Hi, my name is Juan Santos. I am a software engineer at Pivotal, and I am working on the Diego team. This is my friend Jim Myers. He's also a software engineer at Pivotal. He's currently the anchor on the Diego team. We're going to talk to you about our work on scaling and performance of Diego, the Cloud Foundry Distributed Container Management System. More specifically, what Diego is, a quick overview of the system, how we defined performance and scaling goals as a product definition, how we designed our performance experiments, and how we evaluate success, and then a little bit about the future of the work and scaling that we're doing on Diego right now. So what is Diego? On a high level, Diego is a distributed container management system. What it means is that it schedules and runs containerized workloads. And Diego is built from the ground up for Cloud Foundry to replace the old Ruby runtime, the DEA. It should give the platform more portability, stability, and scalability. And even though it's a general purpose container scheduler, all of its use cases are driven by the Cloud Foundry platform, such as building and running build pack-based applications, building and running docker-based applications, and also running Windows.net applications. So as we go through this talk, we're going to touch on a few components of Diego that you can see in this picture. And some of the ones we're going to talk about are the BBS, which is the Central Diego API. Everything that happens in the Diego cluster has to go through that API. And that's where the truth is saved, basically. And that storage is backed by a key value store called HCD, which is a distributed key value store that provides us reliable access to that data. Another component is the cell. The cell is ultimately where all the containers are run. It is the capacity of a Diego cluster. To put simply the more cells we can manage, the more containers we're going to be able to run. And it is also composed, like the cell itself is composed of a few components. One of the ones we're going to talk about today is Garden. And Garden is the successor to Warden, the Cloud Foundry container technology. And Garden is a platform agnostic API to expose container and process management without the system having to worry about the details of platform-specific things. And a few implementations that Garden has today that are supported are Garden Linux, Garden Windows, and coming soon Garden Run C. And the one we're using in production right now and the one we used for these performance tests is Garden Linux. And Garden Linux is the Linux implementation of Garden as the name suggests. Another term we're going to use a little bit is batch processes or bulk processes. They are routines that run periodically on Diego. And they are responsible for keeping the consistency of the system. So for example, if in a catastrophic situation we lose all of our data or part of our database, one of these batch processes will run on its period and grab all the desired stage from the Cloud Foundry API using the Cloud Controller API and then repopulate Diego using the Diego API, like restoring the health of the cluster. And then the auction year is the central logic server for Diego. It's the component responsible for making decisions and scheduling. So it's responsible for deciding which cell is going to run which workload or which batch of workload. So it needs to have an efficient way of getting an accurate picture of what the cluster looks like in any given point in time. And lastly, tasks and long-running processes. They are the units of work on Diego. So when you ask Diego to do something, you're asking Diego to run a task or a long-running process. A task is a one-off action that runs at most once and has no uptime guarantees because it's expected to end. And a long-running process is something that Diego will monitor and guarantee that it stays up. So how do we define a scaling goal for Diego? It's largely a product decision. We need to know how many cells we want to support and how many application instances we want to run in those cells. So the first part of the work is defining where we stand. So what are the numbers we can currently support or what are the numbers we could currently support when we started this? And then decide where we want to be short-term and long-term. So for Diego, we initially targeted a larger than average deployment size, which for us meant 100 cells running around 10,000 application instances. That is a modest goal. Those are not huge numbers, but it's a stepping stone into more aggressive numbers that we want to hit in the future. And it allowed us to flesh out a few bottlenecks of the system early on. Scaling and performance is also an engineering concern because as engineers, we want to be proud of the software we are developing. And we want to have a good story to tell when we're asked questions about how do we compare versus some other container schedulers out there in the cloud ecosystem. And while that comparison is important, it is not the primary objective of this experiment, but it's important for us to know where we stand amongst these members of the ecosystem. So now performance is part of the car process of development of the Diego team, and we as engineers have to keep an eye open for opportunities to make the system scale and make the system better in that way. Cool. So yeah, now that we've defined a set of performance goals that address both the product and the engineering team's concerns, we actually now need to design observable and reproducible experiments that we can use to judge the performance characteristics of a Diego deployment. The first thing we need to be able to do is to measure performance. This means we need to define what it means to be successful when you're running a Diego deployment at scale. From product, we know this means that we want to run n number of instances against some number of cells. However, there's more than that. We also know that we want to have all of our containers be routable at all times. We want to make sure that the performance of our BBS API is acceptable and that the bulk process loops are operating under reasonable time limits. Through both metrics and log lines emitted to LoggerGator, we're actually able to monitor the state of the system and get a complete image of performance at any given time. As well as being able to measure and monitor the health of the system, we also need to design experiments that will produce meaningful data. The questions we have to answer are like, how do we generate a realistic load to run on Diego? Also, how does Diego perform under unusual situations such as bursty loads or failures? When designing the performance test suites, we needed to make sure that we generate the correct artificial load so that we can have confidence in the system and the metrics that we obtain. One of the ways we measure performance is through CF's own internal logging and metric aggregation, LoggerGator. We're able to emit various metrics and then use tools such as Datadog to generate charts and graphs that allow us to visualize metrics in the system. In these graphs, we're able to track things like total number of application instances in the state and the deployment, as well as the total number of routes, the throughput and latency of the BBS, and many other concerns. Another thing along with the metrics that are emitting is the internal system logging of components itself. They allow us to take a more detailed look at what is actually happening on Diego at any given time. By post-processing these logs, we're able to create these beautiful graphs like the one seen here, and so what we do for that is we tagged log lines with tasks and LRP guids, and then we can actually map where the individual workload is in the system at any given time. This chart right here is a chart of 4,000 tasks that are running on Diego, and each color represents a different set of its lifetime, and then the x-axis is the time that it took. This is a great way for us to visualize performance bottlenecks and help us immediately find these bottlenecks so that we can solve them quickly. Our first experiment was designed as a smoke test to simply validate basic aspects of performance in Diego. They consist of running larger and larger number of workloads in a short period of time, and these workloads are just one-off tasks like the ones Jim showed, and also some long-running processes. More specifically, we spun up 4,000 instances of a lightweight web server and measured how long that web server took to become healthy on all of those 4,000 instances. That is comparable to what some of the other container schedulers are publishing as their performance benchmarks, and while this isn't necessarily a realistic workload for a production grade Diego deployment, it did allow us to find some obvious bottlenecks really quickly. One other reason that it does not represent a realistic workload is that it only fills up up to 40% of our capacity roughly. Right from the start of these smoke tests, our tools allowed us to quickly observe a few obvious problems with the system. For example, we were spending a lot of time in un-martialing and marshaling JSON, partially on Diego's own code base and partially on LCD's code base when they read their data from the data store, and the other thing we found is that we had hard-coded concurrency variables such as, like, amount of threads you're going to run for a certain batch processing. So those were the two first obvious things we found with the smoke tests. And to fix that, firstly, we replaced JSON with protocol buffers, which is a mechanism to efficiently transmit structured data, which is both smaller and faster than JSON, but also was really good for us because of the tooling that the community provides for code generation and go-link for these protocol buffers. The other thing we did was we replaced REST with RPC, and that allowed us to express our API in a more concise way, and then reducing the amount of network calls we do for simple operations. And finally, to fix the concurrency problem, we made Diego more configurable, so as you grow your Diego cluster, as you give those VMs more resources, you can also grow those concurrency variables. It seems like an obvious thing, but it's something that we missed initially. And once we fixed those obvious problems, we were able to get some meaningful results such as we were able to run those 4,000 instances in less than 30 seconds. And while 30 seconds is not a fantastic time, it is within the boundaries that we consider a reasonable amount of time to start all of this work. And we decided to focus on growing the number of containers we can support on the horizontal scale rather than reducing this amount of time. One other thing we noticed after fixing these initial problems was the time spent on Diego components was significantly lower. And if you put in comparison with how long it actually takes to spin up a container image, it's almost irrelevant. If you look at those charts, those aren't real numbers, but they're based on the numbers from the experiment. The green bar there is the time it takes to spin up a container image, and the other colors are time spent in an actual Diego code. So that was really encouraging. And after this, we felt confident enough to start the real full-scale performance test because we didn't find any other obvious bottlenecks on the smoke test. Cool. So now that we've proven that Diego can run bursty workloads with no obvious performance issues, we began to design an experiment that's going to more accurately reflect the production style workloads that we want to run on this environment. So the test that we designed operates at like a CF level. CF pushes a set of various applications that will load up the environment until it's completely saturated, full capacity. So in this case, for 100 cells, we pushed 10,000 application instances. Each of the different applications stresses the environment in a different way. We had some applications that were very CPU-intensive and generated a lot of logs, but we also had other applications that would crash after a reasonable amount of time. By using this diverse set of applications, we're really looking to show a reasonable user-provided workload on the environment. After we successfully saturated the environment, we actually just let it sit for about a week. The idea here is that we can monitor it throughout the sitting time period, and we shouldn't see any performance degradations over this time period. And then after that, we can actually, since we have a saturated environment, we can push generalized workloads against this fully saturated environment to give us additional insight into how Diego might react to common workloads at this scale. This test suite closely reflects the initial protocol of being able to support the given number of application instances on a given number of cells. It's important to note that while we strive to compete with our competitors' numbers in the previous smoke test, this test suite is aimed to accurately reflect the performance of Diego to the end users and the operators. We want to show that Diego can run a large workload for an extended period of time with no performance degradation rather than proving that Diego can run a generally unrealistic workload very fast. So in our real experiment on 100 cells, we pushed 10,000 application instances, and we were happy to see that we didn't see any performance degradation over time. The BBS API request latency increased from almost nothing on a non-loaded environment to less than a second, which we felt like was a reasonable number. We also saw a very similar pattern for all the bulk processing loops. They were almost non-existent, and then they increased to times that were much less than their operating periods. We were also able to push new workloads onto this environment quite successfully, and ultimately this experiment gave us a huge amount of confidence in running Diego in a production scale system. The other thing though is since we had Diego running in the happy path, we also wanted to test failure scenarios. So now that we had a saturated environment, we actually tried out separate failure scenarios on this environment to see how Diego would react. The first failure mode that we investigated was the partial failure of the database. We interpreted this as a loss of connectivity to the database. So the way that we simulated this was by stopping the console agents on all of the database VMs. This essentially made them unreachable from all of the internal services in Diego. After doing so, the one thing that we see is that all of the applications that are currently running continue to stay running and are routable. This was entirely intentional, and it's one of Diego's design principles, is that running workloads are the top priority. We weren't able to desire new work as expected because you can't talk to the database, but once the connectivity was restored by restarting the console agent, the system returned to a stable state. The next failure that we wanted to investigate was a total failure of the database node, essentially losing all of the data. So the way we simulated this was just by removing the persistent store on the database node. So we just blew away all of the data. And once again, we see similar results to what we saw with the partial outage. The cells and running applications continue to operate successfully and were routable. And then once the BBS functionality was restored, the cells immediately populated all of the running data back into the database, and the batch processes eventually took all of the definitions from Cloud Controller and put in the desired data as well. In about 10 to 15 minutes, we had restored all of the database that we had just deleted. The last failure scenario that we wanted to test was the failure of a cell itself with running applications. In order to simulate this, we just destroyed the VM in the infrastructure. We observed that within 30 seconds, one of our batch processes noticed that all of this workload was missing, and it actually rebalanced it back on to the remaining cells. We did lose routes for the short period of time while this happened because the applications were no longer running, but as soon as they were started up on the other remaining cells, the routability was restored and everything was great. Once we killed enough cells so that we had too much desired work for the capacity that was available, one thing that we noticed was that running applications were actually favored over crashing applications. This is largely due to the backoff that we have when we scheduled applications that have crashed. This is pretty important because it shows that a Diego deployment will actually run workloads that work rather than workloads that are misconfigured. Once we restored all the cells as well, all of the workload was once again able to run on the system. With these performance experience, we're pretty confident right now that Diego could run a reasonable number of instances on 100 cells, but as Cloud Foundry keeps growing, we know that we're going to have to run environments that are in order of magnitude larger than what we did in our tests. So, for example, our new performance target is 1,000 nodes and 200,000 application instances spread across the cluster. We would love to run this performance experiment on a regular basis. However, this is pretty hard to do because it's very expensive to run 1,000 nodes, and it's also really hard to manage over a period of time with just the devs on the team. So what we did is we created an experiment that we like to call the benchmark BBS. And the main idea behind this experiment is that we can simulate the total load on the API server of 1,000 cell deployment without actually running 1,000 nodes. So we are pretty confident in the fact that a single cell when saturated is easy to performance test, but this is more testing the distributed nature of Diego over time, and as we increase more nodes, how does the central database respond to this activity? So one of the ways we created this test suite was by analyzing the activity that our various components make against the API and then replicating it from a smaller number of nodes, basically. Within this experiment is mainly set to analyze the performance of the read and write characteristics of the BBS. Specifically, we want to know how long our bulk endpoints take, and we want to know how often do we fail to write or read from the database. The results from this test were kind of unexpected. We found that LCD had become our biggest bottleneck in the system. This is largely due to the fact that LCD v2 doesn't support large data sets. Specifically, in this example, we are almost at about a gigabyte, and it also doesn't natively support traditional niceties such as indexes. As we added more and more data, we also saw that LCD continued to degrade. Cells were taking longer than 30 seconds to fetch their required records. This is essentially because you have to do a table scan on each fetch. We also noticed that we were failing to seed the data for our test, and also bulk loops were beginning to take longer than their expected operating intervals. We know that there are talks of LCD v3, which will improve on a lot of these issues by adding indices. However, v3 is still in beta, and we need to hit these performance targets now. We know that we're going to have to make some changes to our database backing technology. How are we going to get to this scale with these blockers? One thing we're doing right now is we actually currently have experimental support for a relational back-end on Diego. You can configure a pluggable relational database that has to be deployed alongside Diego, and Diego will just use that. Reasons for this switch go beyond just scaling and performance. Our data model is inherently relational. For example, applications have many instances, and cells have many containers. It's a common thing you say when you have a relational model. We also have been wanting rich support for indices in our data layer for a while. Having to do a full scan, like Jim mentioned, is not really the most efficient way to get that data. One way we could get around that is by completely normalizing our schema, but that's not really sustainable engineering-wise. One of the concerns we had when we started this effort to switch to a relational database was high availability, because SCD is highly available by definition. It's a cluster, and you get that high availability for free. While these traditional relational databases are generally single node by default, but we're confident that efforts like Galera for MySQL will bridge that gap efficiently. Even in the face of Fader, we saw that Diego is pretty good at recovering from that and being robust with minimal to no impact to the user. Finally, we made the switch after exploring this option using that benchmark BBS suite that Jim mentioned with a minimal implementation of the relational backend. We got some really encouraging results from that. We were able to store upwards of 600,000 instances in the database even before we started paginating or fragmenting data. That's a lot more than we could possibly have with the old model. We decided to allow both MySQL and Postgres being the two SQL implementations we currently support on Cloud Controller and UA, because that would help support the broader Cloud Foundry community. They're also widely used in the world and proven to be effective when used correctly at large scales. Before you ask me when is it going to be out of experimental mode, we can follow the progress in Tracker. We're working out some last implementation and migration details and are going to start a full-scale test of this whole effort soon and hopefully it will be out. Another option we explored to get to the scale we wanted was adding in-memory caching to the API server. We had a pair of engineers explore that for a few days and our conclusions were that while it would definitely get us closer to the numbers we wanted and even hit the numbers we wanted, it wouldn't fix the underlying problem that the data model was not... We were modeling the data forcefully to match our data store rather than having it flow naturally. That's why we decided not to go with it. But it's definitely something we still have in our pocket in case we need to optimize something else in the future. The other thing we can also explore in the future is adding a read replica of the API server because currently the API server is a leader-elected single node for reads and writes. It makes sense for us to have writes be going through one server because we want it to be consistent, but we could definitely expand the read aspect of it to scale horizontally too. That's another thing we have in our pockets for the future. That's all we had. Here are some links and resources from the stock and questions? We have a Bosch release. It's like the Diego perfor release out right now and it has all of the tests and what we ran. It's not easy to replicate, but if you've talked to us, we could help you spin it up and figure it out. As we start running the full-scale tests for the now relational backend, we intend to recreate that in a possibly a more reproducible way so people can consume it a little easier. We also have plans to publish these metrics publicly too. Yeah, these tests are on Amazon. We currently have plans to maybe investigate doing a larger scale one on software as well. The question is about application caching when you push. Diego is not part of that system, so all of that happens outside of the Diego boundaries. I don't know if any plans to integrate that. I don't think we're going to do that right now, but as far as I know, that's completely outside of Diego. No, we just wrote all the queries by hand because we felt an ORM was too heavy weight for the queries that we were making. We are leaving that option for the future. So the question is about if we explored big table implementations? No, we decided to go with the traditional solution because we were already coming from a non-standard solution for the problem. Our data model is actually fairly simple. Now that we have this single write BBS server, we can actually generate these events manually by hand in a higher layer. It's actually a design goal that we're trying to move forward with is moving away from these LCD watches because we tied ourselves very closely to LCD with these watches, and now that we've kind of started to break away from that, we can now have more freedom in the backing layer, essentially. That's not a problem we've solved quite yet, but currently we have a master elected database write server. I think we were going to keep it that way for the time being. We may investigate having read replicas that will read from the database, but I don't think we're going to solve the multi-write node problem at this point in time. Really cool stuff. Question, did you ever play with an in-memory database like Gemfire as the backing store for the BBS since durability really isn't a concern? So we haven't actually explored that, but we considered it. That's the short answer. Cool. We'll be around if you guys want to ask us questions. Thank you for listening.


Brad we're here on Valentine's Day and you have a little member appreciation event going on tell us about it Well, I wish I could say I'm the one who put this together, but it was really everybody else but me who helped put this together, but Wonderful idea of helping recognize some of the new members who've come in here and just get getting our word out in the community a little bit about who main charitable mechanic association is and What do what does membership entail here? What do you get for your membership? Well, among other things is the use of of a member library, which is Really remarkable anybody who hasn't seen this before should stop in some time on the Tuesdays Wednesdays and Thursdays of the weeks that the Library is open from 10 to 3 But it's a way to get to check out books without having to wait popular books without the kind of weight You might have at other libraries it also as as our wonderful librarian Pat will tell you the 8th oldest member library in the country in addition to that the Pat and Donna and Beverly and Reggie put together some Fabulous programs book club meetings that are held monthly a lot of times when the author will actually come in and read from his or her own book Many other events and of course my favorite are the travel log lectures that main charitable puts on and you have one of Those coming up, right? There is one coming up on Monday the 24th of February And that one is going to be on the QE to cruising the Orient and Tell us a little bit more about that. Well, Brian. That's a really good question This is the QE to is is one of the premier cruise ships in the industry very very well respected from the Cunard lines this particular cruise is By Doug Jones who's a photographer known throughout the world Doug hopped on the QE to in Australia and stayed aboard for 40 days 40 nights Went through Melbourne Sydney Perth, Australia over to Bali up through Manila the Philippines through Japan parts of China Hong Kong Vietnam Singapore fascinating journey through the Parts of the Far East and So that's coming up on Monday the 24th the lectures of course take place at Catherine Macaulay High School Auditorium Which is on Stevens Avenue Outer Stevens Avenue. They start at 7 30 p.m. They run about two hours the cost if you if you are a member They are free with your $25 membership fee you get two tickets tickets for two people to each of the lectures If you're not a member you can come in for $5 you can bring your whole family for $15 Now it's really interesting that we've of course been doing travel lectures now for over a hundred years This is our hundred and first season. I was thinking about it here recently I've been going to them for almost half that time over 50 years I've been attending and when I was a little kid I used to go with my parents and grandparents and it really influenced my desire to travel I've traveled throughout Central America Africa and all of that I can relate back to going to these lectures as a kid and Seeing the world on on films for $15 is kind of hard to get family entertainment Where you can really have a meaningful impact on your kids? And maybe you've been to some of these areas before and would like to see them again or whatever the case might be Really recommend them as a fun thing to do and if people want more information about the association or membership Where can they go they can contact the main charitable mechanic Association? Pat and Donna are here during the week Tuesday Wednesday and Thursday from 10 to 3 we're right across from the main College of Art Beautiful building on the corner of Casco beautiful historic building on the corner of Casco and Congress Street


Hi, I'm David Cantor with the Law Offices of David Michael Cantor and today I'm going to talk about how to get property from an inmate who is housed in the Maricopa County jail system That means they have something and you need to get it First of all the inmate puts in a tank order and they will actually set the location of the pickup Usually it's in the lobby of the jail of where they're housed. Now the pickup person Needs to have a current valid government issued ID when they show up passport drivers license DMV ID card, etc. No No, Sam's Club IDs or Swatmead IDs. Also if you have an immigration card Or a visa those are okay as long as you have a valid ID Now it's very common for an inmate who's in the jail system if they've pled guilty And now they received a prison sentence and they're gonna be transferred to DOC at the Department of Corrections They will fill out what's called a DOC release form and they'll designate who's supposed to pick up their property Here's the problem if you do not show up within 10 days to pick up that property. It's destroyed It's thrown away so make sure you show up to pick it up now a lot of inmates get picked up and Their bond is set or they're non bondable and when they showed up They had their wallet or their purse and they have cash and credit cards and cell phones, etc Now that's usually when the inmate says hey I want you to come and pick up my wallet or a spouse will say look I need your credit card So I can pay bills. I need a certain other things. I need your phone so we can contact certain other people That's the time. They'll normally set it for release in the lobby now with inmate with money from an inmate This can be released by an inmate to place on their own books So they can shop at the canteen and they can usually do that within 72 hours of being Booked now if it's more than 72 hours the jail commander has to approve that and sometimes the jail commanders will say no It's too late. You waited a week too bad. Well, all the inmate has to do is say fine I'm gonna release my money to my loved one and once that money is released to the loved one They can put it on the inmates books while they're in the jail And we have a whole video if you go to dmcanner.com that talks about how to place money on an inmate's books Normally you do it at the kiosk in the lobby and it's self-explanatory and there's fees involved now If you have any questions call the sheriff's information management system or sims phone line at<PHONE_NUMBER> If you want to call the individual jails, we list all of the jails and their phone numbers on our website at dmcanner.com Now this information is good as of today's date, but it's always changing so you may want to call prior to going down To the jail to get property If your loved one is sitting in jail and they haven't been convicted of anything yet They're in the pre-trial phase call us at<PHONE_NUMBER> or go to dmcanner.com and fill out a contact us Form we'll be happy to do a free 30 minute consultation in our office doesn't cost you anything But it takes about 30 minutes We'll go over the case from top to bottom and hopefully we can find a way out of this for your loved one If they have pled guilty but haven't been sentenced again call us Perhaps we can get the lower end of the sentencing range at the sentencing and lastly if they've been sentenced and convicted already Call us we can do post-conviction relief petitions appeals or sentence modifications Or maybe we can get the sentence reduced or the whole case thrown out on a technicality Again, we look forward to hearing from you soon. Good luck with getting the property From your loved one, but give us a call at<PHONE_NUMBER> or go to our website dmcanner.com We look forward to seeing you soon take care


Hello and welcome back to the craft box. My name is Brenton today. We are doing the next Lost Pages quest this time we are in Avalon in Caliburn. We need to talk to Pike Delago. Hello Who do for you this day the book of lost pages? No, I do not have it Oh, it is in the hands of the Carpe diem society. Ah, that is our quest Yes, I have a herd of possessed monsters such as you describe a band of for mori giants may have fallen to the curse Seek out these a spell read for mori on the high road. Mayhaps they have your lost page of folklore Okay, so I'll be back once I've defeated. Oh look ten of these guys. I'll be back in a sec Okay, I am back. We are just on our last two for mori's Um, yeah, I accidentally hit d9 instead of a blade. So good job, Brent. You get 11 points. Yay Super duper excited about that one, but I should be fine Yeah, these guys are not too bad. I mean, I haven't really been paying attention, but they don't seem to be too bad So yeah, that's a thing. Let's actually play at this time. That'd be a good idea Brent. That would be a great idea Really good job. Yep 11 our tens So, yeah, that is this is going pretty good actually not gonna lie pretty well Pretty well indeed Leo Pretty good So basically once we've done this We will actually be good to get into the next So stuff, so these are the last two we've also got a new badge as well, which is great Um, I think it's called spell checker, which is a really cool badge really really cool. Nice name spell checker Which was defeating 50 of these dudes, so we've already defeated 50 and that's just the quest I haven't defeated anybody else outside of quests. So Yep, there's a lot you have to defeat The next one's 250 though. So don't think we'll get that during the quest because Um, yeah, I don't think we'll quite get there Because there'll be what like 10 which would take us up to 60 and then another two And another two would be 64 plus people who have defeated now as well. So it's not like Not a lot a lot more that we have to defeat So I'll do that off camera because I want to get all of these badges knocked out. Well, this is still here this time Yeah, because I don't know when it's gonna be back because it's not often it is actually happening. So, huh, yeah Let's see how much will this Derenite do it should kill this dude for sure. Yeah, bye and This fella this fella should be getting quite damaged. He sure did look at that. Look at that damages What we can do is next round will go for a kismal go for a want it next round kismal and it should be GG Should be GG. We've got a blade. So perfectly perfects and perfects and should be goodly good. Good. Good. Good I haven't seen any earthquakes. I mean, again, I haven't been really paying attention But I haven't seen any earthquakes. So that's always good something you need to watch out with them if because they just Earthquake all the time constantly forever So you gotta be a bit careful of them But haven't seen any so don't think they can and if they do it's really rare So don't worry too much about it, but this should kill. Okay, that didn't ask. Yes. We're not expecting it to do that much.  We did it. We did it. Yes, we did So yeah, we can go back to pike delago and see what he wants us to do next We'll probably have to go back to um, I know we'll have to go back to what's his face and what's his face He's the last spell read for morey. You discover a magical page of writing. This must be the lost page of folklore Sure must be boys. Sure must be. Um, see let's head back to pike delago We'll go and talk to him.   Yeah, good idea. Good idea. Hello The spell read for morey had the lost page of folklore who knew they could read bravo Your path is clear you must take the lost page of folklore back to the noble Harold Argelston in Wizard City Make a sure he vows it to keep it safe Okay, let's go and speak to Harold Argelston We will see what he wants from us this time Be like hey, yeah, that's cool. Go on. Go on speak to go and speak to the balance diet, dude I really wish they um kind of shook things up a bit, you know It's funny because I just know exactly where we're going nexus I really wish they'd kind of just shaken things up a bit because it's literally just the same format over and over and over again And it ain't the most funnest format over and over and over again so yeah We are definitely gonna just deal with it because we have to I mean, there's no other way to way around it. So we have to deal with it, but um Yeah, I really wish it wasn't just the same format But you know what whizz is whizz and whizz is gonna be whizz if it wants to be whizz so whizz That's what it is. Just whizz. Um, okay, let's talk to Harold. Hi Hello, how are you? Are you good? That's good Um load that would be great.  Yeah, that's right. That's right Sir pike del lago called me a valiant defender of the wizard city library. Oh my At any rate, I will put the lost page of folklore into the vaulted archives post haste I'll I do that. Can you speak to Arthur weathersfield in ravenwood? Wellersfield can help you track down quinn legend breaker the myth student transformed by the lost pages Okay, let's go back to Arthur weathersfield and finish that off Then we go back over to avalon and into the high road Luckily the high road isn't too far away compared to like mooshu where it was like all the way away away away And um stuff. I know exactly where the mirror is as well The lost page of folklore has been recovered spot on Quinn legend breaker one of the senior students in the carpe diem society has fallen hard to the lost pages curse We need to level her out so she can think clearly again I left a mechanism of balance d's mirror for you on the high road It's calibrated to take you to quinn legend breakers location find her and unravel the curse that has possessed her Okay, um, I'll be back when I am at d's mirror and high road. Okay, I am back We just made to the d's mirror Um, I filled up my potions as well. So that's why there's extra potions here Um, I just thought I would do that while I was um Just while I was in the wizard city vicinity since there's none anywhere else except the arcanum Um, still salty. Uh, yeah, let's head on in and defeat quinn There's an extra space in there that doesn't actually meant to be there. So good job, king So you did did well. You did super duper well today Dupal super duper duper well. Good job. 11 out of 10. Um, I don't actually know how OP Quinners I might actually quickly google that up really good Um, what's this called lost pages? Lost pages Um boom Fomories here we go defeated many of these guys know exactly what these dudes are Let's blade real good and yeah, that should get so room avalon Who is this? Uh, my boss is finished and broke that. Here we go Um, okay.  That's that's strange That's strange. Oh, they do earthquake. Okay. When I said they didn't earthquake before I was actually wrong. They do earthquake apparently I'm just bad. I didn't notice it or maybe I'm too good and they don't do it enough That's probably a thing Um, uh, let's go for a denight followed by a blade followed by a kismar probably a decent idea decent idea. Um, I might actually have to Um convert to life For lesser resist so I can actually pierce the majority of it I don't know why but death always seems to get rid of like we always have like so much resist against us It's ridiculous like can't tell please why why do you hate death so much? Just let us do it.  That is not fair in any way shape or form actually we could have done a We're gonna go for a kismar next we'll go for a Displayed and then input kismar and things should be Gucci game Gucci game Gucci game as they say As the kids say these days, you know Gotta be in with the kids Gotta be in with the kids, you know Luckily they didn't um earthquake so that's good. That's good um, okay What is this flying cheeseball dude this spell takes forever? I forget how long the spell actually does take like Takes an age and a half Age and a half I forget that I have to click on people for kismar. I'm so used to aoe's where you don't have to click at all But we do good job Here we go Yeah Yeah There we go gg. Good job. We did it. We did it boys Squint we're for art thou Let us defeat you. We got a pigeon pie interesting interesting a pigeon pie A pigeon pie the book of lost pages will open your eyes wizard Oh stars that shudder over us. Oh earth that sounds hollow under us vex this wizard's dreams Okay, we're gonna put in the uh mystic just the uh not a mystic. What am I thinking of mystic jays? Um a headless just in case uh, we need it which we most likely will she's probably got a decent amount of health Yep, 16 000 gg boys gg Maybe should have put in uh, I should have put in a lulu or something that would have been probably a good idea But that's fine Lulu probably would have been like the best idea. Okay, just click right off the bat. That's cute. That's cute That's really cute. That's real cute. You know real real cute real cute What spells can she do she can medusa and earthquake so stuns galore basically stuns galore Um, yeah, we're gonna go for a headless. I'm not a headless. What is the spell deonite? I don't even know what these spells are called anymore deonite right off the bat Right off the bat deonite get that in real good Get that in a bloodstream. She can have some of the dotage Get some of that dotage girl. Yeah, that's right. You weren't like that Nice and non non sound affected animation. Good job twin. You think you're so cool Miss hot shot.  Actually it might have done Maybe like 3000 close Um, but yeah slightly not enough damage on her, but we've got a reshuffle. So we should hopefully be fine. Hopefully fingers crossed That's what he's saying. I might kind of just Save up for a headless or something. Are you shielding? Okay, that's fine. Okay. That's not fine That's just not fine That's just not fine at all. I do not approve of these Not approving. This is my face of non approval Um, okay, we've got it down to 1000 already. They should do another 1000 we might have to reshuffle a pool and reinforcements that would be bad We might not actually have to do this. I kind of underestimated overest underestimated her um Should have probably put some more stuff in. Oh, well, we should be fine Like another blade probably would have been good But like I said twiddle be fine Twiddle be fine. Will it definitely? Okay. No crits, please. No crits. No crits allowed. Can we block the last one? Nope. Okay. That's fine. I didn't want to block it anyway Game geez think of so cool with your like crits and stuff. Nah fam. I got you I got you. Can I crit now on her because that'd be cute. That'd be great. Can I crit on her? No. Yeah, no Okay, fine. I didn't want it. Anyway, didn't need no crit. I'm independent. I don't need no crits in my life Yeah, that's right Yeah, Quinn, you think you're good, but no, you've already got down like Like 200 2000 health. Yeah Yeah, that's what I thought Yeah, what's your reply to that ha Quinn? Yeah Ha This is not gonna go well. I can just see this already. This is not gonna go well. Who's online they can help um No one really No one really that's unfortunate Unfortunate unfortunate. Why does death always get so bad and better. It was like I don't understand. Can you just like not? She resists shadow as well. Oh my gosh. No way Is she a god? Probably Shadow wasn't even around when this was a thing. So how does she go about resisting shadow? She doesn't even know about that stuff yet Like seriously, how does she know about that? We might die as well. That would be bad Um, so yeah, if we don't do well, we're gonna have to add in a couple more things and by a couple I mean a lot more things Like a couple more pismas probably maybe a lulu and like d and i not d and i it's like Like maybe a king art that'll be kind of lit I don't really know maybe a whole bunch of prisms as well Because she's not taking a lot of damage. That did 2000 She's what 10,000 we've got her down 6,000 health I mean, that's a decent amount 6000 With like three hits pretty decent I would also put in some more blades if I was back again, that's probably a good idea more blades More blades is always a good answer More blades is always good Okay, well, we might have to reshoot. We're definitely gonna have to reshuffle.  Hello there. I should put in shrike. Maybe shrike would be a good idea. I don't know If we die, we will rethink that so hopefully we don't Um, I mean we're running out of health. So that's not good. That's really not good at all Um, can we crit like something please? Nope. Okay, that's fine. It's fine. I didn't want to crit anyway Okay, that did like one and a half. She's at half health So that was all of my spells got her to half health. That means we can kill her, right? That's how it works.  That's what happens. That's how it goes. Um, we're just gonna pass Um, because we need more pips. We need more pips We need more pips pips pips pips for reshuffle.  It's not cool Crits are not cool. Crits are not welcome here Pete, can you heal? That would be great.  Oh my gosh Stop it. Talk about a god. Jeez Pritting every single time.  Thank you, pet for healing finally. Good job Good job, pet. You did good today. You did really good today I'm proud of you. 380. Yep, that's decent enough, right? Not at all. In no way is that decent In no way is that decent No, that's fine. We are reshuffling. We will go for a blade into a kizma Definitely gonna use our blades with kizma and um, headless I think So we'll enchant both of those. We'll use our first one with kizma just to get a whole bunch of damages on Because it's probably a good idea Probably good. Um, hopefully she doesn't kill me. That would be bad. That would be really bad Really really really bad Okay, kizma here we go boy Confirm If we come into trouble, we do have a heal enhanced. So that is fine. That is fine I Would prefer not to heal honestly would kind of prefer to not just to not, you know Okay, three three three three cool. Good job quarter health. That's decent um blade into a headless Into probably a heal we need a heal. So we're probably going to blade into headless and into a heal Um, okay, I was about to say unless this is medusa and then we're basically screwed do not crit. Okay. Good job Good job. Do not Critting is not approved here Do not approve crits This is not critsity. I mean apparently it is but no not anymore. So what we'll do we'll headless into a Want it into a heal into A Pass pass headless. No pass pass denight. Maybe I'm not sure we can kill. I think we can kill. She's only got 4000 health left This definitely cutting it to the wire like no joke about that Bringing it down to the wire here. Okay 2000. She's got what like 2000 health left Headless can do that. I'm not headless denight. So we need to heal next. That's what we have to do We have to heal next. There's no question about it.  What is your issue? Stop critting. Please.  I can just see it now She's gonna ninja pigs and kill me Please can we get the max the max that would be so good if we can get the max heal Okay, keeper this shouldn't kill me Keeper doesn't do much from memory. She didn't even crit. So that's good. That's good She has a lot of ps though any extra damages ridiculous.  Honestly ridiculous Redonkulous, I'm telling you redonkulous Can we do like the max heal 1000 please? Please pet you have brought me luck before Yes, thank you. Good job. Good job pet. Can you also heal me as well? Like with a couple of unis that would be great Unicorn, please that'll be cool I know it triggers from passing I know it triggers from passing Okay, stop with the stop with the infills. You don't need any of that none of that please none of that Okay, hopefully this can kill. Please don't be kidding me. I think it is right. Yeah, okay. This is fine Remove that blade and that sure thing. This will do what like three thousand three hundred not even okay good That's fine. I'm a proud of that. I'm fine with that. That's fine. You know that is fine Do do do doon, I'm definitely gonna have to get some like extra spells for the Azteca one because if this is a struggle I don't even know what the other ones the Azteca one's gonna be because that's meant for like high levels, so Yeah We are definitely gonna have to watch out for that one. Okay.  What is your issue? Please do not kill me.   I'm gonna be furious I'm literally gonna ever ever the wizard. We've got 1000 so we just need like two rounds Please don't kill me Well gg Well, I'll be back in a bit. Okay. I am back we Kind of doing some damage here. This is Going well, um Yeah, I added a couple extra things in my deck We added Shrike, so we now have no issue about the whole, um Yeah, let's not be able to pierce. I also added this wee little minion girl who fizzles all the time So yeah, she's helped us before so um, I thought you know what just for memes Let's have our bus again because you know, why not? Um, hopefully we can get a shadowpip next round. Otherwise I'm taking humongous backlash Um, like I seriously hope we are I doubt we will be but if we do they'll be great Um Yeah, but um this should definitely do Some damages, which is good. Um, so basically with Shrike. She has no resist for me, which is great So yeah, and look she's healing up. Wow.  Okay, that's cute That's cute. We're just gonna pass We're just gonna pass. We're gonna take a humongous backlash, but that's that's all cool That's all cool. I suppose That's super cool. I suppose Um, okay, that took humongous Humongous bigly damages. Okay. Good job. Um, ouch Man, not too much. That's fine. That's not too bad Would have really loved it. I'm gonna get a shadowpip now this time.  I thought she didn't I don't know. Maybe I'm confused. She's dead though. So Gigi Gigi finally did that that took forever. Oh my gosh Pages, but it was just a lie you have signed a light upon me good wizard I don't know what that was but until it wouldn't let me see anything else until I press the spacebar For skipping the dialogue. Good job. Okay. So, um Let's head back to Ravenwood and let's go back to Ravenwood See what we can mess up over there. That would be good That would be really good. Good. Good. Good. Good And um, we'll see what we can do Here we go new badge here we go You leveled out queen legend breaker and restored her health and soul Terrific work old friend. I've ordered up a spot of bomb bracket cake for her to speed up her recovery Okay. Well, there we go cypher of lost glyphs and we also got the badge Uh spell checker. So yeah, we've got these two badges now, which is really cool. Um next time we will be Probably we'll be getting both of these ones. I believe we won't be getting this one But next time we'll be doing more badges getting more badges doing more stuff So, yeah, thank you for watching until I can subscribe and if you've already subscribed press the little bell So, you know exactly when I post another video follow me on twitch if you haven't already and remember craft outside the box


Wel ym y toffi TV yw'r Y Everton News Daily. John Philip-Gabamon has praised Everton's medical team and staff and thanked them for their support as he recovered from his injury nightmares to get back onto the pitch at Godderson Park, the other night, 597 days after last playing an Everton match. He said, Danny Donoughy, Craig Porter, Adam Newell and Richie Porter all helped me. Everybody was here for me. We had good moments together so I was not only thinking about the injury, every day I was here I was happy. He says he now wants to be competitive and I want to show how competitive I can be on the pitch and I am grateful to them for getting me back. It was great to see him back on the pitch the other night unfortunately Everton couldn't hold on for the three points against Crystal Palace. Hopefully now he can put the injury problems behind him and get fitter and stronger and become an important part of Everton's midfield as we move forward. Be the player that we bought to replace Idrisha Garnagay because we have an add someone who is in that national number six role and who can get around a pitch and this physicality and mobility will be important for Everton moving forward. So hopefully fingers crossed John Philip-Gabamon's injury nightmares are behind him and he can, like you say, become an integral part of Everton's midfield moving forward. Joshua King has been linked with a summer move to Celtic. That's if Eddie Howe, who is the favourite to become the new boss at Parkhead, gets the job, he apparently wants to take King up to Celtic. Joshua King on a short term contract at Everton. It hasn't gone how he expected and maybe how a lot of us fans expected. He's not really being used. I think the most time he's had on the pitch was 36 minutes against Fulham. Every other appearance as a sub has been less than that. He didn't get on at all the other night against Crystal Palace. So at this moment in time it looks unlikely that he'll stay a good person but there is nine games to go and it can change. He may get in, scored a couple of goals and that can change the thinking but there's a few clubs looking at him and apparently Celtic would be one option for him. Eddie Howe does get the job so I want to look out for that. Everton today have a game being linked with Napoli goalkeeper Alex Merritt. Former Everton scout Carlo Giacomuzzi is speaking to Erie Napoli in Italy and said that he would definitely recommend Merritt to Everton. He said he's a good goalkeeper, he's a young goalkeeper, he's improving all the time and he went on to say that Carlo Ancelotti is a fan of Merritt and would like to take him to Godderson Park. This link has popped up a couple of times already. Everton will have to make a decision on a goalkeeper in the summer with Robin Olsson alone due to expire in June. I'd been looked as though Olsson would become a payment of fixture at Godderson Park but again things have happened. I've laid that maybe and put that in doubt and if Olsson doesn't stay then Everton have got a decision to make on another goalkeeper. Do they bring in a number two or do they bring in a goalkeeper like Merritt who can actually challenge Jordan Pickford for that number one role? So, interesting there. Finally, young Everton forward Katia Cuiati has today undergone surgery to repair a damaged hamstring tendon. The young Winger 17-year-old have made his debut in David Hunter at under 23 side in November. He's been suffering with the injury which has hampered his progress this season and therefore becomes the second young Everton midfield player to have surgery this week following on Tyler on Yango's ankle surgery yesterday. Here's how it is today and he tweeted after it. The operation was successful. We give all thanks to the Most High and the road to recovery begins big season to come. So we wish Katia a speedy recovery as we do with Tyler on Yango as well and hopefully they'll be fit sooner rather than later and can get back up to full speed for next season. That is it for the news daily. Give the video a thumbs up, subscribe if you haven't and if you want more videos including daily live videos, get over and join us on Patreon. See you later.


From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Stu Miniman. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and welcome to a special CUBE conversation here in our Boston area studio. We're in spring 2019, whole lot of shows where theCUBE's going to be on, going to lots of events, so many different technologies we're covering. And one of the areas we always love to be able to dig into is what's happening with users. Many of these shows we go to are user conferences, as well as the community. Really happy to welcome the program, believe first time on the program. Steve Athanus. Athanus, yeah. Athanus. You got it. You're close enough. Steve, who is the newly elected president of Vmug. Yes. So I think most of our audience should know the Vmug organization, the VMware user group. We've done CUBE events at Vmug related events. Absolutely. We've talked about Vmug. We've had the CEO of Vmug on the program and of course the VMware community. 2019 will be the 10th year of theCUBE at VMworld. Still figuring out if we should do a party and stuff like that. We know all the ins and outs to what happened at that show. But the Vmug itself, I've attended many, your Boston Vmug is one that I've been to.  Yeah. Well, first, thanks for having me. It's been watching theCUBE for years and it's great to be on this side of the screen, right? So yeah, so I'm Steve Athanas. I show up every day as the Associate Chief Information Officer at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, just 495 here. And that's my day job, that's my career, right? But what I'm excited to be here to talk about and what I'm excited in general with Vmug is it's a community organization. And so it's a volunteer gig, right? And that's true of all of our leadership, right? From the President to the Board of Directors to our local leaders around the world, they're all volunteers. And that's, I think, what makes it special is we're doing this because we're excited about it and we're passionate about it. Yeah, Vmug's, it's created by users, for users. You go to them, let's talk a little bit, it's evolved a lot. It started as just a bunch of independent little events is now, boy, my Twitter feed, I feel like constantly every day it's like, oh wait, who is that, the St. Louis, the Wisconsin one? I'll get ads for like, oh wait, it's the Northeast one. I'm like, oh, is that here in New England that I don't know about? No, no, no, it's in the UK and things like that. So I get ads and friends around the world and love seeing the community. So boy, how do you guys keep it all straight and manage that and allow both the organic nature as well as some of the coordination and understanding of what's going on and how do you balance that? Yeah, that's a great question. So I was a V-Mug member for many, many years before I ever got interested in becoming a leader and you're right, it started, it was 10 of us would get around with a six pack of beer and a box of pizza, right, and we'd be talking shop and that was awesome and that's how it started but you get to a certain scale. When you start talking about having 20,000, 30,000, now over 125,000 members around the world, you've got to coordinate that somehow and you're right on the money with that and so that's why we have a strong coordination effort that is our offices down in Nashville, Tennessee and their role is to enable our leaders to give back to their community and take the burden out of running these things. Sourcing venues and working with hotels and stuff, that is effort that not everybody wants to do all the time and so to do that for them lets them focus on the really cool stuff which is the tech and connecting users. Can you speak a little bit to, what are some of the speeds and feeds of the event, how many do you have, how much it's growing, I'm signed up, I get the newsletter for activities as well as lots of webinars I've spoken on some of the webinars too. Yeah, well first thanks for that. So we have over 30 user cons around the world on three continents, in fact. And what's a user con? Great question, so a user con is user conference, consolidated into user con, right? And those are hundreds of end users getting together around the world around three continents, in fact I was fortunate enough in March, I went to Australia and I spoke at Sydney and Melbourne and that was awesome, getting to meet users, literally almost as far away from Boston as you can get, having the same challenges in the office, day to day solving the same business problems with technology, so that was exciting. And so we've got those all over, we also have local meetings which are smaller in scope and often more focused in content. We've got 235 or more local chapters around the world that are talking about this. And so we're really engaged at multiple levels with this and like you talk about, we have the online events which are global in scope and we do those, we time them so that people in our time zone here in the states can get to them as well as folks in EMEA and APAC, right? Yeah, and I have to imagine the attendees have to vary, I mean, is it geared primarily for, is it still VMware admin, is the primary title there up to, people that are CIOs or wanna be CIOs? Yeah, so that actually, we've seen that change over the past couple years, which is exciting for me being in the role that I'm in is, you're right, historically it was vSphere admins, right? And we're all getting together and we're talking about how do we partition our LUNs appropriately, right? And now it has switched, we see a lot more architect titles, we see more director titles coming in because I said the other day, I was in Charlotte talking and I said, business is being written in code, right? And so there's a lot more emphasis on what is happening with VMware and as VMware's portfolio expands, we've got a lot of new type of members coming in to the group, which is exciting. Yeah, and what about the content sense? How much of it is user-generated content versus VMware content and then understand sponsorships are part of it and the vendor ecosystem which VMware has a robust ecosystem, help make sure that it's financially viable for things to happen and as well as participate in the content. Yeah, so I feel like I almost planted that question because it's such a good one. So, in 2018, we started putting a strong emphasis on community content because we heard from our members that awesome VMware content, awesome partner content but we're starting to miss some of the user-to-user from the trenches, battle war stories, right? And so we put an emphasis on getting that back in in 2018 and we've doubled down in 2019 in a big way. So I don't know if you've been to a user-kind yet in 2019 but we've limited the number of sponsored sessions that we have, right? So that we have more room for community content. We're actually able to get people from around the world to these events. So again, me and a couple of folks from the States went to Australia to share our story and end user story, right? And at the end of the day, we used to have sponsored sessions to sort of close it out. Now we have a community hour, right? And so V-Mug provides food and beverages and a chance to get together and network. And so that is a great community hour. And I was at one recently and I was able to watch a couple folks get together and we were talking about different problems they were having. They said, well, let me get your card so we can touch base on this later, which at the end of the day, that's what gets me motivated. That's what it's about. And Steve, I want to touch on that for a second. What gets you motivated? You've been doing this for years, putting your time in, your president. I know when I attended your Boston V-Mug, at the end of the day, it was a good community member talking about career and got some real good, somebody we both know and it really gets you pumped up in something very, a little bit different from there. So talk a little bit about that and kind of your goals as president of V-Mug. Sure. So I get excited about V-Mug because it's a community organization, right? And because, I've said this a bunch of times, but for me, what excites me is it's a community of people with similar interests growing together, right? And reinforcing each other. I know for a fact that I can call a whole bunch of people around the world and say, hey, I'm having a problem technically or hey, I'm looking for some career advice or hey, one of my buddies is looking for work. Do you know of any opening somewhere? And that's really powerful, right? Because at the end of the day, I think V-Mug is about names and people and not logos, right? And so that's what motivates me is seeing the change and the transformation of people and their career growth that V-Mug can provide. In fact, I know a ton of people from Boston. In fact, several of them have, they were administrators at a local organization. Maybe they moved into partners. Maybe they moved into vendors. Maybe they stayed where they are and they kept accelerating their growth. But I've seen tons of career growth and that gets me excited. Watching people take the next step to be able to build a career. Yeah, I tell you, most conferences I go to, the kind of jobs type boards, especially if you're kind of in the hot, cool new space, they're all trying to hire. But especially when you go to a local on the smaller events, it's so much about the networking and the people when I go to a local user event, it's, hey, what kind of jobs are you hiring for? Who are you looking for? And who do I know that's looking for those kind of things and trying to help connect people and companies? Cause, yeah, I mean, we all sometime in our career, we'll need help along those lines. I know something that's personally that I always love to help. I have a friend who said it, I think best and I can't take credit for this, right? But it's, it can be easy to get dismissed from your day job, right? One errant click could be the career limiting click. It is nigh impossible to be fired from the community, right? And that to me is a powerful differentiator for folks that are plugged into a community versus those that are trying to go it alone. Yeah, there are some community guidelines that if you don't follow them, you might be ejected from the community. But no, if we're there in good faith and we're doing everything like that. Tell me, speaking, you know, this is such, you know, change is the constant in our world.  And, you know, desktop was what they started working on first and, you know, we also hear stories about when we first heard about VMotion and the like. But, you know, today, you know, VMworld is so many different aspects. The community is, you know, in many ways fragmented through so many different pieces. What are some of the hot and interesting things?   Yeah, it's an interesting question. And to be fair with you, I think that's an area that we're still getting better at and we're still adapting to, right? You know, if you look at Vmug five years ago, we were the, you know, it was vSphere sort of first, last and always, right? And now, you know, especially as Vmware's portfolio keeps increasing and they keep moving into new areas, that's new areas for us too.  Because the Heptio acquisition is a really big deal. And I think fundamentally changes our potential community, right?  And I think that's a big piece of it, which is if you're really interested in networking and security, here's an area that you can connect in and folks that are like-minded, if you're really interested in end user computing, here's what you can connect into. And so I think, you know, as we continue to grow, and you know, we're, you know, hundreds of thousands of people now around the world, so that, you know, can be a challenge, but I think it's also a huge opportunity for us to be able to keep building that connection with folks and saying, hey, you know, as you continue to move through your career, it's not always gonna be this, you're right. Change is constant. So, hey, what's on the horizon for you? Yeah, when I look at like the field organization for VMware, it's like, boy, I wonder when we're gonna have VSAN and NSX user groups, just because there's such a strong emphasis on those pieces of the business right now. Yeah, yeah. All right, Steve, let's change that for a second. Sure. I think you said, you know, you've got, CIO is part of your title there, as what you're doing.  Sure, so, you know, it's exciting to have moved from my career, cause I'm an old school admin, right? I mean, that's my background. So, you know, as I've progressed, you know, I keep getting different things in my portfolio, right? So, it started out as I was the, you know, I was the admin and then I was managing the systems engineering team, and then they added desktop support, and that was out of necessity. I was like, I'm not really a desktop person, right? So, it's something new you need to learn, but then you start seeing where these synergies are, right? And not to, I don't even like the word synergies, but the reality is that's where we launched our VDI project at UMass Lowell, and that has been transformative for how we deliver education, and it has in a lot of ways reduced barriers to students to get access to things they couldn't before. So, we had engineering students that would have to go out and finance a three, $4,000 laptop to get the horsepower to do their work. Now they can use a Chromebook, right? They don't have to have that cause we do that for them, and just they have to have any device to get access via more horizon, right? So, that happened, and then they moved in our services operation, right? So, what I'm interested now is how do we deliver applications seamlessly to users to give them the best possible experience without needing to think about it, right? Cause if you and I have been around long enough that it used to be a hassle to figure out, okay, I need to get this done, that means I need to get this new applications, I have to go to IT, they're gonna have my laptop, and now it's, the expectation is just like you and I, right? I wanna pull out my phone now and go to the app store and get it, right? So, how do we enable that to make it very seamless and remove any friction to people getting their work done? Yeah, absolutely. The enterprise app store is something we've talked about for a while. Big deal. Isn't that just the Amazon marketplace these days? In some ways it is, so not all applications, right? Some applications are more specific to platforms, and so that's a challenge which is, I'm a professor, I really like my iPad, well how do I get SPSS on that? Okay, well let me come up with some solutions. Yeah, it's interesting, I'm curious if you have any thoughts just from the education standpoint and how that ties into IT. Personally, myself, I think I was in my second job out of school before I realized I was in the IT industry because I studied engineering, they didn't teach us about, oh, well here's the industry's you're working, I knew tech and I knew various pieces of it and was learning networking and all these various pieces there, but the industry viewpoint as a technology person wasn't something I spend a lot of time at. I was just at a conference this week and they were talking about some of the machine learning pieces, there was an analyst got up at the stage and he's like, here I have a life hack for you. He said, what you need to do is get a summer intern that's been at least a junior in college that's studied this stuff and they can educate you on all these cool new things because those of us that have been here a while, there's all new tools and they're teaching them at the universities and therefore that's one of those areas that even if you have years, well if you need to get that retraining they can help with that. No, that to me is one of the most exciting parts about working in education is that our faculty are constantly pushing us in new directions that we haven't even contemplated yet. So we were buying GPU arrays in order to start doing AI before I even knew why we were doing it.  They were mining Bitcoin, we know what they were doing. I don't think so, but it was, that was a new area for us and now we're old hat at this stuff, right? So that is a exciting thing to be able to partner with people that are on the bleeding edge of innovation and hear about the work that they're doing and not just in the tech field but how technology is enabling other. There's been doing some groundbreaking research in the life sciences space that the technology is enabling in a way that it wasn't possible before. In fact, I had one faculty member tell me, geez, maybe six months ago that said the laboratory of the past is beakers and oscilloscopes, right? The laboratory of the future is, how many cores can you get? Yeah. All right, so next week is Dell Technologies World. Exciting. So, you know, the show, the combination of what used to be EMC world and Dell world put together a big show expecting around 15,000 people in Las Vegas. It'd be the 10th year actually of what used to be EMC world. We actually did a bunch of Dell worlds together. For me personally, it's like 17 or 18 of the EMC worlds that I've been to just because disclaimer, I'm former EMC employee. So, Vmug's there and maybe explain, you know, Vmug's role there, what you're looking to accomplish and what you get out of a show like that. Sure, so Vmug is a part of the affiliation of Dell Technologies user communities, right? And what I love about user communities is they're not mutually exclusive, right? You absolutely can be in a converged and a Vmug and a data protection user group. It's all about what fits your needs and what you're doing back in the office. And, you know, we're excited to be there because there's a ton of Vmug members that are coming to Dell Tech world, right? And so we're there to support our community and be a resource for them. And that's exciting for us because, you know, Dell Technologies world is a whole bunch of really cool tech that we're seeing people run VMware on, right? We're seeing VMware partner with. And so that's exciting for us. Yeah, and to try, I hadn't realized because like I've been to one of the converged user group events before. I didn't realize that there was kind of an affiliation between those but makes all the sense in the world. Yeah, right? And it's, you know, again, it's an open hand thing, right? B and one, B and the other utilize them both for what they're great at. Connecting with people that are doing the same thing. There's a ton of people running VMware on a myriad, like you talked about earlier, VMware's partner ecosystem is massive, right? But many, many, many, in fact, I would say a huge majority of converged folks are running VMware on it, right? All right, so Steve, I want to give you the final word. What's the call to action? I understand a lot of people in the community but always looking for more, always ways for people to get involved. So where do they go, what do you recommend? Yeah, thanks. So if you are not plugged into a user community now and you're in the tech field, I would strongly encourage you to do so, right? Vmug obviously is the one that's closest to my heart, right? If you're in that space, we'd love to have you as part of our community and it's really easy, go to vmug.com and sign up and see where the next meetup is and go there, right? If you're not into the VMware space and I know you have lots of folks that are doing different things, go check out your community, right? But I tell you, the career advantages to being in a user community are immense and I frankly was able to track my career growth from admin to manager to director to associate CIO right alongside my community involvement and so it's something I'm passionate about and I would encourage everybody to check out. Yeah, and Steve, thank you so much for joining us. Yeah, I'll give a personal plug on this. There are a lot of communities out there. The virtualization community, especially the VM-1 specifically, is a little bit special from the rest. I've seen that it's not the only one but is definitely more of, it's definitely welcoming. They're always looking for feedback and it's a good collaborative environment. I've done surveys in the group that you get way better feedback than I do in certain other sectors and just so many people that are looking to get involved. So it's one that I'm not only interviewing but I can personally vouch for it. So Steve, thank you so much, always a pleasure to see you. Thanks for having me, Steve. All right, and be sure to check out theCUBE.net. Of course, we've got Dell Technologies World in the immediate future, not that long until we get to the end of summer and VMworld 2019 back in San Francisco. theCUBE will be there, double set. So for both Dell Technologies World and VMworld, so come find us in Las Vegas. If you're at Dell or Moscone West in the lobby is where we'll be for VMworld 2019 and lots and lots of other shows. So thank you so much for watching theCUBE.


84% of products and experiences don't meet customer expectations, so in a hyper-competitive world there's this need, right? We're competing with each other, we're competing with time, we're competing with other products, and so we need to be on top of it from a customer experience to maintain loyalty, to acquire new customers and from an efficiency perspective. We see that and kind of what we mean whenever we talk about customer centricity is how are we using data and insights to make decisions all across the development process.