I'm just testing my mic. Can everybody hear me? I guess so. So welcome, folks. Thanks for taking the time to attend this presentation. I'm going to be talking about Windows in an OpenShift world. It's about enabling Windows workloads in OpenShift. All right, let me see how this works. Oh, awesome. So before we start to do this deep, diverse type presentation, I'd like to show off hands on how many people have used a Linux container. It's almost 100%. Now, how many people have used a Windows container? I am quite surprised. But it's Antonio, so I'm sure. Yeah, so in many ways, Windows containers are sort of new to the game, even though Microsoft has been working on this for a good five to six years. So let's start with a quick history on Windows containers. There are some differences. When you compare them with Linux containers, there are a couple of ways you could run a Windows container. And that differentiation is based on isolation modes. The first mode that people typically think about when you think about containers is process isolation. Process isolation means that you have namespaces, and then you use those namespaces to sort of protect containers from each other for multi-tenancy purposes, et cetera, et cetera. However, Windows has no construct called namespaces. So because of that, they came out with this silver construct, which they call a silo. It's very close to namespaces, but doesn't work exactly in the way a namespace works. So that took care of namespacing, and what do you do about controlling how much resource a particular container is using? To handle this scenario, what they did is they came out or they didn't even come out. They have a construct called JobObjects, and a JobObject can be used to control a set of Windows processes.  The other thing with process isolation is, of course, you all know with containers, the kernel is shared. So when the container is running, it is actually sharing the kernel that's on the host. However, a key difference here is that Microsoft claims of giving you no security guarantees for using containers with process isolation and a multi-tenant environment. So to get over this, there's also an added restriction in this whole world. The fact is that your host and container kernel, they have to match. So if you created your container on Windows Server 2019, you can only run it on Windows Server 2019 if you're using process containers. So server is 2016, you have to run it on server 2016. So to get over these sort of restrictions that you have, what Microsoft did is they said, oh, well, we'll help you and we'll give you security guarantees if you use hyper-reisolation. So what is hyper-reisolation? Hyper-reisolation takes virtualization and they basically run the VM in a very highly optimized virtual machine. So what do you mean by a very highly optimized virtual machine? So what they're actually doing is instead of booting the virtual machine from scratch, which is you start from real mode, you go to protected mode, 32-bit, then you transition into long mode and then there's a whole slew of drivers that you have to do with keyboard, video, mouse and all the other fun stuff. They said, oh, let's try something different. Let's now boot the kernel at a spot where it's already running in long mode, at a 64-bit mode. So that saves a bunch of time and then what they did is they paired down the device model so you don't have all the devices you would have in a particular VM in this little, highly optimized virtual machine that they're running. So that's a huge advantage because what we're used to with containers is if I do Podman and just run a container, it comes up immediately. So they were trying to get as close as possible they could with that even though they were using virtualization, so that's the reason for all this optimization. And with that, you have another advantage. Your host kernel and your container kernel need a match because hey, you have a VM here, you can just run everything within that VM so a mismatch can happen, but there's still some restrictions. Say you have a container that was built for Server 2019. You can't take that and run it on a Windows Server 2016 host. Microsoft says, no, we're not gonna love that. So that's some restrictions that folks are going to have to live with. So I've been saying container kernel images and you must be all wondering like, what is going on here? Why am I even talking about a kernel when it comes to a container image? To explain that, let's first start with what Microsoft decided to do to help their application developers containerize their software.  So everything that you require to run your application is not provided by the kernel like it happens in the monolithic Linux kernel. The Windows kernel is split into pieces. You have the kernel DLL that runs in the most privileged mode and then a lot of the other services are actually provided by user mode DLLs. So they said, we'll give you these base images which is the building block for all your containers. So you have to start from one of these base images. So how do you pick one of these base images? Basically, really depends on your application. Say you want to write a, you have a traditional .NET application.  Say you have a more complex application that requires the full set of Windows APIs that's out there. Then you would pick the Windows version of this container image. And they also have something called IoT Core. If you're writing an IoT app, you typically use this. The reason for all this is actually, so I was mentioning these DLLs that run in user mode. There's a very tight coupling between those libraries and the kernel. And to make things worse, that ABI is not public and it's not stable. So there's a lot of reverse engineering that happens to discover those ABI's. But if you take advantage of it and you decide to use it, there is no, Microsoft says we give you no guarantees that we'll honor those ABI's because you're not supposed to use it. So because of this sort of tight coupling between those user mode libraries and kernel, you have to be careful about what image that you pick when you're containerizing your application. The other advantage is the other reason for having a kernel is because of hyper-reisolation, you're running in a VM. If you want to run in a VM, you have to boot from a kernel. So end result, your container image not only contains your application and any libraries that it needs, it also needs the kernel in there. So it comes sort of with the game if you're running Windows applications. Now that I have the kernel in there, these user mode libraries that my application depends on, you can take the most basic Windows image out there and you're gonna find that it has a pretty large disc footprint and this can actually cause problems in the Kubernetes space because what happens is you have the Kubelet that runs inside a Windows node and you try to launch an application that's bringing down a 10 GB container image. The Kubelet after a while will say, hey, you know what? I've been waiting for too long. I think there's something going wrong. I'm gonna stop trying. So you have to do something smart. You either increase the timeout that the Kubelet will wait in these scenarios or you have to preheat or pre-download those container images upfront. The other quirk with Windows container images is that it doesn't support the latest tag. So you have to be specific. If you wanna use a Windows Server core, you have to specify a tag that says, I don't know. I think the tag is LTSC 2019 which indicates that this is a 2019 instance of Windows Server core and they have similar ones for if you wanna run Windows Server 2016 containers. So yeah, that's another difference that you would have to get used to in this world. All right, so now let's get on to a more targeted talk about what we are doing with Windows workloads in OpenShift. The question many people ask me is like, why are you doing this? Like we are Red Hat, like why do we care about Windows and what's this whole relationship with Microsoft? Well, the answer is customers. Customers have basically come and told us that, hey, we have large Windows applications, large .NET applications that we would love to run in OpenShift because we like what you did with our Linux applications. We were able to manage and orchestrate all of that using OpenShift and we love it. We wanna do the same for our Windows applications. So that's why the Windows container team was formed with an OpenShift and we have started going down this path of saying, hey, what's the best way of enabling Windows workloads with an OpenShift? So our initial target was, we wanted to start very simple. We wanted to hit just the basics, just enough so that we can say that, hey, we are getting our feet wet in this whole new sort of environment. So the first thing we wanna do is you take a Windows Server instance that's running somewhere and then you'd say, hey, I wanna add this to my OpenShift cluster. This is sort of our model that we call bring your own host model, which means that the customer is basically in charge of creating this Windows VM. They'll create the Windows VM, they'll install the container on time in it, they'll typically attach it to the cluster VPC or the cluster network, and then we can add it to the cluster. And to start things off, we decided to only support process isolation and that's because if you want to do hyper-V isolation, it means you need virtualization support and in many clouds, that means you need to turn on nested virtualization. So we do not wanna go down that path yet and so to kick things off, we are only going to deal with process isolation in the short term. And then of course, once you have the node attached to a OpenShift cluster, we wanna of course deploy a workload to the Windows Worker node. And the way we do this is how do you differentiate between nodes, right? You have Linux workers, you have Windows workers. What we do is when we bring up the node, we apply a taint to that node and then we tell people who wanna run a part on that node or a deployment, you say in the pod space, you say that you can tolerate this taint so that you get targeted scheduling happening on those Windows nodes only. So you don't have this confusion of a Linux workload trying to land on the Windows node and dying. The other key difference here is you cannot use the default OpenShift SDN network type if you wanna run Windows workloads in that environment because what they do in that case is they are actually, we are actually carving out a piece of the network for Windows, what do you call, communication. And this was done not just by Red Hat, we have a partnership with Microsoft. So the OpenShift SDN team worked closely with Microsoft to get all these pieces in place. And where the Windows container team comes here is we don't really develop the networking side, we just glue those pieces together. And then of course you wanna be able to route traffic between pods. This is both Linux and Windows pods and Windows and Windows pods. And then of course route traffic to application users who actually wanna use the service that's running inside the Windows node. So this is our architecture. And since we wanted to start really simple, what we decided to do was we'll write an Ansible Playbook that is going to initialize the preparation of this Windows VM. And the way it does it is there's a bunch of binaries that is needed for this process. It's going to go and pull those binaries from a release location and then copy those binaries to the Windows VM and then launch it in whatever manner that is required. One of these binaries that gets copied over is what we call the Windows machine config bootstrapper. It's a one-time use binary in the sense that it's not a demon or something that runs in the background.  And what this model allows us to do is you can even look at this and say, okay, I can now just take that Playbook and convert it into an operator if I want to in the future. But for the sake of simplicity and because there are so many unknowns in this space, we decided to take this approach. So let's now talk a little bit about some of those pieces. So one of these pieces is the Windows machine config bootstrapper. Now this is the binary that we're gonna copy onto the Windows node by the Playbook and then it's going to do some stuff. So what does it do? It's going to take the worker ignition. Worker ignition is, you can think of it as a packaged file that contains some information that's pertinent to that cluster. And so some of the things we extract out of that worker ignition package is the Kubelet configuration. I do want to call out that we're just doing this for the time being, moving forward, we're gonna construct our own Kubelet configuration which is very specific to Windows. We also, what we get from the worker ignition is we get kube configs. We actually get a couple of them. We get what's called a bootstrap kube config to bootstrap the node and then we get the main cluster kube config because there are some dependencies on those kube configs by some other pieces of the software that we have inside that node. And of course we need search, so we pull them all out. And then what the WMCB does is it configures and runs the Kubelet as a Windows service. This is sort of the first step in saying, hey, you know, I'm now joining the cluster and you can start deploying applications to me.  And if you remember in the last few slides I had said, we apply those taints because it's the taint that's going to tell us, okay, this is a Windows node. So when you write your part spec or your deployment spec, you're gonna say, hey, you should be able to tolerate this stain and that will cost your application to land on the right node. The other piece of work that the Windows machine configurator does is configure the container-native interface, the CNI, and that's required for networking. How all of this is tied together is by the Windows scale-up playbook. Like I had mentioned before, it downloads all the required binaries from the release location, the WMCB, and the way the Ansible playbook is written is a part of it will execute on the Ansible host, mainly to download some of these binaries. But there's also part of it that will actually run on the Windows VM. And things like getting the worker ignition, you can't do that from outside the cluster, you have to do it from something within the cluster. So we grab the worker ignition file on the Windows node itself. We also pull the cubelet from an upstream location and copy that over. And then we also copy this binary called the hybrid overlay. The hybrid overlay is what configures the plumbing that's needed for networking to work for Windows within that cluster. This is a piece of software that was actually written by someone from Microsoft. So shout out to Chaslin, who helped us a lot here. And this was done in conjunction with folks from our OpenShift SDN team. Shout out to Dan Williams and Jacob for helping out with this. And the hybrid overlay, once it runs, it means that the basic etchiness, which is the host networking services pieces in Windows, is ready. You have your OpenShift networks created within that Windows node. And at that moment, what happens is, we can go to the next step of asking the cubelet to be configured to work with CNI, which I'm gonna call right after this. The other binary that we download is the cube proxy. I'll talk about this in the next slide. And of course, when I was talking about network configuration, there's the CNI package that needs to be done. So it collects all these files and then it copies them over to the Windows node. Once the files are copied, it starts to remotely execute these files. It first says, okay, hey, WMCB, go configure the cubelet. It then launches the hybrid overlay. Hybrid overlay talks to etchiness, does all the network plumbing that's required. As I said, the OpenShift etchiness networks are created at this point. And now we have a second step with the WMCB, the Windows Machine Config Bootstrapper, which then runs to configure CNI, which is a container native interface. For this, we sort of relaunch the cubelet with added options for configuring CNI plugins. And then the cube proxy is run. Cube proxy exists on the Linux side too, but it's sort of an optional component. But with Linux, while it's optional, with Windows, it's required. If you do not run cube proxy on your Windows node, you will not be able to allow an application to talk to the outside world. So say you create a Kubernetes service that's running behind a load balancer.  The other thing that happens when the WMCB is configuring the cubelet in the first step is the node will start to generate certs, CS call certificate signing requests, and somebody needs to sign those requests and approve them so that the node can then, the cluster can say, okay, you are a valid node and you can join the cluster. So the scale up playbook also takes care of approving those certs. All right, so now comes the sort of the exciting and a little scary part of the talk for me is the demo. I've been praying to the network gods, the demo gods. They have not been happy with me today morning. I was trying this out and the network here is a little flaky. I do have a backup video to show, but it's not that exciting. So I'm gonna give it a shot, fingers crossed and we'll see if it works. And I'm gonna sit for this. There's no way I can stand to do this, sorry folks. All right. So what I did is to make the network's life easier. I brought up a instance on AWS where I'm gonna run the playbook. The reason for doing this is the network is so slow I need to download these binaries, copy them over, and it was like most of the time I tried it with the local network it was timing out. So before we go down this path, let me show you something about the cluster. So the cluster that I'm running is a OpenShift latest and greatest 9thly version 4.4. You can see that the list of nodes that I have at the moment.  What else can I show you? I also wanna show you the host file that I'm gonna pass on to the Ansible playbook. This basically lists what the address of the Windows node is and the admin password. You're free to copy the admin password because I'm gonna kill this whole cluster the minute this talk is done. So we have all those pieces ready and the next step is going to be running this playbook. So let's go ahead and do that. So what I have here is I'm passing the host file to the main playbook, which is we've called it main.yaml, it has a list of tasks there. And one of the things we pass on to that is the location of the WMCB that we wanna use. There are two ways this playbook can run. One is you can either execute the playbook in such a way if you have Go configured, it can actually pull the Windows machine configure operator by repository and do the build for you and then run. But we don't want all customers to have to do this so you can even pass a release location that you have and it'll pull it down and use that binary instead. So let's kick off this run. And as you can see, one of the things it's actually doing now is it's downloading the binary. So this is gonna take, I don't know, hopefully five or 10 minutes. So what I'm gonna do in that meanwhile is keep going with my presentation and then we can sort of come back to this. All right, so how do I get back to my presentation? Here it is. I'm also gonna, I also should talk about what I'm trying to show in the demo, right? So I'm going to be running on OpenShift, a 4.4 cluster that I, like I showed you. It's configured with OVN hybrid networking. I already have a Windows Server 2019 instance running on AWS and that's the host file that I showed you. It had information about that particular instance and that instance was connected to the cluster's VPC. Now, in the background what we've been seeing is that instance is added to the cluster by running the WSU Playbook. Hopefully it'll succeed and if it succeeds, we'll get to play some Pac-Man. So it's a short and simple, hopefully short and simple demo. Hopefully it'll work. And if the demo doesn't work, I do have a link to a video that'll show you the whole thing but that's not so exciting. And while the demo is running, I do want to talk about what the team is thinking about next steps. We do want to move to an operator model. We do want to move away from just running the Ansible Playbook. We want to make it much easier for customers to gain access to running Windows workloads. We do not want them to go through the pain of creating a Windows VM, installing the required runtime in there. We want to actually take over most of those pieces and the easiest way to do that is actually move to the operator model. It will streamline that whole process for us. At the same time, what we have at the moment is just basic functionality as far as running Windows workloads goes as I described before. So in addition to that, OpenShift has amazing logging functionality. So we want to actually plug in into that so that Windows and Linux, they're on the same plane as far as OpenShift goes. The same goes for monitoring. We have a monitoring framework that's part of the cluster. We do want to plug into that so that no one is going to say that, oh, I'm not able to get certain features that's present for Linux but is not present for Windows. The other thing that we want to do is container native storage. We want to add support for that. And the way we want to do that is, Red Hat has a container native storage team that does take care of storage. They would do some of those pieces. We would be the clue and hopefully we'll get some traction from either Microsoft or somewhere upstream that will help with some of the bits in Windows that is needed here. So this is what the operator architecture is going to look like as we move forward. So we're gonna have what we're gonna most likely call Windows Machine Config operator. And what that operator is going to do is gonna watch for a couple of resources. One is we will create a Windows operator CRD. CRD is a custom resource definition. It's a way to extend the Kubernetes API for different applications. So we will create our own CRD, which we'll call Windows operator. And that's basically gonna describe most, at the moment we think it's gonna just describe the release binaries that need to be used, that you need to go and pull from external sources. Then what'll happen is, it's also gonna watch for machine objects. Machine objects is something very open ship specific. It's a object that describes worker nodes and master nodes. So we would add some features to that machine object that indicates that this is a Windows worker. And then the operator is actually gonna sit and watch for that particular object to see if that object has been created or not. The reason for doing that is, the minute that object gets created, we know a Windows VM has appeared on the cluster. And it's wanting to join the cluster. In addition to the object being created, it's also gonna give us a way to get the admin password of that Windows VM because it's not that easy to use keys to get to the Windows node. So we'll most likely do some further implementation to the machine API that's part of OpenShift that will give us access to the secret in Kubernetes terms in like a secret CR. And so we'll use that secret and then we're pretty much going to do exactly what we did using the Ansible Playbook. We're gonna copy the binaries over, run WMCB. So this is why I was saying that if you look at the original picture, you could have taken that Ansible Playbook and just dropped in this operator and everything should have still worked. So hopefully that's the model we are shooting for. I have actually rushed through my presentation. So let's go back to the demo and see if it's still working. Awesome, it did not work. So what would have actually happened is actually the place where it failed is it was trying to launch the hybrid overlay. And for some reason, there was an issue there. But what would have happened is I'll quickly run through what happens with the demo. So what I'm actually showing here is I'm basically showing the cluster version like I showed before. I'm gonna show you the list of nodes here. And actually what I did, I did miss showing you one of those things. This is the network configuration and you can see the type is OVN Kubernetes. And we also have to change what we call the network operator to make it a hybrid OVN Kubernetes version and once this needs to be done up front before adding the Windows node, these are the nodes that are already existing. This is again, like I mentioned before, is the host file that you pass on to the Ansible Playbook. And again, we're gonna kick off and run the Ansible Playbook here. So I'll quickly go through what the Playbook is doing. Like I mentioned before, it downloads the WMCB from a release location. It then also picks up the cubelet node binary and then from within the cubelet node binary, it takes the cubelet.exe and downloads it locally. It also grabs the cube proxy binary that is acquired and then it goes and fetches the CNI plugins. That's basically a tar-gc file which is then unzipped and will be moved over. And then what it does is it starts to copy these required files onto the Windows node and that's the thing that takes a bunch of time so I can sort of speed that up a little bit. And here it's trying to get the ignition file and once it gets the ignition file, it also needs to figure out what cube version the cluster is using so that it uses the right cubelet binary and it pulls the right cubelet binary. Once it finishes doing that, it's going to pull the hybrid overlay, make sure that the hybrid overlays show matches and then the first step is it's going to run the bootstrapper. Once the first bootstrapper operation is done by the WMCB, it's going to generate a CSR. So what the playbook will do at that point is it's going to wait for some time for the CSR to show up in the cluster and the minute it finds that the CSR is present, it's going to approve it. And then it's going to wait for the next step where once the bootstrap CSR has been approved, another CSR gets generated which is the node CSR and now it's going to approve that too. And these are key factors for sort of authenticating that this node is allowed to join the cluster. And once the CSRs have been applied, the first part of bootstrapping this Windows instance is done. And the rest of the work that happens beyond this point is mainly networking. So as you can see here, the bootstrap node has been applied, the CSRs have been approved and now it starts to do the networking pieces. The first thing it does is it checks if the hybrid overlay is already running. The reason why it's doing this is it's ensuring that this playbook can be run over and over again against the same Windows instance without any issues. Once the hybrid overlay is up and running, you can start doing the CNI configuration. The CNI configuration actually uses some of the annotations that the hybrid overlay, once it finishes running, applies to the node object. So it takes some information from there, creates the CNI configuration and then it reruns WMCB with different set of options and those set of options is what applies the CNI command line parameters to the KubeLit and then the KubeLit starts to run in its final state as a service and once that's done, the next step is it has to configure the KubeProxy that I spoke about so that it allows external network communication to happen and then this KubeProxy, what it does is once that's configured as a Windows service, that's pretty much all the work that the WMCB has to do and you will see now that the Windows node has been added and if you describe the node, you will see that it says the OS image being used is Windows Server 2019 and the KubeLit has started, the KubeProxy has started and at this point, you can actually add Windows workloads onto this instance. So Windows workload, which what I was hoping to show would look something like the following. So if you look at this YAML, we have a service that is basically a regular Kubernetes service. There's no difference here if you compare it to a Linux service. The key difference is gonna be on the deployment side where you will describe things like, I'm looking for that. So as you can see here, see the image that's being used is a Windows Server core image and this is the tag I was talking about before. You have to specify an LTSC 2019 sort of tag, otherwise things won't work. This is the command that's gonna be passed to, this is gonna be the command that's gonna be passed to this Windows Server core instance and the other thing that I was talking to you about was the toleration that it needs to be specified and so we say that, oh, the key that we are looking for is OS and the value is Windows, so that's a toleration that maps to the taint that we have applied to the node and the same thing, we also have a node selector here where we mention what OS type is done. So the end of this, if we were able to launch this, what do you call, launch this deployment, you would be able to access this Windows service from an external source. So that's pretty much all I have. I was hoping to show more if the cluster actually came up but unfortunately it did not, not the cluster but the node. So let's go back to my slides. I can try. In fact, I can just run it in the background while I can maybe open up the floor for questions. All right, so while this is running, so this is not GA, this is not even like available for tech preview at the moment or dev preview. This is something that the team is playing around with and working out. We might pass it on to certain solution architects to see if they can show this off to customers but we're not planning on releasing this anytime soon. More work needs to be done to stabilize it, make it more feature perfect and make it on par with Linux workloads. So we're not ready to GA this. This is, I don't know what we can call this very early alpha preview type things that we wanna start, get a head start on this. So at this point I think the floor is open to questions if anyone has, yeah. So the question was what about the licensing for the Windows? So if you remember very early on we had said that this is gonna be sort of a bring your own host model. So the licensing is sort of on the customer. If they have a Windows license they can use it or pay AWS or Azure for those licenses. And so we don't wanna be taking ownership of paying for those licenses either. So it's mostly on the customer side as far as things like licensing goes. Sure. So that's the area that we have not even touched so far. At the moment whatever default that the container runtime is using we're just going with it but that's another piece we need to work with the OpenShift storage team to figure out. And I did forget to mention something about container runtimes. At the moment we're using Docker because that's what the like you can find instance AMIs on Amazon provided by Microsoft that's having the Docker runtime but the plan upstream is to go with continuity, crycontinuity as their runtime. And what Microsoft is saying is with in the whole Kubernetes space they're gonna go with crycontinuity and they will only support Hyper-V isolation. So we do have to think about what we're gonna do at that point. We might have to use some of the i3 instances on AWS that provides what is called what is that called nested virtualization. There are these instances called Nitro instances where Amazon uses their own version of the hypervisor to allow nested virtualization to happen in a more performance manner. So we do have to think about those things. Yeah, so this is the problem that you're seeing that it's looking for a CSR and not being able to find. So I think running the playbook the CSR has already been approved. So we actually hopefully it'll ignore. I think I'm using a version of our playbook that's actually gonna ignore the CSR. Any more questions? Okay, so the question was what are you gonna do in an offline environment, right? Because we're downloading these libraries from release locations. What are we gonna do in that scenario? The answer is when we go to the operator model we're gonna have a source of truth within the cluster itself. Because we don't wanna keep using different binaries that haven't been certified and things like that. So most of the binaries that we require will come from within the cluster itself. So that way you don't have to reach outside and pull these things. They'll be all packaged as part of the operator. So when you run the operator you basically have it. All right, so the question was is this OpenShift specific or are we planning to make this part of upstream? So if the question is about the playbook and things like that, that's very OpenShift specific. We are only planning to use that against OpenShift clusters. It's very sort of tuned so that it makes it easy in an OpenShift way. But there is nothing preventing us from modifying that playbook to make it upstream friendly too. There's nothing, we're not doing anything funky or special there. This could easily be adopted for upstream use cases. The thing with upstream use cases is we need to figure out what the networking model is gonna be there. It could be anything, right? Here we're being a little prescriptive saying that we will only support a certain networking model that we're familiar with. So as we start supporting different networking models that will become an easier thing for us to support in the upstream. Any more questions? The other thing I, let me quickly go back to my slides. So actually the piece that I was saying might be a problem is actually not a problem. I was using the latest and greatest of the playbook so that actually figures out that okay, this is actually a node that we have already approved so it's sort of ignoring that whole process and it's gonna keep going. But I think the place it's gonna fail is the hybrid overlay which means there's some networking funkiness that is happening on the cluster which is what I was running into earlier in the morning. So I'm not so confident that'll work but we'll see. But I'm trying to get back to my slides. I have a couple more things that I could show in this time. Was there somebody, yeah, sure. Oh, that's a good question. I actually haven't thought about OKD but I would say that if you're able to do this against OCP, you should be able to do it against OKD. I can't think of anything that would prevent us from being able to use this with OKD. So it should be there. All right, let me see if I can get back to my slides. I have actually lost my slides. No, I'm still running Fedora. That's one thing to say that I'm working on Windows is another thing to say that I'm gonna run Windows on my laptop. Yeah, I just wanted to show what I think are, yeah, so these are the couple of links that I've put out there. One is for our repo, which is the Windows machine config operator. We're calling it the Windows machine config operator. It'll soon be renamed to Windows machine config bootstrapper and we're gonna start afresh when you go down the operator model. SigWindows is the special interest group in Kubernetes for upstream work. So if any of you folks are interested in contributing in this space, please join SigWindows. They have a Slack channel on the Kubernetes Slack. There are also weekly meetings where people discuss about work that's happening in this area. So really useful. I highly suggest folks interested in Windows workloads to go and try this out. And of course I have to put in a little bit of a plug for Red Hat, right? We are hiring. We're hiring all over the world. In particular, the Windows container team is hiring in Boston. So if someone wants to work out of Boston, come and look me up after and I'm willing to take in your resume. So that was my plug. If I have a little bit more time, I had a couple of slides that I thought wouldn't make it. Yeah, so it failed at the same spot trying to configure the hybrid overlay. So I must have done something wrong maybe or there's some networking glitch happening at the moment. But sorry folks that I couldn't show you a live enough demo. So Rancher has come out with a release. So has AWS. It's all again, just like us very early, they're not putting any support statements out there. So very early in the game. And that's why I think we're also getting involved as quickly as we can because we sort of want to get up to speed before the rest of the industry catches up. So the question was, is Microsoft Azure doing it? No, not yet at least. They might have plans to release it, but not yet. I was going to show some more slides but I think I'm slowly running out of time. So yeah, there's five minutes. I could maybe show those slides. They're more of historical interest and actually hidden them. I mean, this is just to show you the kind of evolution that's been happening in the Windows Server space. Microsoft started with Windows Server 2016 where they started to introduce process isolation, Hyper-V isolation. They had like a built-in docker for Windows Server. They slowly moved and in the next step, which was I think 1709, they came out with these container images for Nano Server and Server Core. They also had like platform level support for Linux containers. So you can theoretically run Linux containers on a Windows node, but it actually again happens way within a machine. That is something that we're not really looking at, at least with an open shift. If someone wants to run a Linux workload, you just run it on a Linux worker node. And they did the same by the time they got to Server 2019 is where they had more of the networking pieces in place, more of the container storage pieces in place. They also added support for some of the networking plugins like Calico and Flannel. So in fact, if you go look upstream, you would see that all the networking stuff is done through Flannel. But we decided to go the hybrid-ocean route. If you want technical details and more architecture about the networking stuff, you should ping the SDN team. So while they were doing this evolution on the Windows server side, the same sort of evolution was happening in the Kubernetes area too. I know this infograph kind of throws a lot of information out there. It's more to just show you the kind of stuff they were doing over a timeframe. So this stops I think at 113 and we're like at 118 or 119 now at this point. But so they've been working on this almost since the 1.8 or 1.6 timeframe. So Microsoft has been pretty hard at work in trying to enter this whole container and Kubernetes orchestration space for a while. All right, so that's pretty much all I had. I again apologize for not being able to show a live demo. I think I sort of asked for a little too much, trying to add an old life. But hopefully maybe it found a bug in our code, so it's all good. All right, nothing else, thank you folks.


Aaron, what did you think about the way the offense came out tonight? Yeah, it was great. I thought last time out against Walker, we had a lot of good at bats and put a lot of pressure on them. But we couldn't break through on them. Tonight, we're able to do that. And just a lot of guys having a lot of good at bats, again, up and down.  Gio with a lot of good at bats. Frazier, I mean, he was up and down tonight. It was good to see. Gio or a shell, it seemed like he didn't skip a beat from the way he was swinging before he went on the aisle. Just how difficult is that to do when you haven't been in a game in, what, 11 days? Yeah, I mean, and spraying it all over the ballpark, hitting all different kinds of pitches. The one time they got him out was a great play by Gritchick in the gap. And then doing what he does in the field. So it was really good to see him return like that and move around like he did. And to be able to get him out of there a little bit early, I thought it was good for him, too. Another quality start for David Garcia. What stood out to you about the way he threw the ball? Just strike one, dictating the count. Probably wasn't as dominant as he was in Buffalo against him. But that's obviously a very tough lineup to navigate, a lot of long innings. The game a little bit out of hand there early, and he was able to just kind of keep his focus, continue to make pitches, and then kind of finish with a flourish, too. Like he's out there just competing really well and having fun at his craft. There you see him finish it off there in the seventh. So another strong outing. Ron Blum, go ahead and unmute. As you look at where everyone is now compared to a week ago, is there a key or two that started the turnaround in your mind? I think it's our starting pitching. You know, I go back to the game, the second game that we lost when Jay Hap pitched really well. And since then, you know, everyone that's taken their turn has gone out and really set the tone from a starting rotation standpoint. You know, Manny got back on track. A couple good ones from Davey. Obviously Garrett with the dominant outing. Masa's been good. So it's really started with our starting pitching going out and giving us really strong starts. And you know, a handful of those days, the offense has really stepped up. But I think it's all started with the starting pitchers. Thank you. Bruce Beck, go ahead. Aaron, was there ever a point after you had lost those five games in a row where you lost confidence in this team or didn't believe that this club would find a way to start bouncing back? No, no, never.  You know, it makes for some sleepless nights. But no, never losing belief in these guys. And now as we get more and more guys back and healthy and in the mix, you know, I know we're capable of amazing things. And you know, hopefully we're going to find that out. John Schwartz, please unmute. I know it's obviously not a surprise at this point when it's happening, but the advance that Luke is having, you can just, I mean, show the power he's showing, but also just the quality of that in general. Yeah, he's really becoming a great hitter in this league. I mean, and it's consistent with what we've seen since we got him in 18. He's been an impact player, period. Just controls the zone, knows how to go up and hunt a pitch. Obviously, the big power, the ability to hit the ball out to all fields really helps him. But you know, I feel like he's improving his contact rate. You know, he strikes that balance between being uber aggressive, which you want to be. You know, he's up there looking to do damage early in the count, but he has the ability to control the zone along with it. Neftali Medina, go ahead and unmute. Look, boy, what different you see than him this year? And when all the guy is down, it's looking like he being kind of the team. What about you seeing him different this year and what are you out to say about tonight? Yeah, I mean, I think kind of what I just hit on. I mean, I don't see a ton different, frankly. He's healthy, and he wasn't real healthy in the second half of last season. And really, the only time he's had a little dip in his performance was that couple months at the back end of last season when he was kind of going through the sports hernia and grinding through that. He's had the surgery. He's obviously got himself in tremendous shape, having lost a little bit of weight into summer camp. But I think it's very consistent with what we've seen since we got him in 2018. Max Goodman, go ahead. Aaron, what did you think of the stands at bats tonight? I thought they were good. A lot of deep counts. Obviously, smoked the ball, worked a walk. Thought he may have worked a walk on one of his strikeouts too. But I thought he looked good and comfortable. Obviously, he got a lot of different looks from different pitchers. So I thought it was a quality for at bats, even though he didn't have much to show for. And the DJ went deep on a pitch. I think it was 48 miles an hour. It was the last time you've seen that. It kind of reminded me of your walk-off of Wakefield. Yeah. I mean, that just kind of lets the legend of the machine to kind of grow a little bit. Gary's on the bench. 98, 48, 78, slider, fast ball, doesn't matter. So he's just a special hitter.


How about literally chill his comfort food? Yes, my friends, welcome, welcome, welcome, I'm Philip Magnus and this is the third time I'm recording this video review of Unsold, the first book in the Cradle series by Will Wright. The first two recordings went the way of the dodo and were extinct by a variety of technical or other issues, some of them eldritch, some of them threatening much. Anyway, how about literature as comfort food? As I first asked, sometimes you need to unwind in between series demanding reads to lose yourself in a world whose stakes, while not low by any means, don't hit right here and maybe right here, quite as deep. Yes, that's where my heart is. It's not here. It's here for me. I'm special That's how Unsold hit for me anyway. That was the case. Unsold, the first book in Will Wright's much celebrated Cradle series, is the epitome of a comfort food book. I experienced it as an audiobook, which has the other benefit of featuring the voice of Travis Baldry, whose debut novel, Legends and Latte's, stole mine and every other reader's, at least fantasy, reader's heart last year. It was a truly delightful slice of life, for which you can find my review, probably somewhere around here. Baldry is a celebrated audiobook narrator, not only a writer, he actually made his name as an audiobook narrator to begin with, and I can definitely see why. He imbues the characters he voices with personality, which is no difficult task as Wright's characters have plenty of that, even if some of it is a little one note. That's something I don't mind one bit. People often equate one-dimensional characters with bad characters, but that doesn't measure up in my experiences. In fact, it couldn't be further away from the truth. The better part of the characters you'll come across in Unsold are one-dimensional. That doesn't mean they're no fun to read about. As for Will Wright himself, I'll permit to hypothesize that he spends at least as much time watching anime as I do. Unsold has more than a few familiar tropes that made me feel like I was sitting down to enjoy a good Shonen show on a lazy weekend. Haven't had one of those in a while. The Cradle series is also one of the best-known Western examples of cultivation or progression fantasy, a genre known as Jianxia in China from where I originates, and my apologies if I messed up the pronunciation. The genre follows the growth in power of one character from a humble human being into an entity that the gods themselves fear and tremble before. It's slow bloody business becoming a god toe or whatever it is that gods tremble before, and that's why there are 12 of these bad boys to follow main character Lindon's exploits true. I don't believe the 12th one has been published yet but the other 11 are out there for your reading pleasure or listening pleasure if you are like me and don't have enough time to read as main books as you want. This first 12th is a fairly lean fantasy novel and just under 300 pages. Some of the latter entries are beefed up to more than 450. So yeah definitely lean. It does a really good job setting up the world, hinting at there being so much more to see than what this first book introduces and reveals. A lot of sneak peeks and teasers as to entities, monstrous heroes, villains and whole systems of power beyond our ken. It's good. It's excellent to have that in a world that you hope your readers will spend anywhere from dozens to a few hundreds of hours in over the course of what can be a year long odyssey, years, years long odyssey of reading. I speak of course of the perspective that Wright must have had when he first started writing this book. What works in, wait is it Wright? It's white.  I've messed it up now. I'm not starting over. It's real white. I'm probably going to keep saying Wright though. You know what it is now, so don't worry about it. Anyway, what works in Wright's favor is that Lyndon, the protagonist, is a genuinely likeable main character. In the vein of much of the shown in anime I grew up with, bland in some nondescript way which allows you to project yourself onto him but also driven by very relatable goals.  He sees power abused in egregious ways and he wishes to do better. He knows he can do better. So why shouldn't he? That's what motivates him to go through a number of trials and make the best of his circumstances as he makes a friend slash mentor along the way and comes out of the other end stronger and entering into a far bigger messier world than the one he leaves behind. While reading Unsold I was put in mind of the starting zone of an RPG game, a 5-10 hour tutorial experience that teaches you the rules of the world before stepping back and plunging you down its depth. I'm not sure there's much of a practical difference in those terms but then I read the book months ago. What stuck with me after those few months have gone by? Good question. Thanks, past me for asking it. For one, the idea of using your souls is the source of your energies is intuitive, unoriginal but made entertaining through imaginative displays of power. The class-based system in such worlds, defined by power as it is, must be a nightmare to live in from the perspective of our contemporary world but the communal elements White introduces to smooth out its most violent aspects, make a tribal life in this world a more attractive proposition. It's fun to see a family calculating how to advance themselves in the tribe they've just been born in, even knowing that it'll soon look like the pettiest thing in the world. This book is fun and I enjoyed it in between my studies and works of literature that I consider have more value than this in terms of a purely academic interest to me. Well, I'll listen to the next few books. I think so. When exactly there'll be, I can't tell you but it will happen eventually and I suspect I'll have an even better time with it. Perhaps I'll even find something words of truly getting excited about. That's how this genre works though. The more you read, the more invested you get, the higher the stakes, the more impressive the spectacle. There really isn't that much more to say, well, except that if you see an old monk looking like a kid, punch him.  As a matter of fact, that's my score for this one. One out of one punched child monks. It's a very high score indeed, probably the highest I've ever given in one of those videos. If you enjoyed this video, if you would like to see more of my takes on books and what have you, there are plenty more coming so be sure to let me know in the comments, press that like button and subscribe, share the video with your friends or enemies if you're doing it particularly bad. If you disliked this video, cool, cool, cool, cool. Anyway, I'll see you next time. Bye!


Niger, the world's seventh-largest producer of uranium, is one of the poorest countries in the world and receives close to $2 billion annually in development assistance. In fact, according to the 2023 budget projections, of which the total budget is $5.53 billion, more than $2.2 billion, or around 40% of its budget, was expected to come from external partners. However, the coup that occurred in Niger on July 26, 2023, has cut short the proposed budget plans and affected Niger's economy as a whole because the coup resulted in stringent sanctions from the international community, Western nations, and the regional bloc, ECOWAS. ECOWAS as well as Western and European countries, including the United States, had previously provided aid for health, security and infrastructure needs in Niger, but with the sanctions, all this assistance has halted. Of all the countries and blocs that impose sanctions on Niger because of the coup, ECOWAS sanctions have been the harshest so far. The bloc has suspended all commercial transactions with Niger, frozen its state assets in the regional central bank, frozen the assets of the state and state enterprises in commercial banks, and suspended all financial assistance with regional development banks. These financial sanctions by the regional bloc could lead to a default on Niger's debt repayments. ECOWAS sanctions also resulted in Nigeria cutting electricity supply to the country via the 80 megawatt burning Kaby line, while Ivory Coast suspended Nigerian imports and exports. West Africa's regional central bank, the BCEO, also shut down its branches in Niger, citing risks to operations. France, a former colonial master and partner of Niger, also placed financial sanctions on the country. They suspended development aid and budget support with immediate effect, demanding a prompt return to constitutional order. It was reported that France's development aid for Niger, which was about $130 million in 2022, was expected to be slightly higher in 2023, but with the sanctions, Niger will not be receiving any aid from France. The United States is also not left out. Immediately after the coup, the United States, which was a major provider of humanitarian and security aid, paused assistance programs to Niger valued at more than $100 million. Three months after the coup, the US officially declared the coup in Niger to be a coup and immediately cut off more than $500 million in assistance to the country. Other Western and European countries that also imposed sanctions on Niger following the coup include the Netherlands, Canada, and the World Bank. All these countries suspended their direct development assistance with Niger until democratic governance was restored to the country. However, despite all this, the military government of Niger has refused to comply. They have remained defiant in the face of the sanctions and have even received support from the people of Niger and neighboring countries like Burkina Faso and Mali. Although the sanctions have had no effect on the military government's decision to restore constitutional order, they have hit Niger's more than 25 million people. The sanctions imposed on Niger have led to strong inflation of food products and even a shortage of certain medicines. Hamza Dyaqait, a 65-year-old Nigerian, stated that she can't remember the last time her family of eight had a good meal. Not only is food very expensive, but school supplies have also doubled in price. I also have to clothe my children and, above all, deal with their illnesses, the 65-year-old said. Some businesses in the country have also shut down due to incurring extra costs to run generators after Nigeria cut the power supply. But even as the people of Niger feel the pinch of sanctions, many people on the streets of Niome, the capital, say they support the coup. They dismiss concerns from the West and the hardship brought by the sanctions as a worthy sacrifice. Abdul Ali, one supporter of the coup in the capital city of Niger, stated that the love of our homeland has made us forget the hard times that the entire country is going through. No one cares about this rise in the price of goods, he added. So, despite all the sanctions, Niger has remained strong, but it seems the international community is not finished with Niger. Just a few days ago, the European Union announced that it had adopted measures to impose sanctions on members of Niger's military junta. According to the EU Council, the 27-member bloc has taken steps to enact a framework that would empower it to impose sanctions on individuals and entities found responsible for actions that pose a threat to the peace, stability, and security of Niger. The Council specifically declared that these sanctions will target people who threaten Niger's constitutional order, democracy, or rule of law.  Sanctions will include travel bans, asset freezes, and prohibitions on sending payments to people who have been sanctioned. The European Union foreign policy chief, Joseph Burrell, emphasized that the EU supports the efforts of the West African bloc, ECOAS, and noted that the move by the European Union sends a clear message that military coups come at a cost. With today's decision, the EU strengthens its support for ECOAS efforts and sends a clear message, military coups bear costs, he said. Interestingly, this is not the first time that the European Union has sanctioned Niger. Immediately after the coup, the European Union suspended security cooperation and financial support with Niger. Now, the whole point of all these sanctions from ECOAS, Western, and European countries, as well as the international community, is to restore the so-called constitutional order, meaning to reinstate the deposed President Mohammed Bazoum. So, the big question is, would these new sanctions imposed on Niger by the European Union, will the military government of Niger fall under the pressure to restore constitutional order? The previous sanctions have already had a significant impact, most especially on the people of Niger, and now these new sanctions from the European Union would undoubtedly add more hardship to the country. Can they continue to stand their ground? For how long will they hold? Only time will tell. What do you think? Let us know in the comment section down below, and don't forget to like, subscribe, and share this video.


Hey guys, it's Nate, AKA The Foot Accountant, and welcome back to the channel. Happy Monday and start to a brand new week. And starting off the week this week, what I want to enter into is a conversation about the current promo, the fantasy foot cards. Do we have an opportunity to invest in these cards as they go out of packs and as we watch them kind of get packed and maybe rise in price throughout the rest of this week? I think there is potential for that because these are live cards. There's a lot riding on these cards for the upgrades and the hype around those. I want to talk about investing in those and the hero versions in today's video a little bit. Now, speaking of those heroes, yesterday ESEA hit us with a little bit of a surprise with the 87 plus, keeping the hero theme going. They hit us with another hero player pick. We've seen this one before, but it's one of five. Five options for this is massive and it's got a lot of people very excited. The market is moving a lot because of this and the MTD SPC yesterday as well. Both, I guess, decent enough to make people want to go sell some cards and buy some fodder as we see fodder in multiple areas moving. We'll talk about that and speaking of today on Monday, what's the content gonna be? Is it just gonna be upgrade packs to help us craft SPCs and maybe pack some man of the matches, team of the weeks, fantasy heroes and fantasy cards? We'll talk about that and what else to expect with the market today because will we see a market rise on a Monday where Weekend League is still going on? We'll talk about that in today's video as well. So if you're excited for it, hit the thumbs up, subscribe if you're new. Let's quickly go back to yesterday and talk about what happened with this hero player pick to start things off in the video today. I'm sure a lot of you guys have done this. It's not that expensive of a gamble. It's a little too expensive for my liking but EA knew exactly what they're doing with this because they've dropped this pack before but they've never given us or placed player pick before but they've never given us five options, right? And this is massive because five options gives you a lot of potential for the what if, right? When you play that through your mind, this is a gamble where EA is saying, yes, these cards are a little bit behind the curve and base icons or base heroes, sorry, like those are old, man. We've had those since the start of the game. Like the fact that you can pack base, like I don't even know, like somebody base hero cards out of this is just not great and that's what I don't like about it but people are doing it because you have five options and five options gives you the opportunity to pack somebody really good. So 290,000 coins, 72% upvote. A lot of DGNs on this FIFA game right now, right? I get it, I get it. I'm very interested in doing this because if there's no other big SBCs that drop throughout the rest of this week, this is one that you could do upgrade packs, craft it up and have a fun opportunity to try to pack one of those big boy World Cup hero players, right? It's not about, I mean, maybe Ginola, you know, a couple of those guys like Dina Talley or Marquicio and I've seen some pretty good ones in the past couple of hours but I've also seen some pretty bad ones. So it's a gamble. If you don't have a lot of coins, be careful. This is one that I would probably say most people aren't packing cards inside of it that are going straight into their starting 11. A few will, but not that many will. So that's why I would be careful with this one but it is fun and of course you can tell with this upvote percentage and the way the market's moving, people are doing this SBC. Now with the requirements, you've got two informed requirements which has made some informs go up but you've got a lot of 85 rated requirements in here like the 84 rated squad requires 385s. The 85 squad alone of course is gonna require 85s and then the 87 or the 86 squad requires an 87 which means you're probably gonna fill out the rest of that 86 squad with some more 85s than you normally would because you have that higher rated player in there and that has made 85s with all that demand shoot up in price from about a 10 to 11K. They're up to about 15, 14 and a half, 15,000 coins. Very nice price rise on these cards. 86s are up a little bit. 84s are up around 1,000 coins a card now too. Right from just under 4K to almost 5,000 coins even 83s are up a little bit because of this too. So the low rated fodder is what moved yesterday with the demand. High rated fodder just kind of chilling and actually going down. 91s are at 60,000 coins. For right now I would not invest in these. I think I would wait until later on in the week. I feel like there's a very small opportunity and I mean very, very small that EA would drop another sort of big SBC. It would have to take like another icon pack later on this week for EA to make those high rated fodders go back up. So unless we have a leak, a new pack added to the code or something about an icon pack coming or it dropping into the game, I would stay away from that high tier stuff because the focus right now looks like it's on a little lower tier with this SBC requiring all 86s rated and below and then some inform. So that definitely made the market move yesterday. Now what cards dropped? Now a lot of the market did drop yesterday because people sold cards to go and do this SBC. We talked about that in yesterday's video, right? When there's good gamble packs or just good SBCs that people want to go and do, they sell cards to go and get it done. And this is one that's actually rebounding back up a little bit right now that was down a lot yesterday and Katya was 180,000 coins. He went all the way down to 160. Kavicha was one, even on a bit of a higher range. He was like 570,000 coins. He's down to 520 right now.   As a lot of people were myself included, we're hoping for that Vega horse upgrade. Some of these cards are down a lot. 385 right now from Alasio, that's pretty low. He was like 460 yesterday. So some of those cards could bounce back and we'll talk more about the market today. But the bottom line is a lot of people sold some cards yesterday to get that hero player pick done and some of those cards might be bouncing back because I feel like content's not gonna be that insane as we head into today on Monday and even tomorrow on Tuesday. We'll talk more about that in the video but we also had a Umtiti SBC yesterday which a lot of your French center backs in the game like Kalulu, other Syria center backs like Kim and Jay dropped off in price. Guys, I'm gonna be completely honest. I'm not a huge fan of this SBC. I don't think he's gonna get very many upgrades. I don't think the card is that great. Now the good thing is you've got 11 days to decide. Same thing with the pie, right? I would rather work towards the pie and try to chip away at this than doing the Umtiti SBC because I feel like the pie has a lot better chance of upgrades, he's gonna look like a more usable card you'll be able to use him for longer than the Umtiti card who's already got so many other French center backs. Even Kalulu, right? Just go buy Kalulu for 87K. Yeah, it's not as cool, does an upgrade but I think you get a better card for the here and now and you don't have to wait for those upgrades like you will for an Umtiti card. So I'm not a huge fan of that but a lot of people are at 110K. You're seeing him affect other center backs on this game. Also, we had the mini release yesterday which was pretty uneventful besides a Fabian PSG card which is kind of crazy if you think about it. We've had so many PSG midfielders in the past couple of weeks. Fabian right now is about 360, 370K in the market, medium, medium work rates, decent card, upgrades for PSG. So a pretty big club being represented here. Representated, represented, what English TFA? Fabian representing PSG. So just again, think about all the PSG midfielders. Vettinia, Virati, we've had the Carlos Soler from the Showdown series and now we have this Fabian. A lot of PSG midfielders and I think that's gonna hurt his price a little bit but that is a live PSG card right there. So that was all the content yesterday how the market reacted accordingly. We'll talk about the market a bit more but let's speak about these foot fantasy cards and specifically investing in them because this is a question that a lot of people have been asking me about. I know a lot of you guys wanna know and it's something that I'm interested in too because last year we made millions off of the foot fantasy promo but this year it's just in a different time and the upgrades are not coming anytime soon and there's something going on with these upgrades that I wanna talk with you guys about because it even makes me like these cards a little bit less. But first let's talk about the pros. Why would these cards rise up out of packs? There are some nice cards in here and of course they are live and they have the potential to get a plus four, right? With all the upgrades taken into account all the ways they can upgrade it's a plus four potential for all of these cards and the thing that I like about it too is it's not just solely relying on a player's performance or a team's performance, it's a mixture of both. So if the player's not playing too great right at the beginning of the upgrade period, the team can still be doing good and then he can turn on and boom, then you've got multiple upgrades on a card as the player and the club both perform. That's the hope for a lot of these cards. So those are some positives, right? But some of the negatives are the timeline. We still have to wait such a long time, March 17th for when these guys are even able to get upgrades that's still over a week and a half. Basically it's 11 days from now is when we have the first games where these guys will potentially get their upgrades and the worst part about it is, let's take a look at Saliba for example, right? 1.2 million coins for the Saliba card right now. Yes, if Arsenal can satisfy all the upgrade criteria he's gonna be 93 rated and he's gonna be absolutely insane. Now the way they're gonna upgrade these cards in game it shows as plus one. This is not like they did with and are doing with the road to the finals. Remember the road to the finals like Felipe Anderson, Raspidore got plus twos it was a plus one inform upgrade. This looks to be like it's a plus one strictly. None of the cards that are low rated are gonna get a double boost cause they're lower rated. It's a straight up plus one and it might just be a plus one around every single stat on the card. So that's a little bit, I guess, not as fun or as hype for some of these upgrades. So that's one of the negatives I don't like. But then speaking of Arsenal's games again look at the schedules that you have and it's not just you look at a road to the final card and you're like, okay, yeah, these guys have potential to upgrade because their team could progress in the tournament, right? With these road to the final cards, it's pretty easy. Okay, you focus on the team and the wins and who they're playing and their matchups and stuff like that. But for these foot fantasy cards you've got individual performance that is put in there as well and when these games are being played. Look at Arsenal's schedule on the 17th, right? That's the magic day. How many games do they have around the 17th? Well, March 19th, okay, that's after the upgrade kind of window opens. They got one game against Crystal Palace but then look at their next game, April 1st. We have an international break period that is coming up after this next weekend which is when the first set of games will be played for these foot fantasy upgrades which basically from the 19th, the 17th, 17th of March all the way until the end of March there are going to be only that first weekend of games that could count for upgrades and then the leagues stop as they go on international break. That is a big downside for a lot of these cards especially as you think about foot birthdays going to be coming out, more cards are going to be dropping into the game, road to the final upgrades are going to be pushed live, a lot of other things are going to be going up. The power curve, new cards, road to the finals are going to be getting upgraded even as soon as this Friday and these cards are just going to be sitting stagnant out of packs, waiting for the potential to upgrade. So that makes me like these cards a lot less than I did especially and I'm going to mention it a lot of times with foot birthday and pending. Foot birthday is such a big problem I think there's going to be panic selling for it. That is a staple promo that people on FIFA look forward to every year. So personally, I think there are some cards from this team that will rise like Esauk is very interesting to me. He could, you know, get some goals. Newcastle haven't been in the greatest form but I mean still a week and a half away from these guys playing again who knows what could change, right? I think Scrinniar is one that a lot of people are investing in but I like that investment. Tremel I think for Union Berlin and where they're at right now in the Bundesliga is good. Sanchez, Alexis Sanchez, Marse they've been playing incredibly well and I think he himself was playing incredibly well. Potential upgrades there are looking very good. Saliba of course, but he's very expensive. Llorente, very expensive. So I just don't love investing in this team. Personally, I'm going to keep my coins liquid because trading on the rest of the market on this game with out of pack special cards with road to the finals has been so great especially since just getting back on the game this weekend for me. I'm going to stick to doing those sort of trades and flips and not trying to put my coins into a gamble with these fantasy cards. That's just how I'm feeling with them. Now with the heroes it's a little bit of a different story because the hero cards, I don't know if we're getting a team too. I mean, you look at the hero cards that we have, we just have a small list of just a few players but like are EA going to give more cards out as a part of team two? I don't know if they're going to do that or if they're just going to stop with this team one. If they're just going to stop with this team one then I like investing in these hero cards because heroes and special versions and upgraded versions of heroes, you think about the world cup cards, they have done really, really well out of packs. And if you also think about icons, right? World cup icons and team of your icons and think about team of your icons, they all exploded after team of the year. Limited time upgrades to these types of cards whether it's heroes or icons, do very, very well out of packs. I went back and looked through a lot of the world cup heroes and they rose the week after they were out of packs, literally all of them. So I think there's a lot more potential with these cards here than there is with the actual regular fantasy cards just because these are heroes, right? So, Ledley King was 430K earlier yesterday on Sunday. He's now 480,000 coins. Cordoba is constantly fluctuating between like 1.25 and 1.35. Right now he is 1.33 so he's up a little bit, right? Harry Kuhl I bought yesterday at 900, sold them all for like 960, sold the one at 930 to get out of it but 960 to 980 is where I sold a lot of these at. Right now I think he's like 950 or something like that. He's been in the low 900s. So I think these cards will be something to watch throughout the rest of this week but I would just be very careful investing in too many of them or investing in too many of the regular foot fantasy cards because we also don't have a ton of the big teams that have been represented. There's that word again, right? Represented by fantasy foot cards, right? We're missing Manchester United. We are missing Manchester City. We are missing a lot of top clubs from like Real Madrid. We are missing Barcelona. We're missing Bayern Munich. We're missing a lot of the major clubs from these different leagues. Hopefully team two brings us some better cards and if team two does bring us a lot of better fantasy foot cards that could also make the investment in team one a little bit less desirable. So I'm gonna steer clear of these cards just because I think it takes so long for them to get upgraded. We've got so much to happen between now and then and I just don't love the players that are getting released in this promo. So hopefully we see a better team too and we'll still trade with them, right? Like the heroes like I talked about, I'm looking at this Cordova. I'm looking at all of these cards. Esauk, I would love to try out. I think these cards could have some price movements. I just don't know if there's gonna be enough for me to wanna go all in on them like the road to the final. So a lot of words to get that point across right there but I would look to buy if you do wanna watch these cards. The heroes, you gotta watch them pretty soon because if this rest of the week is a slow content week, the low point for these cards might be even today. Sometimes we've seen it Mondays have been the low point for some promo cards in packs just because the rest of the week's content is not that good but we do have a team too upcoming with these cards and of course we do have probably some more leaks as well starting to come up later on this week. So I would believe that I would wait to buy these in my opinion, EA might have another party bag or sort of SBC like that up their sleeve as well. So maybe just put the pause button on investing in these right now especially with road to the finals bringing in the hype Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday of this week and then look towards like Thursday or maybe even the weekend if team two looks really good for an investing time on these cards. Now let's reign it back in. Let's talk about Monday content today because stock the club with the gold rares stock the club with the gold non-rares. They're basically all discard right now as they should be because there's really not any upgrade packs out at the moment. You can get these on bid for 350, 400 for the non-rares the rares that you can get at 650, 700 as well pretty cheap right stock that club because again like I said you know with an SBC like this 87 plus with player SBCs that are out maybe you're working on Play of the Month Ben Yetter maybe you're working on DePie I think it will be a good opportunity maybe Algebra as well. Today's upgrade packs give a great opportunity to try to open upgrade packs to just pack a lot of different cards like we talked about right these hero cards since they have a pack percentage remember like the world cup icons remember the team of the year icons right I packed team of the year icon Piro out of an upgrade pack because these cards since they have a pack percentage here in the store and since they are technically promo cards even though they are heroes they will be packable from whatever player picks or whatever upgrade packs we have today on Monday so I don't know if it's gonna be like an 80 plus player pick 81 plus double 81 times three right we have all of those in the code it could be any sort of different upgrade packs or player picks today that we get but I would assume that an unlimited repeatable one is gonna come out today so stock the club stock with the non-rares and the rares you've got man of the matches you have a team of the week with Messian you've got the heroes and the regular foot fantasy cards so a really good week this week to be opening up upgrade packs I don't know what else we're gonna get though today maybe some other sort of like gamble pack it's a small one maybe you know like an 82 times 10 or 83 times 10 it'll be kind of cool maybe it's gonna be a smaller one like an 83 double something along those lines I could see dropping today as well there's no other leaks for another player SPC right we've had to titty the pie and algebra so I don't know if we're gonna get another player SPC today but watch out for some other sort of upgrade packs dropping today on the game as we often see on Mondays now also let's talk market right because yesterday we saw some prices dropping like Nate you've obviously invested some coins I have right I feel pretty confident and how I feel the market is going to react to kind of the next day or so on this game it's been a common trend where Mondays we see a rise on prices on the market and that's been common just because people get their week in the grow wars they go out they buy cards they put together teams and they go start playing their division rivals games to get rewards they play their champs qualifier games now today it's different right because we have that week in league extension but we've had this happen before in the past and the market on a weekend league extension weeks where we still have weakening going on a Monday the market's still gone up on Mondays I think people still are used to getting their games done in kind of the same time frame so they just still go out and get their games done within the normal time they get their games and then of course since you can get your rewards at any time you can finish off your games and then get those rewards instantly so even though the schedule is different this week I am pretty confident that we'll see a bit of a rise on the market today which is why you've seen me pretty invested I feel like the market could rise today if all we gets a couple of upgrade packs and nothing too crazy I feel like it's gonna be a pretty good day for the market and prices will rise even if they don't rise too much in the morning I feel like they're gonna continue to rise later on after content today unless something crazy happens so I feel pretty good about the market today I think it'll be a great opportunity to be making coins, to be trading and if I see Milasi hit 370 I will buy another one or I will buy some more because that's really really low it's literally down like 80K from where he was I know he's very overpriced but it's Milasi, it's Manchester United Lynx and people still have leghorsed even though he's not getting upgraded that's still a card that a lot of people want to use so I see a lot of opportunity on the market some of the hero cards we were watching yesterday of course this quarter buzz out of packs I bought a couple of him at like 239 and 240 he's 246 right now he's out of packs because his foot fantasy version is in packs and he was panic sold yesterday with the center back Titty dropped and with the hero player pick being dropped and then I also was very interested in Al Oweirin I didn't buy one but he was like 815K some of the World Cup heroes and regular heroes that you saw drop in price yesterday like Dina Talle, Marquisio some of these guys I think will bounce back up very nicely I think Dina Talle was like 220 he's back up to like 238, 240 so a nice bounce back already starting to happen on the market I think that's going to continue today on a lot of cards not everywhere but on a lot of cards today I would expect the market to continue to do pretty well look at the team of the week as well the current team of the week that we have in this game is not like a crazy one I know we have Messi in here right Messi 697 probably going to rise up a little bit but some of these guys are decently priced for fodder in forums especially if you have more demand later on in the week and then you got I kind of like Phil Foden right Manchester City the cheapest Phil Foden special car with a dynamic image that we have all of his other cards are over 100K and 300K for his big boy card from the World Cup so this card at like 20K, 23K I bought a couple of them put on my trains for this I feel like that's a no-brainer, easy investment Zambal and Guisa good links there you've got a man of the match Truckee Lozano that's out right now with the links so I feel like this team of the week could be a slight investment opportunity as well just because I don't feel like a ton of people are opening tradable packs and doing the lightning rounds at the moment on this game now also with the market we have to watch with road to the finals because I expect these cards to also continue rising up as they have, right? Atal is now two nineties probably gonna be close to 300K very soon Phillips 660 he's rising, right? Raspberry still a little bit low I think that's from the pack yesterday Fofana is down a little bit because of Umtiti in the pack yesterday Nuno Menj is rising Malin is rising and a lot of these road to the finals are just doing more of that because we get closer and closer to these games and more upgrades and a lot of exciting times to be had probably this next week again, we're gonna talk about it more throughout this week but look to sell in the hype that is always a safe play that is always a smart play and if you really wanna gamble on it I would just wait to gamble until you actually see goals scored in the game like I'm gonna be closely watching Lucas more cause I hope my Tottenham Hossper can get a dub, right? And of course advance to the next round but I'm not gonna buy this most likely unless I see a massive undercut until a goal is actually scored in that game upcoming on Tuesday or Wednesday or Thursday for whatever player, whatever team you are watching out for so that's kind of where the market is right now road to the finals and a lot of stuff staying the same price or rising a lot of the rest of the market down a little bit but potentially rising up a bit more today into tomorrow unless EA have some other crazy ideas with the content, right? So again, just a little update here's the QL cards that I bought yesterday I got one out just to sell it and the other three I made pretty good profit on I bought some Debalas last night too at about 42 to 45K sold a lot of those for 50K, 51K and then yeah, this is the rest of the transfers right now at the moment just some random specials I got some crouch at like 266 I tried them out yesterday and it's the start of my week and then qualifiers fun card with the five star skills definitely gotta use them on an architect for the lengthy, fun card but that's about it, very, very kind of jammy but pretty clunky so I'm excited to try out some more cards this week and hopefully maybe EA have a little bit of an Easter egg surprise for us somewhere as a part of content today and some good upgrade packs so if you enjoyed today's video smash thumbs up on a comment level if you have any questions and subscribe if you're new it's been Nathan with Account and I'll see you guys on the stream today peace out.


Avatar, 2009. James Cameron's blockbuster sci-fi film has been called overrated by some Reddit users who find the story derivative and the character as one-dimensional. They argue that the film's reputation as a groundbreaking technological advancement is unwarranted and that it fails to live up to the standards of other sci-fi films. The Green Mile, 1999. Frank Darabont's supernatural drama has been called overrated by some Reddit users who find the story sentimental and the character's overly stereotypical. They argue that the film's reputation as a powerful emotional experience is undeserved and that it fails to live up to the standards of other prison dramas. Goodfellas, 1990. Martin Scorsese's crime epic has been called overrated by some Reddit users who find the story overly violent and the character is unlikable. They argue that the film's reputation as a cinematic masterpiece is undeserved and that it fails to live up to the standards of other gangster films.


COVID-19, what can English teachers abroad do? What we can't see can't hurt us, really? Not many businesses will do well out of this current COVID-19 pandemic, gripping the planet with fear at the moment, as we stand waiting like a deer in the headlights for something we can't see to hit us. I don't know what COVID-19 means, however I was looking for a positive way to think about it, and I came up with communication of virtual instruction design, for those unfamiliar with the terminology of instruction design, it's what we do as teachers. The technical terminology is, a systematic approach to education that prompts educators to familiarize themselves with the learners in their classroom on a personal level, in order to more comprehensively understand how they learn. Once educators have gathered the intel about their students, this information is critical to designing personalized lesson plans. Great for one-on-one. The COVID action plan. The obvious concerns are, will we have jobs? If so how will it look, and can we still make a difference to the people we are teaching? I don't claim to have all or even some of the answers here, just a couple of thoughts running around in my head, that I thought have put down for others to think about, we could come up with a collective COVID action plan. As the newly formed acronym suggests communication over virtual instruction design, the communication could be across the net. We can almost replace the word could in that last sentence with would. The new way of teaching at least in the short term will need to be across the net, so can we adapt, should we adapt to our teaching would need to be across the net, in the increasingly more than likely scenario of one-on-one learning? To create a team or discussion group around these very questions, we'll see all of us do more than just survive, we'll thrive. 1. Will we have jobs? My initial thoughts are yes. I know a Canadian teacher that has been teaching online for more than four years now, to classrooms of 20 to 30 young learners in China. Logic says that if 30 students are not allowed to go to school and sit together for a while, then they will still need to get their English lessons in. So one teacher was teaching 30 students, now there are 29 more students looking for an English teacher. On the plus side if you lack experience in teaching, this is our time to shine. This is our time to get that experience. Every cloud has a silver lining, that's our first silver lining right there. So how do we set ourselves up to be a virtual English teacher? We will of course have to get online and create a presence. A website presence, a social media presence, any videos you can YouTube of ourselves teaching. It's not going to happen overnight, however we will be taking the first steps in a virtual world of education. At the same time that you are learning a new skill in website designing, through to how to get things up on social media so you'll be taken seriously, look for work that's online only. I have found a webpage that deals with many positions around the world for online teaching. I haven't verified any of the education companies myself, however the guy that puts this website together claims to have checked most of them, either through his own experience or from the experience of others. Email me for the website URL, I won't list the website here in case the website disappears one day. My email address you will find in my profile here. 2. How will the classroom look, and can we still make a difference to others? This is the part that interests me the most. Both from what I have thought about, to what can we create here as a collective? The obvious questions like, how will I get around the classroom? Will the students be able to see me? How do I see each of the students individually? How do I control a classroom if I am not physically there, and things get out of hand? To the more complex questions like, what do I teach for 1 hour 1 on 1? Has this already been done before? What time zones would I have to teach in? How do I know if I will get paid? As I said I don't have the answers, the objection of this blog is to create discussion and perhaps lend a hand to others. Is it easy, is there a path traveled by many already, is there already a COVID action plan I am not aware of in another form? I believe we can make a difference to those that we teach just as effectively online, as in person with some adaptation. Who knows maybe this is the future of schooling, and we have just been forced to give it a try with this new threat to our way of life. Let me know your thoughts. Thanks so much for watching. We are ITTT, the leading provider for TEFL and TESOL training courses. If you liked this video, please subscribe by clicking that button down here and click on any of the videos here on the left for more interesting teaching tips for getting certified to teach English abroad and online.