Carolyn Crouch was just 19 years old when a trio of criminals broke into her home that she shared with her husband. These criminals ambushed Carolyn, tying up her husband and leaving him to watch the crime unfold. After the crime took place, Carolyn and her beloved seven-month-old puppy had both lost their lives, leaving only Carolyn's husband and their infant daughter behind. The crime that was left behind shook the entire country of Greece, and investigators couldn't understand what the couple could have been in possession of that would have been so valuable to warrant such a vicious and heartless crime. But that's when they realized there was much more to the story than meets the eye. Investigators and prosecutors soon uncovered a plethora of evidence that no one could have expected, landing one man in prison for the rest of his life. Before we get started with today's video, I want to let you know about an amazing new game called Love and Pies. Love and Pies is a free-to-download mobile game that can be played either on your mobile phone or tablet. It's a surprisingly addictive game that I can't recommend enough, mostly because it's just so easy to pick up and play. It's super easy to just pick up and play when you're taking a short break from work or maybe taking a warm bath after a particularly long day. The story involves you taking over your mother's cafe that burnt down, where you aim to rebuild the cafe into a thriving business.  Love and Pies is a great way to unplug from the busy, overwhelming world around us. And if you love juicy secrets, mystery, and captivating drama, I can't recommend the app enough. As someone who has a soft spot for those classic mystery TV shows like Desperate Housewives or Pretty Little Liars, this game is just perfect. One of the best aspects of this game is that you get to customize your newly rebuilt cafe however you want. And with a diverse cast of characters, this is a game you won't want to miss. Now it's your turn to jump into the world of Love and Pies and join me in unraveling this mystery and uncovering the many dark secrets that Love and Pies has to offer. So what are you waiting for? Download Love and Pies now using my link below. Thanks to Love and Pies for sponsoring today's video. Carolyn Crouch was born and raised in the UK for much of her childhood. Her transition to Greece isn't very well documented, and her parents haven't shared too many details about Carolyn's personal life and upbringing. One source stated that Carolyn moved to Greece when she was just eight years old, but we don't know what prompted such an unexpected move. Some sources suggest that Carolyn's father remained in the UK for much of Carolyn's life, so it's probably safe to assume that her father and mother must have split up at some point, but other sources claim that Carolyn moved to Greece alongside both her mother and father. So what caused Carolyn to end up in Greece? Well, we really don't know. Most of the sources I found claim that she moved there with both of her parents, so that's the version of events that we'll run with here. Just know that that may not be completely accurate. But either way, Carolyn spent the majority of her childhood years in Greece, following Greek customs and being raised in a traditionally Greek lifestyle. And this, believe it or not, is what caused things to get a bit weird, at least from an American's perspective. See, Carolyn was the daughter of a retired engineer, with some sources claiming that this engineering experience was spent working with oil and gas companies, suggesting her father had quite a reasonable income for much of Carolyn's life. And when looking at some of the photos of Carolyn's later years, it certainly seems that the family lived a pretty comfortable lifestyle. And that's what makes this next series of events seem rather unusual. I'm sure most of us are familiar with two things. The first being that love has no age limits. That's just a simple fact. The second is that around the world, many cultures will marry for financial or political gain. Keep both of these things in mind and we'll get back to this in just a moment. When Carolyn was entering her teenage years, she'd been considering what she planned on doing for the rest of her life. She'd been actively attending school and was doing quite well for herself, but that's when she met a man named Babis. Carolyn met Babis when she was just 15 years old, sometime in 2017. The two hit it off, but I can't for the life of me understand how. Like I said, Carolyn was 15 at the time, still presumably living with her parents. But Babis was 29 when they met, twice her age, and Carolyn was still a minor. Now, there may be some sort of cultural difference here that I just don't understand, hence why I suggested that this just seems a bit odd, specifically from an American perspective. But keep in mind, in Greece, just like in America, you can't legally marry until you're 18. So by all means, Babis was in an intimate relationship with an underage girl, and her parents were totally fine with this. We know that her parents were aware of this unusual relationship, because in 2019, just two years later, the two got married. Even at this point, Carolyn was still underage, meaning her parents needed to sign the documents to allow this marriage to take place. Now, I'm not going to judge someone for a situation I don't fully understand, due to potential cultural differences, but this just seems a bit off to me. As mentioned, love has no age limits, but if you want my opinion, that rule only applies if you're of a legal age, not still considered a child. Either way, Carolyn and Babis were married, and everything seemed great afterward. The two appeared to be very happily in love, and everything was going well, at least to the outside world. See, behind closed doors, things were not at all what they seemed. Allegations of abuse had begun to run rampant, and to this day, we still don't know whose allegations were more closely aligned with reality. But things were about to change for the Crouch family, and in ways no one could have ever seen coming. The following version of events has been told from the perspective of David Crouch, Carolyn's father. This story has been passed along by him as being completely truthful, so for the sake of this video, I'll be presenting it in the same way, but in the interest of full transparency, this exact series of events has not been proven, at least not as far as I can tell. David says that Carolyn and Babis would frequently go to a local restaurant near Athens. They'd been to the restaurant countless times in the past, and it was one of their favorite places to visit. As time passed by, Babis would become close friends with the owner of the restaurant, a man who's never been named publicly. At this same point in time, Babis was a helicopter operator, and it was a job he seems to have been quite proud of. Babis was a very confident pilot, seemingly with many hours under his belt, and anyone who knew him knew that being a pilot wasn't just a job for Babis, it was part of his identity. Naturally, as Babis and the restaurant owner spoke time and time again, Babis' time spent working as a pilot was a frequent topic of their conversations. But one day, these conversations took a dark turn that no one could have seen coming. According to David Crouch, the restaurant owner began to speak to Babis about his secret business that involved smuggling illegal goods all around the country. This restaurant owner was deeply, deeply involved in his business. In fact, it may have been the whole reason behind him owning the restaurant in the first place. After all, what better way to clean dirty money than to funnel it through a highly profitable business? David says that the restaurant owner approached Babis and told him about a gang that he'd been involved with. The gang had recently been dealing with some pipeline issues, so to speak, and he felt that Babis would be the perfect man to fix these issues. With Babis' easy access to helicopters, there would be no better way to smuggle goods around the country than through the air. This would keep the police off the trail of any potential drops as sniffer dogs and drug enforcement agents can't really patrol the air, at least not very easily. Babis, whether willingly or by coercion, allegedly agreed to this business endeavor, and in the process struck up a deal with the devil. Babis seemingly had no idea that this job would take everything from him, including his wife and daughter.  While Babis may have been an excellent pilot, he didn't have a good sense of business nor did he know about keeping people on a need to know basis.  Now I'm sure most of us are familiar with this idea, but anytime someone conducts shady business deals, it's always the best practice to never tell anyone about it. That's just common knowledge. This isn't usually done in an attempt to lie to the people you love, but rather to keep them safe. After all, if they don't know anything about your crimes, they won't be the ones to go down when the ship inevitably sinks. This keeps your family and loved ones at a safe distance from anything going on so that if things do start to go south, you're the only one that has to atone for what you've done, not them. But Babis didn't seem to have understood this concept, because as soon as he struck up the deal with the restaurant owner, Caroline was the first person that he told. Naturally, being a good person, Caroline wasn't okay with this new line of work. Yet it was going to bring in a massive sum of money for the small family, but it wasn't money that Caroline was interested in accepting. She fought back against these plans every chance she got, but there was little she could do to stop her husband. Worse yet, there was even less that she could do to stop her husband's new employers. When Caroline realized that her words had no weight in the eyes of her husband, Caroline's father says that Caroline started to walk out on Babis. Babis couldn't stand by and watch this happen, but the problem was, Babis's new employers weren't willing to sit by and watch this happen either. Thus, they forced Babis to silence his wife once and for all. David Crouch says that all of this was revealed to him in a handwritten letter that was given to him by Babis while Babis was incarcerated. David says that Babis wanted to set the record straight once and for all, and he felt that Caroline's father deserved to know the truth. But for many people, this so-called truth was just a bit too much to believe, especially considering that Babis had told a dramatically different story up to this point. In fact, Babis' attorney says that this entire story is nothing more than a fabrication on the part of Caroline's father, and he even goes on to claim that such a letter was never handed over to David because that letter doesn't even exist. And according to Babis' public statements, he wasn't involved in the crime at all. In reality, he was just another victim. It was May 11th, 2021. It was a day like any other for Babis and Caroline. That is, until night time rolled around. At some point in the middle of the night, a trio of armed robbers broke into the couple's home, which at the time was occupied by Caroline, Babis, their seven-month-old husky puppy and their infant daughter, Lydia. When the three broke into the home, they immediately grabbed the puppy and heartbreakingly ended its life using its own leash. Once this was done, the three made their way upstairs where they pulled out weapons and demanded all the money that the couple had to offer. Babis told the men that they had about 10,000 euros and even told them where to find the money. But Caroline wasn't going to let them take it without a fight. Caroline had been trained in martial arts and she began to fight back against the robbers. But when they began to resist, they threatened little Lydia, who'd been in the room with the couple that evening. The leader of the three robbers managed to overpower Caroline after making threats against her child, then ended her life by restricting her breathing, leaving her on the couple's bed and fleeing the home. But before they left, they tied up Babis and gagged him, with him fainting just a few minutes later. This all took place around 4.30 a.m. and when Babis eventually woke up, he managed to free himself from his restraints and call the police for help. When officers arrived at the scene, initially everything that Babis had told them seemed to have been true. Unfortunately, when they checked the home security camera for evidence, they found that the robbers had stolen the SD card, meaning that nothing was left behind outside of an obvious mess and a disturbing crime scene. The Crouched family and Babis would later mourn the loss of Caroline, with photos from the funeral showing Babis embracing Caroline's mother as she wept. But just a few weeks later, police would reach a breakthrough in the case, finding new information that would turn the investigation on its head and paint Babis in a much different light. As investigators were doing their best to get to the bottom of the awful crime that transpired in the couple's home that night, they began to notice some inconsistencies in Babis's story. Police requested access to Caroline's phone on the night of her passing, in an effort to better pin down her final moments and what took place leading up to the crime, likely in an effort to find out if she had been in contact with anyone suspicious in the days or weeks leading up to her demise. It was when searching through her phone that they gained access to her fitness data. This is when things get very interesting. So if you have a modern smartphone or smartwatch, you should know that your devices are always collecting data on you. Most of us think of this as purely being your location data, but if you have a smartwatch such as an Apple Watch, then your phone is also documenting things such as your heart rate, your physical movements, and in some cases even your temperature or other details about your health. When investigators looked into Caroline's health data, they found something interesting. According to her health data that was pulled from her Apple Watch, which documented her sleep patterns, Caroline had been fast asleep immediately before losing her life. Worse yet, her location data showed that she never once got out of bed, which was inconsistent with what Babis told investigators about Caroline doing her best to physically fight off the assailants using martial arts. To make matters worse, Babis also claimed that the attack had taken place sometime around 4.30 a.m. But investigators learned from their home security system that the memory card had been removed at precisely 1.20 a.m. More than three hours before Babis claims that the crime began. Caroline's Apple Watch also showed that her heart stopped beating at about 4.20 a.m., again disputing the timeline that Babis had claimed. With all of this information taken into account, police theorized that from 1.20 a.m. to 4.20 a.m., Babis had been staging the scene of the crime. They believe he made multiple attempts on Caroline's life during this time, making sure to cover his tracks along the way, to make sure that things appear as though there was a break-in. But the bigger question here that many of us are wondering is why? Well, that's the problem. There are multiple answers, depending on which version of events you believe. Was Babis truly threatened by an elusive gang member? If so, then he probably took his wife's life because he was told to. Did Caroline truly find out about Babis' smuggling crimes and threatened to leave, sending him into a fit of rage? Well, that's certainly possible too. But in more recent accounts from Babis during his trial, he even claimed that the marriage between the two had been filled with physical abuse. He claimed that his reason for taking Caroline's life was because he was sick of her assaulting him, referencing several occasions in which she would punch and kick him when things didn't go her way. He says that he grew so tired of this that he smothered Caroline with her own pillow while she slept. But if this were true, then why did he also take the life of her dog? That part just seems excessive. If you want my personal opinion, I think the guy is just a cold-blooded monster. He likely had a million different reasons that he was able to justify in his own mind, none of which hold water when he looked at them from a logical perspective. Ultimately, though, none of these theories matter. The only thing that we know for sure is that Babis was in fact responsible for taking the life of his wife, regardless of his reasons. He was sentenced to life in prison plus 11 years for the crimes against Caroline's dog, though unfortunately his so-called life sentence only lasts around 20 years. He's expected to remain behind bars until he's in his 50s, at which point he'll be eligible for parole. In the aftermath of the crime and Babis' conviction, Caroline's family has been highly critical of the investigation and the allegations that Babis has made. Caroline's father in particular believes that there's much more to the story than Babis is letting on, and considering Babis has changed his version of events at least three times since his initial interrogation, there's a good chance that Caroline's father may be right. And we may never know just how deep this rabbit hole really goes. Thank you guys for tuning in to another episode of True Crime Stories. If you want to see more true crime documentaries like this, be sure to hit that like button and subscribe. If you'd like to help support the channel, the best way you can do that is simply by leaving a comment below, any comment at all. It helps out the channel a lot more than you may realize. If you want to help out financially, you can do that by clicking the blue join button below, or by picking up a True Crime Stories mug from Tynaz.com. But with that, my name is Tynaz, and I'll catch you guys in the next video.


Kia ora, tātou everyone. Nō mai haere mai, greetings to you all and welcome to this EHF Live session. How can New Zealand companies incorporate circular economy principles to become more sustainable? Now, we all know implementing circular economy principles with organisations cannot just help them meet sustainability goals but also create new pathways to deliver value to customers and other stakeholders. This session is going to focus on how circular economy innovation can prepare organisations for this era of clean tech without compromising on their bottom line in the long run. Now that's really key, like how do you bring the economic part of it into the bottom line, right? Firstly, Edmund Hillary Fellowship is a collective of over 500 entrepreneurs, scientists, storytellers, creatives and investor change makers who want to make it impact globally from Aotearoa, New Zealand. Now today you will hear from Sheba Sasala, an EHF Fellow who is an experienced entrepreneur and the founder of Renogy, a Singaporean innovation firm with the vision of transforming Asian cities into zero waste, zero pollution and net zero carbon urban spaces using principles of circular economies. Renogy builds new circular economy start-up businesses through their venture studio and investment model. So now Sheba is also the founder of Circular Cities Asia, which is a New Zealand-based platform promoting circular economy innovation in university campuses. Now Sheba will talk about 20 minutes and then we're going to move into some Q&A. So just think about that. What are some of the sort of questions that you might want to ask? It's kind of like, how do you do it? How do you go about doing this and maybe sort of think about why should you and what is the timing? How's the timing right? So just a reminder that we're recording at the session will be available afterwards and then maybe just stay muted so there's no background talk while Sheba is talking. And if you don't want to ask your questions because there's a small group, put your hand up, you can also put them in the chat box and I will ask them on your behalf. But otherwise, over to you, Sheba. Hi, thank you, MC. Hello, everyone. My name is Sheba Susala and Edmund Hillary. Fellow, good afternoon for audiences in New Zealand. I'm logging in from Singapore. I know Lisa is in the US, so probably good evening, Lisa. Thank you for joining everyone. So it's early morning in Singapore. Fine, bright day. So really looking forward to the session. Thank you for the opportunity. So I'm the founder of Renegi. Like MC said, I'm also privileged to be an Edmund Hillary fellow along with Todd and Danny here. And we're really looking to contribute and be part of the New Zealand economy, the New Zealand innovation ecosystem and make ourselves useful. So to speak to New Zealand. Right, so a trend is we are focused on circular economy innovation. We help organizations become more circular. We build new circular economy startups to sort of put our money where our mouth is and demonstrate how circular economy can be implemented in action as well. And today I just want to talk about how organizations in New Zealand can implement circular economy principles. Almost everyone agrees that it's a beautiful, elegant, desirable thing to do. But often I see that there could be some gaps in, hey, how do we go about doing it? What's the first step? What's the second step? What is the end goal we are trying to meet? How do we even know that we are circular, right? And I think this sort of process is what we are good at at Renegi and I want to share some thoughts on that. I have a few slides, like MC said, and then if there are any questions, I would love to take them as well. So I'll just share my presentation. So yes, like I said, we are Renegi, we are Asia's first innovation firm and venture studio focused on circular economy. I hope you can see my screen now. All right. So Asia's first innovation firm and venture studio focused on circular economy. We assist organizations in becoming more circular. But at our venture studio, we also build new startups by designing them and investing in them and all of them focus on making the world more circular as we know it. So what is a circular economy, right? And the different, many a time, and this happens even at the highest levels of government and private sector. Circular economy is almost equated with recycling and as circular economy practitioners, we draw a differentiation. So firstly, let's talk about a linear economy. What is a linear economy? So the linear design is the one that's most dominant in current product as well as economic design. It is also called as the take, make, use, dispose or take make waste model. We extract resources from the earth. We make products out of them by applying labor, energy, water and other resources capital also. We sell the product. We use them and in fact, over the decades, we all know the use cycle is coming. It's becoming smaller and smaller. People are using products for lesser and lesser time. And then we dump that product or good into the landfill. This is the take, make, use, waste model, right. This is very linear because everything that we are dumping into the landfill is depleting the environment and it's becoming looped back into production. The linear economy has in fact almost single-handedly contributed to a lot of resource as well as environmental problems that we have today. Climate change in one dimension but also environmental pollution, poor air quality, poor water quality in another dimension. An improvement over the linear economy is the recycling economy. We still dump stuff into the landfill except we sort of extend the use cycle. But the important thing is this, when we extend the use of the product under the sort of label of recycling, we're actually downgrading the use of the product. A classic example I give is from my childhood where the moment my shirts got slightly older, my mom would take them and use them as mobs at home, right. So she's extending the life of the shirt instead of dumping it into the landfill, but she's actually downgrading. She's taking a great shirt and using it for a very lower value use case. And what she's practicing is actually the recycling economy, right. The alternative that could save the world, that could save humankind, help us all save money, and usher in a new economic paradigm is what we call the circular economy. In the circular economy, nothing goes to the landfill in an idealised circular economy. Nothing goes to the landfill. The technical and biological nutrients in the product are separated beautifully. The technical nutrients go back into production cycles and the biological nutrients are safely returned to the earth, rejuvenating the soil. That is a circular economy. So more broadly what is it, what is a circular economy? It's an alternative design and development framework to produce goods and services that need significantly lower materials, water and energy over their lifetime. So we've super simplified it, demystified it. We've sort of put clear metrics right now over the years. The sort of knowledge about circular economy has evolved to this extent. It works for cities. It works for countries. It works for organisations as well. And today we're talking more in the organisation context. So it's an alternative design framework for organisations to help them produce products, services, solutions that need massively lower material, water and energy for print compared to their current baseline. And that is what a circular economy would be for the organisation in their context. There are a number of methodologies out there, right? And the circular economy itself is not a new concept. It's been around for decades. It's just in the last eight to ten years that it's gained a lot of traction in mainstream thinking as well. But one of the earliest proponents of the circular economy methodology were the cradle to cradle guys. They're known as the grandaddies of circular economy. There's a great book called cradle to cradle. Please look it up by it. It's a fascinating read. In fact, the first chapter of the book is called this book is not a tree because it's made out of plastic that can be infinitely upcycled. As many times as needed. So the first chapter itself says, hey, this book is not a tree. And through the book, we are demonstrating how the circular economy works. Right? So this is called the cradle to cradle approach. It's evolved into a certification. Now organisations can go and get the cradle to cradle platinum rating. Right? They have a five point framework which talks about water stewardship, keeping materials or the highest value of use, use of renewable energies, fair wages. So in that sense, it's a very comprehensive framework that also takes into account social aspects of the circular economy. So the cradle to cradle website is very detailed. Even laymen can go and take the courses. It's their free. I think if I remember correctly. So I'll urge all viewers to go and take the courses there. They're simple. They're easy to do. And you can also get a silver rating as a layman user. What's fantastic about the cradle to cradle website is they probably have the most extensive material health database in the world. So I think they've listed a few thousand materials along with health certificates to certify whether they're circular or not. So really, really amazing framework. The second methodology that's existed for a while is from the Product Life Institute, Professor Stahler and others. It's called the product life extension method. Approach rather, right? So in this methodology, basically you're designing production solutions that never failed at last forever. So you're designing for durability. You're designing to avoid obsolescence. Repair and replacement rather than dumping, right? So that's the product life extension methodology. It's quite academic in the way they articulate things. So interested people can go to the Product Life Institute website. I think it's based in Switzerland if I'm not wrong. And look up the extensive sort of case studies and research that they've done. The third methodology is also, again, it's a systems level sort of framework. It's called industrial ecology or metabolism approach. So practitioners of the industrial metabolism approach believe that, hey, the world is linear because we are unable to track the flow of nutrients in the system. The moment we track nutrients, we can actually close the loop and make them circular, right? Therefore, the industrial ecology approach focuses on how materials are metabolised through a system, right? In the organisational context that would mean how materials are used in a supply chain from cradle to grave, right? And in fact, make sure that if there's no grave anymore, bring it back to cradle. So this is called the industrial metabolism approach. All three approaches or a blend of them work and have been used by organisations. So this is sort of the high level introduction to circular economy. There are no answers there, but this is great. What the Ellen MacArthur Foundation did and again, I would say that this is probably the most comprehensive website out there that articulates circular economy principles, case studies and thought in a very accessible manner for layman and expert alike. So I would urge everyone to go and check out the Ellen MacArthur Foundation website. Again, they have a lot of courses, a lot of case studies. It's very informative. What the Ellen MacArthur Foundation did a few years ago is that they came up with these three very elegant principles that brought together all the other three methodologies we spoke about, the Cradle to Cradle, Oracle Life Extension, Industrial Metabolism and the other frameworks out there. They brought them all together and articulated three very, very simple principles for the circular economy. And they said, hey, organisations can become circular if they do these three things. Keep materials at their highest value of use. I spoke about my t-shirt instead of downgrading it and using it in a lower value of use to mop the floors. One could have repositioned the t-shirt into another high value use case. So I had to become more circular. So keep materials at their highest value of use. Design out waste and pollution. The concept of waste and pollution, ladies and gentlemen, exists only in human societies. Nature is perfectly circular. We have introduced waste and pollution into supply chains because of our design approaches. We can do the opposite as well. We can regenerate nature. Most of our anthropogenic activity, human activity depletes nature. How can we instead regenerate it? So if you do these three things, if organisations can focus on these three things, they're automatically circular. Now, after the energy, we came up with our own three pillar framework based on the Ellen MacArthur Foundation principles as well as all the other schools of thought. And we did this because we felt organisations and we ourselves internally needed a practical, implementable framework for circularity. So we came up with what we call the re-energy circular economy framework. Again, it has three pillars as well. Organisations can become circular, ladies and gentlemen, if they become performance-based. So performance and functionality emerges as the basis of economic transaction and not product. So you're changing the incentive structures. A great example is how Philips, back in the day when they still had their lighting division, they sold it now, what Philips did was they stopped selling bulbs and instead started selling lumens to their clients. And just by doing this, the hardware became Philips' responsibility. Earlier they would sell the bulb, the filament, the glass, the product, the full product and push it out of their factory and they were done. But under this new business model, Philips committed to selling lumens and now they sort of found that they were redesigning the bulb to make sure that they were designing for usability and for ease of replacement and repair. This is how change in the business model significantly changes incentive structures and can help organisations become circular. Don't sell products, become performance-based and sell performance instead. Many examples don't sell shampoo bottles, sell the shampoo instead. Do not sell washing machines, sell washes instead. So this framework can actually be applied to most products and solutions out there. Uber is a great example of demonstrating how not to sell cars but instead sell rides instead. So become performance-based and not sell only products or solutions. The second is organisations can become nutrient aware. We spoke about how one of the fundamental challenges is that we don't know how nutrients flow through the system. The beverage company, the cola company, the FMCG company are not bad guys. It's just that after the shampoo bottle, the cola bottle leaves the warehouse they don't know where the bottle is ending up. The moment come more nutrient aware and track how your nutrients are flowing through the supply chain, you can close the loop around it and become circular. So build traceability and become more nutrient aware of how nutrients are flowing through the supply chain. Just a little note here, in the circular economy world we define technical nutrients and biological nutrients. Technical nutrients are those that can be infinitely upcycled. Biological nutrients are those that can be returned to the biosphere and rejuvenate soil. So that's what we mean by nutrients here. So how can organisations become circular? Become nutrient aware. The third, become nature inspired. I've already mentioned this. There is no waste in nature. The concept of waste exists only in human societies.  Organisations can look at how nature designs products and services and get inspired and mimic that approach and engineering principles. A whole engineering discipline has evolved along these lines biomimically, the biomimically institute in the US is the leader in this sort of approach. Janine is an awesome person and she's written this fantastic book called Biomimically 3.8. And the 3.8 refers to 3.8 billion years of Earth's existence and how organisations and cities and countries can just learn from and design principles. Many case studies, let's take the spider for example. The spider weaves a web made up of material that is between 10 to 25 times stronger on a pound for pound basis than even steel wire. But the spider does it using just biological reaction under atmospheric conditions. Whereas to produce weaker steel wire, we mine iron ore, mine coal, heat it to 600 degree centigrade to force that steel wire that is still weaker than the spider web that weaves it under atmospheric conditions. It's just incredible scientists are now studying how spiders, what kind of enzymes spider synthesise and see how they can actually replicate that engineering approach. Nature inspired ladies and gentlemen, I can give you many more examples and case studies. Organisations can become circular if they learn from nature and get inspired from nature. So this is the Renegi Innovation Principle. So how do you go circular? You can do the accreditation and standard route. Just like ESG, you could get ESG accredited similarly. You can get circular economy accreditations and meet standards. Like I said, there's the C2C certification cradle to cradle. But then there are also a couple of new ISO standards that organisations could use. And comply with it to become circular. What I would recommend, look at your products and supply chains and completely re-imagine and redesign them. So start with the goal of significant reduction in materials, energy and water in your supply chains in a defined time frame and target zero ways to landfill for your organisation throughout the lifecycle. The moment you set these as guiding principles, automatically you sort of usher in a completely new thinking around how you design products. So this to me is a great starting point beyond the accreditation and standards. Those are awesome. But to make a real lasting impact, this is your opportunity to redesign everything. Couple of case studies, Philips is one of the leaders of circular economy thinking. Very, very hardcore engineering company.  You can look up their detail case study on the Ellen MacArthur Foundation website. They've introduced equipment buyback and trade-ins for almost all their medical equipment and devices. They've gone with functionality-based business models, which I call performance-based. They call them functionality-based business models. They even have a refurbished equipment business that sells, and the equipment is priced lower than new equipment, right? And this is great for budget customers. It opens up a new segment for Philips, but it also allows them to ensure that products are kept in use. So Philips has done this successfully. There are some data points already that say Philips has saved money as well. I'm still sort of waiting more robust data, but for sure, some radical innovation there in terms of how even established engineering, manufacturing-driven organisations can become more circular. We've just started working with this organisation recently. It's a startup company in Portugal, Reflont. What they do is they work with a fashion industry and help them unlock value from the resale market. So what they do is they connect customers who've sold their pre-loved clothes. They connect them to brands and help them earn points with the brands and redeem those points against new purchases. So what Reflont is doing is, Reflont is creating new economic incentives and new business model out of the resale platform. Most importantly, they're allowing big fashion brands to benefit from resale by bringing back the customer and locking them in. So this is an example of a new startup that's forced a new business model and the Philips example is a great example of a legacy, a large manufacturing organisation that has pivoted and introduced and embedded circularity in all their thinking and approaches. So I'll stop here. I took longer than I thought I would, but happy to take questions and really excited about the possibility of working with New Zealand organisations with the goal of becoming more circular. Thank you. Thank you for this opportunity. I think Shiva, that was awesome. Does anyone have any general reflections or questions just offhand or experiences of your own with some different circular economy models or examples or case studies that they'd like to share? Shiva, wondering with your other organisations working with cities, what are you seeing kind of trends and patterns and interesting sort of examples at the cities level? Thanks, Todd. So at the urban scale, most interventions seem to be around landfill management and cities saying, hey, how can we actually... There's no space to dump stuff anymore. That's the reality of the world. In fact, I work with policy makers and I won't name the countries but even in emerging economies there are two issues that sort of give them sleepless nights and actually pursuing elections as well. It's not talk around sustainability or climate change. It's two things. One, hey, how do we convince our voters that we are managing the landfill situation well? The second is air quality and traffic. These are the two big issues that policy makers and politicians in cities are super worried about, Todd, even in emerging countries where I have most experience in. And they're interested in circular economy because they see that as a potential pathway to solve these problems. So solid waste especially is a huge issue, both developed economy as well as emerging markets. We've simply run out of space to dump our stuff. We've gotten away for the last two, three decades by moving landfills from one place to another but that is not viable anymore. So the best interventions have happened around landfill management and recovering material from landfills to urban mining, Todd, and that is where we've seen more success in the Philippines, in Indonesia and India as well. And I think those models will scale. The other is around use of materials. A lot of cities have actually taken steps to ban thin film single use plastics for packaging. The problem is that they haven't sort of recommended alternatives to use and that is a problem. But at least they've taken this first stick approach of banning hoping that the private sector and people will respond and innovate. So that seems to be the two big areas of innovation so far. But yes, lots more work needed to do around procurement as well. We were discussing with a policymaker recently in India about how government procurement can become more circular when they're sourcing for concrete, when they're sourcing for infrastructure and so on, how they can actually embed circularity as a criteria. That could be a real game changer as well. It's interesting you brought up concrete because there's a new start-up that came through Creative HQ that actually does that now in New Zealand. Re-circuling for concrete, which is cool because a lot of pieces that are missing that you've run out of materials-wise in New Zealand for years. Danika will go to you and then I've got a question from Ainsley that hit to Lee. Daniel Mute. I bet people wish that that button existed for me in real life. I've got a question. So we've been having some correspondence on Instagram, on the odd gram. We've been hitting up each other's DMs. So you do know what this new idea, business idea thing of mine is that I haven't launched yet? I think HF know anyway, but I've been interested from the very beginning to make it as circular as possible right down to the sanitary dispensers, which is not part of the business model, but it's something that I want to... My original idea was a dispenser in toilets and a sanitary bin that had the human waste on one side essentially and the packaging on the other so that we could start to do things. And everybody around me keeps saying no, don't do that. Just start with the minimum viable product and what you're doing is you're selling to businesses and government that you'll take care of their periods. Like they're not going to care. The customers aren't really going to care about the circularity of it.  So what's your advice for getting started on it in terms of, you know, looking at this would add a whole extra lot of stuff. Not just for me, but for anybody else as well. When launching, is it something that you say start building in from the beginning or is it a do an MVP and then build into it later and just try and sleep or drink your guilt away? And actually, and just before you answer that, Shiva, because that actually dovetails exactly into the question that Ainsley actually asked. So it's how do we change consumer behaviour so that we can support organisations that are following circular economy principles? So that's kind of, I feel what Danny, you're going in for there is that, you know, like, because you need the almost the corporate to change is such that the but then the consumer that has to almost be a pool. Is it a push or a pool effect and what are we trying to get? How do we make this happen? Great question, Danny. Thanks for that. So I'll sort of my responses at two levels and the first level is, hey, how to design a perfect circular economy product or business. And the second is, how do we design it given as startups the extreme scarce environments we operate in and build confidence gradually. So one is innovation building using lean principles and a phased approach and the first is an idealised circular economy situation. So just to sort of summarise my understanding of what you're doing and for the benefit of the viewers as well. You're selling period products and making them accessible at points of use. And there are three things when it comes to sanitary products.  Right now it's super packed in plastic and shipped across oceans. The first level of circularity in your business model is you're saying, hey, we don't need the packaging anymore. We'll dispense using reusable sort of infrastructure at the point of use. So that's the first level of circularity removed. You've designed out the linearity there because there's no real replacement to single use plastic in the packaging at this point given current technology. So you... Well, there is. There actually is there is for the wrapping around and the pad and that sort of stuff, but the reason I'm not pushing those products is because they just end up in a sanitary bin that gets burned or thingied anyway. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, you're just adding to the landfill, I guess.  The analogy I draw is I've seen a business in Indonesia they do amazing work. They basically go from household to household and dispense FMCG products like shampoos and soaps at the point of use so they're not selling shampoo bottles. They in fact work with brands to fill them in carts and they take the carts to households on demand. Right, so house now bring out their containers take the shampoo and go back in. So it's cheaper because now they're not households are not paying for the entire bottle and sort of so in that sense, I see your business as similar.  The second place to innovate for you would be the materials itself. I think a lot of them are linear. Significant amount of single use plastic in the materials you're using for the products. So that's the second area of innovation. The third is if you cannot do that or even if you do that, manage to do that to ensure that these don't end up in the landfill. Right, that would if you also do BNC it would be a perfectly circular business. And I think that is the desired sort of end state. That said, I would still request you to do focus on one of these areas which already have chosen to do which is the delivery mechanism and demonstrate that the success of that before sort of venturing into circularity in BNC simply because that's how investors understand sort of product development. That's how they prefer releasing funding and that's how customers also like to accept incremental change more than destructive. So given these three parameters, I would still probably request you to do one thing at a time and go the MVP route. I don't know if I responded to that question well but I would say that you've explained it in a way you've explained it for the investors and for the end consumers in a way that other people haven't, other people it's been more about protecting myself, you know, like don't waste your money, don't waste your time and I'm like, I don't care about money, I don't care about time. So having it reframed this way, I'm like, oh you know now I can understand why I should do it that way. Okay, thank you. Thank you Danny, thanks for the question. Nice. Any other questions? Yeah, Shiva, how much have you been engaged with regenerative agriculture in the sense that this is sort of moving that whole key sector in the direction of circularity what are you seeing or how much have you been involved there? So most of the work we do is in food system start and in fact I would say, I'll stick my neck out and say this year and the next year soil health is going to be the flavor of the season for investors for people like us, I mean we are committed long term to the cause so regardless of funding ups and downs we will fight the good fight anyway for the next, I don't know how many decades but just from an investor perspective 2023-2024 seems to be the zeitgeist seems to be soil health right now so I think I see a tremendous influx of capital so far our involvement has been in terms of hey what can we add back to the soil to rejuvenate it right but we are increasingly discovering new models of carbon farming that actually could solve the climate contribute significantly to the solution to addressing climate change as well we have measured very depleted soils in countries like India and if you just work on the carbon content in them and bring them up to levels that are in tropical forests for example not only are you sequestering a tremendous amount of carbon back into the soil removing it from the atmosphere you are actually making the soil so much more fertile and conducive to multi-cropping again right with minimal use of fertilizer and so on so very very interested in the topic I think it's going to be key to long term sustenance of food production for we are already 8 billion but let's say for 9 9.5 billion people the I'll stick my neck out and say Todd the only way to produce enough food for 9.5 billion people in the longer and sustainably is to work on soil everything else we are doing controlled environment farming cultivated meat everything else is an interim solution that will help us bias time to rejuvenate the soil and regenerate it so that's how we are looking at it we have a couple of exciting ideas we are working on our energy for soil health as well great I can see we will have to have an offline conversation soon on this because I'm working with some other fellows regenerative funds for smallholder farmers etc so look forward to talking perfect so then make sure you then also Lupin you've got Mike Tatoko who's in this space you've got Josh I can't remember Josh as soon but he actually does soil health from the US you've got Aaron Clapton and there's a few others in there as well there's quite a few so you can have a good little convening on that subject now Lisa you've been patiently waiting you have a question I had two hi Sheba how are you thank you for that of course so I had two questions I'm not sure if they tie into anyone else that has questions but I'll put them out there and then you can organize them however is best for you but so one is particularly on consumer behavior because circular economy is still a new concept and unfamiliar to a lot of people I'm thinking in some cases particularly for example for Uber and Philips where they are going to have to give up the convenience of having a car readily available and light bulbs readily available at home how can we how can we combat that and then also I'm very curious if you're allowed to share the cities and countries that you mentioned are transforming landfills into a more circular way what exactly are they doing and how are they doing it awesome thank you for the questions Lisa so consumer behavior is the toughest bit again if a significant chunk of consumers start demanding circular products so much easier for businesses to justify to their shareholders and to investors the imperative of going circular so consumer behavior is key what we've realized is that is the need for simplification when it comes to consumers so we've just launched a pet food product Lisa you know about it it's called conscious creatures it's a dog food made out of insects so we've sort of started working on it last year it's finally hitting the market now after multiple trials we started off calling it a circular pet food product and no one understood it they thought it was some kind of an ingredient or engineering thing and it was actually lousy on our side to actually project it we were testing it out and finally after multiple iterations we are now calling it the most eco friendly pet food on the planet so the moment we say that we can actually see our customers eyes light up and they actually know what we mean now some of them actually grill us on why we are most eco friendly some of us some of them take it at face value but I think for us it's reinstated the importance of making messages palatable and making messages friendly to the right segments customers may or may not be interested in learning about the circular economy but they want to be part of a movement and contribute to a movement that you know does good for the planet and vote with their wallet so I think brands need to ultra simplify language and give it to them in a language they understand there'll be a segment of consumers who are much more interested than your average consumer they'll grill you so have enough information on your websites on your product brochures to satisfy their questions so greenwashing is a big problem right so you'll have to ensure that you're authentic so be authentic have a lot of information to answer all the questions but most important I think to shift consumer behaviour is they don't have time too much time to analyse when they're actually making the purchase decision give their wallets I think that is what we are seeing as sort of giving us traction so I would probably propose that is there a convenience loss for consumers and businesses offer performance rather than product Philips did the lighting pretty well in the sense that they guarantee to their customers 100% availability of lumens on demand and much more easier to do in a B2B context because their customers were commercial buildings so it's easier to say office buildings it's easier to predict how people would use the space and so on so you can be prepared and you could schedule maintenance etc of hours Uber is a much more difficult example because consumer behaviour is very stochastic very random so you don't know when the next guy is asking for a cab where he may have to wait for 20 minutes to find a cab and instead if he had a car he would have driven but ultimately I think the even in the US there's clear statistics that pre-COVID I don't know what happened after COVID we'll have to relook at the numbers Lisa but even in the US millennial consumers are opting not to buy cars because in cities opting not to buy cars because they now have access to ride sharing so that is a win for circularity so it means that they are trading off a little bit of convenience for the freedom of not being burdened with mortgage payments and EMI is on the car and having an asset that's parked in your garage for 70% of the time so definitely I think consumers have demonstrated the presence so that's I hope that answers one A and one B the second question was on cities and how they're working on circularity so most of the activity at least that's reported has been from cities in the Philippines and in India you may not feel it when you go to the cities but I can definitely tell you that the quantum of the volume of material dumped into the landfill or at least recovered from the landfill is significantly come down rather the recovery rates have gone up so I can tell you that in Indian cities the recovery of solid waste fractions from landfills and from households from businesses is very very sophisticated there are informal networks that work at the grass root level they separate the metals, plastics, the plastic cans, I know a business that just collects buttons from landfills and recycles just the buttons from clothes right so it's incredibly sophisticated it's not as organized as it is let's say in European cities or American cities but their informal networks it's evolved in a very different way and these guys are amazing with in the larger cities at least really good with recovering and reusing most solid waste fractions wet waste remains a huge problem there's no real waste because it has to be localized very instant so insect farming composting biogas are covered and reused in fact I'll share with you it's almost impossible to find copper dumped in landfills in Indian cities because it's all recovered and put it back into production right so that's how sophisticated it's become that's amazing to hear that actually like it's great to hear it but of such a large country and population that's just amazing to grasp shows that we should be able to do it in smaller countries with smaller populations other questions has she even dropped off has everyone just noticed that yeah it looks like he just dropped off he was choppy for a minute that was just me or for everybody here he comes you're back hey buddy you're on mute yeah sorry I don't know when I got bumped off at the end it was at the end of your talk you'd already finished yeah but it was a bit choppy near the end of it but I think we've kind of got the gist of it awesome thank you sorry for that so were there any other questions or thoughts there otherwise we're coming up to the end of our hour and she's been amazing lots of different avenues to go down and I feel there can be more conversations to hand have with our fellows going forward particularly as you will come into New Zealand and I can see already connections happening and with sore health yep Todd go for it oh just one other thought Shiva have you had much thought or reflection on the new EHF mission studio and how what is the maybe the ripest entry point for circular economy or the things you're looking at absolutely I did in fact I've participated in the other climate conversations I think food systems are very very ripe for circularity especially New Zealand it is a sector under threat because of developments so New Zealand is a significant producer of conventional and food produced using conventional methods and there's a wave of disruption that's going to hit us in New Zealand so I think that is an immediate sector where I think circularity can be useful not just for businesses to unlock value and because the right thing to do but also because they need to prepare for the imminent threat that's coming you know we have a lot of dairy meat sectors and I think it's very very they are going to get disrupted so it's imperative for them and I think they are they could use circularity to sort of come up to speed with the modern methods of producing the same I think end consumer services a lot of e-commerce e-commerce et cetera can happen Todd it's a small economy a lot of goods are imported so I seen that import duties can be expensive so goods and services and products are more expensive in New Zealand than elsewhere just because we have to import everything and then the economy is small more reason I think that we should have a strong repair we use refurbish culture and opportunities for businesses to sell you know products and goods to each other equipment and input goods to each other so I think there's a lot of opportunity for new re-commerce platforms damage these I think are immediate so agriculture food systems and and commerce among organizations to promote industry use repair economy I think these are two very immediate opportunities that'll actually have a immediate bottom line impact as well Todd and also like when you have the floods like we have where it has taken out you know almost 100% of New Zealand's either tomato or corn area that was for watis that they put into frozen packs or into their canned goods you know so now what are they going to do import or buy somewhere else yeah yeah no that's great love it brilliant well thank you Shema for sharing and thank you for the energy and and making more connections and making it happen and getting on and convening so thank you again and thank you everyone else for turning up and good questions and hopefully see you at some of the other sessions that are coming up thank you to everyone thank you for the opportunity thanks all for joining really appreciate it


Hi, folks, and welcome to organizing teams for GitOps and cloud native deployments. Today I want to share with y'all some of the things we've learned helping teams adopt GitOps for cloud native, and some of it's based on our own research, and some of it's based on what we've observed with teams directly. My name is Sundip, and I've been with Google Cloud for almost seven years from most part. I've had several different roles and titles over that time, but ultimately it's revolved around helping teams adopt and optimize for cloud in some form or fashion. You can always find me at Circus Monkey, that's CRCS, MNKY on Twitter, if you've got questions about GitOps, DevOps, or anything else that comes to mind. Now there's quite a lot I want to cover with y'all today, so we're going to move through it pretty quickly. First off, I want to share some of what we've learned through our own DevOps research, and then I want to lay out some basics around some of the challenges and assumptions that we're going to make and use throughout the rest of the presentation. Then we're going to jump into different cloud native tenancy models and some of the associated workflows. Next I want to talk about version strategies as it relates to different deployment environments that we should cover how teams collaborate together, particularly around upstream dependencies. And finally I want to talk about guardrails and preventing declarative and imperative operations from breaking things in prod. So let's kick things off with DevOps research. Dora or DevOps research and assessment is the largest and longest running research project of its kind. Dora's goal is to provide an independent and tool agnostic view into the practices and capabilities that drive software delivery performance. Rigorous statistical methods are used to present data-driven insights and the most effective, efficient ways to develop and deliver technology. Ultimately our goal with Dora is to use what we learned to help teams improve their own software delivery performance. But how do we measure that software delivery performance? Well in our research program we have found a valid and reliable way to do just this. There are two metrics representing speed and two metrics representing stability. For the speed metrics we have deployment frequency which is how often you deploy and we also have your lead time for changes. And that's basically measuring the time from a commit all the way to that commit being deployed into prod. And then on the stability front we have change fail rate which essentially is how many changes do you ship that have failures within them and then the time to restore which ultimately measures how long does it take for you to remediate a broken problem in production. Now these four metrics can be applied to any kind of software delivery whether it's web or mobile, firmware, what have you. And using these metrics we can actually bucket teams into specific categories into low, medium, high and elite software delivery performing teams. But these are just trailing indicators of software delivery performance. And that's where the leading indicators come in. Now we don't have time to go through all of the analysis from Dora but we know that there are specific leading indicators that drive software delivery performance and have positive impact. For the purposes of this slide I could only include a subset and I tried to capture best where it get up sort of fits. You know the capabilities listed up here on the left all contribute to improvements in either culture or continuous delivery.  And they also have the most positive impact on the stuff that drags teams down the toil of rework and deployment plane which ultimately leads to burnout. Now something that can be surprising when we talk about all of this stuff from Dora and from the DevOps research is that it's going to slow things down, right? If we get better at the process we get better at the approach we will lose velocity. And actually what we found in the research is that it's actually the opposite. As teams have gotten better and more stable they're actually able to increase their velocity. And it actually all comes back to a concept from lean manufacturing which is this idea of working in small batches.  And it's easier to roll back a small change and it's ultimately easier to operate again high velocity and with a high degree of stability. Now Dora applies predictive analyses to identify specific capabilities that are associated with high performing teams, right? That's what we've learned from all this research and that's how we see this reflected in terms of the stability going up and the velocity going up as well. Now that's just a little bit about DevOps and it's important because I think what we've learned ultimately from Dora, one of the big takeaways for us is that it's not about the tools, it's about the process and the people involved. And that's what really drives the stability and the velocity improvements. So now before we get further in I want to lay out some of the ground rules starting with some of the challenges that we're going to see and giving you some baseline assumptions that we'll work with throughout the rest of the talk. Now the overarching challenge for cloud native teams, those are relatively simple and straightforward. They usually amount to having a lot of individual teams pushing code to a lot of deployments or deployment environments and those deployment environments are spread across many or multiple regions. It's a simplistic view ultimately that encompasses quite a bit of complexity. So let's try to break it down starting with some foundations and some assumptions. So why do teams even want get-ups? Well it's because they want to get out of the imperative operations business. These sorts of approaches are hard to scale, hard to fix and hard to roll back especially in case there is a problem. So we don't want to do this approach anymore. So we adopt a get-ups approach that gives us some very specific properties namely declarative. It's a system that's a system managed by get-ups must have its desired state expressed in a declarative fashion. This also makes our resulting infrastructure applications versioned and immutable because desired state is stored in a way that enforces immutability and versioning retains a history of what happened up to that point. And with get-ups we want to be able to pull software and updates automatically. So we want to be able to pull those in from the cluster and pull them in from those repos as those changes are committed and made and we want those changes to be continuously reconciled for any protection against drift. So if in case there is an imperative operation against a particular cluster if against a resource that's coming from a get repo we know that that imperative operation will actually get overwritten on the next reconciliation loop. So these are the principles that we get by adopting a get-up style approach. So now with get-ups out of the way I want to talk about some of the other assumptions that I want to make up front. So for our notion around kind of many teams we're going to categorize them into some pretty coarse buckets you know forgive me. We have application teams, operation teams and platform teams. Now for infrastructure we'll be assuming Kubernetes as your cloud native deployment which makes sense and some get-ups tooling. We don't need to be specific about which get-ups tooling whether it's Argo CD, Flux or KidFixink. Just know that most of what we're going to talk about involves one of these sort of popular get-ups tools. And then for deployment regions we base that on where our clusters are going to be physically located whether that's in a private data center in a colo facility or in a cloud region or cloud data center. And finally for deployment environments we have the standard prod, staging, QA and dev. Now before we move on I want to talk quickly about teams and responsibilities because I know I had those kind of coarse buckets but I want to make sure we clear on who is responsible for what in this side of a setup. So starting with application developers they're of course responsible for all things related to application right building, packaging, testing, etc. Well then we have app operators they're responsible for deployment manifests and making sure the app or service is up and running. And then finally we have the platform admins. They cover the infrastructure bits not necessarily the compute layer of Kubernetes but they may cover the just one level up from Kubernetes so things like RBAC quotas, resource limits, all that sorts of work right the kind of initial infrastructure that has to get laid down on Kubernetes before application teams can run and scale. Now again these are coarse and imperfect kind of categorizations but in my experience most organizations can model their way into something that approximates this division of responsibility. Alright so now let's go through a couple of different tenancy models and some associated workflows. Tenancy in Kubernetes comes down to ownership and access. If your team has their run of the entire cluster it's probably a single tenant setup and having access to that whole cluster though doesn't necessarily mean you'll be given cluster admin privileges it just means that you can deploy essentially willy-nilly and you have access to the whole thing and ultimately the reason you probably have a single tenant setup is because you have some sort of particular scaling or hardware need like high performance storage or attached GPUs. If your team gets a namespace as their only playground then you're probably living in a multi-tenant world and this tends to be the case for the long tail of application teams deploying to Kubernetes environments. Now regardless of which approach single tenant or multi-tenant the platform team still has a role to play so let's explore where they fit into this equation as well. Now every organization employs different collaborative approaches and cloud native deployments are no different. Ops teams may have shared repos with platform teams or they may have distinct repos. In the case on the left the get up setup process is simple but the organizational process may be more challenging because there's more coordination involved if two teams are sharing the same repo. Now on the left well well sorry well on the right you've kind of flipped that problem on its head and you've made the get up setup more complex with distinct repos but the organizational setup is easier right these teams don't really have to communicate and they'll just push their own objects to their repos and their repos will get pulled into those clusters. Now ultimately as long as teams aren't stepping on each other this setup is all good. Multi-tenant approaches essentially look very similar right the only difference here is the scale and complexity of the repo management. In a shared repo approach this may have to be accomplished via things like PR reviews on protected branches or if you have distinct repos where platform and ops teams are completely separated. Now this simplifies most of the day-to-day get management but it does make the get-ups configuration much much more complicated with this distinct repo approach. The get-ups tools that are out today have different ways of supporting this like Argo CDs application or app of apps model. So there are different approaches out there that's one with Argo with config sync there are other repo and distinct sort of root repo and separate shared repo options as well but ultimately you're putting the complexity back onto the get-ups tooling and you're simplifying the work on the organization. So let's take a look at an example workflow where application operations and platform teams all have separate repos but they are effectively able to collaborate without stepping on each other. Now it starts with the dev team writing code and their applications and building those artifacts and then those artifacts are stored in some sort of artifact repository then ops teams start with a base config and build their specific manifests referencing those artifacts that the application team built those artifacts sorry those manifests are then hydrated into actual config and stored in a deployment environment repo usually specified by a branch and then that config is continuously delivered to kubernetes so they're just a distinct a distinct step between their sort of templated configuration and their hydrated configuration. Now the platform team writes the infrastructure and policy manifests and pushes those directly to kubernetes or through some tooling those are intended to prevent imperative or runtime issues like quota or resource limit violations so that's one kind of example workflow this is not a again a one size fits all and you'll hear me say that many times throughout but it's one example of how these three teams can sort of coordinate and collaborate together. Now if we build upon that example we need to talk through some additional considerations as well so for starters what if config and infrastructure right that the ops and the platform teams what if they had a shared repo between those two teams well how do those teams need to work together is the repo owned by the platform team or is it owned by the ops team are there weird permissions or protected branches that we have to worry about if it's owned by platform can ops just push whatever commits they want or in like the shared model is there a pr based approval process for things on a particular branch like prod maybe or does ops have total control there as well now when we talk about cluster objects this is where you know what if ops teams and platform teams need to actually collaborate on things like quotas or namespace configurations well in a shared repo PRs could be used for that sort of work but with distinct repos there may be other approaches like for example the ops team can make PRs against the platform teams repo as it relates to again things like quotas, namespaces, resource limits but the platform team should use policies as a means of ensuring ops doesn't deploy weird things or break things in prod so the the collaboration is very different right one's a PR based approach one is sort of a policy based approach does really come back to how your teams view the division of responsibility and how they want to divide that work now there's also the option of you know maybe there's a an approval process at continuous delivery time before objects get pushed to kubernetes and maybe that's done by the platform team maybe it's only particular to maybe prod but not the other deployment environments like dev and qa and staging right because we want to stay out of people's way as much as possible and let them work quickly now these are all the sorts of things that need to be understood and again it's not a one-size-fits-all every organization is different in its own ways and everyone views the division of responsibility and the ownership in different ways so instead of trying to figure this out with tools which is not going to work don't let the tools drive this process this should be decided and documented by platforms and ops teams together right they should be collaborating on what the process is going to look like before they even get to the tools because the tools can be made to do whatever you need and they can follow whatever process you've got but if there's no clear indication of ownership or permission or responsibility then you're left kind of wondering how we're going to fix and understand all of this now versioning is the next topic versioning is relatively straightforward but there are a couple of considerations to remember so now this is not hard and fast guidance that's 100 correct by no means but for many organizations and their teams a branch per non-production environment that model tends to work well and provides a pretty clear process and lineage for GitOps deployments so that means for dev qa staging we use branches within our Git repos to define what gets delivered to kubernetes now this example yaml on the bottom half of the screen is from an argocd application manifest where we're specifying the target revision to come from the staging branch of this repo of course the other GitOps tools out there like flux and config support similar approaches i just wanted to put up one example here now for releasing to prod we move away from the head of any particular branch to something a little bit safer the safest approach always the safest approach is to use a commit hash hashes are immutable and give us a very specific commit to pin against but as teams and applications grow this can be challenging to maintain especially as teams have different release velocities and the number of applications sort of explodes over time so instead of trying to update a whole bunch of GitOps controller crd's with different commit hashes all the time we could take a slightly different approach and use tags tags are the next best option from using a commit hash their only downside is that they are immutable so we're back to having good process and hygiene around git be really really important to help keep this from becoming a problem and from get to keep it from getting abused now regardless of whether you deploy to prod via commit hash or tag you want to employ some good basic principles and practices first and foremost those crs that specify repo hashes or tags those should be deployed in a declarative manner and not using any imperative approaches like CLIs or some other you know imperative other approach out there then you'll want to build out some sort of distinct delivery process outside of your application pipelines to deliver these updated CRs that specify new you know branch names or new commit hashes or new tag names and that deployed process should match what your organization wants whether they want to do kind of a blue green deployment and switch 100% of the traffic over or they want to do like a canary style process where you know small percentages of traffic are shifted over to newer versions of the application that's really getting back to what your teams want as that sort of outcome and finally you want to have a documented approval process whether with via human or via automation to orchestrate a safe rollout but everyone should be able to say how is this deployment going to get orchestrated okay it's via automation that means the automation is going to check for health checks and readiness checks before continuing to progress further into the deployment or is there a human who makes that decision and says we're going to deploy 20% I'm going to check the numbers and then I'm going to deploy up to 50% and so on and so forth but it should be written down and transparent to every application team so they know how that deployment process to prod works now another way that dev ops and platform teams can collaborate is via an upstream dependency process now this is often done using things like helm charts so in this section I wanted to quickly mention another approach we're not going to spend a ton of time on it because we're flying pretty quickly through all this but I want to make sure y'all are aware of what other options are out there especially ones that match the getups model much more closely and that approach is called kept we don't have time for a full on kept tutorial or walkthrough but I'd recommend y'all take a look at kept.dev I like to think of kept as basically another way to use package management semantics but with bundles of kubernetes config that's it now one example that often comes to mind when we talk about upstream dependencies is this idea of having approved software packages that can be used by application teams so you could think of things like you know Redis or MongoDB right maybe the platform team or the security team has approved using Redis but they also have done it with very specific configuration details so they don't want anyone just grabbing the Redis image and just deploying it on their own they want to have kind of a carefully controlled Redis artifact and Redis configuration that gets deployed so how do those platform teams then share that with their application teams or their ops teams so this package management approach is pretty helpful because they can actually one pull that packaging in for that bundled config of you know Redis configuration but it also provides the opportunity for them to update that as well so as the platform team updates that configuration or revs that version of the Redis deployment the application teams and the ops teams can pick up that update again using regular old you know package management style semantics so that's why I like this approach and it's worth looking into now the last topic I want to talk about as it relates to teams and GitOps and cloud native is around guardrails and guarding against danger I'll be using some key terms as we talk about this in the next section so I want to quickly define them up front now first is policies policies are rules that tell us how we can configure our resource pretty straightforward when you're using Kubernetes policies can specify things like what labels are allowed on a pod or requiring you know images to have specific tags that sort of thing now policy management is the mechanism that helps us with the ins and outs of a policy so think of this as the framework the runtime helping us manage or pull in external data packaging testing that kind of stuff and the last part is policy enforcement and it really refers to the actions that will be taken and the scope of those actions so again in the context of kubernetes the actions will be things like allowing or denying admission to the cluster and the scope will cover types of objects like do I want to focus this policy on pods or services or secrets or config maps etc and which namespaces I should enforce that scope and that policy on as well now policies are packaged as a set of templates and constraints and the reason we do that is because the template allows us to have a rule and then the constraint allows us to enforce that rule in different ways or in different scenarios getting us the ability to really really target and narrow the scope of how we want that enforcement to happen the policy management aspect comes from open policy agent right that's a really broad and popular framework for for managing policy bits and the policy enforcement aspect comes from a sub project of open policy agent called gatekeeper gatekeeper essentially packages up opa open policy agent and delivers it as a custom kubernetes admission controller so it's there to allow or deny admission to the cluster based on whether you violate a policy or not now where gatekeeper sort of sits is inside of kubernetes obviously so as an admission controller what happens is any incoming method whether it's kubectl github's controller or api clients as they submit new objects to the kubernetes api the kubernetes api with this new admission controller in the form of gatekeeper checks with gatekeeper it says this object wants to enter the cluster how do we decide what to do with this object and then it either provides uh it gets that requested and it provides a yes response or a no response and it's just that simple when the enforcement happens right gatekeeper again reviews the incoming object compares it to the all the policies that are there it checks for the namespace scope the object type scope and again the policy rule and whether that policy is just there for auditing purposes or whether it's there to deny entry altogether and then it makes the decision and it hands it back to the kubernetes api and the kubernetes api then rejects admission or allows admission but more importantly crucially the way this works out of the box today is it only happens at deploy time it's not happening at any other point in the process so as an example if an ops team built an object that violated policy and that policy made its way through let's say i'm sorry that that object made its way through all the way to prod the only time they would be notified was when the object was deployed to prod and not when they built it which means there's a gap and there's a space of time there where the enforcement wasn't happening and the team that was working on it is probably out of the loop on what that change was even about or the platform team has to go and figure out which team submitted this this config object that violates our policy and they have to go kind of trace back the lineage which can be done but it takes work and again it slows down our release process so one of the things we talk a lot about indora is this idea of shifting left on security and so when we extend that idea to policy enforcement we want to shift policy enforcement to the left so we want that to happen much earlier in the development and the debugging process so that means when commits are pushed we can have enforcement happen right there so as you push a commit there's a test that gets kicked off that test comes back and says hey this is actually going to violate a production policy you have to go fix this i can't pass the build whether it's your application whether it's you know a deployment object for kubernetes i can't pass the build until you fix this because it's going to violate a policy and you can have that same approach work on a pr review as well so when a pr comes in the pr is automatically tested and says okay this object or this application is going to violate a production policy and you do that by having the infrastructure team or the platform team write those policies those policies are available for all teams to see and they're able to pull them in so they get the latest and greatest every time they do a commit or do a pr they get the latest and greatest policy library they're able to run their configure run their change against that policy library and find out right then and there if they're going to violate a policy well before they get to prod and if you go back to the example workflow i had earlier if we take a look at that when we talk about enforcing some of these guardrails there are three main spots we want to do it right i just mentioned one where we talk about commits and prs that's at the continuous integration phase we should also have another policy evaluation or enforcement element at delivery time just in case to catch any last minute things that might have bypassed an approach or come in through a different way and then finally we want to stick with the standard opa gatekeeper approach which is to run that at the kubernetes cluster basically as a bouncer for the front door so anybody that's going to violate policy through an imperative operation or some other api client also gets blocked right at the kubernetes door as well now we covered a lot of ground but there's one thing i want you to take away from all this the most important takeaway through the whole thing is that this is not a one size fits all approach right doing get ops for cloud native with teams it is a human and a process problem right it doesn't there is no one approach that works for every single team it doesn't scale to every single organization instead you want to take a very deeply collaborative approach and work with your teams early and often on documenting process and understanding and that documentation could cover things like what is each team's role and responsibility and be specific if it's down to things like hey this team only writes pod and service manifests or deployment manifests great if this other team is only responsible for config you know config map or secrets perfect what we want to have is a clear idea for everybody in all these teams everybody in the organization is if i need to figure out which team is responsible for which aspect of our application deployment who do i go talk to and once you have that process understood then you can design the tools to fit the approach you're trying to use to deploy applications thank you all so much for your time today i hope this was informative and beneficial as always feel free to hit me up on twitter if you need to that's at crcs mnky at sarcas monkey on twitter thanks