Tonight, we are going to talk about Shinseiki Evangelion, a.k.a. Neon Genesis Evangelion. One of the most popular anime, one of the iconic anime in America, this thing's like 12 or 13 years old. One of the most important anime ever in terms of anime histories and modern anime. Now, before we continue, no spoilers, don't worry. We're reviewing this like we review anything else. We're not going to spoil anything, we're not going to talk about what happens, we're just going to talk about what the show is, why we like it, what we didn't like about it, all those normal things. And maybe a lot of information about the show, because it's kind of hard to set the record straight on some things. Yes, granted, I'm going- Not lot related things, but like what episodes do you watch, kind of things. Yes, particularly in the end, and then we have to- Yes, very confusing end. We have to mention something about the movies and the other movies and the re-releases of the movies. And the manga and the potential live action and the video games. The potential live action that's been potential for like a decade. Yep, yep. And two, part of the reason we're reviewing this now is that way back, way back, after we did our final thoughts episode on Big O2, a lot of people were clamoring for us to do more final thoughts episodes. And our thinking was we really don't want to spoil the show that a lot of people haven't seen, because then they either can't listen to our episode or they have to just let the show be ruined. So as a result, we're reviewing Ava, partly so that in a month or so, when everyone who wants to see it has had a chance, we can do our final thoughts. And also, because I haven't seen the show in like, I don't know, four years, and I have to watch it again to do final thoughts. Yes, yes, but actually it's good, because we know a lot of people who haven't seen Ava. And also, by not having seen it just now, it's not going to be easy to go off on specific plot tangents that we really don't need to be talking about. Yeah, you can't really worry about me spoiling anything, because I haven't seen this show since college. In college, I think freshman year, I watched it all the way through on VHS, and then we marathoned it again later. And that's all, I've only ever seen the whole thing twice on VHS, and that's it. Well, you can spoil Ava, but in the same way that you can spoil any show that has something so unbelievable happen at the end. Yeah, but it'd be difficult for me to spoil it, you know, if I wasn't trying to, is what I'm saying. Yeah. It's not like I could slip up and be like, oops, I forgot that that was a secret. Yep. But anyway, I probably just forgot it. Period. Ava, whether or not you like it or you hate it, you think it's brilliant, you think it's crap, I just want to keep in mind while we talk about it that, one, this came out a long time ago, and it set a lot of precedent. Yeah, a long time ago, as in less than 20 years ago. Oh, you mean ancient times? Like the 90s. I mean, back then there were dragons as far as we knew in most of the world. But back, I mean, a lot of the things that people say, oh, Ava's so cliche. It really set a lot of precedents and even if you don't like Ava, you at least have to admit that Ava is a very important anime in terms of how anime has evolved. Now, Ava was directed by an interesting fellow named Hideaki Anno. We're not going to talk about the story behind him. If you want to know more about that, check out Anime World Order. They'll go into great detail about that sort of thing. Suffice to say, the man is either brilliant or insane. Or both. Probably both. Yeah, it's one of those evil mad genius kind of guys. Yeah, and despite his nuttiness, I think that he is one of the main reasons that Ava is what it is, regardless of how you take that.  So, very briefly, because I think a lot of people have seen Ava, but just in case you haven't, the story is actually fairly simple. In terms of what is going on, on the face value, what is the plot? The seed of the plot. Okay, here's the story. You ready? You have this earth and you have this city. And on earth, there are some people living in this city. I think you can start a little bit less broad than that. Okay, okay. I think you're going to explain this really badly, so I'm going to stand by to re-explain it. These people have some robots and the reason they have robots is because they're under attack by these angels, but they're not angels with wingolings and, you know, cupid bows and arrows. They're just giant, horrible monsters that come from the sky sort of randomly. And in each episode, or in most of the episodes, an angel comes down, so they get in their robots and they have to fight it off or else it's going to destroy their city and it's not going to be good. Okay, so basically, normal earth fast forward a little bit, you know, technology's advancing, about modern times is when it's really set.  And a semi-shadow organization of governments has gotten together, basically believing this to be somewhat true, trying to deal with it, prepare for it, and prevent it. One thing leads to another, and at some point, there is a catastrophe on the earth, known as the second impact. No, I forgot about that. The first impact being when God created mankind, Adam and Eve, all that, as far as you know. The second impact is basically God giving forth the harbinger of the end of the world, saying, now it begins, you best be prepared. Now humanity, having the prophecies in the Dead Sea Scrolls, had been preparing and under the auspices of the United Nations and other international organizations, had created an organization that, with scientists and these prophecies, had been preparing from that day forward for the day when the angels came. And the anime picks up pretty much when that day comes, and they're no longer crazy. An angel has come. The military tries to deal with it. The military cannot. They finally relent, agree that these people were not crazy, and they hand over control of basically the combined economic output of the world to this organization to basically try to fight off God and prevent the apocalypse. Yeah, but you don't find that out until... Well, you kind of do. That's what the plot is, and you know what's going on. It's actually a lot more complicated than that. There's actually like 10 different organizations, and there's all sorts of politics, and it turns out that the Jews were behind it. Not really, but kind of. The thing in the show is that they hardly ever say anything right out, you know? Things are always alluded to and implied and symbolized, and sometimes you think something's alluded to, but it's not. They lied, and it's... That's why a lot of people are like, whoa, it's a total mind-fucking show, because you can't tell what's going on. But at the same time, you can, especially when you've watched it, and you kind of know the seed of the plot, you really know what's going on, and then you watch it again, and you pick up a lot more. There seem to be a lot of shows like that. I think part of the reason that is is, I remember there's a couple scenes in the show where they'll show you something visually, without any words, for like two seconds. And if you see that in whatever place and time that it appears, that tells you a whole bunch of stuff that you didn't know otherwise.  Well, like that one scene, this isn't a spoiler or anything. On the aircraft carrier? Yeah, or when... With the suitcase? Yep. And they show you it's in the suitcase for like two seconds. And if you see it, you go, but if you don't see those two seconds, if you blink, you just missed out on like a whole thing, and now you're not going to understand stuff that happens later. I mean, basically the way the show seems to work in terms of that sort of thing is that all the information is there. Nothing actually comes out of nowhere.  It's all there. But they show it to you kind of in the sense that the characters involved wouldn't have noticed. These are things that wouldn't have been easy to spot in the heat of the moment, but they're just there kind of setting you up so that these things don't come out of nowhere.  It's more you see it and you think, why would he have that? What? What's going on? I don't like this one bit. Or like that scene when Ray's got the spirit of long a noose and then stabs that thing that was crucified somewhere. Yeah. And you don't find out what that was about for a long time, but once you do, because that's the thing, later on in the show, something big will happen, and you'll think back. You'll be like, wait a minute, but I saw her stab that thing with the spirit of long, oh, that's what that was. Whoa. Dun, dun, dun. And there's a lot of that. Now we've given you the backdrop of the show. The way the show actually progresses, the story within this plot, is that there's a young boy named Shinji Ikari, and he is a loser.  No one likes him. You don't even like him. I don't like him. I like him a lot more in the manga. I'll be honest. I really don't like him. But the thing is, you're not supposed to like him because the thing about Ava is that all the characters are very human, and they all have very real psychological issues that they really can't deal with. It's kind of hard to not have psychological issues when giant monsters are coming out of the sky. True, but even then, the fact is that all these people have fairly simple psychological issues, but they're very difficult to deal with, and they're all very isolated from each other. And I think part of what makes Ava great is that there's all these characters, and if at any point anyone had talked to anyone else about their problems or opened up at all, almost every problem that happened in the show could have been averted. But no, someone walks in on someone to see some crying and just kind of freaks out, doesn't know what to do, runs away and cries on their own, and then no one vents anything, and everyone keeps everything bottled up, and no one really trusts anyone. And it's really a fairly, I don't want to say accurate, but a fairly poignant and kind of biting commentary on what's wrong with humanity on a very fundamental level. If you think that people have that kind of problem, then yeah. A lot of people do, but... I mean, there are people in the show who don't have problems. It's just that many of the main characters... You mean the cool people? Yeah, yeah, the cool people.  Like my man, my favorite character in the show. That guy is probably one of my favorite characters in anime ever. He's all right. Kaji is just the man. He's got some nice watermelons. He does. I was once mistaken as a Kaji cosplayer, and they even took a picture of me. I'm in fans' view somewhere, because I just happened to have not shaved at some Otacon.  And I was hot, because it was summer, so I had my tie kind of loose in the top button-on-button. And some guy walks up and he's like, Hey, nice Kaji cosplay. And he takes a picture, and I'm like, what? But yeah. But the story is Shinji Kari, this kid, is the son of one of the men who is running this organization. And for reasons, I don't really want to get into the nitty gritty of it, but basically, he gets embroiled in all this, along with a lot of other children, because it just so happens that the children, the people who are able to pilot these devices, these avas, these robots, have to have been born pretty much at a certain time. Like there's this window where kids were born, and these people are the only people who have the capacity to pilot the robots. Yep, they can't just like put soldiers in them, and they can't put babies in them. And believe me- And they can't put nothing in them. They gotta put these kids in there. I mean, another nice thing about the show is that at least as far as you can see, it's not like they don't try. You think, well, why don't they just have a military guy do it? Oh, that's why that didn't work. Most of the characters are like military slash sciences people who are trying to figure out as much as they possibly can. Of course, everything always goes wrong, and goes more and more wrong every episode. My favorite thing is that the one thing that always bothered me about the show a little bit was that they have the kind of like the emergency cut the ties between the pilot and the robot in case something bad happens and eject the pilot. And I guess it worked in training or whatever, but in the course of the show, it never works once. And every time they try to do it, it just doesn't work and there's some sort of catastrophe. Yeah, it's like every single time there's a robot fight with a robot and an angel, right? They'll be sitting in the bridge. I guess it's not really a bridge because it's not a ship, but it's like the war room where all the displays and controls are for everything. It's the best war room ever. It's a pretty good war room. I mean, I've been to NASA. NASA looks really small actually, but... They've got all these freaking lights and things, and every time there's a fight, right?  It's like warning, warning, warning. Oh my God, extreme system failure. System failure over there. Oh, everything's exploding. It's overheating. God knows what's going on. We're running out of power. Well, God does know what's going on. This is kind of behind it all. But everything goes as wrong as it can every single time, and whatever they try to do to fix it never works.  They just don't do anything. However, while you might think that, I do want to point out that part of the reason that seems so strange through much of the show is that you don't know what's really going on too much, and you kind of take a lot of things at face value. And you find out later in the show that you can't really trust what characters in the show have been telling you because either they're misinformed or they're lying or something. And you start to find out that all the things that happen throughout the show happen for a reason. It's one of those shows where, kind of like Big O and Big O 2, where everything that happens happens for a reason. There aren't really many loose plot threads. And it all does come together in the end. And I think a fairly elegant way. In fact, I'm going to come back straight out. I don't think we said it. Despite what a lot of you might say, I really like and I really respect Evangelion. And I think it has a lot to say. And I think a lot of the people who are naysayers are just jaded by modern anime. Or I don't want to sound pretentious, but I don't think a lot of people got it. Or they at most, and I will respect this opinion and we'll get to this, I think a lot of people feel a little bit insulted at how Ava presented the message. Because the story is this kid gets embroiled in all this and politics one thing leads to another. What the show really is, is the first four or five episodes are, check it out, we got a robot show.  Giant robots, robot fights, action show. Check it out. Yeah, not only that, but a lot of these episodes, they like for half the episode, they won't even have any God or robots or anything going on. It's Misato with her pet penguin. It's like people getting drunk, hanging out with pet penguins and having all kinds of fun playing DDR. And who knows what else. Met Misato with, she has two fridges in her house. One for food and one for beer. It is definitely still plenty of that classic anime comedy going on. And there's actually, at least in the first half of the show, a more fan service than you would expect, mostly about Misato, who is probably iconic as one of the most idolized and I guess sexy anime characters, at least in a first American fan. Except it seems like everyone likes the younger characters because they're all perverted. All right, let me just clarify that. It would be hot if it hit them on the head. In Scott and Mine's old man generation, Misato was hot, because Misato was an adult. But I died. And hot. Yes. In fact, my first wall scroll ever was a slightly, it's a little bit itchy. I don't really hang it up anymore because it was given to me by the anime club as a gift. But I have this wall scroll. I thought you won it at a raffle. No, remember? I won the raffle and then they gave that to me and they gave me all of Ava to rent because it happened to be my birthday. I thought we asked for it. Well, we asked for all of Ava and they said, well, it's your birthday. Oh my God. And it was, they even made me show my driver's license. They didn't believe it was my birthday. Whatever. Yeah. The thing's falling apart and filthy. But the problem with it, well, not the problem, but the first five episodes and all this stuff, it's like a typical anime. So the show was designed and I think it was very purposeful to trick the average anime fan or just the robot fighting fan, whatever, to watch this show. What Ghost in the Shell does a lot of the same thing where they try to trick you into watching the show with their violences and their boobies, but really then they bait and switch and they show you something else that they wanted you to see. Yeah. But with Ava, it's so calculated. It's just enough robot show to get people going. And actually all the people I know who like Ava a lot are actually kind of turned off by the first few episodes and you got to kind of get them to watch until the point when the show switches. Not only that, but it's also so little robot show that people who are like super anti-robot will still be able to watch it because they're like, oh, it's not really a robot show. They don't really talk about the robot so much and they're barely even there. And the fighting is just sort of like actual punching and kicking and not so much like mechanical robot fighting. Well, plus, I mean, not to spoil, but there's a point at which you find out just what these robots really are. And I will admit that when I first saw Ava and you find out more about what's going on, I had a chill. It was a very well executed scene. Basically, the show does the bait and switch and the show is not about the robot fighting at all. In fact, at the end of the show, and this is probably one of the biggest controversies ever in anime, is that the show kind of stops right at the climax of everything that's going on and Anno kind of pulls the camera back and doesn't really show you what happened. He doesn't show you the resolution to the plot. He basically says, all right, kids, I tricked you into watching my robot show. I slowly turned it into my commentary on the human condition. Now I'm going to, because I've already got you watching this far, tell you what I think. And I'm going to do it in a very surreal, very heavy handed, very straight up way. And people didn't like that so much. Now people wanted to see their giant robot climax. Yes. So of course, what Anno did is stopped taking his anti-depressants. Yes. Well, basically it's a 26 episode TV series. In the final two episodes, 25 and 26 are Anno's message to you and there's not so much robot in going on. Now I really want to avoid talking about the message. That's for our other show on Ava. Yes. If I was to say, and I'm very open about this, I cried at the final scene of Ava in the original TV show. And I still think it is one of the best endings to an anime ever made. It's fantastic as far as I'm concerned. Well, basically people, unlike Rim, really didn't go for that. They wanted to see their robots.    But then one day someone said, what about money? Money exists. And he says, fuck, I need that. How can I eat if I don't have that yen over there? Yeah, because Ava did so poorly before the movie. I know, right? I got any money. So what he did, he said, fine, I need some yens.  So he went and he made episode 25 and 26 again. He made replacement episodes and he passed them off as the event and the Evangelion, the Evangelion movie. And the remake of episode 25 is called Air. And the remake of episode 26 is called A Pure Heart for You. And that's why we refer to it as Air and a Pure Heart for You. Because it's the two episode titles with the word and in the middle.  Way back before there were Internet fan subs. There's a fan subber called VKill. I really like that. But VKLL. Yes. Not VKILL. Yeah, I guess there might be a VK. I failed at searching for him on the Internet many times because I did not realize he lacked the eye. And I got all the Sailor Moon and a bunch of other stuff from these people and they were really good. But I didn't know about Ava. And he had this thing called End of Evangelion. It looked like a standalone movie. So I got it and I watched it. And I didn't know what it was. And it was really weird and it disturbed me. So I showed it to all my friends.  This is just really creepy. And then we all found out that there was a show and that basically ruined the whole show for us. And to this day, none of them will forgive me for that. Yeah. I also have to say it's watching that first really put the rest of the show in this totally different perspective. Yeah.   I think.  I mean, there it is. I mean here. Except for the part where he shows the empty real life movie theater. Yeah. That gets weird. Yeah. And then that swing that just keeps swinging back and forth for like 20 minutes. It's actually like a minute, but it feels like forever. But I mean the difference between the original ending and the movies in terms of plot is that, you know, the show stops at episode 24. And then 25 and 26 basically are like what's going on in the final care, like in one of the main characters heads at the end of the show. And it even shows you flashes of stills from what happened in the real world. And the message is basically, you know what? Yes. Look, here's what happened. It shows shots of certain people dead or things happening. And the message is basically, by now you should realize that you shouldn't care what happened. What actually physically happens doesn't matter. If you care about seeing what actually happened in the real world and what the end of this plot was, then you miss the point of my anime. Granted, I can't fault many people for missing the point of the anime because it's a little bit obtuse. A little bit obtuse? A little bit. A little bit. It's quite obtuse. But and it's really, I like it. The movies show physically while this character is in his head, you know, kind of exploring, well, what am I and what does it mean to be a human? And why is there this pain of separation from other humans? But is it better to be all that stuff? The movie is here's what happened when the giant robots fought the other giant robot and all the physical stuff and whether or not the Armageddon happens and what happens as a result of that. But the real answer as to what the movies were was Anno basically standing there with his two middle fingers in the air saying, all right assholes, you wanted to see what happened? I didn't want to show you, but you asked for it. So here it is.   It's like, you like those characters? Well, wait till you see what I do to them all. Yeah, there's other, there's, the movie, when we say the movie, we mean the replacement episodes airing up your heart for you. There are other things like Evangelion, Death and Her Birth and revival of Evangelion and all this other movies, different, that remakes with added scenes and stuff like that. And I really can't tell them apart. And honestly, you don't really need to watch any of those. All you need to watch is the 26 episode TV series and then the two replacement episodes for 25 and 26. Don't watch anything else. It's probably just a waste of your time. Now my recommendation, but this is entirely just my recommendation and you don't have to follow it at all. But if you have never seen Evangelion before, I would recommend that you watch the first 24 episodes and then stop, watch the movies now, see what happens in the, like in the end of the show and watch that ending and then watch the last two episodes from the TV series. Because they kind of both say similar things, but they kind of take two different tags on it. And I think that the real ending, well, not the real ending, the first ending, the ending of the TV show, will leave a much better taste in your mouth. And it'll also make more sense. Yes.  Yep. Now, in terms of the show itself, it's animated pretty well, especially considering when it came out. And there are some extremely beautiful scenes in this. The soundtrack is fantastic. The voice acting is really good. There's a lot of big names in this. Yeah. Actually, I've heard that the dub is actually not so bad, but I still wouldn't watch it. It's about as good as all the dubs back then were, which means kind of better than the dubs now. Yeah. I guess it was done by the 80V in the 90s. So whatever 80V was like in the 90s, that's what this was like. Yep. And I got to say, the symbolism and the scenes and the way a lot of the... There's so much symbolism in the show. It's kind of like Gutenna, where it just hits you over the head constantly. But I guess unlike Gutenna, it doesn't get crazy to the point of there's a flashing hand with the finger pointing at the symbolic thing on the screen to make sure you don't miss it. Yeah. But it's sort of weird because it's not like, you know, they tell a completely normal story, but there is a hidden meaning that is hidden, but doesn't interfere. Because the symbolism does sort of interfere. And they do a lot of scenes, which are just symbolic and not literal. And you know they are. And sometimes you can decipher them, and sometimes you can't. There's a lot of allegory in Evangelion. And a lot of the symbolism, I think, like it doesn't say, it doesn't hit you over the head so much. It's more that it kind of enhances the scene or adds a little something to your perception. Like there's a scene, I think this is the best example, where Gendau, kind of the leader of all this business, is sitting at his desk. And it pans out to him at his desk. And the way he's sitting at it with the shadow behind him, his desk and him cast a shadow on the floor that is pretty much straight up a star of David. And simultaneously, there is this shadow from the crossbeams of the window. And as the camera moves, the crossbeams form across over his shoulder. And coupled with what he is saying and kind of his force or what he is doing or what he does in the plot and why he is important, it actually adds a lot, especially if you know anything about Judeo-Christian mythology. In fact, I would recommend that you read up a little bit on Judeo-Christian mythology and the Dead Sea Scrolls. The show will make a lot more sense if you do. Yeah, they'll show you a lot of things and you might say, oh, it's a tree of life. Oh, it's a star of David.  But if you don't know any more than that, then a lot of things will be completely lost on you that they're trying to say. Yeah, but I mean, if you read about, especially the Kabbalah, which while it's obviously not true, it's really interesting stuff and it's kind of neat. And you'll get Ava a lot more if you've read about that at all. Yeah, I guess that's another reason why a lot of people are sort of say they don't like Ava so much because even if they're the kind of people who like symbolic, meaningful, existential kind of stuff, this sort of requires this base knowledge and a lot of attention. You gotta pay attention to everything and every second and every single thing on the screen in order to get all the pieces. And it's hard work. It's not easy to watch and get it. It's very difficult. But unlike some shows, like Utenna, no matter how hard you try, you're not gonna figure out what's going on until the very end. With Ava, you can get a very good idea. If you just pay attention and if you watch the show with the mission of I wanna know what's actually going on, you'll have a pretty good sense of what's going on near the, like as it goes on. And you'll start to figure things out. Because even though everyone talks about how crazy it is, most of the show is pretty straightforward. Like, there's an angel coming. Hey, we're in school. Hey, there's a robot. Hey, should I go in the robot? I don't know, you go in the robot instead this time. Oh, I'm not doing so well in this robot fight. Oh, she's hot. It's most of it is straightforward during the, you know, first half of the TV series. For like 16 episodes, everything will make sense. Complete sense. Like, oh, he's doing that now. All right. Now, I'd like to talk more about the show, but honestly, I really don't wanna spoil anything. And I don't wanna, any more so than we already have, kind of poison the well of how you're going to take Ava. Because much like all the shows like this, there are a lot of ways to take it, and a lot of ways to interpret it. And I really don't want anyone to watch the show having some sort of preconceived notion as to what the show is trying to say.  Yeah, I think what it comes down to is, whether you like the show or if you hate the show and you think it's the worst show ever, it's such a significant show, at least in its influence on current animes and animes since the later half of the 90s to today, that if you're any sort of anime fan whatsoever, even if you're only like Shojo and you hate robots and you hate all this kind of stuff, you should watch it anyway. It's sort of like a must watch. Like, if you watch movies, you have to see Citizen Kane. Even if you don't like it, you have to see it. It's like a law somewhere. And luckily, Ava is really easy to come by. There's a platinum thin pack. And you want that. You can get it for like $20 to $40. There's the whole show in it.  And ADV keeps re-releasing Ava in different formats. Forget all of those. Buy the platinum complete thin pack. Because one, the platinum complete has, it's totally remastered. And with this show, it really matters. It's like night and day. Yep. And two, and this is one thing that bothers me about Ava. In the platinum thin pack, there are the director's cuts or the original cuts of like five or six episodes from the show. And I watched all of those. And I discovered something really, it seems like all the things they cut out of the show were the things that explained exactly what was going on in excruciating detail. I watched this one episode and there's this organization called Gehrin that you kind of get the sense that they're important but they don't really explain exactly what that is. And when they do, it's really roundabout. In the director's cut version of that episode, they're pretty much, Gehrin was founded by this government to do this and this and this by these people on this date. And it's like, oh, great. I really could have used that when I watched the real show. Yeah. So if you get the platinum thin pack, it's cheap. It's the whole show in a one tiny little box. And it's really cheap. And that's what you should buy. Don't bother buying any other DVD box sets.  There'll be some crazy expensive one for like $300 that comes with probably robots and things in there. You don't want that. You could buy the real... Ah, I guess if you could find the old DVDs on eBay, that might be cheap. Yeah, they're not... But make sure you don't get a bootleg. If it's an ADV, it's not a bootleg. If it's not from ADV, it is a bootleg. And don't get VHS tapes for the love of God. Yeah. Yeah, VHS tapes kind of useless. Plus, the main problem with getting this on VHS is you want the subtitles. And it's probably harder to find the subtitled VHSs. I mean, we had them all at RIT, but that's probably the only place. Yeah. But I mean, we really like the show. It's in our top 10, possibly our top five easily. I think the show has a lot to say. And I think everyone out there who's at all a fan of animation should at least give it a chance. In the future, probably in a month or two, we want to give everyone time, we're going to review the show for people who have already seen the show, meaning spoilers and commentary. Which means you have to watch it. So I imagine we'll probably watch it in like August at some point. Yeah. Because... Well, part of it, we have... Starting this weekend, it's cons, cons, cons. We actually have several friends who have never seen Ava. And one thing that... One of my favorite things to do, and I haven't been able to do this much since RIT, is I love to watch one of those amazing shows with people who have never seen it. Because it's more fun to watch their reactions to certain scenes than to watch the show again. Yeah. It's because I've seen the show. Well, I haven't seen this in a while, so I'm actually going to be paying more attention. I've seen Ava about four times. I've only seen it twice, but... Yeah. It... It is something I've seen a hundred times. Like, attack the gas station. God. I can... I can't attack the gas station. I... It's awesome. But if I just watch it, it doesn't do it for me because I've seen it, like, 20 times. But if there's even one person who hasn't seen it before, I want to show it to them so badly. And I'll sit there through the whole movie with them just to see if, you know, they attack only one or not. See, now, at least for us, that seems to be the mark of a good show. Like, some shows are just so important to us or transcendent or whatever that... I mean, you know, the way we talk about Netflix and fan subs and whatever, most things we watch, we watch them once. We throw them away. We never want to see them again. We already got what we're getting out of it. But there's a few shows and a few things in movies that we end up just periodically watching. Like, every now and then, you know what? It's been about that time. We've got to watch Escaflone again. Gotta watch The Matrix. Yep. Gotta watch Snatch. And Ava's one of those things. We perennially watch Ava again and again.  Yeah, I'm an old man. I'll be sitting there. I've read everything and seen every anime and whatever. And I'll be like, oh, seen everything. Watch that Ava again. All right, sure. Yeah. Plus, I mean, Ava really, it stands up to the test of time. If Ava came out today, I think it would do well. Oh, it would do crazy well. Well, especially considering a lot of what's out there now. Yeah, yeah. The thing is, it's definitely from, you know, that older school to fan Ava. They don't make anime in this genre anymore, really. Well, they've tried. And a lot of people say that Razifon does what Ava tried to do better. I watched Razifon. It is definitely in the same genre, but it's also definitely different, even though at times they're directly poking fun at Ava. Well, I guess we could actually do a whole episode on Razifon slash Ava. Yeah. Yeah. You know, we could do a whole episode on just all the shows that pay homage to or otherwise make fun of Ava. Yeah. But yeah, if you like Ava, you should probably watch Razifon. Yeah. And also, if you like both of those shows, watch Big O sold these so that you can watch Big O too. And you might think, what are you crazy?  That's why Big O is awesome. Big O is one of my favorite anime. But seriously, Big O, much like Ava, takes a turn and goes in the direction you wouldn't expect. Ava with Batman. Yes. All right. I think we're done. Are we done? This has been Geek Nights with Riman Scott. Special thanks to DJ Pretzel for the opening music. Be sure to visit our website at www.frontroadcrew.com where you'll find show notes, links, our awesome forum, a link to our Frappermap, and links to all the RSS feeds. We say feeds plural because Geek Nights airs four nights a week covering four different brands of geekery. Mondays are science and technology. Tuesdays, we have video games, board games, and RPGs. Wednesdays are anime, manga, comic nights. And Thursdays are the catch-alls for various rants and tomfoolers. You can send us feedback by email to geekknights at frontroadcrew.com or you can send audio feedback via Odio. Just click the link that says send me an Odio on the right side of our website. If you like what you hear, you can catch the last 100 episodes in iTunes or in your favorite podcatcher. For the complete archives, visit the website which has everything. Geek Nights is distributed under a Creative Commons attribution non-commercial share alike 2.5 license. This means you can do whatever you want with it as long as you give us credit, don't make money, and share it in kind. Geek Nights is recorded live with no studio and no audience. But unlike those other late shows, it's actually recorded at night.


What is up YouTube? So we are going to do a week of me blogging. It's kind of an interesting week. I bounce around here and there so I wanted to kind of Show you guys around and show you what it's all about and today. I'm on general nuclear medicine So let's start the day So like I said, I'm on my general nuclear medicine rotation this week I get switched around moved around a few times to cover some Residents who are on vacation. So I'll be at other spots later this week. So so far this morning. I've just read a few studies It's a little slow in the morning of general nuclear medicine because a lot of the stuff takes time for the radio tracers to go into the body Or the specific organ we are targeting So we have to wait a little bit in the morning. So I've done Three lymphost antigrapes. So for lymphost antigrapes, we basically inject Technesium in the skin surrounding a melanoma and after we inject we wait about 15 20 minutes Maybe up to an hour and wait for that radio tracer to Travel to the closest lymph node, which we would call the sentinel lymph node What we do is we mark it under our cameras And then the patient will go up to the or have the melanoma a wide excision of the melanoma And then they will try to find the lymph node that we marked and take that one out as well to make sure There's no metastasis. So I've done three of those this morning I will read a few more scans coming up here shortly And I'm just trying to tie up some loose ends before I go to the conference I'll check back in afterwards. Ah, the sun feels so good on the face I'm officially done. It is about 4 p.m. We get to head home early today because we finished off the scans And I'm gonna go home and work out because I was too lazy to do it this morning Because for some reason I was tired from having a weekend off Which makes no sense But I'm gonna go work out cook something for dinner And do this all over again tomorrow. We're on a different rotation tomorrow. So stay tuned to find out which one All right, it is day two. It is Tuesday and today I got pulled to ultrasound Yes, I don't know why I got pulled to ultrasound today, but I did so Probably just sit in there read some ultrasounds And hopefully you get out early maybe I need to film another youtube video. So I should probably get home early, right? Anyways cue ultrasound montage Crushing ultrasounds And today I've been feeling a little under the weather. So I've been like here. I'll show you I've been like crushing these all day today, and then I'll show you what else I've been I picked these up when I was in Amsterdam For I got sick when I was on Croatia for vacation And I have no idea what it says, but I think they're cough drops. So if anybody Knows what this says. Let me know, but I'm pretty sure it's just cough drops with some vitamin C in it So this is what I have been doing all day is crushing ultrasounds and Having dutch cough drops. So if anybody speaks Dutch Tell me what that means. Oh, I'm p.s I usually try to avoid taking medicines that I can't read the name of but I had someone help me at the pharmacy in the airport She spoke a little bit English and I think those are actually cough drops. So that's the only reason I'm still Eating them today. You can tell by my voice. It's a little on the sore side today. So hopefully I did better because I haven't told you guys yet But I'm going somewhere this weekend And it's gonna be fun Now it's time to get back to work So I'm officially going home right now And normally I would go home and work out Especially since it's like a beautiful day out. I would probably go running But since I feel kind of crappy today If I'm just gonna go home hang out Rest. Amels is a little loud. Sorry So I probably just go home rest and I have to get my haircut today For my big trip coming up, but you still don't know where I'm going But yeah, that's pretty much it. I hope you guys don't mind this kind of like Random vlog That I'm doing but I just wanted to show you guys kind of loosely like how a week is In the life of a radiology resident. So hopefully you guys find it somewhat interesting And if you do I'll keep doing it. So Head home now All right, so I just finished having a nice dinner real quick And now I'm going to get my haircut and yes, I'm still in scrubs and haven't changed because sometimes when I get my haircut I don't like all of the like haircut shavings In my shirt and before you guys say If you have any good hair salon, we'll put like something around your neck and make sure nothing goes into your Shirt or whatever. It doesn't matter what they put on there's still hair that gets down in your shirt So sometimes I just keep my scrubs on so I can just throw them in the wash when I'm done All right, so let's do the haircut and as you can see I got the new haircut It's time to go to bed And I will catch him with you guys tomorrow I'll be back on nuclear medicine And good morning. It is wednesday Terrible weather out here as you can see Which made it super difficult to get out of bed, but I did had two good night's sleeps in a row Which is pretty impressive for me And I feel pretty good. So off-door All right, so I know I haven't really talked to you guys much today, but I was basically just hammered away at pet scans all morning Then I went to a little peds conference in the afternoon and then hammered away at more pets in the afternoon after that And that's pretty much it. So it's pretty low key day for me today And right now I'm going to go head home And that's pretty much it. So yeah, I pretty much have to go home and finish making another video Which you guys will see shortly and I think I should probably start packing and make dinner And get everything ready for my trip this weekend And try to get all my videos squared away And that's about it. So I'll check in with you guys shortly And good morning It is 6 30 a.m. And we are here for Grand Rounds on a bright and early Thursday morning So I'm going to grab my white coat, which I pretty much never wear, but I have to for Grand Rounds And for those of you who don't have a good white coat Biggs actually sent me this one and it is I mean, I'm not even joking. It's like amazing again, I don't ever wear these things but It has this inner lining you guys can see And you can like pull your sleeves up and stuff. It's super comfy So if you're in the market for a new white coat Get up big Much better And good morning. It is Friday. I apologize for not vlogging the last day or so and that side is super bright Let's go back over here. So I'm headed to the airport today. I'm on pet this morning then I'm headed to the airport later this afternoon And we are going to be heading out, which is why I'm dressed pretty casually today As you can see and uh, yeah, I'll keep you posted We're just gonna read a few pets Eat some lunch and then take it over to the airport Maybe you guys can kind of guess at this point By what is in the airport We can't guess I'm in the great state of Nevada Las Vegas, Nevada, that is And I'm going to see my brother and best friend At the hotel and try to rush Meet them for dinner right now And I'll give you the update of why the heck I'm even here. All right, so I just made it To the hotel and Seuzer's Palace going to meet up with my brother and best friend We're going to grab a bite to eat a second I'll show you The room right now Now we're still going strong I don't even know what time it is, but I've gotten like those ladies in 20 hours But for some reason the city just makes you stay up. I don't know how In good morning, it is day two of being in Vegas It is like 8 a.m And as you can see the place literally never stops People will sit here in Gamble all night into the wee hours of the morning I got a few hours of sleep last night And I'm a little tired. I feel like I've Done like a night call shift or something And because I went to bed like I don't know two or something And got up at seven Plus to solve this jet lag. It's all screwing me up, but Time to play some more table games the first probably All right, now I feel a lot better Got my nice venti cold brew coffee With the bro and friend And we're just roaming around the casino aimlessly until we go to the buffet. This is what it looks like Fresh in the morning Nothing like the saddery morning in the fall in Vegas. Yeah, that's time to go We're on a long trip all the way from Las Vegas So I didn't really tell you guys why I even went to Las Vegas But I'll get into that shortly Or once I get home or something or when I edit this video, but I'm going home now We might be about to be here Yeah, that concludes this week All right guys, so I am officially back at work after a long weekend in Vegas And I want to show you some this is an old view box.  Anyways So is that lighting good? All right, cool. All right, so anyways, I am back from Vegas It was a very long week I didn't even tell you guys why I even went to Vegas and that was because my brother And best friend actually had two different conferences there at the exact same time So which means they had hotel rooms that they were staying at And they kind of just stayed in one for the weekend And they said if I flew out there I had a place to stay so I did I haven't been to Vegas in Like five or seven years or something It was my third time there. It's been a while had a ton of fun Dumbled a little bit hung out with my brother and friend Went to some really nice dinners and had a good time. So now I'm back at work. I got in last night at about I think I got a midnight got home around 12 30 or one And went straight to work this morning and I'm pretty tired So hopefully you guys enjoyed this week in my life as a radiology resident If you have any comments, leave them below As always make sure you smash that like and subscribe button follow me on instagram if you don't already Otherwise, I'll see you guys on the next video


Dewitt Scholar Profile, Dustin. Well, I'm Cheryl Burgstahler, and I direct the Dewitt Center, Disabilities, Opportunities, Internet Working, and Technology. And in that center, we have numerous programs funded by different agencies. And the sole purpose is to increase the success of people with disabilities, particularly in college, onto careers, but everything else. And Dewitt Scholars Program, we kind of become like an extended family. One of our Dewitt Scholars, Dustin, started the program in 2013. My name is Dustin, and I'm a student here at the University of Washington School of Law, pursuing a Juris Doctor degree, hoping to graduate in June 2024. From the classes, what I've learned is learning how to, well, one of the big things is to be a self-advocate. You got to advocate for yourself. I joined Dewitt when I was a junior in high school. So that was around springtime 2013. I went back to Dewitt the following summer. It became someone of a summer tradition for me, at least, because I went back to summer study, helped out as a member of the staff for through, I think, summer 2018, which was right around the time I graduated undergraduate at the University of Washington. One thing that has me coming back to Dewitt all these years is just knowing that it's kind of where my roots are, especially as a person with a disability, Asperger syndrome, or autism spectrum disorder, as it's now known. But also just knowing that with Dewitt, it's also where I first learned about disability rights and history. And so in undergrad, I took up disability studies as my minor, along with Law Society of Justice and Political Science as my majors. But with disability studies, I was able to get more and more involved with knowing about that type of history. And so it actually influenced the type of law that I want to practice today, which is disability rights. Several activities that I've done over the years of me being undergrad, at least. First and foremost, the Husky marching band. I was actually in the marching band as a member of the Piccolo section all four years. I worked at the commuter and transfer commons in the hub during my junior and senior years, being there for anyone who has any questions or inquiries. It's a huge honor to be selected for the Husky 100. I looked at my phone. I saw an email, and it says, congratulations. You just got selected for the Husky 100. And I was just like, I was like, I was like this. I was like, I can't even believe it. I can't even believe I got nominated for, got selected for the Husky 100. This past summer, I interned at Washington Civil Disability Advocate. The first-year law school students, they have a class called Legal Analysis, Research, and Writing, or LARW for short. And so I was able to take what I've learned from that class during my first year here at law school and to apply it towards drafting motions, basically asking the court to do something in favor of your clients. The Duet community has been incredibly supportive of me. They've been there whenever I needed help with getting accommodations and undergrad. They've been there for me whenever I needed help with personal statements. And even if I just needed to talk to someone, so I want to give back. And being able to be a disability rights attorney and hopefully causing societal change for the good would allow me to give back to the disability community. One of my first friends that I met at Duet is someone who has a vision-related disability. And so over time, I've gotten the chance to get to know her and have conversations with her. Having that type of connection does kind of bring, I guess, really increase my motivation to become more aware and to educate myself around those things. And that has also been impactful. I just wanted to express a moment of gratitude for all of my mentors, my friends, family members, and my parents for helping me get to where I'm at right now. Thank you for all that you've done for me.   And I'm very fortunate to be a part of that group. And I hope I'm making you all proud. I really do. For more resources about supporting students with disabilities, consult uw.edu slash d-o-i-t. Copyright 2023, University of Washington. Permission is granted to copy this material for non-commercial purposes, provided the source is acknowledged.


June is a time of transitions. Graduations, new assignments, moves to new homes and schools for many. As you transition, strive to remain centered. What you encounter may be quite different than your expectations. The new environment will likely involve dynamic decision making as you navigate unfamiliar waters. Even your moral judgment will anchor whatever challenges may unfold, and your example will steady those you lead. Even in the midst of transitions, the best leader's integrity remains steadily aligned serving as their ethical center of gravity. General Dwight D. Eisenhower, our 34th American president, reminded us, the supreme quality for leadership is unquestionable integrity. Without it, no real success is possible. Lead well this week.


So, this is the closing ceremony of the 28 KS Communication Congress. And it has been, as always, a long four days. We have had many interesting talks, many interesting events. What I found personally very interesting is that we had a very intense debate, not only in the talks, but also in the hallways and in the cafeteria and so on in the restaurants about what is the role of the hacker in today's world, especially when it comes to how technology is being used. So, the debate about are the technologies that we are building, the technologies that people like us are building, used for good things or for oppressive things, that this debate came very much to the forefront of everything here. So we had a number of talks to simulate this debate, but I found it very good and very surprising a little bit how fierce these debates have been and how much discussion has been there. So the Congress is, as we all know, a volunteer-driven event. So the people who are running this show are the angels. We had quite a number of them, let me look up the number. We had 315 angels and I want a really big round of applause for them. So we have a little bit of statistics because we track quite a few things. There were 3,645 hours of angel work during this Congress that is not counting build up and takedown that is approximately 11 and a half hours per angel, so that quite many people donated lots of their time here at Congress where they could do other stuff as well to make these things work without them that wouldn't be possible. We also want to thank a lot the people, the employees of the BCC without them this Congress would simply not be possible. Big round of applause for them please. So the BCC has been our home for years now for this Congress and we really like to love it. We know where every single cable is in this building and it makes it a really, really nice venture and the people who are running this building are very friendly and very open to our ideas, something that we haven't experienced anywhere else. So thanks again.  So while we are at statistics we consumed about 27.5 megawatts hours here at Congress which is approximately 10 times what an average low energy house in Germany consumes in a year. And I also have the statistics from the CERT. They had 43 emissions to do, 14 of them were because of the paint station down there.  So going on with a few statistics, there were about 9,000 bottles of marta consumed here at the Congress, over 9,000, yeah, 5,500 bottles of beer, 1,500 bottles of cola and about 3,000 bottles of flora power. The problem is that we apparently consumed all of the December production of flora power. And so thanks to the people who run in cafeteria downstairs I found them extremely friendly and helpful so that that was quite good. So we had of course also talks here, some of you may have noticed. Actually the talks have been organized by the content committee which is also quite a lot of work. They need to shift through all the submissions. We had 235 submissions this year, 99 talks have actually taken place, one talk got cancelled somehow. We had 130 speakers here and we made it up to the Farplan version 1.9 with overall 26 versions that were being done. And so I want a big applause for the content committee and the speaker and of course also the people who were doing speaker support which can sometimes be a little bit stressing especially if your keynote speaker doesn't show up until the last minute before the talk. So that is something where we all had fun. So as we all know this building is a little bit tiny for us. We have grown our cultural space larger than this building can hold so we could have solved approximately two times as many tickets as we have been solved. So that's our estimate from what we've seen. So I have one question. That is who of you would also attend a congress that is double the size of this one? And who would not? Okay. So far currently we have many people sitting outside the congress at the peace missions at the known north-left-behind places. And this is only possible because we have an excellent streaming crew, the FEM, I want a big round of applause for them because the streaming this year has been simply amazing. They supported seven different streaming formats at once, had more than 4100 concurrent users peaking meaning more people than were here were actually watching the streams. So far one point I terabyte of video files have been produced and so they had 27 different streams, two month preparation and they're running from 39 hardware nodes. So this was quite an operation. I have never seen anything like this in the sense. So thanks again to the FEM. So we have one little piece of data to show which is could you put it up? The video crew is striving to earn their next applause. I want to talk a little bit about the nock. The nock had their own nock review previously already so all the details were present. But I can give you a little bit of the data still. The nock was also running quite a sizable operation from my experience, thanks for that. From my experience the network quality was far better than anything we had at Congress so far with some hiccups of course in between. So we had 91,246 gigabyte data sent to the network and 23,338 gigabyte received. So that means we are a sender, not a receiver, which is good. We always wanted to do that. And so a big thanks again to the network and wireless LAN crews, they did a great job. And also now that the video is up, a big thanks to the video and audio crews who made it possible that we had this marvelous Congress here, this good audio and video and sometimes even with bus. Yeah of course the big question is when we will see each other next again. The next thing will be the second in Cologne, 18th to 20th of May. You may mark the date. Usually the second in Cologne is a little bit of a different event but still nice and then make Cologne is also worth the travel. So we may see each other again. There will be probably a lot of debate on what will be going on with Congress moving to a larger venue, not moving to a larger venue keeping it here or how to distribute tickets or not. So this will be going on or surprising. So there are a lot of things that need debating. It is clear that things may change which is also something that we need to consider in terms of volunteers. So what we have seen is that the number of volunteers doesn't scale linearly with the number of participants. So we currently have in the region of a little bit more than 10% volunteers who are doing angel work or otherwise volunteer work. But we have seen that the number declines in relation to the number of participants which means that if we scale Congress larger then we may not have enough volunteers to run it. Also organizing something much larger is a lot more stress. So we will see what happens there, no promises yet there. There will of course be a next Congress and so I hope to see you all there again. And thanks for coming.


Hi, folks. My name is Sachin Thakkar. I'm one of the engineering leads here at the Networking and Security Business Unit at VMware. Today, we're going to talk about virtualizing advanced networking and security services. I want to just do a quick apology from us from the OpenStack team. We actually had a bit of a technical glitch, so we're doing a re-record here for the summit that was in Portland a couple of weeks ago. I want to touch on what the agenda we're going to cover here in this talk. Specifically, I want to set the expectation of what we're going to talk about with network virtualization, advanced networking and security services virtualization, and some of the trends we're seeing in the data center today. Let's jump right into it. What do we see in data center design patterns out in the industry today? Well, we're seeing this trend towards fast, flat, fat L2 networks. We have larger L2s. We have leaf and spine networks. We have L3 to the rack. The reason for this is actually to decouple the physical, infrastructural network changes from what an operational admin would need to do on a day-to-day basis as VM workloads spin up and spin down in their data center. This is kind of a blend of the traditional networking and security views with some of the new advanced revolutionary virtualized views that are coming in at the kind of cutting edge of the data center world today. One thing that is helping embrace this is the x86 revolution.  We have these converged infrastructure units, these Vblock-like pods which are ultra-powerful, high-capacity, high-contolidation ratio boxes that can host thousands of VMs. What we're seeing now is build-outs of data centers that go to the hundreds of thousands of VMs. What we need for this is the ability to actually scale up and scale down the network in a power-efficient, operationally friendly mode. This brings us to what we want to do with network virtualization and advanced security and network service virtualization. The new trends in the industry today are for overlay networks and whether that's with the MVP solution or with existing other solutions out there, you have your VxLand, your STTs and other overlay networks that are truly going to let you adopt and benefit from the whole software-defined data center vision that everyone's trying to achieve. Now, why are we trying to do this? We're doing this for a couple reasons. We're trying to decouple the physical operational and change management from a virtualization need. When a tenant is requesting a VM or a three-tier application, for example, they don't need to call up their infrastructure admins and request for changes. They can merely go ahead and click a button within a matter of minutes. They have all the changes they need, whether that's a load balancer, whether that's a firewall, it's a private L2, it's an added network. All of this is fully accomplishable with network virtualization. This also lets us scale up the number of networks. We're no longer tethered to legacy VLAN limitations and we're able to embrace some of the L4 through L7 services, which are typically and primarily only available at your end of row rack, for example, in past data center architectures. We're specifically in this talk going to be focusing on L4 through 7 virtualization, but I wanted to walk through a couple of use cases to put that in context before we get into it. What are the problems in the enterprise data center today? Typically, you'll have an on-site data center, which is going to consist of maybe some storage, some compute, some physical gear inside your fabric, and maybe then on top of that, you're going to have tenants, and tenants are going to come in from the outside world. You're going to have some VMs in a DMZ, you may have a virtualized desktop environment, and then you may have remote users connecting out via VPNs, remote sites, or from perhaps their home network connections. We need to be able to adopt all of these, but they need to be able to be adopted to the data center architectures in a secure fashion. The DMZ must remain a DMZ. The PCI compliant zone must remain a PCI compliant zone, regardless of whether the infrastructure is virtualized or not. That's typically why we need to actually embrace this entire software-defined data center vision to actually accomplish this. In your traditional data center, you may have things that are plumbed on the physical infrastructure, whether that's a VLANs, ACLs, firewall rules. Maybe you have an IDS IPS box that you need to configure, and some antivirus agents. Now, when you virtualize, none of this can change because this is kind of the baseline requirements for your application workloads. When we actually burst out to remote sites or external clouds, we need to actually keep the same logistics true. We need to make sure we have our DMZ's firewall. We need to make sure we have any data intrusion that we need. We have NAT and user VPNs. All of this must remain. What this is actually happening with the physical world is we're actually making this very complicated. This is actually fragmented, manual, and it's requiring many admins to kind of touch different pieces of the equation to get the desired result. This is making something that should take minutes, take hours, days, weeks, and we want to actually bring that back down so that it can actually be truly at the click of a button. It goes and configures exactly what you need, whether that's a VPN or firewall, your application workload, your actual VM. You get it all at the click of a button. Let's dive a little bit deeper and we'll actually take a specific use case, your traditional multi-tier application. You have your web app and your back-end tiers and you are actually trying to silo this. The challenge here is that this is your predominant use case and it blurs a lot of these boundaries.  So now you're dealing with your network admin, your security admin, your server admin doing some of the compute, and then you're dealing with specific tenants. Now, as you scale up to thousands and 100,000s of VMs, this is going to be untenable if you're actually trying to have manual intervention for each of these VM workloads spinning up and spinning down. And additionally, we had to make sure it's not tightly coupled. So the problem with this architecture of it's manually plumb is that it's very tightly coupled to the hardware and it's not mobile within the infrastructure. Now I should be able to kind of forklift this three-tier app and drop it in another data center, perhaps in a vendor location or another rack in my data center, and it should work seamlessly without actually having reconfiguration required. And so this is what we're trying to achieve. So in this typical use case, you would actually need someone to go configure the front-end load balancer, you need to go configure the firewalls, plumb the VLAN at your top of the rack, perhaps actually add ACLs, etc. This is all very manual. And so this is what we're trying to solve here. So diving right into it, we're trying to take a three-pronged approach at VMware to solve this messy situation. So the first you've heard about, and I'm not going to focus on too much, but is network virtualization. Now I'll touch upon just the brief overview of what that's trying to accomplish. And that's decoupling the physical infrastructure from the overlay networks from your actual L2s and be able to provision these dynamically on the fly. So this is embracing virtualization in a couple of ways, mainly because what we've seen as a trend in data centers today is a huge port sprawl. We have instant app standup requirements and we have VM mobility requirements because as you have, let's say a dynamically clustered web application, you need to make sure that let's say on Black Friday and your workload as your scale is going to explode, you need to make sure that these VMs are able to scale up to your requirements without actually requiring physical provisioning in your infrastructure. Now, what are some of the shortcomings that are out there today which are leading to the case for network virtualization? Well, you know, there's static VLANs that are tied to the fabric and each of these directly impacts, let's say your IP addressing or your subnetting in your VMs. That makes IP address management kind of undoable from an automatic automation perspective. Now similarly, VM placement, diamond or mobility is crimped by exactly this problem. And there's unnecessary network detours. Now, when I have one VM that's sitting right next to another VM physically in my data center, I shouldn't have to loop it through an end of road device in my data center infrastructure just to make sure it's firewall. I should be able to do this at a micro segmented level to make sure that all of my applications use cases are met without actually having to take extra latency requirements or have manual provisioning requirements. So that brings us to our next case for services specifically. Now the first one I'm going to focus on is firewall virtualization. Now, traditionally, when you crack open a physical firewall, what are you going to find in there? You're going to find an x86 processor, perhaps there's some offloads for, you know, for specific security and encryption. But other than that, it's an x86 processor that's doing some kind of firewall workloads. Now, firewalls are very important specifically in your data center because you need to have a stateful nature. You need to make sure that you have those compensating controls for let's say your PCI compliance or your DDS requirements. Now, one of the trends for firewall virtualization is again, as we saw for network virtualization, you have a port explosion. Now, as you have several ports, you need to make sure that the data center is is crimped to a degree where tenants are not stepping on one another. And there's no malicious activity going on. Now, one of the other big use cases is to actually group these VMs into into segments and actually having these grouping objects that makes firewall management, you know, easy. One of the big things that firewalls do out there today is make sure that they have solid central management. And what the central management lets us achieve is to make sure that when an admin is trying to make a change, they are doing that within the context of all the other firewall rules out there. And so actually having these group objects, let's us do that by making sure that specific applications are grouped together or specific tenants are grouped together. And you know that when you make a change, you're affecting a specific set of applications, a specific set of tenants, etc. Now, some of the shortcomings that are out there today is typically for firewall management, it's very static. You have your IP sets, you have your Mac sets, and what that yields is ruled sprawl. When you make a change, you're afraid to actually remove an old rule simply because you don't know who else would be impacted. So one of the benefits of firewall virtualization is you can say attach a firewall rule to a specific set of VMs, a V app have you. And what will happen is it'll be associated for that V app for that V app's lifecycle. When the V app is deleted, you are guaranteed that that firewall rule is no longer relevant. You can delete it without any worry, you can make sure your firewall remains performant, and you're not affecting others in your in your virtualized data center. Now, the other thing is we want to make sure we don't have to hairpin any of the traffic to our end of rural appliances, because what that's going to do is it's going to set up choke points in our data center. Now, that's obviously going to be poor for latency and those kinds of use cases. We also want to make sure that we have the flexibility in the physical fabric to enable some of these features without actually having to make sure we have physical connectivity or we have a specific type of firewall at their end of our row. And finally, we have perimeter service virtualization. So perimeter service virtualization is some of your kind of concentrator services, whether that's a VPN, whether that's a load balancer. These services are going to actually allow us to provide flexibility and fit the real use cases for application workloads. So let's say we have a web application again. If we need to put a web load balance in front of it and actually cluster this web application for performance for scale out, it lets us do that. Now, this kind of goes hand in hand with the firewall virtualization, simply because in your three tier application, as we saw in the traditional use case, a couple slides back, we actually have the use case for not only network virtualization, creating an L2, but actually creating some NAT rules and load balancers, some firewall rules specific in the context of an application. When that application is deleted or is wiped out or is no longer needed, all of these services are also naturally no longer needed. And when an application comes up, we'd want to spin this up in a matter of minutes without having to call our security guy or network guy, etc. So kind of traditionally what we're trying to do is network virtualization, let us take the physical IP network, make sure that we're operating specifically over L3, decouple us from that and have specific L2s for any set of VMs that are required. This is kind of the next logical step at the frontier of the next virtualization wave and that is what we're calling network and advanced security services virtualization. And what that lets us do is pull in to these applications, our load balancers, our firewalls, our VPNs, etc. to kind of group with the switching constructs, the L2s that we've already virtualized. Now let's focus a little bit up specifically on virtual perimeter services and something here at VMware we're calling the Moore's law networking. Now as I mentioned earlier there's an x86 revolution.  And what we are thinking is well if we have this compute power and we're looking at typical workloads, memory bound is, we're typically memory bound. CPU is typically not an issue. So if we can cycle steel from these workloads we get better kind of throughput and performance on these workloads. We're utilizing our hardware more, we're saving power and we're actually able to have custom use cases for our application workloads. Now in a recent IDG study we've seen that 65% of servers are refreshed every 12 to 24 months. And as I mentioned earlier any of your physical firewalls out there if you crack them open they're going to be x86 based. So the Moore's law of networking really is saying as there's an x86 revolution and you change your servers every one to two years you can actually upgrade your servers and your network and your network services will go faster. Your firewalls will go faster if they're virtualized on this physical hardware which is upgraded at a rate that's much more great, much greater than actually your physical firewalls out there because those typically are going to be on you know a four year refresh cycle or a couple year refresh cycle whereas this way it's actually coupled with your compute. You get faster compute, you get faster networks. Now what we're doing here is we've actually done a few tests out there with some of the products that we have in the suite today and what we're doing is actually folding together some of the services that we've we've acquired through the Nacera acquisition with MVP with distributed L3 etc and we're folding in some of the VMware networking services that were available in the portfolio before and forming our networking and security group. Now within this we're able to provide you know a VMware implementation for a virtualized distributed stateful firewall, a load balancer, security services, VPNs and kind of that's where we're starting and we're starting with integration in quantum through OpenStack to actually plumb each of these services into the full stack and right after these few slides I'll touch upon firewalls and load balancers and we'll dive into a demo and that's where I want to focus a lot of the presentation today. Now before we get there I want to show some quick kind of checks of what we were getting in performance so the typical worry when you're virtualizing these services is that well you know no it could never be as performant as my physical firewall as my physical load balancer but that's simply not true just because when you have a application which is going to be maybe five VMs maybe 20 VMs you can actually scale up your load balancer your firewall to cater to the five VM or the 20 VM capacity you don't necessarily need to hit everything with a hammer and I think that's the beauty of the solution where you can say well I need something that's going to have throughput X well you can define your application so that you get throughput X and you're guaranteed that you're not wasting any resources there and similarly you can scale that up so with the VMware networking family we actually had in the last release three flavors if you want to call them a small a compact medium size a large and an extra large size of the the edge service load balancer and the edge service firewall and what this was letting us do is actually provide connections based on an application workload now diving specifically a little bit deeper into the advanced services so what we've been doing with OpenStack specifically is at VMware trying to drive some of these advanced services which we are seeing as P0 requirements in the next level of the software defined data center so in the grizzly release we are working with some of our partners out there PayPal eBay F5 many of the other load balance of renders and we came up with load balancer as a service and so the main thing we're trying to do at VMware is make sure all of the integrated L4 through 7 services are available through Quantum first and foremost and also through a VMware plugin so we did that with load balancer and grizzly those APIs are out there out encourage you guys to check them out and we're actually targeting both firewall and VPN in Havana so if you are actually attending the Havana design summit you may have heard some of this buzz and in fact we've made significant progress in the last few weeks and I would encourage you to actually check out these APIs as well as they're under implementation for Havana if your use case actually desires these these services now the other things that we are actually trying to do is make sure that we have routing logical network gateways etc in the stack and and some of these are provided through MVP today through the MVP gateway through you know our distributed L3 etc and we want to make sure that when we couple all of these together you get the full portfolio now another thing we're doing at VMware is additionally making sure that we have a fully extensible platform for all of our third-party network services so through the VMware ready for networking and security program what we've done is partnered with several of the leading vendors out there the Cisco's the F5 is the riverbeds and many more and we're partnering to make sure that if you integrate with the VMware API you can slot in your VMware load balancer or you can slot in an F5 load balancer you can slot in you know any of these switching solutions for whom we're partnered and there's a number of our partners but we want to make sure that the the platform remains fully extensible to any third-party and this kind of speaks to the beauty and the power of the solution is that you know when you're integrating with your API's or with the with quantum out there you can be guaranteed that if you change your vendor and your next hardware refresh or your next software virtualized services require refresh you're guaranteed that none of your applications none of your automations none of your scripting on top of it is actually going to break and what that's going to let you do is guarantee that SLA of you know minutes of performance minutes of uptime etc to make sure that you have your dynamic services you meet your use cases but you're still providing your tenants with the services they desire so let's dive a little bit specifically into the virtual load balancer service so so VMware has a load balancer out there it's been shipping for several releases and we've actually plumbed that into the quantum stack it's available and actually if you were able to attend the one of the demonstrations at our booth you actually would have seen the load balancer and I'll show us quick preview of that in just a minute as well so we have the support for multiple virtual IP's we set have separate server pool configurations it's like your typical load balancer so when you are looking at the load balancer API or the load balancer UIs you would see what you would see on on any other you know state-of-the-art load balancer out there you know we have your traditional load balancing algorithms we support many protocols we have you know good performance you know I would say 550k concurrent connections six gig throughput is sufficient for most application workloads out there today and we'll see a demo of this specific VMware load balancer implementation in a few slides when I jump into the demonstration here and the next thing here is the virtual firewall services so here's a typical use case you know you have your cloud you have the internet backbone you have your perimeter firewall right so there's two types of firewalls out there you have your perimeter firewall is kind of your choke point and then you have the distributed firewall to micro segment within a specific network and at VMware we want to make sure that firewall management is uniform but we can fit in either use case so we have some L2's that we build out we have a few VM's and we have a logical router now within the context of that logical router we're actually going to micro segment on a specific L2 network and provide perhaps one on load balancing services so this is that of instance of a multi-tier application that we saw earlier in the presentation actually embodied in a fully virtual form factor so we have our perimeter firewall and we have our distributed stateful firewall at the v-neck and we have a load balancer providing services and what this lets us do is make sure that our DMZ and our PCI zones give us the compensating controls there and integrate fully with an open stack or fully with the quantum today so without much further ado I want to jump into the demo and what I'll highlight is in the demo we're actually using the load balancer that that we worked on the API's in Grizzly and then firewall and VPN are kind of at the bleeding edge we're still undergoing some design discussions with our our peers in the design summit so the firewall and VPN are all operating through quantum but those API's are somewhat of a preview version they may change a little bit but mostly the concept remains the same so let's take a quick look here at our demo topology so we have an external web client and we have our open stack cloud now within the open stack cloud we have a couple different hypervisor nodes we have ESX and KVM and if you were able to attend Scott Lowe's presentation at the summit as well you would have seen that actually VMware supporting the ESX hypervisor natively in the Grizzly release itself and that's what we're leveraging here but I'm not going to focus too much on that so we have multi hypervisor within our open stack cloud we have a couple networks we have an external network which is going to be accessed by our web client and we have an internal network which is hosting a couple web server VMs and then we have our services container which is actually going to be providing firewall and load balancer services and eventually VPN services so let's say our use cases we're building out this application and we have some web workloads which we want to show on this that this client needs to access so the client's going to connect to the external network and what we're going to do is actually set up this topology so I have a video here and we're actually going to create the logical networks and the logical router through the quantum API so in this demo here first we're actually going to go ahead and create that services gateway we're having advanced services router which we created and that router is going to be providing these services and we're actually going to set up the subnet as we showed in our demo topology so now that the router is created that was all created by a script through the quantum API we have a UID that's returned and we're going to leverage that we go to our demo topology here and we see we have these three networks that are created you can't see it maybe too well but there's a couple different subnets there and we'll see that each of the subnets the outside the private in the inside what we called it in this demo pod here are created on different subnets and are active in our network and we're looking at this through the horizon UI here now the next thing we're going to do is spin up our worker VMs spin up our web servers so that's again going to be driven through you know your typical open stack scripts and we're going to launch what we're calling the test bed here so we're going to go ahead create your logical port create the logical router and it's going to plum up all of these configuration and this is being driven through open V switch through MVP in the back end and we can go ahead to our instances tab in horizon again and we see that well our three VMs were spun up and we have our network topology view in horizon that's going to show us here that we have these VMs we have a couple of VMs as was shown in the earlier topology in slightly different view that are on the internal network and we have our web client VM on the external clients of facing network now the next step is actually for us to connect these VMs to the network through MVP so we go ahead and do that we're seeing the MVP manager UI here and we see our L ports are fully in an upstate and we have our topology kind of ready to go we have a few switch ports that are enabled and ready to use now here's the interesting part now we're going to dive into the services now that our topology is configured so the first step is on that advanced services router we're going to go ahead and configure a load balancer we're going to configure a few pool nodes for those web server VMs and we're going to configure the VIP on the services router that the clients can access so again that's as simple as running a script to hit the quantum API or potentially you can build a UI around this and I think actually for load balancer a few folks in the community were able to build a UI in horizon in grizzly for load balancing as a service so the first thing here is we're going to pop open our web client VM we're going to go and try to access that VIP and this is before we've created any load balancer configuration so we're going to go ahead and try accessing you know <IP_ADDRESS> which is the VIP we're going to configure and we see that well obviously it's not there yet because we haven't configured we're going to run the script to actually create the load balancer and we're going to go ahead and add two pool nodes one on the 1.101 network and one on the 1.102 network we give that just a second and then we create our VIP on the <IP_ADDRESS> network which is the IP we were just trying to access so now that that's completed we're actually can go back to our web client VM and try to access this network and so our web server VMs are doing something very simple you know when you hit refresh one web server VM is hosting a Bing web page the other web server VM is hosting Google and what we see here is that when I click refresh here I'll get Google on one instance and when I hit refresh I'll get Bing on the other so we're seeing our load balancers actually load balancing between the two VMs now this is a very kind of very simple example but it's just to demonstrate the power behind the solution this can be any web VM in the back end that's doing this at the end of the day so we're seeing that we're actually doing load balancing through quantum powered by the VM or load balancer here when we access the VIP so now that we've done that let's go ahead and dive to the next level of detail let's let's add a firewall rule here and see if that actually works so again we're going to do something very simple we're going to actually drop a firewall rule on the VIP on port 80 which is the port being used by the web servers to access the web page so we're going to go back to our scripts here and create a firewall rule that's going to create a couple objects we're going to create an IP object for for the firewall and we're going to create a firewall rule to block port 80 here and as soon as we've done that we go ahead and try clicking refresh in our web client VM again and we see that we're constantly spinning in a connecting state the firewall is actually blocking port 80 as we had desired so that's kind of just a very again fundamental basic use case but that can be applied in many different ways now let's suppose it's the middle of the night our data center our application goes down and we need to have some maintenance but we need some of our our engineers in the IT team who are at a remote site let's say they're hosted in in in China to actually go ahead and and connect to this environment and debug what's going on so what actually we've done here is we connected from our Palo Alto VM our office with a VPN through quantum to a Beijing office that we have where some of our engineers work now what we're going to do is actually have a remote site up as you see at the top of the screen there and we're actually going to create a VPN instance on that advanced services router and have the internal network stretch out to the remote site of via our services router and this is all again going to be configured through quantum preview version of what we're trying to accomplish in Havana we hop back into our our scripts here we go ahead and create the remote gateway which is again also running using OpenStack and we can go and again and hop into our network topology and we see here that the remote gateway is actually connected out via the public network here now we go ahead and go back to the scripts and we in configure the VPN instance between the advanced services router at the local site to connect out to the remote site so we created a site object we created a VPN site to that remote site and then we tried SSHing into that web server VM that may have had an issue which is <IP_ADDRESS> which is one of the the VMs behind our load balancer and as we see we're actually in the remote box and we're able to SSH in to that web server VM so we're actually having a VPN connection from our remote Beijing site into our Palo Alto office all over VPN as a service powered through OpenStack so this kind of just demonstrates some of the building blocks that you can use in your environment to actually build out this infrastructure you have kind of these pieces that you can layer together and formalize into the use case for your application workloads so basically the in summary we have the VMware networking and security services and what we're trying to accomplish is actually make sure that we deliver the leading software defined data center vision with network and security solutions out in the market today and we do it we're doing this through a couple concepts we talked about network virtualization decoupling from the physical fabric but we're adding to that at that bleeding edge with firewall VPN load balancer our services virtualization if you want to call it that to take us to the next level now the next thing we want to make sure we do is make sure we increase that operational efficiency improve utilization we want to make sure that your OPEX and your CAPEX stays capped when you're actually trying to leverage virtualized services virtualized solutions and this is actually all of this is going to bundle up and try to enable your IT department to actually have an agility that lets it you know drive business needs as as requirements desire and the finally and kind of very important is that we're trying to make sure we're doing this through a platform that's very open such as open stack and it's extensible for for either VM or any of VMWare's partners so what we're trying to make sure is we are driving that goal of the software defined data center and we're leaving it open to the tenant to the customer to the consumer to build these pieces out and make sure their use cases are are met without actually being stuck in any specific solution so with that I hope you enjoyed it please feel free to reach out to me if any if any questions come up the load balancer the VPN and the firewall which were demonstrated here are all shipping VMWare products out there today they're actually slowly being integrated into quantum load balancers already out there and I hope you enjoy the presentation thank you