Hey, everybody. This is Christian Buckley doing another MVP buzz chat. I'm talking to you with Arjun. Hello. Hello, Christian. Thanks for having me. How are you? I'm doing well and hope is good there. It's a good kickoff to the year. Anything exciting going on? Oh, nothing yet. Not just resolutions which I will not meet. So just that kind of things happening around. We have to put ourselves through that every year. I know all the things that we're going to do parts of. Make an endless list and make sure that it doesn't meet towards the end of the year. Exactly. Exactly. Well, that goal of not meeting your goals was met. So yeah, hey, congrats. Well, for folks that don't know you, who are you, where are you and what do you do? Hello. I am Arjun Menon. I am based out of Bangalore, India for my day job. I don't call it as a day job. The job which pays me. I'm a solution architect working for a company called Tata Consultancy Services, TCS. And outside that I am a Microsoft MVP in the Microsoft 365 development area. I'm also a co-maintenor of CLI for Microsoft 365, which is a command line interface tool, which you can use it for managing the Microsoft 365 tenants, upgrade your SharePoint framework projects, those kind of things. And I'm also a member of PNP. And I try to blog about what I learn, share it with the community. That's what I do it. Yep. Well, that's cool. And so you've been an MVP for a couple of years now. What was your original focus? What was your path to becoming an MVP? Well, that's funny. I mean, it did not start to look for an MVP. It did not start it that way. So what my journey was that I was contributing to the CLI for Microsoft 365, the one which I'm maintaining it. I started contributing to that through one of my friends, Rabia. She works for Microsoft right now. So when I saw her contributing, I liked that particular thing. And I started contributing. So that was the beginning of the journey. And I kept on contributing because I loved doing it. Not that I was aiming for MVP though. That was my journey if you ask me. So I continuously did that. Whenever I learned something, I tried to start blogging. This was my path to MVP. And then one of my call, I would love to call himself as my mentor, Valdek. So he nominated me, Valdek Mastika. She nominated me for the MVP. And that was the journey. And eventually I think I got it in 2022. Funny that the month which I got MVP, I think a month before was the month where my daughter was born. So hard to forget that. Memorable month. So the child being born. Later in life, that's what you tell the daughter, depending on how good she's being that month. Exactly. Ironically, because of that, I mean, awfully my contributions has been drastically going down because I have to check with the family. But that's a life, right? I mean, that's how it works. Well, that's great. And Valdek, of course, I know, so he long time, he was at the company I'm with now, Rencore. So for folks that remember Valdek from the years with Rencore, but now, of course, over at Microsoft. And I just noticed too, so you've got the links too. And of course, I'll have the links out on the blog, out on YouTube and everything, but out to your GitHub page where it has the links to the CLI for Microsoft 365 links. You have a probably a better link list here than you do on your MVP profile. But with the new site, of course, I've got that linked off the page as well. But yeah, so it's great stuff if you want to follow up with Arjen around that. So what are you, like what are you passionate about right now? What are you talking about? Like with all the latest news that came out, there just seemed to be so much. Like is your life renewed, dedicated now to co-pilot? It's funny, right? I mean, you cannot give an answer without using the word gen AI, right? I mean, everything, it revolves around that. So yeah, I mean, so basically before this whole AI revolution, I would put it that way, came into the picture, I was into the teams development, the Microsoft 365, teams apps development, that was the area which I was primarily focusing on. Now with the gen AI, what we try to do is that we try to bridge the gap between these two, like trying to build solutions on teams using the gen AI, then a flavor of co-pilot. So yeah, answering your question, co-pilot is everywhere, I guess. I mean, including everywhere.  You know, it's funny, I was sitting through a review, a panel that was looking at kind of the elevator pitch for three startups. And of course the questions, the first two, they didn't have AI built into their title or into like the product description. And there was obvious usage there. And the third one, it was like their whole, the company was shaped around the AI capabilities and kind of the enriched user experience from that. But it's interesting. I think it's a positive that people are looking at not just, okay, here's a tool, here's a solution that does these five things for me, but also look at the rich data that we can pull from that. And is there a natural language interface where I can, you know, get more out of that. People are, it's already very rapidly starting to shift where people are thinking in those terms. Semantic search, how am I going to find this stuff? How am I going to improve this experience? How am I going to pull this rich data out and synthesize that with my other documents, my other, you know, artifacts in my system and improve everything? Totally. So what I felt is that the whole idea of search has been changed, right? Now things are revolving around the conversational element of that. Because before you try to find something by going to conventional search and you get something. Your journey doesn't end there. Just continue to the next level. Okay. It is like conversations and the rich data, which it is formulating and it is bringing back is just amazing. Only thing is that you need to know what to ask. Simple.  It is a machine. Well, that's always been the problem with search and it's been more limited. It is. And you used to always say that with just searching and finding content. It is like, well, do you have the right permissions? Was it tagged properly? Was it classified properly? Is it in locations I can get access to? Am I using the right words to get to that? Kind of all of those things. And again, the AI helps with that process a lot. Well, definitely, definitely. I was thinking with all of the new MVP announcements this month that came out. For a while there, Microsoft, as they do, they rename the categories, the buckets of the MVPs. I started out as a SharePoint MVP. I then was, I believe, the second or third Office 365 MVP. And then we got moved over to Office servers and services. Then Office apps and services, then M365 apps and services. And then the latest was just M365. But I just noticed in some of the letters that people are posting up on social. Like there's somebody that just got it added in as a SharePoint MVP. Yeah, I noticed that. I'm like, well, that's fantastic. I mean, is it still technically you're under the M365 bucket? Does it matter? But so having said that, what was originally, so what is your actual category that you're focused on? So I mean, I know that it's M365 like I am. Right. What specifically, what area, what part of the product team that pulled you in? Yeah, so with the classical development I am, I just follow the classical SharePoint path in the interest of my journey. That's what I started. But I think answering your question precisely right now, the focus area which I am into is the graph areas. Anything related to the team's development or SPFX development. That's area which I belong to or rather my contributions account to. But I was just viewing one of the MVP results that SharePoint is one of the category. I felt so happy to see that SharePoint as a category. But like again, I don't know where it belongs to eventually, but that's a different story anyway. Is there a graph MVP? Is that a category? So there is a contribution criteria, but I honestly don't know whether there is a category or not. I don't know actually because there is a lot of changing. Yeah, I know. Yeah, it does change a lot and Microsoft shifts things around. And that's something important for people to understand too. I came in as a SharePoint MVP and I focus on a broad range of solutions. I'm a collaboration technologist. I've been involved in collaboration technology since the late 90s. I was at Microsoft for three and a half years and part of what pulled me in there was the launch of what is now Office 365 was because of my background helping create dedicated cloud collaboration solutions. And I was one of the few people that did that. I was at a company called E2Open. We built something. I took that experience and joined Microsoft in 2006. But again, once you're an MVP, you're in there. We're touching a number of different areas. It's interesting. You have to be focused in an area to get selected. And some areas are tougher to get into.  There are a lot of MVPs in certain categories. It's tough to get an MVP in any given area. But once you're an MVP, you might spread out.  And still it can count into your MVP as well. So that is the advantage in my opinion if you are into those category. But like I said, like you said, there are many areas which are kind of saturated. Again, at least I don't see any much more advancement going into that area at least. Right. Again, you need to be focused to get in. And once you're in, they support being a generalist and spread across a number of different areas. Exactly. I'm also interested. How's the state of community in your region? Are you active in user group? Is there still like our events starting to pop up again? Oh, so we do have an active user group here. Though I'm not actively an organizer of that. So recently we had something called previously we used to have M325 SharePoint Saturdays. So now it is being called as M325 Saturday. So I think last month we had one in the place which I am part of Bangalore where I had given a session as well. Similarly, since India is a very big country. So there are many areas where they will have local groups where they will have a community. Say for example, we have a Pune community. We have a Mumbai community. So there are many areas where they focus on the communities as well. So answering your question, yes, there are communities, but most the impulse and sessions in my opinion are still not up to the level in which it happens in other places. Most of them are virtual sessions, but it is still happening and it is relatively going in good directions. I mean, things are going up in a good way. Well, I know that a couple of years back as things were just starting to open up again, there was the, so I actually was a keynote for the, what was the SharePoint Saturday on Devad. And of course there are a couple of good friends. I'm Mark Anderson fellow MVP was also there in person. He does a lot of business over and travels over to India. So it was, I was a little surprised to see him in the audience. For those that know Mark too, you can't miss Mark, the white hair that confused look. Like he just got surprised by somebody. Though I've not met him in person, but he's a famous guy. Mark is awesome. But so it's great to see that kind of stuff in the hybrid events. I think I'm Devad just had their event. It did last week. I wasn't sure if it was this weekend or last weekend. Yeah, it just happened. It was last week. Yeah. I saw some MVPs that were traveling to that. So, but it's because the reason I asked about the community, because there's a lot of regions, my region here, like we're struggling to build up to our, what we were pre pandemic to get the attendance and things around there. It's things have just changed. I don't know if it's just because people can get information and feel like they're, they're getting plenty from the pure virtual and there's tons of virtual events that are happening. And so they feel like they don't need to show up in person. Yeah, but nothing beats the in person experience. Nothing beats that. No, it's a completely agree. Well, this, yeah. So I, so I always like to ask too, since you've been, you've been in MVP for a couple of years. I'm sure that you get questions from, you know, like, well, what is the process? Like what can I do to become an MVP? How do you mentor or advise people on that process? So if, if I've had similar questions, people ask me. So what I would tell them is that don't keep MVP as your destination. What you do is that you find an area where you want to contribute to the community, keep loving it, keep doing it consistently. And eventually MVP will come to you. At least that's what I always tell the people. Don't keep it as a, as an, as an ambition, I would say, because I've seen people, folks who has kept it as an ambition and they never get it and they will get rejected. So don't do it. It's not a good idea. So what I would tell them is that if you want to start, there are a lot of initiatives, which is around, if you've heard of PNP community, Microsoft is by BNP community. There are a lot of tools and softwares where you can start contributing. CLF and Microsoft is one of the two, which I started the contributing. So you, you can go to these repositories, find some of these issues which you can easily work on. It could be a simple documentation changes or it could be a simple change in the code, which will make a huge impact to the tool. So start identifying these things and keep continuing and see how the whole community works so that you will understand how all of them collaborate, communicate, and eventually when you start doing it, MVP will definitely come to you. I mean, there's no doubt about that. I've seen people getting it MVP because of that. So that's what I would tell the folks. Not a simple answer, I would say, but it is easy to take it up. You know, for folks that if maybe this is the first episode you're watching of this series, go and watch three or four episodes and they range anywhere from 15 to 30 minutes long. But you get that exact same advice. It's pretty consistent. It's out there. And what's interesting is like I've got friends that are now, I've got a good friend who's now an MVP and a regional director, which is a different thing, a much smaller group. There's about 4,000 MVPs now globally and there's just over 200 RDs. So just the difference is there. But it's not like, hey, I'm an MVP and now I'm going to become an RD at that higher level. No, they're just different programs. But anyway, so good friend and just remember having conversations. I was one of the people that nominated him for MVP and he was frustrated that, you know, for a couple of years just was getting, was just getting passed up and I didn't understand why and he kind of said, you know what, I just kind of came to a realization. It says, I think I'm going to withdraw my name from the process because he says, I don't care. I said about that. I'm sharing my knowledge. I'm making contacts. My business is doing fantastic. I'm making all these great Microsoft contacts. I love my role in the community. My interactions with the community are fantastic. I've got friends for life. I've got my, again, the business is booming, kind of all those positive things. And so he just kind of stopped thinking about becoming MVP. And I kid you not, it was like a month later, he got his MVP award. Oh, nice.  It may not result in MVP award, but you're going to make contacts. You're going to help people which has that there's a, there's like a runner's high off of helping people when you're able to actually answer a question or solve a problem for somebody. There's nothing like that. I can see why people go into teaching with its dismal salaries, but they still do it because they love that. And I think that's a lot like this. Oh, totally.  So that is an impact. I would like to test that out. I think there are some amounts of money that I be, let's go on off record and talk about that. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, just keeping jokes apart. I mean, that more than that, you keep a good connect with the amazing folks around those people. For example, I've been seeing him doing wonders right from the beginning. So when you, when you have people like them and when you see what they are doing it consistently, it's hard for you not to do that. I'm not able to do that consistently right now, but it's amazing. You get inspired automatically. Well, I think the vast majority of us are all consider ourselves technologists where whether no matter what our roles are, we're excited. We're passionate about tracking following what's the latest things that are happening out there. How can it solve business problems? Because a lot that's the other side of this. It's not just about talking about touting new features and being cheerleaders for Microsoft. We're, we're using it. We're testing things out. We're coming back and saying, you know, hey, Microsoft, we're seeing these issues or, hey, did you think of this use case or I've got this client that here's their situation. That's different. I love the stories where there are, you know, novel use cases across competing technologies. You see more and more partnerships with SAP with Oracle and Adobe with, with Cisco with, you know, with all these opportunities where people are coming up with these again, really these combinations of technologies across the multiple stacks. And I think that's important because I think gone are the days where you come across a large corporation that is like all Microsoft technology. We won't even consider anything outside of the Microsoft stack. No, everybody is multi cloud. Everybody's looking for that. And so there is a need for people with experience in these different clouds and to be able to talk about, Hey, here's how we use SharePoint. Here's how we use teams, but we use these other technologies. Totally. Totally. I mean, it's, it's very good to see the, the barriers of the technologies getting diluted per se. I mean, it's wonderful. I mean, having the different systems coming together, just to solve a problem for your user.  All it matters to him or her is get my things done. How you do it, which technology uses doesn't really matter. Right. Well, I love when Satya was newly the CEO of Microsoft. He gave a speech at, I think it was the partner conference. There's, there's a partner conference for folks that don't know. It's now called Microsoft inspire, but it used to be the worldwide partner conference or WPC. And it's first one where he talked about, and just to paraphrase, I mean, essentially said, like, you know, Microsoft, we want to build the best software says where we don't have the best solution, or maybe we don't have any solution in an area. We still want to remember the customer is looking at solving this, we might do this piece, this piece and this piece. We want to make sure that the customer gets everything they need. That means we need to partner with the solution providers that are in between or may compete with us in different parts. Because at the end, like we all benefit from the customer's problems being solved. And that it was a dramatic change in philosophy for building software for Microsoft away from the gates bomber era into the Nadella era. It was listening about integration, about solving the customer's needs and that customer experience. That was huge. You know, I've been saying that for years. So it was just was very much in line with most of the community people that I worked with. Exactly. Probably that would have started the Domino's effect in my opinion, because I think that would have started rest of the large software vendors like Microsoft to follow the similar pattern rather than compete with each other so that we will have a collective good rather than we have an independent silo. So I think that would have started the Domino's effect like you said. Yeah. I think so. It was the start of the stone rolling down the hill. Yeah. Whatever you want to use for that. Well, Arjun, I really appreciate your time and coming on and great to you and are you going to make it over for the MVP summit? Oh, I doubt so. I don't think that's a that's a long trip and expensive trip to make. But it's it has become expensive right now and before I think it was not the case, but now it has become very expensive. Yeah. So I don't think so. But yeah. Good that we have a virtual virtual event where the problem with that is that time zones again. So we'll have to again rely on the record at times, but again, no complaints whatsoever. Well, hopefully, hopefully we'll hear like your voice on there asking a question or something or maybe you'll see us. Those that are there in person on camera, but for folks that want to reach out and connect with you, where are you most active in social? Where could people find you? So definitely people can follow me in Twitter or X, whatever you call it that platform and pretty much active and also in LinkedIn as well. So these are the two areas which I try to keep myself updated. And that's what I do. Okay. Excellent. Well, Arjun really appreciate your time. Same here. Wonderful. Thanks for having me here, Christian. Have a great day.


I caught myself being incredibly mean to myself just the other night, basically for not being where I want to be right now in life. And then God spoke to me. He reminded me of how much I've overcome, how much I have changed and how much I've grown in the last year. He reminded me how strong and unique I am.  That it's okay to have bad days and bad weeks and sometimes even bad months, but it will always get better.


Hi everyone, Joe for jaspyscasebreaks.com coming at you with another one box break of 2019 panini contenders optic football One box Ram team break number four one spot gets you two teams and at the end will re-randomize the original 16 names And someone's gonna get an $1800 Super Bowl mixer spot Big thanks everybody here who got into the action in fact Let me copy the that original 16 and put them into this blank list here We'll get to that a little bit later as always. We're gonna do the break itself first. Let's double up your names And there's all the teams right there. Let's roll it. Let's randomize it six and a three nine times for names and teams one two three and Ninth and final time after nine we got ASA down to Down to Sean six and a three nine times for the teams one two Ninth and final time after nine we got Cleveland down to Chicago All right, here's the first half of the list right here Do remember this is 2019 no trades though and in filler breaks the rest of teams right here We just want to get a move on see who wins that mixer spot for this Sunday's Super Bowl mixer which hopefully will be sold out before the game and We're intending to do it before the game So I think we'll get a soul Redemption on the bottom. We got Ezekiel Elliott up front. Here's the final printout right here hot off the presses We've got Julian Edelman on top and then behind him another Julian element this time winning ticket to 99 And that will be For the Patriots Shawn Madden Adrian Peterson for the Washington football team for NARC. That's the 199 Hey, Ray. Happy Friday And we've got Ty Johnson 12 out of 50 rookie ticket autograph for the Lions Allen With Detroit and the redemption behind Julian Edelman These ones aren't numbered the redemption behind Julian Edelman is gonna be Marquise Brown Rookie ticket RPS autographs Marquise Brown for the purple birds. That'll be for Asa and Baltimore The Hollywood Brown Guess when you get a Free toppler out of this too. There you go. And there you have it. All right now the whole point of this is really to randomize those names right here and then See who's gonna win that Super Bowl mixer spot tons of excellent giveaways in there Um Just take a look. It's pretty awesome. So here's the original 16. We're gonna randomize the original 16 names Let's roll it. Let's randomize it six and a two eight times name on top after eight in the Super Bowl mixer. Good luck one two three four Seven and good luck eighth and final time. It's gonna be It's gonna be nark. There you go. Congrats to you after eight times You're in the Super Bowl mixer $1,800 value. Congrats, man. Thanks everyone else for giving this a shot. There's other opportunities So if you want to give it another go give it another chance jaspeaskacebrakes.com. I'm joe. I'll break with you next time. Bye. Bye


The Kentucky Department of Agriculture is now accepting submissions for their annual poster and essay contest. The theme of the 2024 contest is Agriculture for a Better Kentucky and is open to students in grades K through 12. This is a contest that the Department of Agriculture hosts every year. It is for grades K through 12 and this year the theme is Agriculture for a Better Kentucky and so we'd just like to encourage all students to participate in this contest and get out and just learn more about agriculture, especially in our area. Norton iCenter and Pikeville, your local vision experts, experienced doctors using state-of-the-art technology, choose from top designer frames from Oakley, Ray Ban, Nike and more. We accept Medicaid and Medicare plus most insurances are accepted. Norton iCenter and Pikeville, next to track your supply. Essays are to be no longer than 500 words and submissions must be postmarked by Friday, March 8th. Each winner will receive a $100 award from the Kentucky Agriculture and Environment in the classroom and will be recognized at the 2024 poster and essay contest award ceremony. Years ago we used to have eight teachers and stuff going out to the schools and we don't anymore. We are getting ready to try to take care of a little bit of that problem and get more education out in the schools but a lot of our kids at nowadays they don't know anything about agricultural I mean even raising gardens or anything so any kind of education wise that we can get out there to our students is an asset to all of us. For more information including complete contest rules and entry forms go to kyagr.com. Reporting for Mountain Top News, I'm Brianna Robinson.


The Texans are difficult to discuss because we don't know, as of this recording on Thursday, what the status of Will Fuller will be, and he is a huge influence to this team. Because if you look at Deshaun Watson, when Will Fuller is on the field, according to the quant edge, he averages 8.3 yards per pass attempt. His ADOT is 9.3. Those are massive numbers. But when Fuller is off the field, it's 7.0 yards per attempt and a 7.5 yard average target. That's a huge difference. And that means that Deshaun Watson goes from being maybe not the best quarterback on the slate if Will Fuller plays, arguably the best quarterback, I would say is the best quarterback, to being kind of like a secondary type guy if Will Fuller can't go. So what does he read on this Texans offense, given what we know right now? Yeah, I have a lot of the same data. I mean, in nine games where Fuller has played at least half the snaps, Deshaun Watson has averaged 0.35 passing that expected points per drop back. In six games without Will Fuller, he's at negative 0.02. So basically, to put some context behind those numbers, he's more or less been Lamar Jackson when Will Fuller has played and he's been Andy Dalton when Will Fuller has not played. So I'm with you. I have in my game notes article with Fuller plays, Watson might be the best quarterback play out of all eight. So I'm with you. Fuller plays, I love Deshaun, but if he doesn't, I think it's just kind of, he's not a full afterthought, but it drops him down significantly and it drops the whole offense down as well. And he also impacts Deondre Hopkins quite a bit. I think that Hopkins is in play even if Will Fuller goes because he's Deondre Hopkins. He has 32% of the targets in the games that both Kenny Stills and Will Fuller have played. But when Fuller can't play, Hopkins has 35% of the targets and 63% of the deep targets. Now the deep targets overall are small, it's a smaller share or smaller number when Will Fuller is not out there because Deshaun Watson doesn't throw deep as often, but having 63% of them is massive. He is $8,300 for the full four game slate. I'm going to have him no matter what, but I would have a lot more of him if Fuller can't go. And I think that he is the only Texan who quote unquote benefits from not having Will Fuller out there. Even though the touchdown upside and the offense goes down, I think that the increased deep target share for Deondre Hopkins helps mitigate that. Will Fuller, very cheap. He is $5,600 for the full four game slate. That is very, very low. Will Fuller's target shares in the games that he and Stills have played, 22% overall, 32% of the deep targets tied with Hopkins for the team lead there. So if we get like confirmation, if we get the, you know, the shifty bomb that we get like at midnight, the night before each time, if we get one of those a shifty bomb in advance that Will Fuller is going to play, I would have quite a bit of Will Fuller. If we don't get that, like if we get confirmation when an activist come out that he's going to play, it's a lot harder for me to get super enthused about him. So what's your read on the Texans pass catchers here? Again, not knowing how things are going to play out there. Someone like Will Fuller is the right kind of risk to embrace because we know what his true upside can be.  So I'm going to struggle a lot with Will Fuller if he is, you know, good to go. If he is not, I'll probably still just kind of treat Kenny Stills like a sprinkle. I can't fully trust him. He hasn't, he hasn't stepped into Will Fuller as much as we love Kenny Stills on this podcast. He's not been Kenny Stills fan podcast. Yeah. I mean, I guess maybe if anything, we could look more at the tight ends, but I don't really want to play either Darren Fells or Jordan Acons. All right. So do you want to hear Kenny Stills target share with Will Fuller versus without him? Sure. All right. So in games that Fuller has missed or in games that Fuller instills a play. Okay. Kenny Stills has 12.6% of the team's targets in games that Will Fuller has missed. It's 12.7. It is a 0.1 percentage points difference. He's, he can call, he can all in a deep target. He can get a red zone target. Cool. He's $5,800. That's a lot for a dude who we're hoping gets a red zone target. So nothing more than sprinkles. And if he doesn't light up in my player pool, I don't care. That's not going to bother me at all. So I think that we're on pretty much the same page there where we kind of want some confirmation about Will Fuller beforehand.


Yes, I know. Caroline, hello. Thank you. It's so nice to see you, Mr. President. Well, it's so nice of you to be here. Let me say thank you. It's my anniversary. Oh, listen. Listen, we'll never forget this one. Well, let me say happy anniversary. Absolutely. We picked a good day for this. Yes, sir. We sure did. It's not that people get very much the form. Yeah. Yes. As a matter of fact, Nancy, a little tip for you in case you're ever beginning to forget for anything. Nancy, you did not want so much. I could never slip up on a date. Oh, my. Oh, my. I can't put it on the couch. Isn't that forever? Oh, my. That really is something. We wanted to give you a little something from not only us, Mr. President, but all of Kentucky. There's a lot of love that goes into this simple token. I suppose that one might say, I guess I could say it from one side to another, but maybe I better not say that. This is a shoe of secretariat. Oh, for heaven's sake. That was worn by him. Wow. The secretary is now in our district in Kentucky. He's known pretty well across the country. Yes. People at home obviously are very pleased to meet him. This is very nice of you. Thank you very much. A lot of good luck with that. Yep. Yes, sir. And maybe a lot of people don't know that after they win a race, they take those off. Well, that's right. And that's exactly right. Yes, sir. Yes. He's raised resources, but I never raised any as good as him. Well, that's a very special horse. We're very pleased to have it in our district, of course. I'm pleased to present that to you. Thank you very much. Have a nice day. Well, I sure will. Being in this business myself, I know what you and Nancy mean to me. That was like us and what you have to put up with. Thank you. Well, I must tell you that I brought you when you came down to the House floor with a real nice touch of everything. Before you started, I didn't know it was such a good thing. When we came in and said, you know, that's a nice touch. Yeah, that's it. Very thoughtful of you. We appreciate you being where you are and the kind of guy you are. This country is so proud of you. You hear that so many times. You can be redundant. It's so true. We're comfortable with you. Thank you very much. This isn't exactly the way it's bound to happen. No, it's not. It's a good start. Thank you, sir. Good luck to you. Happy anniversary. Happy anniversary. Thank you. 64 years in between us. That's right. Thank you. Priority, priority, priority... Yeah, so we got us in the same place. Receed again. If you don't use it. I'll just say a little pair of friends already then. I wish you'd be standardised. The reason for this is that there are many significant rural events that have taken place over the past several weeks when we witnessed a peaceful transfer of power in the Philippines in Haiti and it was the assassination of Sweden of Congress was in the meeting at Moscow. In addition, we've done the congressional effort to further assist the Democratic Resistance in Nicaragua, and we've taken the offensive on tending adequate fronts for our defense. Now, George, your call on Secretary Schultz, and he's going to start off by giving us a briefing on the current of some of these things. We've been so immersed in the end of that time as you're opening comments suggested. We see a pattern around the world of tragedy and triumph, and you can make that statement practically at any moment. You mentioned the assassination of the Prime Minister of Sweden. He also had the assassination of a very courageous man who had accepted to be Mayor of Manabas at the West Bank, and the enemies of peace and the enemies of things that are respective in that region murdered him. And so it's always so that you have those threats. At the same time, we've all watched and taken part in the events in the Philippines, and there we see very clearly the triumph of the will for freedom and democracy. And we also see what is less noticed, although I think the President has gotten a considerable amount of credit for it. Less noticed is that we have had a consistent policy for a long period of time in the Philippines. We know a lot about it. And within the framework of the strategy we've had and the knowledge we've had as events were unfolding, it was possible to make tactical decisions that worked out, and we had considerable credit. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. See you, sir. See you. How are you, sir? Nice to see you. How are you? Hi. Good to see you. How are you? Nice to see you. I like the way you look. The White House President, wonderful seeing you. Hi. Hi. How are you? How are you doing? I'm the same way I am, sir. I'll see this and that way. I'm the same way I'm seeing you. How are you? I'm the same way I'm seeing you. How are you? How are you? How are you? Well, as you said, Jerry, I see you warmed up creating Vice President's chair this morning. No, no, let me say that. I know our time is limited here, and I just got a little card here that we're opening our notebook today that just received that I think should be an important part of this discussion. It's a development that came about yesterday that Duarte has announced that if the Sandinistas have talked with their armed opposition, he will talk with the Salvadoran guerrillas on the same basis, lay down the arms, amnesty, commitment, and talk. And this opens the possibility of three sets of talks because we have already said that we will meet with the Sandinistas, despite of the fact that we've done it nine times already without too much result, if they'll meet simultaneously with the armed opposition. And this shows I think a negotiated solution is possible. We have some momentum going for us, and I think the key is for the Sandinista to agree to talk with their opposition, and we need to get that message to your colleagues. Good to present our Strawberry Queen. Well, it's my pleasure to re-grow you. Well, congratulations to you. Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to meet you. This is a very nice thing the Senator does every year. Yes, it is. Bring me his Strawberry Queen. Thank you. Mr. Fiola. Hello, Mr. President of the Strawberry Festival. We brought you a gift. It wasn't really stressful. I'd like to give you an honor of this visitation. Well, thank you very much. Thank you. Mrs. Fiola and daughter Heather. Hello. Nice to meet you. It's nice to meet you. Hello, Heather. Nice to meet you. Thank you very much. Thank you. This is the Queen's mother and father, Mrs. Director of... Hello. Hello there. My name is Carol. Hello. And this is for you from Heather Jones, which I had the honor of meeting for you. I do not see it. I don't want to tear things up. I see I can open it and look. That's for you to curl up and keep warm. That's wonderful. And it's a flag. Yes. Thank you very much. Hello there, alarm. Thank you so much. Nice to see you. This is a gift I have for you. Handmade ceramic. Let's draw it. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you. That's right. It's perfect. I'm a little happy to have a child right here. I'm starting to go to bed. First we get this and then we get a group picture. Okay. Why don't you all gather around? Okay. Someone wants to jump on that. Thank you. Very welcome. Thank you. I should have brought a rain. I was kind of nuts. Take care of it, my friend. Thank you so much. Yeah, they say family, again, it's just his daughter, son-in-law, his granddaughter. Of course his wife was killed in the car accident a couple of years ago. They don't think I'll say it. No, because they're not all from Utah and they're spread out all over the country now. And they're just coming to meet my daughter. Sure, just for fun. President, how are you? Fine, thank you. I'd like you to meet my daughter, Sue again. Hi. Hello there, Allison, my son-in-law, Dr. Alan Moore. How are you? And the newest addition to the family? No, the second newest. We had three grandchildren, all within five months last year. I had two children graduate from college. That's basically three grandchildren all in five months. Your speech about all was just magnificent. Right over there. Well, let me get a picture. Why don't you get the medal, Sue? She'll see the camera. You have to fail it. Just tune us out. That's all she sees. Well, thank you. Thank you very much. We were scheduled to do this last year and Allison came early, and so we didn't get to do it. It's better because she wouldn't have been in the picture. Thank you. Nice to see you. Oh, did it? Maybe we ought to. West Virginia Christmas. Maybe we ought to take it. That's a life going on. It's pretty particular. They're gone. Yes. Right. I guess it's okay if the first dog eats something and the Secret Service hasn't checked. Yeah. And it's sealed. We'll do the presentations over here. It's just Dorn, Hatch, and you. How are you? Good. Good to see you. We're working at you. We're working at you. No, it's great to see you. I think we're supposed to be over there. I've had this done for you. Rex Maughan used to do it with the Dell Wind Corporation. And this is done especially for you. I think Utah is the greatest artist in the United States. Yeah, I've been trying to get these to you for a long time. Aren't they beautiful? I think they're something. All right. All right. Thank you. I'll tell you what, I'll get you the names. We'll send them a copy of this picture. All right. Okay. That's great. Glad to be able to do this. Glad to be able to do this. It's always nice to do something for you for a change. Well, you get the addresses to me. I will. But there's not these pictures there. Let us know in the group. Is that a big deal? Of course, in Southern California, you never have to worry about it being the earliest ranger that lights bring. Anyhow, they are going to give you a coin. Good to see you. See you. Appreciate it. Me too. Me too. No. No. Happy to have you. Happy to see you. That's Punctutani Phil. We're back. They would not have springed alive. Mr. President, on behalf of the Punctutani Chamber of Commerce, the Groundhog Club, and the citizens of the weather capital of the world, I'm honored to present you with that silver medallion, commemorating Punctutani Phil's 100th anniversary. Well, I'm very pleased and proud to have that.   I don't know how much Nancy cooks, but what I'd like to do is give this to you to give to Nancy, which is a Groundhog cookbook. And on page 126, it tells how to cook Groundhog, but that's kind of sacrilegious for us, to eat our hero. So we have the Chamber of Commerce, and Mrs. Elaine Light wrote the book. We hope that Nancy will find some recipes in there to kind of fatten up. Well, thank you very much. I'm very pleased to have that, and she will be too. And I just want to remember something, and the picture that was made. We won't tell anyone that you were around, but Phil first appeared. Okay. Thank you very much. We certainly are happy that we could come and visit. Thank you. God bless you, Mr. President. Thank you very much.


Okay, great, I guess we can get started. So first off, thanks everybody for joining. My name is Eric Sacks. I'm one of the engineering directors at Oracle. I work in the systems division and I'm responsible for our efforts around our Solaris-based OpenStack distribution. Ficus, you wanna introduce yourself? Yeah, my name is Ficus Piekas and I work in the Oracle OpenStack for Oracle Linux distribution, also for Oracle. Great. So we've been working on OpenStack for quite some time. I'm trying to remember if this is what our, what fifth or sixth OpenStack summit. I think the first one that we joined was the Portland Summit, which was quite some time ago. I think there was a grand total of what, like three of us. And so I think in total, we probably have around 50 or 60 Oracle people here. There's actually quite a lot of work happening around OpenStack across Oracle, across our product portfolio on the system side, on the application side, on the storage side. So we'd certainly invite you to stop by our booth. It's A2 kind of on the left as you come inside the Expo and you can see some demos and hear about the various areas across Oracle where we're working on OpenStack. So when thinking about what we wanted to talk about, this go around, one of I think our real passionate areas is as we work with our customers, as you can imagine, many large scale traditional enterprise customers, how can we really help accelerate their adoption of cloud? And it's something that we find that many of our customers are very excited about. I think the good news from our perspective, just about every customer that we talk to aspires to move to cloud-based management of their infrastructure. They clearly understand the benefits of doing that, the agility that they see, everything they stand to gain from being able to manage their infrastructure, compute storage and networking as a cohesive system and be able to have all that be software defined and really reduce the amount of time it takes between actually needing infrastructure and being able to leverage all of the automation that OpenStack has to offer in order to be able to get that as quickly as possible. So many of our customers are very interested in that. And in the recent survey that Talogen put out, their state of the OpenStack report, the data that they find is actually pretty consistent with our finding. So the nice thing is if you look at this pie chart, 30% of the survey respondents that they spoke with and they surveyed a pretty wide range of group across virtualization and cloud about how they're understanding or using OpenStack. So 30% of the folks that they talked to are actually using it to support production workloads. Another 30% were evaluating it. And another 36% were familiar with it, though not yet using it. And only a very tiny slice of that pie, 2% had never heard about it at all. And this is actually pretty common for us as well. One of the things that we see when we talk with our customer base, which may be a little bit different sample set than this is if we ask folks in the audience, who's heard of OpenStack nearly every hand and the audience goes up. But when we then ask the next question, who's actually been successful deploying OpenStack and doing that successfully, there's quite a different response. Maybe half or less of those hands that went up actually do so. So we're spending a lot of time thinking about how we can really improve that, how we can accelerate adoption within the enterprise. And so some of the common things that we find, one of the biggest things is that still, deploying an OpenStack cloud really isn't easy. Deploying a single node OpenStack cloud really isn't that difficult. Things like DevStack make this very easy. I think nearly every vendors out there offers a really quick and easy way, including Oracle, to evaluate OpenStack, be able to take and deploy a single VM or a single node, take that for a spin, see what it's like. But there's a huge difference between that solution and what it actually takes to roll out a production scale OpenStack cloud. And what our customers find is even if they have some familiarity of OpenStack's architecture, they understand what Nova, Neutron, Cinder, all of these services do, there's a huge amount of expertise that they have to gain and understand in order to be able to successfully go and actually deploy and operate a production scale cloud. And I think one of the things that's helped, certainly make this easier, is many vendors are offering cloud installers that simplify the process of doing a multi-node installation. But even these come with their own sets of challenges. In some case, they make the initial job of deploying the cloud easy, but they may not handle the complete things from being able to do upgrade or life cycle management. They may not provide the tooling that's necessary for being able to operationally manage the cloud. And the things that we find about clouds is in many cases, they're like snowflakes. The architecture that might be right for one customer might be entirely different for another customer, depending on what their requirements are. So deploying it is a certain amount of deployment complexity that there is to overcome there. And then in the context of a large, truly scalable cloud, we get asked, well, what does it take to actually deploy a cloud that's highly available and that can scale from one node to many hundreds to many thousands of nodes? And then you start getting into realizing, well, this isn't just my three node open-stat cloud of my control plane, my compute, my storage, that may be an okay start just to sort of evaluate this. But if I truly wanna have something that's gonna be highly available, and I truly wanna have something that will scale as my load scales, you really need to start looking at open stacks, under cloud services, more like microservices, and deploying them out in a scale-out fashion, maybe making use of load balancers. And it gets to be quite a bit more, certainly quite a bit more sophisticated. And many of the existing installers that are out there, of course, don't have this level of sophistication yet. So there's sort of this trade-off that exists where on one hand, if you have a cloud that's relatively simple to deploy, that's easy from the deployment stage, but then later on, it's hard to scale that up, and you may run into barriers there. On the other hand, if you wanna start planning through this from the very beginning and deploying a cloud that's gonna be solid from an operational perspective, well, there's a lot of initial deployment complexity that has to be overcome there. And just along the way, another piece of feedback that we frequently hear is there just isn't the availability of tools that are necessary for understanding as I'm trying to go and configure this and something goes wrong. How do I diagnose what actually went wrong? How do I trace that back? There's just sort of a lot of anecdotal expertise that we find our customers have to come up to speed with and the documentation doesn't always necessarily have all of the right answers. So again, looking back at what Talgent found in its state of the open stack report, some of the things that we're hearing from our customers indeed show up here, lack of deployment tools, lack of tools for enabling folks to effectively operate the cloud, how do you go about defining a security model that makes sense? So out of the box it meets your needs around compliance, things like that. So these I think are very common concerns, but very real concerns for folks in the enterprise and I think to some extent may contribute to why there's sort of a drag for adoption for many of our enterprise customers. And the other thing too that we've certainly identified and even in the previous talk I noticed HP made reference to this as well. Open stack, when you look at the set of things that our enterprise customers run and you look at the workload architectures, many of the workloads that are considered mission critical were designed some time ago and they have very specialized needs around the infrastructure that they run on. In fact, many of these workloads were actually designed along with the infrastructure to actually host them. So now as an enterprise customer when you have many of these applications and you really want to move them all into the cloud, how do you effectively do this when the app and the infrastructure were baked together? Does your cloud really provide the infrastructure that it needs to effectively run those applications? And so this is where talking about apps as cattle versus pets certainly tends to come up. And OpenStack certainly seems to do very, very well for these cattle type applications where they're sort of designed to be cloud native from the beginning, they're designed to scale out. They're very resilient in that if one of the virtual machines dies or even one of the physical nodes dies, that VM is effectively stateless and so it can spin up. But the reality is that many of the enterprise applications were designed such that they actually trust the underlying infrastructure and so it's very critical for these workloads that that infrastructure can meet the needs of the workload. And again this is one of the things that they highlighted is that their forecast is that OpenStack should be able to handle just about any workload in short order with the exception of pets. So it's obviously a pretty key focus area for us. Oracle invests quite heavily in the infrastructure that runs many enterprise mission critical workloads and so one of our key focus areas is looking how can we bring the kind of infrastructure that traditional enterprise workloads need into the context of OpenStack so that customers don't have to choose between one or another. And there's actually a lot of very, very interesting work that still needs to be done here. One of the things we're thinking about is how can we allow workloads to specify metadata about more data about what they actually need from the underlying work infrastructure so that quality of service can be specified. Many of these things that these workloads were able to take for granted when they're running on dedicated infrastructure, they actually need to specify this information running in the context of cloud so that the underlying infrastructure can provide that and make these workloads run the way that they were designed to run. So a lot of work to be done there. And just as an example, a few years back, Toby Ford from AT&T I think was speaking during one of the keynote summits in Atlanta, and he mentioned that they had found quite a bit of success with OpenStack. They were able to bring many of their workloads over into the context of OpenStack cloud, but the reality is that these sorts of pet workloads have to be handled and have to be managed. And certainly for us, this is one of the challenges we've undertaken. What can we be building into the underlying cloud infrastructure to better cater to the needs of these workloads? So I was looking around the time that I was doing this presentation, I was thinking about OpenStack since we have been working on this for some time now, and thinking about, I really love Gartner's hype cycle. And if you haven't seen this before, really kind of what this describes is for any generic technology, the cycle that it goes through. So obviously in the very beginning, the technology is gonna solve world hunger. Everybody gets very excited about it. Lots of investment around it. So the hype and certainly all the expectations rise very quickly, but many of those expectations are overblown. And as folks sort of realize this, there's what's called the trough of disillusionment, which I think is a really accurate but somewhat humorous term. And then over time, indeed, as the underlying technology continues to mature and folks have expectations set more in line with where the technology is and they both sort of catch up, over time you pull out of this trough and there's more and more productivity. So one of the things I was, I have sort of a rough idea of where I think OpenStack is on this cycle. How many folks in the audience think that we are, let's see, somewhere on the left side of the peak of inflated expectations for OpenStack? David, do you think we're on the left side of peak inflated expectations? Anyone else? How many folks think we're on the right side of the peak of inflated expectations for OpenStack? Okay, well there's only two sides and not everybody raised their hands. I actually think that, and maybe this is different by sector. I tend to think we're coming out of the trough of disillusionment. I think that this may account for what many, one of our customers are telling us, they're obviously all very familiar with OpenStack, but I think it's taken time for them to get familiar with it and get an understanding of today, where it works really, really well, but also getting an understanding of where more investment is really needed in order for them to find more success with it in the enterprise. So I think that we're coming out of it, but there's definitely more work to do and so focusing on some of those areas we just talked about I think are gonna be key for that. So this is really what we're focused on is what if we could actually invest in building a better cloud infrastructure that's easier to deploy and manage. So we can not only do a really good job of handling cattle and cloud native workloads, but also effectively meet the diverse workload mix that exists in the enterprise today. So that's a lot of what we're focused on. I'll talk a little bit about some of the specifics for what we have and what we've been doing in this area on the Solaris side and then Vegas will talk certainly about some of those same things on the Linux side as well. As we've been looking at our strategy in Solaris around OpenStack, one of the key things is how can we take advantage of many of the native features and technologies that Solaris has to offer and certainly what are the things that are most critical to enterprise customers and clearly security and compliance is one of those things that's top of the list. So in our OpenStack distribution, some of the work that we've done, all of OpenStack's under cloud services will run with the least amount of privilege necessary for them to get the job done so nothing runs as route. We also have some features in the OS that effectively allow you to lock down both VMs and effectively the host environment with a feature called immutability. So the nice thing about this is it basically allows you to treat your cloud, your under cloud infrastructure as an appliance. And really this is the way you should be treating it. You really don't want administrators to be logging into your production cloud environment and making changes in your control plane. Once it's actually set and it's working, you wanna lock it down and it should be in a mutable environment. So the nice thing is even, it's nice that we have the services running with the least amount of privilege necessary. Even if somebody were able to break into the system, they wouldn't be able to make any changes that could compromise the environment because the environment is effectively read only at that point. And we have some specific profiles that we've actually introduced specifically for the Nova Compute node, for example, that take advantage of this. All of OpenStack we have delivered via the image packaging system. So we have all the dependencies expressed, all of the services run as SMF services. So there's automated service restart and dependencies that exist between services. We make heavy use of ZFS within Solaris. So the nice thing about this is it's very easy to roll back if something were to go wrong in the process of an upgrade or something happens. It's very easy to snap off a new ZFS-based boot environment so you can instantly roll back to the functioning environment and that's all very integrated with the packaging system. And then overall, our OpenStack distribution, so using this you can provide tenants access to Spark environments, x86 environments, virtualized via Solaris zones and kernel zones, and then also bare metal via Ironic as well. And so just pretty much graphically captures a lot of what I described in the various Solaris technologies that we are building on top of. And then obviously ZFS is a huge differentiating technology that we build across. We ship the sender driver for the ZFS storage appliance. So that's integrated. It's actually possible too if you have a just a generic system that's storage rich with a bunch of disks, you can put those disks in a ZFS Z pool, you can run sender, and then you can basically hand out LUNs over iSCSI just from a generic box.  All those features are available to you but provisions to Nova instances via sender. So I'll hand it over to Vikas to talk more about the Linux-based distribution. Is it on? There we go. So from the Linux side, we've spent a lot of time. So we started long after the Solaris group starting to do the Linux distro for OpenStack. And we came along for a while and we decided that we quickly realized that the standard for all the private cloud infrastructure is going to be OpenStack. And that's going to be the way that most customers and most people will end up managing the data center resources as a cloud using the OpenStack. We also, from day one, decided we need to support all the hypervisors at Oracle in the Linux side of the house have, so like OVM and KVM. And we wanted to support a heterogeneous infrastructure like with the Docker containers. So to give you a simple overview of what we have today and what we support is like on an oversight. You can see this KVM, Oracle VM server. We also support Hyper-V as a tech preview. So you can actually run Hyper-V as well. The one interesting point which I want to talk about is on the right, the MySQL cluster. So we do not ship the Galera cluster like everyone else. We actually opted to do the MySQL cluster which we find is a lot more scalable and a lot more manageable than the Galera cluster. So for our register, we spend a lot of time getting the MySQL cluster working and correctly integrated into the Oracle OpenStack for Oracle Linux. So to give you a quick overview of how this actually works since the Oracle Linux distribution for OpenStack is all Docker-based. So this gives you just, if you take a look at the picture, we start with the OpenStack Docker images that we ship to you and soon they will all be available on the Oracle Container Registry. So you can get them directly from Oracle. We do suggest people use a local Docker registry to cache them. I don't think everyone wants to open up all the Nova nodes to the internet. And then you have a very simple tool that we sort of wrote on top of the container technology which we use, which is also OpenStack upstream for OpenStack Colour Project. I'll mention, talk about it in a minute. And once you configure it, you just hit deploy and it actually deploys to all the nodes automatically. It's actually pretty fascinating seeing how it works. So containerizing the OpenStack, what does it really mean? So OpenStack has, as everyone knows, many, many, many, many, many services. We started with the base services, the Dev Core services, and we picked the OpenStack Colour Project to really use that to start containerizing this. Each service, for instance, have one or more containers as well. It's like the Nova have the API, the scheduler conductor. So when you start doing this and containerized, you end up using a lot of containers. Nova, I think, ends up being four or five containers. So it ends up being like hundreds of containers that you start having to ship with this product to actually deploy it. And that presents a brand new problem, right? So you went from 100 or 200 RPMs to 100 or 200 containers. So you have to manage that. So what does it buy you, right? You just move the, it's like, it looks like you're moving the ball around. It's like, okay, add to RPMs, that had issues. Now we move it to containers that have this other issue that we have to manage all these containers. Well, what it ended up being is, since we're breaking up the OpenStack services in this micro services, the Docker containers, we can now start deploying this stuff as atomic units, right? So you can now deploy any service on its own and it doesn't affect any other service. One of the bigger problems that we run into if you do this with an RPM, which we had initially, is when you upgrade Cinder, it upgrades a bunch of packages that require Nova to upgrade at the same time, which requires Horizon to upgrade. So you had this whole, you touch one service and everything else had to upgrade because of the interdependencies between them. So with the Docker containers, we can sidestep that. Since we have all that dependencies inside the containers, we can now start upgrading container by container by container or service by service. So the patches we do is upstream the patches as well for all of these and it's reliable and fast to deploy. Since these containers are immutable, we don't actually carry any data in the container, you can repeat the deployment process. You can blow everything away and repeat this deployment and it will look exactly the same as the previous time. So Kola, so as I said, I'll mention Kola, what is it? It is an OpenStack project. It's in a big tent. We started very early on contributing to Kola. It's one of our engineers who's actually a core reviewer for Kola project. And when we started down the road of Dockerizing, we initially started doing it ourselves. And when we heard about the Kola project, we started working with them directly and started contributing upstream. So Kola provides you with two things today. One is the Docker containers and one is Ansible Playbooks to actually deploy these core Docker containers. And that was help a lot. I mean, it actually, for us being contributing to contribute all that code upstream, helps everyone in the long run because one of our big goals is not to help just us, we wanna help the whole OpenStack community. So everything we're doing in Kola, we contributing upstream, anything we're doing on Cinder or whatever, we contribute upstream. We really wanna be, help the OpenStack community at large. One of the other big focus areas for us is the Oracle products, right? So Oracle would want to actually have a way for you to use OpenStack and the Oracle products. So early on, we decided that we need to be able to do like a building block structure. So we looked around at all the products and we looked at Murano. So one of the things that's nice about Murano is we can really start doing building blocks. So with the databases, actually we will release a tick preview for the database Murano application very soon. And once that's out, and it uses all the Oracle standard templates that we had for Oracle VM in the past, so they're very well tested, very well known. They've been, actually people have been deploying for over five years, these templates, right? So we actually have them tuned to a very well. And it allows us now to, when we have the database, now the next step is now we can start building the next application, right? So we can now start building the whole RedStack up. Like what everyone is asking us is like, when is a RedStack going to be on OpenStack? Well, this is the start of that, right? But we have to start with the database. We have to start at the bottom, start building up. And when Murano, you'll see with the Database 12, we actually have a demo running in a booth for this. So come by, see it, and I can will show you how actually we can build the stack up. So a quick update on the release. Oracle Linux will release version 3.0 later this year. It's metaka-based. And it's really focused at this time around, we are focusing on the Murano and the heat integration for the database. We are adding a couple of services as tech previews, Magnum and Ironic. So we had a lot of requests for people who wanna play with Kubernetes and containers. So we're gonna do a tech preview for Magnum. And it's still gonna be released this quarter. So look out for that. Switching back. Okay. Great, so I'll spend the last few minutes talking about some of our work in progress as well. So we are also in the process of building out a cloud installer manager for doing automated multi-node OpenStack installation. So this is something that we're very, very excited about. Basically the idea is it makes it super easy to take some infrastructure systems and be able to designate and assign them as controller node or for hosting VMs or for designating certain nodes or ZFS storage appliance, for example, for cloud storage and having all the automation take place in order to implement best practice for those and actually build out a ready to go OpenStack cloud. And certainly this is something we're gonna continue to invest in as we roll out more and more best practices for doing scale out and high availability. So this is something that has actually come quite far along and we have some demos around this in our booth in the Expo hall and certainly by the time the next show comes around we'll probably have a lot more to show about this as well. And then also along the lines of Databases of Service integration we've also been engaging quite a bit with the Trove community. So we've been working a good bit with the Tessora folks and also with Morantis. One of our focus areas of discussion is really around reference architecture for Databases of Service. So if a cloud administrator wants to roll out Trove-based Databases of Service you know what's sort of the best practices architecture for what this looks like so that it's secure, it's effectively multi-tenant. So this is also some very exciting work in progress. This Thursday at 1.15, Thanu and Amaranth from Tessora we'll be talking a little bit about the reference architecture work so I certainly encourage folks who are interested to join that as well. And then if for folks who are interested in learning more about our open-stack offerings on the Solaris side, on the Linux side, a couple of helpful URLs as well. Our source code is also something that we are very keen to contribute upstream. So we've been doing quite a bit of that lately. All of our source code whether or not it's completely made it upstream yet is available on Java.net for folks who are interested in taking a look at our Nova driver, our sender drivers and whatnot. So those are available there. And I think with that, that might be it. I'd like to open it up for questions. Anybody has any questions they'd like to ask? It looks like there's mics set up on the side of the room. Yes. Well, yeah, no so this is something that is being offered on the Linux side. It's something we're also working on for Solaris. Oracle, MySQL is actually part of Oracle as well. So it seems like a pretty natural point of extension because so much of open-stack natively uses MySQL. So it's kind of a logical extension to be able to take advantage of MySQL cluster in that context because when you want to roll out a database, when you want to roll out a cloud architecture that's highly available, the database is actually one of the most critical pieces to get right. And it's really, really nice I think to be able to take advantage of MySQL cluster in that context so you can have an active, active solution there. So because of the fact that open-stack already takes advantage so well of MySQL, MySQL cluster seemed like a natural extension. Could we in the future do more and add support for other things? That's certainly possible, but that's what we're doing right now. Anything else you want to say on that? Yeah, and one of the things that is on the roadmap is to look at adding Oracle as a backend. We are looking at that, but it will be a much more longer-term project. There's a lot of hard coding done in open-stack for the database. A lot. A lot. I mean, we were actually very surprised to see just how much hard coding there is around NODB. Yeah. Just the NODB. It's like within MySQL, the NODB engine, so yeah. So what we did is on the Nova side, on the compute side, we actually used Libvert, right? So like Nova normally used Libvert, that's containerized and it talks directly. So we don't try to containerize the schedule, the hypervisor directly, right? You are containerized everything above that, anything that's open-stack. And the Libvert would be the last piece that you would call part of the open-stack piece, right? Libvert will then talk directly to the hypervisor. And it works pretty well. I mean, we don't have any, the bigger problem we had was actually getting Oracle VM in there as well, right? Because Oracle VM is then very little of the community is actually testing then. So that took us much longer time than the KVM stuff. KVM was like working out of the box directly upstream from Kola. And yeah, it works fine. We don't see any issues. Gentlemen, Mike. Can you share some details about your scale numbers? Not just the compute scale, but even your networking scale and what issues you had and how you solved them? Me? Networking scale? Neutron, the North-South is always the problem, right? The network node. So currently we are looking at multiple options there. We haven't, I would say, we haven't solved the problem. I don't know if anyone can really come out to say they solved the problem. But the North-South, the East-West, the DVR works fine. We've tested it and that's okay. But North-South still with the network node is a problem. So we are looking at a couple of partners to work with to see how we can solve that. Maybe with EVPN and Arista and so on. Yeah, I think the things that we found is that the nice thing is that most of OpenStack's undercloud architecture seems to lend itself fairly well to being scaled out. Provided you have the stateful parts of the architecture appropriately implemented with something like MySQL Cluster or something for that. But for a lot of the rest of it, you can take advantage of scale-out architecture for that. The big trade-off, of course, is then you have something that's pretty complex to manage and operate and lifecycle manage and so that's where that trade-off kind of seems to play out. Linux, Oracle Linux. Oracle Linux, yeah. They're both awesome. It's something that can't, I really don't believe can be appropriately captured in a single sentence, right? Because there's just such a, there's a lot of diversity on both sides of the fence around technology and technology integration. The other question is what sorts of other components in the ecosystem are gonna be used? Vendor, ISV availability, depth of integration with the hardware portfolio. I mean, there's just, there's many, many dimensions and it's impossible to sort of capture that. I think the best thing to do would be to take a step back and think about what it is that you're gonna be deploying, what applications you're gonna be running, what do you already have in the environment and start to approach it that way to think about what might be the appropriate technologies and tools to be leveraged. It's really hard to say, just off the cuff, yeah, you should use this tool or that tool. Other questions? All right, well, pet applications that are troublesome and open-stack? Yeah, I mean, things that would be applications that would already be taking advantage of something like cluster for maintaining high availability in the environment, maybe things today that are very performance-sensitive and you've built out the infrastructure, it requires quality of service, maybe you have deep integration with the hardware that you're using to guarantee that quality of service and then the real question is, is in the context of an open-stack environment, can you provide that application that same environment and how easy is it to make that software defined? Okay, so I think we're over. We can certainly stick around a little while longer for questions but meanwhile, thank you for joining our session today and please feel free to visit us in the Oracle booth. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you.