Welcome to Monet Café. I'm artist Susan Jenkins and oh am I happy to bring you this video where I'll be creating six different paintings on six different surfaces. This is a beginner-friendly tutorial with lots of information for budding pastel artists. It's also budget-friendly as I'll be using these very affordable Rembrandt pastels. These are the microsets. I'm gonna share lots more about those. These are just some little scrap pieces of paper I save after I finish a painting. The top row are very affordable unsanded pastel surfaces and I'll also demonstrate on sanded professional pastel papers as well. So not only in this video are you gonna get some education on different surfaces. I also hope to prove that you can get started with pastels with relatively inexpensive products. And as a bonus you'll get six different little pastel painting tutorials. So I'm excited you've joined me for the pastel painting fun and learning. Also go ahead if you don't mind and click the like, subscribe, and the bell icon to get notified of future videos. Those simple things really do help the success of this video on YouTube and help ensure others get to see it as well. Also if you'd like to become a patron of mine you can do so on my Patreon page for only $5 a month. It helps support this channel and my patrons get extra content. So don't throw away those little scrap pieces of paper from previous paintings. Even this teeny little piece of Canson paper can be used. Now the top three are unsanded. This is Strathmore Grey Tones drawing paper and the black sheet is just black drawing paper. I'm going to talk about each one of these surfaces more as I create the paintings. The bottom ones here are more of the professional sanded papers. This is pastel matte. The white it does come in other colors.  It's very similar to UART paper. Fisher 400 that I did a little example on on one of my videos and I saved it because I knew I could paint over it. This last one is a piece of Sennelier pastel card. It's La Carte pastel card and it's a really nice surface. And as I create each painting I'll talk a little bit more about the qualities of each particular surface. And as I said I use these Rembrandt micro sets. They're very conveniently organized according to value and color. So I'll be talking about those as well. And here we go with painting number one. I decided to paint Fields of Flowers and I got my reference images from unsplash.com. I will have the links to these images in the description of this video. Now the first little teeny square of paper I'm using is Canson Métonce. It's called and it's an unsanded pastel paper and a lot of pastel artists love the sanded papers but you really can get decent results on unsanded papers as well and they are very affordable. Now you saw I just grabbed my little blue set of the micro sets of the Rembrandt. And basically all I'm doing here is getting in a little tree line shape and you can tell in the reference image if it's really dark. Most of the time trees are going to be one of your darker elements in a painting because they're they're vertical. The sun is not shining down on them like a flat field of grass. Usually things that are flat are a little lighter in value. So I just got in and look how it's even kind of scribbly at this point. So I'm just kind of working in my general shapes. I'm still just using the blue set. I've used three values of blues so far and this is a little bit of a lavender color that's kind of in that blue set as well. And the great thing about these little micro sets is you could totally do a monochromatic painting which means all the same color just different values. You could just use this blue set to create all the values in this painting and it's a really good exercise in learning about color. Now I have gone on to the teal set. You saw me hold it up just a second ago and I thought that teal I was using on the trees was a little bit too green looking or a little too teal green looking. So I just grabbed another one of the darker colors in that set and I'm just sort of developing the tree line a little more. And the great thing about painting small is that you really I have more fun anyway. I don't take it as serious and I just kind of let loose and enjoy the moment. And also too I feel you can see things shapes and spaces better sometimes when they're smaller. All right here's what I'm showing you here. I'm zooming in closely to show you and it didn't focus great. Sometimes Rembrandt's have a little almost film on them prior to using them. Not always but every so often you come up with a stick that has that. So what I'll typically do if I find that is I'll go over to a sanded surface and I'll just kind of rub it off on the area that I need to use to paint with. And once again it's not on every stick but just every so often. Now I'm just as you can see getting in some of my greens because they're arranged according to value these little microsets are perfect for the concept of how things are darker in the foreground and get lighter in the background. Now you saw I early on put down a dark value for that front area of the grasses and what I do typically is lay down a dark area that's almost like a path or trail leading back into the painting and then I gradually layer over that. I felt like it needed to be a little darker at this point. But pastel painting is really all about the layering. I have people ask me all the time why is it considered painting and not drawing? Well drawing is not as much of a layering type of technique and it's more about individual lines and things but painting is more about layering and getting down big areas of color versus linear. Not that we don't use linear strokes sometimes with pastel but it's truly considered painting and this is now just some of those oranges. Now one thing I will say about the Rembrandt microsets at least the ones that I got they have all kinds of different color families. I got eight of the color families and the reds I think they were called even warm reds but they they weren't as punchy as some reds that I like so I do grab another red and I'll tell you what that is towards the end of this little painting. I'm just kind of dotting in some of these little cooler reds they're almost like a pinkish red and I making them to where they're flowers or they're just suggestions really are larger in the foreground and they're cascading into the background getting a little smaller and gathering them in little clumps or areas rather than having them all equally spaced. Now I do apologize that the filming got a little blurry there I think it's when I held up that Rembrandt pastel real close the camera didn't refocus now I'm adding a little lavender to the sky alright that's better now we can see what's going on here now on that now this let me just share here I did grab a Terry Ludwig dark now this will show you real quickly the influence of a good dark it really does add that pop to the painting this is a unison pastel unison has some really nice reds and Rembrandt pastels the microsets I've been using before these last two they're a harder pastel they are more affordable like I mentioned before and I have completed some paintings with just totally Rembrandt's but I find that sometimes if you just need that little punch of color you can really get more color with the softest softies which are typically the Sennelier pastels the unison pastels and the Terry Ludwig pastels now the Rembrandt's are really good for this technique right here I'm just rolling in some grasses and this little painting was lots of fun alright let's move on to the next surface now this is the Strathmore toned gray drawing paper now I'll show you right here how you can definitely do pastel paintings on this drawing paper this is a little portrait that I did of an adorable little girl and I used a combination of pastels I use some new pastels and some softer pastels so you can get a lot accomplished on unsanded surfaces so I really do like the Strathmore gray toned drawing paper this was just one of my simple little tutorials showing how you can paint with pastels using only six colors I believe I like to sketch with charcoal so here we go moving on to the next image once again a reference image from unsplash.com sorry for my studio lights and I like to get interpretive sometimes when I'm doing little paintings like this I don't necessarily have to follow the exact image you saw I held up a bunch of the different little sets that I'm contemplating using I probably will use that unison and that Terry Ludwig pastel again this painting also had some flowers in it they were a little bit more orange than they were red but they still had a little bit of a reds and some nice darks in them now this is the darker green that's in the green set and I noticed in this reference image it had darks on the bottom like where the roots of the flowers were I'm just using a little chamois I think is the the way it's spelled anyway and but this reference image had darks down towards the roots of the flowers and it also had a dark area behind like where the field was you could see the sky peeking through some of them like a tree line in the distance so that's why I had a little bit of dark at the bottom in the top now just gradually layering in some of these other greens it has some nice greens and that little green set and this is once again kind of the teal colors I find often that grasses get cooler when they get buried down in the shadows and you know I have I do have people who've commented a lot that you sure are chatty and I find I think I've figured it out when I speed the videos up like this and often I have to to get all the content in that I want to share with you I think I talk fast trying to catch up with my painting things I want to tell you so I really don't talk this lot of this fast or this much in real life I'm actually kind of quiet believe it or not but I find that's funny when people make those comments okay now I got in some layers of color and now I'm keeping this one a little bit abstract I'm using this chunky Terry Ludwig pastel by the way they're usually longer and rectangular and I break them in half sometimes I find they're more convenient for painting but I'm getting in some little flower shapes with the darks typically I like to put in the dark values first and then layer the lighter values for the flower colors on top now I thought that almost like rusty color dark would look great with some of these oranges from the Rembrandt set on top so I just you see how you can still kind of see the dark and it really gives some nice contrast to the flowers but again I'm keeping this abstract I'm not following the photo exactly I'm letting it inspire me and it's similar to the watercolor video I did not long ago called intuitive watercolor by the way thank you to everybody who liked that video that video got a lot of views in and even though I typically don't share watercolor I got a lot of great comments from you guys and I love watercolor painting so I'll still sprinkle some watercolor painting tutorials in and I might be doing a little bit more of those too by the way I will never stop painting pastels though don't worry I'll keep those videos coming all right so now you saw you some of the red that unison red and I got a little bit of the other reds there's the unison red again that one's kind of like up above the the horizon line sometimes you want a flower that's reaching up even higher so it's like I said it's very interpretive and suggestive I wanted to get some darker darks down in the roots to give a little bit more contrast you see how that gives more interest it was rather flat before when you give some value changes you really create some depth to your painting and now this is that concept of the tree line oh now I am using here this is another Terry Ludwig do you see how much darker this color is then the darkest dark I could find in the rim brand micro sets and that's because of the the difference with pastels when I say some of the soft pastels are harder and some are softer harder pastels like rim brands they have more binder in them they have less pigment in them think of it like pure color and a binder is something that holds it together it's not glued but it's something that holds it sticks it together and when you have a lot of binder and less pigment the pastel is harder and thus you also have less color and when you have a soft pastel like this unison here it has more pigment and less binder so they're pretty crumbly that's why they're super soft but they have more color and that's why they have that punch of color I can't tell you how happy I was when I finally figured that out I really had to figure out how pastels were made before I understood why certain pastels have more color I hope that made sense but I still do like some of the harder pastels they have their own intrinsic qualities that are unique to them as well I like this little teal I thought the teal would make a nice color with some of those oranges as well so looky there just gray drawing paper and you're able to have a little painting fun with your pastel paintings and one of the points of this video was not only to share the different surfaces but also just to help beginners know that you can get started with rather inexpensive supplies to play around and learn this medium before you invest a whole lot of money into sets that are expensive these micro sets are very inexpensive I do have some examples of them on my Amazon shop I like to do product reviews I'm starting to do product reviews it's it's another way I can educate some of my videos are actually going to start showing up on the Amazon products you'll be able to scroll down and see my review videos but I like to give you information and then you decide where you want to buy it on the Amazon site I think these micro sets were about $9 a set I think they varied depending on what color you got if you get the micro sets on Dick Blick.com I think they were more like $8 so always shop around and but it is nice that you can visit my Amazon shop the link is always in the description of my videos here and you can see my ideal lists I'll show you papers I like and other products that I like and you can kind of just real conveniently find a lot of the things that I recommend regardless of where you buy them all right now I'm sneaking in a little bit of that sky in the background adding a few more punches of color and this was a fun little painting for me I I really enjoyed it here's a little better view sometimes you can't see it quite as good of when I have my camera to the side like that but it was really colorful and really fun I just love many painting all right here we go to the next surface which is the black paper once again a reference image from unsplash.com I really liked that field of green and I wanted to do this the other one the previous painting was a long or a wide format what's called a landscape format this one's a tall portrait format but you know really really skinny and now I'm going to use some of these purples now working on black paper is a little bit backwards because we've already got our dark value right I mean even though you could actually get something a little darker than what this paper is but I've already got my dark so now I start working on kind of some of the the other values in the painting and I wanted to get in an idea of the sky the tree line and some of the shapes of the grasses kind of to give me a road map to get started now because I have five little paintings in this video I am speeding this one up a bit more but hopefully you can still follow some of the same principles and you can see here how I did a little lavender and a little blue to the sky once again the beautiful quality of layering with pastels you can use erasers that was a needed eraser spelt K in E A D E D it's almost looks like a little piece of clay but you can erase things I wanted to get more of that tree line now this is the Terry Ludwig dark it's the eggplant color and that's what I mentioned before that you can actually get something a little darker than the paper down I really liked these teal colors I was using for the grasses I kind of wish I had stayed with the teal color palette for the whole final painting but I decided to later add some of those warm greens as well but isn't that pretty you see it's already turning into something with just a little bit of value and some shapes it's amazing what our brains put together with very little information and here's where I'm adding some of the grassy greens it's a pretty easy principle of art that things are larger in the foreground usually and gradually get smaller in the background but they also flatten out I was just praising the Lord there I have praise and worship on music on almost every time I paint but grasses and things they are usually vertical in the foreground and then they graduate that gets shorter and shorter and then they finally turn into like almost like a blanket in the background they become a horizontal shape rather than individual blades of grass sticking up I couldn't quite I was kind of confused about where my path was here I originally had a little path going meandering through there but I redeveloped that as I work and that's always a good idea to have a little path there's sort of one in the reference image but there was kind of a dark area almost bisecting the image in the upper third there you see in the grassy field if you look at the reference image I didn't really like that horizontal line across the field there so I wanted it to meander a little bit more now I'm using that little rolling technique I wanted the grasses to feel like they were blowing this way in that way kind of like the reference image but once again this is just black drawing paper and it was a lot of fun I think the neat thing that I'd like to share in this video is you can learn a lot on these inexpensive surfaces before you commit to buying expensive pastel papers and then even when you are better at art these are great to practice on kind of like I'm doing here I like to have fun on these now let's move on to the sanded surfaces I'm going to talk more about the surfaces but right now I've got those purples and those oranges and that's because I had this really oh and some greens and that's because I had this really neat reference image that had oh my gosh the most gorgeous purple flowers I'd like to try to do this again as a more serious larger painting and I did use some of those blues combined with the purple it makes the flowers like vibrate with color now I'm choosing a color here and I decided with this one I'm doing a lot of different techniques on these two now this surface is pastel matte it's a water friendly surface I like using the white even though I like some of the colored papers as well the white allows me to do an under painting a color of my choice and so I decided with this I wanted to do under painting color I really like for landscape paintings kind of like a gold color so what I'm going to do is I'm going to use my brush I put down some orange and some yellow and you see how you can see both those colors with how they're layered and now I'm just using some water sometimes I use rubbing alcohol it does behave a little differently I have a video where I shared that actually that little paint or that little piece of paper with the blue on it it's a video I did about four videos back showing how water versus alcohol behaves when you add it but I just had water handy so I decided to use it now see how neat that is again this pastel matte surface I love it it's you can put all kinds of different water friendly mediums on it and you know obviously wait for it to dry before you add pastels now because this is an orange under painting I know it's going to be a perfect complement with some of these purple flowers complementary colors are opposite on the color wheel so the oranges and the purples really look great together oh and another thing about under paintings I can't tell you how many questions I get about under paintings but as you can see the Rembrandt pastels were great for creating an under painting you can create an under painting like I just did making one color and or you could create a little value study and you don't have to wet them as I did with the brush and the water in this case but when you do the advantage of it is it actually causes the pastel to liquefy pastels literally turn into paint when you wet them with either water or alcohol like drugstore alcohol but when you wet them they liquefy and they don't take up as much of the layer so you almost like you get an extra layer by going ahead and blending it with water it also creates a nice smooth finish before you begin your painting now I had someone recently make a request in one of my videos in the comments section so by the way comment you guys I will try to answer your questions in future videos but their comment was could you show us you talk about how you can make neutrals with with colors in soft pastels and they ask if I would actually do that in a video so basically what you do is you take two complementary colors like I showed you the purple and the orange yellow and you layer them and then you add white and it will lighten them you don't have to add the white it's just if you want to control it now I wanted to make a neutral color so I combined the green and the magenta as you see here and you see how it softened it it kind of neutralized that color it was too punchy before the green was too bright and the magenta was too bright so you see how that softened it I didn't add any white in that case but I wanted something in the distant field that gave the feeling of grasses maybe some layering of flowers far in the distance it's not going to show up that much but there you go there's your example of how to do that you want to just layer compliments on top of each other and then it's you know you can lightly blend them and it will neutralize the color so if you have a palette with a lot of punchy colors and we know color kind of diminishes it gets more subdued in the distance and you want to create that effect just put two compliments together and blend them a little bit and then you'll have you'll have neutralized those colors so I hope that helps so again you guys leave comments and as I say at the beginning of my videos now please like this video subscribe to my channel it's really helping Monet cafe to be shown on youtube to many other people who have no means for painting with soft pastel or other mediums they go worldwide and I can't tell you how many beautiful appreciative people I get now I'm obviously speeding this one up a lot because there's no way I could have this video of a manageable size if I had all of these in real time I may take one or two of these and over on my patreon page I might just give a real-time video for my patrons that's one of the perks for being a patron of mine is not only can you feel great about supporting the channel and helping these videos to keep coming with better equipment man it sure has helped me I tell you what thank you patrons but also you get extra goodies you get my color guides often and sometimes you get more real-time footage now you can see how teeny this is look at that but look at those blues and here you might be able to see what I often talk about is how colors kind of vibrate those purples with the blues on top almost make a new color it's very cool now let's start painting number five now I particularly liked this one I found this reference photo of a lovely field with some pink flowers this is the piece of Fisher 400 it's almost exactly like UART paper if you've heard of those two sanded papers but Fisher doesn't curl UART paper has a tendency to curl I'll talk more about the paper in a minute so this was a little piece that I had used for a demonstration in a previous painting of showing how different products when you apply them water alcohol and I believe Gamsol odorless mineral spirits so that's why you saw the three little swatches so I just put turquoise on top of it and decided to give it an alcohol wash now alcohol does behave a little differently than water that was the purpose of the previous video but both are fine to use if you want to like I said before it kind of liquefies the pastel that you lay down and makes a nice surface that doesn't have a lot of paper showing through now I apologize I didn't get all of the footage I somehow missed a little bit of the beginning footage of this one but this surface is so great it's quite sanded it feels like hardware store sandpaper but it's archival it'll never yellow and it's a professional sanded paper and I used mostly the rimbrant micro sets for this painting with the exception of those distant hills maybe a little bit of dark I might add to the foreground area and at the end I used some pink senelier pastels for the pink flowers but the the rest of it was all these rimbrants so you see you can really get a lot accomplished with some pastels that are rather inexpensive this is that chamois cloth again I like to use it for softening and blending but I typically only do it at initial stages I don't blend a lot when I start adding my final layers what it does is it it mutes the color a bit as you can see which that's intentional at this point all right there's that terry Ludwig egg plane again it looks a little dark right now but I blend it and as I layer pastels on top of it it keeps that impression of deep roots gives that general feel that the grasses are really deep in the foreground so all of these little things are just techniques that you can learn and I like to say that if you want to paint you can it's really just some rules you learn to follow them and you practice and my patrons I love the communication I have with them because I get to experience their comments of all their different phases of how they're learning and really everybody has to learn even if you're just one of those people who's naturally born with a gift especially like things like drawing there's still rules you have to learn but they're learnable now I added a little of that green on the tops of the trees you see how automatically that made it look like a you know trees and distance I love this turquoise for doing distant trees and then for the ones that are a lot further away I added a little lighter see that gave that impression there's trees even further away the reason for that is things cool off in the distance with color temperature and even if you don't see it in the photo you can push these rules and these things so that your painting is even more attractive and interesting with color so as grasses are in the distance like I mentioned before things become more horizontal and flat rather than vertical so gradually the grasses as you move to the foreground do start to become more vertical and this is an example of these rimbrants of how pastels will start to blend themselves I wanted a little light in that sky that was going to kind of be my focal point the eye coming through that little trail and up and around back to those distant trees and that pretty brightness in the sky but now I'm just using like a periwinkle blue and see how it's they're starting to blend themselves I don't need a chamois cloth to do that with so just reinforcing some things I really did kind of like the green and the orange color palette going on here I kind of almost wish I hadn't added the pink flowers but I just went ahead and went with it you know kind of according to the reference photo but as you can see most of these I've done have been rather interpretive once you learn some rules you find yourself a good reference photo that just kind of inspires you it doesn't have to be perfect but find the thing that drew you to that photo and let that become your focal point and it's really so nice to have that artistic license but the best thing I can recommend if you're starting out in pastels is to maybe get some affordable products like this you can see that the microsets are very affordable the papers that I used on the top row were all unsanded papers you can even use drawing paper but get yourself some affordable products and play that's another great thing about these mini paintings as you can just play and have fun don't expect a masterpiece too soon that's a sure recipe for I don't even like to say failure but for you quitting I almost quit pastels when I first got started I love to tell the story it's kind of the birth of Monet cafe is that was back before YouTube if they had it I didn't know about it it wasn't very accessible and I had to learn so much by myself and got very frustrated but I have a pretty determined spirit and I just wanted to learn I kind of needed it at that point in my life I needed it was like art therapy and so I always thought man I I would love to share all these things that I've learned so it's not so hard for others so there's my story and I'm sticking to it the Monet cafe story now those were those three Sennelier pastels so far all the other pinks I think were the Rembrandt's I think I might have added some of the Sennelier's and now I'm just rolling in some grasses like I did before but you see how that trail just pulls you in and it was bright and colorful and all of these were so fun now here's painting number six now I am going to speed this one up quite a bit man was I just just drawn to the the brilliant brightness of the sun in this one and this is on Sennelier La Carte pastel card it is a very sanded textural surface it's not water-friendly though but you could see a little ghost image before I started painting it is repurposeable you can really just get a stiff bristle brush if you're not happy with the painting I have a video on how to do this with multiple paper types and you can just brush off the pastel go outdoors don't let the pat don't breathe the pastels when you brush them off brush off the majority of the pastel and you've got your layering capability back so that's what I did with this little painting it was kind of one I wasn't happy with and look at that you don't have to be afraid when you start painting with pastels on even on expensive surfaces the sanded surfaces you really can reuse them the other two I use the pastel matte and the fissure you can wash them off like in the sink brush off the majority of the pastel with a brush like like I suggested with this one and then wash it off in the sink lay it flat to dry start over again it's very cool so this Sennelier paper I think it lends itself towards impressionism it has results at a very soft feeling I also like using this paper for animal portraits because fur is kind of soft you know so I love this surface as well I may take this one or like I said one of the other ones and maybe do a real time for my my patrons but I I have some that were obviously a lot slower than this one so I apologize I had to speed this one up I try to keep the videos under 40 minutes but man we're just those flower colors I got interpretive again with the color but the flowers we know in our brain if you look at the reference photo we know they're white but really in this lighting the sun is they're kind of backlit the sun's behind them so they have a little cooler temperature to them almost a bluish look so that's how I you know artistically reinterpreted them and it really made it kind of fun I I purposely made a color palette that was both cool and warm with those cool mountains or trees or whatever they are in the distance but I did want to add a little warmth so I added some of these greens so if you have learned a lot from this tutorial I would love it if you'd give me some feedback ask your questions like you always do if you recreate from any of these little paintings or any of my paintings on this channel I love it you guys have been doing what I've been asking you're following me on Instagram and you're sharing your work and tagging me I absolutely love to see what you do now if you're a patron of mine oh by the way you can tag me and follow me on Instagram at Susan Jenkins Artist and if you're a patron of mine I know I get to see what you do because we have a homework album I get to see what you submit when you submit your work to the homework album it gives you chances to win prizes and also I have a private Facebook group for my patrons I get to see what you're working on I get to chit chat with you guys and we have a lot of other little special things we do with my patrons so I hope you guys enjoyed that you learned a lot try some little paintings the theme this month is Loosen Up in the Monet Cafe Art Group and here on this channel so this was kind of going along with that theme and it was indeed a lot of fun so let your hair down get out some pastels and you can do it it's really not that hard just some rules like I said all right guys god bless and as always happy painting


Welcome to Getting Started with DocsTeach, Finding and Saving Activities. This is docsteach.org, the online tool for teaching with documents from the National Archives. The National Archives is an independent federal agency that preserves and protects the historically valuable records of the United States government and makes them available to the public. We have billions of records at the National Archives and among those records are incredible primary sources for teaching history and civics. So we created docsteach.org to make finding those primary sources and sharing those primary sources with your students a little easier. Today we're going to check out how to find and share activity tools for teaching with primary sources that you can share with your students. But before we dive into how to find activities, let's do a quick overview of what is an activity tool. So from the docsteach home page, I'm going to go to menu, activity tools, all tools, and this gives us an overview of these 12 different activity templates for teaching with primary sources. Each of these tools will help students develop historical thinking skills, practice primary source analysis, and the tools focus on different skills. We have tools for analyzing documents. We have tools for focusing on details, really spotlighting different parts of documents or focusing on different parts of images. We have tools for comparing and contrasting different documents. Tools for finding a sequence, mapping history, weighing the evidence, using primary sources to support two different historical interpretations. There are 12 different tools to choose from and clicking on one of these tools will give you an overview of the learning objectives, some recommendations if you want to create your own activity using this template, and how to teach with this tool. Let's go back to the docsteach home page and find out how we can find an activity tool and share it with our students. So on this page, well, first I should mention I'm currently logged into my docsteach account. Anyone can visit docsteach and find primary sources or search for activities created by the National Archives education team. However, if you create a free account, you will also be able to browse activities that have been created and published on docsteach by your fellow educators. You'll be able to save the activities that you find. You'll be able to view students' responses to activities online, and even create your own or modify existing activities. So since I'm logged into my account, you'll see some of those additional features today. So let's start by clicking discover activities you can teach with. I'm going to go ahead and on this page do a simple keyword search. You can start with a keyword search or you can dive in by browsing by historical era. Since we have the records of the U.S. government, we have records from the revolution and the new nation up through contemporary United States. You'll also find activities that are geared towards teaching civics and government or activities that kind of span historical eras. You can also narrow down your search in four ways. You can narrow down your search by historical era here. You can also narrow down your search by grade level. The thinking skill the activity promotes. Or if you're looking for one of those particular activity tools that we just saw an overview of, you can search specifically by tool. I'm going to start with a simple keyword search. In this case, let's do a search for civil rights. Okay, this search pulls up 104 results. As we start to look through these activities, you'll see ones created by the National Archives Education team. And as you go further through your search, you'll find activities created and published by other educators. This is where, as we can see, we have activities that span different historical eras. This can be where narrowing down your search by historical era can be helpful. For example, if we want to focus on civil rights in the post-World War II era, we can narrow it down to 1945 to the 1970s. It also might be helpful to narrow your search to the grade level you're currently teaching. Let's go ahead and do a search for middle school activities. We can now find 11 different results that come up. We'll go ahead and click on our first activity. Now while we did a search for a middle school activity, it's worth noting that if you're searching for elementary or middle school activity, activities can work for multiple grade levels. So it's worth searching a grade above or below your target audience. So for example, while this one is tagged middle school, when we look at the description, we find it can work for grades four through eight as well. This page that we're looking at is the teacher page. This is information for you, the person facilitating this activity. You'll find information about the historical era. It connects to the thinking skill. It correlates to the Bloom's taxonomy level. You'll find a brief description of the activity and some suggested teaching instructions for national archives activities. This will also include an estimated time that it will take to facilitate this activity. These suggested teaching instructions will also provide some guidance on how to facilitate this activity. In this case, this is recommended to present this one to the entire class. But with Docs Teach, there are a lot of different ways you can share these activities with your students. As we scroll down the page, you'll also find a list of the documents used in this activity to give you that overview. If you'd like to share this activity with your students, you'll want to click start activity. This takes us to the student page. This is the link you would share with your students. So you could share this to an entire class. You could share your screen and share it with your students that way and have a discussion around this particular image. Since this is the zoom crop activity, students will start by looking at a zoomed in portion of this image and they'll click switch view to see the whole image and put the story together. There are some discussion questions students can consider as they examine this particular image, as well as a when you're done question to wrap up this activity. So this could be done together as a class, but there are also ways you can assign students to complete activities online. So we'll dive into that in a moment. Let's say you like the look of this activity. You want to save it for later? Well, if we go back to our teacher page, there are some options for doing that. These three icons here give you some additional tools. So the star icon will allow you to bookmark this activity. And as we when we click start the activity, we'll see a drop down menu that says bookmark this activity in my activities and you can choose a classroom. A classroom is simply a group of activities that you've saved together. I'm going to go ahead and add this one to my default classroom in a moment. You'll also see the option for making a copy of this activity. If you want to modify the questions or change it up a little bit, you can make a copy and actually go in and change it or you can print the entire activity. But let's go ahead and add this to my default classroom. So when we go when we add an activity, it takes us to our my activities page. We can go to we can also access this page by clicking menu, my account, my activities. And here we see a collection of activities that I've put together. On this page, we'll see a couple of options. We can customize the names of our folders. We can move items around. We can remove them from folders. And we can also share activities with fellow educators or with our students from this page. So for example, if you have a group of activities that you'd like to share with students or with teachers, you can click on copy link to share. This creates two links. The first link is one you can share with teachers that will provide links to the teacher pages of the activities. Or you can share links with your students. This link will give will create a link where students can access the student pages of each of these activities. Well, let's go back to our search and take do another keyword search and talk a little bit more about how you can share activities with your students to complete online. So I'm going to go back to the home page. Let's do that civil rights search again. This time we're going to modify it by high school. So again, we can see activities of different types from different eras. Let's take a look at the impact of Bloody Sunday in Selma. In this activity, students will review a series of documents answering questions as they go along. So this is an example of an activity that pulls together multiple primary sources. Again, we're seeing that this activity works for grades seven through 12 and the approximate time needed is 45 minutes. But let's click on start activity. Again, this is the student URL. If you wanted your students to complete this activity online and review their responses, what you would do is you would start by sharing this URL with your students. Then students would go through these different primary sources, answering questions and putting responses as they go along. And when they're done, they click when you're done. There's usually a wrap up question for them to complete. And then they can submit their activity responses to you. Now I should mention students do not need a docs teach account to complete an activity. All they need to do is enter in their name, enter in your email address associated with your account, enter their response and click send response. You can then review your students completed activities. So no account required for the students. They just need your email address that you've linked to your docs teach account. And you'll be able to review the responses to this activity. Now to find your responses, you would go to menu, my account, my students responses, and you would be able to find their completed activities here. Now there are additional ways you can organize these responses, different ways you can assign student work. We'll go over those in more detail in a future session. But the basics are all you need to do is share that student URL with your students. They type in your email address associated with their account and submit their responses for you to review. And again, if we go back to menu, my account, my activities, you can even click on that copy link to share, copy the link to share with students, which takes us to a collection of activities, which when your students click on them, they will get access to the student pages where they could then complete the activity and submit their responses for you to review. Now if you're new to Docs Teach, another great place to get started looking for primary sources and activities is the popular topics pages. These can be found by clicking on menu, popular topics. And these are curated collections of primary sources and activities we put together on a variety of topics. Today we've seen how you could use Docs Teach to find activities for teaching different historical topics. Docs Teach is also great for teaching civics. For example, if we click on the Constitution, we'll find a list of primary sources for teaching some of the big ideas from the Constitution, as well as activities for hitting the civics topics like checks and balances in action, the First Amendment. Or if we click on the Constitution at work, we'll find a matching activity where students analyze primary sources from the National Archives and then connect them to the different article and section of the Constitution that they embody. So again, this first page is for you. The educator gives you some information on what this activity is all about, how to facilitate it. Sometimes there are some additional helpful links that are included in that description. And then to share it with your students, you would share the URL you find when you click start activity and then students would be able to complete this matching activity on their own and submit their completed activity to you to review. Well, now it's your turn. The best way to get started is to dive right in, create your free account, start searching for primary sources and activities. And you can always stay up to date on the latest on Docs Teach by following us on Twitter at DocsTeach and tuning in for future webinars.


Every few months there seems to be some sort of scare article or story about juices or other products Which ones are good? Which ones to avoid? How come they never tell you to avoid the products all together? Hey there njrude22.com here with a product vlog slash alert There was a recent article you can read it. The link is in the description To the article where I share the consumer reports findings about heavy metals and Arsenic and all these other bad things in some juices. They tested they tested each juice three times And it doesn't really say much but some juices had higher levels of this and that and like you shouldn't drink more than four Eight ounces a day and they're talking about kids juice boxes and stuff and I am of the belief that You should really kind of avoid fruit juices all together It's it's pretty much just non-carbonated soda a little more natural But the end result is a high sugar and it's not good in my opinion If you're gonna force yourself to eat fruit just eat fruit and drink water afterward And I think they repeat this this good news bad news good news bad news cycle Maybe to shift up the the divvying of money like oh this month. We're not gonna buy Nudson's Juice we're gonna buy Louza brand juice and then six months later. Oh, no Louza is no good now We have to go back to Nudson's they fixed the problem and they just get you buying different brands of juices every few months so and Never once do they say hey wait a minute Maybe you shouldn't be drinking these juices at all and I think the consumer reports article linked in the link Does talk about not drinking but they make such a like a drive-by comment about it They shouldn't say just don't drink this stuff. It's it's just I'm I Don't know I think that somehow by repeating these scare stories by saying good bad good bad You're always gonna think something is good when in our opinion. They're not and Honestly, we give our kids juice here when I'm in charge I water my juice down for my kids probably four to one Four or five to one like five ounces water one ounce juice because I have to keep them away from the pure stuff as Long as possible because they they really like it and if you ever see what happens to a kid when they eat Anything with carbs and it doesn't have to be a sweet car. It could be pasta You put pasta a vegetable and meat and something else on on a on a plate for a kid They'll devour the pasta parts first then the sweeter parts, you know The meat always goes last and I really like to give my kids meat and dairy But I don't know so read the article and let me know what you think it's it's I think it's a little bit of a shaman and Again, you shouldn't be drinking these juices in any sort of quantity Because four ounces leads to eight leads to 12 leads to 16 and they always want more and you're always buying more juice It's just sugar water Please just when you realize that you shouldn't be eating like even an adult shouldn't really have more than 50 grams of carbs Slash sugar per day like one eight ounce glass of juice can have you know half your daily carb slash sugar requirements for the day and It's just liquid sugar and I highly recommend staying away from it. So be aware of the arsenic. Have a good weekend


Welcome everyone to the webinar. Are you ready to delete some by email by Abhishek Gupta or what do you have a shake? Awesome. Awesome. Thanks so much. So before doing anything, let me pick things off and hello everyone. Thanks so much for tuning in this afternoon and welcome to this talk. My name is Abhishek Gupta. I am a developer advocate at AWS joining you today from New Delhi, India, where it has been raining quite heavily for the past few days actually. So I hope everything holds up well, at least for this session. So I realized this is a post-lun session. So I hope you have your tea, coffee, or your favorite beverage handy with you. But the good thing is that this session is relatively short. It's about 20 odd minutes. So hopefully I'll have your attention for that period of time. And I just have three slides, which this includes one of them. So let's see how this goes. So really, why am I talking about deleting YAML? So to be perfectly honest, I don't have anything against YAML as such. I have tolerated XML in the past. So I guess YAML is fine. But I'm a developer. I want to write code. I love writing code. And the last time I checked, YAML wasn't really a proper programming language. But if you think in terms of Kubernetes, YAML is the king. It's like this lingua franca of the Kubernetes world. And if you look at existing tooling like helm or customize, or even if you were to write manifests by hand, it's all YAML. So although the talk says delete some YAML, take it with a pinch of salt, it's actually more about circumventing it or putting it behind the scenes so that YAML isn't in your face all the time. So yeah, in the next probably 18 to 19 minutes or so, I will talk about this tool called CDK for Kubernetes or Cloud Development Kit for Kubernetes. I'm going to call it CDKs, just a short name there, so which is an open source project under the CNCF landscape, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. And then very, very simple terms, CDKs is nothing but a framework using which you can actually define and model your Kubernetes resources and application. So I'll give you like a whirlwind tour of sorts. Like I said, I'm a shot of how you can actually use CDKs with the Go programming language. So with that said, I'm going to switch over to my IDE now and we'll spend some time looking at some code and trying to make sense of things in whatever limited time which we have. All right, so with that said, let me switch over and give me a second. Yeah, all right, awesome. So I want to actually start by talking about how would you typically use something like CDKs? So as you can see here, this is actually a high level workflow but conceptually it's quite simple. So you bootstrap a project, a CDK project, write some code to define your Kubernetes application and then you can ask CDKs to convert that code into YAML. And once you have that YAML manifest, it is really up to you as to how you want to use it and apply it and so on and so forth. Now, in addition to being a framework, CDKs also provides a command line interface, a CLI. So what I'm going to kick off with is just demonstrate to you how to use that CLI to bootstrap a very, very simple CDKs application here. So go over here and make a command line. I hope it's big enough. So I'll make a new directory and just change over to that directory and then take things from there. Okay, so what I'm going to do is ask CDKs, say CDKs and initialize a Go app for me. So because CDKs actually supports multiple languages, Go is one of them. So that's why I've mentioned it explicitly. Now, I start out with an empty directory but I ask CDKs CLI to give me something to work with. And if you see here, CDKs came back with a simple, it's very simple, but it's very useful starting point from where on I can build stuff. Okay, so if I were to open this main.go file here and just to show you things, right? So what I want to clarify here is every CDKs application consists of this hierarchy or a tree of components and each of them is called a construct. Now, what you can do is combine basic constructs like development, I'm sorry, deployment, service or an ingress and so on and so forth and make it or combine it within a chart and a chart is yet another construct. So let me draw your attention to this function called new my chart. It actually returns something called CDKs.chart. And finally, what you can also do is put one or more of these charts inside an application or an app in short. So app is actually the root of the tree, so to speak. It's top of the hierarchy. So if I were to scroll down here and look at and show you the main functions, I've created a new app and I've made sure that I include this chart within the app itself. Okay, so as you can see, this chart, this app only has one chart and this chart is actually empty, doesn't have a lot of business logic here. So I'm going to add some code here, our favorite Nginx, the simple canonical hello world of Kubernetes. So that's what I'm going to just start off with, just to get you warmed up. And in the interest of time, I'll do some copy paste. I apologize in advance, but if I were to write out all the code, I don't think I'll be able to do anything in 20 minutes, so copy paste is going to be. So I'm going to fill up some code here and just make sure I want to correct some imports here just to make sure. Yeah, should be fine. All right, awesome. So even if you have deployed a simple Kubernetes application, say a deployment or a service, I think you will be familiar with what you see. So if you look at this code right here, so there are things like selectors and labels and containers and a deployment. So just like you would define an HTML manifest, nothing too fancy here, but the big difference is that now, this is everything here, what do you see on the screen? It's in the form of code. This just happens to be go code, but CDK supports Python, TypeScript, and Java as well. Now, while this actually looks pretty simple, and if you spend some time rocking it, and you might feel like there's enough, wow, this is awesome, but trust me, things are going to get pretty verbose when you start building some serious applications using these simple primitives. So what I'm going to do is stick to this nginx example, but show you how you can actually improve this. So for that, I'm going to hop over into a different project now, a different folder. I'm just going to open that up. And if I were to open this file here, and if you look at this function, just draw your attention to this function, and now this code, again, it might look similar to what I just showed you a second ago, but trust me, at the same time, it is different. The reason is because I'm using something called CDKATES plus API. So if I were to scroll up and take a look at this, so this is a different package. So I'm using the CDKATES plus API, which is much more natural and intuitive. So what I do is I define a deployment, I add a container to that deployment, and then I expose that deployment via a service which happens to be a type load balancer. So if you notice, you don't really need to include a lot of boiler plate code here, things like selectors, label, and so on and so forth. So this is all go code, quite natural and intuitive, at least to me. Now, what I'm going to do is convert this code into manifest, a YAML file. So I'll go ahead and switch back to that CDKATES CLI I was talking about. And in order to convert my CDKATES code into YAML, all I need to do is call CDKATES and use this command called sub command called SYNTH or synthesize. And if I hit the enter button, it's going to leave its magic and give us and spit out a YAML file, essentially. So this has generated a YAML file in this disk folder. And if I were to walk you through it, again, nothing fancy.   Now, once, like I said earlier, once you have this manifest, it's really up to you. You can, you know, the natural thing is to use kubectl, kubectl apply and then, you know, sort of deploy this to your Kubernetes cluster, but integrating this into your, you know, sort of existing GitOps workflow is something very obvious as well. Now, it's a very interesting topic, but to be honest, I don't have, you know, time to cover that in detail. So I'm going to move on. And any Kubernetes demo is like incomplete without, you know, a hello world engineering thing, right? So let's deploy this thing and see how things go. So what I'm going to do is I'm using, excuse me, I'm using a local Kubernetes cluster here. You can see I have a client cluster already set up and ready for you. So what I'm going to do is apply this, the contents of this disk folder and quickly check how things are going.  So let's see, I'm going to do a kubectl get pod here and see if it's ready. So yeah, the pod is up and running now, so we can try that out.  I'm going to just use, you know, simple port forwarding in this case, right? 1990 to 1990. I'm going to go over to my browser and just go to this page right here, okay? So hello world nginx, but it's good to get something up and running, right? So, and just to make sure, right? If I were to close this, I don't have anything fancy up and running in the background. So if I were to go back and access this, it's not running. So it's actually the thing which I'm running right now, just for you to trust me. All right, so very simple nginx example, but now let me move on to something a slightly more, you know, involved, right? Basic plus plus, so to speak. Now I'm going to show you a WordPress stack that has MySQL database along with the WordPress app itself. So for that, I'll have to switch into another project or another folder here. So let me do that real quick. All right. Okay, so if I were to open this main.go file and scroll up, now I actually, we have two charts here, right? One is for MySQL, which is this chart. And the other one, if I were to scroll down a little bit, and this is for the WordPress chart. Okay. Now as you can, you might note that there's a lot going on here, right? We are defining lots of Kubernetes resources, which includes a secret, you know, a deployment, which is of course expected, and we're adding a container to that deployment. We have environment variables, and we have persistent volume claims and persistent volumes, right? Things, you know, sort of slightly more, you know, beyond the basic Kubernetes, you know, constructs here, and the same goes for the WordPress chart, to be honest, right? Now, this is great. You think, okay, this is amazing, right? I'm able to deploy a, you know, stateful application here, but trust me, you do not want to write these things over and over again, say by multiple teams in an org or in a company. What you ideally want to do is sort of have this as a reusable artifact, and for that, you can use something called custom constructs within CDKs. So let me show that to you as well for that as always. I'm going to move into yet another project, right? And open this main.go file. Now, just imagine, right? Just imagine someone wants to stand up a WordPress cluster. What they can do is simply go in, and the developer can use this custom construct as an API. Just like you were using those deployments and services, right? To CDK its APIs out of the box, you can now use this WordPress custom construct. Now, what is that custom construct? Now, if you notice this new WordPress stack, it's a function. What it actually does is if I go inside it, it actually behind the scenes, it creates something called a construct. Notice that this is not a chart. This is a construct. And within this, the logic of this function is actually the same code, pretty much the same code which you saw earlier. It has now encapsulated much more clearly. It has exposed some configuration, you know, methodologies and so on and so forth, right? So that a developer can easily and flexibly go and define their WordPress cluster, okay? So all right, cool. Then let's go ahead and, you know, what are we waiting for? Let's go ahead and deploy this WordPress cluster on Kubernetes. So the same old thing. You're probably getting bored, but I'll repeat the same thing. CDK its synth. It's going to give me a file, and I'm going to go ahead and, you know, what first I'll keep a watch on the pods here, and then go to a new window and apply the contents of that disk directory of the YAML file which was just created by CDKs, right? So if I were to go back here, if you see things have, you know, started happening, pods are getting created, but I think it's a good time to quickly look at this YAML file, right, which is actually sort of getting provisioned to Kubernetes now. So like you saw in the code, these are the same things. So it's a secret. There is a deployment pod for my MySQL pod for my MySQL sort of, you know, stateful component. There is a PVC, there is a service. Yeah, all the good stuff, right? And the same will apply for the WordPress application as well, deployments and so on and so forth, okay? So while this is happening, I see, all right, awesome. So we have, so the MySQL deployment as well as the WordPress deployment seem to be ready. We can also take a look at the persistent volume here. Yeah, so we have two persistent volumes, and I think we can take a look at the PVC. Yeah, and they are bound to the persistent volumes as well. All right, so far so good. I'm moving quickly in the interest of time, of course. And all right, yeah, let's try out this thing because our pods are ready. Everything, you know, our workplace application should be up and ready for us to access. I have five odd minutes. So all right, let me go back to my browser and access this WordPress on port 8080. So long way out. All right, cool. So local host, port 8080. Let's see what happens. All right, awesome. So what you see is a, you know, sort of brand new vanilla WordPress cluster. You know, this all this is formality.  That's fine. I'm just going to like fool around with this a little bit. And yeah, you can install WordPress, use it as you want. You can log in with that same password, which I just use. And yeah, just good old WordPress on Kubernetes using CDK, right? This is the WordPress admin dashboard. And if I were to remove this and just access 8080, you can sort of access the WordPress site as well.  You can delete the MySQL deployment to see how things go, how the fault already handled and all the good stuff. But I'm going to move on now. I have like five more minutes left, maybe less. So I'm going to look at a slightly, explore a slightly advanced case of how to use CDK ads along with custom resource definitions. Now, if you're not familiar or maybe just as a refresher, custom resources are actually part of the Kubernetes extension API. So just like you have pods and deployments and other native objects, you can define custom ones as well. And it's actually the custom resource definition API that makes it possible in Kubernetes, right? And although CRDs and their implementations are relatively advanced, but at the end of the day, if you want to deploy it, most likely you'll write some YAML code directly or indirectly, right? But with CDK, what you can do is, you can import existing CRDs or existing custom resource definitions and actually use them as API as code, okay? So let me show you an example of a project called Strimsy. I'm a huge fan of Strimsy. I've used it a lot. So it's actually Kubernetes operator that helps you manage and run Kafka on Kubernetes. So let me quickly go into that. Let me open yet another project here. Oops, not this. Type code CRD. And okay, so I actually have these CRDs already installed in my Kubernetes cluster, okay? So as you can see, there are a bunch of CRDs, but I'm going to be using the ones for creating a Kafka cluster and for the topic, right? So Kafka topics. I'll be using this CRD and this one, right? All right, so let's, I'm going to go ahead and import these CRDs using the CDK8s CLI. So the first one, the first CRD I'm going to import is the one which it uses with the Kafka clusters. Let's give it a second. And now the second one is, let me clear this up. And now I'm importing the CRD for handling Kafka topics, okay? All right, cool. Now that's done. I can actually look at the imports folder here. Okay, so if you see, I have two folders here. This is nothing but code, right? This is nothing but code. So I have CRDs available to me as API within my Go code. So I can actually go ahead and use that to define and write code to define a Kafka cluster. To define a Kafka cluster, right? So if I were to go ahead and open this file right here, and if you look at this function called new Kafka chart, what it does is, again, return a CDK8s.chart, but behind the scenes, it uses this function, another function called new Kafka, and it simply defines a cluster. So I have a version. I want to say how many Kafka brokers do I need? I want some broker-related configuration. I can define that. And similarly, I can define ukeeper as well, right? That's that. And, you know, if I were to go into the main.go file, and this is where it's all sort of tied together. Here, what I do is I define an app, and then I add that Kafka cluster of mine, that chart, into that app, and that's it, right? Now, if I were to try and create a Kafka cluster, the same old boring flow, which you have seen earlier, CDK8s synth, it's going to give me a file, a YAML file within my disk folder. It has generated it. If I were to open it and see, you would have typically written this by hand. And this looks quite short because I'm using an example. Otherwise, the configuration and the head-up is actually much more involved. It has services and so on and so forth. So, right, I mean, this is a Kafka sort of CRD and the same old things, the same thing that you saw in the code, right? Now, to apply this, I can simply go ahead and do kubectl apply, nothing too fancy or nothing surprising here. kubectl apply. And this has actually kick-started the creation of a bunch of resources, right? And to be honest, this is going to take some time, like three to five odd minutes, but I don't have that much time.  So, in the interest of time, I'm going to stop here and sort of hop back into my presentation. But before that, let me show you how things are going, right? So, yeah, things are actually running along. Like, pods are getting created, corresponding to the ZooKeeper, my ZooKeeper deployment, the Kafka deployment and all the good stuff, right? So, yeah, I'm not going to wait for this. I'm going to hop back into my presentation because we are at time, actually. I'm going to take just a couple of more minutes. If that's okay. And yeah, that's about it. I could only cover so much in about 20 odd minutes, but just to quickly recap things for you, right? What we covered is the basic CDK8s API and how to bootstrap a project and write a Kubernetes deployment. And then you saw how to use the CDK8s plus API, which provides a better experience in terms of a more natural and intuitive way of writing code. And we also explored how to abstract a way of WordPress as a custom component and then use that on demand to spin up a complete WordPress deployment on Kubernetes. And finally, some advanced stuff, right? Where we imported a custom resource definition as an API and wrote some go code and then kicked off a Kafka cluster on Kubernetes, right? So, lots of things covered in a short amount of time, but really what I'm hoping for you is to think about this concept of infrastructure is code as opposed to infrastructure as code, right? And what you just saw is a code first approach using the programming languages we are familiar with and what we use day in, day out, right? So, if you want to learn more, of course, there are lots of resources you can refer to. Just if I have been writing up a series of blog posts, I think it's about six posts. I've written about three to four. So, check that out. I'm pretty confident it will be helpful for you. But of course, you can read up more on the CDK8s documentation as well. There are lots of examples on GitHub. Of course, there's the API reference as well. So, you can check all that out. So, thanks again for joining and I really, really hope you found this useful and enjoy the rest of your conference. Yes. Hey, thanks Abhishek. It was a really wonderful session with 20 minutes. So, see you.


Live from New Orleans, Louisiana at theCUBE. Covering .NEXT Conference 2018, brought to you by Nutanix. Welcome back. We're here in New Orleans, Louisiana. I'm Stu Miniman with my co-host Keith Townsend and we're thrilled to welcome to the program two end users here at the show. We have Sharon Harris who's the CTO of Asuda Medical Centers out of Israel. Also have Paul Stallings who's the vice president of IT Infrastructure Services, Guidewell with Florida Blue. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for having us. All right, Paul, let's start with you. Just give us a little bit about your role and your organization. Sure, I work for Guidewell. We're a health solutions company. We started out as an insurance company primarily and now we move to a solutions. So we are on the provider side and the payer side. I run IT Infrastructure Services which is the shared services among five different companies under the Guidewell brand. Great, and Sharon? Asuda Medical Center is the last chain of private hospitals in Israel. We have four hospitals and four clinics spreading across the country from north to south. We're conducting about one million radiologist tests and examination per year and about 15% of the entire surgery is in Israel. Yeah, well, luckily both of you in your industries, but my usual joke is nothing's changing. You have huge budgets, limited staff, and no challenges. Before we get into the Nutanix solution, of course you're using it, tell us about some of the drivers for change in your business, your org, some of the challenges and opportunities you're facing. Yeah, sure. We are really in a growth mode in our organization. In the last six years, we've actually grown to these five companies. We went from a $8 billion company to a $16 billion company. We're in a huge trajectory and transformation is the key. And we have to have high availability. We have to be able to meet our customers' needs. We have to be able to scale and be agile and that's thrown at me every day. So, Sharon? Yeah, now we're in the healthcare industry. We have both ends. On one end, we have to maintain stability and the performance and redundancy because we're working 24, 7, 365 days a year. And on the other end, we must be innovative and innovation and make everything for end users and customers very available, very approachable because users don't want to come to our clinics and hospitals. They want to do everything for them. So, as much as we can, we're giving them the opportunity to do it. Yeah, digitization. So, Paul, that's amazing growth. $8 billion, $16 billion, to $16 billion, whether it's organic, inorganic, that's a major shift in capability. What have been some of the primary challenges from a technology perspective as you guys have gone through that major growth barrier? Yeah, I think the velocity is some of one of the biggest challenges for us, being able to grow. We really need a solutions that we could really want to modally grow, want pay to grow, want scale better. It's really hard when you have so much growth to do the legacy where you think about the next three years, I need this much capacity because it's unpredictable because the growth is so fast, that makes sense. Yeah, it's impossible to forecast. It's impossible, absolutely. I had a CIO that tells me, I said, the data costs are getting out of control. So, you know what, just as long as data is growing, it means that the business is growing. Absolutely. Our drives are definitely the thing that you want to buy. So, as you both deal with growth, stability, capability challenges, what appeals about the Nutanix story to you? I think one of the things that I just mentioned, that pay to grow opportunity is huge for us. The simplicity is huge, the availability, and really trying to get to automation. I really have to do more with less. We're growing so fast, I can't even onboard folks fast enough. So, I think that simplicity, the automation, and that pay to grow model is great for us. So, we're in the digital era. So, we need to supply our end users, once again, as I said before, digital application, and to be able to execute those needs very quickly. And we're looking towards the cloud. And you can't really have public, cloud readiness and services, unless you have private cloud readiness and services. So, Nutanix for me is the best solution for automation as Paul said, and to begin the process to achieve the connection between private and public cloud. An interesting point, could you expand on that? What do you mean by, what does private cloud mean to you? And most customers you hear, oh, we're doing some development, we're trying some new products in the public cloud, you flip that some. Yeah, I spoke yesterday in one of the session, and I asked the audience, how much time it takes to fire up a virtual machine from a template? And the answer was like between half an hour and one hour. So, one hour, that's cool. And how much time it takes for you to take this machine and join it to the CRM or the SharePoint on the Epic or the SAP farm? And the answer was about a week. So, where did seven days go? Why the gap is so huge between one hour and a week? And the answer is because of lack of automation. For me, public cloud is exactly like, sorry, private cloud is exactly like public cloud. The same services, the same ability to execute and generate services level, not server level, because server level are already there, like a few, 10 or 15 years ago, we are already there. Services level in the same ability that we have in the public cloud. Yeah, Paul would love to hear your comments on how cloud fits into your environment. Yeah, absolutely. Because we're in the health industry, private cloud is paramount, but we really need hybrid because we want to be able to burst and scale and have that agility. But to a lot of things, Farone said, I do need that, the automation, I do need the scalability, but I definitely need some commonality on my stacks. I have a shared services, I have to be able to scale, I have to be able to have best prices, I need to be able to compete and collaborate with the private and public sectors. So let's talk about some of the services that Nutanix offers. First, let's start in a private cloud. A lot of great announcements. One of the things that I've been asking from Nutanix since I heard about them is basically what they're delivering in AFS, a, I'm sorry, AFS, a file services solution. Are you guys using any of those file or type solutions within your environment? Not yet. We are not using the file solution by Nutanix, but we're using other services, such as the big data verification with Cloudera because we're actually built environment for our new research development company that we signed in, big data Cloudera, Doop and Impala and so on, and we did it very quickly and stability-wise and performance-wise and file services-wise because it's a big data, you know? It's a different kind of perception over there. Nutanix give us a very quickly deployment and the services that we needed for this project. Could you just expand on that? When you say it was a fast deployment, you know, days, what? Our CEO signed the contract with this company and said, okay, I want it to be ready like two weeks from now. And then I thought, okay, I can do it traditionally and it will probably take me a month or even more and I can do it with Nutanix. And Nutanix wasn't ready that in this time with Cloudera verification, but Nutanix promised me that they will support me 100%. I got a letter from the VPR R&D of Nutanix that they will support me and they will get the certification. Now, most of the vendors that they want to sell you something, they say, yeah, we'll get it, no worries and they delivered it. First of all, they give us full support in the duration of the implementation of the environment and they did get the certification a few months later. So performance-wise, we did the test. So I know that it works with Adoop and Cloudera. By the way, when there was performance issue, it was by Cloudera fine-tuned that we need to do. It wasn't Nutanix at all. Really, I really like this product, but they really delivered. So performance-wise, execution-wise, and stability. You met the deadline that your management wanted. I met the deadline now. The medical staff is behind schedule, but I did my part. They're researchers there. So Paul, is there any particular service that you use within the Nutanix private cloud that you want to talk about? Well, we're pretty new to Nutanix suite of services, but one thing that's unique about our organization is we're one of the first to not only do x86, but do power systems as well. So we wanted that one pane of glass, one cloud management system that we can actually do all of our workloads. So we really just, we started x86, but we just recently got our power infrastructure up and running, about 100 nodes, and that's working well as well. And we're happy to have both sides of the fence and really look at all of our workloads through that single pane of glass. Great. Can you tell me what workload are you running on that? And do you have any AIX that you might look to put on that now that that's going to be supported? Yeah, so we're really now starting to look at things with Kubernetes and really start putting our open enrollments applications on, because that's really our seasonality, right? It's kind of our busiest timeframe. We want to have the highest availability. We have to be able to scale and want to have zero downtime. So that one click, we love those kind of capabilities and that's really helping us with our new application for open enrollment. So let's talk about Nutanix's vision. You both are cloud-forward-thinking organizations. As you look at XI, as you look at integration of COM with the major cloud providers, what are your initial thoughts? I think XI is really interesting where I can have those recovery options. We really got to move infrastructure to resiliency and make sure resilient, but it's always nice to have that backup and be able to click over very quickly opposed to the traditional recovery model where you back it up and you have to restore it. We don't want to restore. We want to be able to bring that back up and have that high availability. So I'm really interested in the XI piece. Yeah, we got the budget for DR this year. And we needed to take into consideration the best DR module for Asuta. Now to be honest with you, if regulation would allow us, I wouldn't think twice. But this is a barrier that I need to check with my legal department. But technology-wise, XI is amazing solution. In terms of cloud, as I said before, I believe that there's no other option. There's no other option but to build your private and moving towards public cloud services. By the way, the main barrier for me is the human barrier because we need to train our personnel. We need to change the way they think. We need to combine between system guys and networking and security guys because now it's one box. So it's quite a challenge. Vontanix, make a difference. All right, it's the first time for both of you attending this show. Paul, start with you. If you can tell us what brought you to the show, what you're hoping to accomplish, what you've learned so far, and general experiences here. Yeah, so as Nutanix is really helping us build our private cloud, we definitely know that even though healthcare has a lot of regulatory requirements, we don't want to do full public, we know we're going to have to start moving more and more into the cloud space. So we know there's different cloud players out there but we want to have that mobility of our workloads and move them in and out and move them back to our environment and move them from cloud provider to cloud provider. And I've definitely started hearing about a lot of the services that Nutanix provides that enables those kind of solutions and I want to learn more about those. For me, Nutanix is bringing to the table new ideas, new perception, and the most important thing that they gave us, giving us things that we need. And you talked about Zai, you talked about Calm, there's been a new concept and they are always moving ahead and bringing the market to chase them. If I can say it this way, and for me the most important thing is to have everything as Paul said in one box and able to do it very simple by automation processes. So one question around people, you're growing at a cliff, like doubling the organization as you go out and look for staff to augment your existing staff to innovate, to change. How does Nutanix help or hinder in the hiring process, like onboarding new employees, you said onboarding is a challenge, onboarding and training, commentary around that. Yeah, so people are our most precious assets, right? And when you hire new, you want to get the best people you can get, right? So I think that we definitely try to identify folks that have the type of aptitude we need. We're not always able to find the folks that are skilled with all the solutions we need because cloud is so diverse and converges so diverse with the stacks. But we actually are doing a better job with finding the right talent or training the ones that we have up and to prepare and give the training to the new folks that are coming through the door. But onboarding is definitely an opportunity for us and I think we're going to be able to scale a little bit better with onboarding as we look at automation. Automation is going to be the key to getting folks onboarded faster. So Sharon, what about you? How has Nutanix helped with your, not necessarily onboarding because growth is not necessarily a change, but people change. Yeah, people change and the market is changed as well and people must understand that they should embrace the change. Even I change each and every day. I learn new things, I implement new things, I dare and I challenge my organization. I have to convince my finance and my CIO and my CEO that this technology, whether it's Nutanix or other technology, is the right technology for our organization. Now Nutanix is helping us in terms of innovation because of the fact that we're beginning to sign contracts with startups and we have to build them labs and combine them with our production environment but do it very smartly and sophisticated way. So Nutanix with the micro segmentation and other features that they're having is very helpful for us in this area as well. All right, last thing I wanted to ask, lessons learned. You're relatively new in the space but there's always things that you look back and say, what could I done better? What I wish I knew a little better. Paul, to start with you is to talk to your peers as to what would you recommend to them and what changes might they make? You know, I think we're so new into it. We don't have a lot of lessons learned yet because we're just really going into production with a lot of the systems that we have and especially on the AIX side and the power side but I do think that we are doing a debrief probably coming up in the next 30 days to really identify if there are opportunities that we probably do differently. Now I will say that I do want to look at the whole private cloud to public cloud opportunities and really understand what those challenges are because I think from an application perspective we don't always build applications that we plan to bring back. So I need to really partner with my development shops that when they build applications how do we make sure we can bring those workflows back and I want to understand some of those cost models. It's awesome. Yeah, I would say choosing the right use case and the prepare for the implementation plan as much as you can because those two things will make or break if you're a beginner. If you're already got some of the things you know what to do but if you're a beginner those things are very important and combine it with a good or very good integrator because once again if you want to succeed in this project because it's another project it's not that service that you install. If you go with this method then you didn't earn anything. So if you want to get the best out of Nutanix and Nutanix have to offer a lot of services as we discussed you should do it. Sharon and Paul, thank you so much for sharing your stories for Keith Townsend and Stu Miniman. We always love to talk to all the users here and glad to be able to bring them to you. Thanks so much for watching theCUBE.