together, we work together and we prosper together. I would like to welcome our international students joining us from around the globe for our Education USA interactive series and a special welcome to our virtual guests from Lima, Peru. I am Krishna Das from Education USA, a United States Department of State network of over 400 advising centers in 170 countries where millions of students find information about how to apply to accredited colleges and universities. Visit our website at educationusa.state.gov to find a center near you. We are here today to provide you with information to find out which school is the right fit for you. We will discuss the choices you may have while looking at the diversity and various types of institutions, programs, geographical climates and cultures when applying to U.S. schools and colleges. To help us answer your questions related to the diversity of choices, when it comes to U.S. higher education, we have George Mihafi from the American Association of State Colleges and Universities and Lindsay Addington from the National Association for College Admission Counseling. George and Lindsay, welcome. I would also like to welcome our special on-camera viewing party in Lima, Peru. Hello Lima, thank you for joining us as well as our online audience that's you thanks to all of you for joining us. To participate in this chat, please log on to the live chat area and ask any questions you may have for us or tweet us questions with the hashtag study in the USA. Within the chat space area, we also have EducationUSA staff and other colleagues who are here to help answer your questions and direct you to resources to help you. By the way, I, like you, came to the United States as an international student myself. And again, thank you so much for joining us. Let's start off our first question by asking our guests. How many types of colleges and universities are there? What for example is the difference between a community college versus a four-year institution, a private college versus a public university? Lindsay and George, I'll direct this question to either of you and then the other person can chime in. I think I'll start. I'd first like to differentiate and talk about the terms college and university in a U.S. context. In the U.S., these terms are used interchangeably, almost synonymously. College and university refers to post-secondary education. So something students are pursuing after high school or secondary school. Oftentimes, you'll hear students say, I'm going to college. That could be a college. It could be a university. But they're going to pursue education beyond their high school diploma or secondary diploma. One of the greatest strengths of U.S. higher education is its diversity. And we have over 4,700 accredited degree-granting institutions in the U.S. You mentioned some of the distinctions, two-year versus four-year community college versus university, public, private. And maybe, George, you could go into a little bit more detail about that. Thank you. Well, Lindsay said 4,700 colleges, universities, public, private, private or for-profit, like the University of Phoenix, or not-for-profit, like Harvard University. For most of you, whether it is a private college or a public college, probably doesn't make much difference because the programming at the level of on-the-ground programming is probably very similar. But the governance questions are different as a function of the two types of institutions. Public universities, many of you are familiar with public universities, they're owned by the national government or by provincial or state governments. In our country, we don't have many national universities, a couple, but not many, most are owned by our states. And then we have lots of private universities, and they're governed by essentially self-governed. But as I said, for you, that's probably not a critical distinction because as you take classes and you attend an institution, whether it's public or private, probably won't make an enormous amount of difference. But the challenge for each of you is to think about 4,700 universities, colleges, and say how do I start to figure out where I want to go and where I fit and where I will get the best kind of institutional experience. That's why we're here today. That's fantastic to know because there are so many different choices with all these 4,000 plus institutions. So let's go to our online questions and online viewer asks. From our viewers, we see a lot of interest in scholarship and funding opportunities. What about financial aid for international students? Does it depend on the university, a college, and the program of study? Sure. I'll start. The question mentioned, does it depend? And I think a lot of US higher education, the answers are it depends. So I think primarily what we advise students to do is to reach out to the college or university that they're interested in and ask about what type of financial aid opportunities are available to international students. One of the things that we have to be mindful of as international students or advising international students is that a US college or university's policy around financial aid for domestic students is often different than international students. The other thing, distinguishing factor, is the term financial aid. Generally, it refers to a type of aid that is only a benefit to US citizens. But institutions can choose to offer a type of aid, either scholarship or need-based aid to international students, but it really depends. And that can also sort of translate to the whole concept of assistantships and fellowships, correct? It does, yes. And I think, again, that's another thing, a distinguishing factor between US citizens and international students is the visa regulations around your ability to work. International students do have the opportunity to work. Generally, I believe it's up to 20 hours a week on campus or through internship opportunities, but that's, again, something that you'll work with your institution and the international student advisors at your institution to help find. And we might, I suspect the question will come up at some point, but we might want to, as long as we're talking about financial aid and financial support, we might want to talk for just a minute about college costs. In general, college costs in the United States operate at kind of three tears or levels. The least expensive college opportunity in the United States comes in our community colleges.  You can only get an associate's degree most of the time. But they are the least expensive of the three categories that I'm going to give you. The second category of institutions are the public institutions, and those are generally, with respect to tuition in particular, sort of in the middle. And then you have your private institutions, and those are normally sort of at the top end in terms of cost structure. But as Lindsay said, the thing that makes this frustrating is that you can find a very expensive institution that then offers a very generous support package even for international students. And so at some point, once you sort of figure out where you want to go and what kind of institution, what part of the United States, size of institution, some of the issues we're going to talk about today, then you have to go to the institution itself to find out what its particular policies are. We have public universities in the same state with different regulations as a function of how much they're able to provide from private endowment support, for example. So when we say, and we'll say often today, it depends. Unfortunately, it really does depend on individual institutions. And so what we're going to try to do is kind of narrow down and give you some frameworks for thinking about this. And then is when the homework really starts for you. Which is interesting, which leads us to our next question about probably all these different kinds of colleges. And online viewer asks, he's interested in learning more about pursuing a associate's degree. And what are the options to continue studying for a bachelor's degree? This probably goes back to your question about the different types of colleges and associate's degree. What offer of associate's degrees and the bachelor's program or a master's degree, et cetera. Would one of you like to take this question? Sure. I'll start. Associate degrees used to be, primarily and used to be offered by two-year institutions, what we call community colleges. But just to make it complicated, just so that we keep you on your toes here, many four-year institutions also offer associate degrees. But if you want the least expensive associate degree, you'd go to a community college for that. But the question also was, can I use that associate degree and then move that into a four-year degree? And the answer is absolutely, and yes. But when you start the associate degree, you need to be already knowing what arrangements that college has with universities for transferring that credit. And now just to really complicate the matters, let me add one other interesting piece, which is in the world, what we've talked about is 4,700 institutions, physical locations. But to really complicate things, many of those institutions have online programs that you can pursue subsequently after you come to the United States. You can then continue that work through online in other parts of the world. And so there are many variables to think about here. That's good to know. Would you like to add to that? Yeah, I just wanted to add that I think the community college model is one of the least understood models of U.S. higher education. And that close to 40 percent of students in the U.S. are educated by community colleges. And it's a great opportunity to begin your education, to earn your two-year associate's degree, and then continue on a path towards a four-year bachelor's degree. Again, it's cost-effective. The quality of U.S. community colleges are very high. And oftentimes, community colleges and other four-year college and universities have articulated agreements to facilitate your transition to continue your education to complete your bachelor's. That's good to know because then it can get complicated. But to simplify these sort of issues, you may want to find this EducationUSA center near you. And for that, you need to go to our website at www.educationusa.state.gov and find an advisor who can advise you on all these different issues. Let's go to our next question. An online viewer asks, what about differences between campuses at different colleges and universities, particularly job opportunities? I think this goes back to your question about job opportunities, Lindsay. What are your thoughts? Yeah, I'll first say that, again, U.S. colleges and universities have very well-established career centers that are there to support students. Again, you're there to get a degree, to help facilitate kind of what you're going to do after college or university. And so that's a major emphasis. Studying a particular major or minor to prepare you for a degree or prepare you for a career after graduation. And so the Career Services Center and as an international student, you'll need to work closely with your International Student Services Center to help think about opportunities for you to get complementary work experience and internship experience while you're studying. And then also, international students have the opportunity to pursue work after graduation. And for that, the international student could go and work with his or her international student advisor who normally could get them in touch with the Career Services Office. Definitely. They generally have close relationships. The International Student Services Centers on campus generally work with all of the other student support centers on campus to facilitate international students' journeys through undergraduate education and to make sure that international students' needs are being met. But Lindsay, you also said that international students can work, but up to 20 hours usually only on campus. Is that correct? Again, I don't want to speak to the kind of visa implications for an international student working per se, but generally speaking you have the opportunity as an international student to work 20 hours a week that can be on campus or through curricular practical training off campus. But there wouldn't be any, I wonder whether or not, I'm not sure about the answer to this, but there wouldn't be a prohibition against volunteering in an internship as long as you're not paid for it. That would open up many other opportunities. Potentially. Yeah. And the reason I mention that is because what we find in the United States is that many of our own students get jobs because they've been in some kind of internship or volunteer work environment during the time that they were in college. And so that's worth thinking about as you're considering coming to the United States. Yeah, internships opportunities are really, really fantastic in terms of giving you the opportunity to get experiences. When I was an international student I did have the opportunity to volunteer and intern at the local community services. And that gave me a tremendous sort of insight on the experiences that I took along with me about the community and the United States in general. Let's go to our next question. I see many of our viewers are interested in graduate and professional programs in fields, including engineering and law. Where can they find information to find colleges and universities with programs that will meet their needs? But right before this, let's go to some of our questions in Lima, Peru. Let's go to a viewing party and ask them some questions. How about that? Lima, do you have a question for us? How important are test scores to animation success? Lima, could you please repeat that question? How important are test scores to animation success? I believe the question was how important are sports? Test scores, sorry, the audio was a little bad. Test scores for applying for admission. Sure, I'll start. Maybe George, you can jump in. Generally when we talk about admission at US colleges and universities and there's different types of admission selectivity. But generally we talk about admissions as a holistic review process. So while test scores are considered as part of your application, they're not the only thing that colleges and universities in the US look to. And this varies from other national systems around the world where a performance grade on a particular test gets you into a certain tier of institution in that country, for example. Again, SAT and ACT tests in particular for international students, TOEFL or IELTS language proficiency exams matter, but that's not all that matters. Generally speaking, your application will consist of essays, recommendation letters. And I think primarily what we've found through my association and our research is that colleges and universities put the most emphasis in evaluating a candidate for a mission on the high school transcript and the rigor of your courses that you're taking, the rigor of your curriculum, and how you've performed over kind of your three or four year secondary education. OK. George, would you like to add? Nothing? OK. Let's go to our next question, Lima. Do you have a question for us? Yes. What are rolling admissions and why do universities choose to have this type of admissions? Yeah, I think it was an admission question. Rolling admissions. Rolling admissions. So what do you think? Frankly, one of the reasons for rolling admissions is that if you waited as an institution until you had all your candidates, and then you made decisions about all those candidates, and you selected exactly the number that could actually fit your freshman class, and then some of those students decide to go elsewhere, then you're left at the end without any students to fill that class. And so rolling admissions is a process by which you begin to admit students and then give them a certain deadline for when they have to respond and say, yes, I'm coming. And then the rolling process allows them to better manage the admission process overall. That's really what that's all about. And the rolling admissions, is it consistent throughout a community college, or is it just? Again, it varies by type of institution and varies by individual institution. Generally speaking, the rolling admission probably is used, I don't know, Lindsay would help me with this, probably used more often in selective institutions. When we say selective institutions, again, in terms of levels, there are institutions that generally will take anyone who fits within a certain minimum set of criteria. Community colleges are typically that. If you have a high school diploma and you want to go to college, you can go to a community college, almost without exception. And then there are what are called open admission institutions for your colleges and universities, where generally speaking, again, the same rules apply. If you have a high school diploma and you have generally all the sort of minimum standards, you're accepted automatically. And then there are the elite and selective institutions and various levels of selectivity. But the most selective institutions, they'll have 10,000 applicants and they'll take 1,000. And in that case, they start really worrying about things and they use all kinds, as Lindsay said, all kinds of measures of your background in order to make determinations about which students they will choose. I'd say of the more highly selective institutions, the elite institutions, they tend towards having a particular deadline by which all students will apply. Generally speaking, it's around early January. And we can talk about some of the other methods of applying, because there are things such as early admission. And in terms of applying, a group of students will apply by, say, January 15th. They will be noticed of their application decision, say, mid-March and April, and then are asked to reply to an institution with their decision by May 1st. So I'd say there's a lot of institutions that follow a more strict application process and deadline system. And that's the reason it's really, really important to do your research. So each institution sort of differs. And it's very diverse in terms of all of these sort of requirements. Lima, we will come back to you soon. But for now, let's go to some of your online questions from our online viewers. I see many of your viewers are interested in graduate and professional programs and fields, including engineering and law. Where can they find information to find colleges and universities with programs that will meet their needs? My specialty is at the undergraduate level. But similar to the undergraduate level, there are sites that help you find programs based on your interests. So if you are interested in law programs or engineering programs, for example, within a search site, for example, the Department of Education has a site called College Navigator that can help students based on their criteria identify institutions that meet their needs. There are also accrediting bodies, such as ABET, which is for engineering, that you want to make sure that a particular degree program or particular offering is accredited. And so that's another avenue that students can take to identify quality programs. The piece that I would talk about as a cautionary tale for all of you is to be cautious about rankings. You'll see a number of ways of ranking institutions in the United States. And when I talk to international students in particular parts of the world, the first question they ask, well, how are they ranked? And they're usually talking about US News and World Report, which is an American ranking system. There's also the Shanghai Jiang Tao. There's the Times of London ranking.  Be very cautious, me speaking. This is not State Department, but this is me speaking. Be very cautious of rankings. Here's the reason why. Rankings measure things that don't matter to students. Rankings measure things like how many scholarly papers did a professor publish last year?  Almost no ranking system in this country or around the world will tell you as a student what the student experience will be for you. And so you need to be very cautious about that. So that's good to know. Thanks, George, and thanks, Lindsay. So the key is, again, do your research well. And for that, go to our website at educationUSA.state.gov. Find a center near you and talk to an advisor. He or she should be able to be a great source of information for you. When we talk about students finding the right school, we often use the term fit. What does this mean when we say a school is a good fit or a bad fit for a student? I think this is a great transition from the ranking conversation that George just cautioned students about. A ranked university, a top 50 ranked university, may be a good university, but it may not be a good university for you. And so when we talk about fit, again, one of these concepts that isn't fully understood, I think, outside of the US concept context, we're talking about an institution that's going to help a student achieve their academic, personal, cultural, social goals for an undergraduate or graduate education. And so we like to talk about personality, that campuses, colleges, and universities have a personality, and you have a personality. And as a colleague likes to talk about it in terms of friends, you have really close friends, you have acquaintances, similar to university, you're trying to find a personality match between you, what you're looking to get out of your educational experience, and what a university has to offer. So while you kind of are searching through these 4,700 universities to narrow down to the university that you're going to attend, colleges and universities are also looking to see if you're going to be a good fit and contribute to their university. So it's this matching game. Which is great to know because some personalities may not be suitable for a four-year institution. They may want to go to a two-year institution or a bigger university. And also according to the community, according to the location, according to the geographical area, the climate. Some may be suited for the South, which is where it's warmer than the Midwest, where it's colder, or the North. So again, it depends on you. And for that, that's why it's very, very important to do your research as to which university you want to apply to, which school you want to apply to, where you would like to be within the United States. Robert Carlo Gill writes, I am interested in studying forensics and want to know if there is an English language standard across all colleges and universities. George or Lindsay, I don't know if you could take this question. Yeah, again, it's one of those. It depends. There is not one English language proficiency standard across all colleges and universities. Many colleges and universities, again, will require non-English speaking international students to take an English proficiency exam, TOEFL or IELTS. And those colleges and universities will have minimum, generally minimum scores, proficiency levels that they are looking for their students to meet. Now, sometimes a college or university who may have an English language program or English language institute on their campus may be able to accept students who have lower English proficiency because they can offer some English language coursework prior to starting the full academic degree-seeking coursework. So again, it depends. So it depends on the institution. OK, that's good to know. Thank you, Lindsay. Let's go to our next question. An online viewer asks, will curriculums be the same from school to school for the same subject? How many can curriculum vary? Well, we're still, we're going to spend a lot of time talking about it depends. The first thing is, is that there is almost no curriculum in the United States that is standard across all institutions, almost none. Instead, there are broad general outlines of the curriculum that are reasonably standardized in some areas, some fields. Lindsay mentioned ABET for engineering accreditation. If you take an engineering degree and it is ABET accredited, it is likely to be fairly standard across all ABET kinds of institutions, not all institutions, but all ABET institutions. On the other hand, if you find an English degree, you can find an English degree that will take you 40 different directions. And you'll find different curriculums for different English degrees at two institutions that are sitting side by side. And that's one of the fascinating things about the American education system. I mean, I could start in college X and have a particular subject and have a particular curriculum while in college Y, I could take the same subject and have something totally different. Absolutely. So it depends on the school, on the university, et cetera. Accreditation, program accreditation is distinguished from institutional accreditation. There are two kinds of accreditation in the United States. When we talk about accredited institutions, we're talking about institutions that are accredited. But within institutions, there are specific programs that are also accredited by different accrediting organizations, law, medicine, social work, engineering, a whole series of those disciplines, teacher education, there are a variety of those. But America is the Wild West in terms of the program and program differentiation. And for many countries where once you take a particular field of study, it's the same no matter where you are in the country, it's bewildering to find out how much variation there is in the United States. But it's a function of the way we grew up. We grew up trying to make sure that we did not have national control. That was George III. We didn't think that was a particularly good idea. And so what happened is all of our institutions grew up in different states, or they grew up as private institutions, and so we have enormously different historical trajectory. And that's good to know, George. Basically what you're saying is that the universities and colleges in the United States have a lot of autonomy. Let's go to our next question. Yuri, one of our online viewers says, is curious if there is an average age for graduate students in the United States? Does it depend on the program or school? Again, it depends. It depends on whether or not students started their undergraduate degrees directly after high school or secondary school. In which case they may be 21, 22, 23 years old when they begin their graduate study. But I think one of the things that, again, distinguishes graduate education and nowadays even undergraduate education is the range and ages in which people pursue education. There's great variety. And again, that's one of the fantastic things about the US education system. You can start off at in your 20s, go and work for a while, come back in your 60s. So even 70s. I mean, I myself, I was a very traditional student, got my first graduate degree in my 20s, I worked for X number of years, and I refused to divulge my age. And I came back to school for my second degree after X number of years. And I don't think that would have been possible in any other part of the world. But that's one of the fascinating things about the American education system. Thank you so much for all these great questions. Keep sending them in using the chat or on Twitter using the hashtag study in the USA. Let's go back to Lima now for a couple of more questions. Lima, do you have another question for us? Yes. What kind of extracurricular activities will help me stand out in my application and is more better? The question is, what kind of extracurricular activities will make a person or an applicant stand out when he or she applies to a college or university? I'll start by saying that colleges and universities, as they're reviewing applicants, are looking to see what students are passionate about. More is not always better. I think quality over quantity is something that colleges and universities look for. They want to see perhaps that you have dedicated a lot of time and commitment to a particular activity and perhaps will hold a leadership position in a club or organization or your first chair in your band or music group. So it depends. Again, it depends. But colleges and universities really want to see what students are passionate about. And so that can help kind of dictate your extracurricular passions and activities. Now, I would also say that what would be increasingly what institutions are paying attention to is not only the activities that you had within your high school, for example, but the community activities that linked you to the broader community. There are a variety of states that require service learning, where students go out and work in the community and provide service and learn, hence the term, service learning and volunteer activity. But again, as Lindsay said, connected to passions and so that you begin to, you don't have a list of activities just to have a list of activities. But you have a list of activities that suggest who you are and what you care about and where you want to go. And that's going to be much more compelling than just I did everything, but I sort of dabbled in everything and I didn't get deep into anything. And Lindsay, going back to the extracurricular activities, it could include sports or community service or working with a volunteer organization, correct? Even working part-time. Some students need to work to help support their families and colleges and universities recognize that that's an important contribution that you're making. And so, yes, not one particular thing stands out, per se, over another. Again, we could get into, also, and likely we will later, the discussion of student clubs and organizations and extracurricular activities and what's available at the college and university level. And basically, I think your institutions are looking for a very well-rounded individual, which includes your extracurricular activities and your grades and the programs of study, et cetera, correct? Lima, let's go back to another question. Do you have a question for us? Yeah, why do some US universities offer big financial aid to internationals and others to serial? Yeah, the question is, why do some institutions offer financial aid to international students and some do not, or some may, and different types of sort of financial aid? So the question is basically going back to what we discussed earlier about financial aid. Sure, sure. Well, some of it is, obviously, is a function of how much endowment or what the resources are of a particular institution. It's also, we have institutions that don't, frankly, pay a lot of attention to internationalization efforts and other institutions that are deeply committed to that. And there are limitations in the public sector, public universities, about how many international students they can take. So it depends, that's our favorite phrase now, but it depends on the character and the personality of that particular institution, whether they're deeply committed to that work. So a lot of that depends on the institution. Lindsay, would you like to add to that? Yeah, just again, complimenting what George had to say that some institutions, again, an increasing number of institutions are recognizing the benefits that international students bring to a college or university campus. And with that at some institutions, they have the ability to offer some aid or scholarship, merit and money to attract international students, to help contribute to that environment at the College of University. That's good to know. We have a lot of more questions coming in from our online viewers. Our next question is, what's the difference between a college in a major metropolitan city versus in the suburbs of a city or in a small college town? And how many of the campuses and school sizes differ between schools? This is such a great question. I love to hear questions like this, because students, there are so many choices. And it's not just the school, but the geographical location. And some people may be more apt or happier in a small college campus than a big university. And many of these universities are like many towns themselves, but 40, 50, 60,000 students. So would you like to take that question? Yeah. I mean, I'll just say, again, a college or university, an urban college or university, I think one of the major differences between an urban institution and one that may be in a suburban area or rural area is the self-containment of a campus, per se. So a George Washington University or an NYU has buildings spread out throughout the city. It's not a defined campus, per se. And that many times suburban or rural campuses will be self-contained within a campus community. It may be a more residential area. But again, we bring up a lot of good points. There are six different time zones in the US. And with that comes different climates. International students may be interested in how close an institution is to an international airport to facilitate travel to and from. There's a lot of things that we can discuss about kind of how you select a type of institution in what US region. And then, again, urban versus rural. Yeah, which, no, I think the part of what, if you are from an urban area, you may feel more comfortable in going to school in an urban area. And similarly, if you are from a rural area, you may find a large city university very confusing or very difficult to navigate in. The size somebody asked, or part of the question was about size, our institutions range from less than 1,000 students. The largest of our universities is more than 60,000 students. Public university, Arizona State, followed by University of Central Florida. So you've got all kinds of ranges there. You've got rural institutions where the rural institution is the only institution in this tiny community. And that has a bearing on what kind of study you want. If you want to have extracurricular activity as a rodeo, you better go to a rural institution where they have rodeos. So again, that depends on, depends. My own experience coming in as an international student, I grew up in a city with 15 million people. And I grew up where the temperatures were the coldest. It would get to 70 degrees.  And it worked out great for me. So again, it depends. It depends on your personal choices. And I found out about this, I fine-tuned my choice by talking to an EducationUSA advisor at a center close to me. And for that, please go to educationUSA.state.gov. And I'll just add that this stresses the importance of getting to know the university. If you can visit in person, I know that's sometimes difficult for international students or students who live further away from campus, but that's one option. Many colleges and universities these days have virtual tours. And then get online and talk to the current students. That's another way to start to get to know the personalities. And they're a great resource, your peers. Let's go to our next question. An online viewer asks about cost of living in the United States for an international student. How much does this differ from place to place? Again, I'm going to say it depends, but then let's ask the experts. Well, the answer is it varies enormously. Your large cities, particularly on the east and west coast, are your most expensive places. And the Midwest, the middle part of the country, and rural are often the least expensive part. But again, we haven't yet talked about housing options, and we're going to get to that. But cost of living sometimes is mostly about, principally, about cost of housing. And you can live on campus or off campus. Sometimes on campus is less expensive. But then getting around, how much does it cost to get to campus and then other things like that. So generally speaking, most expensive on the east coast, west coast, large city, generally less expensive in the middle of the country and less expensive in rural than urban settings. OK, that's interesting. Because also, I think, apart from the location also, at a university, there is a difference in costs between certain programs, certain professional programs like business or medicine may be more expensive than a liberal arts program. Am I right, Lindsay? Yeah, tuition does vary, again, by institution as well as by sometimes within program. Generally, undergraduate degree programs are typically, regardless of major or discipline, are typically the same price. But what I was going to suggest is that each college and university is required, should they be admitting international students, to provide an estimated cost of living above and beyond tuition and fees. So you can reach out to the colleges and universities and ask for them to provide you with this information. OK, that's good to know. Let's go to our next question. How about housing options for students? Where do students typically live?  And I'll come back to that in just a minute. They either live on campus or they live in the community. They live with other students. They live in apartments. They live with families. So those are the two basic differences that many campuses have housing on campus. And on campus, housing varies enormously from very traditional residence halls, small room, two people, four people, to what look like very fancy apartments with suites of students all together and with a central place to fix meals and socialize. So within our institutions, there are enormous variations in on-campus housing and then off-campus on an unlimited number of options. And again, it's something that when you get to the campus and start talking to the advisors on campus, they help you figure out that stuff. And that's the reason one needs to do his or her research before coming to the US and by going online or by talking to our advisors at educationuniversity.state.gov. We're getting closer to the end, but we would like to go back to our viewing audience in Lima, Peru for just a couple of more questions. Lima, do you have a question for us? Yes. What are the limitations of student biases? What can I do? What can't I do? Yeah, the question is, what are the limitations of student parties? What can they do? What can't they do? Student parties? Parties, parties, I'm not sure. Could you please repeat that question? Was that? What are the limitations of student visas? Oh, student visas. OK, I'm sorry, the audio is a little off. But yeah, do you have any thoughts on that? Well, I would just, because there's a lot of particulars around student visas and different categories of student visas, typically students, international students are attending on F1 or J1 visas. But that each college and university has at least one individual dedicated to working with international students to better understand some of those limitations and some of the opportunities. Again, we talked about work. That's a big one, that there's a certain number of hours up to, say, 20 that you can work while you're a current student. But again, there's opportunities to work full time after you graduate and receive your degree. You need to maintain good academic standing. Be registered for a full course load of classes. Certain things like that are what you should work with your international student advisor to better understand. Admissions officers may have a general understanding or could put you in touch with the international student advisor on your campus. So it's extremely important for international students to work with their international student advisor, whom should be looked upon as their friend. Definitely. Let's go to a few more online questions. Do schools have religious cultural groups for students to participate in? Absolutely. Every college or university in this country has student groups. Some of them are religious. Some of them are cultural. Some of them are areas of interest, like chess clubs or sports groups. The list is absolutely amazing, the number of organizations on campus. But I want to make one quick comment that's a little bit along that line, but a little bit off-center, which is that one of the things I worry about is whether students go to a campus in the United States and they only hang out with students from their own country rather than trying to fully integrate themselves into a new culture and to take advantage of that culture. So one of my criteria would be I want to go to a place that doesn't have too many of the students from my country there so that I will hang out with students from many different countries and a lot of students in the United States so that I absorb that culture rather than just be a little isolated cell. And so my urging to all of you is if you come to the United States, try to make sure that you get beyond your comfort level and beyond students that are like you. That's interesting, but again, the comfort level does make a difference. And again, it depends on individual choices. Let's go to the last question. Where can I find information on American colleges and universities? What resources, sites, can I use? I think, Krishna, you've brought up a few times that EducationUSA advisors are a great resource. And I mentioned earlier in the program, the Department of Education has a tool called College Navigator, which allows students to input criteria and prioritize things such as location, size, major to, it will pull from its database of the 4,700 colleges and universities to help you identify a good fit institution. And again, that is so important to do your research and find the right resources. Again, let me reiterate, please go to our website at educationUSA.state.gov. And that's a great source of information. You will be able to find a lot of things that you're looking for. Unfortunately, we have run out of time. I would like to thank our guests in the studio for this extremely productive chat. Thank you so much, George and Lindsay, for joining us. It's truly been a pleasure. And thanks to those who joined us from Lima. Lima, thank you so much, appreciate you joining us. And also a big thank you to all of you, our online viewers from around the globe who participated in this chat and submitted those great questions. This program would not be possible without your participation and fine input. So thank you again, thank you so much for joining us. Although this chat is over, you can continue to participate in our discussion on Twitter by using the hashtag study in the USA. And don't forget to visit our website at educationUSA.state.gov for more general information on studying in the United States of America. Tune into our next program in March to learn about sports in US colleges and universities. Thank you and goodbye.


Okay, we're going to get started. Hello everyone, thank you so much for joining us for today's CNCF webinar, Event-Driven Architecture with Knative Events. I'm Jerry Fallon and I will be moderating today's webinar and we would like to welcome our presenters today, Nicholas Lopez, Senior Software Engineer at Google and Brian Zimmerman, Product Manager at Google. We just have a few housekeeping items before we get started. During the webinar, you were not able to talk as an attendee. There is a Q&A box at the bottom of your screen. So please feel free to drop your questions in there and we will get to as many as we can at the end. This is an official webinar of the CNCF and as such is subject to the CNCF Code of Conduct. So please do not add anything to the chat or questions that are in violation of the Code of Conduct. Please be respectful of your fellow participants and presenters and please also note that the recording and slides will be posted later today to the CNCF webinar page at cncf.io slash webinars. And with that, I will hand it over to Nicholas and Brian for today's presentation. Awesome, thank you very much for the great introduction. My name is Brian Zimmerman and I'm a Product Manager here at Google. I focus on the serverless part of our offering and specifically on our event-based products. Hi, everyone, I'm Nick Lopez. I'm a Senior Software Engineer here at Google and I work with a team that builds Keynote of Eventing and other related products. Great, so today we're gonna be talking about Keynote of Eventing. We'll start out with some basic concepts. And first of all, we need to talk about the history of how we got to this place when it comes to the need for event-driven architecture. And so we'll start talking about the rise of microservices, then we'll talk about the advantages and the place that event-driven architecture has in customer ecosystems. Then we'll introduce Keynote of Eventing, core concepts and its components. Finally, we'll have a demo that actually goes through this in action. And then we'll talk about the vibrant community that is behind Keynative and how you can get involved. So to start, we'll talk about the rise of microservices. So going back in time, most applications were always built as a monolith. And when I say monolith in this case, I'm referring to an application where there's that single application layer that contains everything integrated into that one platform, everything required for the application. So take an example of an e-commerce store.  There are some inherent issues in this particular pattern. Most notably, this can scale in only one direction. That's vertically. You can create bigger machines with a little work. You can add more machines, but you can't scale out individual components of the application. Secondly, it can be very overwhelming to build, deploy, and maintain in terms of the application as it grows. You could imagine as you add more and more features, functionality, and teams to your application or your application ecosystem, things can become unwieldy in terms of impact from one system to another. This makes deployment, management, and coordination very, very difficult over time. And similarly, it can become a nightmare to change anything. Any change that one team makes by virtue of it being part of that same system could affect the whole or any of the other related teams. So this can become a nightmare to manage and mitigate the risk of change. So the solution to this is microservices, which I'm sure everybody here is familiar with. And talking about the migration path, people typically don't flip a switch and go from a monolith to microservices. They typically will migrate in a staged way, starting by separating out a couple key components that may benefit most into their own services, attach the core monolith. This will happen over time, bit by bit, until you reach the end state, where you have all of your services in a microservice architecture. In its final look, this appears to be a spider web of complex interactions among many microservices. This provides separation of concerns with loosely coupled services that promotes agility, makes it easier to maintain, and perhaps most importantly, this creates the ability to scale not just vertically, but also horizontally. That way you can meet the demand and need to ensure the best customer experience, however that demand pattern appears. Services can be scaled independently to meet that demand, without impact to the rest of the application. So this is a massively improved pattern, but there are some inherent challenges. First of all, as I mentioned that spider web of point-to-point interactions can be very complex. Despite the loose coupling, changing anyone's service can have significant upstream or downstream impact on other services. You could see that adding or removing services actually would require changing the other services that either expect input from or are sending input to the downstream services. If your teams operate in a true walled garden distributed model, predicting impact may be very difficult and require a lot of coordination, which can be complex. So what's the answer to the problems that microservices create? Don't get me wrong, microservices is a great application pattern that solves all of the problems we talked about when it comes to monoliths and even more. Event-driven architecture is an attempt to try and solve some of those issues with complex spider web microservice applications. To understand this, first let's talk about what's an event. So here's some key concepts to get there. First, we start with an occurrence. Occurrence is something that is incurred within your application or environment that could warrant an action. The event is simply a statement of fact. It contains information about the occurrence as well as context such as where the occurrence resided. Because the event represents fact, it does not need to include any information about the destination. The producer thus has no expectation of how the event is to be consumed. This kind of pattern is key to the power of this type of architecture. The event then triggers an action and we'll describe how this works later, specifically with Knative Eventing. In simple terms, building in an event-driven way ensures that you are reacting to the facts in your environment or facts about your application rather than having to construct every point-to-point interaction as needed. Let's consider an example. A new user is added to my e-commerce store. So in a microservice application that I would maybe have a new user service or something responsible for that, it would then have to write to the database, once complete, signal to the email service that would send the welcome email and likely a host of other onboarding activities that would be required when that new user is added to the system. Now let's consider I've entered into a new market and I need to check for compliance against embargoed countries or user lists. This is an incremental addition to my application and in a microservice architecture would require for you to change that existing application. I would need to update the new user service, potentially other services that depend on the completion of that compliance and then build the compliance service as well and then update them all together because there is the requirement of interaction so I need to manage that deployment. You can imagine how this is very complex. In an event-driven pattern, I only need to build my new service and respond to the new user event. This makes build and deployment much simpler and I don't have to manage the concerns of the other services. We'll talk in a moment about how this works specifically with Knative Eventing. So in an event-driven pattern, there are three key concepts, producers, the intermediary and the consumers. Your services don't communicate directly to each other. Instead, they communicate to an event intermediary and we'll discuss what that looks like in Knative Eventing specifically. That intermediary will then communicate directly with the consumer applications. In some cases, there could be several layers of intermediaries but in general, for our purposes, we'll talk about just one layer. We'll discuss this in a moment but it should be noted that the producer does not need to be a service within your application that you create. Instead, it could be a source that you input to react to the occurrence and deliver the corresponding event to the intermediary. So a service running in your Kubernetes environment can either be a producer or a consumer or both actually. In fact, for this pattern to replace the spiderweb of concerns you saw earlier, services may likely have to be both producers and consumers. What are the advantages of this type of system? So this creates a fully decoupled architecture. It's no longer required to update upstream or downstream services as they are now fully decoupled having true separation of concern. This also leads to high scalability and perhaps most importantly, it can extend organically. We discussed in the earlier example of having to add that new compliant service. In this type of pattern, we wouldn't have to affect any of the other components of our application. In a microservices pattern, you of course would have to. So in a lot of ways, when you are intending to extend your application, which most of us are, this model offers the superior ability to do that organically without having to worry about what it could break in the past. So let's see how Knative can fit into this. Knative eventing is our intermediary of choice. It is a set of composable primitives to enable late binding of producers and consumers. For an intermediary to work, there needs to be some standardization, otherwise you actually still have to build in a shared understanding into your code. For example, what the messages will look like, how they'll be delivered. To address this, Knative utilizes the cloud events format as the message envelope. This is of course a CNCF project. The producers in this case are referred to as Knative sources. A source could be one of your services by means of raising what we refer to as a custom event delivered directly to the intermediary. However, in Knative, there is also a vibrant community of sources that allow you to react to facts within or outside your application without the need to directly communicate or write them yourselves. For example, there exists today a Knative source for GitHub, Kafka source, and many more. The consumer is any service that can receive the event. And the broker represents the event mesh. Events are sent to the broker and then sent along to any specific consumer. The trigger is the entity that defines the subscription to a particular event by said consumer and thus directs the filtering appropriately. Another key concept to talk about is event source registry and event registry. This is a key component to developer experience. If every developer has to learn from square one what events are available, what sources are available, it makes it a lot more difficult. So there exists a pattern of an event and source registry where you can learn what can be added and what events can be reacted upon. There are more primitives to consider such as sequences, channels and flows which we'll discuss later on today. Okay, so without further ado, that's enough talking. Let's see this in action. Next, I'm gonna hand things over to Nick who will show you how this works in real life showing you actual application of the concepts we talked about. Then afterwards, we're gonna deep dive into some of the things you saw to discuss the concepts in more detail. Over to you Nick. Thanks, Brian. So what I'm gonna be showing you today it's an image processing pipeline application. We're gonna be seeing some of the concepts that Ryan just introduced a few slides ago and we're gonna actually see how we can connect the services by a creative event. So what we're looking at here is a setup in which we have a GKE cluster, Kubernetes Engine cluster running. It's an image processing pipeline as I was mentioning. So the purpose of this pipeline is that users on the left hand side, they can drop images on what we call here the images input, this cloud storage bucket. And what we will want to do is to connect this via a source that we will be looking in a minute in detail which will trigger an event that will be received by our filter service. Our filter service will be in charge of filtering any images that we don't wanna process in our system if they have content that is undesired and it will be using the vision API to do this. After this, the filter will be producing an event as well. It will be a custom event which will be sent to the broker once again. The resizer on the label or service will be receiving that event and they will be in charge of changing the size of the image and identifying tags for the image respectively. And finally, we have a watermarker service in the middle which will be receiving an event produced by the resizer service. And this service will be adding a watermark to our images. And all of the resizer, watermarker and label services will be dropping the results of their processing into a cloud storage bucket as well which we have called here the images output and which would be consumed by end users of this image processing pipeline. So we already have the setup for some of these pieces in our current running cluster. What we will be doing specifically during our demo is creating all of these arrows that you see here. Specifically, we're gonna be creating the arrows to connect via advanced images inputs with services in our GKE cluster and to connect the services in this GKE cluster. So we'll be setting up all of these in the next few slides. The first one that we're gonna be setting specifically is a cloud storage source. So what this one will be defining and we'll look at exactly what it looks like in a YAML file in a little bit in the demo. This cloud storage source, it will describe that when and over when an object gets stored in our input bucket, an event will be sent to our cluster, to our broker and our cluster. After that, we'll be setting up a trigger. The trigger will allow us to route the event from the broker to the filter service. And right after that, we're gonna be setting up some custom triggers for the events that are produced by these services. The triggers will be configured so that there are a resizer, a label, and watermarker services consume the events that they're interested in consuming. Okay, so let's go ahead and jump to my screen, Brian, if you don't mind, and I'll show this in action. Okay, can you guys see my terminal? Yes, thank you. So the first thing we're gonna check is we have our cluster running and what we're gonna do is we're gonna check that we have our eventing pots running. So the bringing up of the cluster and the starting up of eventing takes a couple of minutes. So we did that before the demo so that we make this a little bit faster. And what we see here is that we have some controller and work webhook running in a couple of namespaces corresponding to our services for creative eventing. And we're also gonna be listing the services that we're gonna be connecting via our example. So we have the filter, the labeler, the resizer on the watermarker. These are key native services. We could list them with that gcon command, but we could also list them with our kubectl command. Additionally, what we have is a couple of buckets where we're gonna be leaving our inputs images, which we call the image input bucket and where we're gonna leaving our output images where the services are gonna be dropping the output images. So these buckets are currently empty. And the first thing that we're gonna do now is bring up our broker. So we're gonna use a gcloud command to bring up our broker, but behind this gcloud command is a simple YAML that is just bringing up a default broker. And here we're just checking out the status bar broker. It's ready to be used. Next thing that we're gonna do is we're gonna be creating our cloud storage source, the first arrow that we saw in the slides a little bit ago. So we're gonna be just showing the contents of that file. It's a simple YAML for a cloud storage source type of resource. It's back, it's pointing to a bucket, which is our input bucket. And it's pointing to sync to our broker that we just created a couple of seconds ago. Our next YAML that we're gonna be applying is for the filter trigger, the first trigger that I showed you. So again, this is a resource here for a trigger. We see that it has a filter on a specific type of events, which is a cloud storage object finalized. And the subscriber for that type of event is the filter service. So the cloud storage source that we just created a little bit ago, we'll be creating events of this type, which will be then routed by the broker to our service filter. Now we're gonna be applying another trigger for the labeler. This is the service that's in charge of receiving the image that has been filtered. So it is actually receiving the filter here is for that specific type of events that our filter server is gonna be producing. And it's pointing to the subscriber being the service labeler. We're gonna be applying a very similar trigger for a resizer. So it has the same type of filter in that it filters the same type of events while uploaded. But in this case, our subscriber is our resizer service. So here we can see how with the same type of events produced by the filter service, we can have two other services downstream that are gonna be connected without having any of the knowledge of the other one. And the last, let me just go ahead and clear this for a second. Our last trigger that we're gonna be creating is for the watermarker service. Apologies for the background noise. So this is our last trigger. This one is gonna be filtering of events of a type file resized. So this corresponds to events produced by our resizing service. And our subscriber in this case is our watermarker service. Okay. So at this point, we have all of our services running and we have connected them effectively with our storage source and our triggers. So we're gonna run a kubectl command to get our storage sources and another one to get our triggers just to make sure that everything is running as expected. So we see our storage source here and it's ready. And we see our triggers that have been set up for our four services that are also ready and running. Okay. So now this should be ready to actually execute our image processing pipelines. So at this point, what we're gonna be doing is we're gonna be copying a file that I have here prepared. Let's go ahead and copy a couple of files to our image inputs bucket. And at this point, our pipeline should be processing. So one of the features that Knative eventing has is that it also produces traces. So traces can be consumed via SIPKIN or via Stackdriver. What we're seeing here is what the traces look like in Stackdriver. Let me go ahead and refresh this window to see if we can see the traces for the events that just occurred a little bit ago for these two images that we uploaded to our buckets. Okay. So here are two dots that correspond to our events that we just sent. We can go ahead and check one of these is out. Let's go ahead and expand it. And we can see here the trace of our event as it passed through the broker as it then went to our filter service. As then it went through our trigger for the resizer and then it went through our trigger for a water marker and it was successfully processed. We can check details of all the time that interface as well. I'm not gonna go into many more details here. Let's go ahead and check out first the output of this processing, which should be ready. So I'm just listing out the files in our image output buckets. And we see that we had three files produced for the Paris file that I uploaded and three more files for the River file that I uploaded. Corresponding to the resize file, the file with the labels, which is the text file and our watermark file. So we can also go ahead and check out here for instance, one of these label files, which got produced. So it has all the labels identified from that image. And we can also check out in cloud storage what that resized and watermark file look like. So this is the result of our file being resized and watermarked. I also have another tab here with what that initial file looked like. Okay, this object is a little bit large but we can have a preview here. So the image is actually larger than what it's showing us here. So this was our file that got processed and got all those labels and resized and watermarked. Okay, let me just skip here to this last, just to recap for a second before I turn it back to Brian, what we saw here is this image processing pipeline. We had a Google Kubernetes engine running with some services, some Knative services are already running. All of these services were disconnected. We had pre-created our storage buckets but these buckets did not have any effect when any action occurred there. And we created a storage source and a series of triggers to connect the services and we actually saw this processing happen. And we also saw for a couple of minutes there what the tracing of one of those events looks like in Stackdriver. Cool, so I think with that I'm gonna stop sharing my screen.  Thanks Nick, that was a great demo. Thank you. All right, so let's go over at this point a few concepts that you saw to a deeper level. But first of all, let's just review what you saw here today. So in that demo, you saw how you can use Knative to set up an event driven architecture in less than 15 minutes. What you saw here was an application with no interest service communication where we set up the triggers in real time before your eyes. And the result was an application that was fully decoupled with true separation of concern, observability was easy to set up and it was easy to understand what was happening with your application as you saw in the tracing as an example. You'll notice that we didn't have to update a single line of code or wire up the application during this process. Obviously your consumer applications do have to be coded to consume the CloudEvent format but luckily with the CloudEvent SDK and libraries that's also easy to do and fairly standardized. Now all of the configuration you saw, it wasn't in your code, it was other than the consumer that is, it was all done via configuring the intermediary. So next we're gonna talk about some Knative core concepts that you saw today. The first and most notable is the source. So the source is a component that generates or imports events from external sources. The main purpose of that source is to produce the event in CloudEvent format. There's lots of different types of sources that come in different packages. What they all have in common is that they take care of generating the event so the consumer is fully decoupled from the producer. Sources are the components that observes and reacts to the fact in the environment or application and delivers the appropriate event to the broker. In GCP for example, and this is what you saw in the next demo, there are many built-in sources related to activity that happens in Google Cloud, such as the source related to the storage bucket. This is an example of a vendor-specific source and you didn't have to figure out how to understand and observe the occurrence that source was built in for you in that vendor-specific way. There's also a number of community sources such as GitHub, Kafka, API server source that responds to Kubernetes activity and much more. And what's really exciting here is as the community grows and that list of sources improves, we all benefit from the rapidly expanding way of generating consistent and actionable events. We'll talk later about how to get involved with the community, but producing your own sources is a really good way to do that, especially if the problem you're solving is likely to be solved by others. If we all work together and produce that rich catalog of sources, everybody benefits. So let's talk about how the sources are implemented. Knative is designed to be as native to Kubernetes as possible, hence the name Knative. In that, we use the standard way of extending Kubernetes, the custom resource definition or CRD. CRDs define new resource types similar to classes and a programming language. These are then instantiated to create custom objects or COs. This is similar to an instance in a programming language. Broadly speaking, there's two high-level types of sources. There's pushed-based and pull-based. Push-based sources are where an upstream producer pushes an event directly into an address that must be exposed to the producer. So for example, if you have a public URL exposed and GitHub was to push events into that particular pushed-based source, that source would then convert it to Cloud Events Format, deliver it to the appropriate broker whose trigger would then deliver it to the appropriate consumer. These are really easy to scale. They can leverage Knative serving for scale up, scale down. But the disadvantage, of course, is that you have to expose a public URL. And that's not the only type of source because for a lot of enterprises, that's not gonna be possible. Pull-based sources is the solution for that. So in a pull-based source, there is something always running to pull for changes and there's no need to have network access into the source. You just have to have network access out from the source to the producer.  There are some complexities as far as scaling that is handled depending on the implementation that you're using, but these basically allow you to keep your private networks private and they take care of the pulling and then, of course, delivering to the broker and then ultimately the consumer. The next key component we wanna talk about is the broker and the trigger. So these two pieces together make up the event intermediary you saw on previous slides. You can treat the broker as a black box that you throw events into. And you can think of the trigger as the object that specifies when an event is delivered to the individual consumer, a subscription, so to speak. The event sync can be any addressable, Knative Service endpoint, et cetera. In our example, we were exclusively using Knative Services from Knative Serving. That's the least amount of friction to get this all started. In fact, serving and eventing work really, really well together. There's a default broker. However, there are alternate implementations such as the GCB broker and the Knative broker, which may be more useful depending on your environment. And let's go through a couple of those examples. So here is a brief flow of how things go through the Kafka broker as an example. So in this case, there's the publisher which will then send the request into the multi-tenant ingress. From there, there are individual Kafka topics created for each of these individual events. Those are sent to the multi-tenant dispatcher that subscribes those topics, filters them appropriately and sends them via the configured trigger to the appropriate consumer. GCB broker as an example works very similarly. The notable differences here are that the PubSub topics, sorry, the topics are PubSub topics that handle the messaging rather than Kafka topics, but ultimately it's very similar. The other fundamental difference here is what happens in the error case. When things aren't able to be delivered, they're sent to a failure topic and then there is a retry, multi-tenant retry service that will watch for those and ensure that they're re-delivered to the consumer so that you have at least once delivery. A couple other pieces to talk about, I mentioned this earlier, there are additional primitives that are interesting to understand for those looking to extend this model into more complex use cases. Those are, there's messaging, there are flows and then there are channels. So, or sorry, sequences. So messaging, I mentioned earlier that the channel, that's an abstraction of a message transport that takes care of things like message persistence. The subscription allows listening to messages to a particular channel, which allows message delivery. Many ways to implement this, you saw the example of Kafka and GCP using PubSub, there's also ASQS, NAT, et cetera. Flows is another interesting concept. These allow sequences of events, either in sequence or parallel, series or parallel rather. For an example, in a sequenced event, you could actually have a single event that represents the entire job, yet multiple services may have different roles in that particular job. They can act on the event and mutate its details to be passed down to the next service, allowing you to have that complete unit of work. For those who are GCP users, you can utilize Knative by means of events for Cloud Run for Anthos that has recently been released to beta. This product builds on top of the Knative primitives that you saw today to offer an experience but tailored to GCP. In particular, there's a large number of Google provided sources and easy setup. So if you're interested in trying out Knative and you're on GCP, give it a shot. You can find out our quick start under the documentation at cloud.google.com and we have a link to it later on in the presentation. So last thing to mention is about the Knative community. There is a vibrant community of developers across the globe that are supporting Knative. We talked about eventing today, however, Knative also contains serving. And in fact, if you use them both, it adds additional simplicity and they work really, really well together. There's over 10 active working groups from 450 contributors. There are 15 plus active repositories with over seven Knative based offerings from vendors such as Google, IBM, Red Hat, VMware, et cetera. Okay, so what's next? I'm sure that you've left this presentation being really interested in how Knative eventing works and perhaps Knative more broadly. You can learn about more at knative.dev slash docs link provided here. This contains everything you need to know on how to get started with Knative. If you're a GCP customer and want to do a quick try of our implementation, which will get you familiar with those key concepts and you can extend and play from there, here's a link to our quick start documentation which can be found at cloud.google.com slash doc slash event slash anthos slash quick start link provided here. And then to get involved, view us on GitHub. There you can find out things like how this is implemented and start contributing, which is really exciting. Now a couple notes of some other open source events that are happening provided by Google open source live. On November 5th, we have Go Day from nine to 11 Pacific time. In this session, Go Lang experts will share updates on everything from Go basics to package discovery and editing tools. You'll hear from our partner Khan Academy who will walk through an interesting use case about how the organization is using Go to save time and money. On December 3rd, there is Kubernetes Day. In this event, Kubernetes experts at Google will cover the life of the Kubernetes API, admission web hooks, how apply works and the distributed value store ETCD. So we hope to see you all in those events as well. They're surely to be interesting. Again, thank you for your time. This was great. You've been a great audience. Really appreciate it. If you have questions, we want to hear from you. Feel free to reach out to me directly as I would love to engage with you. I'd be happy to answer any questions that you have about how you could apply this technology if you want to understand more about the examples and samples we showed you today. We're happy to provide. And most importantly, I'd love to hear about your use cases and scenarios. What are you looking for Knative Eventing to solve? Do you have a problem? And you're not quite sure how to solve it. Do you have a problem that we're not well positioned to solve yet? Do you have applications for this technology that you're excited about? No matter what, I would love to hear from you. Your feedback really helps us understand where to focus our efforts and it's great to engage with the community. So Brian, we already have a few questions here in the Q&A. I can read them out loud and we can go through them if you think that's a good plan. So first question is, great demo of Knative Eventing with GCP. Just to double check that nothing in demo setup is tied to specific GCP capabilities and it's possible to implement on other clouds using upstream K8s. Thanks. So let me answer this first, Nick and you can add additional color if I missed anything. So yes, everything you saw here can be implemented on other clouds. In fact, most of what Nick showed today was not using the GCP G-Cloud commands. It was using the Q-Cloud commands. The only exception to that is the source. So the GCS bucket was a vendor provided source. Now you would have to have an equivalent K-Native source written for AWS or that you wrote yourself for querying another storage location. So that would be the only thing you'd have to swap out. That was a vendor provided source. But I could imagine that other clouds may have something similar and you could write a source to swap that in and everything else is all using K-Native primitives. You saw the implementation we showed was also using the GCP broker, but nothing substantive about the demo you saw required the GCP broker. You could be using a different broker as well. There might just be some idiosyncrasies about things like the tracing support. I don't have anything to add to that. That's a good answer, Brian. Let me go ahead and read the next one from Rahesh. Does K-Native have any advantage over Kafka? So again, let me start here, Nick, and then you can add more. I think I would like to freeze your questions slightly differently, because the broker which utilizes the message queue, there is a Kafka broker, right? So in that sense, it can be using Kafka, right? So what does it provide to extend Kafka? And it's all about having that decoupled system where you didn't have to worry about how to communicate with Kafka. All of the messages are sent and translated via the source to the cloud events format and then consumed with the cloud events format so that your consumer applications, your containers only need to know how to use the cloud SDK, the on-martialing library, in order to understand the details of that event. So it was all somewhat standardized and the individual developers of services don't have to have an understanding or appreciation for how that message is delivered nearly as much. And that's a very high level answer, but just the Kohl's notes there is it's not about, does it have advantage to Kafka? It's what does it add on top of maintaining your own Kafka implementation? And it's that we try to maintain, the components are maintained for you. So there's also a couple of Kafka related questions there by Manish and Jing Dong. The first one is a Scandinavian replacement for other pops up tools like Kafka, SureService, RabbitMQ and the other one, which I think you partially answered just a bit ago. Is it possible to elaborate on use cases between using Kafka and Kinead? I think you're muted, Brian, right now. Oh, yeah, I think those are similar to the first question. So I'll answer them in the same way. PubSub, for instance, is what's used by the GCP broker, Kafka is what's used by the Kafka broker. So it's not a replacement thereof, it's an extension too. Thanks, Brian, let's read the next one. Could you speak to a bit about durability and message processing guarantees supported by the broker components? So I don't have specific answers on that one. In general, I think it depends on which broker component, right, so in the GCP broker component, I showed in the diagram that there is an error root topic that's not the technical name, but that's the idea. And there's also, you can utilize a dead letter queue to react to failures. But I think the idiosyncrasies are gonna depend on the broker that you're using. What I would suggest is why don't you reach out to me offline, so Brian Zimmerman, Brian with a Y at google.com. And actually, if you're still seeing my screen, it's there on the screen, but reach out to me and I will get you a much more well-formed answer, very likely pointing to the documentation online that will specifically answer your question. Thanks, Brian. Let's go to the next one. So does Knative require a broker like Kafka to work or is it bundled with its own broker? It does require some type of messaging system, right? So it doesn't have its own messaging system, the channel basically, right? So there's a Kafka channel, you can use a PubSub channel and those are implemented in the different brokers like the GCB broker or the Kafka broker. There's also an in-memory channel so that you don't have to use a different type of channel which just keeps the events in memory. It is not recommended for production use, but if what you're getting at is, I'm trying to develop on my workstation and I don't wanna stand up all these extra components just to get my container written, that's where the in-memory channel can help. But as far as production implementations to ensure delivery guarantees, it's not recommended to use in-memory, you should use another channel like Kafka, PubSub, et cetera. Thanks, Brian. Last question here on our Q and A. Does Knative support AMQP 1.0? That's one I'll have to get back to you on. So send me an email, Brian's ever met at Google.com and I will be happy to answer that offline.  I don't have an answer from the top of my head, no, sorry. I'll answer similarly to the next one. How does Knative compare with other event-driven frameworks such as Vertex? I'm not familiar either with Vertex, yeah. Yeah, but reach out to me. I'd love to have a conversation of what are the advantages or disadvantages of Vertex that you see and to have a good discussion of what Knative eventing does or doesn't compare. More questions coming in. How can Knative be extended to support serverless event-driven code processing in general? I think GCP has the capability already. I'm just trying to think through what specifically the use case that you're interested in. Again, I'd be happy and love to talk to you about this offline in a deeper way. I think in a high level, the approach that we're taking in GCP is that a lot of things that are happening in the environment will generate events and the sources that the vendor specific sources that we're providing are able to pull from that event. So for instance, I showed on one of the slides there's 60 plus services that are integrated through cloud audit logs or things like BigQuery or Firestore, et cetera. And so what you can do is as you're writing to a BigQuery instance, for example, that can generate an event that triggers your Knative service in GKE, for example. So I'm answering very GCP specific here and that's just because I have more familiarity there, but that approach can be extended to any kind of implementation. If the sources are there to latch on your workload's action to something that happened in the environment, whether it be on-premise through sources you build yourself or whether it be in other or other implementations. I think the model I described is gonna be consistent. What matters there is the sources because that's where you can latch on to things that are happening. I don't know if I fully answered your question but definitely let's kind of offline. Love to hear from you. Thanks, Brian. We have one more question there. It sounds like Knative works as an orchestrator for the long running transactions, SAGA, that span across multiple microservices. Is this the correct understanding? The SAGA pattern is a very specific thing so I don't wanna oversimplify it. It is basically Knative eventing does function as an orchestration feature. I think this is one best discussed offline if you don't mind reaching out. I don't think there's anything fundamentally wrong in what you're saying. However, I think that there's a lot of very specifics there. Thanks, Brian. One more question in there. Can you please give an overview of how Knative eventing fits into the overall serverless Knative framework? Yeah, so it's just part of it, right? So Knative has two components serving and eventing and so Knative serving is how those servitors are, how to control the ingress, the scaling, the revisions, the deployment, the management of services which running as serverless workloads on top of Kubernetes. Knative eventing is just the extension of that. So in a serverless way, if the only way to execute an endpoint is just by reaching out or execute a service is by reaching out to the endpoint directly that limits the decoupling that you can achieve here. Hence why Knative eventing was created as that right hand person to Knative serving. So it really just goes hand in hand. Thanks, Brian. We don't have any more questions or Q&A right now. Now, is there anything that was mentioned there that Nick that you wanna add more to or extend out of the questions that were answered or anything else you'd like to convey? I don't think I have anything else to add to what you said. I was pretty comprehensive, thanks. And I will say, I know I've said this a few times, but feel free to reach out. Often it's hard to understand the full nuance of the question in the 15 seconds. And I'd love to give you a lot more time to discuss things openly, bring in the developer subject matter experts as required. So yeah, definitely feel free to reach out for follow-ups on any of these questions or for anything else that comes up. We'd love to hear from you. And thank you everyone for joining us today. We're coming to the end. So if there's any other questions, happy to answer them. If not, we'll hand things back over to our moderator after Asin's here. Thank you from the end. Thanks everyone and thanks Jerry. Thank you all. Thank you all so much for a wonderful presentation. Thank you all for attending today. As I said before, the recording and slides will be available on the CNCF webinar page at cncf.io slash webinars. Everyone take care and stay safe and we will see you at the next CNCF webinar.


All this month get any smart phone 32 giga under for 50 percent off regular price at Appalachian Wireless. Better service, bigger savings. That's today's Appalachian Wireless. While supplies last, two-year agreement required. High school basketball season part two is underway all this week as teams buy for their district titles in hopes of making their way to the region tournament. In boys basketball the 57th district tournament got underway this evening from Mcguffin County High School as the Painesville Tigers suited up to take on Johnson's syndrome first-round play. Senior Austin Davis putting in work early three points. The Tigers looking to answer and Seth Williams has the recipe from the wing. He puts up three points of his own. Future U-Pike Bear Mason Blair wants to get on get in on the action from the perimeter. The basket is good. Eagles trying to secure the early lead but Tigers Mason Moore goes up and end. But three points is better than two. Cole Crace for the Eagles racking them up early as Johnson Central gains a steady lead over the Tigers. Seth Williams flying through the paint over defenders keeping Painesville alive but Johnson Central's offense was too much to handle. Austin Davis gains control of the ball passes it down low to Cole Crace for the goal and the Eagles win it from Mcguffin County. Final score Johnson Central 77 Painesville 61. Eagles advanced to play the winner of Mcguffin County in Sheldon Clark which takes place tomorrow evening. The voice 58th district tournament continued tonight from the DW Howard Fieldhouse. Last night it was Allen Central over Betsy Lane 44 to 40 tonight at South Floyd and Prestonsburg vying for that final seat in the championship match. Getting things started for the Raiders Jake Collins brings it up the floor and takes it himself moves past defenders and drains with 15 foot jumper. The black cats answer back with Blake Sloan getting the handoff and hitting one of his own. South Floyd's big man Brady Kahn goes up and in for the big offensive rebound and then fights through contact hits the layup and draws the foul. The black cats answer back on offense as Austin Indicott steps into this pass and hits a big three pointer. A close one tonight from the Fieldhouse in double overtime. South Floyd wins it 79 to 76 over Prestonsburg and from the T.W. Oliver gymnasium the girls 59th district tournament got underway tonight and in the night cap it was Eastridge and Pikeville. Pikeville off to a superstar here tonight pulling away with a 12 point lead early holding the Warriors to just two with three minutes to go in the first quarter. Leslie Stewart a key player for the Panthers up and in basket is good Eastridge looking for something to fall their way. Katie May from the pocket and the Warriors begin their climb but the Panthers were quick to retaliate. Kelsey Joe Tackett from distance and the Panthers keep it pushing.  Nunamaker finishes with 16 points turnovers a problem in this one. Eastridge with 13 just in the first half keeping them alive. Junior Brittany Tackett knocks in three baskets in a row bringing the lead to just two. She would lead all scores tonight with 29 points but Pikeville was quick to answer in transition. Grace Bartley gets a basket leading the Panthers in scoring with 17 points and the Panthers run away with this one in first round action. Final score Pikeville 75 Eastridge 59 the Panthers advanced to play Shelby Valley in the 59th district championship.