Thank you for joining us for another OpenShift Commons briefing. My name is Michael Waite from Red Hat, and we are bringing you our special Veterans Day edition of the Operator Hours show. Today we have Mark Brewer and Hugh McKee from Lightben. And Mark and Hugh are going to be talking about fueling digital transformation with cloud-native applications.  Hi everyone, my name is Hugh again and I'm a developer advocate for Lightben on the ACA platform. So my role is pretty enviable, I've been a developer for many decades, but now I get to talk to people about ACA technology, about Lightben technology, I speak at conferences around the world, do lots of videos, do lots of events like this. And also I get to write a lot of cool demos with, my favorite thing is adding some eye candy. So that's going to be showing you later on in this session, is a couple of demos of ACA running in OpenShift environments in Kubernetes with some fun eye candy pieces to it.  How does that work? This is my battle station they call it, you know, some of the stuff I've been working on. We'll be seeing some of it in a little bit. Excellent, we're looking forward to that. Mark, over to you. How are you today? Good. Like Michael said, my name is Mark Brewer, I'm the CEO of Lightben, been in this open source industry for quite a while, actually 20 years now, I think 21 years. My first company in the open source space was Covalent and Covalent was the company behind the Apache web server and the Tomcat server like container. I actually had an opportunity to work with Red Hat back then as well. But I've also, from there I should say I went to Spring Source, so I was part of the Spring team that took Spring framework and the Tomcat product and brought it to market and then of course that company got acquired by VMware back in 2009. And then a few years later became a spin out of VMware, it was pivotal. And so anyway, I stayed with Spring Source until, I'm sorry, I stayed with VMware until I came here in 2012. Looking forward to talking about my time. So you've been in the open since 2012? Yep. Okay. The company was founded in 2011, I joined about a year later. Okay. And Lightben, bending of light, is there a symbolism in the company name or did you decide to just pick a name that was easy to pronounce and people wouldn't misspell it or how did they come up with the name Lightben? We have, a lot of our partners have insect names and some of them have farm animal names and so why Lightben? Yeah, well actually we weren't Lightben when we were founded. We were Typesafe. And Typesafe, the name to type safety, which is one of the things that Scala, the language that were the vendor behind, provides type safety. And so the name had a lot of meaning initially when the company was all about Scala and early on with the product we focused on Scala developers only. Just to side note, today and actually for the last seven years, Java has been our primary language that our customers utilized. But anyway, the company was Typesafe for its first five years of existence. We changed the name in 2016, went through a long exercise of trying to come up with a trademarkable name and a name that wasn't restrictive like Typesafe was. Typesafe was all about Scala and the company provides the full platform. As I said, it's targeted at the Java audience more than it is even the Scala audience. Regardless of that, we also struggled with people spelling the name wrong. Typesafe frequently became typeface and we never were a font company and never intended to be a font company. But, Mark, I've been here for 19 years at Red Hat. And I completely get it about the spelling. I mean, Red Hat's two words. It's capital R, capital H, and people make it be one word with lower case H. So I completely get it. Matter of fact, we actually went through a huge logo rebranding exercise about two years ago. And it's probably our 18 month project to kind of make the logo and the brand a little bit more consistent with modern day. And so I completely get it how important the right branding is and picking a name that people don't misspell. Yeah. Well, we accomplished that with Lightben. The other thing that we were trying to accomplish is to find a name that was not only easy to remember and easy to spell, but didn't limit us. It wasn't tied to just one piece of technology like TypeSafe was. So I'm pleased with the name, but it doesn't have any other specific meaning. Obviously Lightbending is a real thing. It's difficult to do. It takes a pretty big mass to actually bend light, but it can happen. Mostly it's just a cool name and, like I said, isn't hard to spell. Okay. So that's how you got in the business by sort of transforming the company and so forth. What about your relationship with Red Hat? We've had a longstanding relationship with Red Hat and even prior to that with IBM. We've worked with IBM on a number of fronts. In fact, they're actually an investor in our company. So our relationship with Red Hat extends through a number of relationships or areas in the relationship, specifically around OpenShift. So we have, you can find our technology on the OpenShift Commons. Find us on the Marketplace as well, the Red Hat Marketplace. We just last year, I guess it's this year, not last year, sorry, won the Lightbender, I'm sorry, Red Hat's North American Partner Award. And we've certainly found many customers that are using OpenShift with our technology. In fact, I'm going to be talking about that here a little bit later. But we have quite a few customers who have been leveraging the OpenShift technology along with Lightbender's platform. So I'd like to put in a gratuitous plug for Lightbender. You folks have been a member in good standing of the OpenShift Commons community for quite some time. It's not trivial. You mentioned that you folks have an application that works with OpenShift and you're in the Red Hat Marketplace operated by IBM. I just wanted to make sure that people understood that that's not a trivial statement. That's not a logo swap and putting it on a website saying I'm affiliated with some program. You folks have been working our technical teams for quite some time to build and test your containers. And most recently, your Red Hat operator. So you folks have a Red Hat certified operator for OpenShift. And that enables companies then to be listed with a commercial offering in the Red Hat Marketplace operated by IBM. So I just wanted to point that out that at the end of the day, the story for customers is people who want to run Lightbender on any of the Red Hat platforms, including OpenShift, can know that, you know, for the best day to supportability is assured because of the engineering integration that we've done together between our companies. So I thought I'd thrill that out there. Yeah, I appreciate that. And we appreciate the partnership. Well, it's all about doing it for the end customer. So nobody likes surprises. They want to try and run something in a production environment, especially now when we have, you know, everything's multi-cloud and distributed everywhere. So it's all about, you know, enhancing the customer's value. That's my team's chart anyways. Okay, so talk a little bit more about Lightbender, like what it is, what it does. I know who was bringing it to Aka. You know, is it one product or they're multiple products or they're, how does it work? Yeah, before we jump into the product, I'll give you a quick history. So the company, as I mentioned, is started in 2011. The objective of the founders, that's Martin Odarisky and Jonas Bonair, was to help companies build distributed based systems and bring it to a broader audience, a broader audience than previously could have built these kind of complex systems. Thinking back to, you know, 2011, this predates cloud native as a term or even something we've thought about. But that's essentially what they were envisioning, is that people are going to build systems that need to run in the cloud, an environment that's obviously distributed and not controlled by the developers or even the ops folks that might run those applications. So let's shift gears and talk about our technology and how it's being used. The use cases that are highlighted here, we'll talk about some real customers and they'll all be ones that are running on open shift. So real-time financial processes, obviously this can be not only time sensitive, but it also has to be really performant in that it can handle mass volumes of data and be able to process it near real-time. Hyper personalization, being able to actually deliver contextually aware personalization in near real-time. Real-time analytics, similar to the financial processes, just being able to process a lot of data and come up with answers in a very short period of time. IoT, interesting use cases in Internet of Things type projects. Everything from Tesla with their power wall and virtual grid to companies that are just tracking devices and trying to keep, collect all that information that comes off of the device and predict whether there might be a failure or something needs to be replaced or repaired. Simply application modernization, I'll talk about one customer where it was all about that. They had a very old legacy system that was getting harder and harder to maintain and they just were looking for a way to bring it to newer technology, but make it easier for developers to continue to maintain that application. And then finally, e-commerce, we see a lot of new e-commerce platforms built using the Lightman technology. Let's talk about some customers. Actually, let's first talk about the platform. So you asked me about the product. We sell the ACA platform and ACA data pipelines. Essentially, it's one product. It's the ACA platform. They're just as two personalities, if you will, or personas. One is focused on delivering what you need to build reactive microservices and get them into production. That's the ACA platform at its core. And then ACA data pipelines brings in streaming technologies, both our own streaming technology, ACA streams, as well as some third party spark and flink and others that are widely adopted in the market. But in the ACA data pipelines product or persona, you can build streamlets that become core or integrated into the application that you're creating. And like I said, we'll talk about a couple of use cases there. All of this, of course, runs natively on OpenShift and takes advantage of features and functionality that OpenShift and Kubernetes provides. So what does it deliver? Well, delivers performance. Obviously, with the use cases I highlighted, that should be a foregone conclusion. Reliability, something that you don't find in a lot of platforms. And more importantly, you don't find developers thinking about it as part of their core construct, that being embracing failure, that something might crash, that something might go down and you need it to be able to heal itself so that there is no exposed or experience from the users that something has failed. Scalability, one of the things we're really proud of is that LightBin technology and specifically ACA is used to run some of the most highly performant and biggest web applications out there in the market. Whether that's Spotify, Shopify, parts of Lyft, Twitter, LinkedIn, all built on top of the ACA platform. So we use these every day. Don't think about them as being something that ever fails or has issues. But you have to also recognize the amount of processing, the amount of users that are accessing these services in real time. And system just runs or just performs. Next, efficiency. Efficiency is obviously important. You want to find ways to utilize your cloud infrastructure, whether it's running on Kubernetes or not, you want to make sure that it's taking advantage or only utilizing what it needs. And in a Kubernetes open shift world, highly efficient. You'll run these things in a very small footprint with scale when you need it or availability when you need it. Real time, talked about this already, but streaming of data and processing of data in near real time, where you can actually make business critical decisions, whether that be AI or machine learning based system or personalized customer experience, be able to deliver that in real time or near real time. Let's talk about some customer cases. First one, Brighthouse. This is Brighthouse, by the way, is a spin out from, I'll take it because we're talking here, but they became a public company a couple of years ago, spun out of one of the large insurance MetLife, there we go, I knew I'd get it. And the problem they were trying to solve was to reduce, not just risk, but reduce the amount of time to process mass amounts of data to come up with answers on risks, whether or not this was an insurance policy that had a high risk or a lower risk. They were able to accomplish that and reduce it from 70 minutes or more down to less than 10 seconds. Now this doesn't just mean that they can get an answer faster, it also means that they can run these models much more frequently. So they can evaluate risk at a much more rapid and frequent basis. Yeah, so with USAA, another Red Hat Open Ship customer that was looking to improve the time it took to send out messages through all their different channels. If you don't know USAA is an insurance provider for military families, and I think they have 10 million members or more, and one of the things that they were struggling with was being able to interact with their member base in a way in which you could get information when it was relevant to them. So if they got in a car accident, they wanted to place a claim or let their insurance agent know, take a picture of the accident and send it directly back to the persons that would authorize a claim. Well that used to take days, now you can do it in real time. They replaced their entire under core communication system that allows them to communicate with their members via email, via SMS, via actually phone and the like. So this application was started in 2017 or started being developed in 2017, went live in 2018. Their development team was able to get this into production in less than six months. That was something that they didn't expect, they thought this was going to be a much longer project. I mentioned this earlier, personalization, hyper personalization in the cruising industry. When cruising happens again, obviously cruise ships haven't been going out anywhere for the last nine months. It's going to take a while for sure. Here it is, it is. The Norwegian and we're actually working with a number of cruise line companies that use our technology, all for the same type of application where it's about personalizing the experience of somebody who goes on a cruise. And that starts from the time you book the cruise, whether you do it on the web or over the phone or via their app. They actually have an app where you can book your cruise. But more importantly, it's the experience once you're on the cruise. Booking your reservations, whether it's for dinner or for an excursion, if you're going to go out on a snorkeling trip and you realize the weather is bad, you need to change that excursion to something else. Well, this experience, this personalized experience happens on the ship for everybody. And in the past, before they had this, you used to have to book all of your reservations in advance and days trying to get on the phone to change something if the weather looked like it was going to be bad. Now it all happens in real time via the application. And like I said, this is something that we've seen with a number of the cruise line industries. Norwegian has been a customer of ours and a customer of Red Hats for a number of years. Mark, how does that work? I'm not quite sure I get it. I get it that you don't have to book everything in advance, but how specifically does Light Bend and your products, ACCA, actually improve that the user experience of people on a cruise ship? I'm not picking it up. So they built an app that you experience via the phone or a tablet if you've got an iPad or something. And that application allows you to keep track of not only all the things you've booked but anything else that's available that you might want to try out. All the way down to your dinner reservations, you can even find out if there's a long line at a particular restaurant on the ship, but you don't want to go there for dinner or lunch because the line's too long. So it's all via an application. And you can also set up alerts so that for your dinner reservations, if you want to be notified that there's going to be a long line, then it'll alert you so you don't even bother going to that particular restaurant. Does that make sense? Okay, I know that Hugh is going to be giving us a demo later on as well. So based on all the eye candy that he has prepared, I think it will be something pretty interesting. Yep, I've got a couple more use cases I thought I would share and then we'll turn it over to Hugh and have him give the demo of the product. Rogers Telecommunication, they're a Canadian telecommunication company. This was all about reducing costs but also delivering a much better experience on their e-commerce site. If you go to Rogers.com, that site and the app where you can buy a phone, you can order services, whether you want to change your cell phone coverage or you want to add a new family member or change something else on your plan, all of that's done via an app that was built using the light and technology. So the most important thing they were looking for was to reduce their footprint in infrastructure while making sure the system stayed up all the time and obviously that's a requirement for any e-commerce site, anything that you want to run your business through. So they were able to accomplish this by using light event technology, using ACA in our frameworks. The reduced footprint has saved them nearly 40% per year in their bill for infrastructure. So the amount of footprint that they were running their old system on versus what they're running it on now has shrunk by 40%. And then lastly, I think I have one more, ING. ING, if you're not familiar, that's a large international bank based out of the Netherlands. They have offices all over the world. They were looking to replace a very old cobalt based system and some of us have been around long enough to remember programming and cobalt. It's hard to find cobalt programmers. It's hard to maintain cobalt based systems. So this is a swift payment system. Anybody who's been in the banking industry knows what this is and has experienced with swift payment systems. They decided they needed to replace it and replace it with something that not only was more modern and could be maintained, but would allow them to add functionality in a more rapid fashion. The old cobalt based system, I'm sure it hasn't changed much over the years. They're not done with this. They're in process. This is also an open shift customer. Their plan is to roll this out at the beginning of next year. We'll see how many cobalt programmers are left in the market. There's probably a few. There's still a few. There's still people who are writing applications for open VMS. I know. Hard to believe. You see the beautiful open shift console here, right? Wonderful. All right. So I'm going to be flipped over to an app. So I'm going to show you two demo apps, both running Aaka, both running in a Kubernetes environment. One's running on my laptop using open shift code ready containers. It's a developer tool. For me as a developer, I want some kind of a Kubernetes environment. So this first app is behind the scenes. I'm actually running in an Amazon environment, but behind the scenes, there's two Aaka microservices and they're both running a number of pods in a cluster. So the second demo app, I'll show you the anatomy of this thing. But here I just wanted to show you kind of a little bit more realistic type of an application. So the user interface of this demo app is a map. It's like a Google map. The concept is that this is simulating an IoT type of an application. So these markers that are distributed around the world on the map are showing locations of these simulated IoT devices that have created using this demo app. And the real goal of this app is to create some load. We're trying to push the parameters of how hard can we push Aaka? How hard can we push in open shift Kubernetes environment? And probably the biggest one is how hard can we push the backend databases that this thing interacts with?  And I'm going to zoom into the area around London. And as I get closer, you start to see where there's these highlighted regions. And what's happening here is this is showing where these hypothetical IoT devices have been placed. So each IoT device is in a certain region on the map that's bounded by a rectangular area that falls within kind of a top left bottom right longitude and latitude. But if you... How does Aaka know that? Are the IoT devices phoning home to a central... Yes, exactly. Yeah, great question. So what this demo app is doing is that one service... I'm using that to simulate the outside world, like IoT devices that are sending in telemetry messages into another services. So this is what's happening here. The second service is receiving these telemetry messages saying things like, hey, create a device at this location on the map. Is the device happy? Is the device sad, kind of a state change, or delete a device? So this is a demo app. It's intended for developers to take and implement or get running on their own, say in code-ready containers, play around with it and learn about Aaka, but kind of a more realistic example. And the JavaScript and everything that I'm using to make this map work and so on is something I wrote that's included with the demo app. So the developer can take all this and make it work. But on the backend system, there's... Aaka is the actor model on the JVM. And actors are kind of glorified objects. So if you're a developer of any kind, or if you heard about software development, commonly you hear about object-oriented programming, well, actors are kind of very much like objects. They're written in the same way that objects are written, but they have a kind of unique characteristic. And the unique characteristic is the only way you interact with an actor is you send it a message, an asynchronous message, versus how you would interact with, say, a normal object written in Python or Java or something like that. So in this system, what I'm zooming in, but as you can see as I'm mousing around here, moving their mouse, it's kind of pulling data from the back end. But there's 1,024 devices. So in this region that I'm over right now. So on the backend of the system, there's 1,024 actors that are alive that know the state each individual device. Now, in this map on the bottom right, it's showing that there's like 223,000 devices that have been created. So what that means is there's 223,000 live actors, kind of hot in memory. They know the state of every single device on the map worldwide. And in this view here, I'm looking at around 26,000 devices. And the idea is that the concept, and we got this from the folks at Tesla, they're doing some really cool stuff with ACA and batteries, and they coined the term digital twin. So for every physical device out in the real world, like a battery or a book detector or a streetlight or whatever your IoT system is doing, on the back end, there's a digital twin, which is an actor, which is kind of responsible for echoing the state of those physical devices out in the real world, one per one per one per one. And that's what the system is doing. Where do the operators that you folks built for OpenShift, where do those operators live? So if you think of there as like an AI, artificial intelligent daemon, if you will, that allows apps to self heal and helps with configuration management and so forth, where do the operators fit into this whole scheme here? And with ACA, the main thing is for deployment of the applications to the environment is what we use the operators for. So one of the things that I can do with this app is, like I said, it's kind of a test bed for demonstrating the technology. There's a lot of source code for developers to look at and things like that. It's kind of fun to play with interactively here is I can kind of do things at scale. So for example, I'm going to create a bunch of devices and I can do through this UI, I can create some devices and it's not like one device at a time. I'm kind of backed away from the surface of the earth a little bit. I'm at a level above the earth where this region can hold and it's just by design of the application can hold around 4,000 devices. So if I can pick a region and if I click it, that sends a request to the backend system and it kind of goes through some gyrations but then what we see is those individual devices get created. So what happened was that the first service got this request, a single request. It cascaded that into 4,000 gRPC messages over the network to the second service. That second service got those 4,000 requests as if 4,000 devices suddenly came online over the course of about four seconds.  So there's a lot going on behind the scenes that made it all that work but it runs pretty fast. You know, that was 4,000 pretty quickly. I can do my little bit. I'll do it once more just for fun and create 4,000. I can zoom in to kind of watch them happen in a little bit more granular scale. So you can see the devices start to show up and it's done. So there's now another 4,000 devices. So I can zoom out more and generate more traffic but I want to go to the second demo. All right, so this is another demo that's running in OpenShift code-ready containers on my laptop. The first one was running, you know, a real cloud environment in Amazon in Kubernetes. But this one is structurally behind the scenes exactly what that other application was doing. And it's a way to kind of show a cluster, an ACA cluster in action. So this is showing kind of live things happening within this little demo application. The scale is on the map. I was dealing with hundreds of thousands of things. Here I'm dealing with hundreds of things. It's scaled way down because I can't render hundreds of thousands of things like this. Can you help me with something? So the ACA is sort of the core brain, if you will, right? And all the IoT devices that are out there, let's, I don't know, you know, what they might be, there needs to be some kind of a relationship set up between the companies, the people, and the apps that are running in those IoT devices to get them to talk to the ACA infrastructure, correct? Correct. So how does that work? Does your company basically, you know, sell your services to all these IoT vendors for them to be able to have all their information phone home into your systems? No, it's more of we're giving them the tools to build those kinds of systems. We're not giving like an out-of-the-box IoT system, but we're giving them the kind of the core tools to do that. And so building things like authenticating new customers and allowing customers to set up devices that would phone home to, you know, the back end system, those types of things are things that have to be implemented in the application, but that's not part of what we provide. We provide them the tools to build those kinds of applications. Okay. So in the case that Mark Brewer was showing there with, I think it was the Norwegian Cruise Lines customer story, this infrastructure that we're looking at right here would be the infrastructure of the Norwegian Cruise Lines organization. And all the little blue dots, all the, you know, IoT devices would be all of their stuff that they use to run their business. Yes. So, and the demo app, the map app, where, you know, the IoT devices, each one of these little blue circles represents an individual physical device. If this was a shopping cart app, if somebody used ACA to build the classic shopping cart app, every one of these blue circles would be somebody actively interacting with a shopping cart, you know, your shopping cart, my shopping cart, somebody else's shopping cart. These little blue circles represent real actors running in the system. In this demo, again, it's like I got a hundred or so of these little blue circles running right now. In the map app, I had 225,000 of them. Right. So the idea though is that the, we're making it easy for developers to write the business logic for handling, you know, the manipulations of the devices or the shopping cart or whatever the application has to do in a very distributed environment. So on the perimeter of this circle, I'm showing a bunch of, you know, a hundred or so, the count is down at the bottom here, this entity count, it says 102. It'll change because these things are coming and going because the system's actually, you know, percolating along here. Next level up is another kind of actor, which is shards, they're called shards. And if with databases, for example, you know, sharding in databases is a way to kind of delegate work out to multiple places. And this is exactly what the shards are doing here. We're using shards to distribute work across the cluster. Pardon me. Poor functions of spanner, right? Was how they, how they grew the spanner database was sharding it? Yes. And that's exactly what's going on here. That, you know, in this case, I've got, the number of shards is fixed, you know, the actual number. You know, in this case, there's 15 in the map app, but there is like about a thousand shards. And, you know, to scale the hundreds of thousands of actors. But the shards are basically, their work is really just to distribute, you know, work across the cluster because the big circles here represent pods running in Kubernetes in like in my OpenShift environment and in my laptop or in a real Kubernetes environment running somewhere in the cloud or in an on-premise OpenShift environment. So right now I'm running a cluster of three pods. And those pods, of course, contain a container and those containers are running a Java virtual. Those Java virtual machines in use Aka and the Aka code allows things to collaborate with each other. But it also gives us things like, I want to kind of show you resiliency and scale. So I want to, if I, I'm going to tag one of these entities by clicking it and it should turn red. All right. Just so I tag it. So I'm going to force this pod to stop this pod 19 and do that just by clicking this up here. So it should shut down in a moment. And what we should see is this entity that I've tagged as long as, as well as a shard will jump to one of these other pods. There it goes. Beautiful. So right away, this is where it recovers. It's like, for me as a developer writing to code that does, you know, handles the entity logic, I had nothing to do with the redistribution of my code around the cluster that was all handled by Aka. One moment my, you know, that the instance for the year shopping cart was running on one pod and the next moment is running on another pod. It recovers itself. It just kind of brushes failure off. It's like, yep, expected that. We know pods come and go. That's just a fact of life. And it just deals with it. So, and then the meantime, the beauty of running in a Kubernetes environment is that for a moment we were down to two pods, but I told Kubernetes I want three pods in this environment. So Kubernetes saw that there was a pod down and it started one up and it came back. So the Kubernetes is like the perfect, perfect environment for Aka clusters. Aka cluster has been around for a while and it pre-takes Kubernetes. I used to Aka clusters when I used to work at HP and IT and we had, you know, just like virtual machines that we really, really wanted something like this, you know, a beautiful orchestration environment. It's just Aka was waiting for something like Kubernetes.  I can do that by scaling up my load generator. Which is just some pods. So what you should see is the, these, on the top right here, these are nodes or pods running in another cluster. And all they're doing is generating traffic that's flowing into this service. You know, it's generating HTTP requests that are flowing in and I'll show you. So these four more spun up. And now the density of the entities is increasing. So I'm, you know, kind of trying to simulate increasing the load on the system. So now the stress, say, on each of the pods running in this cluster, each of the three pods has gone up. Of course, this is at a very small scale, but say this was, you know, a much higher scale. We were, we went from around 130 or so, I think entities and now we're up around 180. So, of course, with Kubernetes, you can set that up to auto scale, but you can also manually scale. So that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to go back over to the open shift also. And I'm going to scale up my ACA cluster here. So what we should see is two more pods will show up to which contain two more containers, which are running to more JVMs. Those containers will spin up. Those JVMs will light up ACA. They reach out and say, Hey, I want to join the cluster. Here's what the one just came in. And then the second one should come in. What you see also is that the shards are some of the shards are automatically getting redistributed to these new pods. So now we have some extra processing capacity thanks to Kubernetes. And ACA sees this and this is part of the sharding strategy. It goes, Ah, I got more capacity. Let me move stuff over there. So ACA recognized that more pods came into the cluster and said, I'm going to go and redistribute the shards for you. Yes. The zero code that I wrote that makes that happen as a developer, you know, I developed this little demo application. I developed the map application. I don't run any of the code that does all this rocket science redistribution and stuff like that. That's handled by ACA. And I just have to follow kind of a very simple, prescriptive approach for setting up the way my application works. And I get this kind of out of the box. Where do the limitations start to come? Meaning like if you went back to the OpenShift console and you just cranked it up to be absolutely monstrous, is that something at some point ACA says enough is enough? No, actually, I mean, I just heard, I think it was yesterday at another conference that somebody recently was playing with ACA a cluster scaling to thousands of nodes, thousands of pods. So the scale can get pretty high. I think before this, I'd heard things like ACA clusters running with say 2,000 nodes, things like that. I think more typically though, you see clusters run with 10, 20, 50, 100 nodes, those types of things, but we can scale. You think about it, Fortnite, the game runs on ACA. And when there are all these active players at the same time, it needs to scale to some pretty big numbers. I don't think we ever got a final number from the Mahoney nodes, but it's in the thousands. And when people aren't playing, it just shrinks down. So it's elastic. And therefore, their cost of running the system is only high when they have a lot of people using it. What about application monitoring of the devices all the way out on the outside perimeter? Does ACA help with that? Or do you integrate with other tools from other APM vendors? ACA is managing that. You, I think the question was on monitoring, providing metrics on the devices. Oh, yeah, sorry. Yeah, we've got, as a commercial offering, monitoring that provides instrumentation, very specific to ACA, the JVM and so on, that can be integrated in with some of the more common tools, the application monitoring tools. So yeah, it does that. But as far as things like when a node fails or a node spins up and we want to redistribute work across it and the decisions to do that, that's all ACA itself, the open source ACA of the box that does that. Yes, telemetry is part of our commercial project. And telemetry plugs into APM tools like Datadog and New Relic and others that are out in the market. The one last thing I want to show you is kind of the flow in the system. These extra lines that appeared when I clicked this one circle, you can think of this top right as a load balancer, just a load balancer in Kubernetes. And these HTTP requests are coming in from this load balancer into an HTTP endpoint that's running in this JVM, this one JVM here. And it's getting requests in to send messages to specific entities. So some of those requests are to entities or entity actors that are running within the same JVM as where the HTTP requests landed, but many others are in JVMs that are distributed across the cluster. So all the routing of these requests is handled by ACA itself. So as a developer, it's really easy, all I have to do is I write the code that kind of receives the incoming, say, HTTP requests, maybe some JSON or whatever it is, create an object which represents some message that I want to send off to an entity actor. And I identify the entity by some ID that I want to send this message to. And all the routing to either local or remote off to another node across the network is handled by ACA itself. It's all called location transparency. The location of the entity actors is completely transparent to the code. So when I write my code, I'm writing it as if we're running in a single machine, but it's actually running in a cluster of machines. When I turn them all on, you can see all this flow coming in from the load balancer. And it's just kind of a spaghetti bowl, but it's showing all the distribution of all these incoming messages around 20 messages per second are coming in this little demo app that are just getting distributed all across the cluster. And it doesn't matter where the HTTP request comes in. We'll always route it to the correct entity actor no matter where that thing is. And that allows us to do something with state because a very common pattern for people to develop applications is called a stateless type of an application. And the reason they do stateless is that it's hard to do stateful in a distributed environment. But this is exactly what ACA excels at because it has this very powerful mechanism for distributing messages across a distributed environment, which means that we can have stateful actors, which means with stateful actors, we can do things like reduce the load on databases, which means the applications can scale to higher levels of performance. That's really cool. It's been really helpful, too, for me. Excellent. Excellent. Yeah, this visualization has been fun. And again, these are things that we make available. Just stuff I wrote for developers to take, play with, maybe show their team, get excited about ACA or see how ACA works. And like I said, have a little bit of eye candy. I love doing this eye candy stuff. That was actually great for me because when you were talking about the Norwegian cruise lines and the cruise ship, I was kind of struggling to figure out, okay, so how exactly does ACA fit in there and tie all this together? But now I get it. When you're running these large, complex businesses that are mobile and moving around the world, I couldn't imagine trying to manage a business like that without something like what that you folks provide. You couldn't do it. Well, there's even a more challenging aspect in Norwegian or any cruise line use case. That is that they aren't always connected to the internet. They may be out at sea and they may not have good coverage. The satellite coverage isn't good or they're too far from shore to get the wireless connections there. So the ship itself is a data center. And that data center has ACA running and has pods of ACA running. But when it's close enough and it has internet connectivity, it expands to the internet. In other words, it uses Amazon, I think, as their provider. But regardless, it literally behaves just like that visual graphic that you were seeing there from Hue, where all of a sudden there's another pod available. Now I've got the internet so I can start using it to process these things. But when the ship is out too far away from the internet or too far away from the shore or satellite coverage, it still works. Everything works. We were talking about, I mentioned people are still using OpenVMS. I used to work for digital. I used to help software vendors port their apps to Alpha, Alpha NT, Digital Unix, OpenVMS. And there were tools out there made by computer associates and BMC and others that were kind of doing something, and correct me if I'm wrong, kind of like what ACA is doing now in a distributed multi-cloud world. Is that a fair analogy that some of those more legacy vendors were doing it in a data center, but now there's applications like ACA that can take that same type of functionality and have it running on multi-cloud, whether you're in Amazon, GKE, or on-prem? Yes. I don't know if you want to make a comment about that. On steroids. Because I was there. I worked at HP when I was kind of technical sales and digital was our biggest competitor by far back in those days. And this is just to a new level. And one thing I wanted to say was the big challenge we have for people going to the cloud, just like before, was getting them to unlearn what they know from pre-cloud and learn how to really use the cloud. And I think one of the strongest things about ACA is that you're kind of forced without a lot of pain and suffering to unlearn a lot of your old habits, adopt these new habits, and you get really where you're really, really using the cloud.   It's just massively cloud native compared to what most people seem to be doing, kind of bringing forward, oh yeah, we're going to just build our stateless microservices on Kubernetes and all good, right? It's like, well, no, you're not really taking advantage of all the really awesome things you get with things like bringing open shift, bringing the cloud on-premise to USA, for example, and allowing them to really take advantage of the power that they're getting, not doing the old things anymore, doing the new things. And application modernization is not just buzzword bingo. I mean, it's what everybody needs to be doing. Mark, we talked about some of how old we are. We talked about present day things with Norwegian cruise line, but if the state of computing has changed so much since back in the day to now, what's it going to be like in 24 months from now? Yeah, great question. I don't have a crystal ball, but I will say that there is a number of movements that we're both a part of and watching very carefully, specifically around abstraction, making it easier to build these complicated systems. If you think about all the configurability and what frameworks provide you or provide a developer, it gives you a lot of power, but it also takes a lot of work for the developer and even for the ops folks when they put those things into production. We see a world where in 24 months, maybe much sooner, where companies are going to look at serverless, look at ways of abstracting complexity and therefore losing some of the configurability, but giving it up in exchange for rapid development and honestly, something that I don't have to worry about that literally has been operated by the cloud providers, the service itself just runs. I just write the business logic and deploy it and all the rest of it's handled for me. We've launched a project called Cloud State and we're going to be launching a service called ACA serverless and that's all about abstracting that complexity and making it much easier to build these complex distributed systems. I think that's not just Leitman that's driving towards that. You see other vendors as well, including IBM Red Hat, providing technologies to make it easier to build cloud native based systems and not put a lot of the work on the developer. And we have an OpenShift serverless offer as well. Serverless also could really just mean somebody else's servers. Unfortunately, the term is not well defined and overused. And you need operating systems and kernels to make computers run. It's just where are the servers? I guess I didn't say it very clearly, but the simplest way of describing serverless, at least in our context, is abstracting all that complexity and configuration stuff you have to do. So there's less work. This makes it easier. Sorry, go ahead. I was just saying less drama. All the drama of trying to get things working, you know, you go to, I mean, I kind of look at the world today in three areas. You know, there's pre Kubernetes, there's Kubernetes, and there's post Kubernetes, which is serverless. And it's all about abstraction. You know, that Kubernetes is a huge abstraction layer that removes so much complexity that we had to deal with, say, in that, you know, when we were dealing with real machines or virtual machines. So now we have this new abstraction in Kubernetes. And then serverless takes it to the next level of abstraction where I don't even care about things like pods anymore. And I have no idea about machines. What all I'm doing is saying, I will spend up to this much, you know, things like that, you know, I will pay for this much compute power and IoT operations and how you do it, I don't care. I just want my app to run. I want it to scale. When things break, I don't want to even hear about it. Don't give me any drama. I just want to focus on the heart and soul of my application. You know, what's the business logic? What are the features that I want to implement? Well, we're coming up on the top of the hour. We have a couple of minutes left here. If I called your director of VP of marketing, would that person be saying, oh, my gosh, I can't believe you were on there for an hour, Mark Brewer, and why didn't you talk about the phone? Let's stop that call from happening right now. Yeah, so to engage with light, Ben, it's pretty simple. We obviously provide a lot of open source technology that people take advantage of. But when it comes to engaging with the company, it's all about helping you with your project, making sure you're successful at building those applications. And they meet your business requirements, whatever those business objectives were, whether it's transforming your business to something new or adapting to this new online world where we're not doing as much physically in person as we used to. Those projects, those business objectives, we want to see them succeed. And so you can find out about light, Ben, by going to our website, find out more about light, Ben and its relationship with Red Hat. Please, please reach out to us. We're happy to help. And by the way, you'll also be able to see all the use cases and more that we talked about today.  So people can go to marketplace.redhat.com, find the LightBend offering that's there. And certainly if anyone needs to get in touch with Mark and or Hugh, you know, you have Mark's email right there on the screen. We're at the top of the hour. I am Michael Waite. And this has been another exciting edition of the OpenShift Commons Briefings with our operator partners from LightBend. Thanks, everybody. And we'll see you next week.


Those of you who read my blog will know that this year I have somewhat of a interesting resolution kind of thing that I'm doing, and that is I am not going to go to any restaurants this year. And I've decided that for a couple different reasons. The main reason, you might think it's some kind of absurd asceticism, like I'm just depriving myself of something for like some spiritual reason, and that's actually very much not the case. I just have to say that over the past, I mean definitely in the past like two years, okay, things have gotten so expensive and so annoying. I find myself every time I'm going to a restaurant, I am just constantly, even if I'm not complaining about it, I'm like, oh my goodness, I wish I could go back to when I was a teenager and I could pay five dollars to be full. I wish we could still have five dollar footlongs. I wish I could buy two pounds of Chinese food for five bucks, but you can't anymore, to get like a basic entree at any restaurant. It's at least like fifteen dollars, and that's like a girly entree that's only gonna fill up like little kids, okay? In order to be absolutely full when I go to a restaurant, I have to basically pay at least 25, sometimes 30 bucks, okay? That's just how I look at things. Aside from that, I'm never satisfied. So if I'm never satisfied by restaurants, and it's been that way since, you know, thanks to President Brandon and Inflation over the past two years, why should I just go to restaurants expecting this disappointment? Especially when I go with other people, and everyone is like low-key complaining about how much of a rip-off it is. Why should I go to a restaurant? That's what I'm thinking about. So I'm not going to. I'm gonna solve this, I'm gonna solve this problem by just not going to one. And it's already been like halfway through January, and I have to say that it's already been a resounding success. Or it doesn't feel like, I don't feel like I'm missing out on anything, but I've been doing a mental tally of how much money I've saved, and I think it's actually between 100 and 200 bucks, which, you know, normally I think of myself as very minimalist. I would never spend that much on restaurants anyway, but I think I just had like more opportunities to go to restaurants and stuff like that. So either way, I've saved a good deal of money. In fact, even more than I expected. And firstly, I want to talk about some of the windfall benefits of this, okay? Because firstly, saving money, well really, it's not about saving money. It's about saving disappointment, okay? I'm avoiding disappointment. I don't mind spending money for something that's worth the money.  This is so awkward. I can't believe I have to pay that. That's something I want to avoid. But either way, so I have been saving money. I have been saving disappointment. I think also there are some other things contributing to why I wanted to do this as a kind of a resolution thing. One is like, I want to be more thoughtful of like when I purchase things and when I eat, which I mean usually I think of myself as pretty like continent in terms of, I don't know, impulse control. I like to think I'm very continent. But I think it's easier to just avoid it altogether and avoid like the kind of temptation. And also like when I'm doing stuff like traveling or you know, making trips to different towns to do chores or whatever. I'd like to just kind of, like I'd like to have to plan around that. I'd like to have to say, okay, I'm gonna have my food ready. I know what I'm gonna eat. I'm not just gonna like impulsively decide when I'm there what I'm gonna do, okay? So that I think is my thinking. It encourages me to like plan for trips better. This weekend I'm actually going on a trip where normally I would be stopping at restaurants and stuff like that. Even stopping at restaurants alone. I've complained about that. Like I there's something it's like bowling alone. Like one of the most pathetic looking things is when people are at someone is at a restaurant alone. And I always hated being that guy, especially when I'm traveling because that's usually when I did it. But so I'm gonna plan around that, prepare food beforehand, and just think about when and how I'm gonna eat. And worse comes to worse. If I ever need, if I'm on a trip and I need to eat something, I will go literally to the grocery store and get something that I can prepare in whatever means possible, right? I'm pretty serious about this. And the blog post and an email of people when I put out this blog post saying I was gonna do this. Some people emailed me saying, bro, are you gonna stop at a deli?   No, no, no, no, no, of course not. And I'm definitely not, especially with a gas station. Like I'm not gonna replace restaurants with something even worse than a restaurant. Like that's just ridiculous. Like it's not about getting rid of convenience because like you want to make yourself suffer. It's about getting rid of convenience so you think more about the stuff that you're doing in your life and you have to like plan it, you know what I mean? And one of the other little benefits, little windfall benefit that I've had of this, I'm kind of walking backwards because I think this looks better than this. Like in terms of the lighting, I don't know. It's very vain, but I'm gonna do it. I just like it. One of the windfall benefits that I didn't expect is actually, you know, I realize there are some times when let's say I'm doing work at my house and oh, I kind of need to do this chore. I could drive into town, I could drive 20 minutes to this city and do this and pick up this at the store. And while I'm there, I guess I'll go to a restaurant, right? Just kind of accidentally. Well, I realized that a lot of times I don't really need to make all those separate drives to cities, you know what I mean? I could wait a day or two and do a bunch of things in one big trip, right? And what I realized is when I cut out the idea of going to restaurants, I did less unnecessary trips because my brain was actually just rationalizing. I really just was bored and didn't want to make food for myself, so I wanted to go to a restaurant. So I'm not just cutting out restaurants, I'm actually saving a lot of gas money I didn't realize because it seems I guess I was like just kind of impulsively saving for that as well. Anyway, so those are the kind of benefits I'm talking about. Again, saving money, saving disappointment, but also kind of thinking more about the kind of stuff that I'm doing in my life. Now, I've done weird resolution. I'm not usually a New Year's resolution kind of guy, and I mean, really, I just decided to do this around the time of New Year's. But I do remember back in 2020, I had the resolution of like not buying clothes from anything that wasn't like American made. That was actually kind of hard.  It was a worthwhile experiment. But either way, I think this is going to go pretty well.  I'm not going to be like, I'm not going to go to a restaurant, blah, blah, blah.  But if it's a big event with a bunch of people, a very special circumstance, I'm not going to be like, I'm not going to go to this restaurant for this, that or the other reason. Really, the whole idea of it is to cut restauranting, unnecessary restauranting out of my daily life, which has been a lot easier to do than I thought. We'll see how it goes. Originally, I said I was going to like reevaluate like maybe I'm going to start strict and maybe like reevaluate as I go on, like, oh, maybe I'll make exceptions for a deli or maybe I'll make exceptions for that. But honestly, I don't think that's that's going to happen, to be honest. I think the more difficult thing is like planning for trips. Because, you know, I'm the kind of person, especially when I'm going on vacation. Traditionally, I've just gone to restaurants all the time, basically. I mean, I very rarely make food for myself on a vacation, but that's got to stop. That's pretty degenerate. That's pretty lazy anyway.  All right, so that's all. I think that's all I have to say here. So I encourage you, actually, if you're interested, you don't have to start on New Year's Day, but you could try something similar yourself. I think it's probably a good idea. I don't think you'll regret it. I don't know, bring back picket. You got to bring back picnicking or something like that. I don't know. Force it on your friends. Some people in my life have been like, Luke, you're just going to be so annoying to us because you're not going to go to restaurants and stuff like that, but it hasn't been a problem yet. It's at least if it's been that big of a problem, no one's complained about it. But you know, the whole idea is replacing it with something that is just as social, but not, I mean, it's not a restaurant. Yeah, bring back picnicking. That's all I got to say. Anyway, I forgot how I used to end videos. Oh yeah, that's right. I never had a way of ending videos. Goodbye.


Alhamdulillah that we have reached the blessed days of Eid al-Adha in the blessed month of Dhul-Hijjah. Alhamdulillah, this is a very, very mubarak time where the heavens and the earth are glorifying Allah Subhanahu wa Ta'ala and we are taught and told to follow them in their glorification. We are taught to repeat throughout these days, Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar, la ilaha illallah, Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar, wa lilla ilham. And this day is known as a day of sacrifice, specifically that Eid al-Adha is known as a time of sacrifice. Many of us have either already done or placed our orders for our sacrifice or are going after this to literally sacrifice the animal or we will be doing so over the course of the next day or two. But what exactly does that sacrifice symbolize? Where exactly did this sacrifice begin? As many of us know, this begins with the story of our father Ibrahim alaihi salam, Sayyidina Ibrahim alaihi salam, and known as the father of religion and many of the world religions stem from Ibrahim alaihi salam, the dominant world religion stem from Ibrahim alaihi salam. And so Ibrahim alaihi salam was told, after art, gone through many tests and many difficulties in his life. He had a son, like most of the scholars say Ismail alaihi salam, and he was told to sacrifice this son. What exactly does that mean? That it came in a dream vision, and the dream vision of the prophets, it's revelation that he was seen sacrificing his son, literally taking a thick knife and putting it up against the neck of his son. And originally he didn't quite understand and then it came again and he realized that this is a command from Allah. It's a very, very difficult command to understand, but it was the station of Ibrahim alaihi salam that he was told this is a sacrifice that you're going to have to do. And so as we all know the story, Ibrahim alaihi salam takes his son, Ismail alaihi salam, up to the top of the mountain, and he begins to prepare him for this situation. Now what is his son? His son doesn't resist. His son doesn't say, whoa, is that right? What are you doing? Of course that would be a very logical thing to say. He asks him, and we understand that this came from Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala and he says, he submits, he enters into a complete state of submission.  He's one of the foremost of the prophets. And so he begins this action. He begins to place, as he's about to place the knife on the neck of his son, Allah tells him, qad sadaqtaru, you have fulfilled the vision. You have been truthful to the vision that you received in Ibrahim alaihi salam. His son is replaced then, as many of the scholars mentioned, with a ram. And so his son is not actually sacrificed, but the action and the sincerity that Ibrahim alaihi salam had has literally benefited all of creation since then. Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala never tested anybody again with such a command to literally sacrifice their own child. But what exactly did he do? First and foremost, Ibrahim alaihi salam he submitted to Allah's will. We're told many times to do certain things with our religion. We're told to pray. We're told to fast. We're told to lower our gaze. We're told to stay away from certain things. And we have a very, very difficult time submitting. Ibrahim alaihi salam was not only had he submitted to all of the other requirements that were put on him, but imagine submitting to such an action. And it was through that sacrifice that his station of submission increased further. That Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala says in the Quran that Ibrahim alaihi salam was an umma on his own. Imagine the umma of the Prophet sallallahu alaihi salam. The umma or the umma of the Anbiya that came before, millions and millions of people. Ibrahim alaihi salam did not have outwardly thousands or hundreds of thousands or millions of followers that were visible at the time. There was a very, very small group including amongst his own children in Qajj. He was an umma, umma on his own. He was a community on his own. Why? Because of these actions that he did. Because of the state of his heart. Allah says in the Quran that Ibrahim alaihi salam had achieved a qalb salim, a sound heart. And so it was through the sacrifices that he made and through submitting to Allah's decree that he was elevated. So we have to ask ourselves, how much elevation do we want to achieve in the next life? And how much do we sacrifice in the next life for this life? We chase after all these different things. We're regularly chasing after dunya. We're caught up in things we know we shouldn't be doing. And this is the day we reflect what am I ready to sacrifice? What am I ready to give up in my life? Because of the people who came before me and because of all that they gave up. Look at what came from the blessed progeny of Ibrahim alaihi salam. That you have all of the prophets. You have first and foremost the prophets all over the salam who comes from the progeny of Ibrahim alaihi salam. Then you have all the prophets of Bani Israel in another line. Sayyidina Musa alaihi salam, Sayyidina Yaqum alaihi salam, Sayyidina Yusuf alaihi salam. All of them stem from the prophet Ibrahim alaihi salam. Umma on his own because of the sacrifices that he made because he submitted to Allah's will. He submitted to what Allah wanted him to do and Allah elevated him. And these practices were not just firm in him. It's not just like you have one person who's kind of on the theme in the family and the rest of the family slipping. No, no, no, no. He made sure that these practices and that these stations and that these meetings were inculcated in the hearts of his family. That we know the story of Bibi Hajar alaihi salam, her haggard, that she's told Ibrahim alaihi salam takes her and he takes his son to a valley completely barren, to complete desert, to the valley of Mecca. And he says he has a little bit of some narration, a little bit of food and a little bit of water that he gives them. And then he's like, I'm out. I gotta go.  We're going to this valley. What are you going to do? I gotta go. That doesn't make any logical sense. Again, you have these commands that are coming that don't really make rational, quote unquote, rational or logical sense sometimes. Your intellect can't grasp it, but that's because this affair of this being is more than just about the intellect. It's not just about the brain. This isn't a affair of the heart. This is an affair of spiritual realities. It's not just about understanding everything. It's sometimes just about Samiyah now, we hear and we obey. And so naturally say the haidah, at least sometimes she's worried what exactly is going on. She doesn't, you know, lose her cool, she doesn't serve out. She asks, she clarifies, so what exactly are you doing? And then she asks Allah command you to do this. And he says, yes. What does she say? No, no, no, plead with Allah. That you take us away from here that this is going to be really, really difficult. We're not going to be able to stay in the desert by ourselves. She doesn't say any of that. She says, he says, I am leaving you in God's care. And she says, I am satisfied with Allah, that she submits to Allah and he leaves. And now she's in this valley and eventually the food that they have, everything that they have runs out. And she has a young child with her. And now her own test begins, her own test begins. And so she's out looking for food, looking for water, but this isn't hot. And if anybody's ever been to Mecca, it's hot. And no AC at this time. You don't have the fancy buildings and everything that they have now. We're talking complete, barren desert. And she's in between these two mountains, Safa and Marwa. And so what does she do? She doesn't just sit there, only sit there and start making go, I know, she actually does both. She starts to first and foremost put in her effort.  There's no water inside, there's no food inside.  Doesn't make any sense. Why would you waste your time looking for food or looking for water? Again, because logic is not what guided these people. The intellect is not the only thing that guided them. You're talking about spiritual realities. They had a trust in Allah. If God told him to leave me here, God is going to take care of me. God is going to make something come and he's going to take care of you. So what does she start to do? As we know this story, she's running back and forth between Safa and Marwa. She's running back and forth between these two mountains in the heat of Mecca, very, very completely in a disheveled, broken state before our Lord. She wasn't in this, like, yes, there is a trust in Allah, but ultimately she was realizing her state of submission before Allah, that I am a servant to Allah. And Allah will do with me what He wills, because that we come from Allah and to Him we are going to return. And so what then happens? She's running back and forth, running back and forth. And ultimately as she's expressing her brokenness before Allah, boom, an angel comes and strikes a rock and we know as the well of Zamzam that we know from today, if we go to Mecca and you're able to drink from that blessed water, Zamzam starts to pour forth. Again, out of, completely out of nowhere because nowhere would she know that, yeah, angel's going to come, there's going to be a whole thing that's going to happen and then all this water is just going to come. No, she is doing, she's putting in her part. She first informed us, she submitted to Allah and Allah asked for her. When she revealed it through a prophet which was Ibrahim al-Islam and she submitted to it. That's the first thing that happened. The second thing then is she starts to put in effort and she starts to place her trust in Allah. But the effort is still there. So we learn from this that when you are being patient and when you are trusting in Allah, you still have to put in effort. You can't just resign yourself and wait for things to happen. There has to be a moment of effort, but you're not relying on your effort. You're relying on the Lord of your effort.  That is the lesson that we learn from her. Look at these meanings, look at these people and we have to wonder where are we with regards to these meanings? That these were the people who preceded us, our forefathers. Where are we with regards to following their example? She then shows her brokenness and her weakness before Allah and then Allah does what? He gives her a way out because he says, That whoever has Taqwa of Allah, whoever is conscious of Allah, whoever follows Allah's commandment, whoever places their trust in Allah, Allah will give them an exit strategy. That he will provide to you where you never expected because all these means are in Allah's control.  Don't worry if the doctor says that. Don't worry if someone says you're never going to get better. Don't worry if someone says that your life is going to end in a year or two years or the same thing is happening to your family members. Place your trust in Allah, turn to Allah, rely on Allah, Allah will give you a way out. If it's best for you, Allah will give you a way out. If someone is struggling financially to fool us into thinking that these people and their fancy cars and their fancy homes and the fancy jobs and all these sorts of things, nothing wrong with having nice things, but that's not the goal. You see when Allah honored them, he didn't give them the giant mansions and giant cars or they put them on camels and things like that at the time. No. He gave them the men's station such that this is a woman who every single year we replicate her action at Hajj and every single day there are people doing umrah, thousands, thousands, hundreds of thousands, inshallah, Allah open up Mecca again for all the people to visit. Millions of people are replicating her action, but replicating her action outward form is not enough. You have to replicate the inward as well. There has to be an inward reliance on Allah. How many, how much of our life are we going to live? Are we reliant on all these other things and we don't place any of our trust in Allah. So that is the main lesson that we take away from this. And then there's the lesson of sacrifice. They sacrificed everything so you could be here today, so we could be here today. So much. And we have a difficult time sacrificing a little bit of haram. We're going to sacrifice an animal today. Where are we with sacrificing the animal soul inside of us? The nasal amada, the evil commanding soul inside of us. That tells us to look at haram things, it tells us to drink haram things, it tells us to smoke haram things, it tells us to do all sorts of things that we shouldn't be doing. Where are we with sacrificing that inside of us? That is the question we should be asking today. How much are we ready to sacrifice for this being? Because this life is pretty short. It's going to pass. And are people going to sacrifice you as an umma on your own? Is that the station that someone achieved because of their sacrifice? Can we try to at least live the realities or attempt to live those realities? Or do we just want to be remembered as just any old person? We have to keep us caught up.  Whether we're fighting with people, whether we're arguing with people, whether we're missing our prayers. We have a desire, shahawat, that keep us caught up. And it's at every level of this being, different desires are there. It doesn't mean that someone has stopped the major sin that they don't have desires. Sacrifice continues. There are people who sacrifice their desires. From there they begin to sacrifice their time for the sake of the being. And then you have the people who literally sacrifice their life for the sake of this being. If the sahabah ikram, the companions of the prophets of Allah, they sacrifice literally everything, so that you and I could be here and worship Allah. Everything so that we can say La ilaha illallah alhamdulillah. We know the stories of them sacrificing their wealth. We know how much money they gave in the cause of Allah. We know how much time they devoted. But how many of us reflect upon the fact that many of them literally sacrificed their very life, so that we could sit here today and worship Allah. And you have the story of Sayyidina Jafir ibn Abi Talib. I've actually known Sayyidina Jafir ibn Fayyah, radi allahu anhu. That there was a battle of the Prophet ﷺ sent them on an expedition, the battle of Mu'tah in the area of Jordan. And the Prophet ﷺ, many of the sahabah are still in Medina. And in the variation it comes, that Sayyidina Jafir he was bearing the standard. He had the standard in his right hand. So he's fighting this battle, he's bearing the standard, and then what happens?  His right hand gets cut off, his arm, rather. He moves it over to the left hand. He doesn't stop fighting. He keeps going. He's still fighting the kafat. He keeps going. He has the standard now in his left hand. Next thing what happens? His left hand is cut off. His left arm is cut off. He's still fighting valiantly, sacrificing himself, doing what he can because he has this internal reality that I need to spread this theme.  What does he do? He holds it up in between his arms, whatever he has left in his arm, until he can't do it anymore. And then, he's wounded, severely wounded. The sahabah, they take the standard from him, they pull him to the side. They count 80 wounds, all on the front of his body, from swords, from spears, from arrows. No wound on his backside. Why? Because he never turned around. He kept going. No matter what he said, this is it, I'm going for it. He sacrificed everything. Imagine 80 wounds. This was, and this was like real, real, real battle. This wasn't gunshots and drone strikes. No, these people were fighting with their swords, with their spears, right in their faces. 80 wounds, they count. They offered him water. They said, drink some water. What does he say? I'm fasting. I'm not going to drink water. I'm fasting. He says, I hope to break my fasting paradise. And that's exactly what happens. At the time, the pausasam is sitting in Madinah Manawla. And the sahabah who are there, they see the pausasam say Wa alaykum as-salam wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuh. And then he starts to begin speaking to somebody, and they're not understanding what's going on. After the gathering, they ask him, Ya Rasulallah who are you speaking to?  Allah replaced his arms with two wings, with wings that he can fly with wherever he wants to paradise. And he came where he was in paradise. Who did he come to visit? Sayyidina Rasulallah As-salamu alaykum. Because of his love for the pausasam. He came and he visited the pausasalam, and the pausasam saw him, so he became known after that as Jaffa al-Tayyam. Look at what these people did. They sacrificed everything for us, and they did not do this so we could just sit around. That's not the purpose of our life. We have to literally talk about whatever we're caught up in. How much of people have gone before me? The likes of Zidna Ibrahim al-Islam. The likes of the Sahaba. So many Sahaba we could mention. Stories of each and every single one of them, and how much should they sacrifice. Did they sacrifice all this so we could just waste all our time on Netflix watching this show after this show and just sitting around, letting our life pass by? Was that why they sacrificed? Is that what we should be doing when we reflect on their life and how they sacrificed? Did they sacrifice so we could spend our time arguing as a community over small little differences and not actually making any progress? Or so that we could just work, work, work for our dunya, focus only entirely on our career, and ask a lot of money but do nothing for the sake of this need. Why did they sacrifice so much? That's the question that we need to be asking. Is it just so we can hang out all the time and socialize? Is that the purpose? There is deep wisdom into why the Sahaba Ram sacrificed so much. And so that we just a small portion we could take and we could continue the work that they did in some way or another. There's a lot of work to be done and a lot of sacrifices to make. A few years on Eid, Amir Sundiata, and Allah bless and preserve him, that he gave Khutbah and he mentioned how much work has to be done in this community. How many people are struggling? How many people are thirsty for guidance? They're begging for guidance. What responsibility then do we have? Everybody here has some talent or another. Everybody. It doesn't mean everybody has to be involved outwardly in spreading the cause of the theme, but everybody has some talent. We have to ask ourselves what are we doing to use our talents, to use our services, to use what Allah has blessed us in the service of this religion and how are we going to sacrifice some portion of our time, some portion of what we can do so that we can continue the great work that the people who came before us did. So it was through these sacrifices that these people attain the station of complete complete submission we're not always in the state of submission but we kind of wonder when God's rules come down how often are we questioning why do I gotta do this why do I gotta do that why do I do this why do I gotta wear this what happened to this state of the one who created me told me to do it so I'm gonna do it and I'll find out sometimes you just gotta find out later why exactly did I have to do that nothing wrong with asking questions but there's something beautiful about submitting to what God wants from us and God wants something general from all of us and then he wants something specific from each one of us and that is the relationship we have to ask him yeah hello what do you want me to be doing what should I be doing with my life how should I be spending my life whether I'm engaged outwardly in work if I'm working here if I'm constructing something if I'm working at a job if I'm a doctor if I'm a lawyer whatever it is but what else do you want from me because surely I know what you don't want for me is just come home every day sit on a couch let my time pass by for five six hours and then the weekend comes and then all I do is socialize and hang out or hang out online and then the weekday starts and I just keep repeating that I got much we can all say that's not what God wants from us so what does he want from us first and foremost we know he wants us to submit and he wants to submit to the rules of this being that's a hard thing to do in this society that everybody it's an unpopular word to say submission but Muslim is the one who submits Islam is the religion of submission and through submission you would take the state of peace and the state of tranquility Allah says the Quran referring to the Kaaba that we made this house a place of security and then he said and take the Maqamah Ibrahim the standing place of Abraham as a place of prayer Imam al-Qusheri Rahimullah he mentions about this verse that the station of the Rahimah Islam in addition to the physical station that is there in Makkah is the station of attaining a state of complete submission turning your affairs over to Allah you submit outwardly to the rules and then inwardly you resign your affair over to Allah what does that mean we let go of our desires and then from there we began letting Allah run our life we say Allah you are in control ultimately I'm going to turn my affair over over to you that was the station of Rahimullah Islam when he was young many of the commentators mentioned he was very young when this happened and he was trying he was confirming to he demolishing the idols there was a very very very dark and evil ruler there at the time he built this huge fire he said we're going to burn a Rahim in the fire and so they what do they do they build a giant fire and they build a huge catapult and they put it Rahimah Islam in the catapult and then they're all watching this is like this giant ceremony they began catapulting him they release it and he begins flying through the air and going towards the fire at the time that he's going towards that fire what happens to him say Najib real islam the angel of revelation comes to him and he says is there anything that you need he says as as for from you know my lord is aware of the situation has been a low and it would look he I resigned my affair over to Allah and there would have been nothing wrong with you who's sending say that to realize that I'm talking about of course God is the one sending him asking him do you need anything but he said no because he was in a complete state at this point of submission trust in Allah complete submission and you see this theme throughout his life this theme of submission and he resigned affair completely over to Allah and he said husband Allah and Allah says to the fire that become cool and peaceful for Abraham as we know in the verse the Quran and he goes into the fire and becomes completely cool and peaceful and some of the commentaries like a bed of roses and he mentions in his life that some of the best days of my life were the day that woman I was in there because he did what again all logic and the intellect it doesn't doesn't make sense you're getting catapulted into the air there's a ginormous fire you're about to be completely burned this angel comes to you and asking you do you need anything you're like no I'm good because God knows what I'm going through already husband Allah when it will keep and that is when we are struggling when we are going through something and if an angel comes to you know no problem asking them but there's a station that she completely trusted in Allah he had completely resigned his affair over to Allah so we need to see things is coming from Allah that test came from Allah the test of sacrificing his son came from Allah the test of leaving his wife and son in the desert came from Allah all of this is from Allah even if it's coming hourly from people ultimately it's coming from the Lord of people and so we just need to see what exactly is Allah testing us with how are we going to go about submitting and the more we sacrifice the more you sacrifice internally the more this I was sacrificed the more you give up on your life the more your heart in terms of state of submission the heart is it is possible for the heart to submit but the more the spiritual heart and the normal caught up in desires the more we'll pull up in our lust the more we'll cut off and promise the more we're not doing things we shouldn't be doing and say things we shouldn't be saying and dressing in a way we shouldn't be dressing and looking at people that we shouldn't be looking In all sorts of things, the more difficult it's going to be for the heart to be in a state of submission and to be in a state of contentment. And so Allah, the Prophets, has now told us, and Allah commands us in the Qur'an, that when you are struggling with these things, seek help in patience and in prayer. Because you don't know what's good for you. Allah says, And perhaps you hate a thing and in it is much good for you. And perhaps you love a thing and in it is much bad for you, and Allah knows that you don't know. Ultimately, God knows what's good for us, God knows what's going to be best for us, and outwardly something might appear like this is really, really damaging, this is really, really difficult. But that doesn't mean that's the inward reality. And so as we contemplate these stories of the greats who came before us, as we reflect on this day, the day of sacrifice, we have to think how much are we ready to sacrifice. We should all make an intention right now that we want to sacrifice something for the sake of Allah. We want to sacrifice something for the sake of the Messenger of Allah, Salaam. We want to sacrifice something for the sake of all the greats who came before us, everything it is that they did for us. But that's something haram that we're doing, and if we stop a lot of the major things, then some portion of our time to do the work of this Deen, to do the work of trying to help people. Whatever it is, we are living in a community with a lot of help that's needed. Let's make that intention, let's try to form a deeper relationship with Allah. One that's not just that when we need something, we ask. But one that's, you are my Lord, you created me, I'm at your service. We say in these moments, when you are a Hajj, La Baik, Allahumma La Baik. Here I am at your service, my Lord. La Baik. We should turn to Allah and say La Baik. Here I am at your service, my Lord. Whatever it is that I can do, I'm ready to do. But it begins with submitting, it begins with sacrificing, it begins with leaving the haram. It continues with leaving the things that Allah wouldn't like, the Makru. And it continues with leaving things that we just wasted our time. And it continues them with us spending as much time as we can in spreading goodness, in spreading fear, in spreading nul, in spreading this Deen. Doing whatever portion we can to bring good to the society that we're in, that we're in. And that will be the route, inshallah, that allows us to attain a station of nearness to Allah. A station of love of Allah, a station of love of the Messenger of Allah, s.a.w. And a station where Allah is Messenger, inshallah, please with us. That you heart in all of our sins, that you elevate us, that you increase us, that you accept us, that you forgive us inwardly and outwardly. Asalla-Llah wa sallam, bye. In the name of Allah, the most Gracious, the Most Merciful.


This is JSATV, the newsroom for tech and telecom professionals. I'm Dean Perine, and welcome to JSATV. We are coming at you on location from ITW 2017, and I am here with my, I'd like to call you long-term friend at this point. Mr. Anand Bush, Anand is the CEO of NetSapiens. Anand, welcome to JSATV. Thanks for having me back. It's good to see the team again. It's always great to see you as well. So Anand, why don't you tell our viewers a little bit about the latest and greatest coming out of the NetSapiens newsroom? Sure. So, as everybody knows, I think, Dean, you were there at the user group meeting. I was. I think it was March, boy, time flies. But we continue to kind of really focus on, obviously, we re-branded the company with respect to what our model is in terms of unified experience. And so we continue to see a lot of growth and continue to focus on that market segment, you know, the first or the second, third tier carriers, if you will. We don't really focus on the larger carriers and we continue to focus on that kind of mid-market and smaller service provider segment. We continue to actually add a lot more to the team in terms of reliability, scalability of the platform. And then we continue to do a lot of work in that unified UC space in terms of new products and new services. Excellent. Let's go there then. Why don't you tell our viewers a little bit about what it is that NetSapiens does? Sure. As a whole, what we provide is a really, what started as a voice over IP platform has now obviously evolved into more of the UC end-to-end solution, so we build a software platform that is used by small and medium sized service providers to ultimately offer services to compete anything from basic telephony all the way to unified communications, anywhere from basic telephony all the way to voice video now that's actually in beta and we're using that all the way to contact center type functionality and other services that they need. So the key thing to keep in mind there though is that we are a B2B company. We're not a service provider. Obviously a lot of the folks here at the event are service providers themselves, but we actually provide a platform that allows service providers to compete in the space so that they can create their own clouds. Obviously that's been the big theme in the last two, three years. People are starting to use the term cloud instead of hosted, right? So they will in turn take our platform and then leverage that platform to offer services above and beyond what they do today, whether it's a legacy telephone company, whether it's a legacy internet service provider or an MSP, they're trying to unify what they're offering anywhere from telephony all the way up to contact center type functionality all in one package. We enable them to do that, if you will. Very good, so you've touched on this just briefly, but a unified experience. That's kind of your internal motto at NetSapiens. Why don't you tell our viewers a little bit about that? So sure, so I think the, in general, the reason I use that term is that we're trying to, over the next several years as we continue to grow, really try to take UC to the next level. We've heard about unified communications in UC for many, many years now, but the issue tends to be that people don't really understand what that really means. And so really the idea here is to really focus on the experience so that we can see growth in the UC space. When somebody talks about unified communications, they talk about all the different means of communications, but they don't necessarily talk about the ease of use. They don't talk about the experience itself necessarily or they haven't been. We're starting to see more of that now and to really gain a lot of adoption in the marketplace. That's what we focus on and saying, okay, not so much the technology itself. Of course, we have a great technology team and that's the reason we're here, but more so looking at what is the experience that we provide with our platform. The key other piece there is also, the market is evolving in terms of the clients that we work with. And so it's not just about the technology and about the use of the technology, but how do we work with them? How do we unify the experience when it comes to client services to support, to sales, to marketing? Really try to help them grow as much as we can. Outstanding, so you brought it up, so I'm gonna, you're providing great segues for me today. Thank you, Anand. But your customers, what does the ideal customer of NetSapiens look like? So really, if you look at the market today, and it's been this way for quite some time, if you look at the broad markets in terms of small businesses, enterprises, and those that use next generation communications, 80% of that market is covered by really the bigger players, the tier ones, the AT&T's, the time warners, and folks like that. But what we focus on is there's literally thousands and thousands of smaller service providers that focus on either a niche or a regional market, right? So what we see today, for example, if you look at the 130-odd service provider clients that we have, that actually, they service, ultimately, or have probably an excess of 400,000 seats out in the marketplace. So if you do the math and you do the averages, you'll notice that our average client probably only has 4,000 to 5,000 seats out in the marketplace. And so that correlates to a number of subscribers. And so in that scenario, you can see that the average client, whether it's a managed service provider, a small ISP, those are the types of clients, a small CLEC, and those are the types of clients that we're seeing the most traction with because they're all trying to grow to the next level. Yeah, that makes perfect sense. Okay, Anand, last question. What do things look like for Netsapiens, say, in the next quarter, or how about the next year? The next year? Okay, so obviously we were here last year this time. We continue to grow the team. I mean, obviously one of the reasons that we're here at ITW itself is to now explore some relationships with other markets so we can continue to grow, right? Predominantly, most of our business is in here in the US. We've got a handful of customers that are out in Europe and Asia and so on and so forth. So we continue to explore those markets. So that's one of the segments that we're looking at is continuing to expand our channels and try to grow the business into other markets. And then we also continue to work with our existing clients, if you will, to create more of a marketplace environment because a number of our ecosystem partners have continued to add value added services that can integrate to our platform. So we continue to see a lot more work in that area. So you'll start seeing some work that we're doing in terms of trying to bring really, I would say, a more efficient mechanism to market for all of the ecosystem players that we have so that our clients can leverage those types of things a lot more effectively. Outstanding. Anand, thanks as always for joining us on JSA TV. I can't wait to get out to San Diego to see you again. So thank you very much. Appreciate it, thank you.  And thank you viewers for watching JSA TV. We'll see you soon.


In the How Far Away Is It video book, we have covered distances for the Earth, our solar system, the Milky Way, and galaxies from our local group out to our local superclusters. In our final segment, we'll put it all together as we consider the cosmos as a whole and look forward to the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope.


Hi everyone, Joe for Jaspy's casebreaks.com coming at you with the random number block for that Spectra two box pick your team break featuring a lot of teams here a lot of good ones, too That's how that works if you're not familiar with it big. Thanks to this group for making it happen. Congrats to the winners of spots in that filler There are the numbers and let's roll it. Let's randomize names and numbers six and a three nine times each one two three four five six seven eight and nine For nine we got Alan down and Nancy Six and a three nine times for the numbers one two three four five six seven eight and Ninth and final time. Good luck after nine. We got eight down to six So here's how it shakes out for everybody Alan. You got eight Nancy with five Alan with seven Tim with one Andrew with three Ed P with two Bobby with zero So you get any and all redemptions for that big list of teams right there Including one of one redemptions Tim. You'll get live one of ones Tim. You also have nine and four Nancy with six Let's sort by Number here and coming up in the next video will be the break itself We'll see you for that Jaspy's casebreaks.com