All right. Hello everybody. My name is Cecily Essary. I'm the CRE of Hots Hall. I live here. I work here. I supervise the RA's. I work with lead hogs. I will see you around soon. But it's my job to take care of this community and so I'm excited to show you around today. First off, before we leave this space, I want to highlight the Fulbright dining hall, which is right over to your left. That is where you will get food and get to hang out with friends. There are lots of food options. We also have Club Red, which is right down here, where you can get a quick bite to eat as well if you are hungry and in a hurry. It is in the maples. Yep. So it's only a couple minute walk from here. Okay, fantastic. So I'll take you guys inside. This is our self entrance. Typically you'll take this to go to class because campus is that way. And we have a couple of people watching already. Nice. Hello. Tell us where you're from. We'd love to find out a little bit about what you're starting here. We need to use the fob there, right? Yep. So everybody has to have fob access to get into the building. You can't get in without a fob. If you have guests, we ask that you have them wait in this area until you can escort them because the only way you can have guests in the building is if you do escort them. But for the beginning of the school year, keep an eye on visitation policies because those will change. All right. Well, welcome inside. This is our lobby area where you can play pool. You can play ping-pong. We do ask that you bring your own equipment this year just for safety reasons. We won't be checking it out at the desk for the first semester. There's also our kitchen area where you can have a meal with some friends. You can cook. We do have a community fridge. We ask that you don't keep your items in there very long because we do have 400 people living here and only one fridge. We have a capacity of up to 416 and we have 16 RAs, so there's 400 of you. So we ask that you label all your food. We also have a microwave oven and we have a convection oven. So you can cook in here. Please bring your own cooking equipment and make sure you clean up after yourself when you're all done. What kind of things do people cook in here? Do you know? Well, we cook all the time. There's a group of students. The past two years we've had cooking Sundays or baking Sundays. So if you all want to continue that tradition, then we welcome it. But students, you know, cook things. They bake things and build community through that. The next area we have is our theater room where if you like movies, you like to watch sports. This is your place. We have gaming parties in here. We have watch parties. There's plenty of seating. We've got a beanbag chair. You can also see that there are lots of fridges in here. We have micro fridges stored in here right now. What are those fridges about? Oh, let me tell you. A really sustainable option and good option for having a fridge in college is these micro fridges rented out by collegiate concepts. If you just Google collegiate concepts, you work, then you can find how to rent them. But it's a microwave and a fridge that you can rent for the year and then you'll give back when you're done. So it's a great option for not having to leave with a micro fridge that you don't really need in the future. So you kind of have it when you're here and then it's gone when you're gone. Yep, you may need it. You know, your first couple of years living on campus and if you ever move into an apartment, you may not need one. So this is a great option for that. But we do encourage that you stay on campus because it's a great experience living here. Alright, we are also going to show you our music room. We have a lot of students who love music. We have a lot of people in band. We have a lot of people who play music in different ways. So we have a drum kit and we have a piano. We actually are looking into getting a new drum kit soon. And so hopefully we'll have a brand new one that's even fancier than that.  You can. Work off a little extra energy. Yes, we have a lot of students practice. You play drums, right? I do not play drums. I wish I was a drummer. That would be awesome. Okay. I'm going to pass it over here to Xavier. Oh, yeah, sure. Hello, hello, everyone. My name is Xavier Smith and I'm the Graduate Assistant for Recruitment and Diversity Retention within the Honors College. And I specifically work with the Honors College Path Program. And so that is a program for high achieving underrepresented scholars. And so through that program, we provide a great community that helps them excel throughout their college career. But I want to talk to you today a little bit about the Jessamy E. Samuel Meeting Room here, which is newly dedicated. I see the label right there. For sure. And so that is a wonderful dedication to a former student here who is unfortunately not with us. So we wanted to put this in her memory. But this room is a wonderful room for you to be able to study as well as we often have programs in here. Now, of course, due to COVID-19, we will have a different setup for our programming this year. They're most likely going to be virtual, but there are some great perks that you can still have within this room. And so one of the things that you might pay attention to is these hot letters here. You'll come this way and see. As you can see, there are names all over the letters, all over the letters. And it's hot tradition to have every freshman resident each year sign their name upon these letters. And so we cannot wait for you guys to have your name upon these letters just like our former residents here. That's a nice tradition. Yeah, I like that. For sure. For sure. So look forward to that. And so I also want to bring your attention to our patio over here. And so this is a wonderful outdoor space and wonderful outdoor space. As you can see, this is great to study. You can also socialize out here while socially or social distancing. And so previously this was home to our professors and pizza on the patio in which students could mingle with and connect with professors and enjoy pizza. Pizza and professors. Awesome. Right, right, right. Gotta get your food, right? And so this is a great educational space and also a place to relax and unwind. And so we cannot wait for you to utilize this space and socially distance this year. For sure. And I think we're going to head back inside. I think we're going to hit that second door over there. Right. Yep. And if anyone's watching and has any questions for us, now's the perfect time to ask. Again, we'd love to know where you're coming from. This is another one of our gathering spaces. A lot of people hang out in this area to study or just be with a friend. There's always something going on in the Hots lobby. It is a place where if you want community, you're going to find it in the first floor lobby. I can hear people in my apartment till three in the morning playing games sometimes down here. It's always a good time. There's also places to study in the fish pool. I'll show you that in a minute. Behind you, we have our front desk. So our RAs, we have 16 RAs in the building who are here to serve you in many different capacities. One of them is at working at the front desk. And so typically in the afternoons are on the weekends throughout the whole day. We have this space for equipment rental. Even though this semester we will only be looking at renting out HDMI cables and remotes. That is the only thing we will be checking out. That plug for, Shameless plug for campus Cox cable services. If you want TV in your room and you have one, we have free cable hookup. You also can get free cable services on your laptop by searching campus Cox, you work. And you can get free cable television on your laptop. So if you want to watch a live basketball game when they come back, when they're back in season or you like the bachelor, you can watch it for free and it's all live. So we have that. So questions come in while we're talking. Ethan asks, is there a good place to store a bike? Yes, we have a bike storage area on both sides of the building. So there's plenty of space for you. I also love to ride bikes, so I encourage you to bring your bike. You can also, you could store in your room if you're really protective of your bike, but there's not the most space in the world to do that. So I recommend you put it outside. And one more resource when it comes to bikes here in Fayetteville is we have what's called the Greenway, which is a wonderful bike path and multiuse path between here and all the way up to Bentonville. So yeah, if you bring a bike, you'll have plenty of places to ride. Angela asks, I checked out collegiate concepts and only saw the fridge. Is there also microwaves? And the answer is yes. Yes, because it's connected. So the fridge and the microwave are together as a package. I don't, if there is a separate microwave option, I'm not sure about it. So you'll have to do some more digging or you can email me or you can comment in the second. Yeah, well, they're both available. We know that, that there are fridges available and microwaves available, whether they come together as a pack or you have to get them individually. I'm not entirely sure. I usually see them come together. Okay. All right. So that's it for the desk. If you ever need something you don't know who to talk to, come down to the desk. We also have a 24 hour hot RA on duty. So if you ever get locked out of your room or you just need, you don't know something happened. You don't know who to talk to to get help. You can always call the RA on duty and they're there to help you. So the numbers are posted all throughout the building. We've got 16 amazing RA's coming to work for you next year. And there's two RA's per floor. So you always have someone who's really dedicated towards helping you as well as all of them. So let's head this way. Yeah. And while we're walking in that direction, let me ask, how is mail handled? How do you do mail? Good question. So this is not a full service desk, but we do have a full service desk that we work a lot with at Maple South. So it's two minute walk again. And that's where you're going to get your mail. You can send mail from there. You can't send packages, but you're going to have to head over there. You'll get your own mailbox code and you'll share a mailbox with your roommate. Thank you. All right. So this is another hangout space, but then we have our fish bowl. This is one of my favorite rooms. Wait, what did you call it? It's the fish bowl. It's supposed to be a computer lab, but we don't have computers. So now we just have this awesome space with a huge table. There's a hookup for if you want to do a presentation or you just want to share a screen with people to watch the show. You can do that. And this place is just usually a great place for studying. Don't run into these glass doors. It happens a lot. People don't realize the doors are closed. Oh, against the fish bowl. Okay. Yeah. That's a dramatic table. It is. It kind of is. Laws could be written at that table. But a lot of studying is how a lot of good things have happened here. You know, I had a group of students a couple years ago, give me a shark tank presentation of why they should have a second floor RSO registered student organization in this room. They set everybody up. They presented in suits. So there's a lot of important things that happen here. We also have our, we typically have our lead hogs meetings of your lead on. Hello, we're excited to have you. We have our meetings in there. We'll see what they look like this semester. We probably will see a lot of virtual stuff. Then we have our first study room. This is a great space for a small group. You can also come in here and take a test. If you need to, you can just put a sign on the door. We also have whiteboard walls. These are amazing. Bring your own whiteboard markers and erasers and you can write right on these. We ask that you wipe them off when you leave them. Just right right there on the wall, huh? Right on the wall. That's crazy. And then this is another TV lounge. We have these awesome chairs that are ergonomically made for gamers.  I don't really see people game in them. They're usually just hanging out, but that's fine. So then we'll go down this hallway. We have two offices. So the first one is my office. If you ever need something and you don't know who to go to, you can always come here. If my door is closed, you can always send me an email. My email is on the door. You can call me. And my office hours are nine to five. I have a lot of meetings and work with a lot of students. So if the door is closed, just don't be hesitant to reach out in another way. It says world's best CRE. Is that official? That's 100%. I don't know what to say. I would say true, but there's some great CREs here. But this is my office. I meet with RAs in there, do a lot of administrative stuff, stuff that nobody knows about, but it's what I love to do. So Heidi is our GA who is basically the liaison between the Honors College and HOT students. So she, you'll see her around putting on programs. If you ever need help with academic resources, she's your person. Really sweet gal. And so she works out of this office. And she's with the Honors College. She works for the Honors College, but she hangs out with us in HOTs. All right. Our next face. Unfortunately, we'll be closed in the fall due to COVID-19. We will reassess in the spring, but when it is open, we have a lot of equipment. We have a Smith machine, some treadmills, a dip machine, an elliptical, all of that. So this space really, it's a great space if you don't want to walk down to the hyper. The hyper will be open. If you're interested in working out and doing all of that, I would check their website out for their new COVID-19 hours and procedures because they are looking to be safe and open for you. And so I would not be discouraged from working out. Just head down to the hyper. I think we may have some former students in our field right now. Isha Rizzo and Sydney Lulusmith and Natalie Torres. Very nice. Yeah. Okay. Good to have you. I'm also on the first floor. Yes. So good to have you on the first floor. We also have a men's restroom. A lot of people can't find it because it's not next to the women's one down there, but don't forget it's over here. Okay. There's also a stairwell to go up the stairs that way. There's a lot of programs and hanging out that happens down here. The RA has put on a lot of programming to give community building opportunities, educational programs. And this is a lot of where that happens as we've talked about, you know, COVID-19 planning may look a little different. But we also have some vending machines for you and some recycling. So you can always recycle here. There's recycling on every floor, but you can start with the first floor behind here. There's some spots. We know I was wrong. They're actually not students who were here. They're here. They're coming this fall. They're coming this fall. I was like, I'm not sure about this. We're excited for you to be watching us. There are also two elevators behind us. There's some rumors that the elevators don't work super well at the time. Let me assure you they're up and running. They are ready to go for you. We also have trash room.  Remember to bag it and make sure it's clean. And you can put recycling over in that corner. You break down your boxes and put them on top of that trash can right over there. There's no place to recycle cardboard anywhere else in this building, only right there. Okay. Thank you. Yep. Stop is going to be the laundry room. For those of you who don't have your parents still do your laundry, here's where you'll do your laundry. Some people will go home every weekend to do their laundry. I mean, if you got that ability. Yeah, you know, I don't know. So we have plenty of washers and dryers as you can see. You have already paid for them so you don't need coins. You don't need your card. There's an app that you can scan to tell you when your laundry is done. The most important thing for you to remember is to do your laundry promptly. This space will fill up quickly with 400 people if you're not quick at remembering when your laundry is going to be done and turning it through. So I recommend that. We ask that you don't use bleach. You'll bring your own, your own laundry detergent. It's usually what we recommend. Yeah. Really just be respectful of the space. That's the biggest thing because we have a lot of people doing laundry and a lot of stuff can end up laying around here. So please be kind to our space. And the Laundry Alert app allows you to see when different machines are open and when yours is ready to go. Do you want to take the elevator? Yeah, let's take the elevator. All right, let's do that. And so tell me, where are you from? Me? Uh-huh, yeah. I'm from Oregon. If there's anybody from Oregon watching, whoop, whoop, I love Fayetteville now. So I moved from Oregon to go to grad school and then met my husband and ended up staying here. My husband also lives here. In the building? Yes, his name's Jeff. He's awesome. And you may see him around. He loves Fulbright because we get free food working here. So you have a few comments come in just now. Yes. Emma asked, is hot open to incoming transfer and upperclassmen students? It is not. You have to be a freshman to be in hot. 100% freshman. And Olivia gives a shout out to the Pacific Northwest. Yes, Olivia will have to talk. And Sydney is in room 322. Okay, we're on the third floor. So while we're in the third floor, we might just dip in for a second. Just real quick. Okay. Okay. So what I'm going to show you first is the study room. And then we're going to head all the way back to the other rooms. We have a bathroom area here. It's identical to the other side. 322. We're just going to miss her room. There's a stairwell here. And then this is your study floor or study space on your floor. You're on floor 3. It's a little echoey in here. But another whiteboard wall for all your equations and things that you're studying. And then we've got a couple of tables in here for you. The biggest thing to remember in this space is just keep it down after 10 o'clock because it's a little echoey in here. For these students over here. There's 322 on this side. Let's go over there. These doors never lock. So they just kind of stay open. Okay. 322. Here's your room. It was in Olivia. Yeah. Nice. Olivia, here's your room. Your bed is lofted. Yes, your bed is lofted right now. Okay. Very good. We'll show you how many people have we got watching. We've got about 52. Nice. Okay. Let's see. Jackie. Well, Jennifer is in room 909. Jackie asks, can we see a corner room? And we do have a corner room on the tour. Yeah. Anna asks, will study rooms on each floor be available for students to use? Yes, they will be. The biggest thing is just capacity. So we'll probably take a few chairs out of there to make sure there's not too many people in one space, but they will be available. And Angela asks, can we see a restroom? And yes. Yes, I got you. That is an important part of this. So I want to highlight the community spaces. So these are our lounges, our floor lounges. There's a TV that you can hook up. A lot of people do like game nights and movie nights. And this is just great space. I also want to highlight the RA room that's over here. So there's two RAs per floor, as I said. And here's where one of them lives in 318. And then we do a lot of programs in this area as well. So students hang out and then sometimes RAs put off programs. Back at the elevator lobby, recycling is really important and hot. We do a great job at recycling. Sometimes we have people who are really passionate and they come through and students sort it for us. And we've got a really good sustainability crew. And so you can do plastic, metal, and paper here. We've got a question from Amber about will masks be required in the dorm common spaces? To make sure that we're all safe and people are feeling comfortable, we will be requiring masks in common spaces. The place that you don't have to have masks is in your room. Here's another common space. As well as you can see there's a closet over here and that is the trash shoot.  There's also a broom in there that you can use and so you don't have to bring your own. Okay, I'll show you the bathroom. So first off we have a water fountain. We do recommend that you bring your own water bottle. The fountain part where you would put your mouth close to will not be available when you get here. But this will be so that it's touchless and you're not getting your mouth near it. So we have three types of bathrooms. So the first one is the unisex bathroom or ADA. This has a huge shower. You want to pull that curtain? Yeah, this is going to close. So the biggest thing is make sure you always close the curtain all the way. Otherwise the water will come out and then you have a wet bathroom floor and we don't want that. That's a pretty big shower. Yeah, you need a big shower and there you go. So that's that and then you have toilet sink, all that. And then we have another bathroom that's individual but it's a little bit smaller. And that's just the toilet? No, it's the toilet and the shower. There's a shower back here if I can squeeze back here. So single-stall shower and then toilet and there sink. And then we have the community bathroom where you have five different sinks. And then what we do, we don't allow students to keep their items in here. So when you come in, you'll bring your stuff and when you leave take your stuff with you. Just because there's so many people we can't have everybody store in their toothbrushes and hair stuff and all that. So we have three or four different types of bathrooms. We have a shower and a toilet here. The next one has a toilet. We have a shower and a toilet. And then we have just a shower. Okay, so it looks like most of the showers have kind of an area where you can get dressed. Yes, and the cool part about these is they have the full door. So you're not feeling like you're in a stall in a public place. It's a very private. There's all the way down to the floor. Yes. How European of us. Oh wow, how European. I didn't know that was a European thing. All right, and then we're going to go to some rooms now. So we're going to start with the 08 room. We have eight of them and they're our specialty room. These are not a typical layout. There's only a few of them, as I said, but we'll show you kind of the layout of the space and the furniture. And if we have any questions, let us know. This furniture is all the same as it would be in another room. So I can just kind of go over that with you. Every room has two sets of the same thing. So we have your bed. This is a lofted bed. So this is as high as it's going to go. If you want to deloft it, you'll just need a mallet from the front desk and a friend. And you can deloft this down. Most of them are going to start out lofted for the year, but you can also put in a request on the housing website if you want to be sure that it's lofted. There's a mattress here. A lot of people bring mattress toppers just for a better sleep. So if you want one, bring one. Then we have your dresser. So there's three big drawers. And you have a nightstand with a place to lock. So if you want to have just a place where you can lock stuff up, you can just put a padlock in here to the drawer.  Help me remember this when we go to the other room? Yes. And ask us the height of each drawer inside the dresser. Good question. We'll get into the other room. We'll measure that. Okay. And then you have your armrest where you can store a lot of your clothes. It also has a full-length mirror so you don't need to bring a big mirror with you. A couple clothing racks and some cubbies. Let me give a good pan of this. What do we call this? This is the end room. We call it the end room or the 08 room is typically what it's called. Yeah, I'll let you pan around. And then this room has two entrances to exits as well. And then we were asked to look at a corner room. All right, we're going to the corner room. This room is just slightly, slightly bigger than another room. Not by much at all, but it's enough. So same furniture, a little different view, different window layout. And then there's a smoker or a particle detector in every room. So there's fire safety and all that in every room as well. Carbon monoxide detector for safety. Sydney asked, are the rooms besides the study rooms on the other side also corner rooms? And I believe they are. Yes, they are. So there's four corner rooms and then the 08 room and then the rest are the same. Hailey asked, how wide is the corner room? And I feel like we have that maybe on the website. Yeah, the website or I don't think this one has that. I think we have just a general standard. Do you want to get the wide one? You guys don't have to work together. That one may be a little harder to use. Okay, we can try it. Assuming is that the way you want it. 140 inches. Someone can divide that by 12 and get us to how many feet? We're close. 144 would be 13. So yeah, 12. As you were saying, yeah, was it 12 feet? Yeah, it didn't change. Any math major don't get mad at me. It was a business major. Okay, so we're heading into a more typical room now. Okay, same furniture, same layout. And then this, the dimensions of this room are going to be 13.6 inches or 13 feet, 6 inches. And then by 11 feet, 6 inches. So just a little bit. This is 11 feet, 6 inches. That was 144 inches. Yes, we're just closer to 12 feet. Okay. Yeah, and now is a great time to ask us any questions. We did have one question that came in earlier about the height. I believe of the door. Yes. So while he's measuring that too, I want to highlight, clearly every room has multiple people. Some of us have, some students have single rooms, but if you have a roommate, something we do every year is we facilitate roommate agreements. So a lot of people room with strangers and sometimes it comes with that is figuring out what you prefer. And so at the beginning of the year, your RA will meet with both of you and you'll do a roommate agreement to talk about what you expect with living together and how to work best together. We also do the RA's, do one-on-ones with everybody. So you'll have a chance to have a one-on-one interaction with your RA as well to build that relationship. Very nice. 8 inches high. 8 inches high. 8 inches high, but 24 inches deep. So each drawer, is each drawer the same? Yes, all of those are the same. Yep. So each one is 8 inches. 29 inches wide, okay. So what's the height from the top of the drawer to the bottom of the lofted bed? The top of the drawer. So this is a fully lofted bed. This is fully lofted. Yep. And it can go down 3 inches and 3 inch increments, I believe. 27 inches. 27 inches, Lily. Okay. We're certainly up for more questions. One that we, can we get that ledge, because I recall, has a little bit of an indention back there? Yes. Students forget things when they move out back here, so don't forget your things when you leave. Do they want the whole thing? Yeah, let's get the whole thing with the indention. If it'll go, will it go that far? No, it won't. Okay. Okay, do you want it all the way to there? Yeah, if you can, that'd be great. Oh, this thing is not long enough. Pull it. Oh, it's already there. Okay, gotcha.  Yeah, support it. Thank you. Okay. And Lily asks, can you block the vent? No. Do not block the vent just for safety purposes, and then also you just want to make sure you get some fresh air in the room. Right. So just make sure you keep it away. You can put something in front of it as long as there's space in between, and then you can continue. I'll give a closer view of that. Another thing about these rooms is, so all the furniture has to stay in the room, but you can arrange it however you want. And so this is a standard layout, but typically people move this stuff all around the room. Sometimes roommates, you know, put both dressers on that side and all of that, but you can arrange it however you want. Everything's movable. Yeah, it's all movable. The other thing is outlets. A lot of people ask about the outlets. There's an outlet down here, and there's an outlet down there, and on this side it's the same. So there's two outlets on each side. There are not outlets on the south and the north wall. So we have a couple measurements coming in here. We'll go over them one by one. Jeff asks, what size rug will fit? And, you know, I guess, can we give them maybe this space down here? Yeah, if you want a space, so we'll measure the space with a standard layout, but really you could do it any size in the room if you're okay with furniture going on top of it. But we'll fit one just for this common area. 65 inches? It's about 65 inches between the two beds. Yeah. About 114 inches in that dimension. Lily asks, if I put a shelving unit right in front of the air vent, will it block the airflow? If it's a flatback, you know, there's those ones with the cubes. That one would probably be fine. But if it's a one with a flatback, you just want to make sure it's like six inches away from it. You could probably make it work if you're willing to give up a little bit of space. Right, right. And then Jennifer asks, is the room length dimension to the wall where the bed is or is the dimension to the window or window ledge? Let me think through that again. Let me make sure I'm getting it right. Is the room length dimension to the wall where the bed is or is the dimension to the window or window ledge? Oh, I think she's asking about the dimensions we publish. And I believe that the dimensions we publish would be... To the floor to floor. Yeah, not to the window because the ledge isn't going to be counted in the floor and the dimensions of it. Yeah, I wouldn't think so. Jennifer asks, what's the dimension between the two beds? I think we just got that when we did the... Thank you. Okay, love these questions. Sydney asks, can you measure the distance between the ceiling and the top of the fully lofted bed? Good question. Yeah, I would go at the top of the mattress too. Oh, okay. 29 inches. Okay, thank you very much. Another thing I want to highlight too is we have the... Like I talked about, you can have free cable in here. The boxes are on that side of the room. They're on either or, but this side of the room, it's on here. Or in here, in this room, it's on this side. You also have some towel racks as well. Nice call out on the towel racks. Let's see here. Eric asks, does each room come with Ethernet? If so, how many ports are there in each room? There's one port and each room has one. Okay. Good question. What's the difference between the door and the corner of the room on the bigger side? On the bigger side. What's the difference between the door and the corner of the room on the bigger side? Okay, let's just show those two corners. You mind closing the door? If you have this side of the room, typically you'll want to work with your roommate to kind of share this side of the wall because if you're on this side, you're going to have a door on your side of the room to figure out how you can share this side of the wall. Yeah, we'll just compare the two sides of the wall. Okay. Sounds good. And then Jennifer asks, well, she's saying thank you. Our pleasure, Jennifer. Anna is asking here, what is the height from the floor to the top of the bed frame when the bed is at a height that accommodates the dresser underneath? So what is the height from the floor to the top of the bed frame? It doesn't, it accommodates it right now. So she's saying right, if it's right above this, then it would be, I mean, just above. So probably, oh gosh. What setting are we at right now with that? What height are we at right now? Well, from the floor, like if we were telling them, hey, I want to set my bed at this height. What bed, how would we tell them that right now? Could you go to the frame, the top of the frame? 59 and a half is where it is right now, if that's helpful. Okay. Isha asks, since there will be community washrooms, how will we mitigate possible community spread of COVID-19? And we are taking some extra precautions this year when it comes to the cleaning of bathrooms. They will be cleaned, normally they're cleaned once a day during the week. This fall we'll be cleaning them twice a day and also every day, also on the weekends. And the high touch areas will be cleaned more often just during this time. And she talked about, was it the washroom or the laundry room? The washrooms. And then Lila asks, what's the distance from the towel rack to the door side of the wall? Towel rack to the door side. Forgive me y'all, these are hard to interpret from words. Okay, so from here to here. Is that what she's asking? I think so. Get it. What was that, about a foot? About one foot is what we got there. And feel free to retie your questions if we're totally missing it and you're at home being like, oh my gosh, these people. And are towel racks behind the door? Yes. There are towel racks right there, two towel racks. And you also have your thermostat here. You want to change the temperature of the room. I'm not as well. Is this a corner room or a standard room? Standard room. If you want to look at a corner room, rewind a little bit and we just went through one. And really the main difference here is maybe less than a foot I think, and width or something like that. And then Catherine asks, will both wardrobes fit beside the door? Yes, on this side. If you're talking about this side, absolutely. Easy answer on that one, yes. Let me just double check. I'm pretty sure they will. As I look at it, it looks like yes. I think so. It's to be covered, so let's do it from there. An inch and a half to spare. A lot of people do that. And then Jennifer asks, are you able to measure the wall space between the door and the corners please? The door and the corner? 20 inches, Jennifer. Okay, and yeah. Lilly's saying thank you. Jennifer's got her questions answered. Great. We're happy to answer these questions for you. It really gives us a lot of pleasure to do so. I'm excited to see you more. That's really it. I'm getting pretty lonely around here. It's by myself in this 400 person building, you know. She's going a little crazy in a good way. I'm getting pretty crazy. I'm used to like people being all around here and I'm all the time. It's getting pretty quiet. Well, with no further questions then. Yeah, as you're saying, you're excited. I'm excited. We're excited to have all of you coming this fall. And any other thoughts you might pass on to your incoming freshmen?  I hope you're excited as well. I know we're all working with an un-traditional school year, but I just really encourage everybody to come in. I'm just flexible and being creative and just kind of rolling with whatever this year looks like. We're obviously going to do our best to, you know, protect you and be safe and all of that. But I just think we can just get creative with what this year looks like. I think we'll have a really cool year. So we're excited to see you. If you need anything, just email me at sessilyr. C-E-C-I-L-E-E-R at urc.edu. You can look me up in the directory too. But if you need something, just reach out to me and I'm just, I'm looking forward to seeing you all. Yay. You wave us goodbye. All right. Bye everybody. Have a great day. And Ben, I'll just say we'll catch your question in comments afterward. Okay. Thank you.


On the subject of this before we got news of the ceasefire an individual named Deborah Messing and she really puts the mess and messing right folks. That's the best you get from me in terms of jokes anyways, she had this thread and This I mean I read it. It almost made my head explode. Please take three minutes and read through this carousel There is so much disinformation about Israel being spread and it is getting people hurt now It's ironic that she says this right here because as you're going to see The things that she says here. I don't know if she made it up. I don't know if she got this information from a particular source either way I mean verifiably false things here and yeah, so Leah says that this thread was so frustratingly terrible.  Things about the entire Arab world and the Arab area the Middle East and North Africa. I Don't I don't even know Look, we'll just read it. This honestly is baffling So there are videos from all over the world including the United States of crowds of pro-Palestinian protesters attacking beating kicking Using pipes as bombs against Jews. It's horrifying Attacks against Jews has increased 483 percent in the last 10 days 86 attacks Hamas is a terrorist organization whose sole purpose is to kill every Jew and destroy Israel Most people living in Israel one piece. So first and foremost, let's understand that there is this implication here That anyone who speaks out at the behest of Palestinians inherently their anti-Semitic They're the ones responsible for all of these hate crimes. Now. Is it the case that hate crimes against Jewish people has been up? Absolutely, and the left speaks out against that But what she's trying to do here is tie The activism and advocacy for Palestine directly to this so she's attributing culpability To Palestinian activists here, which is the first thing that rub me the the wrong way. She makes it seem as if People who support Palestine and are against the apartheid Endorse this and support this. That's absolutely not the case. I unequivocally condemn any and all violence and anti-Semitism, but you see what people like this do is they disingenuously link anti-Semitism to criticisms of the Israeli governments and that's such a it's such a Brazenly disingenuous tactic to shut down criticism. That's legitimate and valid of a right-wing government I mean imagine thinking that it was anti-American to criticize the American government or it was racist to criticize a majority Muslim country like Saudi Arabia or a majority Black country like Uganda. I mean imagine imagine having that logic. It doesn't make sense, right? Of course, you can criticize the policies of a country. So for her to say this it's it's disingenuous to say the least so what she says here is Three I pray for a for a two-state solution. I pray for the killing to stop first of all a two-state solution I Mean is this even does anyone actually think this is feasible at this point? Nobody's talking about a one-state solution. People have to start actually taking into account whether or not a one-state solution with equal rights to Palestinians is something that is Worth looking into you more.  I support a two-state solution, but this is This is a lazy This is a lazy take care and part of the reason why she says this isn't just so she has some plausible deniability So she doesn't completely hate Palestinians or not care about them But also because she really wants there to be an ethno state with Netanyahu at the head of it So but that is impossible as long as Hamas is allowed to continue its campaign to destroy Israel Hamas must be defeated for the safety of everyone in the region for the safety of Jews every everywhere. So again, there's an underlying assumption here All this could end if Hamas stopped. They're the ones who are the aggressors here. First of all I don't think she knows about this inconvenient fact that Hamas was emboldened by Israel second of all Hamas isn't the occupier here you can condemn what Hamas does and Say that the rockets that they fire They absolutely lead to Palestinians getting killed because Israel always uses that as a justification to bomb Gaza but Who's the occupier in this instance? Yeah, Hamas asked for a ceasefire since last week as Tara pointed out and they didn't get that because It comes down to what Israel wants Okay, moving on to point number four.  That is very ironic coming from her Share it widely disinformation is gas on the fire of anti-Semitism And it is everyone's responsibility not to amplify disinformation on social media It hurts if you are an ally, please act like an ally. We need you. Oh my god We're gonna get to the disinformation that she is Sharing because she is going to share these images here.   They are wild I read online that Israelis are ethnically cleansing Palestinians Okay, so that's myth number one that she's trying to debunk stop taking everything you read online for face value Okay, Palestinians face many challenges and inequalities But are not being ethnically cleansed to say that this is an understatement It's an understatement To minimize everything that's going on and reduce it down to oh well they face many challenges This is literally ethnic cleanse cleansing apologia. That's what she's doing. She's minimizing ethnic cleansing And I don't know if she is dumb or disingenuous or a combination of both either way It's a distinction without a difference and I actually agree with agree with the premise that misinformation is a problem, but She's one of the individuals who's spreading it However Jews have been ethnically cleansed from the rest of the Middle East Okay, so she's shifting Victimization here actually contrary to popular belief. It isn't the Palestinians. It's Really the Jewish people here who are victims now Nobody on the left would deny victimization of Jewish people Jews have suffered great atrocities But what she's very clearly trying to do is change the entire conversation This one is by far the most Weird and bizarre comic if we want to call it a comic But I heard that Israel is an empire that colonized Arab land Look at this response here Empires require a motherland A place where the Empire seeds the goods they steal and where they bring the culture and language to oppress their colonial subject Like Britain and America or South Africa and British plus Dutch Israel is only 0.03 percent of the Middle East and the only Jewish state in the world There are 57 Arab and Muslim countries in the Middle East that are part of the Arab Empire folks Okay Let's let's look at the entire Middle East and North Africa region the MENA region Ask yourself, where did she get this number from because the last I checked There's like 22. Where did she get 57 think of the logic here because there's so many Arab and Muslim countries in one area that makes them an empire a bunch of countries with their own Sovereign government governments and territories that actually constitutes an empire.  Yeah, Thorben. That's a good point Is she including all of Africa here because I don't I don't know where she's getting This number from there are not 57 Arab and Muslim countries in the Middle East and North Africa, I don't believe that Israel isn't a colonial empire. I've read so much about it from Instagram I mean think of how condescending this is as if all of the people who are concerned with Palestinian human rights They just get their news from Instagram or Facebook. We're basically like conservative boomers We see these memes online and that's how we educate ourselves it's not like there is a robust history of literature and news and videos that we can watch with our eyes of Palestinians getting bombed. I mean as Benjamin Dixon was interviewing a woman from Gaza You can hear a rocket going off around her. I'm in my house and I'm ready to be bombed at any second like literally any second and That's saying in our house makes it any less risky Like we really don't know where they're going like it's all indiscriminate. They can like hit our house any any second I love how there's this implication that we're uninformed because we get our news from Instagram Which is not true when she's the one who's saying there are 57 Arab countries in the Middle East What? So I don't know how much more of this idiocy I can take Because almost all of this is wrong and honestly like if you were to report this for misinformation I don't necessarily think you would be unreasonable because there are things in here that are just factually incorrect Why do so? Why do so many people spread these lies online then?  So why do people believe the correct information that's being spread around online? Well, because people like you know nothing about the conflict and resort to infographics What is this Deborah? Is this not like an infographic type of thing? You're sharing like a comic where there's this weird conversation going on like I want to know did she make this? Did she get this from somewhere like she probably got this from Instagram herself? Because people like you know nothing about the conflict and resort to infographics on Instagram Who's getting their information from Instagram Deborah?     Are you sure about that Deborah? Are you sure you want people to actually research this topic because that's why so many people Understand what's happening. So how do we free Palestine according to Deborah Messing? Well, the majority of Israelis support a Palestinian state beside Israel in the West Bank and Gaza You should support it too. Oh, it's that simple. It's it's that simple. Did the Palestinians know everyone? Did the Palestinians know that it's that simple? Extreme nationalists on both sides try to claim Palestinians plus Israelis don't deserve national rights If you see someone opposing the basic human rights of either side or saying they don't exist stay away again So we should stay away from Deborah Messing, but I love this this very very Large question for someone who likes to talk about how complex the issue is like Deborah Messing She doesn't give you a definitive answer because she knows what the definitive answer is We have to put pressure on Israel How do we put pressure on Israel first and foremost? The US government has to stop vetoing every single resolution condemning Israeli apartheid and their war crimes at the UN Security Council second of all boycott divestments in sanction, you know, it's not That foreign history that you have to look back to see what was effective in South Africa in South Africa during apartheid So I love how you know, she she gives you a little bit of something to think about so what do we do to free Palestine? Oh, we'll just support a two-state solution Boom that easy Folks, she's got to get this information to the Palestinians because I don't think they realize how easy it is to end the occupation that they're currently Dealing with so I think she says one last dumb thing. No, that's it. That's it. And I love the responses here. So Desiree You are entirely ill-informed remarkable the irony here is that this thread is very threat of spreading this information Great job in that regard. I've got to like these. These are great. Everything you've said in this thread is disinformation like I Mean if it weren't for these people calling her out, this would make me feel crazy because she's so She's so disingenuous and so confident like this is the Dunning-Kruger effect right here She thinks that everyone else is wrong and everyone else is getting their information from Instagram infographics and memes when she Doesn't even have basic facts about the world that are easily verifiable How long does it take to Google how many states are in the Arab world? But she put 57 she shared an image that said there are 57 states within the Arab world and not only that all of these states Collectively account for an Arab Empire like what is wrong with Debra messing out of all the liberals She's the most uninformed and insufferable like I'm calling it right now.  She took this information From Instagram herself and she changed it to make the information incorrect I don't know if she did that herself or if somebody else did that and she just shared what somebody else did but she took good graphics and Changed it so aren't Israelis and Palestinians just fighting over religion. They're not fighting is real Israelis are the oppressors and Palestinians are the oppressed and the situation is about anything but religion She is truly shameless


I'm really excited about being here. It's my first time in Europe. All the talks have been great so far. I've been running around between both the rooms. But I'm here for now. I hope you're excited about learning some things about serverless observability. Let me start by telling you who I am. I'm Vridwan Sharif. I work on observability tools and solutions for different GCP environments. Most of my work has been focused on agents like OpenTelemetry and Prometheus and our own agents called the Ops agent and getting them to run on VMs. But more recently, I've been working on leveraging OpenTelemetry and Prometheus on serverless environments like Cloud Run. I'm here today for two main reasons. The first is I always wanted to visit Europe. And this way, Google pays for it. And the second is because for the past six months, I've been working on making Google serverless offering called Cloud Run more observable. There were lots of lessons along the way, and I think it makes for a good talk, I think. And a lot of our lessons are very applicable to the open source world, and we just wanted to make sure we build these solutions in OSS as opposed to in private. This is a quick agenda of what we'll cover. We only have like 25 minutes, so we'll stick to some of the basics. And if you feel like some of these topics are rushed, find me after. They probably are rushed. But yeah, let's just get started. Let me tell you what we're talking about. We'll cover serverless briefly. We'll talk about some of the problems with serverless observability. We'll then cover some changes we actually need to Cloud Run itself to accommodate observability. And then we'll talk about its implications on different kinds of telemetry systems, like push-based ones, like OpenTelemetry Collector, pull-based ones like Prometheus. And then we talk about how we productionize and configure these agents in the wild. So let's get started. What, why, and when do we use serverless? Now, the premise of serverless is pretty simple. It gives you the promise of having users only pay for what they consume. It scales quickly and transparently as workloads' demands change. It's a way of providing the infrastructure as a service on a paper-use basis. Typically, you will have to write code or some configuration. And that's it. You don't have to worry about the underlying infrastructure anymore. And Google serverless offering, called Cloud Run, offers serverless for containerized workloads. If you have containers, you can scale them pretty seamlessly with Cloud Run. It implements the Knative serving API. And like Knative, it attempts to scale to zero. What that means is, if your service sees no traffic, you pay for no CPU or memory costs. Why you would use serverless? Well, the main reason is cost. It's generally very cost-effective. You often pay a fraction of what you would pay otherwise because you don't pay for unused space or idle CPU. Developers that want to use serverless will not have to worry about how to scale up their code, and they'll all scale on demand. It also gives you a quick time to market because you don't have to worry about complicated rollout processes and procedures. You can just write code in the serverless vendor. It usually takes care of the rest. I really like this illustration that shows some of the cost benefit of serverless. The things you see in dark blue there are your cost savings because you don't pay for unused space or idle CPUs. Serverless is not a silver bullet, though. You don't get to use it for every problem you encounter. For Cloud Run specifically and other containerized serverless workloads, there are very specific conditions you need to satisfy for you to use it. For Cloud Run, it has to be requests driven, usually HTTP or GRPC. It does not require a local file system. Network file systems are for most file systems. Network databases are fine, though. Your container should be able to handle multiple instances of the app running simultaneously and doesn't have very strict, very high CPU or memory usage per instance. And the most important one is for Cloud Run specifically, it has to be containerized. There are containers that we're scaling. There exists a perception that if you're running containerized workloads, you have to choose between Cloud Run or Kubernetes or some equivalent. But I don't think that's really true. They can and should be used together. I like this sketch because it kind of gives you a simple illustration of when to use what resource, what runtime. If you want committed resources, use VMs or Kubernetes. If you want pay as you go, use one of the serverless offerings. If you're using containers, evaluate Kubernetes or Cloud Run, and that's what serverless is. Now let's talk about why observability is tricky when you're dealing with serverless. So on the spectrum there from traditional on-premise instances from all the way to software as a service and serverless things, you trade off what you manage with what your serverless vendor manages for you or your Cloud vendor manages for you. On one end, you manage everything from the hardware to the operating system. And on the other end, you only manage maybe the configuration and maybe some application code. But what does that mean for observability? If your vendor abstracts away the infrastructure that you want to observe, what does observability mean in this environment? Well, sometimes it feels like you're looking at a brick wall. You might be flying blind without access to custom telemetry that you really want or you're used to in the other runtimes. And sometimes when you want to add this telemetry, it feels like you're onboarding onto the Cloud vendor-specific tech stack now. I don't mean to say there is no observability on serverless right now. There certainly is. Like if you have any logs that go to standard out or standard error, they usually go to like cloud logging or one of the equivalence back ends.  Like this is an example from our back end.  But say you have your custom application, your containers running some exporter. You want some application custom code that you've instrumented yourself, some things about your business logic that you have telemetry for, what then? Then you're actually out of luck. You might need to actually get your hands dirty and add a considerable amount of complexity to your infrastructure. And that kind of sucks from Google's perspective. We would much rather have that you build an image you instrumented once with your favorite instrumentation, whether it be Prometheus, open telemetry, or something else. And you take this container and you run it across any of these runtimes. And then instrument and visualize them the same way. This would be like what ideally we would want, except that serverless branch there is not really true. It's not as simple, because of a few problems. And let's cover them now. Now, serverless compute is designed to reduce runtime of services. This means that instances in serverless might actually live at an extreme for exactly one request. They might pop up server requests, and then the instance might terminate. And so all telemetry produced by the serverless instance will need to export and flush all their telemetry very efficiently and quickly. And a lot of the instrumentation libraries that exist right now don't actually have that functionality. They don't flush telemetry on shutdown. That doesn't happen with Prometheus and open sensors, for example. Open telemetry does support this, but we don't want to require everyone just to use that for instrumentation here. And oftentimes what you build for serverless will be built in a way that's not very portable. You're often writing containers that are built specifically for serverless to get around this. Admittedly, the second problem is more of a Google problem. Our time series database, Monarch, doesn't allow cumulative metrics to be stored without start times. What that really means for us is we actually need two points to report the first cumulative point to our time series database because we cache the first one and normalize every subsequent point with it. In serverless, this is tricky because we might not live long enough to actually have two successful scrapes because of the previous problem where instances die very quickly. The third problem is quite general, though. A lot of the Prometheus-based scraping, Prometheus-based and pole-based metrics, they often require that metrics are pulled and not pushed from the instance itself. And this is a problem. Prometheus is pretty opinionated, as probably all of you know here. It assumes that you have long-running instances that live long enough to be scraped and discovered. They're OK with missing scrapes, and they communicate with local hosts and ports. A lot of these assumptions don't actually hold with serverless vendors. And even if it did, an external Prometheus entity doing the scrapes doesn't know the lifecycle of these instances themselves. And so what you'll have is you'll and we'll see an example shortly. You'll have the Prometheus scraping fail oftentimes. There are solutions around this. There are push gateways and aggregation gateways. Actually, in KubeCon, two years ago in Europe, there were two talks about how you can play around with Prometheus for the serverless world using aggregation gateways. There are talks from Colin Daas from Cloudflare and Fleeting Metrics by Bartek and Saswita. Interestingly, they're all here at this KubeCon, so hunt them down too. But this is what that looks like. In Prometheus, when you have a long-running instance and you have interval-based scraping, you'll get successful scrapes and you'll get a lot of aggregated data that you can pull away.  And even scrapes that do actually scrape partial data, you'll only get partial results because that instance might never be scraped again to get the rest of the aggregation or the rest of the results. And that's a problem. There's also the last problem. It's a minor one. In the other runtimes, like Kubernetes, you might have nice operators to configure your agents. But on Cloud Run and on a lot of serverless vendors, we don't have that. So we need to be more creative on how we configure these agents and deploy them. And so this is what that looks like. The nice and portable story you wanted, we don't really have. Instead, we have this very hand-wavy system of how we should instrument and deploy our observability solutions. And we were determined, OK, we were going to address this now. How should we do it? Well, we actually cheated. We decided that this problem, we should actually partially solve in the serverless, like Cloud Run service itself, not so it could run our bespoke agents, but also so it could run hotel and Prometheus. So let's cover that now. What changes did we need to make to Cloud Run to accommodate observability? Well, the first one is we introduced the sidecars. Now, sidecars allow you to start independent containers that run alongside the main container that's serving web requests. The main use case for this is to support running collection agents, like Hotel Might Run and a sidecar. And they can communicate freely with the agents, with the applications. All containers will share the same network namespace so they can communicate with local host and port. They also can share files because they have shared volumes that are mounted. To be fair, observability is not the only use case for sidecars, so we didn't have a very hard time convincing people to add this because they can also be used for nginx in front of your application container. You could have authentication and authorization filters. You could have connection proxies. Sidecars are generally quite useful. We didn't need just sidecars, though. We also needed one more bit, which is we needed the ability to order the life cycles of these containers. And so what that means is we can define a dependency between the containers. In this case, container A is a dependency of container B. And what that will mean is container A will start up before container B starts up, and container B shuts down before container A shuts down. And let's motivate why this is important with a couple of examples. Say you have a push-based approach to your telemetry with the open telemetry collector. Your application starts up. It might want to flush some metrics. When it flushes that telemetry, it will expect that the hotel collector is up and ready to respond to those flushes. So the hotel collector actually needs to exist before your sidecar is alive. The same thing on shutdown. On shutdown, your application might flush telemetry once again. And when it does that, the hotel collector needs to still be alive. And so the hotel collector needs to terminate after. And so this dependency relationship is quite important to make sure we don't miss telemetry. For the pull-based approach, now say you have Prometheus as a sidecar. You actually need the opposite. Because the flow of telemetry is initiated by the sidecar itself, the Prometheus sidecar might actually want to pull when it starts up. In which case, it will expect the application to already be alive. And the same thing on shutdown. On shutdown, when Cloud Run says, OK, there's no more requests. We're shutting down the instance. We actually need to shut down the sidecar first so it can do a final scrape of the application before the application itself terminates. And so this is what an instance would look like with no instrumentation. Once you add these sidecars, they will look like this, where we talked about the dependency before. And so every time the instance pops up, the sidecars pop up with it for the purpose of observability.  And that's it. That's all we needed to do to Cloud Run. Now let's look at what this meant for OTLP push-based ingress. And then we'll talk about Prometheus after. Turns out nothing. That's all we actually need. And OTLP push-based metrics now work fine. All you need to do is make sure when you add the collector as a sidecar, you specify the dependency ordering, and you'll have your metrics flowing with no lossy telemetry. And that's quite nice, actually. Pull-based metrics are not as nice. Pull-based metrics were a little tricky and not as simple. And we actually needed to make a few changes to the Prometheus libraries and some hotel components to get this to work. The main thing we needed to add was the ability to scrape on shutdown. This is that when the Prometheus collector is shutting down, it performs a final scrape. And we had to add that to the libraries. And we need to make sure that these scrapes are guaranteed, even if the sidecar just booted up. The last point there is a GCP-specific thing. We needed to make sure that these final scrapes actually do complete within 10 seconds. Because of the dependency ordering, we need to make sure that after 10 seconds, the application gets a chance to gracefully shut down. Otherwise, everything is going to be killed non-gracefully. This is what that looks like. You'll have your regular interval-based Prometheus scraping, and then you have this final scrape at the end to make sure you collect all the time and you're not missing any aggregation. This is what it looks like when your instance is only alive for, say, 10 seconds. We'll actually scrape optimistically on startup with some offset. And then, again, we will scrape on shutdown. And like we talked about before, there is the extreme case where your instance only lives for exactly one request, in which case your instance pops up and dies immediately after it serves the request. We will still scrape once on shutdown. I alluded to this before. Our issue with GCP was we weren't able to deal with just a single scrape for cumulative metrics. So we needed to make a change to open elementaries Prometheus receiver to allow us to do some hacky things. One thing is we actually synthesize a start time metric. So we will look for the process start time metric that a lot of Prometheus SDKs will export. And if we don't find that, we'll use the collector start time and synthesize that instead. There is a slight catch that's very rare and definitely an anti-pattern, where if your serverless application is like using an exporter that's emitting a metric about something that lives outside, you might see a high rate. But again, this is rare. And we were OK making this trade-off. And that's it. Now we should have pole-based and post-based metrics working correctly. The only last bit we need to figure out is how we deploy and configure these collectors in the world. Well, this is admittedly a little hacky, but we use Secret Manager. Secret Manager is our secret store.  But what we do essentially is we store the configs of these collectors as secrets. And these secrets are nice because you have granular access controls for who can edit and view them. And we then mount these secrets onto the collectors so that the sidecars can access them. This is quite nice because any update made to the secret will automatically find itself in the local file system for these collectors because they're mounted. And then we have the supervisor process of the collector that pulls for updates to this file and reloads the collector so it makes sure it's running the latest configs. This is what that looks like. You have the Secret Manager and how you store the secret. It's mounted as a volume. And then you have your Cloud Run sidecars. It'll keep reading the file until it sees a new config and at which point it will reload the collector. If you want to configure it, all you need to do is, again, define the dependency ordering that we talked about before, making sure that the application's dependency off the collector. And then you define the secret, mount it as a volume, and use that hotel collector that uses the Prometheus receiver. And that's it. You don't have to make any changes to your instrumentation. This is an application that we have that runs. It's the same image that runs on a VM, on GKE, and on Cloud Run. And using this, you have the same metrics come flowing in the same way from all three runtimes. And that's kind of where we are now. We had built-in telemetry support. We then made some changes to Cloud Run to accommodate observability. Over the next few months, what we're trying to do is making sure the changes we had to make to open telemetry and Prometheus are upstreamed so that they're useful to not just our collectors, but just these projects in the wild.  A few of them are resource overhead because the sidecar approach is nice, but customers directly pay for them, pay for the CPU and memory they use. So us keeping control of how much memory they use is vitally important. And there've already been a few talks about instrumentation overhead and maybe collector overhead is something we can look into. There are other issues, like CPU throttling. This is quite tricky. This one is annoying, and we have not figured it out yet. But essentially, if you have a serverless service that doesn't have high enough QPS, that it's continuously alive, but doesn't have low enough that it shuts down, you might be in a state where Cloud Run will give you an instance, but it will give you no CPU, in which case your scrapes will fail and your flushes will fail and you get a bunch of errors and limited observability. There are also other approaches we're considering. Those are more vendor specific, though, like having sidecar less monitoring where the control plane itself will do scraping. But that's not as interesting because it's completely closer. Yeah, but that's what I have for you. I hope this was useful. I'm also curious about what people will use these changes we made to Cloud Run for. Yeah, but that's about it. I'll open it to questions. Thank you for listening to me ramble.


Jenny Horne, thanks so much for that report. We are watching General Mills. General Mills is trading higher after its results this morning. Let's take a closer look into what's going on here. Our panel is ready. Arun Sunderam, Equity Research Analyst at CFRA and Melissa Armo, founder, owner of the stocks. Thank you both for being with us. So Arun, I'll start with you. We saw a beat. We know the prices have been on the rise 20, 30, depending on what you're buying at the supermarket. What did you think of the quarterly report and more importantly, the outlook? Arun? Yeah, great question, Nicole. The quarter was good. All things considered, they beat EPS by six cents. Organic sales were up 4%. And more importantly, I think price mix was up 7% this quarter. This is actually the third consecutive quarter where you saw price mix sequentially accelerate. And it sounds like from their earnings call today, it sounds like price mix will even further accelerate their upcoming quarter fiscal Q4. It's a really strong price mix. And it's obviously being driven by cost push inflation, costs are on the rise. Everyone knows that. And one thing you gotta remember is these price increases that we're seeing, these are price increases or price hikes that was announced last year. So it's finally making its way into the income statement for General Mills and other packaged food companies. So there's a hope that maybe gross margins have bottomed here. But there obviously are lots of risks right now given what's going on with commodity prices, especially after Russia's invasion of Ukraine. But for a lot of packaged food companies, including General Mills, they are largely hedged in a lot of their raw materials and packaging stuff like that. So what's happening right now in the commodity markets isn't really leaving a significant impact on them right now. But that remains to be seen if that's going to happen down the road. Yeah. And I'm curious to hear more about some of the other names in the group and whether or not you think they're passing prices on to the consumer. Melissa, I'd like to bring you into the conversation here with a name like General Mills, which is seeing this up arrow today. Tell me your thoughts. Well, it's falling today, even though it gapped up in the morning, and this stock is strong, but it's nowhere near the previous highs, which was a long time ago, back up at 72. The problem that they announced today in the earnings report was that they're having a problem meeting demands in the stores. Pills, buried products is one of the things that they sell. They can't meet the demands. You go into stores now and this is all across the board. Other companies are having this issue too. Why aren't the products there? Typically, they said they'd like to meet 97, 98, 99% of the demand for their products. In other words, you go in, you can always get a Pills, buried product, but that's not the case right now. And the reason is, again, the same thing we've been talking about for two solid years, supply chain shortages. They're having problems getting the products to make the things that they need to make to sell. They're having problems getting the products out to people and they're already talking about inflation being a problem, even going into the rest of 2022 and even beyond. Right now, I just don't understand why they're saying the inflation rates overall 4.7%. I don't believe that. As a consumer, I go in and everything is increased in prices. Some things have increased 30, 40, 50%. I've seen some food things that have doubled. So this is going to hit the fan when it comes to our next journey report. So again, if they can't get the grains and the oils and the fats and the things they need to make all of their products, how are they going to get them out to the consumer to buy them? That affects their bottom line if they can't sell the products in order to make the money. Right. Up 2.5% right now for general mills at 64.21%. It's been a, for the year, you're to date down about 4%. Is general mills are doing something better or worse than some of the other names in the group? Do you like general mills? You're rating on that one versus some of the others? Yeah, we have a buy rating. We have a buy rating and a $72 target price on general mills right now. They're one of their few buys in the package food space. Obviously, we've been seeing investors recently gravitate more towards value stocks as opposed to growth. And I think there's a lot of value in the package food space. General mills is a little bit more expensive compared to peers, but relative to other industries within the consumer staple sector, I think package food is a good place to put your money. A lot of the companies in the package foods are trading around 14, 15 times forward earnings. That's much lower than some of the household product companies we cover around 20, 25 times earnings, forward earnings, and even beverages companies that we cover typically trade around north of 20 times earnings. So there is a lot of value, I think, in package foods here, and that's one of the reasons we have a buy in general mills. Yeah, that's interesting. You brought up beverage because I was actually thinking about that and how that fits into the picture if it's similar or different from some of the package foods. So as we expand this out, Melissa, are there names or groups within what the consumer is buying or doing, the habits that we're seeing that could be winners? Well, I think general mills is still good buy even though, again, it fell today on the earnings. I still think this is the best in the sector. When I look at other things like craft or even Campbell's soup, those charts do not look as good as general mills. So again, I look at the technicals. I'm looking at the strength in something compared to the weakness in it. While they've all had rallies since the lows two years ago when COVID first hit, general mills has had the biggest move up. So again, across the board, as far as the overall sector concerns, I do like this pick as the best pick even though the stock is down today. Yeah. I run most of the analysts, I see a lot of holds on general mills. What do you think is holding them back from saying buy? Well, I think it's really related to all the broader things that we're seeing, especially right now, I think a lot of investors on their toes trying to figure out if inflationary pressure is going to get worse throughout the year, we've seen prices of a lot of key commodities rise 20, 30% over the past few months, given what's going on in Russia and Ukraine, wheat prices, soybean prices, things like that. And right now, everyone's like, is that going to impact the bottom line going forward? But I think the positive that we heard today from general mills is that they are almost fully hedged on the commodity needs for the remainder of this fiscal year, and they are about 50% hedged for the rest of calendar 2022. So they shouldn't, at least for the next few quarters, I don't think they'll still see significant cost inflation. But if commodity prices remain elevated throughout the rest of this year, then there's no doubt that general mills, as well as other packaging companies, are going to experience higher costs next year. And who knows if they can increase prices even more next year, they've already increased prices a bunch over the past year. So we already know consumer budgets are going to be tight right now. So I don't think that the package food companies will have that much leeway to implement further price increases going forward. Yeah, from cereals to snacks to ice cream, prepared foods that are ready to go, convenient meals, that's what we think of when we think of general mills. Final quick thought, Melissa Armo. Well, I definitely think costs are going to go up. I definitely think inflation is going to go up and interest rates are going up too. And I just want to say that I think that that pal said that he did thought inflation last year was transitory. He's saying the same exact thing this year. And he they think that rising interest rates or raising interest rates is going to stop the problem. I don't think so because it's not going to help the problem with getting the supplies and the shortages we're having to put more pressure on the consumer, because they're going to pay extra things and higher costs and interest rates, and then they can't get the stuff they need as a result of that too. So I think overall, we're not I'm sort of bearish in the market to be honest. We've rallied in the last week. So that's what I said. Understood. Nice to see you both very, very much. Thank you. I enjoy our conversations. Thank you for coming on with us each time. Melissa Armo of the Stock Swoosh, Arun Sundaram of CFRA. Thank you. Thank you friends for being with us here on the watch list every single weekday at 2 p.m. Eastern time. I'm Nicole Petalides. Keep it right here. Market Unclosed is next.