Okay, let's start then. So we don't have too much empty space at the beginning of the recording. My name is Erdiko VanCe, I'm also working for the OpenStack Foundation and I would like to welcome you all on this community meeting. This is basically a new meeting series and the goal of this series is basically to give an opportunity for projects to give updates and demos on the work that they are doing. This is a completely open forum and we are actively looking for people to contribute and present their work. So if you're interested in being up on stage on any of the upcoming occasions of this meeting then please reach out to my colleague Chris Hodge or basically anyone from the foundation who you have the contact info to and then we will make sure to get you up on the schedule. Another thing that we have is a community newsletter that you can sign up for. I threw the link to the sign up page into the chat so if you're interested please check it out and go and sign up. On the today's call we are introducing one of the new top-level pilot projects of the OpenStack Foundation. It's called Starting Acts. This project is a new software stack basically for edge computing and IoT use cases. It integrates together a lot of well-known open source components from open stack services to Linux, Kubernetes, OBS, DPDK and so forth and it also adds some new services focusing on important things such as high performance, low latency, high availability, everything that's important for edge and IoT. The team is also getting the first release out this week and it is also a growing community so I would like to encourage everyone on the call that if you're interested after hearing more about the project and the project team and the community if you're interested to participate please do so. We have a website for the project StartingActs.io with all the information that you need to know in order to be able to get started also don't be shy to ask questions and as we have two people on the call being way more knowledgeable than I am I would like to give the word to Bruce Johns and Ian Choliff to share more details with you about StartingActs. Okay can we see the slides on the line here? Yes. Okay I'm going to roll through here and hopefully my friend Bruce can join us back in flight here shortly. So my name is Ian Choliff, one of the members of the Starling X community and a member of the technical steering committee of the Starling X project. So as Ildeco was saying we're launching Starling X officially with our first release this week and it's a new top-level pilot project of OpenStack Foundation. We're really excited to be sharing with you today all the great capabilities that this project brings to the table providing high performance low latency and really a small footprint for critical edge applications and solutions today. Certainly looking forward to growing the community we've got a large community already established but lots of interesting technologies for people to contribute to and grow the code base and extend the promise of edge computing and cloud computing in general. So really excited to be here today and share the community aspects and also the technology. So from a project perspective there's a number of technologies and trends in the computing industry today as applications move closer to the edge or require higher performance at the edge whole new requirements are coming forth for things like autonomous driving, IoT in communities, mass transit and really bringing latency high bandwidth to these applications because more and more data is being generated closer to the edge of the network and it's really not practical to backhaul it all but we need low latency high bandwidth at the edge to deliver that solution. In addition we need to build in security because whereas typical cloud solutions are in a physically secure data center many of these edge applications will be in less secure locations at the edge of the network. In terms of the youth cases that this community is exploring VRAN so virtual radio access networks is certainly a very interesting youth case providing the capabilities to serve up high bandwidth low latency to the baseband units as well as the radios so really providing that that linkage and providing a virtualization layer to really radically transform and provide application consolidation at the edge of the network to really enable other use cases like multi-access edge computing where we're bringing virtual reality augmented reality to the table along with the radio network and tying that into things like connected vehicles as well. From an industrials perspective for healthcare we've got some really interesting use cases for imaging and diagnostics how can we improve the patient experience and the clinicians experience in terms of having all the data available to them seamlessly, transparently and being able to have a really informed dialogue with the patient and in a very secure way within a healthcare facility. Some more use cases so if you think about an autonomous car and how that concept applies to some other transportation modalities certainly rail is a very interesting use case where in a freight train there's a huge amount of momentum behind the freight train so being able to adapt the environment around it and provide security for people that are operating in and around the train through camera analytics and really transforming a locomotive into a rolling data center. Same thing in a ship so a ship has got a huge amount of data going through it and being able to leverage and consolidate all of that information and optimize the fuel burn in a ship for example. Also seen applications where we're joining the HMI so the human interface into automation and controls for virtualizing programmable logical controllers as well as providing full digital twins of control systems for simulating and and doing analysis of very complex control systems and really taking that to an edge cloud in an air-gapped environment is critically important. From a micro CPE perspective again bringing content delivery, SD-WAN and all these solutions together where you've perhaps got a hierarchy of clouds with some centralized cloud with again distributed distributed control solutions for providing content delivery at the edge of the network. So what problems is Starling X solving today? Certainly we're seeing a need to drive compute to the edge to do all this processing and minimizing the backhaul. It's really changing a cloud computing architecture challenge which initially started with driving up the scale of computing and providing mobility of applications within a data center into a massively distributed data center that is a really a hugely interesting classic distributed computing architecture that is going to require new approaches and new solutions and that's the thing that excites me about Starling X is how do we attack and overcome some of these really interesting distributed computing architecture challenges. So really the intent of this project is to reconfigure and take the foundational elements of cloud technologies built on top of the outstanding work that the OpenStack community has been doing for for many years now and see how we can take these technologies and distribute them geographically and drive the adoption of edge computing and really bring forward some of these transformational use cases that we've been talking about so far this morning. So we really want to drive down the friction because of adoption of these technologies cloud computing is maturing but still not super easy to adopt and as you drive these technologies to the edge of the network we need to lower the friction make it easy to manage and deploy all these all these great technologies. So let me talk a little bit about the stack that the community has built and where we're going with some of these technologies. So we've built a very scalable and deployment ready solution. Obviously we build on top of a Linux OS bring together technologies like KVM, OpenVSwitch, DPDK, Ceph and others to build a solid compute stack infrastructure. So we build on top of Linux. KVM is the primary hypervisor of this project. We layer in OBS along with DPDK so the OBS DPDK project for virtual switching and then layer in OpenStack services for the cloud control plane. So we're leveraging projects like Nova, Neutron, Keystone, Ironic, Cinder, Glantz, Heat, Swift, Morano and the telemetry family of projects like Panko for example. And last but not least obviously the Horizon GUI is also available as part of this project. There's an additional set of projects that Starling X is managing in the Starling X repos and I'll go into more detail about some of these in the subsequent slides but I'll touch on all of them at this point. So config management is all about managing and deploying the services to the various nodes within the system. Fault management is all about monitoring and recovering faults that may be in this very small edge cloud, being able to provide REST APIs to be able to query what faults are where in the system as well as providing traditional interfaces for some telecom use cases for things like SNMP. Host management allows us to manage all the hosts in these clouds, monitor the services that are going on them and take them in and out of service so that we can actually do some maintenance on them as well. Again as we get to the edge of the network there's less touch available and big barriers to actually rolling a truck to go and manage these remote hosts. Service management is an overall maintenance framework that allows us to monitor the health of every individual software process on the system, asynchronously recover any of those services that may have issues with them and seamlessly recover them and get them back into service without impacting the operation of the cloud. Lastly software management is all about how do you make sure that your cloud is running the latest and greatest software so being able to upgrade from one release of another of this curated stack of projects as well as a framework that allows rapid deployment of fixes to any CVEs that may be in the cloud or bug fixes or bulk changes to the infrastructure within this cloud context as well. So one of the things that Starling X is particularly interesting about is you know traditional open stack clouds are typically deployed in in data centers at very large scale. Since we're focusing on the edge we have to really focus on the on the footprint so we have three main topologies that we're able to deploy a single hyperconverged single server solution where all the compute services the cloud control plane and storage services run on a single node along with VMs. We scale that up into a one-for-one protected pair of servers where this is a critical infrastructure application and the the user wants to be able to be redundant from any hardware level failures as well. So that's the next scaling point. On the far right hand side we have the multiple server configuration where there's a top of rack switch dedicated controllers for the open stack services and Starling X services for the cloud control plane dedicated storage nodes and this really allows much much more scalability and a variation of this is also where we would have a centralized cloud control plane and remote hyperconverged nodes where you're able to have manage those across a geographically distributed set of sites as well so but it all provides a single plane of glass to the cloud operator. So drilling down into some of the services at the next level of detail as I touched on configuration management is about managing and installing the initial cluster but also making it really easy to add new nodes to the cluster and manage all the all the configuration through a declarative framework. It also allows us to provide new nodes that are added to the cluster with personalities so it's a new node, a storage node, a compute node or some other function. As we talk about higher and higher performance solutions the inventory discovery allows us to configure and provide visibility into the huge page configuration for memory configuration for very high performance applications as well also making things visible like GPUs and cryptographic accelerators as well. On the host management side we're able to manage and deliver the full life cycle management of the host so bring a host online but then bring it in service and then be also able to monitor if it does fail and then use that information to migrate VMs to active nodes and things like that so very critical during the management phase and the upgrading phase of the cluster as well. Host management also provides a framework where board management BMCs are available to do out of band activities like power on off also provide visibility into the cluster in terms of any hardware sensors thermal fan again gives a next layer down of visibility into the infrastructure and allow recovery and maintenance actions to take place and all through an easy to use REST API. Software management is a great framework that allows people to deploy corrective content or security vulnerability fixes out to out to these clouds be able to manage and automated use an automated framework to roll through a full cluster so you're able to add a patch to the controllers and then through a programmatic interface the system will automatically upgrade all the hosts migrate VMs around the cluster to minimize the impact on the running application so it looks at the available resources and uses live migration to seemingly migrate seamlessly migrate these workloads around again we use the same framework to do upgrades from one well we will do that in future future releases of Starling X where we'll be able to migrate from one release to another and be able to do this in a seamless way so that the framework can be leveraged to do this in an automated way so you're not tying up operators with a lot of keyboard work to migrate through all the hosts and get them up and running to a new release of Starling X so very interesting framework that allows people to do some some pretty cool things in terms of making sure the the security of the the cluster is up to date and operating optimally so that that's a bit about some of the the frameworks and technologies we're leveraging today what Starling X brings to the table in terms of additional services and how it all fits together into an easy to use and seamless framework for for the edge I'd like to move on and talk a little bit about where we're taking the technology and enabling some really interesting new and exciting technologies that are around in the industry so we're really turning the stack on its head in some ways the community is working on today containerizing all the open stack services to make it even easier to deploy and manage with a zero touch provisioning framework along with a declarative framework leveraging projects like OpenStack Helm obviously having a local Docker registry and running Kubernetes services to manage all the all the containers as well the initially the Starling X services will run on bare metal but our our view is the architecture will evolve and those services will also migrate to containers with service management which is monitoring the underlying all the underlying software processes you know we'll have to figure out some interesting ways to manage that in a container so again some really interesting problems as we move to a more of a tainer centric environment and really allows us to do a lot of flexibility in terms of quickly adding new services so if a user wanted to deploy and configure a new service they'd be able to update a declarative framework and then deploy that in a very cloud native kind of way and you know we're really taking these concepts to the edge of the network again focusing on making sure we have a very small footprint for the solution and making sure that this fits in one and two node configurations and then scales up into a distributed edge cloud configuration we're using Calico as the initial networking plugin bringing stuff to the forefront and leveraging Helm and other other projects here so we're really broadening out of the ecosystem this will provide you know continued full support for virtual machines and building on on the container support that's present in in the current release for applications but also taking it to the next step where we're containerizing all the Starling X and OpenStack services in the future so a really interesting and exciting part of Starling X and really encourage people to join us and bring their ideas to this exciting next generation technology so so this really helps accelerate the adoption of edge technology we've got a lot of building blocks out there that people can make choices on Starling X helps accelerate that by providing some choices and building together a full stack solution that people can deploy that's been tested and ready to use for people today so I'm going to pause here and see if Bruce has been able to join us or I will I am here can you hear all right I can hear you Bruce over to you my friend computers are such fun so next slide please so we're very very proud and happy to be part of the OpenStack Foundation and part of the OpenStack community and we're fully committed to the four opens of software development we look for our technical contributors to make all of the technical decisions under the guidance of our technical steering committee which I'll talk about in a minute we're committed to building a diverse open and strong community next slide please so this is actually a fairly large project and in order to help us manage the complexity and to you know kind of reduce the scope of what people have to think about as they're working on it we've divided the project up into a number of sub projects each of the services that Ian has been describing for you today as its own project they are slightly dependent on each other right now and we're working to reduce that dependency in support of those main projects we have a number of other sub projects for documentation for tests for release for security we also as part of the build we include a number of open source packages and so we have sub projects that help us manage those life cycles we're constantly scanning for updates from the upstream packages for fixes and cvs and etc each of the sub project teams has a lead a team lead a project lead they will have a number of core reviewers and of course contributors and I'll talk about all of those on the next slide so we've borrowed a lot of our governance from both the open stack community and the kata containers community who've done some really pioneering work and really good work and defining how to run a well-run open source project so we're calling a contributor someone who's made a contribution in the past 12 months and anyone who is a contributor can run for and vote for the elected positions that includes the tsc and all of the leadership roles that I'll talk about in a minute a contribution can be code it can be test it can be documentation um we're trying to keep this simple and automated so we really look in the garret cues and see who's contributed and then if needed the tsc can provide contributor status for people who've made other contributions to the project that don't necessarily show up in garret we're also using the concept of a core reviewer these are active contributors and experts in a particular technology area they're appointed by their fellow core reviewers their main responsibility is for reviewing changes and specifications and the cores have the ability to merge changes into the garret tree the next slide please so we've we've split the traditional open stack ptl role into two separate roles in starling x so we have a technical lead per sub project that sets the technical direction for that particular sub project we also have a project lead who's doing the coordination work and the tracking and the communication and serves as kind of an outside facing ambassador to the project and we're doing this for a couple of reasons one is that we've been blessed with the people on the on the teams who can fill these roles and second reason is is that there's a specialty of skills so people that are good at project level work aren't necessarily strong technical people people that are the strong technical people aren't always good at the project level work so it's a way for us to optimize the team and to let people work on what where their skills are best suited next slide please so overall the project is managed and led by our technical steering committee they're responsible for the architecture of the project for approving new sub projects for archiving sub projects that are no longer needed or no longer active it's also the place where the buck stops and any final decisions or escalations or disagreements with the team can be resolved in the technical steering committee the current governments governance says that this will be seven people the initial group will be appointed that we will move to an election-based system within the first year of the project the initial members are Brent Ian Dean and Saul let's go on so there's lots of places you can start looking at our code is available in git garret we have a wiki that contains informal documentation we're in the process of moving that documentation into the the a document documentation repository where it can be web accessible if you go to starlingx.io today you can start seeing the results of that I'm very very pleased with the work that our documentation team has done in moving the content off of the wiki and into the formal track documents we're tracking our bugs in launch pad we're tracking our stories and storyboard and we're we have a specs repository where you can see the currently active and approved specifications that the team is working on next slide please so you do not need to be a member of the open stack foundation in order to contribute but if you'd like a vote in the foundation board director's election you probably would want to join I strongly encourage people to join the foundation it's a pretty cool place if you're contributing on behalf of an employer then please make sure your employer has signed a corporate contributor license agreement next please so we have a free no channel we have mailing lists we have email we have weekly calls we actually each of the sub teams has a weekly call the overall project has a weekly call the tsc has a weekly call we encourage everyone on this webinar anyone who may watch it later to feel free to join our mailing list so check us out on irc welcome to have you attend the weekly calls and thank you very much we're happy to take any questions that you have thanks Ian and Bruce I see questions in in the chat so I will start with reading in those and then if anyone else has questions then either type it up on the chat or just ask it after these two are answered so the first one is from Andrew he's saying footprint consideration is key as mentioned what the actual memory requirements for a single server deployment and what are the system CPU needs so the the memory footprint would be dependent on the number of VMs that somebody would want to deploy so it would be not just the platform infrastructure but you'd have to take into account the the amount of memory depending on the number of VMs that people would want to run we have some recommendations in terms of anywhere from 32 gig to 64 is typically what we what we see in terms of cpu footprint we can fit the base services in a one and a two node configuration into into two physical cores so very very small footprint okay I guess the question was obviously the number of application of the determines the amount of memory and cpu for applications clearly but the question was more about the system overhead right so on the cpu side it's one to two cores okay and the memory again it depends on the number of VMs that you want to manage and what services you're running but you know sort of guidance we give is 32 gig okay thank you okay the next two questions are from Phil he's asking about the first target use case you are looking for so there's some natural use cases for Starling X there's a number of telco use cases if you think about putting edge servers at the base of cell phone towers and be able to manage those remotely those kinds of use cases are fairly natural we also think that there's a number of use cases around factory automation and industrial deployments where moving computing resources closer to the manufacturing line and doing more processing closer to the manufacturing line can benefit the the overall manufacturing process thanks the the next question is again from Phil he says I understand the technical details are based on open stack and containers and there are similar projects to this and he's asking about the differences with other mac projects so I'm probably not the best person to talk about other mac projects I'm not sure what what projects he means Phil are you there can you maybe clarify the question so I'll go ahead and try to answer anyways I think the the the value proposition here is in a couple areas one is the the new unique services that Starling X provides that simplify the manageability and the upgrade ability and the overall maintenance of the platform and the second is is that the system is validated and tested as an entire stack so the components have been optimized and tuned and validated together to ensure that they all work and can be easily deployed so should we move on to the question from mark about the integration with Starling X and Nova yep so I'll I'll take a shot at that and Ian may jump in there are a number of changes out of tree changes to Nova in Starling X we are actively engaged with the Nova community to get those upstreamed get them accepted by the Nova community or re-engineered in Starling X to align with Nova we're actually at the PTG we had really good sessions with Nova with Neutron with several other open stack related projects the Starling X team is working very hard to reduce the patch backlog that we are carrying right now it's very important for us it's very important for the community we're down by a third of the open stack related patches since we started the project so we're making ongoing and continued progress to address the the delta between Starling X and the upstream masters yeah and I would add at the PTG in Denver there's a great dialogue with the Nova Nova community you know there are a number of specs that we've contributed to the Nova project and they're under under review by the Nova team right now and you know that that will continue the collaboration with Nova team and you know looking to accelerate those reviews cycles so there are people on the call to who are interested in that please please get on and promote the reviews that that you see there happy to happy to get input from folks sorry if I could add follow on to that do we have an idea of a timeline for what release these might be landing in well I think that depends on the adoption of these other projects so we've got to work into their existing work work queues and and backlog so you know there's there's a lot of review cycles that go on so it's something that we're actively working release over release so there's there's specs and changes submitted to Stein already across several of the open stack projects and everything we want won't go into Stein so it'll go into whatever comes after Stein excellent thank you so who do we contact to create a proof of concept you can contact the community on our mailing list you can reach out to me directly you can reach out to Ian directly either one of us would be more than happy to help with any proof of concepts of Starling X Ian can you talk about the GPU question I don't have the details on that yeah so the the approach right now is is to leverage the GPU pass-through capability and also work with vendors in an open way to have a V GPU so virtual GPU capability and uh those vendors are working on some of those technologies so it's really a vendor vendor agnostic approach I am aware of community members who have done done work with Nvidia and others and like Intel for example as well so I'll take the acreno question um what is the relationship in roadmap vis-a-vis acreno and Starling X so um both uh both Intel and Windriver have representatives on the acreno technical steering committee we're very much a part of the process I'm part of the acreno community myself there are blueprints that are being submitted for Starling X within the acreno community there's work within both communities to try to align in general the the plans that Ian discussed for containerization include using airship which is part of the acreno stack that AT&T is defining in their blueprints so I think the answer to the question the short answer is the community's overlap and there's several of us that are part of both yeah I'm also a member of the acreno community and and you know it's a community that's evolving and we we plan on that continue our our work in that community and making sure there is good alignment between Starling X and acreno okay so the question on the state of OS abstraction is something we're just starting to work on it's a very large effort the software updating software upgrades that Ian described right now need abstraction layers built into them in order to handle other package file formats validating on a new OS maintaining additional OS every OS we add to the project multiplies the validation effort so we're looking at but we're very much looking at moving in this direction we have a sub project created called the multi OS sub project for addressing those issues and working on them and it's all being actively worked in the community right now yeah I think it's really important to highlight that the multi OS project is just getting started and you know providing that layer of abstraction that Bruce mentioned is is what that sub team is focused on and you know we're looking for expertise and contributions from other other groups and other Linux variants to help this multi OS project provide that abstraction so that we can provide that base OS flexibility to starling X users and developers we're also working hard to make the services more independent so they can be used in other ways and other systems there's a lot of value in the technology that's that's been open sourced here and we're hoping to see that value fully realized other questions it seems that all the questions are answered so with that I would like to thank you again Bruce and Ian for the amazing presentation for those of you who are interested there are a lot of links in the zoom chat including the the website starting axe.io the website contains all the links that you would possibly want to have like to the code the documentation communication channels such as mailing list and IRC channel so if you have further questions please reach out to the community and ask them on the mailing list or on IRC this meeting is also recorded so we will post the recording to the website as well once it's available so you will be able to listen to dad and I also mentioned that there is a community newsletter that you can sign up for the link for that is also in the chat as well and with that I would like to thank you all for participating and see you all on the next webinar slash community meeting and everybody thanks this is Chris Hodge from the open stack foundation and I want to thank everybody for joining us this is kind of our second big community meeting for the first few of these we're actually doing them at a very high level the previous week's meeting was about project governance if you follow the link to the ether pad in there you can you can see the the slides to that to that meeting the first few of these meetings are probably going to be a little bit higher level but as we move on I really want to encourage everybody within the entire open stack foundation community across all of the strategic areas to contribute you know talk about exciting things that you're working on and you know really make this this meeting about you know kind of showing you know sharing with the entire community the work that we're doing so thank you for everybody who came to this meeting and if you would like to contribute to a future meeting please feel free to contact me at chrisatopenstack.org thanks and with that I think we'll we'll call it into the meeting


Do you have the same issue with the camera doesn't working? So sorry, this is another translated in English, but with the camera doesn't working, all blacks train on teams. Even if it turns on and works with other apps like Zoom, I did try to reinstall help only one time and keeps not working after one call. Yes, plain and simple. My experience, personal experience? Yes. It turns out that it was basically a reboot, and then teams would see it again for whatever reason. It is a situation where I think too many apps were using my camera because I would switch between Zoom and a team. That's the thing. It's hanging on to the video somewhere. There's a tab where there's a camera open. That's the most common scenario. Yeah. It's holding on to it, and it actually probably was because I had to go do a go-to meeting. I haven't been at a go-to meeting like forever, and that was a browser-based because I don't have the go-to client loaded. So the browser tab comes up and asks you for permissions to use your camera and your microphone. When you do that, that's for your whole browser session. So it's not just that tab, it's the whole session. So you have to close your browser, and then it releases your camera supposedly. So anyways, yes, that happens. Reboot picks it for me, but it's pretty common problem, I think. I have the same issue even switching between Microsoft tenants. That's why I was late for signing in today. I had to restart my computer because I was in a different tenant logged out and my camera wasn't working. So it's not just from one platform to another. It's just teams like, my mind takes my camera and holds it hostage. There's no way to go, I don't know if there's a process you can kill in the background that would know which is which, but yeah, control-alt-delete, restart, see you by. It seems to fix it. It's sad but true that there are so many problems that are, the first thing, the resolution is, did you try turning it off and on with it? Well, it's the other reason I have a little slider on my camera that I can close because I don't know whether no one is active or not. Yeah. With any of these web conferencing applications, have a startup service that would lock a camera? I know WebEx does, because WebEx actually installs a service, the Cisco WebEx service. I don't think it locks the camera. I think they say that it makes a quick startup, so it doesn't take so long for it to actually initialize. I can tell when an app uses my microphone, because I got this little thing in Windows 11 now where you have a little icon in your test bar that pops up, and it says an app is using your microphone. I don't have, what I want to have is a little icon that pops up and says an app is using your camera. That would be cool because Sherry, then I wouldn't have to have that slider or that cover. I know when an app is actually using my camera. Yeah.  I mean, I've got the light that's in the camera, so I see that too, but then you'd see it that, hey, there's a service that's utilizing the camera somewhere. This is not really- That's good feedback, Mike. That is good. This is not Microsoft Teams specific, but on one of the later updates of Android, now it has a little green dot that lets you know when an app is listening or watching. Yeah, iPhone has it too. It can be a little scary when you're in what you think is just like a simple interactive app, and all of a sudden this green light comes on. You're like, well, why are you listening to me as I'm- Well, that's how it knows to be responsive to your every whim, and if you want to ask questions and things too, that's why. It spies on me all the time and it activates, and it starts transcribing what I'm saying or what's on my screen and it creeps me out. It's like, no, I will act just like, I will turn on the on button when I want to actually talk to you. I don't have that, hey, Google or hey, Bixby or I don't do any of that. Let me just say I'm really uncomfortable with this line of discussion that because our AI overlords are clearly listening and I don't want to get them angry. Let's just move on, just move on. Don't question it, just do it, just move on. More tinfoil for my hat, please. Hey, hey, Alexa, Rick roll me. Christian's got Alexa in his office.  That worked, that's awesome. Did it really work? That's hilarious. It really works. Test to see if he's got his payment account tied to it. So you can say, order more kiddie. All right, we're moving on, all right.


But first this talk was very informative, but I fear that a lot of people are just going to get stumped by the word schema. So for the convenience and understanding of the larger audience out there who don't speak the same technical language like both of us do, can you explain schema in very simple words for us? Absolutely, absolutely. So let me let me take, you know, explain that by a small example. You know, we all know events, right? We all know events. Now this event, for example, this event when, you know, when, when this talk got scheduled, there are different content properties in that talk. There is a time that it starts. There is a start time. There is an end time. There is a speaker, you know, which is me right now name, right? There is an organization name. There is a, you know, link, right? Now these are all different content. Now there are two ways of inputting that content into a content management system, right? Either you can club on all that, you know, in one, one text field and input that all that content into a one text field, or there is another way where you say start date, start time, end date, end time, right? Speaker name, zoom link, right? Topic, right? And have all these different fields. Now, the two, so from a, from a, from a front end point of view, both are displaying the same content. There is no difference in the, from a front end point of view in the same content, right? It's still showing, you know, the both of the content are showing the topic and the name and the speaker name and start time and time. But on the back end, where you have defined different fields, what it is doing, it's a very structured content. That means the computer, the system understand that what that, you know, content means. But if you put that all in the text field, the system doesn't understand what that means. That means the Google doesn't understand what that means. Unless and until, you know, it does a lot of effort to essentially from an LLP point of view to, you know, find meaning out of that content, right? And that is the difference between a structured and an unstructured content. And schemas are essentially predefined structures to the structured content.  I mean, you know, you know, somebody actually claimed, you know, I asked this question to one of very senior person in this industry from an SEO point of view, and he said, if there is 97% of the use cases out there, you know, there is a schema out there. There is a structured format, right, which is already out there. So what do you have to do when we say implement schema, that means make sure that when you're defining content type or the fields in your content, right, you adhere to that structured format of schema in that, you know, you know, in that your content type. I mean, made sense. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I'd like to continue on this. But before that, if anyone of you in the audience have any questions, please post them on YouTube or on zoom and I'll be taking them. So continuing on this, this bit itself. So one of the things that I would add to the schema is that if anyone has not come across schemas just go to schema.org. That is probably the starting point wherein you can see one of the largest repository of the structures that are accepted by or agreed upon by the by the web community and lots and lots of organizations are honoring that. And as as Gaurav just pointed out, there are predefined formats by which you can define and therefore inform our program program or a or a software that this is how this is an event. This is a recipe. This is a person. This is an organization and so on and so forth. So this is a very, very, very essential part of having information in a structured way on the web. But Gaurav, you said that even Fortune 500 companies don't implement it. Why do you think that happens? Why is that the case? The majority reason is essentially, you know, awareness, right? You know, it's not the only reason. It's always an afterthought. It's always an afterthought. And what that also means is that, you know, it's a pain. Right. So for example, New York Times, right, as I said earlier, the structured when they started implementing cooking, right, schemas, right, recipe schemas. That means that they went from, you know, few, you know, seven, eight fields to a 50 field form. Right. Now, what you're asking the content writer to input content in a 50 field, rather than a 10 field. Right. Now that's a, that's a huge ask, right, if you will, that's a huge ask, right? There's a lot of conflict. There's a lot of traction. I mean, you know, that, sorry, there's a lot of issues, right, that happens if you start implementing such things in a large organization. But having said that, right, there is lack of awareness, right, in the digital leadership, most of the times, right. And they know about schema, they have heard about schema, but how important it is, is something that's still very, very few digital leaders understand. Right. And who do you feel should be championing this in the sense that is this something that the developer should come in into the organization and tell and talk about it, because that's what I feel at least personally because it's definitely quite technical nature. But it is, I feel that it is, it is going to be hard for someone who is owning a business or running a business for them to understand that upfront. So what where would you feel should be the highest responsibility for introducing this in an organization, do you think this is, as you said, right, the, this concept is extremely technical, right. Right. And, and, you know, so that's why, you know, the tech folks need to champion this, right. But what they have to be a little aware is that, you know, it doesn't only involve, you know, the technical implementation, right, it involves a huge buy in, as I said, right from content teams. Because now they have to input the content into a much, much bigger fields than India, right. It always also involves, you know, buying from the business teams, because now it means that, you know, for the same content, which you were taking, let's say, you know, it's going to take, you know, much more time for building the same kind of content because it's a much bigger structured format to input the content. Right. So, so that's where and what also does is that it forces, right, it forces the people who are building content to adhere to a particular format so that they can't skip a particular field and they say, I'm not going to put this information, right. But because then, then your, it's the information is incomplete, right. Right. Right. That's where it means a lot of buying from the, from the business, right. But showing the importance definitely lies in the hands on the technical people, because in the end, you know, they understand the concept and how it is affecting the overall implementation. Absolutely. All right. Just moving on coming to voice a little bit more than structured data. Some of the examples that you just shared on in the talk today, are they really voice related searches or voice searches or they could have been just searches typed searches as well. So what is the element of voice component in the search examples that you shared over here. Sure. They only coming up in voice searches. So NLP for natural language search, you know, is, you know, I mean, when, so what, so can the natural language search happen, can happen on a mobile or a, or a web as well. Absolutely. It can. Okay. It needs, you know, there is unfortunately Google doesn't open the data and, you know, and, and, and the reason that they have got is that they don't want to bastardize the, the industry that it, you know, the way SEO industry got bastardized. Now, you know, but, but, you know, it is, it is at least the best we can do, right. The best way that we can get the data around, you know, natural language search. But no, but voice or no voice, you know, the point here that, you know, the content is usually not optimized for natural language search. Right. You have to optimize because the way the movement, right. And that's where these, these two sites are important because even Google, the way it treats a natural language keyword versus a normal keyword is very, very different. Right. When, when I say, you know, the content is not optimized for natural language search. I don't mean that, you know, you are not ranking on it. You might be ranking on it. But are, is it being, giving the information, right? So for example, right, for the same, you know, if you see that right here, you know, Google is, this is even the first video, but it's not that, you know, he's not giving the importance. It is, is lowering down the importance of that video. But you see that, you know, that, that she is still primed and said that this is out of this long video, right, long 18 minutes, you see that 18 minute video, right. Yeah, you know, these are the eight seconds that you should be looking at. Right. Make sure that mean that, you know, you have to always be very, very aware that for all those searches where you are, you know, where you are essentially coming on or ranking on how are you, you know, giving that information very, very quickly. Right.  Right. You know, don't have to really get into that argument of whether it's voice, not voice, but how do I optimize the content for natural language searches and give that information very contextually. Right. I agree with you because I do remember about. I would say about us, even six, seven years back, when you would search something like searching on Google used to be a skill that if you can't find the thing that you are searching for that means you don't know how to put in the right keywords or put in the right set of terms so that Google can understand what you're looking for and give you the right thing. You would almost as tech people, we used to blame our peers around that you don't know how to put in the right keywords in Google to get the result that you want. But Google is getting smarter over the last six, six and seven years. So it is now less about your ability to put in the right keywords, but more about the responsibilities taken by a software like Google are to figure out what is your intent and then give you the best result as possible. And for that reason, as you pointed out, if we give structured data, that means we are helping Google more. We are helping a software like Google learn and understand our content. So what do you and in last week, I was, I had given a brief session on technical SEO and and I was pointing out this this bit last week itself like the concept of SEO now has changed into how can we make sure Google understands us better than to preempt or or or in any way game the game the system and optimize for certain keywords and all. So what are your thoughts about this, like the entire talk that you gave today seem to be something very much on the lines of how to be do better at SEO in the modern era than specifically voice. So any comments or any thoughts around this? Sure. I mean, yes, you can you can definitely say that right and and and in the end right in the end, what see what what end up happening right so if you if you build your content in a way that you know it is and and I always when it when I when I used to do this talk earlier right and I used to go into a lot of critical concept and I really slowly and slowly realize that people are more interested to understand more practical implications. Okay. And what that's where I changed my talk, you know, in the last year or so, is that you know, what are the what are the what are some low hanging fruits that you can do right for for for building, you know, for optimizing your content for the voice. Right. Now, so yes, is it technical as you absolutely be technical as you know, but you know, but it is it is very very focused on to one part of the technical SEO, right, which is just just how do you optimize the content, or how do you tell your content, you know, Google, much better about that what that your content means, right context on the content, right, which is the bedrock of the voice optimizing your content for the voice work, right, because you know, you know, if you remember right earlier, the context precedes content content in the voice world. So the more you more you optimize your content for the voice world, right, the voice first world, right, the better, you know, chance you would have to you know, essentially run and the better chance you would have to, you know, you know, you know, essentially heard by your consumers on the keywords that you want to them to know information on, right, so it goes hand in hand right so yes, the more information, the better you tell Google what your content means, the better, you know, chances you have in the voice world. So I would take a step ahead and say that you're you're probably optimizing not just for voice search but also future of all forms of search is that absolutely. Absolutely. Okay. So one of the other things that I had in mind is that do you feel that there is a, it's kind of related to this because you said, people have been saying that voice doesn't work, something like that. And in my context at least, and I don't work with the same set of clients that you work with but give me some information around that a lot more organizations are focusing on ads and digital ads to get discovered than focusing on organic search or search optimizing for search in the first place. Maybe because it gives quick returns, maybe for some for me for other things as well, but, but largely organic search or ranking high on search doesn't seem to be as exciting thing as it was say, five, seven years back. Are you observing a similar thing or our ads taking over more than optimizing for search. Well, if that's the case, I mean, it's your clients are a lot in trouble for, so I'll give you a very quick example. Okay. If the ad and you know it's a little, you know, different from, you know, what we're talking about why is but you know just from an ad point of view, right. So if the content or if the if the strategy for the traffic acquisition strategy, okay, if ad centric, and if it is not being optimized, right on how your, you know, how it would end up bringing more organic traffic in the long run, right, then, you know, there's a big problem in the strategy. Okay. And even in that, you know, ad acquisition strategy, that the usual way or the right way to implement ad driven acquisition traffic acquisition strategy is when you know that you actually use ads to give Google a signal that this particular page is important for the users for a particular keyword. Right. Okay. Right. And, and, and, and essentially keep on optimizing it for right so for for the users are driving in so if a person come in and if you have a let's say 70% bounce rate from the ads, right. And that's why I don't really like this, you know, the, the landing pages concept of ad driven strategy, because it's very, very tactical. And if it's, if a, if a, you know, if if a company is doing that, then it's they're very thinking short term, right, they're extremely short term. You know, when I work with clients on an ad driven, you know, traffic acquisition strategy, I bring back them to the website to do a landing page for sure they had to have a farm. But the whole idea is that, you know, how, so if I'm able to let's say bring 1000 people from ads to a page and 1000 people if I'm able to reduce my bounce rate to a place where it's 20 30% right on that particular keyword. So it's a very, very good chance that it will give the signal back to Google that this is a good page that people are liking on that particular keyword. Okay. Okay, so if your ad driven strategy is not working on that lines, right to optimize, you know, your content, your layout, your structure, your CTA for to ensure that you have a very low bounce rate. So that you can find, you know, get a lot of more, you know, organic results in the future, then there's a huge problem in that strategy itself. Right. Sorry, go and complete your point.  Organic acquisition. So even the video that I showed earlier the logical video, it does talk about the organic, organic traffic acquisition. Right. And it is definitely a central whole centerpiece. Right.  So they can't think of ad driven strategies, which is extremely small, right, a month or a couple of months, you know, kind of a strategy, right.  Right.  But, you know, but that would not mean that, you know, you should not have a long term strategy. Right. And long term strategy is what is going to anyway give you results. Right. I do have a question around the thing that you explained when you say that from an ad if someone comes to your, your site and the bounce rate is low. The fact that Google gets a signal around it. So is this something that is documented publicly known or something like that, that this is a signal. There is a lot of growth hacking articles around it. Right. Okay. And not only Google, right. And it's a quick, you know, tip, right, for anybody out there, you know, which have worked. I don't know who wrote about this. Probably not me. I don't know somebody, somebody wrote about it. I don't remember. Exactly. So, so if you're, let's say if you have, if you're writing an article on a medium, okay. And a lot of people have actually seen that. So see everybody. Okay, let's look at Tik Tok algorithm. Okay, let's look at like any, any fights algorithm. Right. How do you come on the featured page? Okay. You know, or Tik Tok or, you know, everything, they essentially look at the particular content and they say, how much traffic is this content getting other people actually engaging with that particular content. Every damn, you know, platform works like that. Right. Right. And, and, and, you know, so for example, if you're writing an article on medium, right. Right. And you want that a mid medium article to get featured on that featured page. Right.  Okay, and a low or a low, you know, 50 C. Right. And just, you know, send some traffic, initial traffic to medium. So that's going to give a, give a signal to medium that, hey, this is something that people are liking people are reading. Right. And it automatically pushes it back to, to the feature page. It's a, it's a very well known hack actually now. I mean, have these have medium said that no, but are there any. I agree. You say usually I don't recommend these hacks. That's, that's my stand. But, but coming from God of this is something that if anyone wants to practice. Go ahead, give it, give this a shot. But with specifically with Google, it sounded because I have a counter logic in that is running through my head at this point of time, because if, if someone was paying ad revenue, if Google is getting ad revenue on something and then learning that this is actually working. What is the incentive for Google to actually start organically raising it because then it, it then it would end up losing that revenue also. On the other hand, I do get this, the understand this point where, where in all these platforms want to show the highest hit thing first, because they all want to show that they're best content out there because then only more people will have trust on it. But the revenue will start getting reduced if they started using that as a search signal. That's what it doesn't, it's not going to help Google in the long term. Right. And I think Google definitely understands that. Right. So, and, and this piece, you know, people have seen benefits. I have seen benefits with the clients, right.  See, in the end, you know, Google wants to make sure that, you know, it is serving content to people, which people find interesting, right, which people find worthy enough to spend their time on. That's the whole goal. Okay, which we are working on. Now, if in the long, if, if, you know, Google, don't, if let's say, you know, just take, take a moment for a moment, right, Google, you know, it doesn't push that back on the organic acquisition, right. You know, I mean, and the person, you know, and there's a good content that's being created, right. At one point of time, the organization will run out of money, right, to run ads. Okay. And, you know, and, and, and I think that's, that's very counterintuitive for Google in the long term. And Google has to help business, right. I mean, it's kind of universal that we have to make sure that we have to do the right things for our clients and the right thing would happen to us. It's a very, at least I know, but it works all the time, right, to answer all this, right, do the right things, the clients and the right thing happen to you. And I think that's what the motto is for business. And so it will not help Google in the long term, right, even if it's, if even it's going to help in the shorter term from ad revenue, not in the long term for sure. I mean, it is going to fuel if it helps the business, it's going to help them in the, in the longer term, right. All right, makes sense. Absolutely. Speaking of the voice based search again one more question I had was how if someone has to validate that voice based searches are increasing and obviously there are facts thrown like about 50% of searches have become voice based and all. And I assume it these these numbers that that come just this is just a side question to you, Gaurav, do these number combine all the bots and Alexas and Apple series and all of that combined or is it just voice search on Google, which is, which has increased really to a very large proportion of global So the 50%, you know, the number actually came in from one of our senior executives of Alibaba many, many years back in, you know, in, in a conference and that's been going around and, you know, for a long time people, you know, so yes, everybody did take that but very few people realize that actually where that number came from. Yeah, but actually came from Alibaba many, many years back that by 2020-50% of the searches would be voice based searches. So very old, you know, The, the last time that Google shared the data, okay, was 2017 when Google shared the voice based data. And, you know, and there is actually, I think, Indian Rajan and someone who had some of the article and some you can you can quickly Google it but I think, 2017 was the last time it opened the data. Right. And what it said that on mobile, you know, again, you know, I don't have that handy but in mobile, right, the, the, you know, the voice searches are the second number of searches, right. You know, and, and there was a number to it, you know, you can even quickly find it if you Google it. But after that, Google has not opened up the data. Neither Alex, neither Alex nor, you know, any of them and and in the last conference, there was one of the conference and I was actually talking to a panel which included all big shots of this industry. And I did raise that question that why you guys are not opening up the data. So the answer that came out from that panel was that because we don't want to bastardize the industry, the way the SU industry got bastardized. So I think Google just don't want to open the data. Okay.  And if you, if you, if you actually, if you put in any website name, you will find the keywords for which, you know, the traffic is coming on the site. And there is a section which talks about the NLP queries that is coming on the website. Right. So you can just look at the NLP queries and you'll find a lot of natural. This is hrf.com, right. Yeah, that's a very popular, popular tool in SEO. The question that I actually intended to ask that if someone is a website owner and they want to know how many of the searches to my own site is coming from voice. Is there any way for them to do it? How can they find that out? So hrf is one good tool for knowing that. Right. And then, you know, you can look at the, the, the Google's, the site console, right, the, you know, the Webmaster console, right. And, you know, you can find a lot of keywords there, right. If you dig in the data you can, you know, find there. There's been rumors. I know not confirmation, but there have been rumors that soon there would be a tab in there which would say voice in the Google search console, right. So at least the owners know that what is, you know, what is the kind of a searches are coming in. It has not confirmed yet. But for now it's just, so you have to look at the keywords, look into the keywords in which the, from a traffic is coming in and you have to essentially dig in and to find which are the natural language keywords. hrf does a good job. It gives you a complete different tab. It just ranks all this keywords. So if you are, you know, high traffic website, you know, you have to probably dig in a very, very deep into or find this searches. hrf does a good job to essentially just highlight them very quickly. Right. But, but in any case, non English vernacular searches in India and all a lot of it is happening on, on voice because it just, it's just easier to just speak it out to Google. Rather than to type a non English thing. So is that a trend or something that you'll, you have also observed that you are aware of. Oh, absolutely.  So I have some videos in the, which is actually high, you know, skipped I skipped because of the time. But, you know, anybody who's looking at some of the videos right here. Right. So, you know, I talk about a little accessibility. Right. And, and different videos, you know, out there, and these videos actually talk about a lot about accessibility and it has actually a video around.  Right. Accessibility is a very, very big focus. It's a very, very big focus. And recently even, you know, the accessibility standards that they got updated last year I believe or this year I don't exactly remember which year this got but, you know, in, in US, you know, the federal government essentially added that your, your content should be understandable in audio format as well. Right. Okay.  Right.  Right.  Yeah. It's, it's a, it's a fantastic piece. And I think accessibility is a huge, huge push. I have not, I have not really dwell deep into the data of myself on, you know, on saying that, you know, what kind of a searcher, what is the number of searchers and things like that. But again, you know, I've, I've, yes, I've heard a lot of people saying that, yes, you know, Hindi and, you know, other languages. Yeah. Right. Okay. We'll be running out of time in a bit. I'll take a few more minutes, a few, one is, as a closing thought, I just want to know that there are three different primary roles that I talked about at the beginning, which is content teams design and the technical or the development teams. Can you tell that for the future of search, including voice or outside it as well, what should be the role or what are the things that the content team, the design team or the development team should take the primary responsibility of in order to make sure that their websites are friendly for searches through voice or any future form that you might expect. So can you talk a little bit about what responsibility is the content team should be taking the design team should be taking the development team should be taking. Sure, absolutely. I can, I can, you know, take one of one by one. So I think the, the content team or the people who are responsible for content strategy and it's going hand in hand with the design teams as well because a lot of time design teams build this content strategy right on, you know, different right how the content should be structured and things like that. But if I just, you know, take these two, you know, in one go. What do you have to, you know, ensure that, you know, you are, you know, thinking about how some, how you're going to serve the same content over a voice based interface. Okay, how will somebody understand the context of the content, right, you know, which I've been talking about all my talk, you know, in the voice world. Right. And that's the that's something that you have to focus on. Right. All the time. That means that, you know, if you, so if you, for example, if you stuff on five different topics on one page, right, you know, if you're building a, if you're building a design, and in that design, you know, you're trying to explain five different topics in the one page.  Okay. So just, just be a little more aware that, you know, how would you serve this content from an to the voice world, right, from an accessibility point of view, right, you know, it's not an it should not be an afterthought.   Right. Don't. So when you're building this, this, this, these fields, or, you know, or these seamless platforms and show that it is in a structured format, right, if there is a, there is a, you know, there is no content piece that should go into an unstructured format.  Right, I think, I think the design team is particularly a team that might have difficulty around this because the kind of work they do is so visual in nature. And we are really, we are really saying that turn yourself blind and try to experience it in a way, but but then yeah, good tips for the three of them, the three groups. Where can we learn more about this? What if we want to understand more around voice search or the future of searches and all what should be our sources of learning? Yeah, so voicebot.ai, it's the, you know, run by the gentleman called Brett Kinsella, right, you know, that's right now the best platform for all of things. Even so he does a lot of, you know, data researches and surveys and things like that. So a lot of questions around, you know, where the consumption is going, what is the kind of consumption is, which people, what kind of people, what industries are consuming, he's trying to answer that.  I mean, and it's a very popular, you know, blog, right, it's more than a few million hits every month. So voicebot.ai.ai is probably the best place. Alright, so voicebot.ai. Alright, we have run out of time. I'll just close this thing. Firstly, I thank you, Gaurav, for spending a little over an hour with us early morning your time. There's a lot to learn. There's a lot of technical in nature, the conversation that happened today, but I can just summarize a few points that I had that had come out from the top that Gaurav gave. One is that use schema. Schema is all about structured data, which is to make sure that Google and other softwares are able to understand the context and the content that you're giving in. Conversational language use a lot of questions answer questions. This is something that Gaurav pointed out a few times a few times over and and also eventually this is at this point of time this topic from what I understand is still evolving. But from a larger point of view, as Gaurav pointed out a large number of things that we are talking about in this context is is really talking about technical SEO and it's really talking about how we make our information more understandable by search engines and and other tools that are out there so that they can make sure that the relevant answers come in. Whether search through voice being one of the focus area that Gaurav said or any other way as well like even if you people do start doing tech searches. If this was going to benefit in the long run anyways. So thanks once again Gaurav for this for your early morning talk. Before I close I just want to make a few points for our audience. One is that we are doing these sessions every Saturday neck from next Saturday onwards will go back to 11 am time which is the time when we do most of our talks in India when especially when the speakers and the participants are from India. We this today we talked about voice search next week we are going to do a more detailed discussion around amp. Of carrying forward from the conversation we had two weeks back where someone from the amp team Nana from amp team had come in and told us about amp. But in the coming if we are going to have a couple of developers around to talk about some practical considerations and as well as challenges that people have faced in implementing amp and is really amp. A great way forward in also trying to address that question in a way. We are also having conversations around PHP WordPress security. How do we use web page test more effectively some conversations around e-commerce trying to line them up at this point of time. And also designed oriented talk is something that we are lining up in the next few weeks. If you would like to hear any topic or if you would like to speak or participate in in any of the conversations. You can go to has geek dot com slash content there's a place where you can drop in your proposal and you can express your intent to participate or ask for a topic that is useful for all of us. So that's all from our side. Got of any closing thoughts. This has been great. Thank you for having me here.  Right, it was really fun to have a conversation with you to God of I hope you also enjoyed as much. Thanks. Thanks a lot. Have a good day, God of and a good evening to everyone else in India. Thank you. Bye.