The following is a presentation of TFNN. The Power Trading Hour with your host, David White. Call now toll free at 1-877-927-6648 or internationally at<PHONE_NUMBER>. Now, David White. Welcome all to another excellent edition of the Power Trading Hour. And as always, it doesn't matter really where you're at as long as you're here at this time. The following takes place between 2pm and 3pm. Well, we had a pretty big rally today, up 70 points on the SAP cash. And of course, a few things going on behind the scenes on that. I wanted to talk about a few of these. What? Yeah, that's never... Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That sure probably should have been at the top, and that's never mind. Which all I could think of is Fauci backpedaled all over himself. Maybe the cataclysmic end of the world apocalypse that I said last week, actual real data, not what I was thinking was going to happen. Maybe he's not as bad as I said. So, Roseanne, Rosanna, Dana comes out again with a big never mind. So we've got a nice pop. The S&P really bottomed on Friday. The NASDAQ pretty much today was going to be a quick market on the turn. I didn't know where it was going to be from Monday into Wednesday. But up 170 points on the NASDAQ probably still going to get some consolidation. I don't think that this is going to just take off to the races. I think we could see a minor pullback into Wednesday when we go delta neutral. But certainly it is a market that looks like sector rotation is the watchword of the day, and that is out of the higher PEs and into the lower PEs. Give me a call today at<PHONE_NUMBER>. And of course you can always email me at path at tfnn.com. And put a message in the den if there's something you want to look at. A couple of the things I wanted to get to today, had some questions about what pipe deals are, so we'll talk about those. NVIDIA's call to arms, in fact we'll just start bringing some charts up here as we speak. Come on, come on, there we go. I had some questions about NVIDIA and whether or not this was really a big deal that we saw a couple of weeks ago. I think everybody kind of knows that this deal was in trouble for six months. Maybe I'm wrong, but I didn't think it was as big a deal as most people thought. NVIDIA down to 283-8, a little above 300 as we speak. In fact, let's get that exactly. Take a look, NVIDIA, 299, okay, 299-78. I'm not surprised that we're at here at these levels, but certainly they were doing everything they could last week and had willing participants. Fellow travelers trying to crush the market. Part of that probably tech selling and tax selling for both, but part of that was trying to get out of these super high-fast runners on the thought that the end is nigh, but all that kind of stuff just kind of continues on. So on NVIDIA, is this a big deal? Well, it certainly would be nice for NVIDIA to pick up arms. Is it the end of the world if they do not know? What's behind it? Every other company in the world looks to arms for designs, and especially Apple probably leading the charge. It doesn't want to see anybody else in the food chain that they can't bully. And it reminds me of somebody I was talking to over the weekend that knew the Kumo brothers. He says, you know what? He says, I knew their dad, and I knew both sons. I was talking to somebody from New York, and they said, you know what?  I just thought that was interesting. He says, the old man, he was a prince. Always treated his fine, great, was a great guy. The two sons, though, always ran around like mobsters trying to prove something. And he says, you think a lot of this stuff has just come along in the next couple of years? There have been people out after there and willing to go after him.  You'll need somebody someday, and they will not be there for you. Anyway, I just thought that was interesting. Anyway, on NVIDIA, don't think that there's a whole lot going on out here that, you know, that if you close at 300, all this did is make some topping sound. I know everybody talks about the huge PE. This is a company that can sell today and every day four times what it can make. So I don't know why you want to think that the end is nigh for a company that literally doesn't have a problem with demand only with production, and it's not like they're screwing up and can't make anything. Them and AMD, both kind of getting hit today, again, a lot of discussion about out performers in the market. AMD over the last couple of days, not really much of a different chart from these guys. I think that they can continue to move on and higher when we look at the leaders. But you probably have a fairly good piercing of the lows. It's probably going to be on significantly lighter volume, and we're going into the time where it's seasonally good to be long. Again, probably eight-tenths of what you probably thought we were going to get between now and Christmas happened today. That's never a good sign. We've gone from one exhaustion selling climax to one exhaustion buying climax to one exhaustion selling climax to one exhaustion buying climax again today. So you know what? You got a lot of going on. Okay, somebody has posted something in the den. I thought I'd read it. Anyway, 4609 on the S&P cash is the last tick I show. I had some other questions. Anyway, first of all, AMD, what else did we have here? I wonder what. Taiwan Semi in the tech sector, oh, we're almost running out of time, going to three nanometer technology that I think that was on Friday. I just didn't get to it. Of course, this is all about what they can build for everybody else. It gets better, but they're starting the three nanometer technology. It doesn't mean transistors are three nanometers from each other. They kind of build them like Lego, and if you just took one brick and moved it one to the side, it's kind of like that. They're building them up 3D, and all you need to do is offset them a little bit, and they've got that down to three nanometers, but that means they're building them like a partner. We come back, we'll get through the rest of the news. Are you grinding in the market? Not seeing little to no return?  Learn to take the path of least resistance with David White's powerful trading newsletter. David White is an accomplished trader whose deep understanding of technology and the markets allows him to consistently find and share winning trades. Support and resistance define the ranges in which stocks trade. By understanding these trading ranges, David White is able to find the path of least resistance. David White's trading newsletter, The Path of Least Resistance, is delivered daily before the markets open to make every trading day an easy win. 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As we return, let's do a little history, I don't have a slide for it today, but why don't we just do that and I'll get back to my rant. On this day on December 6, 1884, workers placed a nine inch aluminum pyramid atop the Tower of White Marble completing the construction of the Washington Monument. Most people do not know aluminum was worth maybe 50 to 100 times what gold was in 1884. They'd figure out how to actually smelt it and get it all taken care of in the next 25 years by a process. I can't remember the guy's name right now. Pretty famous for coming up with a process on making aluminum cheaper than steel now. But that was it. Anyway, as early as 1783, the infant U.S. Congress decided to statue of George Washington, the great revolutionary war general should be placed near the new congressional building.  Most people didn't think much of him at the time. And since he was one of the few to actually wanting to go show what he could actually do, probably if he wouldn't have done that, it's not like they would have pushed him into a position of that power. But there's more than a little bit to say that up to that point, let's say 1774, 75ish, not a lot of people thought a lot about him, but he decided to fight and fight on. And now he has a very giant symbol of himself right there on the Capitol Mall. Okay, let's get back to stuff already in progress over most of TFNN. 4608, as I said, probably another buying climax coming out today, at least in the S&P, got a little more room to run, probably in the NASDAQ. But is that the end of it? Probably no. You get a big earthquake like we've had over the last week, 10 days. There's going to be some aftershocks. They won't be as strong. But any of the stocks that are weak will probably be most susceptible to that kind of action. So you don't know. But anyway, Taiwan semi, keep an eye on that one. Nvidia calls to arms. Yeah, that deal's probably not going to go through. We talked about Fauci kind of walking back. As I said last week, I thought what we would find out would certainly be that it was a producer's kind of the zero-mastel version of that movie, not the one, although it wouldn't bad. I thought the zero-mastel and Gene Wilder version much better. If you're unfamiliar with the movie, some unscrupulous folks decide to make a lot of money by selling 1,000% of a play, trying to make the play the worst play in the world that they could, and having it become a resounding success, only to have all 10 investors who all think that they own the play show up and want some cash. Of course, they end up in the huskow for that. But you never know what's going to happen when you try to overemphasize something and then back over. But yeah, a big Roseanne, Rosanna Dana, never mind to the Fauci. So what else do we have going on here that I wanted to talk about? That's kind of the beginning of it.  These are private investment and public equity deals. Two reasons for them to be in the news today. DWAC, the digital acquisition company, got a billion dollars in a pipe deal. That is private investment and public equity. They call these things pipes. Generally, what you want to do in these is really look close at the fine print in these if you're thinking about investing. I would say three-fourths of these are done with some kind of back-end agreement, and that is that you can't sell the stock for a year or two years or something. And for that, you get a special deal. Well, DWAC, which is down 2.25%, I think was down, what was the low of the day here? Let me take a look real quick. 41.26%, but it had been as high as 48 or 49 pre-market. Let's pull a chart up of it here. DWAC. And it doesn't really don't see it because of the pre-market thing, but you get kind of an idea of what was going on here. Like I said, it started off fairly high. People started looking into it. You have to really find out whether or not those folks can sell right away, because if you bought on 75 cents on the dollar, you're still probably doing fairly good. The reason I bring that up is that a lot of times people will either forget, or the companies will not say, and you end up on the other side of it. One of those examples today is ARQQ. I tried to get an answer on this same pipe deal, along with when they were going to have their earnings. I'd never been able to get anything. I didn't mind day trading it, but I wasn't going to put it in my newsletter again. It had been a big winner, and you hit 28.70 today. The question is, you've got to wait now a little while and see how it settles out, but generally the problem is, do you know for a fact that those folks can't sell? Because if they double their money in a week, they're going to sell. They're not dummies.  They decided to throw it at somebody without margin, and it may be a great company still, but in the short term you have to worry about those shares coming back on the market. 877-9766-48, email me at path at tfnn.com. Another question from a subscriber. He said, you thought going short the UVYX was the thing to do. UVYX before the bell on Friday. Kind of a nice reversal off of Friday's spike. Yeah, I thought it was either Friday or generally I don't put these in the newsletter other than the fact that I'm going after these because you're not going to know within 30 minutes. Yeah, I would out now. Are you having fun trading the markets, but having trouble finding like-minded individuals to discuss your trading and investment ideas with? Become an Apex creditor in the trading markets and join the Tiger's Den Trading Room only at tfnn.com. The Tiger's Den is an exclusive trading room where successful traders from around the world come to exchange trades and ideas. 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The art of timing the trade charts is designed to help you when scouring the markets for stocks just beginning to form the trading patterns that many investors spend days, weeks or even months searching to find. And right now we're offering licenses available at only $79 a month. We are so confident that you're going to love this new charting software that will even give you a 30-day unconditional money-back guarantee. Don't miss out on this incredible new piece of software. Get your copy of the art of timing the trade charts today by visiting tfnn.com. As we return, Tesla, I have a question about that. Is the first leg down probably done for the end of the year?  Do I still suspect that it's going lower? And over time the answer is yes. Along with Eric's question about the article this morning about hydrogen power and must discounting it. If you're trying to become the de facto leader of technology, you pretty much poo-poo everything else. But yeah, that was very interesting and as we talked before, very interesting to see the second generation of Toyota's hydrogen-powered cars. I think that is going to be the long-term solution over batteries. Maybe someone comes up with some kind of magical thing, even if they don't catch fire, even if they eventually become recyclable, which they are not now. In fact, I was talking to emailing somebody on YouTube, emailing them, I aming them or not, not actually I am. It was not a thought thing, but I had this real Tesla fan boy. And he said, well, you know, you're just, it's full cells. Well, there's always that weight-to-horsepower thing on motorcycles. Every eight pounds is on a racing motorcycle, because every eight pounds is worth of horsepower. It used to be. It's probably, every pound is probably worth 10 horsepower now with bigger engines and putting out power, but that's what used to be 20 years ago. That's the same thing. I was debating whether there was 2,000 pounds of batteries or 1,500 pounds of batteries or 1,000 pounds of batteries. And basically this guy was trying to run some jive on me about the shortest distance that a Tesla could go on the smallest batteries, and then telling me about his one that could go much farther, but it had 2,000 pounds of batteries. And of course, I said, well, the problem is the batteries, 20 pounds of hydrogen is worth about 2,000 pounds of batteries. But I think part of the article that came out this morning was about BMW getting into this space and having a whole bunch of i5s out driving with hydrogen power. And they've got some electric versions of those. In fact, you can probably go catch some hybrid versions of them, but they don't drive very well. You don't buy sports cars that have huge amounts of power. So you got 400 pounds of an engine, maybe 425. You got maybe 250 pounds of fuel cells. So they're actually handled a little bit better. And they talk a great deal about Teslas out at the drag strip and all that. And that's great, but you may not have enough electricity to go home because you use that up real quick. And it's not like you can charge the battery in five minutes where you can charge up fully in hydrogen powered cars. I think eventually, like a lot of technologies, the electric part, I don't have a problem with. It's the battery part, which has not been fixed yet. And fuel cells, Toyota's got 25 years with them. Panasonic has about the same. And they've been used for a very long time in industry in Japan. They're very conscious of the environment over there. And I think that that is something that could move very on. But anyway, version two of the fuel cells out from Toyota brings to range to about 650 miles. In fact, they drove one over 800 miles on a single tank. And when they came back to charge up, it took five minutes to fill. But I continue to think that there's a problem eventually that everybody's just going to recognize, which is that batteries and this technology are going to catch on fire. You can mitigate some of the risks. The problem is not that they catch on fire. The problem is you can't put them out. The lithium ion batteries are going to burn until they burn out. You throw all the water and foam on them you want. They just not are going away. Hydrogen has a much better idea for being able to degas the hydrogen if there's a problem in an accident or something like that. But at the same time, you're really talking about loose fittings and hydrogen. You're probably going to get some warnings and some other stuff on it saying, hey, you got a leak. But I wouldn't be real worried to put a hydrogen car in my garage. But Tesla is sitting in the street, partner. That thing catches fire. I do not want to be underneath it and sitting it over it in the master bedroom.<PHONE_NUMBER>. And anyway, that was the one problem. The other question is how far do you think this issue with Tesla goes for the SEC and the FTC going after them about the solar tiles that never ever became something as everybody knew they wouldn't. And the easiest thing to know is if you can't aim your solar cell at the sun and track it during the day, you're giving up at least 50 to 60% of the power that a solar cell could actually get. So, you know, you've got to pretty much always be aiming those things. They make a lot more sense in a big park of these things with people maintaining them and doing these, putting them on your house. A poor value and generally the only way it makes economic sense is making fellow taxpayers pay for your pipe dream, which I don't think it. They're just not economical yet, which is like a lot of technologies. There's early adopters. They help out. But I see no reason why a trillion-dollar company like Tesla needs subsidies to sell their cars if they're that great. They don't. But we shall see. Anyway, and other just ludicrous things like like Rivian's valuations, stuff like that. They're just nuts. And the reality, Rivian probably had the best new design take on a lot of stuff. The Ford F-150, I think the CEO on Friday said that he would be number two and probably number one within a year, year and a half of EV cells on the pre-orders on the F-150 already. Down at 1861 on Ford, back into the trading range today. So again, pretty much just there. Give me a call today,<PHONE_NUMBER>. Question on NFLX. What do we think of it here now? We'll be back in just a minute. We'll go through the fang stocks. Light volume bounce inside Fridays to and a lot of articles in variety about these streamers. Are you in the market for buying or selling real estate in the Bay Area, including the surrounding St. Petersburg, Tampa and Clearwater markets? Tiger Real Estate LLC is a firm that has extensive experience in the Tampa Bay Area. Whether you're looking to sell your current property for maximum value or you're in the market for a second home or investment property, Tiger Realty has the experience across all areas of real estate in the Tampa Bay Area to help buyers and sellers make the most informed decisions across all price levels. From the price you should be paying per square foot in certain up and coming areas to the type of cash flow investment properties are capable of creating, Tiger Real Estate can help you make the best decision when it comes to all areas of the market. Before you make one of the biggest decisions of your financial future, call Tiger Real Estate LLC today at<PHONE_NUMBER> or email us at tiger at tfnn.com. That's<PHONE_NUMBER>. Call us today. The technology around us is changing every day. With so much happening, it can seem impossible to keep up with all the information. 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Occasionally, everybody winds up and thinks they're going to hit the big home run with an out of the money call or put in the S&P 500 stocks. But the VIX is nothing but the premiums on the put and call sides that are out of the money. So it's nothing that's in the money. It's only that's out to take a look at it. So when you look at the VIX, that's what it is. It's the people thinking that there's a home run out there to one side or the other. And generally, when that happens and when everybody starts thinking that way, you're ready for it. Now, one of the things that hasn't happened for a while, and you can see on my chart that I'm showing here, I've down at the bottom, I've got a blue line and I've got the kind of the red line, the red lines, the VIX put call, that tends to be rather manic depressive. There it does tend to be kind of a little bit less of that in the overall equities, total equities in the S&P 500.  But when you look at this almost every time, especially the big time back here a year ago in, well, almost a year ago in January. And you see these big spikes, especially in the equities, where people even at the thinking that they want to buy some in the money downside protection back there. What is that? Yeah, what is that? January, I'm going to say January 17th.  But you had a big spike in the VIX.  We're actually almost at 40%, which was the long-term equity over the last year for equity put calls. So everybody's been buying calls. We haven't really been over 50%. Now, I would also say that I do my percentages. We talked about this a little bit more on Friday. And that is that I don't look at put call ratios going over 100%. And you should take the total amount of puts and calls and figure out what the percentage is from there. And I think that makes people a little less reactive to the swings in those. But it's kind of easy to let those things, people here, 180% put call ratio. Well, there's not really over 100% of anything. But I, you know, I understand the way that they're doing the math. But I would say that you don't want to see over 100% of anything in that put call, unless it gets you a little bit too steamed. But even 60% on Friday gives you a good indication of the put side of the out of the moneys for that. Anyway, as I said earlier, thinking that we probably had some kind of buying climax here today, and looking for sideways action in the market till Wednesday, which is Delta Neutral Day for options expiration on the 17th. Anyway, back to Netflix. Oh, and I had another question I was going to answer to someone asked me because it actually has changed. And it is a lot easier to look at today. If I can find it, because I think I can. Is that it? Yeah, that's it. They were asking about what I look at from FINRA on the long and short data. FINRA has finally added and done it right, where you can actually just look at the national market system. Actually, it's called the Consolidated National Market System, and look at that number and see what the shorts were for a particular day. In the case of Apple, I've got Apple and IBM up here. But what you're really looking at, you can go back and see what I'm talking about. If you want to look at the YouTube thing, just look at here, what it's a 47 after the hour. But you've got the numbers you can look. You used to have to take three or four different files and put them all together. If you want to now, all you have to do is download the file at the end of the day from FINRA. And I'll send you the link, if you want to, just email me at path at tfnn.com. But go to that webpage, download it each day, do a search, find for the symbol, and find the N... Well, you want the NM... N... I can't even say it. You want the CNMS, which is the Consolidated National Market System total for shorts. And you'll see it in there. It was 25 million. But you can look at that. That's the total number now. You don't have to do any magical thinking on it. It's not easy. I will continue to download these and have my own things in the newsletter every day.  But a good thing has gotten better with being more accessible from FINRA's data. Okay. 877-9766-48. Back to Netflix. Yeah, kind of about a minute and a half. A lot of articles about the incredible inflation in movie production costs from a variety of sources. But it's sound stages that are becoming a real problem in the bottleneck for Disney, Netflix, Amazon Prime. Literally, they don't have enough sound stages for people to work inside. And it's become rather a problem to get places to film, office insides. And a lot of people are trying to overdo old, dilapidated warehouses, that kind of stuff. But the throttling behavior on Netflix and Amazon Prime to a lesser extent, they don't make that much money on it. And Disney, which I think has set its future on streaming for the way it's going to make money, is running into production problems. And I think maybe over the last week, that may be a little bit of selling from the market. But not a lot of good news in that streaming sector, thinking that there is a lot more costs to be endured by Netflix and others. Netflix, Disney, kind of the big movers out here, in just trying to afford and get through production. I think, in fact, sharpening your skills as an investor is like getting better at playing a musical instrument. You have to practice, sure, but you also need excellent instruction from experts. At TFNN, you'll get advice and guidance from the authority and technical market analysis. And it's not just dry, tedious text, either. TFNN airs live financial content streamed live on TFNN.com and TFNN's YouTube channel with Tiger TV, live every market day from 8.30 a.m. to 4.00 p.m. Eastern for free. 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Do you want to make $1,000 per year on $100,000 invested or $7,000 per year on a secured Tiger First Mortgage? The Tiger First Mortgage Program may be just the program for you. The Tiger First Mortgage Program pays 7% per year, paid monthly. For more information, you can call<PHONE_NUMBER>. That's<PHONE_NUMBER>. As we get back to wrap up the show for the start of yet another week, as I said, at the very beginning, we've gone from one buying climax to a selling climax to a buying climax to a selling climax to yet another buying climax. We're going to get lower volatility here before we probably really start moving up significantly. Generally, in these kinds of markets, the best-performing things are commodities. Look at crude gold, that kind of stuff as we go further. That's probably going to continue on, I think, through the end of the month. I mean, the lower volatility. We've probably gotten 90% of what a lot of people thought we were going to get already to the upsides. Now, we're going to continue to just move around. Options continue. As I said, the last three days, options continue to show that 4,600 was kind of a magic number that the option market makers were looking at. We'll see if that changes in the next couple of days. That's kind of it. You're looking at what I think is, you want to buy on the despair and sell on the manic part of the market. That's what everybody's doing. Got manic here over the last hour or so. Got over 4,600 on the S&P cash. Now, there are going to be some sellers. Eventually, it's going to work itself out. I don't think, I've got a question, I don't think that we're going to see another 200 points down before Christmas. I'm going to just say that this probably is going to be just kind of floating around a little bit. But that's it. Anyway, we'll go back to the market already. Progress. Yep, not going to get that. I'm just going to get the volumes. Sell when you can. Also, as I said, on Friday cover when you get greedy in this market, even the markets only go down about three-fourths of the time. I mean, a quarter of the time, even if it's a lot more than a quarter.


Next, I have the privilege of introducing Brendan O'Leary, Staff Developer Evangelist at GitLab. Brendan is a career technologist with a wide range of experience. He's worked in all types of roles from product and engineering to sales and marketing, and he spent time in the trenches as a DevOps practitioner, solving the same types of challenges that you all solve every day. One of my claims to fame is that Brendan and I actually joined GitLab on the same day in October 2017. So we both just celebrated our four-year anniversary of being part of the GitLab team. And what I can say in the last four years of working with Brendan is the thing that I have appreciated most about him is not his expansive knowledge and experience about technology, but it's been his expansive heart. Brendan is always human first in everything he does. So even as Brendan talks about technology, he always does it with deep empathy for the people using that technology. In this talk, Brendan will show us how we have entered the era of platforms, what that means for us and what you and I can do to navigate the current technology landscape. Today, you've already heard a lot about the evolution of DevOps from DIY to the DevOps platform. But what do we mean by platform? And does it only impact DevOps or is it broader than that? Well, that's what I want to talk about today. As developers, we can sometimes overuse words and platform is definitely no exception to that rule. We often talk about the platform we're building or how we hope our users will see our product as a platform. And what we mean in all of these instances is we expect our users to be able to use what we build as something greater than the sum of all the parts. And when we talk about an internal platform, we often mean the sum of all those tools that we use to deliver software. What you might think of as the traditional SDLC software development lifecycle or DevOps tool chain. We've often strung together these pieces and tools into a semblance of a platform. That's what we heard William talking about at the start of our day about, you know, those DIY DevOps platforms. And those platforms come with two significant challenges. First, they aren't integrated. To be a platform to really have something greater than the sum of its parts, someone must perfectly integrate those parts together. Even at GitLab, we didn't see this at first. When GitLab was young, GitLab CI came around simply because our co-founder, DZ, was tired of the effort it took to keep all the servers that were building and releasing GitLab then watered. And GitLab and GitLab CI were separate products at first. Our leadership team intentionally had it that way. And it wasn't until they were challenged by a newcomer to the open source project, Camille, who also wrote the GitLab runner and eventually came to work for us that they even considered putting the two together. They're separate tools, they said. They're as perfectly integrated as two separate tools can be. And you should have many sharp tools and things like that. But in the end, Camille was convincing and we took a leap. Integrating the tools into a single application. And once they were in that single application, the advantages of a truly integrated platform like single authentication stack, a single project, setup, installation path, data store and project flow, as well as all the emergent benefits of the DevOps platform became possible. As great as those things seem, integration isn't even the biggest challenge that comes when you don't have a single DevOps platform. The biggest challenge is one that any business or economic student can name for you. And it's called opportunity cost. When I think about opportunity cost, a couple of clear examples come to mind. The most personal one is represented best by a dining room table. So a few years ago, our family was growing a lot. We had four kids under the age of seven. And yes, that's too many kids. When I pointed this out to my wife, she aptly told me that it was a little late to come to that realization.  It's too many kids. Well, that's a whole other story. Anyway, with the family growing, we're quickly outgrowing the current townhome we were living in. And we needed to find more space. We were fortunate to find the house we're in now, the one I've been working in for the past four years while I've been at GitLab and the one that we brought our fourth home to. Now, being that the house was a lot bigger, it came with a lot more room and rooms than we had before. And I guess that seems obvious. But for a young family, we didn't have a whole bunch of furniture. And so many rooms, heck, maybe even a few still, had little to no furniture in them. The most obvious kind of gaping hole was in the dining room. We didn't have a dining room table. And we typically ate at the kitchen table. But a dining room is kind of well designed for a table. Luckily, I consider myself as much an amateur aspiring carpenter as I do an amateur aspiring software engineer. So I told my wife of my grand plans to source some local wood from a tree that would otherwise go to waste and mill it down myself, let it dry, and build a fantastic farmhouse table out of that was, you know, of our really my dreams. The best laid plans, though. Flash forward a few months. Having, of course, made zero progress on the DIY front, we walked into a furniture store looking for outdoor furniture. And there it was, the exact table that I had had in my mind. And it was on sale. So I had a choice to make. Do I buy this table for probably the same that it would cost me in getting a nice lumber and parts and for sure less than all the time it would take for me to build it? Or do I dig in my heels and say, no, I'm going to build our own family room table and I'm going to build it better than anyone else could? Well, I guess you can tell from this picture and what I just said that, you know, what choice I made. And I love that table almost as much as I have if I had made it myself. And instead of spending time in my workshop, probably doing a lot of, you know, using a lot of choice words and hurting my thumb with a hammer at some point. Now I get to spend time at this table with my kids. My daughter loves to build puzzles on it and my five-year-old loves to draw. And when the whole family is in town, well, it also has this great built-in leaf system that I definitely wouldn't have been able to pull off myself. And so we expand it and it fits everyone around it. And that was the opportunity costs that I chose to, you know, make a decision about and not spend that time building it myself. And maybe that kind of opportunity cost seems, you know, maybe obvious to a lot of people. I know if you asked my wife, she would tell you it was very obvious. But there's a lot of these costs that we allow to happen outside of kind of a, you know, cut and dry decision, sorry, a little lumber pun there, as, you know, building or buying that table. And that's what I want to talk about. So I have another example, actually from my experience as a software professional that I want to give as the second example of this opportunity cost. So early in my career, I helped run product and engineering at a small medical software company. It was at the time of, you know, great consolidation in medicine. And so we had this huge opportunity to really bring a solution to market. We had great product market fit. We lived in a very tight vertical. It was in women's imaging within radiology. But to take advantage, we had to constantly outpace our competition. And in terms of innovation, we at that time were the market reader. And the rest of the market was trying to keep up with us. And so we wanted to hold on to that lead. Anyway, one day I'm walking back to my office from the CEO's office. I don't remember what the meeting was about, but I do remember what happened on the way back to mine. In between our offices was a server room.  Oh, and office buildings, I'm sure you remember those before remote work. Okay, that is a whole different story. But anyway, I'm walking past the server room and I noticed the doors propped open. It's basically never a good sign if the server room doors propped open. And as I'm going past, I turn my head to the left to see what's going on in there. And just across the room from me at that little work desk, you know, is in the room, is one of our top engineers with a screwdriver in a server. That engineer was working on one of the few critical path new products that we were trying to bring to market at the time. A first of its kind electronic patient questionnaire on this newly released device called an iPad. And here they were with a server on their lap and a screwdriver in that server. That server happened to be the RedMind server. It was the tool we used to track project progress, bugs, feature requests, et cetera.  Since it wasn't working, they didn't know what to work on next. So the thing they were working on was fixing the RedMind server. It was at that moment that I had a real epiphany about the opportunity costs of hosting and running our own development tools. And right there and then I decided to go out and spend money on this other new thing called the cloud. It was still very new at the time. And we were going to move as much as possible out of that server room. Heck, at the time, I think we even still had an email server in there. But I didn't want our lead engineer putting screwdrivers into servers anymore. I knew there had to be a better way. As William said, my name is Brendan O'Leary and for those who don't know me, I've spent most of my career looking for that better way. From my start in product and engineering management and that medical software company to working with the US Department of Defense and US Special Operations Command on this DevOps thing to my time at GitLab where I've had a number of different roles. I've always been passionate about developer tooling and enabling developers to do their best work. At GitLab, I've been fortunate enough to have spent time working directly with customers, helping to build a professional services organization to help our customers get the full value out of GitLab. And then I spent some time as a product manager looking after the very part of the product that made me fall in love with GitLab at first, CI or continuous integration and our GitLab runner. And most recently, I've been privileged to work as a developer evangelist and to speak to people like yourselves and spend time in our community and other communities, understanding the real problems stopping developers from being as efficient and effective as they want to be. And when we think about that, about enabling developers to do their best work, I think we have to think about our own return on investment. And I don't just mean in a strictly business sense, though I guess this talk might double as an economics lecture with all the economics terms I'm using. But also developers and software professionals want to work on things that matter and see the results and return from their labors. And what we find when we end up spending our time on things outside of our core value proposition to our users, like our DevOps tooling, is when we find that those returns diminish quite quickly. So sure, putting no effort into your DevOps tools or practices isn't gonna get you to be very successful. But by the same token, it's not a linear growth path to say that the more effort and time you spend acquiring, integrating and utilizing lots of different tools or even building tools of your own will always pay off. Eventually, that kind of work faces the law of diminishing returns where even a little more effort doesn't give quite the same output or return as the last bit did. And eventually, you fall off the cliff where your teams are getting less value out of the time they're putting into dealing with tools than you're actually getting out of those tools. And it's important to understand what that means. If your team is less effective because they have to spend time on a tool chain or finding data in various systems and syncing it up, then your stakeholders are who are gonna really suffer. What you really wanna do is have happy users, happy stakeholders. My wife, very happy to have a functional dining room table and even happier that she didn't have to take care of four kids by herself for a month of Sundays while I built one. And that's true of every tool and platform we choose to use. It's not only true for the DevOps tool chain and the tools you use there. It's true for other platforms like Kubernetes. In the end, cloud native technology is only as valuable to us as the value it allows us to show our stakeholders and users. That's the actual goal. The actual goal, a table to eat at, value delivered to our users, a stable environment for our application to scale in, that is what's important. And that is what we have to focus on. The goal of Kubernetes or any technology isn't that, or at least it shouldn't be, to use technology for the sake of technology. Oh well, you know, that's what they do in Silicon Valley, isn't a great way to run your business or your technology organization. In fact, technology for the sake of technology is never a great idea. Just ask anyone in a post-apocalyptic movie with technology taken over or anyone in an episode of Black Mirror. The goal of use in technology then is to enable you to get to your goals more efficiently. The explosion of the distributed systems can be hard or impossible to manage without a structured way to deploy and control how those systems interact with one another. And we wanna be able to provide elastic compute. Long gone are the days of, well, how many servers do we need to do this? In the world of microservices, those services can and must scale up and down to meet demand without human intervention. Without problems like those to solve for in order to make your stakeholders happy, maybe Kubernetes might not be the right fit. I know, it's probably a bad thing to say at KubeCon, but it's true. And a similar environment exists for DevOps. The goal of DevOps, which is over 10 years old now, was not just to invent a new word that put development and operations together. It wasn't just to create a new role for people to go around and be able to say, I'm a DevOps now. The goal was to solve the problem of a lack of coordination between developers and operators. And that problem at its core was a problem because it was limiting teams ability to deliver better software faster, to be efficient, to outpace their competition and secure their environments, all while making their users and stakeholders happy. The goal of DevOps was never to acquire as many tools as we possibly could. That can be fun. Again, if we go back to my carpentry story, of course I like getting new and exciting tools. But it's the ones that I actually put to use to solve problems, to fix something my wife or my kids have been asking me to fix. Those are the ones that are actually valuable outside of just the tool itself. So when we're thinking about solving these problems, about bringing together operators and developers, we have to remember the overall goal and we have to factor in the opportunity cost. For developers, that might be the difference between delivering on new products or new features or putting a screwdriver in a server. And for operators, it might be the difference between working on MTTR or the mean time to recover a service when it has a problem or increase the organization's ability to deploy frequently or putting a screwdriver in a server. And before you say it, no, it's not always screwdrivers in a server. But believe you me, every minute your team spends clicking around the AWS console is just the modern day equivalent of putting a screwdriver in a server. This kind of thinking, this focus on results, doesn't just help your users, it helps everyone. Individual contributors on your teams want to work on new features. They want to work on system stability and true SRE level tasks. And your engineering management. They want people working on those things too, not spending time messing with their tools. To put this type of thinking into action though, we have to force ourselves to take a step back and change our focus. We have to focus on what's really important. And what is really important? The thing that everyone in our value chain wants us to be thinking about. The thing that our users of our products our management, our board members, our shareholders want us to be thinking about and spending time on is differentiated work. We want to free up our best engineers to work on the hardest problems.  And when we do that, we'll enable our organizations to move faster. And when we can move faster, we'll be able to respond to market changing and changing conditions faster. And in today's world, where software has eaten the world many times over, having the right platform means being able to respond to the market quickly. And that is what allows all of us to win. So okay, you say, I'm in Brendan, I get it. But what is really needed? What are the things that I should go back with to my team after this day is over? Or maybe after the weeks over, if you're staying for the whole conference. Well, I think it's a focus on three key areas. The three key goals at the end of any discussion around platforms and why we choose the platforms we do. Each of these aspects drive discussion around those platforms, whether it be your DevOps platform of choice or the platform you choose to deploy your code to like Kubernetes or some sort of serverless platform. First, it's operational efficiency. You want your team working on the most important issues, not doing the busy, undifferentiated work of trying to connect systems together or understand what the status of something is or what's next to work on or when should I expect this change to be getting approved or how's it going through the dozen different dashboards that tell me that kind of different status. What teams really need to work as a team in this DevOps methodology together is an efficient platform to use for all collaboration and communication, a single source of truth. And once they have that, teams can now work in parallel, not serial. Feedback is delivered faster and the wait time is reduced greatly. And those benefits, coupled with a focus on automation for things like testing and deployment and security will allow your team to deliver better software faster. And finally, while it may seem antithetical to the idea of speeding up the time of delivery, you will also be able to reduce your security and compliance risk. The surface area of your platform versus a wide variety of tools all administered by different teams with a different set of security practices will be greatly reduced. It will be cleaner and easier for your teams to ensure compliance, especially if you work in a regulated industry that requires strict compliance or audit capabilities. And on top of that, independent research has shown that this increase in velocity doesn't actually have to come at the cost of security or stability. Once you've decided to focus in on these capabilities, there are four key metrics you should be measuring to understand the impact your changes are having on the teams and the software you deliver. A seven plus year research effort from Dora, the DevOps Research and Assessment Group, has been examining what separates teams who excel at delivering better software faster from teams who struggle to keep pace. They have found just four key measurements that both correlate to higher performance and have predictive relationships with not only software delivery performance, but also overall organizational performance against those organization's goals. The data shows that focusing on the enabling capabilities that allow organizations to measure and improve these four metrics is directly attributable to the ability for organizations to improve overall. And that includes areas like revenue or other goals, as well as human factors like job satisfaction. The first two metrics, lead time and deployment frequency, consider the effectiveness and efficiency of the software development process. These provide insight into the speed of software delivery, how quickly teams can get changes into production. Often I like to think about it as this, if I had one line of code that I knew needed to be changed, how long would it take me to get that into our production environment? And how many steps does that single line of code have to go through to get there? The other two metrics change failure rate and mean time to restore, as we said often referred to as MTTR, speak to the second half of the pie, stability. How reliable are those changes that are coming into production? How often do those changes result in production instability? And since that number is unfortunately never gonna be zero, how long does it take to restore services when something does go wrong? These four metrics, which seem pretty simple on their face, can accurately measure a team's overall software delivery and operational performance. And measuring them in a way that we can set about improving them requires a tightly integrated system, a DevOps platform, where all the data is available in a single data store. And that's just it. That level of integration, that level of insight, that level of impact, that is what you should expect from your platforms. And it is this ever increasing desire to move software to market faster that has ushered in this era of platforms. The platform shift is one we've been seeing for some time and I'd expect it to continue well into this decade. As software has grown to eat the world, we've all been racing to catch up and make sure we have systems to meet ever increasing requirements and demand. But too often, we focus only on the engineering side of software engineering. You know, the amazing things we can do with code. We understand that a lot of our problems can be solved with code. But in the end, it's not just the code that counts. What really counts, the ethos of DevOps really is bringing together people, processes and tools and aligning those three dimensions to a common goal. And that kind of alignment, the alignment that brings with it the ability to really deliver for our users, our customers, our stakeholders, that isn't something that comes easily. It requires a concerted effort that is much larger than the actual code that implements a feature or fixes a bug. And when it comes to the tools and process part of the people process tools equation, the only way to bring both and align them together, the tools and the processes of our teams towards the same goal, towards value delivery, is to incorporate both into a single platform. Whether that's Kubernetes or another platform to deploy our code to, or it's a DevOps platform to create, build, test and deploy that code from, those who choose the platform approach will outpace the rest of the industry every time. But that alignment of process and tools doesn't come at the cost of not understanding the people who are involved. In fact, I would say it's the people that is probably the most important part of people process and tools. And I don't think I'd be alone in that thinking. Platforms enable teams to do their best work together, to collaborate without boundaries, to aim for and achieve results together, to work efficiency efficiently without wasted time, to bring together diverse sets of skills and include everyone in the process to foster a sense of belonging. They allow you to iterate quickly, moving to where you need to be, not where you thought you should be six months ago. And the best platforms do this all by enabling transparency, being as open about as much as possible and bringing the threshold for collaboration lower and lower. It all reminds me of a scene in the first episode of Halt & Catch Fire, which is a drama about building the computers in the late 70s and 80s. There's a visionary idealistic product manager, his name's Joe, and he's trying to give inch to a hardened engineer, Gordon, to sign up for what they're gonna build together. It's very reminiscent of another company founded around that time, but I'm sure AMC would say they're not related. Either way, the closing argument for this project sums up nicely how I like to think about software development. Joe says computers aren't the thing. They're the thing that gets you to the thing. And later, in closing the series, another character, Donna, calls back to that line and adds, the project gets us to the people. And that summarizes fairly nicely for me what makes both Kubernetes as a development platform and GitLab as the development DevOps platform even more special. Both are built on the foundations of open source and drawing people from all over the world to collaborate together on the very tools that they are gonna use to then go and build something bigger. In this way, open source allows us to work together, no longer siloed building our own little platforms out of bubble gum and bash scripts, so many bash scripts, but bringing all of our ideas and creativity to bear on the problem and all of our collective experiences and expertise as well. And that's what keeps me around and what makes me so proud to be a part of the cloud native community and a part of the GitLab community. And at GitLab, we're very particular about how we use certain words. Since I work for GitLab, I'm a team member. We don't use the term GitLab'er there. And that's because we reserve the term GitLab'er for more than just our team, but for the whole community of users, contributors and customers. The project gets us to the people. Thank you so much. I'm glad you chose to spend some time with us. GitLab team members and GitLab'ers alike today. And I hope you learned something. I'll be around, commit at KubeCon today, and I'll be around at KubeCon all week, both in LA and online if you're joining virtually. Please come say hi. Thanks again and stay safe.