I'm going to be talking about roughly a period of 250 years so I'll try to fit that into 45 minutes or so. Encompassing from the middle of the 15th century really to the end of the 18th century. A period which encompasses what is often called the Renaissance, the Reformation and towards the end of the period what we call the Enlightenment. A period of the great bourgeois revolutions essentially, which represents two and a half centuries of basically the most immense class battles, a struggle of living forces that went on for two and a half centuries. Battles that weren't just fought out on the battlefields and on the barricades although there were plenty of those in this period, but which was also fought out on the plane of religion, on the plane of philosophy and on the plane of science, as well as art and every other sphere of human culture. And it was a period which in many respects was much like our own is. That is to say it was a period in which an old social system was dying on its feet but was refusing to leave the stage of history. And in which a new social system was basically struggling to be born. And in the course of these struggles you had thrown up throughout this period a galaxy of some of the most brilliant thinkers, some of the boldest thinkers who defined persecution by the religious establishment and the church and who sought to carry out a wholesale revolution really in human thinking to liberate human thought from mysticism from the fog of superstition. And they fought for rationalism, they fought for science, they fought for human reason and they fought, the boldest of those thinkers amongst them fought for a militant form of materialism. Now Engels described it as a time which called for giants and produced giants and I think that's very much the case. Now the roots of this crisis in this period that we're talking about obviously have their origins in the dying feudal order which had dominated Europe basically for centuries. In fact Europe had been through a period basically a millennium of darkness effectively since the collapse of the Roman Empire. Populations had collapsed, centres of culture had declined. It was almost literally a period of darkness in so far as not just were the ancient Greek texts of science and philosophy lost but the ancient Greek language was completely lost basically for the majority of Europe in this period. And it was in proportion as the centres of culture declined and Europe entered an epoch of backwardness. The strength of the Catholic Church increased its grip basically a vice-like grip over the minds of men and women throughout this period. And the church of course provided the ideological, was an ideological bulwark and really a part fused in with the new feudal ruling class basically. The church was part of that and this was reflected in the role that philosophy basically played throughout this period. The only purpose that philosophy and natural philosophy in science formed part of philosophy actually until the scientific revolution starting in the 15th century. The only purpose that it played basically was to glorify God's creation and our natural place effectively within it. And that was also reflected in the elements of ancient Greek thought that were preserved throughout this period which were limited amounts of Plato's ideas and a homeopathic dose of Aristotle's thinking. And Plato in particular, his views formed the philosophical basis of the thought which was predominant in the period of the Middle Ages, in the monasteries amongst the monks and all the different schools of philosophy. Fundamentally his world outlook was an idealist outlook. That is to say he inverted the relationship, for Plato the relationship between mind and matter was inverted. It is mind which is primary and matter which was secondary basically. Basically Plato divided the world effectively in two. We have this world around us which is mortal, which is imperfect and which is in a constant process of change. And then we have a second world which is the world of our conceptions which are perfect, which are immortal and which for Plato have an objective existence independent of this material world. And in fact this material world is merely an imperfect reflection of this world of ideal forms. This was the essence of Plato's idealism basically. And the Christian church took this on board and gave it its own spin of course that they rejected. They encouraged people to reject this sinful mortal realm and if you wanted to seek real knowledge it had to be knowledge of that spiritual ideal realm effectively. And that knowledge was to be grasped of course by the means of divine revelation through faith. It was through faith that you were going to gain knowledge and insight into that other realm basically. And the mode of thinking which dominated throughout the medieval period was known as scholasticism basically. It took these texts which were based upon faith and dogma and the fact that the church had sanctified them. A small infusion of philosophy and of course the Bible and other religious texts and the commentaries upon those texts. And knowledge was sought by basically applying syllogistic logic, formal logic to these texts to draw out further truths. So you have commentaries upon these given texts and then commentaries upon commentaries. And a huge amount of intellectual energy was basically exhausted. Commenting upon and debating utterly nonsensical ideas. The idea of scholastic philosophers debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin is basically the kind of caricature but it wasn't far from that basically. Francis Bacon, who we'll meet later on, a 16th century English materialist, described the endeavours of the medieval schoolmen as like the spider who worketh his web and brings forth indeed cobwebs of learning admirable for the finest of thread and work but of no substance or profit. In other words they were very intelligent people but they weren't looking out into the external world to seek knowledge basically. They were working it up from within themselves effectively, producing these cobwebs of knowledge. And what I think is interesting listening to Bacon's words is how applicable they are to modern academia basically. This idea of cobwebs of knowledge produced from within themselves, the commentaries upon commentaries of the medieval scholastic philosophers. Just like the textual analysis, the discourse, it's all based upon basically the same fundamental idealist notions and methods basically of the medieval schoolmen. Modern academia really are the inheritors of the scholastic tradition, not the Enlightenment tradition in some respects and to the extent that that means anything. I think it's no coincidence basically that for the many schools of academics such as like the Frankfurt School and the Postmodernists independently have come to the conclusion that they reject the Enlightenment and what they basically mean by the rejection of the Enlightenment is the rejection of rationality, of reason, of the possibility of gaining a rational insight into the material world through scientific empirical investigation and the rejection of materialism. And I think this rejection of the Enlightenment of the Postmodernists and these others is really a sign of how far the bourgeois have declined, of how spiritually pulparised they have basically become. Because in their revolutionary youth they represented the progress of human civilisation, the capitalist class they stood, or their best representative should I say, they stood for reason, rationality, the scientific method and they produced these brilliant thinkers because at that time they did represent progress because unlike the feudal lords whose wealth was based fundamentally upon land, this nascent bourgeois class, of course their industry, their wealth was based upon industry, sorry, and therefore their wealth increased at that time in tandem with every advance in science and production and technology which created the basis for new productive techniques, for new methods of navigation and the expansion of trade routes and their intellectual needs of this nascent class were fundamentally and utterly incompatible basically with the stifling atmosphere of the domination, this dictatorship of the Catholic Church over the minds of men and women throughout Europe. And you should begin to see the first elements of an intellectual ferment preparing the way for a revolution basically in the material world and also a revolution in culture. You begin to see that as early as the 12th and 13th century in the form of a crisis of scholasticism and this crisis was actually provoked by the rediscovery, either translated from the Arabic or the rediscovery of the ancient Greeks, of the ancient Greek originals, of the writings of Aristotle. He was a disciple of Plato, but unlike Plato he was fundamentally a materialist basically. He emphasised investigation of nature, of experiment and so forth and his students even had a phrase, there is nothing in the mind which was not first in the senses, that is the starting point of a materialist outlook and it created a crisis, but it was in many ways really only the harbinger of a greater revolution in philosophy and science to come which really begins in the mid 15th century and its centre is in northern Italy and it was kicked off of course by a man known as Nicholas Copernicus who wrote a book on the revolutions of the heavenly spheres from his deathbed I think in 1543 actually. From his deathbed for a reason he had a certain trepidation of what the consequences for himself might be because he understood rightly that this was laying down the gauntlet to the church basically, this was a revolutionary challenge to the old outlook of the geocentric earth-centred universe was basically part of the cosmology of the church which justified it was part of the justification of our place within God's creation which we must accept with resignation and therefore to place the sun at the centre of the universe was a serious challenge at that time and this scientific revolution was not limited to Copernicus' discoveries you also had discoveries in this period on magnetism the circulation of the blood in engineering and actually industry and technology played a massive advance in sparing all of these discoveries and advances in science and in the early 1600s it was a discovery from industry in particular the Dutch invented telescope which played a revolutionary role in the hands of one of the great revolutionaries of this period and in my opinion the true father of the enlightenment along with figures like Francis Bacon and Descartes and that is Galileo who took the telescope and he directed it up towards the heavens and he made observations that he didn't just limit himself to these observations he also studied terrestrial mechanics and the whole of existing physics as it had been inherited by him and he carried out, basically pushed forward a revolution in the whole of the existing understanding of the natural universe not just in astronomy, in terrestrial mechanics in a whole series of areas affecting physics basically and now the full weight of the inquisition was brought down upon Galileo he was silenced by the church even before Galileo had published his landmark writings Bruno Bruno was burnt at the stake for advocating the most modern of ideas to be honest Bruno was an incredible thinker and basically the intellectual life of Northern Italy was to a large degree snuffed out by the church in proportion as this challenge came up from below and their grip was being loosened upon the minds of men and women they resorted to terroristic methods of the inquisition to crush the intellectual life of this that was bubbling away basically but it was too late Galileo's revolution had left its mark on the whole of the subsequent century really the whole subsequent 17th and 18th century and on philosophy in particular and his revolution began flowing into the stream of another revolution that was happening simultaneously and parallel and that was in philosophy and its centre really was in England where you had the restatement and the systematic development of materialist philosophy for the first time in the modern period and its originator was Francis Bacon who I previously mentioned three years Galileo's senior he was a man quite unlike Galileo in a sense he was not a revolutionary in fact I think he was Lord Chancellor under James I and he didn't even intend to carry out I mean we think of materialism quite rightly in antagonism to religion and mysticism he was not a religious reformer or a revolutionary religion basically like a lot of the materialists in England actually you'll see that they didn't really want to challenge the established order or even the church and in fact he dodged a conflict with the church by basically saying well God is unknowable to either our sense perception or to human reason you can only know God through faith so let's leave God to one side and let's look at the material world we're familiar with it was a bit of a backhanded compliment to God that just batted him away basically but nonetheless on the primary questions that concerned him Bacon was a materialist he regarded matter as being primary and the ideas in our mind are a reflection of the material world around us and knowledge he explains could only be had could only be accessed through empirical investigation of nature through our senses our senses form a window onto the external world this is the basis of empiricism but it's also the starting point of materialism and it's the starting point of the scientific method actually it is a correct observation to say that is the starting point of our knowledge science begins by making observations and collecting facts about the outside world but how does that scientific method progress according to Bacon who is rightly regarded as the advisor of the scientific method in the 17th century contemporary with these great advances in science well of course we take particular facts and particular observations and then of course what we do is we discard what is non-essential about those things and we seek what they have in common basically and then we draw out universal conclusions so in other words through the method of what we call today induction we go from the particular to the universal that's how science takes place you know you have particular data points on a piece of graph paper and after you've got enough data points you can draw a trend basically that is how of course science develops according to Bacon and indeed yes it is the start it is the correct starting point of a materialist outlook but the question is is it only by our sense perception alone that we come to knowledge is it only by sensing the world that we know the world now of course the answer is no it's not of course simply by sensing things that we know the world as soon as we begin to sense the world of course we begin to process the world in our brain we begin to seek some rational insight some make generalisations basically and then having made those generalisations having gained some insight basically our reason in turn affects what we then further observe right sorry we obviously what we decide to go out and observe the significance we place upon observations is informed by our reason itself if I've lost my phone I'm not going to look everywhere in this building for my phone I'm going to retrace my steps I'm going to bring reason into the equation if I'm a biologist and I'm carrying out a comparative anatomy of say zebras and horses and I decide to dissect them and look at their tissues and organs I come with a certain amount of knowledge of those investigations right the idea of species, the idea of tissues the idea of organs it determines what I look for the scientist comes with a hypothesis so there is a dialectical interaction between reason and observation the two parts of the same process which furthermore is not also the gaining of knowledge is also not an individual process it is a social process actually most of the science that you know isn't because you individually have done those experiments they've done some of them but you know I've never proved that the atom exists but I know that someone has done it and I've read those experiments and the results of those experiments it is a social process actually and knowledge is a social phenomenon it's not an individual phenomenon so there are many different sides to knowledge but of course this and the sense impressions are only one of those basically the question is the issue was with English materialism this new materialist school that was developing it had the potential for a many sided development but in the hands of the successors to Bacon it was really developed in a very one sided way this question of sense impressions was developed and empirical investigation, empiricism this school became known as became really a very one sided emphasis on this side of knowledge to the exclusion of reason basically and human activity and the reaction to that was actually the development of a parallel school of thinking which was based primarily in France which was centred in France which emphasised the other side of human knowledge of reason and these were the rationalists the great rationalist philosophers and of course as you might expect the rationalists starting with Descartes they placed a great deal of emphasis on reason rather than empirical observation and this tendency did have a strong leaning in the direction therefore of idealism, the idea that we can simply deduce things from mind from simple facts that are obvious to our innate human reason we can deduce certain things in the manner of logical or mathematical proofs about the world of course that is a legitimate method but emphasising that of course to the exclusion of empirical observation can lead in the direction of idealism obviously but precisely because of the one sided character of materialism as I'll go on to there was a great contributions that were developed by the idealist philosophers and in particular of course it was through idealism that we came to the rediscovery of dialectics in the modern period although as I'll come on to not all of the rationalist philosophers were by any means clear cut idealists but back to the English materialist for now who were basically who came after Bacon they very much developed materialism in this one sided way they very much developed it in a purely mechanical sense and they regarded matter effectively as all of matter is describable in terms of mechanical motion now what do I mean by mechanical motion I mean bulk motion as it's described by the laws of physics but Newton of course was the one to definitively describe the mathematical laws of physics later on but basically this motion takes place through like Newton's law things basically continue moving in a straight line undeflected basically unless there is some sort of impulse from the outside matter itself is fundamentally inert for the mechanical materialist it's not self-moving basically and it is only through physical impact through collision that motion is produced and therefore I mean Locke himself says it we observe matter only to transfer but not to produce any motion it's a very inert sort of character of or notion of motion so I didn't do that intentionally thank you and so we have this impression of the world basically as lots of interlocking parts that are bumping into each other and causing a cascade causing a cascade of simple causes and effects which can be easily delineated from each other much like a piece of mechanics and that was how the world was seen as like a piece of clockwork basically and precisely because everything can be described in terms of mechanical motion therefore all of the qualities of nature which we see around us were fundamentally reducible to the properties of mechanical motion all of the qualities of nature could be described in terms of trajectory, speed, shape you know different geometrical qualities hardness and penetrability these sort of things were the fundamentally everything could be reduced to this it was a very reductionist outlook effectively and you know ironically it was a distortion that was caused by the rapid advance of astronomy and mechanics of terrestrial mechanics in the hands of great geniuses like Galileo and others that precisely because these sciences went further ahead than the others you know it wasn't until the end of the 18th century really that chemistry became a real science with the discovery of oxygen it wasn't until the 19th century with Darwin in biology that therefore everything it was informed by the science of its time the form that materialism took was very much informed by the science of the time Descartes for example even described the human body as effectively being like like a machine basically albeit one inhabited by a soul and Hobbes who was a contemporary of Descartes and Hobbes lived a time of incredible storm and stress he lived in the course of the English Civil War he lived through these great events ironically although he is probably one of the best representatives of bourgeois materialism he was a royalist actually he was a reactionary and he was therefore forced to flee to France where he wrote some of his great texts and he actually analysed the state as a little bit like the mechanical clumping together of atoms forms us as human beings the mechanical clumping together of men basically forms this great monster the Leviathan, the state basically it's the necessary evil with the autocrat at its head who is a necessarily sort of bringing order amidst the brutish and selfish competition of human beings that he very cynically imagines that we were of this sort of character it was a very mechanical sort of interpretation but you can see actually it came with certain personal dangers to advocate these views in France for Hobbes because of course it also strips the state of its divine justification and so he was forced in the 1650s to appeal to Cromwell to return back to England which he was able to do so you can see there's a seed of a revolutionary idea there but Hobbes was far from a revolutionary he was a pragmatic bourgeois materialist who could make peace with an absolute monarch or a lord protector at the same time he was a practical materialist of a bourgeois sort of outlook but ultimately because actually of this empiricist development of materialism, this very mechanical development empiricism itself as developed by Hobbes and Locke and particularly those that came after them would actually find itself in a dead end philosophically it would find itself ensnared when taken to its extreme and therefore absurd conclusion it would find itself in the realm of subjective idealism now for the mechanical materialist like Hobbes and Locke we interact with the world just as the world interacts with itself by very mechanical sort of motions where our sense organs are basically like buttons being pressed externally by the world around us and that is how we receive knowledge it's a very passive notion of knowledge basically and in fact John Locke described the mind as effectively like a tabular rasa a blank slate which is empty until the senses are impacted by the outside world our senses basically write upon our minds they fill our minds with content which is empty until such thing as our senses fill it with knowledge but immediately actually this very mechanical conception of things sets up a sort of duality effectively which became a serious problem for empiricism it places an opposition between cause and effect between the sense organ and that which impacts upon the sense organ between an outer objective world and a sort of passive inner subjective world in other words it sets up an opposition between mind and matter basically which is an inheritance from the middle ages really it falls into the same fundamental problem and in fact it raises a question if all we have are our sense impressions basically they are the interface between that outer objective world and this inner subjective world which are completely distinct from one another if all we have are our sense impressions which tell us about that outer world how can we know that they actually give any real impression of that outer world basically how do we know that the world is the way it is as our senses tell us it is how do we even know that there is anything beyond our sense impressions actually that's the sort of question that is raised by this sort of duality of falsely stating the problem in this kind of way and even Locke who he's largely regarded as a materialist but even he basically raised the question mark over even the existence of a material world he describes matter as merely the something we know not what the supposed but unknown support of those qualities we find existing so I mean he's not exactly sure himself whether there is a material world now the solution to this problem was actually provided or indicated really by one of the great rationalist philosophers and that was by Baruch Spinoza who lived in the Netherlands although he was of I think Jewish Sephardic ancestry and he explains the solution to this problem basically which is that there is only one world there is no fundamental separation between the objective and the subjective he regarded extension i.e. extension in geometrical space and the properties of mechanical motion and thought and experience and these sort of things as basically two qualities, two aspects of the same fundamental thing which he calls substance effectively and that is very much the case we're not simply passively receiving sense impressions from the world outside of us we're not separate and apart from that we have a material brain of course inside our material body which is as much part of the material world as anything else and for Spinoza everything was made of this one substance i.e. he was a monist he didn't set up this dualistic separation between mind and matter but for Spinoza as Alan explained last night this substance was God effectively in a pantheistic manner everything is God I am God, you are God the chairs and tables are God but of course if everything is God then nothing is God basically it reduces the mystical element of God entirely God is effectively a byword for matter in that kind of idealism so it's a kind of idealism that is for all intents and purposes materialistic basically it comes very close to a materialist worldview but once more returning to Locke and the downfall really of English materialism now Locke well he lived at the end really of a revolutionary period in British history the period of the 17th century in which you had the great English civil war, the restoration and then towards the end of the century you had the glorious revolution which was very much the time Locke was writing he had gone into exile I believe to the Netherlands in the time of the restoration and returned from exile when a Dutch adventurer, William of Orange was invited to take the throne of England from James II and it was a time basically in which the revolutionary potential of the British bourgeois was becoming exhausted now they were basically compromising with the elements of the old order that was still existing with the church the monarchy you had this constitutional monarchy the house of lords these remnants of feudalism and they came to a compromise basically with the old aristocracy in which the bourgeois would effectively have power and be able to make money in the means in which they which was their fundamental priority basically and Locke's philosophy was fundamentally in keeping with the spirit of his time basically his philosophy was a practical but inconsistent philosophy it had materialist elements but it doubted the existence of matter it left just like Newton it left room open for God despite the fact that you had this mechanical universe which would continue on its motions for all eternity it allowed room for a prime mover who would have the great role of just setting the whole thing in motion it was not exactly like the God of the Old Testament that could turn people to pillars of salt it was rather less than that so it was very much in the spirit of the time of compromising inconsistency basically of the British bourgeois but as I say having arrived in power the British bourgeoisie were determined to put an end to this period of storm and stress they became basically increasingly sceptical of anything that smacked of revolution or even of materialism and therefore a period of philosophical reaction effectively set in and in the 18th century the immediate successors of Locke in England actually I think Hume was Scottish was he not and actually Bishop Barclay was Irish but they still were the less formed part of this tradition of British empiricism they very much indeed did take empiricism to its logical and absurd conclusion and Hume precisely denied the possibility of knowing whether there even is a material world out there beyond our senses and the logical conclusion of that is actually that all I can be sure of is that I exist solipsism, the idea that I exist but I'm not sure any of you exist or the material world around me exists but that's the logical and completely sterile conclusion basically of this empiricism and Barclay he went further he denied that there was a material world at all all we have are our sense impressions there's no evidence for a material world in fact it's a leap of faith what we actually believe gives order to these sense impressions and therefore he believed it was God simply implanting these ideas in our heads basically so you see how this one sided materialism ran into a dead end and was taken to the extreme of subjective idealism by people like Hume and Bishop Barclay and it reflected the reaction of the British bourgeoisie in that period of time but if materialism died a death in England in the 18th century it had a brilliant revolutionary rebirth in France in the same period now by the 18th century the conditions were increasingly coming into conflict with the existing the existing state of affairs basically was coming into conflict with the state the old ruling class the old Ancien regime was in conflict with the progressive society basically the whole thing was teetering on the edge of collapse you had a series of wars with England and with European powers in which the French were dealt heavy blows and of course the national debt was increasing and who was forced to pay that debt it was the third estate basically i.e. not the first two estates of the clergy and the noblemen they didn't have to they had a say in everything but they didn't have to pay any taxes it was the third estate i.e. the increasingly wealthy bourgeoisie who represented the majority of the wealth of the nation who had to pay for these what they regarded as senseless wars in other words the French bourgeoisie were coming into a acute conflict with the whole of the existing order with the clergy, with the aristocracy with the monarchy and a revolution was brewing a revolution that would eventually end of course with the fall of the Bastille with the fall of the monarchy and with the beheading of a monarch and the beheading of much of the old aristocracy basically but in order to prepare the grounds for what would be an extremely thorough going revolution in France it was necessary to prepare the minds of men and women for this tremendous overthrow of the old order in other words society was crying out basically for a philosophy for an outlook an outlook of this revolutionary class in the ascent of the revolutionary element within the French bourgeoisie and it was in these conditions that actually it was ironically a conservative compromising gentleman that was John Locke his ideas were brought to France by a guy called Condillac and given a completely new content basically this English materialism when it was imported into France in the hands of a series of brilliant thinkers including Holbach, Helvetius and Diderot who were in turn closely aligned with the great social theorists although not really philosophers Rousseau and Voltaire whose names are synonymous with the great revolutions of the 18th century and they took this materialism this English materialism and they filled it with a new revolutionary content basically and it reflected the fact that the French revolution was basically being fought on a higher level than the English revolution the English revolution was fought on the basis of a purified religion of a puritanical sort of religious war the French revolution was fought under the banner of reason and of creating a rational society of liberty, equality and justice basically and in the same way that the French revolution itself was fought to its logical conclusion French materialism was also taken to its logical conclusion the great French materialist they didn't shirk the logical conclusion of materialism it's anti-religious, it's atheistic side it's revolutionary edge which people like Hobbes and Locke were very much not of that character these people they intended to turn materialism into a weapon against the gods and the church and the monarchy and the whole of the existing order which was deemed irrational by these thinkers they denied the divinity of monarchs and they declared that the highest good was that which led to the greatest happiness of human beings basically and as I say it was very far from the cynical self-serving materialism of someone like Hobbes who believed that we as human beings are naturally brutish and selfish and therefore we need some sort of authoritarian strong hands that's going to bring law and order no, these materialists were they believed that if you elevated human conditions you could also elevate human beings basically, we needed to liberate men and women from the awful conditions these barbaric conditions which create a barbaric culture and society and therefore they believed it was possible to reorganise society on the basis of human reason rather than on the basis of superstition and unlike those superstitious thinkers who thought that who preached a better life after death they said, well no, on the contrary suffering is not something that was created by original sin, it doesn't go back to Adam and Eve and all of these sort of things suffering is an ill produced by society and we can get rid of it basically by revolutionising society we can have heaven here on earth basically or not at all was the philosophy of the French materialists in other words you can see already the direction is being pointed forward towards how materialism connects to communism you can see that in French materialism it's already pointing in that direction to change men you have to change their material conditions and make them more humane fundamentally, Marxism owes a direct debt of gratitude really to the French materialists who in turn these brilliant writers and really they were, I mean Marx I think regarded Diderot as his favourite essayist their works were pulsating with life, they were really vivacious bold thinkers who also they harness all of the latest developments in science, they were really keenly interested in science, in fact Diderot himself led the editorial basically of an encyclopedia which aims to bring together all of human knowledge of the time in science, in philosophy in social theory all of these ideas into a great encyclopedia for which he wrote about 7000 articles himself he's a very prolific man and yeah, he thought that basically science was the way to liberate humanity it was through reason, getting rid of the fog of superstition and he came under this encyclopedia was basically banned by the church and by the French state at the time these people were prepared to face serious personal persecution these were self-sacrificing individuals who believed that they were doing what they were doing for the good of humanity and they their ideas are full of this really genuinely bold and revolutionary spirit and in fact there is a direct link really between French materialism and Marxism precisely actually through the utopian socialist Fourier himself was directly inspired by French materialism Robert Owen was more indirectly inspired by the ideas of Helvetius and Robert Owen precisely wanted to elevate men and women by creating decent conditions for them in the factories he was very much a materialist himself basically and even Lenin in the 20th century after the Bolsheviks had come to power in a short article he wrote he showed there is still life and a sharp edge effectively to these great French materialist writers he wrote an article on the significance of militant materialism and in the war against the influence of the church and of mysticism in the countryside in Russia to awaken the intellectual life of the Russian peasantry he actually advised Russian communists to translate the writings of the great French materialist precisely to awaken that mood of critical thinking and rationalism amongst the peasants and precisely because it contrasted it had so much colour in contrast with some of what he described as the sort of like the grey copied text of the so-called Marxist literature which he thought was of a deplorably low quality at that time so we I think we owe obviously a great deal I think there is a direct heritage really that Marxism owes to this brilliant school of French materialism but nonetheless it is worth pointing out of course that the French materialist suffered from all of the defects of English materialism basically it was very much an undialectical materialism and it was very much in that sort of vein of a mechanical mechanical outlook but just as with the English materialist or even to a greater degree considering the emphasis upon scientific investigation that these great materialists placed you can't really blame it upon the French materialist themselves I mean the level of science was such that the whole world outlook was affected the whole outlook of science was effectively undialectical species were regarded as completely static in the same form that they had been given to us since the origins of the earth it was regarded that basically the earth goes around the sun as do all the other planets and have done for all eternity in exactly the same sort of rotations and it was only Kant who really came up with the idea of the nebular hypothesis of the origins of the solar system a brilliant idealist philosopher actually but his ideas were not widely accepted actually until the start of the 20th century the acceptance of the nebular hypothesis of the origin of the solar system became widespread and then of course geology didn't even exist as a science really that either we had had these geological features that we see around us for all eternity or they had been created by great biblical catastrophes this was kind of like the fundamental outlook of the time and these were the this was the level of science basically and it's no wonder of course that the French materialist reflected that level of science although it should be said there are brilliant dialectical insights in the great writings of the French materialist so for example I recommend reading Dallunbeir's conversations with Diderot or Diderot's conversations with Dallunbeir where Diderot actually hypothesises that species have evolved they've evolved from other species it's quite remarkable really it's far ahead of his time considering he's writing in the middle of the 18th century about you know a bit less than a century before the origins of the species came out so of course it's no wonder that they suffered from these limitations and of course the writing limitation of French materialism was precisely the fact that they were the ideological trailblazers of the great French revolution of a bourgeois revolution in other words and you know they were in order to raise the nation basically to raise the population for a struggle against the Ancien regime it was necessary to raise the possibility of fighting for the liberation of humanity not the liberation of a particular class these great thinkers were of course fighting for the liberation of humanity as a whole that was precisely what inspired them but of course it wasn't the French revolution would not end with the liberation of humanity it would achieve the liberation at least not in the immediate term it would achieve the liberation of the bourgeois class and itself was shown to be in given enough time it too was shown to be irrational it had its irrational elements also you know the kingdom of reason became basically the bourgeois republic the rights of man were really the rights of bourgeois man the rights to enjoy private property and the utopian socialists used the same method as the French materialists and the rationalists of the enlightenment to basically argue precisely that capitalism is just as irrational as the ancient regimes the feudal regime which fundamentally came before it these ideas were in a manner of speaking only semi-materialist and precisely for this reason because they were the ideas of the bourgeois revolution because they sought to liberate humanity in the abstract they talked about the rights of man in the abstract reason and rationality were abstract ideas that were basically you know reason could we could draw out reasonable conclusions at any period in time it was only because these thinkers happened to be born in the 18th century that the ideas of the rights of man the social contract and all of these sort of things of a harmonious social order were really discovered in the 18th century rather than say the 15th century or something like this and the utopian socialist fundamentally applies the same method you know they looked around at capitalism and they decided it was equally irrational you know the great satanic mills the poverty the slums all of these things and they were right of course capitalism did have that element of irrationality in it it had a class contradiction within it but of course in the period of the 18th century and the early 19th century there was a great deal of truth to what the French materialists were saying because of course that the to quote Hegel all that is rational is real and all that therefore the completely the obverse of that is that all that is irrational is unreal it was precisely because the old feudal system and the trappings of the old feudal system were coming into conflict with the needs of society that it was irrational it needed to be overthrown and they were correct of course in that analysis but that was not a timeless statement about feudalism and capitalism as social orders this was a historical truth of course and it had its historical limitations and the point is that today of course it is capitalism which has become irrational which is in conflict basically with the interests of society as a whole and it is the proletaria it is the working class which is which carries on its shoulders basically the destiny of humanity which is the ascending revolutionary class and which has nothing to be afraid of from the truth from rational insight and from reason basically but these are not of course now understood as a historical timeless truths basically but historical truths about where class society has come to in its culmination in capitalism basically and it's precisely as Lenin said that the reason that Marxism appears all powerful is precisely because it is true and the capitalist class today the truth is not on their side the truth actually speaks against them which is why in academia in the Frankfurt School post modernist they all turn their back on the enlightenment because these men and women they fought for truth they fought for rationality they fought for an insight into the workings of the world and the insight that genuine science gives us into the working of society is that capitalism is a doomed system that must be overthrown and therefore they turn their back upon rationality they turn their back upon reason and these sort of things but I think we should gladly allow them to turn their backs on that tradition of the enlightenment because these men and women these were giants who I think we can claim as part of our they fought in their own manner they fought honestly for the liberation of humanity not just materially but spiritually intellectually as we are fighting for the liberation of humanity spiritually and intellectually ourselves and some of them paid a terrible price for it the ultimate price for it people like Galileo people like Giordano Bruno like Spinoza and others they were great revolutionaries within the limitations that they had of course which were the limitations of their time and we if the bourgeois want to cast them aside and say that they don't want them as part of their tradition well we will say that Marxism stands on the shoulders of these great giants as well not just Marx Engels Lenin and Trotsky but also Giordano Bruno yes also Galileo and if you want Bacon and Descartes and all of these great thinkers of course also form part of our revolutionary tradition from which you know Marxism is the distilled essence of all of these fantastic ideas that also preceded it so on that I think I'll finish


Thank you so much everyone for attending. Today's talk is going to be about a deep dive into the Ospo five states model personas that for those who doesn't know it's part of a bigger study that to the group in collaboration with other research and also other organizations such as Comcast, Bloomberg and more released a few months ago and today's topic is to try to better understand all these stages and how can it help these resources in your Ospo journey. First of all also I would like to say that this talk is not for people that doesn't know why an Ospo and what is the value of an Ospo. If you're in that journey yet I really recommend to check like previous Ospo contracts and talks especially my previous keynote I gave because I can dive into like why an open source program of it is important what it's an Ospo and so on but in this talk everyone that is here is already aware that it is important to have a strategy on top of all the open source efforts and that adopting a strategy poster around open source is no longer optional. Okay so when people are already aware of that and is in that point there are some questions that comes to people's mind right so for instance where is the organization in terms of the open source involvement like what place of the journey is this organization also like how is my organization interacting with the open source ecosystem at this moment and or what kind of open source efforts so the organization be aware and prioritized in the first place and then in the long term and these questions can help to streamline this Ospo adoption and there are some tutor resources that can help to do this streamline to answer the where question the Ospo materiality model can help to answer the how question Ospo archetypes might be useful since it shows some kind of identifies patterns of the different Ospos on how Ospos can be built and the what questions maybe the Ospo main man can help you identify all the different responsibilities and try to identify which ones are the most important ones for your company based on the organization on your organization schools so we're gonna go one by one first is gonna be the Ospo maturity model so what is this basically a framework to understand the different maturity stages and this is based on the insights collected from past Ospo service we have been doing every single year and also testimonials for thousands of organizations that they have been as they have been moving through their open source journeys and you will see the model in a while but there will be they're gonna be the two variables so one the ability to execute of that organization and then the level of involvement in open source but before starting with that maybe some of you here will be thinking Ospo okay how do I know if my organization has an Ospo if it uses a different name because maybe we can I call the organizations that call it open source technology center or there's open source center or there's open source software committee you know there are really different ways to call the Ospo and Ospo and I think this can help to actually identify if your organization is doing some kind of Ospo work or not so if your organization when you you're thinking in your organization is applying open source strategy and policies good you're in the right path you your organization is being more mature and they understand that they need a strategic posture around open source and they're working to build a matrix of experts to communicate the the Ospo people with the rest of the teams in your organization if on the other hand your organization is doing open source at hug there are no coordinating efforts even though you're you're using open source and open source is part of your organization but there is no strategy and policies maybe you need to think about this adding a strategy on top of the open source efforts just start building what it's called an Ospo or different names but same same concept okay so let's continue with the Ospo model so the Ospo model defines this path from open source at hug to strategic decision making partners there is a initial states that is not really a stages like the zero states that is the adopting open source at hug there you can see like there is not Ospo level at the very beginning and then once the organization is aware of that moves to some legal driven states then to the community driven states to the engagement driven state and to the leadership and they how fast is this transition going depends on the ability of execute of the organization because some organizations might have really strong barriers industry barriers that doesn't allow them to go as fast as they can and others goes really well and it looks like oh and just one year I just develop a really amazing open source strategy and policies and your organization is aware of the open source efforts and and understands open source um so we're going to go states by states to try to identify uh like the main character like what characterize those stages and then um when uh it's when when that transition from the legal to the community the community to the engagement and engagement to the leadership happens also um also to let you know that this is not like isolated stages like once you cover the legal part you move to the community part while keeping all the efforts in the legal part so it's accumulative um stages so in the legal driven states um the organization already recognized that open source software is a key part of their business and the technology strategy and there are the tasks that usually follow is identify all the legal and security risk try to see ways of how to do risk mitigation strategies like for instance as I said there are like inventory taking developer education from the legal concepts and careful licensing um the next step uh moves more to a community driven state that has two phases so in that part uh your your organization is already have already policies around all the legal and security issues in place and um they allow them to start creating this internal ambassadors to promote the usage of open source products and approve open source products that deliver the team say yeah you're good to go this is the set of open source product you you're good to to contribute to so these ambassadors are promoting this community education and try to educate developers within the organization into open source um we're still in the community driven states but part two so as they keep learning and and having more knowledge of the open source and how open source benefits the organization uh the hospitals start to optimize all the open source contributions is that is the time when the out bone open source contributions are increased the quality and they are more meaningful because they actually know how to engage in the open source ecosystem and it's also sometimes with the Ospo create and launch open source projects and to start this broad credibility in the open source community and once the organization is educated into this part like community and legal education it's when we really put can can start to make actions and have an impact in open source ecosystems and it's when the engagement driven states start so it's when these leaders uh that has been being formed in the organizations starts to launch open source projects in the public sphere and um they understand that these projects are benefiting the organization so this is in this state there are a lot of let's create playbooks let's create checklist and tooling and uh other mechanisms that allows to organize and operate in open source projects like open source uh best best practices and also ways to keep training these leaders that will fuel the organization with and will act as the link between the organization efforts and the open source ecosystem and finally uh if the organization uh it's able to have all this is when we can start talking about a leadership driven state so it's when this Ospo can become this advisor of the organization and drive guidance uh for instance advise the CDO and the uh technology leadership on what open source technologies are the best ones to use or um uh see what is decide what constitutes an acceptable open source project or interested open source project for the organizations to contribute and to participate and also to help organizations understand and navigate project politics so um we have now covered the where like a way to know better like where is my organization at in the Ospo journey now let's move to um how uh to how how how is my Ospo operating in the open source ecosystem because their Ospos are so different and there are many ways they can behave so we can identify patterns um that uh we can relate our organization with those patterns uh to help better understand what what my Ospo is for um also I have to say that an Ospo might have different hats and um we're gonna see like a some some sort of different um archetypes here I'm not gonna cover all of them because there are like six we're gonna cover like just three examples but uh once I go through all these um archetypes maybe you might say oh my Ospo does all of them like I can relate to all of those or maybe another person say well my Ospo I can relate to with two of them instead uh because that is what the patterns are it's tried to identify patterns and that is what your Ospo is so let's let's put examples I think it's gonna be better um so one Ospo archetype um for instance this happens a lot in the automotive companies from the European Union um can see open source as a way to improve uh to make better uh all the industry infrastructure for them so they built an open source consumption uh to contribute to key open source initiatives uh that it's that benefits the industry as a whole like for instance in this case the automotive industry uh but there are all the kinds of Ospo's that sees value in um okay I want to um better create tooling that could automate uh deconsumption and thus uh have better contributions and contribute better to their community so for instance this is an example uh that Bloomberg worked with Microsoft to make contributions to TypeScript so this was like create better a better tooling to help them contribute back in a more efficient way so these are sorry these are called the cross industry collaborative and the other ones were called the industry collaborative um and then another example and I think that this is a common one is um this Ospo's um that are trying to facilitate this incubation of open source projects within the organization and then launch them so for instance Comcast uh incubated the Apache traffic control project and that is another example for instance and as I was mentioning there are several ones you can try to find out your Ospo personas I uh added there the dvpog where you can take a deep dive on all the different archives and also to say so these archives are really corporate focused um but they are not an a closed list so this can be wider and wider and there are maybe other organizations can add value and find other patterns and add more archives to the list so other component other Ospo's when looking at this looking at these archetypes can relate to themselves right so finally um let's now move to what so uh what are the different Ospo responsibilities uh that a call an Ospo can accomplish and uh and how can I know which ones are the best ones to focus at uh depending on uh in based based on my organization's goals so uh there's another resource at the uh to the group that is the Ospo mind map in fact like one month ago we just released the uh second the 2.0 version of this mind map so it has improved a lot with a lot of uh contributions for the community and from season it as far as as well so thank you so much um I know some people from the to the group community here um that are helping to grow this community and I just want to say that I'm really grateful to be part of this because I see so many efforts and so many um yeah um excitement excitement to build this uh Ospo adoption and help other Ospo's to grow so as I was saying the Ospo mind map can help to frame these Ospo responsibilities so uh these are the set of different responsibilities that we can find in an Ospo some Ospo's are more are smaller than others some Ospo's are just starting and other Ospo's have a really big team so uh the amount of responsibilities the Ospo can take depends on the size of the Ospo and where is the Ospo located and and the uh and the journey and and and and the states where the Ospo is uh some of the responsibilities for instance in our source like I know some organizations uh has inner source outside the Ospo but we're still we're seeing more and more organizations having implemented inner source practices and have it there as an Ospo responsibility in order to infuse the organization with open source knowledge on the different uh teams for instance also in the Ospo mind map uh you can see the different roles that an Ospo can have because Ospo is not just like a team with the same people and trying to do open source I mean no like Ospo's will be the center that can communicate with the different departments and the different teams of an organization and because of that because it's so diverse and has a lot of different domain knowledge from different expertise they need to build a matrix of experts so take the time if you're building an Ospo or willing to build an Ospo take the time to build this matrix of experts in licensing in security in marketing in developer education in engineering uh to uh is this communication across teams to talk the same language of the different teams um to end up with I would like to serve some key learnings uh this this learnings comes from um the past panel discussion we had at the linux foundation uh two weeks ago where ports come cast uh bloom birth well and v and were were talking about the value of the Ospo's and I think it's uh I took like some learnings from there and I wanted to serve with you so the first one it's I think I mentioned at the very beginning uh starting an open source program office uh means moving from uh doing accidental um taking accidental decisions in terms of open source like oh there is a vulnerability here so I need to take care of this open source but you're not thinking far away from that so from that for to adopt a strategic posture around open source it's put a strategy and that's accelerate this open source and the innovation um second um build your matrix of experts so make sure you're infusing the organization with a clear understanding of open source because that is going to be the baseline to actually take actions and start uh having engagement with the open source community because sometimes there are a lot of problems that I've heard in the to the growth from from organizations saying uh it's so difficult to make my employees contribute at bound in a with quality in quality with quality contributions at that usually is because this education of the open source hasn't come yet but it takes time and uh finally um some of the hospitals mentioned that it's really important for them to um lead by example uh because if uh their hospitals if the organizations see that that hospital is engaging uh with open source and the employees are contributing to open source are releasing open source uh that builds makes them believe on that and so lead by example as a best practice of when building the hospital I think it's a really important uh topic to take into consideration um once you figure out uh like where is your hospital is how to engage uh in the hospital system and what are the responsibilities uh you should be taking care of I really um encourage you to take a look to the to the guides that explains how to start the hospital and uh deep dive into these processes and more resources that you can find at to the group.org slash guides also if you would like to collaborate if you're an hospital willing to collaborate with this community and building more resources to help hospital adoption and education worldwide uh please say hi to slack or on slack or get up and uh follow us on twitter on linkedin for more updates and finally something about me um I'm Anna Jimenez currently the hospital program manager at to the group uh formerly I I was at viteria where I spent more than three years helping organizations in their inner source and open source metrics uh strategy um finally I uh end up my master's degree in data science and I'm involved in all the open source communities such as chaos several collective several Spain open chain and um of course uh inner source and of course to the group thank you so much do we have time for questions yep okay are there any questions hello uh the first thing that I have to say uh the guides from the to do group are really awesome two years ago we were doing open source but we didn't know that so we started a journey to to establish an open source at Comet uh this is the best part where if if anyone is interested to establish an an ospo you should start there so thanks for that guys and in the first place do you think that innovation is an ospo responsibility so what do you mean by innovation learning innovation processes yeah so the way I see so open source drives innovation and I think uh if you've been able attending to the talks here uh I think that it's a phrase that has been in every single place so um the way I see it is ospo since you are putting a strategy on the on the open source efforts you're accelerating the open source adoption in your organization and since you're accelerating this open source adoption you're at some point accelerating innovation so I don't know if that was the question or my question is focus and in another part because at Comet we have to split both both concepts because we were losing the focus on open source we were just trying to run innovation process try to think what we should do instead of trying to give it back to the community oh yeah yeah I could do yeah so uh establishing an ospo I'm gonna go back to the slides really quick okay uh it's a way to take conscious of open source and not just like how can we drive innovation no it's about uh starting to be a good open source citizen and how to engage with the community because open source is a community of communities and sometimes uh that it's difficult for an organization that doesn't know anything about open source because the way they interact is completely different uh if you want to have some um presence in a in a community and in a project you can not you can just you cannot just uh oh let's pay developers and um let's take the project like you cannot do that in open source so it's really important uh to um the ospo can infuse the organization of this uh how to be an open so a good open source citizen how to um how to how to participate in open source communities so at that point of course I think it can accelerate this innovation and and how to um how to in uh evolve and and be part of the open source community okay thank you um okay thank you how much do you think um the you know I know for a follow's function into some of the advice in here seems to say indicate not get caught up in whether it's an ospo or resource center or whatever um you know part of my organization and a lot of other organizations have adopted with the scaled agile kind of Spotify and they have all kinds of fancy terms for things like tribe squads chapters guilds and whatnot um in an organization that maybe potentially has is moving away from the notion of a program office or has an aversion to the term program office right have you seen any um organizations kind of fitting it into the chapter tribe squad model or something along those lines so uh can you give an example of what it's like a squad model uh it's just the scaled agile agile at scale okay right so they move away from kind of individual certain it's just a fancy new thing where and I believe in it and when you actually go through the training it certainly makes sense of just pushing power to the edges giving product teams and teams built around features a little bit more autonomy right um but um I guess the the idea that um you know tribes and squads around organize around features and instead of the traditional kind of functional mapping that they have now this notion of chapters and guilds right communities of practice communities of interest or just kind of you know where the the the functional alignments are so I'm not an agile expert so sorry about that but um I know like there are ospos that are doing agile and they're implementing um agile best practices within the ospo that's all I can say um you can also I think that that is an interesting question and uh in the community in this black channel and ospo forum that is something that maybe you can ask and other ospos will be more than happy to to discuss about this thank you I'll take it up in there hi thanks for the talk it was really great um I was wondering so with your experience with open source and with inner source um can you talk about any migrations you've had to do from inner source into the open source setting and how what the experience is like um so when I was in my former company I held organizations that had inner source and open like my organization didn't have inner source and ospos but we were helping organizations with that uh so based on my experience I've seen so many different profiles like I've seen organizations starting with an inner source and then from that um they use inner sources as a way to uh develop to educate developers internally and once they got that they say let's build an ospo let's go to open source um as a way to help them uh other organizations they just say let's do inner source and open source at the same time because um it makes sense like we see inner source as a way to educate developers and the ospo must be the ones in charge of educated developers so it has many phases to be honest but it's true that now that ospo is having like this momentum and and having like like this keyword it's it's um in the top of mind of many people there uh I'm seeing organizations say let's let's merge it together or at least collaborate together even though it's some different teams thank you very much but really quick then too just to kind of add on to what joe is asking too so actually having an inner source project like a single standalone inner source project and then moving it out into the open have you had any experience with that and any like key lessons learned about that um I will say that um I don't I guess you're aware of the inner source commons community of course uh they have great resources on that and they're also like some um I see people from the to the group also engaging in inner source commons because uh and most of the community are like the same people um so either you asking the to the group or in the inner source I'm sure they have good experience to start there so the talks I've been to and looking at the list of case studies are all large companies we're 100 people the developers are we use open source in our product individually we're giving back when we can but do you have any examples or or resources for smaller companies and getting something in place that that helps the company be more obviously part of the community um let me give you some quick context of that because the cases study so Osprey has been there for more than a decade right now and initially started with big software companies so that's why like when you take a look of the Osprey use cases most of them are like huge companies what it's happening what has been happening over the past two years or so is that Osprey's are being formed also in the small organizations and in medium ones as well actually well I'm from Europe I'm from Madrid Spain and in Europe we don't have so many big organizations like most of the organizations are small and medium and they are they are creating Ospes we don't have like we haven't created Osprey use case for small organizations yet but there I know I know they are there like they're interacting in the community and they're asking questions maybe they don't have these resources to promote like hey we have an Ospo and look how cool we are they are like go they're going step by step and maybe they are taking more way in the legal side so that's why they don't have it they don't ruin a lot of impact I wanted to mention uh this is not a small company like it's more medium one but um there is one company that started the Ospo one year ago that is called Avian have you ever heard about them so they're like they're a medium company they they have an Ospo like not not so many people are in the Ospo but they are there they are doing incredible work in just one year so yeah I just said Pratt so um I will say it um to learn more about experiences I really recommend to engage with the community and I know I'm I'm always telling that you this but it's um I know that is what works like uh being in the in the channel being in the network in the spaces and the calls and engage with these people and and share learnings together is what actually will let you know that okay um first of all thanks thanks for the presentation um if I record correctly the Ospo archetypes are a set of um patterns so I'm just wondering if you have also developed anti-patterns things like the companies shouldn't do like or perform or things like that um actually we don't have it uh but as I said this is the archetype is something that started this year um and it's pretty new uh we want to open contributions for that like this kind of ideas will be really useful for instance so we welcome the community to contribute to that and to expand this this vision because this this is a really reduced vision as I said these archetypes uh are corporate archetypes only right now we would like to spend this and maybe with adding the archetype like this is what you shouldn't do um so yeah thanks for the feedback and the advice um later today there's actually a talk called Ospo's you're doing it wrong which is sort of like anti-patterns and the person who's doing that is van Lindberg and he used to be counsel for the python software foundation and uh partner at like but anyway he's also started something to your question gentlemen in the purple suit who's texting you um the Ospo is a service Ospo co I don't know if you've looked at that at all but for a smaller company that's a really awesome way to have uh resource anyway two plugs for van wow I should go collect money from him thank you any other questions okay so I think we can we can end the talk um and the q and a thank you so much


Greetings! It is our pleasure to meet each other at this CubeCount 2000 virtual event. My name is Huamin Qian. I work as an office of studio as a Red Hat. And my name is Martin Frantzik, where I work as a software engineer at Kubermatic. This talk is organized in this way. First, we go through the CubeVerse project. CubeVerse is a CNCF project that manages virtual machines the same way as Kubermatic does for containers. Then we introduce Gardner project. Gardner is the open source project that manages Kubermatic cluster's life cycle and offers day-to-day operations. It runs on a number of infrastructure platforms including CubeVerse. We explain how CubeVerse features can help Gardner to deploy high-performance and highly secured Kubermatic clusters. We focus mostly on networking and storage features. That's how to use motors, CNI for high-performance and fully isolated networking configuration and how to use beta volume and clone to accelerate virtual machine deployment at scale. CubeVerse joined the CNCF sandbox over a year ago in 2019. It enables workloads that run instead of VMs to be deployed on the same Kubernetes cluster as containers are running. It uses some of the Kubernetes native objects, such as positions, volume claims, and resources claims. It provides a convenient way to describe virtual machine configurations and their states. In this example, a virtual machine that consists of a virtual network interface and virtual disks are described as devices API instead of the virtual machine. Specifically, the interfaces API describes how the networks are configured, which network they are attached to, whether that is the Kubernetes pod network or additional networks that are defined in the network attachment definition. The virtual disks are described in a disk API. The information includes such as the size of the disk, whether the disk is the data disk or cloud in this disk. Specifically, the disk can be referred to existing virtual persistence volume claims. In addition to the virtual machine APIs, CubeVerse also provides APIs to manage the virtual machine templates, data volumes, and virtual machine states. CubeVerse can be conveniently installed on open shifts and Kubernetes as an operator that is available as an operator hub. Gardener is an open source project that delivers fully managed Kubernetes clusters at scale. In simple words, imagine that you can create new Kubernetes instances as pods. We can call it Kubernetes as a service. Let's take a closer look at architecture. Gardener runs on Kubernetes. We can split the diagram you see into three separate clusters. The first square on the very left side is the garden cluster, where all core components run like Gardener API server, Gardener controller manager, and Gardener scheduler. The second one in the middle, the seed cluster. As you remember, I said Gardener is capable of creating Kubernetes clusters as pods. Thus, the role of the seed is to run control planes of freshly created Kubernetes instances. Each seed must have a running component called GardenNet. As you can observe, there is an analogy to Kubernetes core components. GardenNet to Cubelet, Gardener API server, controller manager, and scheduler to Kubernetes ones.  On the right side, where all worker nodes run, the cluster itself must be created on one of the following cloud providers listed below. Each provider has a Gardener extension that knows how to start a new worker node. To summarize this, a newly created Kubernetes instance is stretched between seed, where control plane is present, and shoot, where worker nodes are available. Communication between them takes place via load balancer services and VPN connection. Recently, we added the Kubevert extension that allows customers to use any bare metal environment that supports Linux KVM, and allows to start many Kubernetes clusters on-premise. I must admit that I find this use case very interesting as we run Kubevert VMs as worker nodes. It brings some challenges and part of them we will describe in the following slides. Mouser-CNI is the meta-CNI that allows Kubernetes parts of Kubevert VMs to attach to a different network other than the default part network. In order to use motors, you have to install the necessary demo sets and CRDs. In OpenShift, these are all pre-installed for you. In this example, we create a Linux bridge-based IP VLAN enabled network attachment definition. There are multiple types of motors in line. In this example, we use a bridge. In that example, you can see Mac VLAN and IP VLAN. The bridge has to exist first. If you do not have it, you have to use some other automation mechanisms to create the bridge on the nodes as you want the attachment to happen. The Linux bridge uses IP VLAN tag 1234. In environments, especially when you are running on public clouds, you may not have access to native VLAN. You can create tunneling mechanisms. On top of the tunneling device, let's say, for example, VXLAN, you create the bridge and then using the VLANs on top of the tunneling device. The IP address management used in this example is a well-bought, which allows you to manage IP addresses across the nodes globally. There are other types of IP address management such as static, which only manages the specific IP addresses, or host local, which is limited to per host as VNs or parts are running. Q-verse uses motors for a number of use cases. So in this use case, we want to separate the networks. So the virtual machines can use the default part network to access Kubernetes native services such as API server and using another network for data management. So by separating the two networks, the VMs can ensure that the traffic from each of the networks will not interfere with each other. For such configuration, we first defined a network attachment definition that describes how the network interface is constructed and how IP management is done. The network attachment definition is referenced in a virtual machines network's API. On the right side of the YAML, the network API supplies a number of types. The part type is a Kubernetes part network. The part type is referenced to the network attachment definition using the format as namespace slash the name. It also supports a number of attachment mechanisms, such as bridge as well as RILV. Once this YAML is applied, the virtual machine YAML is applied. In the background, the virtual launcher part will create a necessary networking and a QVM view environment to configure the VM, so it's just as desired. Allowing the VM to access both the part network and other networks is great for the VMs to access all types of services provided by Kubernetes and other networks. But for security sensitive environments, it does not want the VMs to be exposed on the part network, because we can pin or just attack the VMs without proper authorization. Network policy is surely going to help, but it's not efficient. So we have another configuration for full isolation, where the VMs is completely disconnected from the part network. So if you look at the YAMLs and the configurations, the only difference is that in the virtual machine network's API, the part network is completely removed. Only the motors network stays. In this configuration, when the VM starts, it loses access to the part network. So any network traffic from the Kubernetes part network will not reach the VM. This ensures that the VM is in full isolation in its own VM. And this also saves the IP address from the part network, so it's also efficient. We are going to see the both configurations used in different use cases in Gardner. With that information in mind, now look at some of the diverse network configuration use cases. The first is the high performance network configuration. As you know, the virtual machines are often worked with cloud native storage. That's a provisioned by Rook. Rook is another CNCF project that's recently graduated. It's a storage backend operator that's provisioned set, as well as Apache Cassandra. One of the recent features in Rook is that it allows a self-cluster to use separate network defined by network attachments definition so that the front end, the public network, the self-clients are interacting with, has the best possible bandwidth. And while the cluster network, where the OSDs are communicating with each other to share for the data to balance the data, they are separated from the public network. So in this use case, the VMs and the self-public network reference the same network attachment definition, so that the traffic will be isolated in the same network. In this configuration, they can assure that the traffic is not interacting with other networks and the performance is guaranteed. On a separate occasion, for the full isolation configuration, the VMs are protected in their own VLANs. In this configuration, we use Linux Bridge as the connectivity mechanisms in network attachment definition, with the VLAN number embedded in the definition. Again, for environments that should not support native VLAN tags, you can build up tunneling IP service underneath using VXLANs and create a bridge device on top of the VXLAN. So the VXLAN will emulate a switch trunk that will just tunnel all the VLAN between different endpoints. So this is one of the configurations you can reference for network isolation. Now, let's put our learnings into practice. We will use Gardner and the Kubernetes integration as a case study to show how we can use the two configurations of model C&I to provide the best performance as well as the best isolation. So, we call this Gardner project provides Kubernetes as a service. It's a provision of Kubernetes clusters on a number of infrastructure platforms. It's done so by abstracting the underlying resources including the cloud environments, the infrastructure environments, opening the system, network, and working-nose management and such and such. These abstractions programmatically and administratively allows Gardner to be extended to different platforms. So the Kubernetes cluster working-nose created by Gardner is called shoot. So we have two shoot clusters in this example. The blue shoot cluster consists of infrastructure config that has two networks. One is the shared network. In this case, the shared network refers to the network attachment definition created by Rook for SAP's public network. So the reference here will be, the reference used by namespace RookSaf and namesaf will refers to existing network attachment definition. The VMs will use this network attachment definition to attach to the same cluster as SAP. The Tennis network, on the other hand, provides a set of information that will be used to create a network attachment definition on the fly. So this is its own privacy network attachment definition that will not be used by other clusters. To have another layer of isolation, the NAS attach depth also uses a VLAN1234 to ensure that the VMs are running in isolated VLANs that are not accessible by other VMs on a different attachment. The second shoot cluster, the green cluster, the gray shoot cluster also refers to the same SAP's shared network for high-performance purposes. This creates its own Tennis network by providing a different set of configuration for network attachment definition. The VLAN configuration in this case is different. It's 2345. So by having two network attachment definitions and two VLANs, the green network and blue networks are separated physically and symmetrically as a different Kubernetes cluster. So this just shows the case that the motors configuration used by Qiverse can provide a flexibility for different use cases. Before I start talking about data volume and clone, I must say a few words about the project behind, the containerized data importer. It's among one of my favorite add-ons in Kubernetes. The primary goal is to provide a declarative way to build virtual machine disks. However, you can use it as well to initialize Kubernetes volumes with some data out of the keyword context. CDI includes a custom resource definition that provides a data volume object type. Those objects are an abstraction on top of persistent volume claims and are very helpful in terms of data imports and uploads onto PVC. This is a way to automate virtual machine disks management. Without that, you would have to prepare a PVC that contains the disk image yourself. One of the good outcomes of CDI integration with Qivert is that you can specify a concrete data volume which is tied to the virtual machine lifecycle. You can do it over data volume template in the VM spec. When you delete the virtual machine, the data volume would be destroyed too together with the provisioned storage, so there is no requirement for the user to take care of the cleanup. On the right side of this slide, we can see a sample data volume defined. There we have two interesting parts, source and PVC. The source determines if data is supposed to be cloned from another persistent volume claim or downloaded from some address. In that case, in the source we would have HTTP options with URL value. Below there is a PVC section as the name indicates it's about PVC settings, like what kind of storage class you want to use and how big storage you want to have. So having all these details in place, data volume would create a new persistent volume clone for our disk. The addon makes our lives much easier. I encourage everybody to check it themselves if you haven't yet. I'm going to show the possible user strategies in the next slide. Virtual machines images management. Here we can see two diagrams that show two different strategies of data volume usage. Adhoc and triallocated data volumes. For now let's focus on the first one, the adhoc approach on the left side. As I mentioned in the previous slide, we can download data directly from the internet by changing source from persistent volume claim to HTTP with an appropriate URL. So now considering the scenario where we type data volume to virtual machine by using data volume template in the spec, means each time we create a new virtual machine, each time we download the disk. This can cause many problems if you want to schedule hundreds or thousands of VMs. First, you can have performance issues. You might have quite slow network connection or some rate limitation, even heavy network workload. Let's say you must download 4GB disks for each VM and you run many of those. Second, the endpoint you are using might disappear, causing reliability issues. Somebody could say that instead of downloading stuff from the internet, you could create, let's say, a local HTTP server, I don't know, maybe using nginx and serve images from there. Yes, you could, but that doesn't solve all problems I mentioned in 100%. And you still can cause network latency on your cluster. Now, let's focus on the pre-allocated data volume, as it helps to get rid of problems I spoke. The diagram on the right slide, the pre-allocated data volume that is visible in the middle, is a source for other data volumes. You download the disk image only once and you use the volume as a source for other virtual machines you want to bring to life. This strategy we follow in the gardener-cubivert extension implementation. We get rid of problems I described previously. We reduce network latency. Data volume supports two types of cloning and I'm going to describe this in the next slide. We have two ways of data volume cloning, host-assisted and smart cloning. The first split on the left side shows a diagram of the traditional cloning of persistent volume claim. That is host-assisted. It means there is a data stream from source PVC to target PVC. The entire volume is being copied. It is a traditional heavyweight approach. It is not necessarily needed to weigh storage space and put some additional load on disks just to copy the whole image. On the right side, I show another strategy of volume cloning. It is a feature called smart clone. This is being executed when it's possible. In order to improve the performance of the cloning process, the containerized data importer team introduced smart cloning that uses volume snapshot. Of course, to use such a feature, the CSI plug-in which you use must support snapshots. The YAML structure of the data volume is still the same. The data volume automatically checks if smart cloning is possible. If yes, then it creates a snapshot of the source PVC. Next, the snapshot is being used to bring a new persistent volume claim. Finally, the snapshot itself is going to be deleted. Additionally, if you want to use the feature, the requirement is to make sure that source PVC is in the same namespace as the target PVC. The source and target PVCs are in the same storage class. And finally, there must be a snapshot class associated with the storage class. Depending on the storage backend, you can really benefit from this. Especially when snapshots are implemented as copy on write, which is often. On the next slide, I'm going to show you in detail how we deal with disks and volumes management in the Gardener Kubevert extension. It should cluster that I was talking about at the beginning is defined as a custom resource object. You can see an example on the left side. The should YAML definition. As you can see, there is a worker section where users can define volumes. The first one, the volume object spec. It defines a root disk of virtual machine and the second one, data volumes, which are blank additional data volumes disks. The worker pool definition is processed by the worker controller in the Kubevert extension. Based on that, an appropriate specification of virtual machine is prepared. The size parameter is an obvious indication of the storage size. And the type determines which storage class should be used. Somebody could ask why didn't you name the parameter storage class instead of type? We didn't because Gardener supports many cloud providers and this is the API. Then, following the arrows, we can see that volumes are translated to data volume templates. So data volume is closely related to the virtual machine lifecycle. By default, the extension uses a relocated data volume approach, which means that the first virtual machine created will download the image and other virtual machines from the worker pool will clone the volume. We use blank data volumes to provide additional disk and storage space. These are completely blank disks and it's up to the user to handle them. One way would be to run cloud init and format the disk according to their needs. Although I must admit that this is not yet possible to pass users cloud init scripts in the extension. The reason is that we are using cloud init to join nodes and we still have to decide how we want to deal with the custom part of cloud init. But for sure, at some point, this feature will land in the extension. On that slide, I'm going to talk about highly isolated clusters and how to upload these images there. It happens that customers demand highly isolated environments. Not so long ago at Kubermatic we had such a case and environment where we could not pull keyword images directly from the internet. There was only a bastion host where we could access a cluster and expose a few services outside. But still, those services were only visible to the bastion host. Each port couldn't reach the internet. Somehow we had to provide virtual machine images to the cluster. We could create a local image repository. However, with containerized data in Porter, it is quite easy to upload image. We can benefit from that and prepare data volume which will be a source for others. The upload is done over CD8 upload proxy. First, users have to expose upload proxy service and it must be accessible from outside the cluster. Next, it is required to create a data volume with source set to upload. Similar like on the slide. And finally, we must request an upload token that can be done over upload token request custom resource. The CRD of the object comes from the project itself. When all dimension steps are complete, it's time to upload an image. You can obtain the generated token from the status section of the CR. Then, you have to pass the token to an HTTP request with a disk image. There are two ways of upload. Synchronous and asynchronous. The synchronous connection can be closed unexpectedly because of the conversion or resizing process that can take some time. With an asynchronous approach, the connection will be closed as soon as the disk image has been transmitted. However, you have to check yourself if the process of resizing and conversion is finished. For more details and examples, I encourage you to visit the containerized data in the portal github page. It's a very nice project which solves many issues regarding volumes and disk management. This concludes our talk. We are so excited to share with you the optimizations in Qtiverse using modules and data volumes for high performance and high security configurations. There are even more features in Qtiverse including the steps you will remember with storage and networks. We are looking forward to share with you in the future opportunities.


So thank you very much for the award of this research gift and with a focus on pediatric nerve and muscle diseases as a clinician and a researcher I witnessed first hand the impact of muscle weakness, disability and shortened life expectancy in children with inherited nerve and muscle disorders and in fact many people in this room wouldn't be familiar with such disorders as spinal musculatrophy which is one of the most common that I would see is the leading inherited genetic cause of infant death. The treatment landscape has recently been transformed with the availability of the first and only treatment for spinal musculatrophy which is a form of motor neuronesies affecting children and what that has really shown is that there are so many more uncertainties now we have a treatment and prospects for future care so this research gift is fundamentally linked to the goals of the Brain Foundation in focusing on treatment, improving understanding of diseases treatment mechanisms to improve the treatment that we deliver to our patients to improve their outcomes. So essential to ongoing treatment in neuropathy and future developments is the availability of tissues and human biospecimens and amongst all these disorders it's absolutely essential to establish the research infrastructures to ensure that collection of such tissues is of high quality that it can be used for the best possible research in the future and to be able to manage the high quality samples and link it to high quality clinical data. So this study will be used to implement the research infrastructure to be able to establish such a bank for specimens and this will be very important in applying the new technologies across neuroscience research to be able to understand the mechanisms of disease the mechanisms of treatment and how to measure the success of such ones to be able to improve treatments and really apply innovative technologies and really expands the capacity for research across pediatric nerve diseases in the future so it is deeply appreciated and I think it will be a legacy for many years to come thank you.