I invest in all the stocks that I personally use that are very, very stable in terms of kind of their future. Because I think that's what value investing from what I've learned so far is. Seeing kind of, is it a great company? And in terms of the projection, how well are they going to be doing in kind of the next five to 10 years kind of a thing? But yeah, definitely want to invest. Definitely, like what you mentioned, maybe do more homework to build up your own competition more. But I think you really have a very deep understanding of Apple's. You probably just need to go through it later to see if you have the confidence to buy. We've got Kathleen, it's like, oh, also invest in Apple. Nick is debating whether he wants to buy tonight. I think long-term wise, I think Apple is pretty fair, pretty fair price. But once again, if you want to catch even at a better price, maybe wait for the PE ratio to drop maybe around 23, 22. That would be definitely a better, but don't know whether it's going to come. But once again, it can be paid, it can be investing. It's also a patient game. But I think importantly is when you invest, you can do portfolio sizing. Let's say for example, you have $10,000 for Apple. You don't have to go in $10,000 right now. Maybe you can go in like $3,000 at this stage. And if it drops some more, I will go in another $3,000. And if it drops some more, I will go in the final $4,000. That's how you don't miss out when the stock price goes up. And if it goes down, you have more bullets to buy. I think that it's more important. So just have the mindset that it doesn't have to be a whole chunk at once. You're different, I think it's tranches that you guys talk about. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I'm trying to sound like very, very sophisticated investor, but no. I'm working towards it. Definitely I've got the mentorship from Chloe before too. And everyone, this is definitely a great opportunity to ask questions too, because Chloe is very, very knowledgeable in the aspects of like investing, but as a true kind of livelihood and not just for fun like gambling, because I think that's kind of how I've entered it before, where it's like, oh, people are telling me that you should get into this. You should get into this. You should. And then you're like starting to drop money off of it. You don't really check it. And if you're lucky, like for example, for me with cryptocurrency, it was like I invested during the bubble like three, four years ago. And I think I lost like 90% of my money.  I have like three times of what I invested before now. But yeah, so I think it's like, I don't know if it's, yeah, it's a due diligence thing. Like definitely do proper research to the best of your knowledge.  So absolutely, absolutely. Yeah. Actually, I think I don't know if people, I don't think we've shared this part yet, but Chloe does have a wonderful telegram that you can be part of. It is the t.me slash Arigato investor. So Arigato, if most people don't know means thank you. Yeah, thank you. Definitely, definitely a great page to follow to on, you're on most of the social channels, right? Yeah, like YouTube, I'm more like more active on YouTube, as well as my own telegram channel. Telegram is more like snippets of my investment insights. I think it's quite easy to post, right, in terms of work format most of the time. But my YouTube is like more detailed breakdown of certain of my analysis. So I think you guys can follow if you want to have more insights. Yeah. Nice, nice. Definitely go give it a follow because I have done so. But yes, so I guess let's dive a little deeper into kind of the next phase. So I think we're going into another company that I use quite a lot, less on the gaming side, but more on the practical kind of creation side of things, which is Sony. I think a lot of people once they hear the name, there's already kind of polished to Sony. For me, recently I've invested into a lot of their mirrorless systems. This one you see here is the Alpha 7. The newest iteration of it right now is Alpha A74, so their Mark IV version. And what Sony did a few years back, it's quite a while back already, that was really, really changing to the photography world, is taking out the mirror in the camera. So most people probably have heard of DSLRs, and SLR stands for single lens reflex. D just stands for digital. So before the older cameras, I'll actually have one here as an example. So this is actually, this is not the A7, this is the Alpha, but before the cameras actually have a lens that reflects what the lens information has to the eyepiece. And what Sony was able to do was remove that piece. So the body of the equipment can minimize down to like about this much. So the portability of it is great. You can still change your lenses. It used definitely less power. And I think that changed the whole game. They were the first to enter it. So Canon, Nikon, and all these bigger brands had to follow. I think only up till like last year, Canon and Nikon or Nikon has actually caught up in terms of their technology, but Sony's still leading the way of it. Plus right now, a lot of people are finding that they can utilize these cameras as webcam. So I do have a Sony camera right in front of me right now behind my teleprompter device that I have here. And for me, I can broadcast my live with this high quality from anywhere. Because for me to bring a device like this, and let's see when you take out like the lens itself, it becomes so light and portable that I can put it in like this little like lunch box. And then also I would bring like, let's say a Yeti microphone or something with me. I think that portability now, you don't have to sacrifice quality. Whereas before there was this where the larger the device, the bigger the lens, the more the information that comes in, the better the quality of the image. But now it's like everything is compacting down like, even your iPhone, I think with kind of the lenses now and the technology, it's so easy to capture. You don't need a separate device to capture.   And I don't need to like be pulling out all these things. So like all clunky, it's just your phone and the images that come out are fantastic. But yeah, Sony is definitely a life changer for me because of the portability plus still maintaining image quality. So, yeah. But isn't this space a very competitive space? Like what do you think that Sony is able to maintain its leadership? Yeah, I think jumping back into that conversation of their first jump into being the mirrorless kind of king right now, they obviously have their other side of, you know, people know PlayStation. The gaming world is huge where PS5, even PS4 and some people still play with PS3. I think I'm still playing with that. But the brand itself, it's so kind of well rounded in terms of what they bring in. It feels like a metaphor in a certain extent where they're able to have really cool products in different arms of their company. And looking at a PS5 right now, how they've designed things to is something that's cool to have. So like when you compare it in a photography standpoint, let's say with Canon and Nikon and Canon. Canon has a lot of office type supplies too, like the office industry that they're in, like photocopiers and stuff like that. So they don't only make cameras, but they were the king in terms of the photography side, where their lenses were really awesome, also in-house. And then they were able to, I think the market share was over like 90%. Like Nikon only had like a very small share, but what Nikon did really well too, I think they were in the optics world. They made very, very good glass. So a lot of the medical devices would also use Nikon glass. Whereas Sony, I think the other aspect of things was they teamed up with this company called Carl Zeiss. Their lenses are great. They also, I think, make the sensors too, within the camera too, that other brands utilize. So they have this deeper kind of advantage of the brand being very kind of widespread. The width is quite awesome versus it just being in the camera space. I think if it was only in the camera space, then yes, it's super competitive. Because Canon and Nikon has been such a brand kind of authority, how were they able to jump in? But they jumped in with an amazing technology that Canon and Nikon have to follow right now. I see. Yeah, I totally agree with you. I do feel that Sony itself is a conglomerate and they do many different things, not just the camera, but actually they are pretty good in many things that they do. Especially like what you mentioned, the gaming which is the PS, PlayStation, the camera side, they're also doing well. And of course, they do all the other things as well. So if you look at Sony as a company, I do feel it's a very stable company. It has been, be it the revenue, be it the net income, it's been growing in a very steady manner. So I think it's a profitable business for sure. But of course, in terms of the margin, I think it's slowly improving. I think especially in the past few years, it's been increasing its margin to close to 10%. And one thing I like, Japanese company in general, they really have very little debt. So in this case, Sony also has very high interest coverage. That means basically they are able to pay back many times of the interest that they incurred from the loan. So they are definitely in a very safe position. And if you look at the PE ratio, actually Sony is something that's actually right now undervalued as well. 18 times versus the average is 21 times. So even I think Sony stock price has really gone up very consistently over the years. Yeah, like just the last two years itself, it has gone up quite a huge significant percentage. So long-term wise, if you believe that Sony itself is a conglomerate at the same time, still has a fast growing industry, especially the gaming side, I do feel you can consider take a look at it. Nice, nice. Something I'm looking into for sure. So I'm not a gamer, but I might look like one because of my setup. So actually that's a big part of my own personal brand, like Charm Logic right now, is how do I bring technology into elevating your presence? And I've found that people that are really good in this space of display and communication are gamers. They're able to work at a pace that is incredible. People that are having issues with Zoom, it's such a big discrepancy in terms of what gamers have been doing. They would have three to four screens too, and they have the chat that's going on that they're working on while they're playing games. And there's also chatting on their microphones and stuff. Right now the technology is so awesome that when people, let's say, subscribe into their channel, they're able to control part of their screen too. Yeah, so it's like you can choose the color of their lighting. You can choose at different cameras if they have multiple cameras. And the technology has shifted so much of how you connect with kind of the host and the brand itself. And that's why I think live streaming has definitely transitioned into the mainstream now that I think in 2022, a lot of people will definitely be very comfortable with the idea of live streaming. And it's not just this kind of like spooky thing of, oh, if I press this, will it explode? Basically, so I think I have an idea. But no, awesome, awesome. So yes, I think, do we have one more? How about as a bonus? Yes, if you guys love that bonus, maybe you can type bonus in the chat. So this is a special bonus that we, I wanted to talk about only three stocks, but if since we have time, and since you already prepared a bonus for you guys, and this is also the company that Romy, he himself, uses quite frequently, especially after for post-editing. How do you use this company for me? Definitely, definitely. So yes, if you want bonus, which I type, oh, okay, there's someone who typed bonus. I'm like, I went into the comments and typed bonus myself because I wanted to see it. So yeah, bonus. So the company is Adobe. I think, yeah, people probably recognize it most from the PDF side. No matter what you would have to, Adobe Acrobat Reader is probably one of the, or they call it Adobe Reader now. One of the most popular softwares that people have to download when they want to see PDFs. But personally, I've been using Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom a lot. In terms of the production side of video, I've been using Adobe Premiere Pro a lot too. So I've touched on all the softwares in terms of the whole creative suite. They call it Creative Cloud right now, which I think is a fantastic name. Cloud itself, I think there's a whole shift in branding probably about like four to five years ago where everyone was talking about the cloud. So I think CC, which is what they put behind their brand now, stands for that Creative Cloud. Photoshop is great, amazing, amazing software to do almost too much. You can do almost anything in Photoshop. And basically photo editing, video editing here, you can actually do also in Photoshop. But I probably touch Photoshop at least twice a day. Lightroom even more. So Lightroom is a raw image processor, which was embedded in Photoshop before. So with these cameras, you're able to shoot something called a raw image. The raw image is basically from the camera itself. You get all the information that the camera can give. People probably have heard of JPEGs. So JPG file is a compressed format actually. So the camera itself actually would have to compress it to make that JPEG file. So with the Sony files, it's actually called ARW. So you would take these files and put it into a Photoshop where you can adjust the exposure, contrast, highlight, shadows. You can even go in colors and adjust the color specifically. But there's no actual photo manipulation yet. Like if you want to move the nose or take out like a pimple, those are the things that you have to do within Photoshop to make it really, really pretty or not look like you. But the main thing right now with Adobe is if you truly want to be a very in-depth creator, then I think you would jump into the Adobe world to understand kind of what it can provide. Because it's like owning very, very powerful tools. But if you only use a percentage of it, I don't think you have to dive in to the Adobe world just yet. A very, very popular brand right now is Canva, which I think a lot of people recognize and use. And Chloe, yourself, I think you also use Canva. I use Canva because to me, I don't know how to use Adobe at all. I really feel that it's quite a steep learning curve, right? But on the other hand, this banner is completely created using Canva. And then it took me less than five minutes because there are existing templates available. Yeah, and it's so easy to use. You don't need to be a designer to design this, like me commoner with very little artistic sense. I can still do that. Oh, you have good sense. I think it's more kind of connecting that good sense into good design. Canva is so powerful, like you said, the templates that they have already for Canva is fantastic because it's like, oh, this looks pretty. I picked this and then I put in my own image and then also my own content and then you're done. That's the power, I think, people's focus on expression right now. So how do you, like for me, I've learned recently from a little talk of Yo-Yo Ma, the great, like cellist. He talked about expression over perfection. He was in concerts before in the younger part of his life to play perfect concerts, which he did, but he found that it was super boring. So he actually focused on more of the art side of things and about expression. And hence it's like, you don't have to have things perfect, but you want to make sure that you can get your message out. So let's say for Chloe right now, I think her wondering about live stream stocks and my photo is more just like, I'm posing there and not really doing anything. But I think that was the only photo that probably Chloe could find that was a little better. But I can feel that, oh, this is really cool. Two people that are going to be talking in live stream and one person, people that see and knows Chloe's brand will be wanting to connect. Same thing vice versa. People that know my brand would want to connect too. But I think, yeah, Adobe has definitely, I think they started the trend of the creation side with Photoshop. A lot of people have heard of the name, but like you said, it is a very steep learning curve. You know, when you first go into it, there's this like canvas space and then all these tools that are on the side and you're like, wow, what do each of these tools and tool sets mean? But whereas Canva, right when you jump in, it's free too to join. You can definitely immerse yourself into the world right away. But yeah, I think there's definitely the shift of very easy applications to use through apps on the phone, also with your computer too. But the main thing is kind of what is your purpose? Do you want to, again, go in depth with a design or do you want to distribute quickly? And I also have this question for you, like since Canva, it's very easy to use. And actually there are also applications that are probably free, video editing tools or something that's way cheaper than Adobe subscription. What do you think it's the, could it pose a threat to Adobe's power? Like the threat, yeah, it definitely has, I think pose a threat, not to their power because they're quite ubiquitous in terms of where they are. Like you can see how many apps that they have. They have this whole section for power users and they have kind of a new set for people that want to get into it too. Just to compete with those people that are doing just the task specific type apps. Let's say if you want to remove the background or if you want to have this nice filtered face people won't be able to see all the wrinkles and everything. They're starting to pick up what people are talking about in terms of the small applications that are not theirs. Remember, I think I shared with you, there's this caption feature in let's say or Filmora that you can translate what I'm saying directly into captions. And not only the actual language, so I'm speaking English right now. These applications can translate to Chinese for you directly. And I thought that, wow, this is so powerful. How come Adobe hasn't done that yet? And then yeah, Premiere Pro, I think finally brought it in kind of the two updates ago now that you can do the captioning and stuff. So they are playing catch up in terms of these small features but they have to choose kind of who to compete with too. You cannot just, yeah, you cannot just, you know, if someone has something that's cool and you keep trying to pick it up because they have this whole kind of ecosystem that they're also taken care of where if you know how to use one Adobe software it's very familiar in the other ones too. Just like Apple, I think they merge very well that way. So the energy in between different apps as well. It's huge, it's huge. And that's why they want you to incorporate everything together. So for me, a big part would be like Photoshop Lightroom. Those are very good, powerful apps. If I want to do publications in terms of PDFs and stuff, I would go into InDesign. So InDesign is for publications where you can do books and stuff too. So I guess you can quickly dive into Adobe's numbers. I think in terms of the P valuation, it does seem on the high side. But on the other hand, if you see that the subscriptions has been increasing, actually mainly the majority of the revenue comes from the subscription, which is the Adobe Creative Club that we just saw. So and one thing that Adobe believes that it actually has a lot more market share to grab. In terms of the Creative Cloud market share, they believe that by 2023, it's going to be like 41 billion. But right now, if you think about it, everything is just probably add up together about 12 billion. So it's going to be at least a 3x kind of space from Adobe point of view. And if you look at the finances, everything is just really beautiful. It's a brilliant company, very strong stable, and everything has been really increasing in a very healthy manner. Margin is fat, oh wow, it's close to 40% in terms of net margin, very little debt. So in terms of the financial stability, it's very safe. And on top of that, of course, Adobe is just more than just the Creative Cloud that we just saw. They also has the Acrobat. It also runs services right now, which I think is related to marketing. But I do feel that this is slightly more competitive because there are a lot of other services, companies are doing marketing, but they believe that the total addressable market for them, it's going to be very huge, like 147 billion. And right now, they are just, maybe they have, in their opinion, it's going to be a 10x space for them. So but once again, the P ratio, it has been high actually all the time because Adobe is such a brilliant business, very stable, consistent predictability. So five-year average, it's 53. Right now, 54, if you compare to five-year average, it's actually pretty fair. It's not extremely expensive as compared to five-year, but if you are not comfortable paying 54 times, then maybe to you, it could be expensive. Yeah, but I really feel that one thing that I looked at Adobe, I felt it was quite interesting is because they do buy back their own shares, pay the company buy back their own shares, and the recent purchase price is $627, which is not too far away from the current share price. So if you want to enter first-trunch and you want to enter it even at a slightly lower P ratio than the current share price, you can consider using these share buy back price as a benchmark, which is 627. Then you can set like GTC, and that means when you buy it, you are literally buying from the company management point of view that hey, this is a good price to buy this company shares. So I think that's pretty safe. Yeah. That's awesome. That sounds almost like a jarble to me, but I'm sure the people that understand investment, that's fantastic. I think it's because I'm also up really early in the morning. So when I'm like listening to numbers, I'm like, wow. No, really, 5 a.m. in the morning right now. Yeah, it's 5.08 a.m. right now. But that doesn't matter. No excuses, because I love this conversation. And then I found that definitely there is a value in understanding how to use your own money to make more money. Why do we always have to use the physical effort to make money? I don't think it's a great long-term strategy if you truly want kind of financial freedom. And the sharing today is definitely to gear towards how do you reach that stage where your money is working for you really, really well. But like you said, it takes due diligence, but it also takes a lot of patience, because that's something that I'm still learning at this age. I'm only 21. No, I'm just kidding. I'm a little bit close. We're close in age, Chloe. But yeah, it's the... There is this kind of exhaustion working in the media world and creation world that sometimes can be felt that I'm like, okay, if I build up my own company really well in the creator's space, I want to take the funds that I've created and put it into things that are quite powerful. That can extend my money. But yeah, I think, do we have any kind of famous last words from us? Not in a bad way, but... Do you have any last words? Yeah, I think investing is really a journey. Maybe the initial learning curve can be pretty steep, but once again, if you're willing to work on this journey, it's going to be very fulfilling, especially like 2021 is overcoming to the end. If this is something that you want to learn and you want to really build up your wealth, passive income from 2022 and beyond, I think we really should start going forward. Like I think it's very important to build up your investment education so that you don't buy or sell blindly and you really have a proper system to guide you. So for myself, I actually conduct pretty often my like frequent sharing on how to invest, how to step, start your investment journey step by step. So for those who want to join me, actually this coming Wednesday, I do have my own webinar sharing about, especially how can you start investing using stocks and options. I think options is a very powerful tool. Come and learn for those who have not learned it before. It's definitely going to help you to accelerate your financial freedom goal as long as it's just really applied. Apply what you're going to learn as well. So it's going to be a free webinar, two hours, come and join me if you really want to take your finances to the next level. Yeah, this is great. Awesome, awesome. Yep, I've put the link down also in the comments. So definitely go click and check it out. I've personally taken the course of Chloe's too and she is fantastic in communicating the complexities of investment. Again, I'm not totally a numbers person. I'm good at math, but I'm bad at organization because I'm an artist. But in terms of these classes, do you have it quite frequent then or? I do have it once a week. So next Wednesday is the one. If not, it's going to be like next Wednesday, something like that. So it's every Wednesday. Awesome. So if people want to pick up, it doesn't have to be this one if you're already scheduled for things. Chloe's always going to be available to share this wonderful information. Personally, in my space too, my brand is Charm Logic. I do have a Facebook page that people can follow now that I'm shaping kind of people's first impressions and how to create better relationships through first impressions too. But yeah, do give us a follow. How can you create your lightings in background? Look so cool, man. Thanks, Chris. Yes. Come follow me or message me directly. I also have classes that I will be posting up, probably not as frequent as Chloe's yet. I want to systemize it where I can also share about live streaming and not just the lighting part itself because I think getting your message out there is almost more important than how you look and how you sound. But that is definitely a close second. Once you're comfortable with sharing, this will definitely elevate your game a lot. But yeah, if we don't have that advantage of looking as pretty as Chloe, then we didn't need some lighting and audio to work. So well, I know I'm not horrible looking, but for people that feel that way. Who are good looking, that everything just light up everything as well. Thank you. Thank you. Again, it's the lighting. So the people that definitely want to elevate their game, give me a shout. Also give Chloe a shout if you don't know how to connect to me. But thank you so much again, Chloe, for today. It was a pleasure and an honor to speak with you because I know even though you share this information a lot, to have a heart to want people to improve is a different game. And you definitely have that for people. And I think I have that too. I want to help everybody. So if you do, if you guys need any help and want any knowledge in anything terms of image or investment, you can share with us. So follow me. He has a lot of insights to really up your game. Thank you. Thank you. But no, so if you guys are watching the replay, please, if you have any questions, please post down in the comments. But yeah, I appreciate everyone joining today again. And thank you, Chloe, again. We will talk soon, everyone. Bye-bye. See you guys. Thank you, everyone, for watching. Thank you. Bye. Bye.


Welcome to All Hands Update, here's what's happening around your Navy today. Commander's submarine forces kicked off ice exercise 2016 in the Arctic Ocean with the construction of U.S. Navy Ice Camp Sargo. Ice X 2016 is a five-week exercise designed to research, test, and evaluate operational capabilities in the Arctic region. The three officers assigned in Naval District Washington Security Forces received the Attorney General's Award for Excellence in Law Enforcement. The officers received the award for their acts of heroism during the events that took place at 10.16.2013 at Washington Navy Yard Building 197. The award recognizes outstanding professional achievements by law enforcement officers. Service members and civilians gathered in Washington to commemorate the fifth anniversary of Operation Tamadachi. The operation was a humanitarian mission focused on aiding the people of Japan in the aftermath of a massive earthquake and tsunami that struck the Fukushima Prefecture in March 2011. You can read more about what's happening around your Navy at Navy.mil.


Good morning, how's everybody doing? So welcome to kind of a deep dive into ASTARA. My name is Mark McClain. I'm a co-founder and CTO of Aconda, which provides services to support around the OpenStack ASTARA project. Previously, I served on the technical committee for a couple years, as well as former Neutron PtL. So I think when a lot of people wonder, like, what is ASTARA? What were the challenges for it? Why do we go off and write ASTARA? Why did we not do this inside the Neutron? And so I kind of want to touch on those a little bit today. And so when we started taking a look at it, ASTARA, as a project, was born from the time when I was working at Dreamhost with some others, and from the public cloud use case. And how can we solve the operational needs? So when we started taking a look at it, when you're running a cloud, you're going to have multiple services. You're going to have each SDN, L2 is going to be a little bit different. They're kind of difficult to change. In some respects, if you take a look at Neutron with like ML2, you can change some bits. But if you, say, have a monolithic driver, it can actually be a little bit more interesting if you're changing your provider over time. And one of the things is when we were designing the public cloud there is that we knew that services and vendors were going to evolve over time. It's just a fact of life when running in operations. And really day two matters. And so taking a look at it, those are some operational challenges we were trying to solve. But also you kind of have to balance that with, could we attack some problems in Neutron? And yes, we did in some places. And other places were like, this isn't a Neutron problem. This is an operational problem. This is an implementation problem. Not something that needs to go be fixed in Neutron because really nothing's broken in that area. And so kind of keep that in mind. It's like where we did things differently, it's just because we had a different opinion. And that's okay because when you realistically take a look at how Neutron's constructed, I mean, you can have a wide variety of solutions that solve a lot of different unique use cases and it doesn't invalidate another particular solution. So one of the takeaways is make sure it's not that what Neutron did with its implementations is wrong. It's just that for certain use cases it didn't match up with what we wanted. And so that's the good part about experimentations. The good part about an open ecosystem is that we can borrow and share and use different ideas. So logical Neutron, it's clean. You can make these nice pretty diagrams. I can log in Horizon and now the diagram bounces, it moves around, it gives me all kind of cool stuff. But underneath the hood it's a little messy. What's actually going on? How are we handling layer two? How are we handling layer three? Should we when writing systems handle layer two or layer three? So when coming with that for a STARA we made a conscious effort, a conscious decision to say we're going to be layer two agnostic. We think there's lots of solutions out there that do layer two fairly well, whether it's OVS or Linux bridge. We also prefer when you start talking about day two operations in terms of technical staff and operations to keep to use standard tooling. Some of the SDN solutions that do layer two and layer three converge are very interesting and provide a lot of benefit. But we decided to take a little bit different and really kind of respect the layers within the network stacks so that you have each layer is kind of doing it what it specialized best at. So with that, the STARA project was born. A STARA if you're wondering is basically kind of like a callback to the escape prototype name. Originally this project when we started was nicknamed the rug. If you've ever seen the movie The Big Lebowski there's a line in the movie about tying the room together. A STARA loosely translates into carpet. So that's how the kind of lineage of the project name. So within that, like I said, this came from the public cloud use case. So we wanted to be hyper scalable. We knew we were going to have a large number of end points. We knew we needed to, it was going to be supersized. It needed to be highly available. We also knew that we wanted to deliver services over the top. So specifically layer three and above services. We also knew that over time wanna have provisions to grow that set of services so that it was easy to add them, easy to integrate them. Yet, because it was born out of the public cloud use case maintain those open source APIs. Standard Neutron, Standard Nova, Standard Glance. If you write extensions, it makes it really hard on the tooling.  So we wanted to avoid all that. So like I said, the rug was where we began. So if you hear me say orchestrator or rug, it is the same entities. I use them interchangeably at times. So Reference Neutron, I think, you know, there's about a billion variants of this slide out there. You know, just to kind of differentiate it a little bit. So Reference Neutron, it's, you know, fleet of microservice agents. So you have layer three agent, you have DHCP agent. You have variants of those agents that talk within each other. If you're running DVR, it's even more agents. But, you know, conceptually, that's where it started. And, you know, that model works. And so what we want to do is explore an alternative way, which is what happens if we change this and provide some services, either in VMs or containers or hardware, you know, without all the agents and think about something that was a little smarter and could combine some services out. You know, I authored some of those agents on Neutron. And so, you know, it was interesting to look at use case. In this case, what we did is we simplified it a little bit by we have the Astaris service. Astar itself does not sit within the data path. We'll kind of hit on that a little bit later. It's purely control plane. Talks directly with Neutron server, you know, as well as sometimes I could put like a little dotted line that goes down to the message queue. But you'll notice we leave the layer two agents there. Astar is a layer two agnostic, OBS Linux bridge. We've run on top of other proprietary solutions, physical networks, it does support those. You know, again, with the Neutron reference, you know, you've got your hypervisors, you might have your full mesh, you have network nodes, you know, they're providing network services, whether you have one in the case I drew here or, you know, 10s or, you know, 50 of them, you still at times can encounter problems in terms of congestion, points of failure, you know, you can do high availability with DHCP and metadata, you can do those services. But we want to take an alternative approach which is what happens if you take those network functions and actually scatter them out throughout.  And so if a particular function dies, you know, for lack of a better term, your blast radius in terms of tenants impacted is very tiny. So, you know, that's kind of alternate model, we were exploring what does this look like, how is it scheduling. And so a lot of times in the default case, if you were to download the code in GitHub, it's going to do a one for one, whatever service except for in, it's going to combine DCP metadata and routing typically are co-located on the same box within the open source components. So with that, let's kind of dive in a little bit under the hood.  We have pluggable drivers. Again, this is kind of calling back to one of our motivational challenges which is we knew we wanted to change technologies over time. Historically, historic support of the appliances that were based on VSD, Linux, you know, some proprietary appliances from big network vendors as well have, you know, been integrated. It's multi-process and multi-threaded. I'll kind of touch on that in a second. It actually helps in a number of different ways in terms of scaling. And, you know, we started development in Folsom it went in production in 2013. So, you know, while the project joined the big tents last fall, this is something that's been going and churning and been in constant development for some time. A star supports dynamic routing, both OSP, FPGP, it's pluggable, it, you know, I think the current appliance that we produce for kind of testing is based on bird, easily integrate quagga if you like that variant, you know, it's all, and designed for V6 from the ground up. You know, we started playing around with V6 even before Neutron had full support for it. It was a nice kind of learning lab. It was a good way to kind of, you know, try out some ideas and see what worked before some of the interfaces in Neutron were baked. And like I said, it's agnostic. So, you can run OBS, you can run Linux bridge, or something else. So, the Astar architecture in terms of control plane, if you look on the left-hand side, it's going to be Nova Neutron. You have the orchestrator. And then on the right-hand side, what you kind of see is what you see, like in the data path. So, you have at the bottom, you have your physical network.  Some of the things we've done and kind of talked about in the past, if you've seen previous summits, we've integrated in with some of the switching that supports hierarchical port binding so that you could, you know, you can do a lot of interesting things with that. That's where you get that kind of OTT, L2 agnostic kind of shim layer there that enables us to kind of say orchestrate if we wanted to work in an environment like where you're running VxLand within the rack, and then your VTEPs, the hardware VTEP with the overlay across the tours, standard open stack APIs, and then you got routing, you know, low balancing firewall VPN. Today it supports routing, low balancing, still waiting on the firewall API to kind of get mature enough to build an implementation.  So, because if you're running with service VMs, you can upload an image to Glance. One of the things we've recently put in Mitaka was the ability for a tenant to upload an image, and then so you could have alternate images for a particular, say, routing service, because fundamentally once you plug it into the network, you can, I mean, the plug-ins generally the same, so you can have different variants of image. It's kind of nice in terms of if you think about a public cloud provider because while you may have lots of tenants, they're not necessarily all the same or equal, and so you might need to provide special images for certain tenants, so that's an advantage, as well as it's driver-based, so low balancing, HAProxy, IngenX, IngenX Plus, VPN was rolled in, touched on routing a bit earlier. So, internals, we're all Python-based, I mean, that's generally what you find within the OpenStack ecosystem. What's a little different is a star of the orchestrator itself is based on Python multi-processing. An orchestrator instance will have multiple processes that all have master process communicate via the multi-processing internals, but within that there are several workers which will have threads. The nice thing is this gives you two knobs to turn. You can scale up your number of processes, as well as you can scale up your number of threads available, and the benefit to that is because each of the threads are typically dispatched to manage a particular VNF, if you have a VNF that's hung or you have a VNF that's slow, you're only impacting one of the threads. Pythons, traditionally, with some of the problems you would have with a ventlet, per se, where it might hang, we're actually using traditional Python threads. It's kind of interesting, they just work, they're fairly fair, not always good, because Python threads have a consistent byte code count before they yield, but what we found in production is that it was a lot easier, made development a lot easier, so if you take a look on the right-hand side of the screen, what you'll see is at the top we have a process, kind of a master process that will spin up a number of helpers, so kind of the big functional blocks is you have something that's responsible for notification processing, so it's listening from the telemetry coming out of Neutron, and so Neutron as the API service runs generates lots of events from Create, Update, Start and End events, and just a fire hose of events. We have a processor, it's sitting there listening, and we're listening for the type of event, the ID, but not necessarily all the contents of the event, because if you're listening to that fire hose, timeliness doesn't matter, so what we're more looking at is what's interesting about that event stream. So it processes it as rapidly as possible, generates an event internally, which is passed down to a scheduler, and when we say scheduler, realistically what it's doing is it's sharding across the number of available workers to then dispatch, so the key is basically based on tenant ID, and so then it will spread that out to a worker, and then within the worker, the worker then keeps a separate queue of say I need to go work on this tenant's routers, and then we'll further dispatch a particular router down to a thread, and so that rolls down, and so what that does is that if you have a particular noisy tenant, it kind of keeps the path, but you're not initially creating lots of congestion for everybody else. Within a worker, it's basically we keep a state machine, and some of the events, it's like, is this thing even up? So in the state machine kind of turns through, first thing we kind of do is we kind of figure out what we need to do, so if you take a look at the rights, kind of like a representation, so when you're using automated tooling with Neutron, you tend to generate a lot of events at once, it's not necessary to always process them all individually, you can actually take a look at the set of events, kind of coalesce them down, and then take an intelligent action, so while you may have eight events, they may all be seven of them, first one may say create, and the next seven may be update, so when you're taking a look as the worker gets to it, its first action is to kind of go through, scan the backlog of events unique to its network functions managing, and then kind of coalesce it down and say okay, I've got one create and seven updates, I can go do a create with a full config refresh, and then you're not sitting there wasting extra cycles. Other thing that's interesting about this is, let's say at the back end of the queue, somebody spun something up, and then they've used it, and then as they're working, they decide it's time to tear it down, what we've also found with automation tooling is sometimes you create a lot of update events followed by a delete, and so what we're able to do is peek ahead all the way in and be like, oh, I have a delete event, there's no reason for me to sit there and unwind and run all these config changes for updates that aren't actually going to matter. And then within a worker, we also have an instance manager, it's pluggable so that you could have varying types of instances. Traditionally with a star, it's been service VMs, but you could switch it out. The instance manager is capable of talking with novits, it's the interface where we abstract out, do I talk to Nova, how do I boot this thing, how do I manage it? With that, it's kind of like within each a star orchestrator, but one of the other things about that is you don't really want one node running because what we all know is hardware will fail or somebody will turn off the wrong circuit.  So how do we scale this thing active-active? How do we have multiple orchestrators work together? So within that, like I talked about, kind of with the scaling up, we can add more threads that gives us stability. Within a star orchestrator, what we've found through it via testing is that a single orchestrator can easily handle thousands of VNFs. It doesn't really sweat, pretty easy to tune. For a while, this was also run active passive. They just scaled up, it kind of worked. But for that HA, we can actually expand the set of star orchestrators. We're kind of leveraging, the nice thing about being a part of a big community like this is we can leverage the two's library, it gives us membership, it allows us to kind of do clustering. It can be backed upon what ZooKeeper, Memcache. And so as you increase the number of a star orchestrators, we then are also using hash rings and kind of deterministically sharding the petition, basically sharding which VNFs were handling. So you kind of get that active-active. I could go through, I can add a third orchestrator, I can also contract the set, and it all kind of works. Now, oops, oops, back, okay. So like I said, this is implemented using hash ring. Again, one nice thing about this community is people have already tackled things like this. So we were able to take the hash ring that's been working in Ironic, kind of take a lot of that code, make it work for our purpose. Other thing we also did to kind of make things a little bit more simple is Workshare kind of really makes no assumptions about the current state of a function is. Because what you don't know is you don't always know when you have an event, say a contraction event, you don't actually know if the orchestrator is previously managing this network function actually did everything it was supposed to do or maybe it just died or hung or something like that. And so as you change that set, you actually have to go back and go through and ensure that the configuration is up to date, that there hasn't been any drift. It actually simplifies a little bit, expand and contract because you're not worrying about a late notification because if you have a multiprocess system, it's possible that host A is now managing in particular V and F, but the notification actually arrived on B. In this case, we don't really care. The notification will arrive on B, it's fine, it's just going to get dropped, but it's not going to be an issue in terms of how do we process it because we're basically going to assume a cold start and make sure that we have a fresh, fully populated config. So within that, within Mitaka, I talked about bring your own network function. You can upload a new image. It's something we're kind of excited about. The primitives are put in, I think when Newton, it's really kind of, we talked this morning in one of our design summit sessions, probably talk a little bit more tomorrow about that, about how we can expand this, what things we can support, active, active appliances. This was in Neutron proper and so it just took us a while to get that. So it was support for VRP, VPN as a service. So, you know, interesting thing is, you know, one of the little bit differences that orchestrator, or not orchestrator, but the appliance here actually runs strong swan whereas upstream is more open swan based or lever swan. So just a little bit difference there. And then instance pooling. And so instance pooling is very handy, especially from a VM based, when you're doing VM based services, you can keep a ready spare pool. The nice thing about this, you can keep pools of different types.  They're tunable, configurable. Nice thing about that is you can do rolling updates and you can pre-populate that pool if need be by growing it, letting it build and then doing an issue in your update so that can even make it faster. Combined with VRP, most of the time tenant doesn't even notice the update occurred. So within the ecosystem or within the ASTARA project, so we have the orchestrator and then we have a couple other component projects. We have an ASTARA horizon, which provides a little bit of integration of horizon. I'll show that in a moment. And then we have the ASTARA appliance. So while I said ASTARA itself is not in the data path, we needed something for testing. We needed something to show how routing as a service worked and that's something we could build against. So the ASTARA appliance, it's basically a basic router image. It supports BGP based bird, VPN, DHCP and is able to provide the similar services for metadata that you would find in the OpenStack and the Neutron version. It's Linux, it's Debian 8.3. Pretty simple to build, uses disk image builder. Again, re-leveraging components of the community. What we wanted to do is when building the simple implementation, differentiate where it made sense, but borrow and consume as much of the output of the rest of the community as we could because that's the benefit of all of us being in this big community. The ASTARA appliance itself, everybody kind of asks how it's configured. Fairly simple REST API just passes mostly an intermediate version of the config across. Could we have chosen a different protocol for support? Yeah, but we found REST was just kind of easy. Also made it easier for new people to kind of see what was going on and not have to learn. If you're not necessarily familiar with all the alphabet soup of varying ways to configure network appliances, we thought this was kind of the easiest way. And so typically what you find in interface with the appliance, the management network is gonna be wired up first on East Zero. Occasionally Nova will plug this in a different place. How we kind of counteract that is at boot time we pass via cloud in its commands that will tell the appliance that this is the MAC address of your management interface. And so from the appliance itself is able to go scan its available interfaces, look for that MAC address and appropriately configure that one as the management network. Typically within ASTARA it's historically always been IPv6 based. It just because we wanted to be IPv6 first it does support v4 occasionally. That question comes up occasionally. And then the other interfaces you'll find heath one is typically external network and then you have two through whatever which is tenant networks. And then another component is the ASTARA Neutron project. I'll get questions about what this is exactly. It's a small chimilar which enables ASTARA to better interface with Neutron. One of the challenges of being an implementation is that sometimes you need to run ahead of where the upstream community is going or other times you need a chance to experiment and then figure out if this is the solution before saying, hey let me go write a spec let me go make changes in Neutron because some ideas are great some ideas look good on paper and then reality need to kind of play around them. And so this is what ASTARA Neutron handles. It does provide a traditional layer three plug-in that you would standard, you know that service plug-in that you would consume standard and an install and a config file for Neutron. And provides a small M2 wrapper is interesting. I was chatting with some folks yesterday evening about this and they're like, why does this even exist? And part of it is for to add some support for some features that necessarily weren't in Neutron currently today and also to kind of test to see if it's, you know validate that the plan actually works. And so one of the things we'll hope to get in Neutron is to actually get rid of this ML2 wrapper and push those small tiny changes upstream and make them work in a wider array of folks. So like I said, long-term goal let's get rid of this thing. It's a very small set of code but it also, you know for us being an implementation the closer we are to mainline Neutron in terms of REST API and interfaces the better but that's just one of the components that's there. And so I touched on that. So let's, oops, so now the fun part.  So, you know, so one hand it's like, okay hey, this is standard horizon. We've seen this, that's our goal. You know, the horizon interface should be the most boring part but behind the scenes what I'm gonna scroll here so it's kind of giving an idea of what's going on is the historic orchestrator is running. It's looking for changes. It's looking for, you know what modifications are going on within the network. So if I were to go in as the demo user and let's just say I've got a simple topology setup. You know, so I've got a router. I've got two networks.  I'm, you know, turning, I'm shutting things down. If you notice you'll see some motion in the background as the stars reacting to some of these things I can go through. I can, you know, detach the network from the interface. I can go back through, I can go back through connect it to the interface and you'll see the motions and you'll see the actions are going on underneath the hood. And so, you know, that's all the generic. What's happening is that a star is listening to the telemetry coming off of Neutron. It's reacting if I were to, and then see there's a big config change that's pushed. Now if I exit out of this, what I can do is just kind of give you an idea what's going on within the appliance kind of diving into it a little bit. Is, you know, like I said, the testing appliance is standard Linux. It can access it via IPv6. So, you know, I can kind of standard set of interfaces that we're seeing here. If we take a look at the services, it's gonna be DNS mask. Nice thing about this is that we were able to kind of co-locate a couple of services. So within this particular appliance, I'm running routing, I'm running VPN, DCP. So in terms of resources, a lot of the tenants resources, a lot of the tenants services are all co-located together. You kind of get shared fate. Operationally for operation teams that have been running this, it's very easy for them to dive in and then say, okay, I need to troubleshoot a particular tenant or maybe I need to go through and, you know, maybe I've got a tenant who like, you know, has an NTP reflection attack going on. It's like, okay, but how can I go through and make a targeted change to tenants to then fix something back in for their network? And so within that, like I said, it's standard Linux, it's just, we wanted to keep things as standard as possible. So looking ahead a little bit to Newton, this morning we talked a little bit about, you know, I think one of the outcomes is implementing a generic VNF driver.  What we're seeing from some workloads is that there are VNFs that exist that people want to wire into their deployment, using their deployment. They have external management systems, which is fine. So within that, just a generic driver that can take that appliance, boot it, wire it and connect it in with the network. Python entry point support. Nice thing about this is that we can have drivers that aren't necessarily in the Astara tree that Astara can then utilize. Load balancing just kind of, you know, within the last cycle, they've added a lot of extra support for new APIs and load balancing. And so just as we've been growing the Astara team, you know, keeping up and making sure we're matching everything, SSC integration also came up this morning as well. So, you know, join our community. It's growing. We've had lots of new contributors in the Metaka cycle. It was exciting to see all the new faces. You know, my favorite part about the OpenStack community is, you know, while we may interact with people one-to-one in person, I always like when you have people jump in on IRC you've never met before and like, hey, I really like your thing. I want to help and let's work together. So, Project Status is on Launchpad Astara. Documentation. Either docs.condit.io is a redirect really for Astara.read.docs. And then FreeNode and then our weekly meeting is Mondays at, you know, 1800. So, with that, you know, just kind of the last little takeaways is, we designed it to be hyperscalable, control plane, very pluggable to provide layer three and above services, all open source. So, thanks. Questions? Thank you for the presentation. Before coming into this meeting, I was just seeing this Astara as a wrapper sitting on top of the neutron. I'm glad I came here. So, I see that it's much more than that. Mainly just you provide, not only wrapping on top of neutron, you have a stateful machine running in there to monitor what has been happening and maybe on the northbound interface of Astara, there's a subscription and notification mechanism will be provided from Astara to external systems, I assume. In that sense, what is the relation or how do you tie Astara with attacker? Because you're delivering pretty much the element management system, EMS, for the VNS. So, the attacker is orchestrating all these deployments and doing all these conflicts, and so, it seemed to be that these two can be bundled together to offer much more. Thank you. Yeah, so, I definitely agree that when you start taking a look between Astara and attacker, they're both within the OpenStack ecosystem. In terms of relative age of the projects, I think Astara was running a little bit ahead of where attacker was. And so, I think kind of logical next steps is figuring out how we can work together. One of the reasons why we moved our fishbowl session to this morning is to avoid overlapping with attacker for that very reason so that we can start, we can jump in and kind of cross-pollinate and talk and share ideas about how to better integrate. Because, like I touched on, the number of elements that we've either used or ideas have been inspired by other things in the OpenStack community and also integrating in with projects where it makes sense, it's a clearer win for everyone. Yes. Two questions here. How do you operate in provider networks kind of an environment? So, in a provider network environment, it's really no different. We run in provider network environment because from our perspective, a layer two connection is a layer two connection. Okay. The other one is, if you have an existing architecture with plain wheel in a neutron deployment with tenant networks, is there a migration path to a server? Is there a, so the question is, is there a migration path online migration path in the code we have today? No, have we written scripts that can do some of that stuff? Yes. Migrations are always a fun thing because every different cloud has a different SLA. So, but it is possible to migrate them. It is possible you can unschedule an instance via the neutron agents and then spin up a corresponding ASTARA VM. It is possible to do that and kind of migrate through. One of the things we also want to, possibility it's out there and really just could we take and leverage the VRP support for HA that's in neutron now and then actually have it fail over into ASTARA is make a really seamless path would be one of the things as well. Any other questions? All right, thank you very much.


Individuals in the vehicle, we see you. Come out with your hands up, do it now. So we are a very ops focused squadron here at Shaw. We have an almost army-centric type of organization in that we have the S1, S2, S3, S4, S5 construct, which is similar to Army Battalion. And that sort of structure is, again, very ops focused in that our S1 is supporting the administrative needs of the squadron. The S2 is our kind of connection point to all space agencies and the other law enforcement agencies in the area, but also providing the intel that drives the operations here on Shaw. The ops section is that touch point, the folks that you see out of the entry control points, the patrols out on the base, the flight line security. Our S4 is ensuring that the catam section is able to qualify or weapons qualify for the entire installation, as well as our supply and UDM functions reside there. And our S5 is maintaining the visitor control center, as well as our alarm planks throughout the installation. Alright, so you're just left for your way, so you can breathe in. So without a defense force, I believe it would only be a matter of time before that vulnerability would be exploited and a personal organization would take advantage and cause harm to the mission. And our presence creates a harder target and a significant risk to those adversaries.