In a deployed environment where communication with loved ones at home is at times nearly impossible, chaplains play a unique role in the lives of their marines and sailors, ensuring the morale of the unit is as high as possible. And it's a bond it's hard to describe but it's through the relationships and I think that's the best part about it is when someone that you never thought would ever talk to you just comes to say you got a second and that's when I know I'm like yeah it works and that's why I'm here and that's why the Marine Corps keeps me. Chaplains continue to serve in times of war and peace carrying on the mission of the Navy Chaplain Corps serving God, America and America's sea services. Reporting from Ford Operating Base Geronimo, I'm Corporal Meredith Brown.


Thank you. Hi everybody. It's great to be here. I want to talk to you about design now, and I'd like to do that with a bit of a history lesson. So for the past two decades, I have been practicing designer, building products and services, largely for the web and mobile and things like that, but for the last three years, I have been a partner at a VC firm in San Francisco called True Ventures. I still very much identify as a designer, and it can lead to some sort of awkward conversations when people ask me what I do. If I get into an Uber, typically they ask me things like, you know, so what do you do when I get into the car? And I say, well, I'm a designer. And they say, well, what kind of design do you do? And I say, I guess, you know, I've worked with startups, and they say, so what sort of things do you design for them? And I'm like, well, I'm more on the kind of the investing side of things now, and they're like, oh, like a VC? And I'm like, yeah. And they often say, great, I got to show you this app I'm working on. And I respond with this. So now when people ask me, so what do you do? I say, well, I'm in finance, and that's pretty much the end of the conversation. So my transition in my career from designer to investor, I think, is kind of reflective of how the technology industry is changing, that the skills we need to be successful in the products that we make, as well as the businesses that we create, are changing. And I want to do that with a sort of history lesson that goes from three separate eras of how digital technology has shifted over time, over the history of technology. Because the skills that we need are still very much centered on technical competence, but increasingly an understanding of humans and human behavior is more important than an understanding of technology. And that while kind of being the smartest is still going to be the way that we win, that emotional intelligence is going to become even more important than just raw intelligence for making the products. So like I said, a history lesson, let me start with where my career started back in the early 90s. I remember going to a party just after I got out of university and seeing this magazine on the table at the party. It was the first issue ever of Wired Magazine. And I was shocked that there were other people in the world that believed that technology was going to become incredibly culturally relevant and not just about all the gadgets.  I put it cover to cover, very antisocial at this party, and I was like, this seems like the future. You have to understand that at the time in the early 90s, there were about 2,000 websites out there. So it was conceivable that you could have seen everyone. And if you wanted to see what new websites there were, you would go to the What's New page for the whole internet, and that every day about 12 new sites were launching and they would list them here and you'd get a sense of this. So it was very, very early on. I wanted to go work at Wired Magazine. So I sent them an email with a URL that pointed to my resume as HTML on the web, and as it happens back then, I was the first person to have ever done that. I got their attention and I got the job. I was fortunate then to work on the first commercial ad-supported website, which was HotWired, which was called HotWired and looked like this. Now, to give you some sort of historical context or technical constraint that we were under, if you were to take kind of a modern 5K iMac and translate this over to those pixels, it would look something like this. This made quite a splash in 1994 when we launched this because at the time in technology, design was not taken very seriously. It was considered something you do at the end with fonts and colors and layout and things like that. The popular sites at the time were Yahoo, which looked like this, Amazon, which didn't even have a picture of a book on it, and this was where technology was. This is because in the first era of technology, the human interaction was not considered at all. The first era of technology is something I like to call computation. It was strictly big machines that were designed to do math better than humans. In fact, the earliest machines were machines of war. They were used for fighting Nazis, so, unfortunately, I think history might be repeating itself a little bit, but they were designed to do things like crack enigma codes and plot out missile trajectories. Then they moved into business where they were used for things like inventory management and accounting systems. These were systems that were designed for expert users. These were often systems that were used by the people who designed them, and the interfaces that they used looked something like this. They were direct representations of the data structures that were inherent in the systems, inputs for the algorithms, and that was it. The users who would use them were trained to be able to use them. They were experts themselves. Very little was considered about the human interaction between them, let alone things like trust or delight or a sense of accomplishment. Even up to 10 years ago, people thought of using computer, using technology as work.  That all changed at that moment when I was starting to work at HotWired and some of the first early websites came around. That heralded the second age of technology, that of connection. We linked all the machines together, and as it turns out, that's what popularized digital technology with the entire population because we were able to take the experiences that we have every day and share them with the people we care about. That completely exploded when we moved those computers off of the desktop and into our pockets and purses and fundamentally changed how we started thinking about the interactions we were having with those devices. Now that is because of the unbelievable scale of what we were doing. When I started in the industry, there was about 19 million people using the internet. Today, about half of the world's population, 3.8 billion people are using it every day. So that means that people are no longer experts that are trained in the systems that they're using. They are the full range of humans with all of their cultural understandings, their amazing human abilities and disabilities, and levels of expertise all over the place. Okay, poor user experience affects us even more, affects more people even more often. We would use our computers 10 years ago, two or three times a day to do some work and then go on with our lives. But today, roughly 80 times a day, the average person pulls out their phone, has an interaction with it. That interaction is either successful or not. And when they're not, it causes a set of emotional responses in people.  I'm not really into technology. But now you need it for every single thing you do in your life. That causes people to feel angry, frustrated, or even ashamed. These are feelings people don't want to have, and therefore they reject digital products that make them feel that way. That has brought design and user experience research into the forefront of how it's a way to have successful products that make people feel empowered. When you make people feel powerful, it changes everything when it comes to designing for technology. We do this by designing for humans, by bringing people in and understanding how they succeed and fail with our products, or us going out into the world and understanding the problems that people have, what they're experiencing, and how we can provide solutions for them rather than the other way around. That's important today for the interactions we have, but even more important as technology goes into the third phase that I like to call comprehension. This is a video of the best human go player in the world losing to a machine in a way that he cannot imagine happening. He's utterly perplexed by the solution that the machine is used to defeat him. We are teaching our machines to learn, and we are doing that in a way that is inherently rife with the cultural biases that are around us in the world. When a couple of weeks ago, our iPhones started responding with this weird autocomplete, this alien message that we didn't understand, not only did we not understand it, but we didn't understand why it did that. It was looking at billions and billions of data points and coming up with the best recommendation based on the patterns that it saw. It turned into a sort of jokey kind of meme on social media, but it has significant implications when applied to systems that people use every day that help define sort of whether they think they should be using those products or not. Google Translate, for example, when it goes from Turkish to English, does this. Turkish has no gender for its pronouns. All the pronouns are just, oh, but English does have gender for pronouns. So Google looks at the billions of web pages that are out there, looks at the patterns that are there, and makes recommendations that cement the cultural biases that are rife in the language that we use today, as opposed to the world that we're trying to create in the future. This makes people feel left out. It's even more important when it's a personal rejection saying you are not allowed. So this passport application system which uses computer vision to help automate the submission of portraits that people put on their passports has clearly been trained only by a subset of the people who would possibly be using the system, and probably trained by a subset of people that look like the people who are designing the system. This happens in the lab all the time where researchers aren't out in the world understanding how people are reacting, but instead simply doing their research in isolation. As you can see by a group that was completely surprised when people rejected the idea that they should be using computer vision systems to determine a sexual orientation based on people's pictures on the internet. It's never been easier and cheaper to start a company. Many of you are probably in startups and realize that now, but it's never been more expensive to grow them. So why on earth would we design systems that fundamentally exclude portions of a potential audience as we get started? So how do we switch this around? There's a great quote in a Wall Street Journal from Ben Weizmann recently saying that all business is a bet on human behavior. So now as an investor and formerly as an entrepreneur, very interested in how to reduce the risk on that bet. We call that the product market fit, which is we take the things that we have built and hope that there is an overlap with the things that people need and that that overlap in the middle is a market that we can create that provides value. When we hear pitches all the time, there's traditionally a lot of engineering hubris that goes into it that people say, I can build this thing right, but very rarely do we hear people say, I can build the right thing. And that's what we're listening for now, is are you out in the world? Are you engaging with people and listening in a way that is respectful of what they need so that you can go back and create solutions rather than taking the solutions and pushing them out on people. Humans before machines. The reason that we are in this kind of mess that we are is that so much business is based today on the practices of companies that look like this 100 or 150 years ago. This is when human resources were applied to physical resources to produce products that would go out into the world. And the most important person in this picture is this guy right here.   But you can imagine that the focus on unrelenting productivity of the people was the thing that tried to drive the value and success of these products. And that is no longer the case anymore. Productivity obviously is important, but creativity is where the next wave of value is going to come from. And the design systems, the design methodologies, and the human-centered research that we have done in the past is the way that we're going to get there. Google has a good example of trying to understand this. A few years ago, they commissioned a study of all the projects that they had ever done to see what were the qualities of the ones that succeeded versus the ones that failed. They called this Project Aristotle. Google is a computer science-driven organization, so obviously they took a quantitative approach to this. They looked at the grades of the people on the teams, the size of the teams, their IQ, the methods that they used. They looked at all of these things and found no patterns in what caused success. It wasn't until they took a more liberal arts approach and found that the one thing that all of the successful products or the projects had in common was a sense of psychological safety. This is one of the most computer science-driven technical companies in the world, but the only time products succeed were when the individual members of the team felt that they had a sense of confidence that the rest of the team would not embarrass, reject, or punish them when they spoke up. What that meant was the teams where there was safety led to much, much higher levels of creativity, meaning that the teams could evaluate many, many, many more opportunities for solutions and apply them to problems that people had in the world to be successful. There are many ways that you can do this. It is the language that we use in meetings, and it's a way that we conduct our product reviews and code reviews. It is the interactions between people that's modeled from the top down as inclusive and open as opposed to opinion-driven and aggressive. There are a couple more ways that we look for companies to succeed at this. I've been talking about this human-centered process. That means actually taking people, whether they use your products or not, and bringing them into your organization to watch them use the products and either succeed or fail. It is unbelievably powerful. It leads to better product instincts when everybody on the team, and I mean people in sales, engineers, literally everybody in the team, spends time watching users because then we get united with a sense of empathy for the people that we witness struggling to use the things that we are creating, and it changes your motivation for why you want to do it. It's incredibly powerful. And finally, the teams themselves, we need to increase the diversity of the teams that we have, and I mean on economic, gender, cultural, age, all the dimensions of diversity for the teams themselves. When we have people who are not like us on our own teams, it forces us into a form of communication that is more robust, more open. It also increases the amount of experiences that can go into making decisions. Now, I don't mean having users in your company and having diverse teams just as a matter of doing better design. I mean as a way of developing high, emotionally intelligent companies that are gonna succeed in this next era of computing. That means creativity through safety, human-centered design for decision-making, diverse teams for problem solving. That is the roadmap. That is the kind of thing that reduces risk in the world of investing. And I encourage you to be able to do that with your own teams, to practice this way. Because frankly, the future depends on it. And thank you very much for your time. Thank you.


One thing that I think holds back every nun marketer who is attempting to do music marketing is the fact that you don't think like a music marketer. You think like an artist that understands music marketing or a labor owner that understands music marketing or whatever you want to call yourself that understands music marketing, but you're not thinking like a marketer. See marketers man, when you end the field of marketing, we got to keep our cool at all times. We got to look at the data from over here, look at the data from over there, put it together and make sure that whatever game plan comes out the data makes sense. And then hopefully it works, right? And I don't see things that holds back a lot of artists, right? So rather than me holding all the gems in my secret vault, locking it away, throwing the key out the window and making sure that you never learn these things that you need to learn to make sure that you can think like I think think like other music marketers think I'm going to give you some tips in this video on how to think like a music marketer so it will make your life a little bit better. Let's get into it. It's the matter. What's going on? My name is Corey music marketing co-founder country brand agency. And today, I want to talk to you about how to think like a music marketer. Now, like I said earlier in the video, I honestly think that a lot of you are being held back by the fact that you don't know how to think like we think, you know what I'm saying? Like you don't know how to think like a music marketer.  I won't go through that again. You get what I'm saying here. You don't think the same way that music marketers think.  Everyone thinks they can do marketing. Everyone can do marketing. You know, so I want to give you some tips, some mindset hacks that you need to get into to make yourself think like a marketer so you can improve your marketing campaigns and hopefully get better results in everything that you do. Now, before we get into all of that, come and follow me on Instagram and TikTok links will be in the description below. Come talk to me, come engage with me, come give me some video ideas, all that good stuff. Now that being said, let's go ahead and get into it. So one of the first things that you have to be okay with, you have to tell yourself in order to be a legit marketer like this is the first step, right? Is you have to tell yourself that you don't know and you have to be completely fine with knowing that you don't know and why do I say this, right? Because you're probably thinking like no, that's not true as a marketer. You have all this past knowledge and wisdom from past campaigns and that should guide you to the right decision, right? Yeah, you're right. That's true. That's the case. But every marketing campaign is genuinely different. And the reason that every marketing campaign is genuinely different is because it's a different person. You're pushing it to a different audience. It's a different piece of content. There are so many different variables that come into play that don't make everything work exactly the same. And one thing that I'll tell clients or potential clients before we start campaigns is like, I'm gonna be honest with you. Like, I don't know how this is gonna work. I don't know what the outcome is gonna be. I don't yet know what exactly we should do because nothing has happened yet.  But before we get to that point, I have to be okay with the fact that I don't know and I let the fact that I don't know God my decisions, right?  Like, of course we have like structures and we have systems and we have things that we do do over and over and over, you know what I'm saying? Because they produce results. We don't necessarily do them all the exact same way because we don't know if that makes sense yet. So that's the first thing that you have to just get out just your head about is you don't really know like every time you decide to market a new song or market a new music video or market something new from yourself, the layout completely changes like the battlefield completely flips and it's a similar field, right? Like it's a place that you see me sort of kind of recognize but it's not exactly like the last battlefield that you just got out of. And I've seen people going to campaigns thinking like, Oh man, like I know exactly what I have to do. No, you don't. No, you don't. You don't know. You don't know yet. How do you know you don't have any data? Nothing's been launched yet. Nobody said anything. How do you know you don't know and once again, I think in order to be a competent and good marketer, you have to be okay with the fact that you don't really know like you think you know, but if you do it right, then you gonna figure it out and you'll be okay.  Or it to be a goat, you have to become unattached to the product and become attached to the results. Let me say it again, because that's a bar and I don't know if y'all was listening to me volume up real quick. I'm a pause. You got to be unattached to the product and attached to the result. Now, what do I mean by that? As a matter of fact, I want you to comment below if this has ever sounded like you right or someone that you know right. Yo, like this song right here, bro. This song right here. Like I know this is the one. Like this is the one bro. Like I need this one to go. This is the one that I just know is going to go. How many of you have ever said that? How many of you have ever ran a campaign, been disappointed with the campaign because it wasn't the song that you wanted to work that was working and then you just stopped doing the campaign because it didn't match what you wanted to be the one. I'm willing to bet that it's a lot more than you didn't willing to admit that. You know how I know that because I see it a lot from a client side. Like I can't tell you how many campaigns we've had to stop or almost have to stop because it wasn't the song that the artist wanted to be the one that works, right? Like they'll send us a list of three or four songs that we run through and maybe song number five is the one that converts the best and has the cheapest cost per click on the ad, but they really were in love with song number two. It was their baby, you know what I'm saying? Their biggest brain child they feel like and they get hurt when it doesn't work. And that's why I say you have to unattach yourself from the product and attach yourself to the results because in most of those cases what ends up happening is they stopped the campaign because it's not doing what they wanted to do and now they have nothing or they go like yo no I don't believe that I'm gonna run this anyway and then they're running like they're not running the best optimized version of the campaign because they want to go where they want to go with, right? I personally believe that is one of the biggest benefits of having a third party marketing team run your marketing because we don't feel the same way about your music that you feel, right? Like you're looking at every single song as like your baby as a child and as a parent it's hard to pick a favorite child, right? Like it's hard if you're a parent of three and somebody tells you like yo those two kids over there are geniuses but this one right here? Man this one right here a little off. You know what I'm saying? Like that hurts, I get it, but when it comes to marketing you have to remove emotion out the situation and run with whatever is giving you the best result that you want to get. Now there's other things that you can do to push people back to the music that you care about the most and maybe that song just doesn't make sense for the time that you're trying to do something with it but you gotta unattach yourself from the product and attach yourself to the result. Every song and piece of content that you make is another swing at back. Does it really matter if you hit a home run on the first back or the third back? No, you're just trying to hit a home run and that's all that matters. So I'm going to say it again, you know what I'm saying?   Unattach yourself from the product, attach yourself to a result. It doesn't matter what gets you the result that you are looking to get as long as you get that result that you're looking to get. And the last thing that you need to just like drill into your brain in order to be a top level OG super saiyan marketer is you got to understand that marketing is more than just data, right? And I get it, it's very easy to just get wrapped up in numbers. You know you got 100,000 impressions. You got 20,000 clicks. You got 15,000 views. You know what I'm saying? You spent $3,000. It's very easy to get wrapped up into seeing marketing as just numbers and number manipulation. And you know, just you watching numbers grow. But at the end of the day, you have to understand that in order for you to do marketing at a super high level, you have to understand that behind those numbers are actual people, right? So when you look at a click and all you see is a click, you're doing the game wrong. What you should see when you look at a click is Josh from Detroit, who loves basketball and likes to skate in his free time. They like to listen to Trippie Red and the baby when he's listening to music, right? If you look at your as and all you see is a view, then you're doing the game wrong. When I look at views, I see Mary from Chicago, who likes to go to dance lessons on the weekend and has two kids who both love Kanye West or something like that. Understanding that there are people behind these numbers and then understanding that the work doesn't end just because you got the number to go up. Now you have to do the work to decipher what the people behind these numbers actually like and what does it mean and all this other stuff. That's the next level of marketing, because it's very easy for people to get caught up in like, Oh, I got 10,000 clicks. That's great. We're doing. No, you're not done because now you need to understand what about those 10,000 people that clicked over may then want to click over and a lot of time that boils down to things like lifestyle and interests and hobbies and trauma and stuff that they're into, right? Like it boils down to things that are deeper than just an impression or a view or a click. So I feel like if you're doing marketing or calling yourself a marketer and you're not able to look at the numbers and break it down into human elements, right? Like break those numbers down into a way that allows you to read it and figure out like who are the type of people that make up these numbers? Then you're doing it wrong. If you're not even attempting to do it at that level, then you're just doing marketing wrong all together. So that's one big thing that I stress to my team. I stress to my marketing team is that you have to look beyond the numbers and really start to figure out like who are the people that are that are giving us these numbers? Who are the people that are viewing this video? Who are the people that are clicking this ad? Who are the people that are sharing this mean? Who are these people? What are they? And of course, how can we find more people like them? And if you start to look at your marketing as more of a thing that's designed to gather people around you, rather than a thing that's designed to build your numbers up, you will have subjectively more successful marketing campaigns. That's what I think. So those are the three mindsets that I think you have to have one trying to think like a marketer, right? Secondly, you got to become unattached to the product and become attached to the result. And that's like honestly, probably one of my favorite things I've ever said on this channel. You got to become unattached to the product and become attached to the result.  I just just don't do it. And lastly, you got to realize that you don't know until you know if you go into campaigns, feeling like you know everything and feeling like you have all the answers before anything has been started and you're going to be extremely disappointed in yourself.  That's what you're going to think. You don't want to get to that point. You don't need to get to that point. That's what you got me for to keep you from getting to that point. Now that being said, if you feel like you're learning anything today, please like and share this video, hit those post notifications as well as I wouldn't want you guys to miss anything. Once again, my name is Cory and I'll see y'all next time.


Hello, everyone. Welcome to this breakout session where I will be speaking about horizontal scaling with VITAS. My name is Deepi Sigareddi. I am a software engineer at PlanetScale, where I lead the VITAS engineering team. I'm also a maintainer and technical lead of VITAS, the open source project. You can find me on Twitter or on GitHub. Let's talk a little bit about the problem that VITAS is designed to solve by taking a step back. What do modern applications need? They need performance, scalability, uptime, which translates to high availability, and we don't want to lose data. Whether it is user data or transactional data or system level data, we do not want to tolerate data loss. This is a little bit different from how things used to work, say, 20 years ago before everything moved to the web. Software applications only needed to be available during business hours, 9 to 5. They were located in specific locations. They did not have a worldwide audience. They did not have billions of users. All of that has changed, and that has changed the characteristics that we expect out of modern applications. VITAS solves this problem at the data layer. VITAS is massive. It's highly available. It provides you durability guarantees with respect to the data, and it is my SQL compatible. VITAS is a CNCF graduated project. It is licensed under the Apache V2 license. It's community-supported, and it is written in Golang. A little bit about the history of VITAS is that it was originally started at YouTube over 10 years ago to solve the scaling problem that YouTube was facing with their monolithic MySQL installation. And since then, it has grown to many, many production installs. VITAS provides an illusion of a single database. So even though behind the scenes, it is not a single database, as far as the application or the user is concerned, it looks like a single database. And it looks as if the application has a single dedicated connection to the entire VITAS cluster. And VITAS is compatible with both MySQL and variants, like MariaDB and Percona. Given the place where VITAS fits in a modern application architecture, it needs to work with database frameworks, ORMs, legacy code, and third-party applications. Some of the third-party applications that VITAS integrates with in the MySQL ecosystem are things like Ghost, PT Online Schema Change, Frano, Scoop, and many others. VITAS serves millions of queries per second in production. These are the logos of some of the companies that are running VITAS in production. Let's focus on a few key adopters of VITAS. There is Slack that is running 100% of their data storage on VITAS. So many of us use Slack on a daily basis. We have a Slack workspace for this conference. All of that is running on VITAS. SquareCache also runs 100% on VITAS. And then there's JD.com, which is a huge Chinese online retail company. It is the biggest in China, which basically means it's the biggest in the world. And they are running 10,000-plus individual databases in a single VITAS cluster. There's also PlanetScale, which provides a database service that's built on VITAS. PlanetScale's data store itself is on VITAS. And PlanetScale is also running many thousands of individual VITAS clusters. Some of these installs run on quote-unquote bare metal, meaning they are not running in a containerized environment. But many VITAS users also run VITAS on Kubernetes in the cloud. Let's talk a little bit about the key features of VITAS. VITAS is compatible with MySQL. It's also compatible with popular development frameworks, like Ruby on Rails, and Django, and Laravel, and PHP, and so on. VITAS comes with many database management features, for instance, connection pooling. The application can make a single connection to VITAS, and behind the scenes, VITAS is managing a pool of connections to the backing database. Schema changes in VITAS are online. They are safeguarded in such a way that database downtime due to schema changes is a thing of the past. The other interesting feature that VITAS gives you is query consolidation, where, let's say, there is a very popular YouTube video, and everybody is trying to watch it. There is a single metadata row that corresponds to that video, and you might have millions of people trying to access that single row in the database. And what VITAS will do is that if there is a query in-flight to fetch that particular row, there may be thousands of other queries that come in at the same time. They will all be held, and the results from the first query will be returned to all of those 10,000-odd queries, so that that identical query is executed once instead of tens of thousands or millions of times. VITAS achieves scalability through sharding. So in terms of scalability, you can go vertical or you can go horizontal, scale up versus scale out. And scale up is typically done by running things on ever larger machines, which eventually hits cost or physical limitation. And scale out is achieved by adding more and more instances of the same small or medium commodity hardware. And the way VITAS achieves scalability is by adding more and more instances of small or medium commodity hardware and hosting different shards on the new hardware. High availability in VITAS is achieved through failure detection and failover. So typically in VITAS, the databases, the various shards are run in a primary replica configuration, and the replicas are available to failover to if the primary goes down for any reason. VITAS also provides a whole bunch of data services, so materialized views, rollups, or aggregations of data which can be updated in real time, change data capture, notifications, data migrations. All of these features are facilitated by a part of VITAS that we call V-replication, or VITAS replication, which is built on top of my SQL replication, but it is sort of a filtered replication. So for instance, if we look at real time rollups, the way they work is that what you are streaming from VITAS is an aggregate number. Could be something like sum of column values which fit a particular filter condition. Now, if one of those values changes, then VITAS knows how to adjust the sum, basically subtract the old value, add the new value, that's your new sum. So whether a row is inserted, deleted, updated, VITAS knows how to keep this value up to date to reflect those changes. Data migrations is another key feature of VITAS. People come from various previous versions of their data store when they come to adopt VITAS, and it's important that you be able to migrate the data into VITAS with as little downtime as possible. Let's switch gears a little bit. Now that we have talked about the features of VITAS, we will now look at what is it in the VITAS architecture that facilitates these features? How do we go from building blocks to where we want to end up? So the question here is how does the VITAS architecture enable transparent database operations? Before we dive into that, let's look at a few concepts. The first one, and the one you'll hear the most of, is key space. A VITAS key space is a logical database. This goes back to our illusion of a single database. Behind the scenes, there may be tens, hundreds, thousands of physical databases, but as far as the application is concerned, VITAS presents a uniform view as a single database, and we call that a key space, and that's the logical database. Within the key space, each row in a table has something called a key space ID. This is a computed value. It is not a physical column. It is not a value that has to be provided by the team that is setting up VITAS or anything of that sort. This is a hex value between zero and FFF, and it can be provided to VITAS by using what is called a sharding scheme. And the sharding scheme can be functional, meaning I want to take a column, apply a function to it, and use that as the key space ID, or it can be custom, or it can be numeric. There are many different sharding schemes. The example I just gave of applying a function to a column value is the most common way people use VITAS, and the most popular function, and the simplest one is hash. But there are other functions that can be applied to data values to generate key space IDs. The next concept I want to talk about is shard.  It will in turn correspond to many physical databases, but logically it's a distinct piece of all of your data, and if you put all of the shards together, then you end up with all of your data. So it's a subset of your data, so to speak. The other concept that people run into often in VITAS is cell, and the idea of cell is to facilitate high availability and failovers. A cell is any failure domain. So whichever part of your system architecture is a self-contained piece corresponds to a cell. So that could be a data center, or it could be one rack of servers, or it could be a region or availability zone in a cloud provider, but this is basically a failure point, and you define it as a cell in order to say that if this whole cell goes down, then we can define how the system should behave and which cell is sort of the one we will fail over to. A common configuration for databases is a cluster with primary and replicas, and when you start putting VITAS on top of this, what we do is we will place a management module on each of these databases, and this module is called a VT tablet. It's a sidecar process that runs right next to each of the databases. It controls the database process, the MySQL server. It interacts with the MySQL server. Typically, it's on the same host as MySQL and communicates through sockets. In production, there may be multiple such clusters, whether they correspond to different teams in a company or different shards in the same key space, there may be multiple clusters. User and application traffic is routed to these clusters through a component called VTGate. VTGate is a smart, stateless proxy. It speaks the MySQL protocol. It gives the illusion to the application of being a single monolithic MySQL server, and it relays the queries to VT tablets. In order to scale out for traffic, a typical witness deployment will run multiple VTGate servers. So VTGates can be scaled up by giving them more CPU and memory or by creating more VTGates. And this also allows people to deploy VTGates in different parts of the world, depending on where their traffic comes from. VTGate, we said, is transparently routing queries to the correct databases. And how does it do this? The way it does this is by using the concept of key space ID that we talked about. So from the app when VTGate gets a query, it is able to compute which shard or which key space the query should be routed to. The routing is based on the schema and the sharding scheme. So there is a table, it has a certain set of columns, and by knowing how the sharding scheme for the table is defined and where the table exists, VTGate is able to route the queries correctly. The next component we'll talk about is what we call a topo server or topology server. This is a distributed key value store, and it stores the state of witness. The schema, the key spaces, the shards, the sharding scheme, tablets, users, roles, authorizations, all of those things. We support multiple different types of distributed key value stores. You can use HCD or ZooKeeper or even Kubernetes itself as the topology server for witness. And the data that is stored in the topology server is fairly small, and it is mostly cached by VTGate. So VTGates don't have to communicate constantly with the topology server. The expectation is that, and this is a core principle of witness, the expectation is that query serving, whatever applications need on an ongoing basis from witness, should not actually depend on the topology server being up. It's only cluster operations. Let's say we are adding a new shard or adding a new database into the cluster, or we are doing some sort of management. We are going to take a note down for maintenance. So we want to fail over everything that's running on that node to a different node. These sorts of management operations require the topology server to be up, but query serving does not require the topology server to be up. The last component we'll talk about is a control daemon, VT control daemon. This is used for running ad hoc operations and things like we are going to take a note down for maintenance. How do we inform Bitus that we now want to fail over all traffic to a different node and then remove everything that's on this node from the cluster before it goes down for maintenance? Or let's say our traffic is growing and we want to add more tablets. We want to add more databases into the VITS cluster. So these are the types of operations that the VITS control daemon facilitates. It also provides an API server that can be used to inspect the state of the VITS cluster so that we don't have to do command line operations against HCD or Kubernetes to inspect the state of the VITS cluster. So in summary, VITS provides an illusion of a single database to an application. So all the application does is speaks to VITS as if it were a single MySQL database, a single database of some sort. But behind the scenes, behind the red line, we have all of these components in VITS that facilitate that illusion. Let's now start talking about sharding. The title of the talk is horizontal scaling. So how do we, in fact, achieve horizontal scaling with VITS? But before we talk about horizontal, we want to first talk about what is sharding in the first place. If I were to define sharding, and I've said this once before, but I'll repeat myself, sharding is the process of splitting some sort of monolithic data into small subsets, which together form your full database. And there are two types of sharding. There is vertical and horizontal. Vertical sharding refers to maybe each database has a different set of tables, and an application talks to one of those databases or key spaces. So in VITS, you can create multiple key spaces and have a subset of tables in each of those key spaces and design your application so that they speak to only one of those key spaces. So that is vertical sharding. Then you have horizontal sharding, where you say, well, even if I were to split my tables out into different key spaces, things are growing so fast that at some point, the cost of continuously scaling those databases up is going to become prohibitive. And it is not a sustainable strategy. So then you end up with horizontal sharding, where for the same tables, data that belongs to the same tables actually gets split into multiple databases. And using VITS as VT gate and key space ID, queries can be routed to the right physical database. Why do people do sharding? There are various reasons. The main reason is performance or management. As database instances become bigger, they become harder to manage, performance suffers. There is only so much you can tune. There is only so much you can get with adding memory or moving it to a larger physical machine. The other thing that happens when my SQL databases get into the multiple terabyte sizes is that if there is a problem, then the recovery time becomes much longer, which translates to longer down times when there is an incident. By sharding, first of all, you sort of spread the risk because you have many physical databases. Any one physical database going down doesn't actually impact your full application. Everything doesn't go down at the same time. Maybe a small function is unavailable for a short period. On top of that, with VITS and my SQL replication, with running in a primary replica configuration, VITS will let you fail over very quickly in, say, 15 to 20 seconds to a replica and be back up. So now we are talking about incidents that used to cause hours, sometimes even 24 hours of downtime, can be managed down to the point where an incident results in 15 to 20 seconds of downtime at the database level, which is very much tolerable at an application level just by using retries. Most web users have now become used to the experience of, oops, something went wrong. Please try again. And no one minds. And if they retry it and it works, that's fine. And that's the sort of experience you can give to the end users with a 15 to 20 second downtime at a database level versus multiple hours. The recommendation for VITS is to keep the shards at around 256 gig. What this means is that with fairly standard hardware, whether you're deploying in a cloud or in a dedicated environment, it doesn't take more than 15 minutes to add a new replica, or even if everything is lost to build things back from a backup and to come back into a serving mode. Now, a demo. So let me talk a little bit about how this demo is set up, and then we will actually get to see it. So I started with creating an unsharded VITS cluster using the VITS operator. The VITS operator is an open source Kubernetes operator that was built by PlanetScale. It's also available with Apache V2 license. So I create a VITS cluster, I load some data into it, and then I set up a monitoring stack, Prometheus and Grafana, so that we can see what the query load looks like. So I run a query load, we look at some metrics, double the query load, we look at the same metrics, and then we'll shard this into two shards. Now, if I were to run through this whole thing here, it would take about 30 minutes, including the time taken waiting for Kubernetes pods to come up. So I've actually pre-created all of this, and we will focus the demo on the sharding part of it. The schema for this demo is very simple. I just have one table called users with a couple of columns, a user ID and user data. So when I started, there were about 800 queries per second. And if we look at the query latency in the second graph, it is between five and six milliseconds. And then I doubled the query load so that the queries per second went to about 1,500 queries per second. And we can see that corresponding to that doubling of the query load, the query latency went up to between seven and eight milliseconds. So this cluster is a pretty lightweight cluster. I'm running it in Google Cloud using medium nodes. So nothing powerful. So very soon, we can see that the traffic actually affects the performance of the system. Now let's scale it up. So let's look at what we have deployed in Kubernetes already. HCD is the topology server that I chose for this demo, and it's running with three replicas. We have some VT tablets, which are the MySQL management components. And we have a VT CTLD, VT gate. And we have two instances of a database load generator running. Now, if we look at what our key spaces look like, we have a single key space called Customer, and it has just one shard. And like I said, this demo was created using the VITS operator, and it's running in a Kubernetes cluster on Google Cloud. OK, so we have one shard, and it's denoted by just a dash. So the names of the shards have a start value and an end value, and these are hex values. When I talked about key space IDs, I talked about how they go from 0, 0, 0, 0 to FFF. And dash basically means that this shard spans the full key range from 0 to FF. The next thing we do is we apply the sharding scheme. And I used a VT CTLD command called Apply V Schema. And on this table, we have a single index of type hash on the column user ID. So this is just setting it up so that we can start the sharding process. This is declaring that this key space is now going to be sharded. Once that is done, we will bring up our new shards. So from one shard, we will actually go to three. So we have one old, two new. And we will copy all of the data from the old one to the new ones. And then we can bring down the old one. So the way we deployed the first shard was by declaring a partitioning with one equal part. And the way we are creating the new shards is by declaring another partitioning with two equal parts. It takes a while for these things to come up. The pods are initializing. Everything is not ready yet. So we will skip ahead to a point where everything is up. So at this point, all of the new processes are up in Kubernetes. Everything is running. And we can refresh our key space view and see that we now have one serving shard, same as before, but we now have two non-serving shards, dash 80 and 80 dash. So what these names are telling us is that the first of them spans 0 to 8, followed by n zeros. Key space ID is typically an 8-byte value. And for each row in the unsharded database, we will compute a key space ID. And depending on whether it falls before 80 or after 80, we will copy it into the appropriate place. So let's look at the steps that we are going to run through to do the resharding. So the first step is going to be to create a resharding workflow. And we tell it what the source is and then what the destinations are. And this workflow has started. And it has created two streams to do the data copy that we talked about. One of them goes from dash to dash 80. The other one from dash to 80 dash. Once the workflow is up, we can actually check on its progress. So this says the copy is completed and the streams are running. What it means for the streams to be running is that initially we take all of the data and we copy it over. But as we are doing this copy, new data is being created on the source because traffic is still coming in. And these streams keep the destinations, the targets in sync with the source so that any new data that's coming into the source is also on a live basis being copied to the target. At any point, we can say, OK, given that the copy has completed, I want to now switch the traffic. I want to start sending all of the requests to the new shards instead of to the old one. And this can be done all at once for reads and writes or it can be done in a phased manner so that you switch the reads first, see how things are working, and then whenever you're ready, you can switch the writes. What happens when you do switch writes is that we stop accepting writes on the source shard for a very brief period and wait for the targets to catch up. And once the targets have caught up, we update the routing in VT gates so that writes will now start going to the targets. So that brings us to the end of this demo. And then we look at what the metrics look like. Oh, but before we go, we should see that now the serving non-serving has changed. The new shards are the ones that are serving, meaning they are the ones that are getting traffic from VT gate. And the old one, Dash, has gone into non-serving. And once the sharding process is complete, we can actually tear down the old shards. But one of the other things people sometimes do is to keep them around so that if something has gone wrong, they are able to actually fail back to the original. That is also possible. When we switch the reads and writes, we set up reverse replication streams to make sure that the source now remains in sync with any new data that's being created on the targets, which are now taking traffic. So after we did the sharding, there was a brief blip in the traffic because we stopped writes for a brief period while we were switching everything over. And then the queries per second pick back up to their previous level. But we can see that the latency has actually gone down. It has fallen to the levels at which it was when we were running half the load. So with 800 QPS, we were getting about six milliseconds of latency. With 1500, we were getting about seven to eight milliseconds of latency. Now with 1500 queries per second, we are getting about five or 5.5 milliseconds of latency. So those three lines are the P50, P95, and P99. So the yellow line is actually the 99th percentile latency. It is not the average latency. Average latency is below three milliseconds. I wanted to share some of the resources that we have for anyone who's interested in VITS. We have a vibrant Slack community with almost 2,500 people now. It is big, but it's not so big that someone new would get lost. There are always lively discussions, and there are people who are very much willing to help anyone who's new to the community. We do have tutorials in the form of getting started guides, which will walk you through running a very simple VITS setup either locally or on Kubernetes. And in terms of local install, it could be Linux or Mac. We also have a tutorial that can run in Docker. The source code is available on VITS, and we welcome everyone to come over and check it out. Some further reading. We talked about how Slack, Square, JD all run VITS at scale, at massive scale, in fact. SquareCache has blocked about how they did their resharding, how they went from one shard to eight or 32. CNCF, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, that VITS is a part of, does case studies for their projects, and they have published multiple case studies on VITS. And JD.com, which runs something like 27 million queries per second against VITS, is one of those case studies. The Slack Datastore team has blocked about their VITS migration, how using VITS's V-replication feature, they were able to take a migration project that was projected to be multiple years and finish it in less than one year. So that is very interesting. And just yesterday, GitHub Engineering, the GitHub database team published a blog post on how they partitioned GitHub's databases. They used to run a single MySQL. They now run VITS. In the process, they first did vertical sharding and split their tables into different key spaces, but they have also done horizontal sharding with VITS. At this point, I can take questions if there are any. No questions. I will be in the Slack channel for the OS databases track after we are done here. And at that time, I can take any questions from the online audience as well.


My name is Alex Francis, and I'm a mechanical engineering graduate student. UWM was appealing to me because of the engineering program, its location, and the athletic department. I discovered undergraduate research, connected well with my professors, and really enjoyed the academic. During my bachelor's, I was a Milwaukee Panther on the cross-country and track teams as an endurance athlete, and I'd like to say I ran through my degree into my master's. I'd recommend students pursue their master's at UWM because of the great faculty that are one research status. We're among the elite universities in the nation like Yale, Harvard, and MIT, and of course the location right near the lake. Get on the road with me to become a Milwaukee engineer.


All right guys Merry Christmas today. I wanted to do my review on Batman Noel Batman Noel is an interesting take on the Charles Dickens classic a Christmas Carol Created by Libra Mayhoe who created who co-created the Joker graphic novel The story is narrated by a low-level petty crook named Bob Who the story portrays as a type of Bob Cratchit character with Bruce Wayne Batman being Scrooge The Joker is the ghost of Christmas future Catwoman portrays the ghost of Christmas past and Superman being the ghost of Christmas present Batman attacks Bob who is working for the Joker as a delivery man at the time Demanding to know where the Joker is Bob doesn't know after much intimidation Batman lets Bob go with a tracker attached to him Bob runs home to his son Tim Bruce tells Alfred that he intends on Bob being arrested. So Tim doesn't follow in his footsteps all the while Bruce is fighting off pneumonia A vision of Jason Todd takes on the role of Jacob Marley throughout the night I won't go into too much detail about the rest of the story because it's fairly short But needless to say it plays along with a Christmas Carol pretty closely. I Really enjoyed the story. It's a great retelling of an old classic comparisons are spot-on and fit the classic tale into the DC universe well Created in 2011 Batman Noel is an instant classic that cements Libre Mejo's place as a pop culture icon as stated before Libre Mejo also did the art on the Brian Azariel as Azarello written Joker Grapping novel from 2008 which shows the rogues of Gotham City in a more realistic light At the end of the novel were given a summary of the people who worked on the book For Mejo who began drawing for Wild Storm Studios at the age of 19 in 1997 Barbara Siardo an Italian colorist who started out with Gigi studio for Marvel Disney and Top Cow and Todd Klein a letterist who's been lettering comics since 1977 We're also gifted with six pages of commentary by Bermeo himself as he talks about the inner workings of creating this masterpiece of pop culture and What he looked forward to drawing during the process as well as his inspirations So now I'll leave you with the synopsis of the story itself as The Dark Knight pursues his most hated enemy Across the frozen landscape of Gotham City a bizarre series of evidence Threatens to steal his soul forever Written and drawn by comic books superstar Libre Mejo Batman Noel tells a Christmas carol of a different sort Hey guys if you like this video make sure you hit that like button Maybe put a comment below and hit that subscribe button and be sure to head on over to our Facebook page links are in the description below


itigate this Hazard to a level that we're comfortable with I think we're kidding ourselves Even if we have an effective standard consumers will use these products In foreseeable ways that any Reasonable standard wouldn't be able to address unless we come to the conclusion That a chest of drawers needs to be a tv stand and there's a standard for that I personally don't think my chest of drawers should be a tv stand because we know people are going to put A tv stand on top of a chest of drawers. That's my personal opinion So, uh, I've used the first half of my time Talking but it was fun to get in a debate with my republican colleague commissioner berkel on the subject I think we see more alike in the subject than is let on here Um in terms of of letting on as well the chairman mentioned that he suggested to put rule making In the operating plan an a n pr Mr. Borla's you mentioned that staff considered putting an a n pr in in furniture, so Is this a chicken and the egg scenario? I mean who who instructed whom did this bubble up from the staff? Or as the chairman said did he instruct staff to put a n pr in a mandatory standard? It certainly came up from the chairman and but in terms of evaluating You know the chairman's request that is the thought process that staff went through and looking at the rule making It's a smart move. I used to have a ceo to him when he made a recommendation I uh, you know I pretty I gave it the pretty good thought as well Where I where I strongly agree with commissioner berkel here is and chairman with all due respect To put in our operating plan an a n pr Suggests, we don't even have the report this commission funded an essential piece of data to In to inform the commission whether or not the 20 57 14 standard is effective And we don't even have the results of that How can we suggest and dedicate resources that could otherwise be spent elsewhere? Into an a n pr without having the results of that work Now I know for a fact you don't have all these all these reports And i'm not suggesting that you hold them and you know and just keep your only keep you you get informed These come up when it comes up with the rest of the commission But it suggests that almost that why do we need this other report? Some people are saying that systems are rigged in washington dc It seems a little bit like this thing's rigged if we're suggesting that hey the outcome of that report better be A n pr and go into mandatory rule making Um, I was a strong supporter uh behind I think it was a co-amendment, but commissioner robinson took the lead I'm I'm happy to take as much credit for that for that forthcoming project in terms of determining the effectiveness of 20 57 as As is justified, uh, but because I think that's a critical piece of information to inform what we do next with future production and I don't think now is a place to discuss or to debate whether or not an a n pr is appropriate at this point I'm in the op plan, but I do think it's appropriate to talk about whether or not Anchoring it should be funded in the in the operating plan I think before and i'm willing to move off of op plan, but I think the chairman would like would chairman Would you like me to yield to and no, okay? I thought you were looking to wanting to respond on on Further on furniture tip over or anchor it um I will I will move off of anchor it at this point in time, but I felt obliged to to uh Defend my position on why I think it should be a funding priority moving on to crib bumpers If we can the staff just recently completed a a package With four identified regulatory options to address the risks of deaths and injury associated with crib bumpers and In looking at the mandatory standards table staff does not Suggest or recommend preparation of either an a n pr or an n pr But instead suggests data analysis and or technical review What is foreseen in terms of the staff's recommendation as opposed to I would otherwise Lead to be led to believe that staff suggested Rulemaking if there was if it said a n pr n pr as opposed to d atr But there was a thorough amount of work that was done What what more in terms of d a data analysis and or technical review still needs to be done and is recommended by staff So in 17 on crib bumper staff has Main activity is related to the voluntary standards related to crib bumpers There is also some data analysis work in there The last direction from the commission on rulemaking was to initiate rulemaking as a result of approval of the petition and as laid out in the record of commission action So we've have laid out in the package four different rulemaking Options all of which from 104th really through Do require work as we laid out in the package and so the 17 work relates to Voluntary standard work also looking further at performance requirements. I think it was clear from the package that there was still some work that could be done on Defining performance requirements. There's a lot of unknown still and that's the other area that staff's looking at for crib bumpers You mentioned that staff was under direction for rulemaking In that case, why why wasn't there a recommendation for a npr npr in the mandatory standards table? we When we looked at what we needed to do for 17 we just we felt that For the resources we were putting forward that Doing both more I guess additional data analysis that research piece on the mandatory side in the voluntary side Was the appropriate way to go in 17? Okay, I'll just close it up. If can I know I'm out of time But if we were suggesting to to not go forward with mandatory rulemaking I just wonder why it wasn't a similar approach as is suggested with upholstered furniture to send a briefing package to recommend terminating any Rulemaking procedure moving forward to then unclutter further the regulatory agenda. Sorry for going over mr. Chairman Dr. Worley, so you want to address that I'm happy to use my time for that mr. Stevenson Sorry, can you repeat that question? I If staff is not recommending moving forward with rulemaking as they have Recommended not moving forward or terminating rulemaking on upholstered furniture I'm just curious as to why they didn't follow a similar approach with crib bumpers as they did with upholstered furniture And to not increase what's otherwise a cluttered regulatory agenda where we're not really promulgating that's all From the analysis and as we laid out while They were we recognized on crib bumpers that there are going to be difficulties with going forward with rulemaking Staff didn't get to a point where they felt that the recommendation should be to terminate rulemaking Thanks, dr. Borlase, uh, I would hope that uh, we can Run this last round and this will be our final round for a sake of Humaneness for the staff who sit in front of us. I'm sure that they would concur with that and behind us commissioner Others correct. So I'm going to not use up all my time as well I do want to thank dr. Borlase for those answers on the crib bumper package I've had strong feelings about this product for many years even when I worked for the prior chairman And I do plan to offer an operating plan amendment that I will of course circulate amongst the commissioners after discussing the staff About finding a path forward and even in the staff package that was sent up Certainly combined with the package that was sent up in 2013 I do believe that there is an ongoing hazard that is also addressable But I'll get into that later as the plan discussions continue Uh, I do want to just mention briefly about anchor it that I don't think the issue is an abstract one or a conclusive one about the Value of that program. I think just think it's all relative and you hinted at this commissioner moho rovick. It's about making very difficult choices Uh, I'm certainly open to any amendment that you may put forth to find this money But no surprise with the discussions that I've had with mr. Wolfson That at some point we have to know what we're getting for this money and while We may have a belief about its effectiveness for any education program I don't know that we've done the difficult work that I think we need to do to know that this money Considering how precious that it is for us for any I&E campaigns is actually making a difference So that's my hesitation with it. It has nothing to do with its It's uh abstract value. I think it's an excellent campaign In an ideal world, we would get five million dollars above our base I'm sure mr. Wolfson would be very happy with that To fund this and to fund it robustly and to put into it an evaluative component that would actually give us some type of Inclusive responses, so I've nothing more on that. Thank you again to the staff both for sitting here and enduring this I know that these are never easy. I think you did a phenomenal job And we look forward to working with you on the questions that we have and the amendments that we're forming commissioner adler I thank you, mr. Chairman, and I will try to be brief and I Have been reminded that we got a little carried away with the regulatory agenda and I've been implored not to repeat the length of that meeting but listening to commissioner moho rovick and My colleagues on tip over I don't only use a tried expression it you're both right because there are certain things that are Contradicting one another but I think it's fair to say they're both valid points To say that we're doing effective recalls Even if you don't approve of them recalls is a terrific mitigation strategy for stuff that's in the marketplace But the point commissioner moho rovick that I think you're making that is extraordinarily on target is That that's part of a multifaceted approach and we could have an effective recall program that still leaves millions and millions of People at risk and so the two are not inconsistent And it may and what you're doing is making a point which I confess i'm very sympathetic to that This might be an area if we can possibly find some additional resources To use to address tip overs because it is such an extraordinary problem. I also I don't want to get too lost into whether we do an a and pr we don't but I do want to go at least to a more generic Observation one of the things that I heard that makes me uncomfortable is this notion that well We don't know what the injury pattern is and I just want to reiterate that when the people who wrote the consumer product safety act Wrote it they went out of their way to send a strong message that we don't have to wait for a body count And I hope we never get into the posture that we Are immobile until we've seen bodies accumulate There are tremendous engineers within this agency who can look at Products test them and say this product is a hazard And especially when we've got an equally excellent human factor staff that can help Paint that picture and it would be my hope that we never have to wait for bodies to accumulate that we Find out early on that there's a hazard and we act decisively so End of comments. Thank you Commissioner Robinson just very quickly. Um, I I want to be perfectly clear that Mr. Wilson the campaign that's been put together for anchor. It's been outstanding I just and certainly I think this is a multi-front Effort to try to stop kids from dying and being seriously injured from the furniture tipping over But you certainly the beginning and end of what we need to do is not an i and e campaign as commissioner Burkle seems to be implying We first have to design out the hazard So I don't mean anything that I'm saying in terms of the other efforts that we should be making to in any way Imply that the anchor campaign is not important But as we all know it's going to reach a limited number of people number one number two There are so many people with little kids that cannot anchor their furniture to the wall without paying a penalty that they Can't afford whether it's veterans housing whether it's whether it's public housing whether it's rental units There are we just know that there are limitations even if we got the message to everyone in the country There there are limits to what we can do with the anchor at campaign To to describe us as having been overboard going overboard on this. I think is is extremely Very very very inaccurate. There's still so much dangerous product out the dangerous product out there I think all of us have been Impressed in a very negative way at how much furniture both the kids report And we are finding that doesn't even meet the most minimal standard And and anybody will tell you that whether the voluntary standard that's in place does or does not Is or is is not adequate? Nobody's going to say it's anything other than the most minimal standard And there's so much dangerous product out there that doesn't even meet that But then as commissioner mo more rovick pointed out the deaths are happening with things that meet this standard And it doesn't take it a rocket scientist to to stand and watch I mean I was down in north carolina at the ace tam meeting and they brought out Product that had been selected for the committee and for the cpsc to see And they showed us what what furniture met the the standard and it was There was just no way that a real life situation with a two-year-old scampering around was going to in any way Be sufficient to to design out this standard. So I look forward to working on this Design out this hazard. I look forward to working on multiple fronts on this And I certainly think the anchor at campaign has been and is very effective But there are so many other fronts on on which we should be working Nothing further Thank you. I just wanted to emphasize my point and that is that If we are pushing for an anpr or we are pushing for a more stringent voluntary standard It's incumbent upon us to have the data that justifies that And until and unless I see this briefing package with the idis with the information the injury and death information And whether or not those uh dressers complied with the standard I I can't I can't make that judgment call and so I just believe we are data driven and that should be our emphasis I just want to talk briefly about um upholstered furniture and the package we started the discussion and I appreciated the opportunity yesterday um with regards to now what and um So we are going to get a briefing package. Well, we did get a briefing package on tb 117 and um Whether or not to adopt it as a standard and also with um a recommendation from the staff that we terminate the flammability rulemaking standard And I appreciate all the work that went into that and um found it very useful We talked about this a little bit yesterday, but I want to hear um From you today. How will the termination of the rulemaking um on the flammability affect The resources that are allocated with regards to this hazard So for 17 and I appreciate the question because it does highlight a point that staff wanted to make sure was clear in the tv 117 package While staff is recommending terminating the mandatory rulemaking That's not the same as staff not wanting to work to address the hazard anymore staff recognizes that when it comes to residential fires and especially deadly Uh residential fires that upholstered furniture the fuel load In furniture is a contributor to these large fires and we want to address that risk What staff saying is we want to take a couple other approaches that don't include mandatory rulemaking the other risk management approaches So in the 17 operating plan, we've put the resources towards voluntary standards work Put the resources towards Research and then you know other other work with what's available perhaps with scott wolfson and ocm Can you talk a little bit about the the briefing package that we're expecting with regards to terminating the rulemaking? Will that include all of the testing that's been done? All of the chairs and all of the research that's been done out at the lab From time to time we've seen the contracts coming across and being posted but The in-depth information that was gleaned from all of those studies and all of those tests that were done Will that be included in the briefing package? Yes, and that And I guess i'll turn to gc to talk about what are the requirements for terminating the package and What it comes down to is from ex hr. We provide all the technical information to support those requirements without Going into a legal analysis that I would provide to you In closed session the process requirements that are referred to earlier in terms of ROVs would be the same the staff would present to the commission A briefing package recommending termination and the reasons why they recommend termination with that recommendation for the commission To then make the ultimate decision. Thank you. I think my question is more technical in in that Will those the all of the testing that's been done to lead us to the point where Staff is recommending we terminate that room making will that be included in the briefing package? Yes, if it's not already published and referred to in another place we would include that as part of the body Of justifying our recommendation. Okay, and will the briefing package Present us with supporting data as to itb 117 wasn't adequate to address the smolder standard I'm not For the f y 17 planned work staff's not planning on doing any additional Analysis of tb 117 beyond what we presented in the briefing package last week. Okay One of the reasons for terminating the rulemaking is that staff can't make a connection between the small bench scale test results And compare that to the flammability performance So if that's a problem, and it's been an ongoing problem and the reason why they're advising us to terminate the rulemaking how then do we when staff is is In the voluntary standards process, isn't that a problem that will translate to the voluntary standards committees? I mean that same being able to to Find the connection between the small bench test How do you address that? It is and it's a recognized problem and staff's been working for years on providing Recommendations to the voluntary standards. I know From my time in engineering sciences. I think back in 2011 we sent a letter to ASTM with recommendations on how to improve Their voluntary standards. So staff's recognized it as a problem And you know, we've worked with the voluntary standards before and we plan to keep working with them on on addressing it One of my concerns and I think I alluded to this yesterday, but I'll say it publicly because we're now in a In the process of determining which way to go on flammability issue And so we are going to get this briefing package from staff that recommends we terminate rulemaking on flammability It seems to me it would make sense that we would pause And give us time to absorb and to read and review that information and then say to staff Policy-wise this is where we think we should go If we don't do that, how will staff determine Which direction to go in my understanding as nfpa deals with large open flames It seems like we've already made the determination that that's not the way to go So I'm under I'm trying to understand how will staff be directed to In this endeavor and how How will they focus their efforts? So we've uh In the 17 op plant our recommended efforts in 17 are aligned with the way we've we've put forward in the op plant So we would have to then it would be i'm coming upon the commission if we wanted to change directions Or we could do that before we vote on the ops plan. Correct. Okay. All right Um, we talked a little bit yesterday about nfpa and I I think you're going to get us the information about the standards committees and What the makeup of the committees are and whether who's at the table and how they they reach decisions So we'd appreciate that Correct. We're working on that. We just weren't able to get it turned around before this morning That's all I have for today. Thank you Thank you. Mr. Robert. Thank you, mr. Chairman and uh, just to stay with the pulsed furniture for a moment Um, I know you have in front of me because I distributed it to you as a reminder the v-star report from the mid-year f y 16 to get into Um, a level of granularity in terms of what we're going to fund staff To to resource towards a voluntary standard now nfpa 277 You mentioned the extent to which upholstered furniture Adds to the fuel load of a fire. So is that voluntary standards work to Mitigate or create a voluntary standard so that upholstered furniture can withstand large open flame Is that a transition from small open flame? Which might be from a matches or cigarette lighter where upholstered furniture is the first Item ignited to moving towards a different kind of hazard scenario where there's already A fire started and upholstered furniture is as you said contributing to the fuel load. Is that correct? I'll have to get back to you on the whether it's a small open flame or a large open flame with with nfpa 277 in that just to confirm because Different following as we've gone through it over the years There's been different definitions of what's a small open flame versus a large open flame So I just want to make sure I can get correct for you nfpa's approach on how they're defining The different flame sizes and the flame types and what it's simulating because it's been changed over the years Thank you in your own words. You said contributing to the fuel load Is what is envisioned behind contributing to the fuel load? That wouldn't be first item ignited right because fuel load assumes that there's already a load Yeah, not it's already a fire. You are correct that it expands it beyond first item ignited So if it was the something in the trash can that ignited first, you know And then and then the furniture ignites and then it limits egress And then we can find additional fatalities property damage associated with whereas if we mitigated it we could reduce that right correct Yeah, I think we're on the same page Nobody foresees barrier technology At all being a potential effective mitigator for large open flames. Is that correct? I mean I've heard of Barrier technology and it's limited potential with regards to small open flame, but is there is there any is is there any reasonable Mines that think in the fire protection arena that barrier technology could with could help mitigate large open flame I know we're still looking at that. Um, we've just finished in uh posted Last year's rounds of research. We're still looking at it Um, I think it's fair to say that we don't think it's at a point where we can point to You know, there's still a lot of applied research that needs to go on in that area To your point on barriers, we know there's a difference between a barrier for smoldering versus a barrier for Open flame kind of independent of the size and trying to resolve those two because one sometimes Uh propagates the growth of the other So if you have a good smoldering barrier, it may not work well for open flame and vice versa Thank you very much. Mr. Ray. I have some I have two questions in compliance um to page 26 project number 34 352 is um interesting to me in terms of a Suggestion that uh with our import surveillance activities will be able to start Focusing on defects and I know that's come up uh at the commission level And so I think there's a shared appreciation and an understanding of uh of what we hope to gain by that Can you provide some clarity in how we propose to go about that at import? I think uh many are very familiar as I am with our uh with our successful efforts with regulated products But in terms of defect analysis at the port of entry is one that uh peaks my interest So I'll um talk very generically without getting into specific um techniques we'll be using You know, I think we've um Highlighted the how the ram and the targeting system has helped us Um identify potential violations on a on a regulated side Uh, and we realized that on the defect side It's it's a challenge But what I would say is that we are looking at ways that we could do that And work with The import team working with the compliance team to help in those situations And some of that is um as simple as using the data to understand where Things that we've identified as the defects are coming from sources trying to identify potential sources where Products that are defective are coming from and and trying to target on that basis But without getting too much more specific We're looking at different ways to try to use the targeting systems to improve it beyond just the regulated Well, thank you. I applaud those efforts. I'm encouraged by them and excited about it And I'll be continuing to work with you in the uh the extent to which we're successful moving in that direction I think that's a wonderful turn The last point that I have for the meeting to the meeting today is with regards to page 20 on the compliance Uh priorities. I did notice a prioritization with regards to tracking labels And uh tracking labels and and their effectiveness with regards to I I've never seen them pointed to as uh as anything that is Improving recall effectiveness. I recognize that it's a congressional mandate and therefore we had to promulgate a a statute And my research has found out where that came from from a set of recommendations I came from commission or more and congress took their word for it What are we doing with tracking labels in terms of a priority for compliance in fi 17 So I won't get into the specifics of the enforcement policy that we're talking about but how would characterize this as This is really probably more of an internal efficiency Exercise that the office of compliance and import safety team has identified As a way to make the current process that we are using to enforce tracking label violations to make it a more efficient process well I would hope in looking at the limited resources you have available to you considering in a risk-based decision making consideration the extent to which greater compliance with our tracking label Regulation will help safety in any essence at all. I'm not suggesting Enforcement guidance or something other than that But there is a lot of different violations that we can direct attention towards and I'm just wondering what the yield To use a term that the chairman used earlier in get it ramping up compliance with the tracking label as I've still yet to hear anybody finding from what was expected through cps ia the Mandatory tracking labels for children's products. And in fact I researched as many of our recalls and none of them even mentioned the tracking label So I don't know how it it is also as the statute Intends it's going to help consumers Understand better whether or not a recall is associated with a product that they do or don't have so We can follow up on that. Maybe I can get a better understanding on Why that's considered a compliance priority for 2017. Thank you, mr. Chairman Thank you to the commission to the staff including our special assistants We are due to vote on october 19th in a public setting. There will be a lot of


Item number, SCP-001. Object Class, Euclid. Special Containment Procedures. All elements of SCP-001 are to be contained in separate, environment-controlled lockers at Site Zero. The location of Site Zero is Classified Level 5 and is only known by members of O5 command. Next to SCP-001, its transcriptions and data is restricted to O5 level personnel, except during Protocol Zero. Protocol Zero may only be enacted by a direct, unanimous act by the entirety of O5 command, and Protocol Zero procedures are to be disseminated only to those specifically permitted by O5 command. Description SCP-001 is a set of two objects and 33 documents, belonging to Data Expunged, alias the Administrator. SCP-001-01 and SCP-001-02 are, respectively, Data Expunged. SCP-001-03 through SCP-001-35 are a mixed set of handwritten and printed documents. They are normal in all respects, except that they do not show signs of aging or fading in any way, and dating of the paper on which they are comprised of has shown inconsistent results. The contents of these documents, as detailed below, consist of Data Expunged, as these objects formed the impetus for the creation of the SCP Foundation and all of its constituent activities and processes. As such, this information is only to be disseminated by direct order of O5 command, as per Protocol Zero. Classified level 5 by order of O5 command, eyes only. Unauthorized access of these documents is punishable by immediate termination. Addendum 001-01. Analysis of SCP-001-01 and SCP-001-02. SCP-001-01 is a smooth device, composed of an unidentified grey metallic substance, approximately 22 cm wide, 30 cm tall, and 1.5 cm thick. It is unusually heavy, weighing approximately 8.2 kg. It is equipped with a small digital display and has a single opening that appears to be a type of keyed activation switch. Attempts to disassemble the device or analyze its technology have been unsuccessful so far, as there appear to be no seams or fasteners visible on the device. Attempts to image the interior of SCP-001-01, utilizing X-ray or magnetic resonance, have resulted in inconsistent results, suggesting that the device is either too dense to properly image, or has inconsistent internal topography. SCP-001-01 appears to only be capable of displaying two indicators. One appears to be a status or progress bar with an accompanying number, currently at approximately 23%. The other indicator is a single digital counter displaying the number. SCP-001-02 is a small key, composed of the same unidentified metallic substance as the main casing of SCP-001-01. It is currently assumed that this is the activation key for SCP-001-01. Addendum 001-02, transcript of SCP-001 documents. SCP-001-03 is a personal diary belonging to the administrator. SCP-001-04 through SCP-001-35 were inserted between various pages of SCP-001-03 at time of discovery. Excerpt from SCP-001-03, page 1. I always hated the idea of writing in a diary. Documentation is one thing, but I guess I never saw the point in putting down my personal thoughts. The scientist in me is telling me that someday someone might want to know how this all started. Excerpt from SCP-001-03, page 3. They say that the first time is always the hardest. I have managed to secure funding and personnel from the federal government, and I have established an organization that will allow me to continue the research. President Eich insists that I turn the device over for safekeeping, but I have made it clear that I can't let it out of my possession. Excerpt from SCP-001-03, page 7. Progress, unfortunately, has been slow these past decades. I am adamant that we cannot reproduce the technology until we have found a solution, as I am sure that unless we kill both birds with one stone, we will simply hasten the process. Excerpt from SCP-001-03, page 9.  They had been reproducing the technology all along and hiding it from me. I will be moving on to the next 24 hours. This place is doomed at this point. Excerpt from SCP-001-03, page 15. Again, I will not make the same mistake again, but the mere thought of lying to the very people I need to reach my goal is bitter, but I can no longer afford to let them know the truth. SCP-001-05 is a page printed from what appears to be an inkjet printer found inserted between pages 15 and 16 of SCP-001-03. This page has been preserved in the same unidentified method as the rest of the documents in SCP-001. Memo from the Office of the Administrator. Humanity has existed in its current state for hundreds of millennia, yet only the last few have held any meaning for us. What did we do for the countless years before recorded history? We huddled in caves, warding off the night with small fires, fearful of the things that we could not understand. It was not just that we did not understand why the sun rose every morning. It was the mystery of enormous fish with the heads of men and rocks that came to life and monsters that drove those who saw them mad. So we called them angels and devils, begged them to spare us from their wrath and prayed for salvation. As time passed, their numbers died out and mankind flourished. The world began to make more sense, yet the unexplained can never truly go away as if the universe requires for there to be things we can never truly understand. We will not go back into the dark fearful night. We will not be ruled by the unknown. We will stand up for ourselves. Even as the rest of humanity remains uninformed, we will fight the darkness, containing it, and shielding it from the eyes of the common man so that they can continue to live in the blissful illusion of a normal world. Excerpt from SCP-001-03, page 22. Their faces haunt me in my dreams, hundreds, thousands of them, ones who blindly went to their deaths for me. Excerpt from SCP-001-03, page 28. Made a mistake. Told someone the truth the night before I left. Had to use the last of my original medical supplies. In a way, I wish he'd aimed for the head. Excerpt from SCP-001-03, page 41. This one solved an equation that could set a framework for the rest of the solution. I killed them by my own hand.  Excerpt from SCP-001-03, page 64. I suddenly remembered today what they told me before I left. They said that I probably wouldn't see anything, that I would probably simply fall asleep and wake up again. They lied. I can see them as they are consumed by madness, as the walls of reality crack and shatter, only to be replaced as if nothing happened. I can see everything. Final excerpt from SCP-001-03, page 68. It is finally done. The equations are complete, the math is sound, but it comes too late once again. This team will not have the time to construct the solution, and I will have to abandon the foundation again. But I do so with the knowledge that no more will have to suffer the same fate. SCP-001-34 is a worn handwritten page discovered between the front cover and first page of SCP-001-03. To whom it may concern? First, I want to say that I am sorry for everything.  If you are in possession of and reading this document, then I am probably dead. If that is the case and I did not bother to destroy this evidence, then that means I have also probably failed in my mission. This means that my responsibilities have now passed on to you, and that your fate and the fate of your world are now in your hands. I was not born into your world. I am a traveler from a parallel plane of existence, an alternate reality separate from your universe. The year from which I originate is of little consequence. If I've learned anything from my travels, the passing of time from universe to universe is meaningless. What is important is that in my plane of origin, mankind was highly advanced. We harnessed the power of entire stars, molded planets and moons alike to suit our needs, and even learned to manipulate the fabric of reality itself. We had conquered death through advances in medicine and technology, and we thought ourselves masters of our own fates. We realized too late that all such things have a cost, and that our greed and hubris would not only result in the loss of everything we held dear, but doom countless others as well. Our meddling in the structure of existence had opened up cracks and twists in the fabric of reality. A corruption of the multiverse that we had failed to notice earlier, because we could not see the pieces of our reality leaking into others. By the time feedback began to manifest, it was already too late to stop it. Before this corruption consumed us completely, we came up with one final fail-safe. We would gather up what knowledge we could save and sacrifice our world to send a single individual through to the next. This could not repair the damage that had already been done, but could bias the time to start over, to find a way to stop the corruption of reality. That individual was me. If you have not already found them, then the evidence to support my claims will begin to bleed into your world soon enough, like a rain of glass. The shattered remains of other universes will begin to fall and slip into yours. Things that defy your understanding, fixed loops and structures without meaning a rhyme that cannot be destroyed by any means you possess. Things that drive men mad and challenge all the assumptions that you hold dear. That which I carry with me is the final legacy of countless worlds. The equations a technology described in its pages carry with them the hope of stopping the corruption, a hope that has come with a heavy price.  At the time of this writing they are nearly complete, but time is ever against me. If I am no longer able to see this mission through to its bitter end, then it falls to you to finish what I began. Good luck, data expunged, the administrator. SCP-001-35 is a single handwritten page found between the last page and back cover of SCP-001-03. The handwriting in SCP-001-35 is inconsistent with that of the other handwritten documents in SCP-001. This is it. The last evidence that our civilization will have ever existed. No one is entirely sure what will happen when you activate the failsafe. Some of them are saying that the backlash from using it will instantly shatter what remains of our existence. Others are saying that using something of this power will merely accelerate the corruption by a hundredfold. Either way, it will be quick.   I can only hope that, with the time we've bought you, you can find a way to stop this disaster. If not, the device will keep track of the relative corruption level of local reality, as well as how many times it's been activated. A bit sadistic of us, perhaps? By the time you read this, I will already be dead. I'm sorry, but you have always been the stronger one. I don't have the strength to face the end with my head held high. Not without you. I love you. Addendum 001-03 SCP-001-36 References found within the documents comprising SCP-001 suggest the existence of SCP-001-36, an electronic device or large document containing comprehensive technological and mathematical data related to SCP-001. The current whereabouts of SCP-001-36 are unknown.