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Hi, Lee. This is Sanku. Hi, Sanku. How are you? I'm doing good. Thank you. Good to finally talk to you. Yeah, Sanku, remind me. Is it, uh, wait, am I affiliating Intel with you correctly? Yeah, perfect. Yeah, remember it. Yeah. Nice. Yeah. Yeah, good to talk to you. Yeah, I recently started working on service mesh and so being ramping up on all these details and also the community perspective of what's going on. Yeah. Yes, say more. Oh, yeah, so right now looking into on why and its usage models and its performance aspects. So that's where I reached out in Slack, join SMP and SMI. So, and it's all through the documentation that's been there, which I should say it's been pretty well documented on a lot of these things compared to the other communities have been part of in the past. So, really good starting point. Yeah, still in the learning phase. So trying to participate and understand what's going on and looking to contribute going forward. Nice. All right. Well, you signed yourself up now. I think. Yeah, there could be some symbiosis happening to the extent that that you that you getting engaged a bit helps give you a leg up on, you know, your your daytime focus like to help you sort of achieve part of your goals more quickly. It could help and then at the same time help some of the projects actually we're going to talk about a couple of them now. So, and in part of that it's funny funny that you mentioned it because part of it is about organization. So, yeah, absolutely. It's interesting to see a few years from the topic because that's, that's been my background last few years now. And that's, that's the space we're looking at leveraging on why, for example, among other things, but yeah so looking to see what that discussion entails. Oh, nice. Did you say I'm sorry I'm doing like way too many conversations. Did you say, did you say performance. Yeah, NFE as well. That's been my background. And yeah, I'm looking at some of the performance aspects to start with. But yeah, to understand performance better understand the stack so that's where I'm right now learning the stack. Gotcha. Okay. Yeah. All right, good, good, good. We, we, if we don't do it on this call. Let's make a point it will just make a point of exploring a bit more like there's there's a number of things that for me to share with you I think that might might be helpful. Absolutely. So, yeah. Amy, I think, yeah, I'm not sure I didn't start recording. Yeah, that's not good. That's, that's actually quite bad, because these are all set up to be automatically recording. However, you're here it's good. I'm assuming that you all are canceling your meetings for the next two weeks, because there will be no staff. Good. And we'll pick back up in January. So, okay. All right, fair enough. Good. I'm recording now it seems like everything is working so sorry. Yikes. No, very good. You know what it may be. We will see when we're done maybe it was recording the whole time and I just couldn't tell, but So, fair enough. What we've got a set of a small collection of dedicated individuals on today's call. And we've got two other individuals who are Lacking with me and And I'm trying to get them to join the call because it would be easier to do it verbally. So, okay, very good. Okay, well, the good thanks. Ken very nice to see you. Frederick. How's it going. Pretty well. We have any other guys who are planning to present joining today. There is. I'm Ian Wells from Cisco was wanting to talk about NFV. And, and so I've invited him to the call. I'm not sure if he's going to join or not. I'm going to talk about a couple of things somehow a little bit housekeeping housekeeping around the work streams inside the service mesh working group to talk about. And since Frederick is here is a little bit to talk about with respect to SMI in general. Cool. And actually, I'm Ken, since you're here, there's another topic that relates. Let's get right down. It's just the way all the topics are service mesh topics except for NFV. Okay, fair enough. So, thank you all if anyone has any other topics, please feel free to list them because we'll, we will get through them. So today is the December 17th. This is the CNCF signal work call. So we have a couple of topics of the service mesh working group. And so as a refresher for, for most of us, a working group have been formed on our some many months ago. The efforts that have been given on those work streams have been presented the last couple of cube cons. So we've given kind of an intro and a deep dive to, to those work streams. I'm highlighting a few of them. And, and really the first thing I think I want to ask about is, is a topic that we've had in the past and it's been, hey, for these more for these deeper conversations. Is there at the time we didn't know if it was appropriate to use this. So it's a big networks time to go through those. And we decided like, hey, there's enough. There's enough room in the agenda to go deep on these. And so we can part of the challenge is that some of the folks who are critical to those meetings aren't able to make this time. And so, Amy, one of the things that I'm doing, you know, I've struggled with either suggesting that this SIG network meet at a different time, or tossing out a separate meeting time for service mesh working group. We've got a CNCF calendar that overspills. But Amy, other than changing this, what did you have a suggestion on whether or not we should change this, this meeting time and just use it to go deep on some of these projects. Yes, you should just use the meeting time that you have adding more meeting time is not going to improve the situation of calendar collision. Sure. Sorry. Yeah, no, no, yeah, the problem is some of those people can't meet at this hour. And so it might be like, that is separate. If we need to find a different time for this meeting that is completely fine. Okay. Okay, I would just like to be consistent about when this group is planning on meeting so that we have a chance of being able to have some sort of like, you know, show up every week at the Yeah, it's like, I'd like to get us away from doing like one off meetings. That was all. Yeah, make sense. There's a lot of struggle in there so we'll probably send out a doodle or a or a survey or a request for times. So one of the reasons why, why this time is an inconvenience is based on time zones of the people who are working on a couple of things within here so there's under this focus is about performance and service mesh service mesh performance. It's about a few things trying to standardize the way in which service meshes and their workloads that their performance is analyzed. It's not entirely about hard statistics with respect to performance it's also with respect to measuring the value that's being derived from a mesh and how it's being run. It's to say how much you asking a service mesh to do and how much weight do you give how much do you value those things is part of the conversation part of that same conversation is about distributed performance analysis. A lot of times performance analysis at least in context of service meshes is done from a single vector. By generating load against an endpoint and measuring the throughput and the latency of those responses and watching overhead in of memory and CPU and that kind of a thing. Well, then, probably a fairly one D perspective a one dimensional perspective. And so there's been part of what that group has been working on is a 3d perspective is of how to characterize the performance of different of your microservices and using a service mesh to do that. What is taking on a name. Well, or is is taking on a project name called get nighthawk. If you're not familiar with nighthawk, it's the load generator for of the envoy project. And so there's a few load generators out there actually many load generators out there. The envoy's nighthawk load generator is is becoming more and more popular, and that working group is trying to help it be so it's creating a get night, a number of distributions of nighthawk, and kind of a get nighthawk dot, you know, dot I O project. So bringing this as a little bit of a review for those who might have heard some of this before. You can learn more about the projects at probably at this first link on the slides. So it is a call for participation, but it's also an acknowledgement that this time probably doesn't work for some of those that have been real interested. Earlier this week met with Microsoft, a couple of folks of Microsoft those that are working on OSM, and they're quite interested in participating in service mesh performance. And our I think that the project's probably bigger challenge has just been finding a venue to have that meeting and from my part I've been really hesitant to bring that holistically to this. Because I feel like it would do a disservice to, or, you know, going really deep on one thing and only talking about that thing would do a disservice to someone who wants to talk about core DNS or, you know, ambassador or other things. That's been my personal challenge probably about guilt over. Anyway, I should. No, no reason to feel like upset about this. We are we're currently working on being able to figure out better processes for, hey, how could we actually get projects that want to be incubating in. So, I mean, like I would put this on the SIG updates for January around help support the SIGs in this process. Is that fair. Yeah, yeah, cool. Nice. Okay. The other thing. Another topic is about let's talk about service mesh interface a little bit. A couple of couple of recent conversations with respect to the project. And I think there's there's something of I had called a meeting with a couple of the maintainers this week to discuss how to breathe some more life into the project. And how to help acknowledge that the leading service mesh are the leading service mesh by amount of adoption and mind share is steel. Trying to try to be thoughtful with my words but just as the, you know, as the lead as I'm hasn't shown a lot of interest in SMI and having all of the measures participate is most helpful to an effort like SMI to making it more useful and achieving its purpose. That's that's most that's just a statement and so I'm how to help make sure that the current SMI controller for Istio continues to be up to date as Istio goes through changes. We're talking about how to how to do that. Talking about maybe adding some new specs to SMI or or minimally enhancing the ones that are there. So adding things like the ability to define a retry to define a circuit breaker. To define how a canary would look like part of this ties into something that I've spoken to in the past and that is that there are any number of service mesh patterns that that working group has been working on documenting and and a number of those patterns like you would ideally be able to characterize those patterns in SMI like in SMI parlance like hey here's a pattern here's how you could here's how that would be fulfilled through SMI well. A lot of the patterns aren't able to be fulfilled through SMI based on its surface area today the surface area of the API. So the discussion is and the agreement was, you know, the land of those that are involved and focused and have skin in the game. Some of that has changed over time. And right now it looks like there's a number of people of the maintainers that are involved are ready to move some things forward. So for my part I'm one of those inside I think. So, so for most of the people here this is this these updates aren't intended to be a monologue for me. Please interrupt I'll try to pause as we're going. There I'm really giving part of these updates to say there's a lot going on in this this on these work streams and organization of them and getting them like part of this is I'm sort of pointing the finger back at myself and kind of having Ken on the side of the line as well where I'm saying hey there's a bit more organization for us to do to make to to bring some of these together to like have consistent meeting times to make sure that we can meet and go through these and begin publishing some of these things there's a bunch of well documented work that's been done around each of these but that but it's not. But for my part I'm falling short and so are some of the other people participating falling short on getting the word out there. These activities are going on, because I happened to bump into a lot of people who are very interested in them. One of those is as a related note is like the service mesh survey. So Amy you you might be in a position to help characterize this a bit more as Amy still with us. So some of you have seen. It's been once or twice there've been the CNCF has done it does a number of surveys I'm not sure what the the latest ones have been called but they're basically usage surveys. And one of them had been about how different service measures are being used and being adopted, and was looking the last you know a year and something ago when I looked at one. It was embarrassingly wrong. And I made comments about that privately probably. And then there was some recent chatter about another one that was published, and it was less embarrassingly wrong, but still quite wrong, or quite pissed poorly done.  And people might think that the, the service mesh working group or the SIG network might be responsible for that kind of a survey. Maybe we should get it right. And in the service mesh and the SMI by weekly meetings there was an ask for to survey SMI users or potential SMI users for use cases like ones that Frederick had recently mentioned. And so I took up an action item to help facilitate such a survey. I'm taking it through the SIG network here. So for my part I think I think it's high time that we do a real, an actual survey that there's there's no doubt. And maybe December is the month there's no doubt and can you may know. There's no doubt a was the CNCF radar, the use end user radar and user technology radar that will eventually there will be done one done on service mesh. And the clock is ticking. And for my part. I think those can be kind of helpful things. They're, for the most part, also not well done and I understand that those are hard to do. And we definitely want to be involved in those I know that it's not it's not registered a schedule gap but we do want to definitely support that leak. Nice. Okay. Yeah, good. Yeah. I think a barrier had been recently broken down it. I've been invited to go to hang out on the end user call, which is great because for my part I want to help bring those use cases back to the service. And so yeah, so I was going on public record to say that I caught myself before I made a silly comment like, Hey, this survey isn't well done. Well done. And so, so maybe we should step up and do something. I'm going to, if anyone's interested in participating in organizing this survey. Comment here, or comment verbally. I think that the ones that have been done to date they feel more damaging than they are helpful. I think because we've got things like are you using this project name and turns out that project isn't even a service mesh. So, I do want to point out that Ian has joined us and we have missed him in the start of the conversation. And so, so I want to point that out in case we want to read this BNF B stuff. Yeah, I'm here, mainly because Lee wanted to know whether I was going as gray as fast as he was been the answer is easily. Yes. Wisdom, it's all it's all wisdom just. Yes, genetics one of the other. Yeah, if we want to talk NFE again I would very much like to have that conversation, which which is obviously way off the top of service measures but a topic of service measures but to be fair that that's part of the the reason I want to raise this here. Ian has a moment. Hey, Ken, it's been a very long while actually. Yeah. Apparently, this is the ex Cisco complication that's really quite disturbing. So, NFE, as a general statement is trying to make things that usually end up not exclusively but usually end up in service provider networks things that are trying to do, you know, treat network traffic as more packets or do weird things with weird protocols because you know service provider standards are generally weird low level more low level networking than you would normally find in Kubernetes. These are the things where that I'm trying to deal with. And to be fair, there's a lot of people from different companies also interested in this for obvious reasons, and the puzzle that we have, which has been tinkered I think not necessarily solved in the Kubernetes world is that we want things from networking that CNI is and therefore service measures built on CNI is not providing. And the reason for that is that the CNI's job is to simplify developing conventional applications, and the sort of things we're talking here are anything but conventional with their use of networking. We all know that networks, networking is made of packets but most of us never actually have to give any thought to that because the BSD socket API we consume is not relevant to, you know, the packets that are broken out. So, the problem we have here is that the CNI, again, is nearly 100% of its users. It is delivering exactly the functionality that they're looking for. And again, the fact that when we want extensions we can just build on top of it with a which says to me that it's doing the right job. So, the question I'm left with is, firstly, can we enumerate our requirements on the NFE side of things the things we want to do without regard to the solutions like CNI out there to actually say if we can do this then we can get our job done. The second question is, what's the best approach to getting those things done when we're working when we're trying to make an application run on top of Kubernetes. And my feeling here is that the more we try and bend the CNI to the will of a very small minority of use cases, the more we're doing the wrong thing. So, that's a personal feeling. How the general question is, if I want to run a network function that plays with packets, the other network function I want to concern myself with is if I want to run a network serve function that consists of multiple reaching domains verse on the network. How can I get those things to work in Kubernetes and what would I need to change. So, just to for more context in is, is part of the use cases and the conversations that you've been having to date have those. Any of those been in and around the network service mesh project. At the start the network service mesh, Ed took it and run with it but it was me and him and Kyle who had the original idea so yes. The original idea of NSM was something a little bit more raw than it's turned out to be. And I think it might have a potential part of this solution, although, as I've seen it develop I think it's developing more in the direction of cloud to cloud connectivity, which isn't our problem in NFE. It's actually more dealing with things like wide area networks controlled by independent operations teams who would like you not to stuff up their network and get them in trouble. Who would also like to say that them playing with their network is not stuffing up your application and getting it in trouble. So, the it and the NSM use case don't seem to gel quite the same stand in fact my feeling is my suspicion is that in much the same way as you've got CNI and then you've got service measuring on top. NSM fills the role of that service mesh in raw networking, but there isn't an underlying layer there and there's a more basic question of how it should be dealing with the network at the lower level that was is the one that we're missing right now. Again, again to like to just help characterize the problem statement or like part of the question that you're trying is, would it be a mischaracterization to say that that you're in search of extending CNI surface area. I want what I think is a far enough different kind of networking that it's probably not sensible to add it to the CNI. If we're being honest, in much the same way that I don't try and make block and subject storage answer to the same API is I don't think these two sorts of networking should answer to the same API is a little bit towards that as well there have been years worth of efforts to try to extend out CNI scope from variety of different parties and CNI remains mostly unchanged in this respect. So, I even I agree that I with with the end but I don't think it's the right approach anyway, but even if we thought it was the right approach the chances of getting a community to accept the meeting in that area is makes the point most likely moved anyway. It doesn't. Again, when you consider, firstly, the, you know, the kind of networking we do is way off the wall compared to, you know, anything that your average Netflix or whoever is going to do for a web app or similar. It's, you know, dramatically different to that. So, trying to combine those two things into a single API leaves you with all the complexity that we might need thrown into, you know, all of the standard use cases that don't use it. I don't think it's going to make anyone's lives happier. And I'll sum up the contract in a phrase. I, it's an API that when you call you say please, please add networking to this network name space Linux never came space and tell me what IP address you chose. Tell me what interface name and IP address you chose. They're not even the summit like it's very, very, very minimal down. So it's focused around pure pure L3 connectivity for landing an interface into into a pod. And anything beyond that is not part of the technically not part of the spec like there's, there's people little drop things like oh let's do something with SRV let's do something with MPLS let's do something with with only additional and these are technically all out of out of spec and they're running into the same problems that neutron ran into earlier on which is that neutron did not meet their needs and so they ended up co-opting things like oh yeah this Mac address label that's an MPLS label instead. And until they worked out they could actually get underneath to the to the underlying Q and inject their own messages and then became a nightmare. So what it comes down to is without necessarily judging what the implementation is going to be whether it's going to be the CNI or not but at least bearing in mind that it might not be. What I would like to do is I'd like to make sure we've got some degree of quantification of the problem statement, rather than the solution, because this is one of those problems that you tend to find people are basically saying I see these open source projects they've been out there for so long. They must solve my problem. I don't think people necessarily appreciate how different their problem is. So I think it's more. There's an element of just defining what would be a working solution how I would know if a solution was enough for what I wanted. And then, you know, kind of exploring some of the more perhaps off the wall options than then again trying to adapt the CNI to make this work. Yeah, one question here. Some of these requirements are being discussed by service providers and operators and CNTD or what's going to be, for example, the reference models or their CNF working group. So how are we talking about the requirements from there that we could address via CNI or outside of CNI or. Well, I'm here in part because I've been involved with the CNF working group, but I just want to be clear about an audience problem that we have here. We talk as if service providers are our audience for this level of feature and that's simply not true. The people who consume API is that do networking and the people that write applications that do networking. Service providers then try and run those applications but service providers don't generally. I mean there are exceptions to every rule but service providers are generally not the authors of those applications. So if we jump in and say that a group of service providers, like for instance the telco user group or CNT which is service provider dominated are going to, you know, come up with the right thing to make an application run. Yeah, it's the tail wagging the dog in much the same way that Kubernetes APIs were developed by people who are writing applications. These APIs, first and foremost, need to satisfy the people who are writing those applications. And then as a secondary factor they also want to satisfy the requirements of network architects. They want to more accurately produce results that make network architects happy. It's probably not the API is themselves the architects are calling but yeah. So I guess then the question is like, how do we capture those requirements and have a solution for lack of better term solution via CNI. Is that the kind of question we're discussing here. We are right. This is a judgment. Firstly we define the problem before we start saying how it's solved but my best guess here is that whatever that solution looks like it's so far removed from what CNI does today that it would make more sense not to mingle it with the CNI. But that is a best guess it's not necessarily true right now until you know what the problem is we can't say what the answer is. Yep. Yeah, and to be clear, another thing in terms of CNI is there's also a northbound and southbound API issue so one of the problems you run into is, well what problem are you trying to solve so if you're if the problem you're trying to solve is I want to get multiple interfaces within a pod, then a CNI approach may be okay because you can do like CNI multiplexer. One of the one of the problems that CNI multiplexers tend to run into is that they're commonly configured through a custom resource. They bubble up the southbound CNI API to the northbound, which means that if Kubernetes ever decides they want to change the CNI spec that those low level details have been have been exposed. That also means that the many of these the subnets and similar and or parameters like what like VLAN, the XLAN parameters and so on often get welded into those as well rather than negotiate it so we do want to be careful there. It's interesting what you've just written down Lee, because I'll come to that in a moment but but starting from what Frederick's just said right if we look at something like maltas. Right it said that a CNI networking the CNI networking API is largely adequate to the task it describes the sort of networking that we want. And then it said, but the only problem here that we used to be able to do with virtual machines and we can't do with containers which we can't get multiple interfaces into a single container. Now, there are flaws with both of those statements statement one to one number one that CNI gives us the kind of networking we want, which is that there's a single network domain. It is layer three addressed it's all about reachability that there's one egress from the cloud that I use for for the networking that's coming across the CNI. Literally none of that is true. In terms of NFP, I want multiple points of egress from the cloud. And the only reason I have multiple interfaces in the container is because that's the only way I can point at different points of cloud egress at the same time. Then we get things like whenever we get into this it always seems to turn up with IP address management. I might have an IP address, and it doesn't always rely on one interface I might be doing things like ECMP load balancing so my interface, my address, my grades, I might be doing MPLS where I don't have an address at all. So, all of these assumptions. It's easy to find a use case that invalidates them. And then finally, that namespace thing. I am trying to get multiple interfaces into my namespace actually no no I'm not literally don't want to interfaces in the namespace that's exactly the thing I don't want. I might want them into independent namespaces. I might want one of them to be passed through interface but I absolutely never want to interfaces in the same namespace. By the way tying this to to the layers as well so most of these are at the L2 and L3 layers and we have people who are service mesh experts here. So, one of the one of the things one of the challenges as well that we that we need to look at is, is how to build in these things so that they complement each other so in other words. Most service measures focus on the L4, L7 managing PCP sockets managing application related things like HTTP or GRPC or similar. And at this particular level, you're looking at how do you actually establish that initial connectivity like multiple clusters how do you establish connectivity between those clusters or maybe a cluster with connectivity to external systems could be a VPN to a client or a partner. In the case of telecom they could also be how do I establish connectivity across multiple sites now that we're starting to see edge data center start to start to come up and how do we ensure that we don't get things like IP complex or localize the global and scope trying to localize them. And these are problems domains that are outside of the standard service mesh, but they have, they have massive impact on on the service mesh space, depending on the type of service that that is provided. And the ideal state is that it's fully abstract again that you don't have to worry about those low level details as long as like, you know how to connect to something that it just works. But we're not at that at that state just yet. And so just just some just some thoughts as well because I want to make sure it's relevant to to the people who are who are on the call as well. So you need both is what I'm saying. Yeah, you totally do as a matter of fact you know there's an any number to your point. Frederick there's any number of like sort of core service mesh use cases that that when you have a service mesh, as it's defined today or as it's commonly spoken to today, we have a service mesh discussion. But don't. They don't go low enough to rely. They don't go low enough so that you can actually realize a number of those value propositions, because the way that you would deliver those value propositions is by use of lower layer networking or things that aren't just And I would argue that they shouldn't drop down to that level as well because they over complicate the, the solution and they start to make assumptions in the space and so it's better to keep loose coupling and keep that abstraction. But the problem with it is that all all these abstractions end up being bleaky in some areas so you end up making some, some requirements somewhere. One thing that will help in this particular space is there's right now if you look at how have what the underlying assumptions are the underlying assumptions are primarily around networks are the identifier of who you are and IP addresses are the identifier of who you are. And when you establish a service, like one problem I ran into this actually was on an enterprise not a telecom site but we'll see the same problem arise on on telecom and service again especially with with edge data centers coming along. And so I had one, I had two companies I was joining together, one of them was on Google and everyone had a major on on prem solution. One site said that they, they had a range of IP address they're able to use. The other said that those range of IP addresses were completely taken you're not allowed to use them and and join them, and the cloud prevented it was using Google at the time and Google prevented them from making use of other set of addresses. And that particular system took around six months to resolve because of IP conflicts and firewall rules that have to be set and have to be mitigated and this problem is not uncommon, the, the average time with many large organizations could be literally several providers just to establish that initial connectivity. And so the implications on that are huge. And so when we start looking at things like application method and large enterprises tend to actually look like service providers because their service providers for their be used, and they have a lot of infrastructure for their views. And so these problems are not isolated only to do telecom. But one of the things that I strongly recommend is not using the network, or IP address as the identifier anymore, because that's now dynamic we have, we have, it makes the, it makes the infrastructure. When you bind identity to it it makes your, you've welded the security and infrastructure together in a way that makes it brittle. And so one of, we have within most of those meshes, the spiffy identities or we have cryptographic identities are able to use. So binding against the identity against those trust domains is a much stronger proposition, because I could say this trust domain and that trust domain, we can move together. And it doesn't matter what IP address they move to, we can say, yeah, that's using 10 dot something it's using when I do it's using a public address, don't care. So prove to me who you are based upon that cryptographic certificate across across trust domains. One of the problems to run into is that the service messages don't tend to implement the Federation portion of speed they implement the workload API, but not the, the Federation portion of API, which then complicates the Federation of these of these identities. So by providing some form of Federation, whether it's allowing your system to to run with spire and building against spire, or building the Federation API out and not a complex API. It doesn't fully solve the problem, but it gets us a major step towards that level of independence and then that helps separate you from those L2L3 concerns. And that means we could even drive you to a different protocol, which could be non IP based, you don't care, because you've asked for something, as long as you can get that socket to what you need, you've maintained that that independence. So, does that make sense. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I think that the day had, the day had long past sense some, it was appropriate to use an IP address to identify much or at least, at least in my area of focus and when you said spire a moment ago, was were you using that interchangeably with an, an SFID, like, let me let me say like this that I'm being, I'll be, I'll be very specific. So spire is a is a reference implementation of spiffy. There's two APIs, you have a workload API that pushes down the SFIDs down, and then there's a Federation API, which is how do you actually join things together. How do you join together multiple trust domains. And so, spire is a reference limitation doesn't have to be spire. I'm bringing that in as an example because it fully implements both sides but it could be, it could be Istio or it could be Kuma or be something else. As long as those Federation APIs are a dear to in the spiffy spec, the spiffy is the is the spec. Then that gives that would help tremendously towards getting us towards the multi, towards a multi cluster approach. That's actually something that we're really interested in. On the side here. Well, wondering, like, what is the status of other service matches interest in either like the Federation spec of spiffy or the Hamlet spec that was proposed by VMware and seems so kind of like lost steam over the past like year to six months. It's definitely something that we're looking at for internal use cases of federating like console servers with console plans with other console deployments independent that are independent. But we're definitely interested in hearing from other measures about what sort of interest they might have in those protocols. Mike that the Andrew Jessup or a representative of spiffy inspire projects had wanted to put together a definitive list of which meshes have are have implemented spiffy or have implemented spire. And he did so. Here as a reference under under this section here under functional just there's a spiffy inspire section. And so that's put together that the yet the yays or nays are well put together by project project maintainer of spiffy inspire. And so, you know notably, and you know Frederick is sort of hinting around this that one of the one of the more prominent service messages doesn't you know doesn't necessarily use either the two of those, or like sort of halfway uses spiffy and that that if these were all green checkboxes I mean one way of saying this if if sort of the spiffy column was showing a lot of green. Some of some of the challenges that Frederick it was as articulating begins to and some of the power of, like, in my mind, while there are all kinds of non technical concerns and politics to be addressed around the projects. As long as service mesh as a technology makes it, so to speak that it's an inevitability that federate in Federation of these identities of these catalogs of these services is either SMI, or maybe an NFVI or a or a Hamlet. You know needs to become a real boy and and one place to sort of make it a real boy if you will is is here in this forum, run this in the CNCF sort of in this forum. And those project maintainers had asked a couple of times about interest, and then we're interested I mean we're, I think there. I know for a couple of individuals that are involved from VMware that they were. It was pre pre release of Tanzu service mesh, and they weren't feeling the love and Istio environments working group, so to speak. And we're feeling placated or we're being placated in the SMI community meetings. And between that and I think, you know, yeah, I think that you've got an accurate sentiment as you characterize, so where the projects at. Yeah, some, some information on VMware, they hired three of the top spiffy spire engineers and are having them work primarily on on spiffy and and spire. And so that that was done. That was done relatively, relatively recent. So, not that they have a service mission in the game but HPE acquired site tail which was the company that was driving spiffy and HP has been doing a lot of work to continue that those engagements. We've been actively working with several service measures to help with that with that integration, including in some scenarios, providing manpower in some limited cases, based upon their based upon that teams capabilities because it's still a relatively new acquisition so they haven't fully scaled up yet. So there's. So there are commitments from Friday groups. I've also had conversations with with red hat and they are they are interested in the, they don't have a good Federation story. And they are interested in this has a potential approach, which has some SDO implications but there's, I think the SDO one is going to come down to whether the governance has been sufficiently decentralized, because while he was being controlled by by Google, it, the, the, the will just wasn't there for for some of these like they've been you, they supported the, the SFID downstream but not the, not the not the Federation portions. And so I, if, if the governance is decentralized, there may be more, more interest in this type of things because it helps with with a broader set of use cases then the initial scope that this deal was originally designed for which was only Kubernetes cluster because it welded the big problem actually comes from where do you, where do you root your identities to is do you root them to to an individual cluster because right now the cluster is the is the identity provider, or can you can you weave it into a wider story, which as a company or as a business unit, you're able to control your identities, regardless as to whether they're Kubernetes, some or something else, and to provide that that integration across the across the board. And, again, going back to tying it back to the end of the portion. This allows us to treat entity as a layer, and we don't have to worry about from your service website you don't have to worry about worry about any level detail as much because you're not bound to a specific IP address you're not binding to a certain VXLan protocol or similar those are those are all abstracted away at that point. Ian, with the time that we have left the of the goal that you were more or less attempting to accomplish in terms of like, you know, raising up you know defining some problem statements sort of identifying where a couple of these are, in other words, you are either after a different persona or after different use cases for those same personas in your, how can we help, or, or what, what would be ideal as either an outcome or sort of a set of work or Let's try that without mute. So that's that's a good question I don't have a straight answer for you right now. I just wanted to basically, I guess, terrify you about the kind of networking we're doing so that, you know, really to say that it doesn't matter what you do with service measures, it isn't going to solve this problem, because it's a weird and different problem it demands efficiency, among other things. And, and it's annoyingly low level and not really relevant to, again, most people's experience of what they're doing with networking so I just want to basically raise the fact that there is a weirdness going on here. You know, the networking see I don't want to hide it from you want to basically lay it on the table. Now, in terms of solving it. I'm working on that. I'm working with Taylor on that we have the CNF working group. It doesn't currently belong to a SIG. It's not obvious that it necessarily wants to belong to the network SIG, because it's not about networking in Kubernetes. It's about building a network function. And what Kubernetes needs to provide to do that is only one part of the problem and it's also a little bit. I'm trying to figure out at the moment it's how do I make my, how do I make my network functions cloud native, what is cloud native what is an application so it goes on. So it's a little bit cross platform. Really, I just want to basically lay the problem out. So you can see we've got some work to do here. I want to figure out how to get the right people in the room to talk about that because again, talking to people who operate hypothetical network functions is well and good but it isn't going to resolve the networking needs of Kubernetes to talk to them because they're not the ones necessarily writing those applications. I think this will be an ongoing conversation while we figure out the structure of this basically. So I think that's one of the points and I'm to be candid, I'm confused as to like CNF conformance working group, like, it is all about I wait like, for my part, I don't need any additional work. So you're happy not to or not happy to have the working group here or not. So much more about networking and even deeper sort of lower layer service providers centric networking than the CIG, CIG app or the other and granted it's a cross function. Yeah, well that's it. There are other parts here, things like for instance CIG app delivery could potentially be interesting but on a fairly cursory read of what they're doing. Then what they're doing is talking about applications that are delivered, including the Kubernetes right Kubernetes is a part of the application. And again, that turns out to be a use case distinction between what service providers would like to do. And how most people use Kubernetes most people are interested in running one app on their Kubernetes. That's fine right controlled by the app team because it's helping them. Service providers want to basically make this an independent component that they look after and they run multiple CNFs on it. So if we are doing something different than then the familiar pattern that's well studied. I think it's important that we get people who are thinking to do that to recognize the distinction between what they want to do and what everything that has been done before because the immediate conclusion they come to is, this is the best work. And all I have to do is go and pick and choose the components off the shelf and figure out which ones make it work. And that's sometimes a flawed assumption. Other comments on problem statements that Ian is documented. I think by the way I'm Frederick and Ian both of you guys like the way that you you characterize the differences of these layers is, is nuanced, and I thought, I think very accurate, like, and the nuances are quite meaningful. There's, it's a deep, it's a big old and this is what why this is why earlier when we're opening the call and I was talking about the service mesh working group and some of the things that it's doing. The where I was trying to express a feeling of potential guilt was to like go deep and focus on one of the advancing one of those initiatives using this hour, because networking as a thing is fast, broad. And so, but you might view this as for networking as a whole, how do we make the important things easy and the hard things possible. And arguably the CNA might makes a lot of important things very easy and service measures make even more important and comparatively complex things easy. But the CNI as it stands denies the possibility to make the hard things possible that so there's a little bit of something that needs to be broadened out in that direction. And since, again, nearly 100% of Kubernetes users have no interest in doing hard things. It's completely understandable that's where we are. But unfortunately, we're awkward. Yeah. Let me ask you this. Right, there's a number of related problem statements that that I would probably add to this list that are from a layer seven centric perspective where we're saying where I would I would say that the application and its needs are under characterised in in layer seven to be able to bring forth to facilitate for those needs a bit more programmatically or a bit more automatically and things like not exactly CNAB, but things like open application model OEM. I am lost with your terms but where are you going with this. But there's a lack of the lack of application lack of a complete definition of what a workload is what it is what it needs what it depends on doesn't need multiple paths out like, and if there are, why would it prefer one versus the next sort of we consider like things about affinity or anti affinity and yeah, you've got it's sort of interesting. I think what's happened here is that we don't really talk at the level of a workload. We talk at, you know, again if I'm Netflix right. And sure this is not how they run on many levels but if I'm basically running a and as a service offering with Netflix be it Salesforce be anyone else right. It isn't a matter of running multiple applications I'm running literally one application of the components that I'm trying divide up and give to people to manage them separately, but I only have one application I don't really have to think at the application level because it is my literal job description. When you start asking yourself well how what happens if I'm running many of these things simultaneously not microservices but actual self contained applications. If you run it in one cloud, then you actually don't have a description of what an application is and what it touches and what else it might want to communicate with, because a lot of these things like policy of how microservices communicate and the security you put in place there, and the metrics of how microservices communicate that are relevant to the person running the application and maintaining it are also interesting to the guy who's using multiple applications because now they want to know how these are interacting with each other, but actually the internal communications the application is a black box right. It's happening. Get stats out. They mean nothing to me because I don't know what conversations this thing has internally. So, we haven't got that higher level of abstraction today, certainly. There's, there's a part of what needs to be considered in the space as well is how do you provide enough information for these infrastructure components to be properly scheduled by by the orchestrator. So, right now, it's, it's, it's a black box but even the parameters on on what the system supports is is still a black box and not well, not well abstracted. So in other words, to, if I want to run a bump into wire firewall, this thing doesn't have an IP address it doesn't care about load balancers or anything like that. But when I, when I install it into Kubernetes, I need to know, okay, well what, what protocol is this thing going to use is it an Ethernet based on was it IP is it something else. So what is its payload. And the second thing is how do I actually communicate with it like do I speak with it over a kernel interface is there a shared memory thing I'm going to drop in is or a device I'm going to drop in that it knows how to communicate and so it needs to be able to describe its capabilities to the northbound so they can get scheduled in now whether it's Kubernetes or something else I in the ideal world shouldn't matter. But, you know, there's right now there's not a good description or definition of what these things look like in a way that we can meaningfully consume them. Despite the fact we have all these different efforts to find okay well what is the infrastructure for this like this core problems still still remains not untouched but but insult. It's some of these things. Again, if you consider effectively you've got a at the lowest level of this networking you've got abroad, but dangerous level of abilities, you can do whatever you like, almost with the networking. But most people will shoot themselves in the foot if they try and join in at that level. And at the highest level, you've got something which is narrow and prescriptive, but generally doing exactly what you want to do with no additional, no additional craft, like, again, service measures trying to deliver particularly specific functionality that health applications. It's possible that if we stuck that lower level in there we would suddenly find more flexibility at the higher levels as well. I'm not saying it's necessarily exactly related but the one that always comes to me is the fact that envoy is effectively running privilege because it's doing dirty tricks with the, with the networking that aren't strictly permitted by the CNI and argue would be a related question of well what networking is the CNI itself consuming. If you want to see an eye plug in how does it attach to the outside world is there a positive potential for for more things there so it's possible that what we're doing here would bring value. It's not the first place I'm trying to go, but I'm certainly not saying this is all on a on another avenue all by itself and it doesn't tie back in. By the way, the OAM looking at the networking portion. I think is binding on the wrong thing because you're binding on a subnet for your application and you pass in a subnet ID for for how to connect it in. And this, this is, they should have nothing to do with the application itself the application should not ask I need to be on this specific subnet in order to in order to communicate that that's something else. There is a place where you need to describe these these properties, but it should not be in the application definition itself. This this is one of those things where we always like to talk about immutable infrastructure and if networking is infrastructure then indeed it's immutable.  So when we talk about network functions since they're going down to the lowest level, then they start choosing their addressing. They start choosing their MAC addresses sometimes they certainly start choosing protocols that are not IP. And that's where, you know, a lot of these standards like oh well you're an application of course you'll want to submit and figure out what to do with it. That isn't actually how this works once you've got to that level. There's also the question do I even want to submit like if you look at Calico Calico networking is not subnet based it's actually everything is a slash 32. So, the concept of a subnet in Calico is not to say it's completely meaningless but it's, it's not what you would expect. Sounds like you've got another meeting to go to Frederick if you don't like what they've written in this OEM spec. Yeah, I do have, well, I'd say I have to jump onto another call right now. So, not an OEM one, but possibly I can only see sounds so many though so I'll see what I can do about that. Yeah, yeah there's, if anyone is interested in the link to that call. There's a link to the call to get the overview of OEM. I don't know that it, I'm not suggesting that it captures or provides a facility to capture all of this. It did look at first blush fairly like it had considered for quite a bit.  It's a top level request it's not it's not the actual binding it's like I need to connect to my Postgres service, whether it actually renders to an internal Postgres or some external one, a hosted in cloud version, you don't care about the protocol is Postgres and you need to communicate to something that speaks that. And so, having a having a system where you can describe I need to have a relationship with a service within the spec I think would be would be excellent. And how the system renders that into it. It's the same advice that I gave to originally they call it the multi interface working group they changed it to to. I love it now but I never never plumbing. I think it's what they call it the working group within within Kubernetes. But the initial version of it was that they wanted to provide multiple interfaces and it's like who actually cares about multiple interfaces as a user I don't care about it about multiple interfaces I care about. I need a fast I need fast access to my, to my storage. And I want to describe that I have that I need this faster access somehow, and how it gets rendered into the system I don't care if it's all over the same interface whether it's a different one. If they, if they found a way to make carrier pigeons work in a, in a ethical way, then I'm all in. And so it's, it's not. It's not a, like, you know, you want to be careful not to bind to things are too low in this scenario and I think that's, it's a common practice to do so but there's, there's consequences down the line as you start to, as you start to try to scale these things up. And so I think describing what they need to connect to, and the type of things that they need would be okay. But not necessarily describing down to like I need the specific submit ID or I need these particular, because those that now you're making, now you're making assumptions about the implementation that may not be accurate. Clear separation. Sounds like we will, we will not. We will meet next year, I think is our next point of collaboration. It's been a great, great call. Any, any final requests or call to actions that people had had before we close out. Thank you Frederick. Thank you. I think we may want to catch up a couple of. I'll be working this week probably middle of next week. Ian and Mike Blake very thanks for coming guys. Welcome. Yeah, thank you. Have a happy new year. And he's happy holidays. Bye guys.


Let's take a look at just some of the most beautiful planetary nebula scattered across the galaxy. Here we have the Dumbbell Nebula. It was the first planetary nebula ever discovered. Charles Mezzer found it back in 1764. Here's a close-up taken by Hubble. This object is named Gomez's hamburger. The star has already expelled large amounts of gas and dust, and is on its way to becoming a colorful glowing planetary nebula. But at this point, it is simply reflecting its light off the dust.


So, good morning. My name is Lucia Dolce. I'm the convener of the DMA Buddhist Studies here at SOAS, and I'd like to welcome you to SOAS Virtual Space. So, and welcome to the Buddhist, to the program. You may have already read in information on the program that this is a most comprehensive program in Buddhist studies in the UK. It's housed within the School of History, Religions and Philosophy, and is supported by language teaching that includes most of the languages of Buddhist. And as an extracurricular activity, we have also a research center, Buddhist Studies Research Center, which offers other opportunity to engage further with the study of Buddhist. So, what I would like to do today is to say a few things of what you can expect from the MA Buddhist Studies, and to speak a bit about the program structure. So, let me start with the first point. How do we study Buddhism? We take Buddhist Studies as a field, Buddhist Studies is not a discipline, but it can be approached from various disciplinary perspectives. So, I think we can consider it an interdisciplinary field of inquiry where it is possible to combine historical, philosophical, ritual, material, culture approaches, or to choose any of these. The basic approach at SOAS is a critical one, which I mean that we look at the traditions respectfully, but we also are interested in the academic studies of these traditions and the consequences that the study of Buddhism has had for the study of the areas where Buddhism has impacted and the study of religion or philosophy in its whole. We are also very much interested in placing Buddhism in the areas where it developed. So, we would be looking at Buddhism not in the abstract, but as a living religion. So, with attention to not only the scriptural literature, the textual literature, the philosophical thoughts, but also the practices of the Buddhists in the countries where they existed today, where they have existed in the past. Another very important point about our approach is that we do pay attention to the development of scholarship, not only in the West, but also in the East, if you allow me, these broad categories East and West. And here I think we need to know the importance of Asian scholarship, especially Japanese scholarship, but also Chinese scholarship more recently for the understanding, for general understanding of Buddhism. All our faculty, the members of staff who will be teaching in this program are the master researchers in one or the other form of Buddhism. So, the teaching in the program is based on research and first hand knowledge of the field, which brings a lot of advantages because you have a very sort of fresh and up-to-date approach and knowledge of the field. Now, what else to say about Buddhism? We used the word Buddhism in the singular, but we do also need to understand the diversity of Buddhism. It's historical and geographical development, so we can as well speak of Buddhism as of Buddhism in the plural. This means that Buddhism has both a transnational dimension. It's a Pan-Asian religion that started in India, Central Asia, and moved to Southeast Asia and what is called Northeast Asia, so up to the Far East Asia. And from there it moved to Europe and to America. So, we can think of it as a transnational religion, as a transnational philosophical approach, but it also has very important local incarnations. So, this dynamic between the transnational aspects and the very local aspects is a very important point to note in the study of Buddhism. And this brings also a lot of what I call ambiguities and contradictions in how we represent Buddhism. Buddhism is at the same time one and many. Buddhism engages with the construction of the political world of society, and therefore it takes different forms. So, while studying Buddhism, we can also study aspects of the interface between religion and politics, but also more broadly about the construction of gender, theories on the environment, and so on. So, let me pass on now to the structure of the program. As I said, the program is based in the School of History, Religions, and Philosophy, which is abbreviated as HRP. And the core teaching team for last year, for this year, and I'm saying this because it may be there may be additions in the coming years, is made of three members of staff. Myself, Luchedocha, I'm working on Japan mainly with some foreign, the Chinese and the Koreans of the Sino, the Sinitic world of Buddhist. Dr. Tarvanyan, Stephanie Tarvanyan works on China. And Professor Urish Pagar, who is also the head of department who works on India and Tibet. So, this is the core team in HRP, but we are very lucky to have several colleagues who work on different aspects of Buddhism in other departments. And I thought I would mention here, especially the Art History department, where there are two colleagues with whom we collaborate and whose classes are included in our program. And that is Dr. Christian Lutzantis, who is a specialist in Tibetan Himalaya area, and Professor Ashley Thompson who works on Tarvayan Station. So, this is a pretty substantial team of researchers whose first research has come to us. Now, the structure of the program that you have seen already from the website. I hope you have already familiarized yourself with what is on the website, so that there are questions or queries about it that can be solved during this presentation. The basic structure of the MA with the studies follows the structure of all MAs and so on, of most MAs and so on. You need to take total modules to the equivalent of 120 credits plus a dissertation of 10,000 words. That is worth like the 60 credits. There are different types of modules, core modules, which means the modules that you have to take, everyone who takes within the program has to take. And then there are elective modules so that you can choose from a pool of options within the department that work on Buddhist studies or on related subjects. And then there are often options that means that you have a maximum of 30 credits that you can take from courses offered across the school. So, when we come to what exactly these modules are, the core course of the program, so the compulsory core course, is called critical concept in Buddhist studies. This is a especially a methodological course that looks at some concepts, some ideas that are relevant for the study of Buddhist studies and a Buddhist study of Buddhism and looks at them from different perspectives, basically. So, for instance, we would be looking at what it means text, what it means image, what it means ritual in the case of Buddhism. And again, what is society, what is an institution within the world of Buddhism. This is a course that I convene at the moment and normally has just students from the MA, Buddhist studies, although some students of related MA are also allowed to take it. Then the other courses of the program are more area-based. So, we have one course on India and Tibet that is called Buddhist meditation in India and Tibet. I would look at Buddhism in these areas through the focus on meditation, that we have a course on East Asian Buddhist thought that covers one tradition within the broader East Asian world, every different tradition. That we will have a thematic courses on China in Japan, Chinese Buddhist MA themes and religious practice in Japan, text rituals and believers. So, with this, I think we cover the great majority of Buddhist Asia. There are other modules in the program that are either on related tradition or on comparative perspectives. And I've given here some examples of the most, of those that are most commonly taken by students or who modules the students have found to be as most useful. And those are modules on Daoist that is of interest for working on East Asia, religions of ancient India that covers all other religions that grew up in the Indian continent at the moment of the development of Buddhism and origins and development of yoga in ancient India. As I said earlier on, there are also modules in our history that are Buddhist specific. And again, there are changes from one year to another in the offering that we can make available. But basically, these are available courses. One covers the Gandharan art, one covers the Tibetan, well Tibetan and Malayan areas of Buddhism. And that's what is called interpreting visual expressions of the Mandala and another one, the art of the Maritime Silk Road. So, the so-called southern way of development, southern route of development of Buddhism. So far for the more conceptual courses, next to them, we offer a number of canonical and spoken languages of the Buddhist world. And I hope that I've written all of those that I'm on offer at this moment. So, we have Sanskrit, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Burmese, Vietnamese and Thai at this moment. And we hope to offer to missing ones next year again. And as for the other options, I didn't write them here, but you will be allowed to take other options if you have space and if they are relevant to what you want to do in the MA through consultation with the convener.  One very important aspect of the MA program at SOAS is that at the same time, focus and flexible. So, it does allow you to, let's say, build your own portfolio. And I would like to give you an example of how you can do that. And I've taken as an example an hypothetical student who wants to concentrate on the development of Buddhism in Japan. And I've done that because obviously it's my own field of research. So, you would be taking on top of the core course of the program, critical concept in the studies, the two courses that are mostly most relevant. So, the course that is dedicated to Japanese religions is religious practice in Japan. That is a 30 credits course, what we call a full unit, which means that it goes across the entire year. And this course has a historical, contemporary dimension and introduces different theoretical perspectives to the study of Buddhism. And then you would take also East Asian Buddhist Code, which is 15 credits, so half a unit means it is offered in one term, which, as I said, focused on one tradition of the Sino, well of Sino-Japanese, of Sino-Japanese Buddhism. Then, and this is where the choice, the most interesting choice comes to, you just think of how to complement the very focus to study of Buddhism in Japan with either other related tradition in the regional context. So, let's say the Semitic world, and here you could do something like Buddhism in China, or Taoism, or something more specific in Japan, for instance, Japanese pre-modern literature, if you are interested in the pre-modern development or modern society, if you are interested in contemporary expressions. Or you can go through more specific themes related to religion. So, for instance, you could join in the course on the expression of mandalas if you are interested in a more visual, in the more visual aspect of Buddhism, or you can do religions of India if you are interested in looking at the origins of Buddhism, or Buddhist meditation in India, or something like that. And finally, if you have never studied the languages of Buddhism, or if you have studied them and you want to improve your knowledge, you can take courses in the primary languages in this case of Japanese Buddhism. So, we offer classical Chinese, classical Japanese, and of course modern Japanese at all levels. And the insertion of language has been very important for those students to take this MA as a step towards a PhD, a further study in the field. If you may know, or maybe not, maybe I'll say that the MA programs, and in particular the MA Buddhist studies, has this double function of being just further education for anyone who has done a bit of religion, or even a bit of Buddhism, I wanted to know in more details, one or the other tradition, but also as a sort of filling the gaps kind of course for those who have, for instance, already a BA in Japanese studies, or have done a BA in history in Asia, and want to concentrate for their research degrees on Buddhism. So, it does have, you will have in class both students who may be interested generally about Buddhism, or students who have very clear ideas of what they want to get out of the course. And that brings a very interesting dynamic to all, really to all courses. Okay, I'd like to go on really a little bit more afterwards, we can take your questions. How do we teach? There are a variety, there's a variety of teaching methods, so it's difficult to say just in one word, but you will have regular lectures followed by seminars, or you will have interactive lectures, where the lecture would be open to interruptions, to discussion within the lectures, or very fluid format. In any case, what I really want to stress is that active participation from the students is always required, welcomed, and encouraged, so that that is the way of learning, of learning more, and of being, of learning together, let's say, let's go this way. I also want to say something that's about the new modes of learning that have been introduced last year because of the of the need to teach online. Although we are now already back on campus for most of the classes, but not for all, we have maintained a kind of double mode of teaching, both what we call asynchronous learning and synchronous learning. So there is a lot of material that you find online on the dedicated pages of each module, which allows for asynchronous learning, and that adds to the contact time that takes place in class or with your peers. So these two modes actually worked out pretty well in increasing the occasions to learn. As teaching is different from course to course, assessment is different from module to module. But generally speaking, the modules are assessed by coursework, which means essays or written work rather than exams. Obviously language courses will have exams, but hardly any other course has exams. And that is because we do want to encourage a critical approach that is more obviously unfolding through written work and also to develop a better research skills, whether you will be using it for a further degree or you will be using in all other career paths that you will embark. So when I mean written coursework, the traditional format of an essay, but also case studies, the response papers, reviews, a range of different written work that is meant to hone your skills. Some modules have also class presentations, whether individual or in group. Most modules will have seminar participations. And also we also introduced some formative assessment, which means assessment that is not marked. So you don't need to worry about your final mark for that assessment, but that helps you to develop the skills you need to write a good essay, for instance. So that's what I can say about the assessment class attendance is always being compulsory, but in fact, my students are not really very happy to be in class and to take advantage of the opportunity offered by not only the lecturer herself, but also by the discussions with their peers. Almost all, I mean, we are all staff members are very much available for student consultations. We have dedicated office hours, but we also offer quite a good deal of supervision for not only for the final dissertation, but also consultation for writing your essays. So there is a lot of guidance besides the contact hours during the teaching itself. This maybe we don't need to do it, or if there are questions, we'll come back to the numbers of hours that the programs are supposed to retain. I wanted to say just one word and then I'll stop about the fact that although the curriculum of the program itself is quite intense and quite full, there's much more happening at SOAS and we do hope that the MA students coming into the program will make the most of it. I mentioned earlier on at the center and I'll come back in a minute, but first of all, the library. SOAS Library is one of the world's most important academic library for the study of what we say Asia, Africa and the Middle East, but in our case for the study of Buddhism. And there are other very important resources in the area where SOAS is, which is called Bloomsbury for those of you who are not familiar with London, both in terms of library, British Library for instance, and museums. The British Museum again is very close by and we often organize some events together. There are also many talks and guest lectures and seminars offered across the school in departments or research centers and they are really a treasure trove for getting familiar with maybe little topics within the study of Buddhism that are not covered in class. And here I present a few things about the center of Buddhist studies, which is our flagship and one of the oldest center of Buddhist studies in the country and which I'm the chair of at the moment. We have two series of lectures. One is a dedicated lecture on Chinese Buddhism, which is supported by the Hope Foundation. And another one is one of the really oldest lecture series called the Buddhist Forum that is more broadly on all aspects of Buddhism. Often these lectures are joined by occasions for seminar-like discussions with possibly students, both PhDs and MAs, so there is really a lot to take from them. And there is an outreach series that is funded by the Chinese Foundation called Buddhism Inside Out and we have covered the different themes through the years and what we have looked at. Beth and Buddhism, we have looked at meditation, we have looked at sound, music and Buddhism. So these are very open lectures to a broader public, not necessarily the academic one. And you can see the events on our website. There are other relevant research centers according to the geographical area so that you are interested. And there's a center for the study of Japanese religions. There is a South Asian Institute. There is a Center for Yoga Studies. And then there are other regional centers of the China Institute, which is a Korean Institute and so on. So research is very much in our interest. And equally, there are some extracurricular activities that are not part of the credit building, but that have been very much appreciated by MAs students. They're not meant originally for MAs students, but MAs students have often taken part in it. And I put down here on this slide a reading look in Chinese with this text which seems to be very popular this year, with this year's cohort. Okay, I think I will stop here and I'd like to take any questions that you may have or anything that you want to hear, father. Hello, chair. Hi. Hi, my name is Ayako. Thank you very much for your seminar today. Thank you for attending. Where are you joining us from? I live in England, Uckfield, which is one hour and a half minutes away from London. And then I used to be taking an MA translation course that took so was 2012. Ah, okay. So we are already familiar with the system. Yes, yes. And then this time I'm very interesting Buddhism course for my sort of career and my like, it will be my life research. That is what I feel now. So this will be the beginning of it, I hope. That's very nice to hear. Yes. So there are four questions that I have. The first one is that if it's at all possible to provide us some reading lists, if at all possible, because I don't have academic Buddhism knowledge. I'm very interested in and then I've grown up in Japan. So I know what Buddhism looks like in a daily life, you know, but not in academic way. So I'm reading academic Buddhism books in Japanese right now. But if there are some recommendations or reading lists in English written in English, that would be really, really helpful. And then I could make the most of the course as well before, you know, entering in. So yeah, that's the first question. This is a question is the recurrent question. Actually, I can supply a couple of a couple of general books, but my colleagues do not agree with giving out reading lists before students apply. Of course, yes, I understand. So I can supply, because I'm the convener, so I get, oh, it's me the one who gets this question, but there is a lack of reluctance to do that. So of course, beforehand, I'll be happy to do that after maybe we have seen the applications. So if you can come back to me, I certainly can provide you a couple of sort of introductory courses. Yes, yes. Yeah, introductory is perfect. Yes, thank you. Thank you. Right. So the second question is that, well, you mentioned that, you know, students are now back to the campus, most of them.  And then I was wondering if there is a possibility of like joining your lecture online, of course, with the video so that you can see, you know, I'm actually here. At the moment, it is possible. We teach, so I teach all my classes both online, I mean, I teach in class, but on Zoom. So that is possible because the situation at the moment is not such that we can avoid that. Students who are sometimes ill and the government has still allowed some Asian students, some non-domestic students to join online up to, I think, this year is up, although we expect everyone from January on. So in principle, we would like to keep the system, but I can't tell you exactly how. One thing that I can say is that we actually have always recorded our lectures, even before the pandemic as part of our strategy for helping students, because we have also a pretty large number of foreign students to look back at the lectures and to clarify something with themselves. So if it is an occasional, an occasional absence, there will be a way to get back the material of the lecture. We do hope, I think we all would like to keep this opportunity to do it online synchronously. I mean, it has worked quite well, you know, you don't hear 100% when the students speak, but you certainly hear the teachers and those who are closer to the mics, because we don't have, you know, it's not that all of a sudden we could organize all the classrooms that saw us with systems that you needed to do a really synchronic thing. So that is a level of expenses that is out of our visibility, but we are doing it because we had already the equipment there to record lectures. So it has been working pretty well, I must say, this year, because it happened to that, you know, once one student is actually one got covered, the other one was really feeling sick and didn't feel like joining the others just in case. So these kind of things at this moment, unfortunately, happened. So we hope to keep that system. But I want to say it's not going to be an online delivery course. Of course, yes. Yeah, I would like to join, like, face-to-face, of course. I mean, because we have also built, we worked so hard to build a lot of what I said are called asynchronic resources. So we, you know, we want to, we have learned that, so we can as well organize, although we have learned to make things available more broadly. And if we manage really to find a good balance, and if it works well, this year, we may think we'll have it for a longer period, because last year the fact that we were online actually meant that many students joined from all sides of the world. And it was really different than I was, very interesting. And they would not have been able to join, because maybe they were worth people work or were doing like a second degree and something like that. Mm-hmm. I see. Yeah. Okay. So, so I think there shouldn't be any problem. But yes, keep it, if you, let's say, if you had said that you are in Japan and you're not coming out, I would have said, well, no, this isn't, it's just occasional thing. I'm sure that there would be, I mean, there are certainly, there's material on the dedicated pages. We have a platform for students where we put all our material, including the recordings, so. Oh, okay. That would be great, because that, you know, once, once I'm in, I would like to make the most of it. So, yes. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. And I'll be quick. So, yeah, the last question that would be, is there any chance to, you know, chat with the current students? Because I'm interested in what the current Buddhism students are doing, for instance, for the dissertation. I found, you know, there is a page, a source page that you can chat online, but I couldn't find anyone from Buddhism course. So, I don't know that, so we'll have to be organized. Later on in the year, I used to have one of the students joining us when we were on campus for the open day, so to speak a bit about what they do. But if you want to know only about the dissertation, we had planned to put a number of titles on our website, just to give an idea. Now that you mentioned it, it seems not to have happened. I asked our offices to do it, just to give an idea. But the themes are really very broad, depending on. Yes, yeah, I believe so. It depends on every year would be different. I don't think I've had, I mean, I've almost never had the same dissertation topic. Oh, that's interesting. Oh, yeah. Yeah, because everyone comes with their own interests, so directing the dissertation that go from, I don't know, very philosophical analysis of the mandala to, you know, the role of Ashoka in East Asia, or in India, to the kind of institutional problems of contemporary Buddhism in Japan or Chinese Buddhism and environment. So there have been really such a variety of. We do have, we hope to keep it at the moment. We still have a prize for the dissertation in Buddhist studies, which is sponsored by the Kensei. I can tell you that some of them should be online on the website of the center. The winning, you can look at that for the winning presentation. Maybe Rachel, if you are school there, would you mind to go into the website of the center of Buddhist studies and look at the Kensei prize for the dissertation? Maybe we can share that page with the students here. So you can look at that yourself. And if we have a minute, I'll do it myself later on. But is that all? Maybe we should ask it. There are other questions from other attendees today. I see a Talisha and Marilina. Any question here? Hello, can you hear me? Yes. I'm sorry. I don't have any question because I arrived a little bit late. We'll see the recording later. Okay. Okay. Yes, we don't hear you very well. Thank you. Do you hear me? Yes. Perfect. Yeah, I arrived a little bit later too because I had to pick up a package and there was some issues. So hi, I'm Talisha. I'm coming from Netherlands. And so I'm not sure if I missed out on it in the beginning of the lecture. So that's why I'm happy it's also recorded. But I'm currently doing a master in international relations where I specifically focus on the direction of culture and politics and how that plays a role. And so I've been really focusing on the Buddhist approach to international relations. Fantastic. Yes. And I was wondering if that would be okay to then apply for this master because I don't know what is like the application requirements. Do you mean the availability? So where do you come in when we were talking about the program? Yes. Yes. I'm from the Netherlands and I'm currently studying at Leiden University. Yeah, I understand that. At Leiden University. Yes. That's actually my alma mater. Oh, okay. Yes, I did my PhD in Leiden. I'm familiar with the institution. No, I think it's very interesting. It's a very interesting perspective that you can certainly carry out in the program. And in fact, I was talking about all these extracurricular activities that we have. And one of those that we are going to organize was supposed to be this year, but because it's so complicated with the current pandemic, that will be for next year, is a series of lectures with the International Red Cross. Oh, wow. To speak exactly of this international relation focusing on Buddhism and their activities that have already been carried out and they want to go on carrying out. One of our staff members is involved in this international event related to what happened in India, in Sri Lanka and so on. So that would be exactly basically what you'd like to do. And one thing that I spoke about assessment generally speaking, but one thing that I didn't say is that in most of these courses, certainly I can't remember about Buddhist meditation, but certainly in East Asian, Chinese, Japanese, you are and also critical concept, you are free to choose the topic of your essays. So you can build the program around your interest also because of that. So let's say that you want to write in every course on a perspective that we may want to call that of international relations. And this international relations is very broad, so it depends on what you mean. But you could focus in all your essays on that point of view, let's say, by a consultation with the personal teachers in these courses. And so really use what you're learning plus to build up your knowledge and apply it to the question of, let's say, international relations. Yeah, that's great. And so when I'm applying, it's okay if I just send in my BA degree, but then also like a great list up until now, because obviously I didn't finish my master yet. It's okay. Normally the selection is done via the BA. So I have to say that I'm the academic advisor. So the admission, the professional services, the offices will be taking care of all the admission and so on. So the application will come to me only as an academic advice, as the academic choosing it. But you have a statement to write in the application. So the application is online. You can look at it already, go on the program. So you have to write a statement. And I think there is where you can write what you have done so far, what you want to get out of the degree. Yeah. But I mean, it's absolutely okay. We are quite flexible on the previous academic course of students coming into the program, exactly because Buddhism is such a wide kind of field of inquiry and can be approached in so many ways. And also, some students have a very different knowledge that maybe, you know, there may have been a practitioner for 20 years. And in fact, they know a lot of details about Buddhism. And so what they need at that point is more the kind of framework, the academic framework, while there are students, maybe like you have not really studied Buddhism, and then want to get the story, you know, in its entirety, so to speak. Yeah. Yeah, I think the course it works for both kinds of students. So it's a difficult course to teach, I'll tell you. So far, so far has been quite successful to cater to both these types of students. Yeah, it sounds amazing. Thank you. Thanks. And I see there's something in the chat. Oh, yes. So Rachel put, let me see if I can open it. And the grants available. Actually, that's not what I meant, but with these events, news, I think, maybe. For some reasons, it's always echo here. Can you see my screen? No, I should stop sharing. Sorry, I'll share another screen here. Share. Can you see this screen? Yeah, I can see it. So on the news, you will see the Kinsey Foundation award for outstanding while actually it's MA dissertation. Why is it written PhD dissertation? So if you open it, I don't know. Oh, that's a different one. Sorry, sorry. That's not given by SOS. I think maybe. Sorry, the source one. I cannot control the website. But somewhere here, that should be, you see this one? Yes. So this is for instance, the award for the MA dissertation. And so you can see the title here of the dissertation and something about the student. And she did the presentation for the open day last year. Maybe we have that recorded and we could put it on the website. Maybe Rachel, we can look into that later on. Yeah, sure. So, but Ayako, this gives you an idea, maybe? Yes, certainly. Yes, I will read this later on. Thank you very much. We can read this. And if you look down there, these must be also the same awards. Yes, these are the same awards. And they are for MA and PhD students. They used to be for both now and they are only for the MA students. Okay. Thank you. We are almost at the end of the session. Any other questions, any other comments that you have? Yeah, thank you very much for today. Okay, then. Thanks to you, to all of you to join us. And I hope to receive your applications after the program and for meeting your test. Yes, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks, everyone. Goodbye. Thank you. Bye.


To follow on on that, the enemy was just going into your flank and getting a third German squad into the trench system.


There's something very homey about this game. I don't know what it is. Like, I just feel like when I play 20, it's like a foreign territory. Maybe it's because I got a logo. You know what I mean? The neighborhood is familiar. The park looks lit as s***. Look at this, I got crowds for a text. Ah-ha-ha! Yo, man, we made it. Oh, man, I'm not irrelevant no more, man. Ha-ha-ha. Well, if you look closely, you don't see a witch. There's no- You don't see a witch? Yeah. Can you imagine if they still was updating the park? I would have no reason to play 2K20. Time to expose the agent, guys. If you only play 2K20 once every two weeks. Oh, yeah, there's not no expose. They know that. There's a contract no bad, though. Ha-ha-ha-ha. Can you imagine if people had to legally play 2K? Oh, man, I've been running through controllers. Just look at two hype at the end of the year, so they can get invited to the event. Come on. Get here for me. Latency is so much better than 2K20. Holy s***. Pin that, pin that. I'm here to want it. You don't want it? Yo, it feels so much better. It just feels better, bro. Everything about this feels better, man. I'm home. Oh, yeah, there we go. Good take. I'm home. Oh, my god. Get off! You're cringe. Get off! You used to be underneath, huh? What am I on my knees for, my god? Do you want to answer? No, I can't. Rebounds. You got boxed out? Oh, my goodness. Oh, my god. Bro, they double team me. That's free rebounds. Oh, my god. I got boxed out by the other man's player. Vortex just was just watching it happen. Well, I'm open. No, you're not. You're not. You're not, though. You're not open to me. No, you're not. You're not open. And then when you are open, you still miss. Vortex! Yo, what are you doing? Are you trolling me right now? That's bad. Oh, now you didn't. Yeah, that's all right. Oh, not change. You're not going to make that change. Oh, my goodness. We're a little rusty if you couldn't tell already. It's been a minute. Yeah. So you're not even going to try to play defense. All right, cool. That's the even worst. They try. They try on me, too. That's what happened right now. They try too hard. You shot over three. We could just go to an empty court. I mean, we don't have to. Yeah, that's fine. We got a logo now. There's more people playing this game. That is crazy. That is absolutely wild. There's more people playing this game than they are on 2K20, bro. I'm returning 2K20 tonight. That's wild. Is Vortex going to hit a try? Oh, yeah. Mr. O for three? Mr. White Open Brace is talking?  Mr. Compromise had us.   I'd be very good if people could just do that. Let's catch. You better make it.  Yikers. Yo, what a dangerous pass. What are you doing? Like the open dunk. That's only weakness right now. There was no demigod glitch. This game would be ours. Oh, you see that? Oh, yeah, chemistry. You know, the latency is way better. The gameplay feels way better. The parks are way more lively. I'd explain to you why I need to be playing 20 still. There's no reason. Deadass. That's the crazy part.  Yo, Deadass, 2K just need to start just updating your games. What are you doing? That was the most interesting thing ever. I need you to never click circle for a bounce pass ever again. You should lock it. I see you. You know I seen the vision. OK, we're in that like a real conversation. There's no reason. Absolutely no reason why anybody should ever, like, for Christmas, don't ask for 2K20. Deadass, don't ask for 2K20. Just keep playing 2K19. That speech is tied up with Martin Luther King. I had to read. Look at this guy. Look at this guy. I know about that one, chief. You better make it. Oh, it's game. Let's go. Demi God ridden three big men ridden 2K19. Then consider going on 20 for fun. For fun? For fun. Look at the vision, man. Let's go. This game was so much better. This game was so much better. Oh, my goodness. This game was so much better. Let's go. Let's go. Give me one. Give me one. Hey, last question. Why are you all playing 19 instead of 20? I'm going to let you know right now.  All right. Just way better. 2K20.  Hey. That nigga Ronnie. Hey.  I'm trying to grind 2K18. Stop making noise. Oh, depression. I'm trying to grind 2K18. He's going to do it. Stop. Lee, what happened? Bro, you got a breakup or what? Whoa. What are you doing? That's what I'm doing. I don't ever need you to judge me. I don't need you to doubt me. No, I wasn't. But I wasn't talking about you. I was talking about the bounce pass. All right. All right. I was talking about the bounce pass. Is he a demigod? What are you doing? You're just crazy. I got it. I went a little too far there. You know what I mean? Look at him. He's seven-three with Playmaker Trebles. He's a demigod. He's seven-three. He can hit that. I'm not going to get no rebounds because he's a demigod. You're not. You're not. I was like, he's not going to get the board. Oh, it's my guy. Should get that checked out, bro. I think you're depressed.  Why can't I pass? What the? Oh, my God. Yo, Mike. Mike. Mike. Get that. Get that.  Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. There's a few things I missed. I want to be able to see everybody's shot meter, 3-5-3-point. Yeah. It would have been nice. But the gameplay is so bad on 20. I'd rather have this any day to week. Good rotation. I shouldn't have stayed on yours, my bad. He good. He good. Oh, my God. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, my Lord. What if 21 is nothing but 19 mixed with 20? Oh, I don't want to mix with 20. I want the game of 20 had. Two takeovers? Wow, man. Oh, my God. How do I defend a guy faster than me, taller than me, bigger than me? You break his bed. Bait it. That's a break. Let's go. That's a break. Bait it, buddy. You're baiting. That's a game. You're baiting. That needs to be a movement, bro. Don't buy 2K20, bro. No cap. Get your refunds immediately in 2K20. And in Black Friday, it just passed. What a shame people didn't know how great this game was. Not doing. Paul! I had to rebound. My bad. Did I have to rebound? I don't know if you did. Oh, my goodness.   Oh, my God. You're out of your mind. Stop. Please stop. You do it by both of us? Wow.  Since you're not going to give me a logo in 2K20, I'm just going to make the whole community play 2K19. Oh, come on now. That's buckets. That's buckets. You got to be pretty good at that, man. I didn't feel fun in 20, but I suspended my judgment because I thought maybe it'd get better. There's too much wrong.   Don't play him like that. Don't play him like that. I really forgot how nice I was on this game, man. I really did, bro. How's it going, fellas? How's it going? How's it going? How's it going? Ha, so this is what I do, man. No, no, no. Wait, wait, wait, wait. Don't take off. Don't take off. I'm taking off. I'm taking off. I got a question for y'all. Why are you guys playing 19 instead of 20 right now?  I'm full. I'm hurting, though. Come on, man. You know, right now, my guy, you're not missing out. You need to stay right here. It's way better. Honestly, I kind of just wanted to chill and reflect. Is that cool with y'all? Yeah, of course.  Vertex, you're not on the right course. What? What are you talking about? You just teleported there. Whoa, what the heck? You ever got teleportation in 2K19? See, this game is way better. I'm stuck. I'm stuck. Ronnie. Let me out, Ronnie. I'm sorry. I'll sign it. I signed it. I promise.  K, man. You want to see a real demigod? Absolutely. We're going to see exclusively demigods in here. If you want to see the game being broken. So how do I have fun on 2K? Tournament? Impossible. Yeah, that's not possible at all. You got to delete the app. That's step number one. Okay. After you delete the app, make sure to erase your cash. You can't have any traces on your PS4. Oh, what are you doing? Do you know we're on the 5K now? Losing 5K. That's what I'm doing. He said losing 5K. Oh, my God. I missed the dribbling. I missed the dribbling. Oh, my God. You know the easy though? If I clicked X, you might have intercepted it, right? Oh, I never thought of it like that. Yes, you buddy. Oh, my God. We're out here, man. They don't play around on 5K. What are you doing? Out of that time, you didn't shoot? So you didn't shoot that time? But you're the other time. You shot? You did. Oh, you just shot. Oh, yeah, let's go. That's such a good pass. That's such a good pass. I wasn't ready for it, bro. I just lost 5K.  All I have is 5K. We haven't lost. How are you dunking like that? How do you know how to guard something like that? Oh, my God.  Out of here. What are you doing? Oh, I mean, I guess that. I made it. 19, that hit. That's the problem. That's the problem, 20. Yeah, that has that low. Why do you put it on the right side of the screen? Right there, right there. He's hitting him with the dough. He's still, he still is contested. It doesn't matter. You could have contested it more, my God. I can't wait for your podcast, guys. I had to work you for the last point. He may not even get a screen. He's like, f*** it. No way. Oh my god