So I put in a lot of work here in the last few weeks working on DTOS, which is my arch post installation script. It installs a bunch of programs and config files. So you guys can get my Xmoned desktop environment essentially. And one of the things I've been getting, of course, a lot of support requests about DTOS and I wanted to have some kind of help information, some kind of help program installed along with DTOS. So you guys can quickly search for some of these help topics. And I think the easiest way to do this is I've made more than a thousand videos at this point. I've made a lot of videos about things like Xmoned and Dume Max and the fish shield and various command line utilities. And why don't I just make that the help program is what I'm going to do is I'm going to create a D menu script that will list out various videos I've made about these programs. And you guys of course can search through the D menu script for whatever information you're looking for. For example, if you're looking for videos about Xmoned, just type Xmoned, you'll get some search results return. And then you click on the video that you want to play and it should open it in your browser and creating a simple shell script to do all of this for me. This is not going to be a difficult task. I know a lot of people, if you're new to Linux or you're new to the Linux command line, a lot of people have this misconception that, you know, shell scripting is really difficult to learn and is really difficult to, to understand. It's actually quite easy to understand. If I actually switch over to my desktop and I will show you what I've done here. Now this is not a shell script. This is me going to YouTube and I found a bunch of videos that I thought would make good help information for DTOS. So what I did is I copied the titles of my videos followed by space and the URL. So this very first line here, you know, I've got the title and then space and then after it, the URL. And I did that for, I don't know, 50, 60 videos here. So what I'm going to do is let's turn this into a proper shell script.   So you guys can see exactly what I'm about to do and we'll go ahead and zoom in way in. Okay. The very first line, of course, needs to be the shebang, which is going to be crunch bang slash user slash share, not share slash user slash bin slash in the space bash. All right. I'm so used to typing slash user slash share at the command line because I edit so many files on that particular directory.  And I think what I want to do since this list is title followed by URL, I think I'm going to use what is called an associative array inside bash. And I do notice I misspelled that word there. I put two G's and only one in in beginners. So rookie mistake there. So what is an associative array? Well, that would be where I do declare space dash capital A space. And then the name of the associative array.  And then the next line should be the listing of the values. And I could almost use this list because typically for an associative array, you'd do something like associative array. And then inside brackets one for the value here or the key and then equals. And then the value, which would be whatever value you wanted.  And then the key is actually going to be the title of the video. And then the value will be the URL of the video. So I'm just going to have, you know, 50 lines here of this associative array and the values. I'm just going to have to plug in the values here. But thankfully through the magic of Vim or in this case, evil mode inside Emacs, which is of course, emulating Vim, I can actually very quickly put these lines here that I copied earlier into this format for the associative array. So since we declared that the associative array that the name of it is DT vids, every value would have to be DT vids here. So I want to make that point right away. So let me go ahead and use command mode here to actually add DT vids at the beginning of each line here. So I'm going to do shift V to get into visual line mode here inside evil mode, but you can think of this as Vim because this works in Vim as well. And I'm going to select all of those lines I created, which is just the titles of my videos followed by a URL. And now what I'm going to do is I'm going to do a colon to get into command mode and you see the single quote, then the angle bracket to the left, comma, and then single quote, angle bracket to the right. That means do this on every line that we've selected. Then I'm going to do space norm for normal mode space capital I, meaning insert at the beginning of the line. And then what do I want to insert at the beginning of the line? Well, I want to insert DT vids and then a bracket, just the opening bracket, not the closing bracket, the closing bracket we'll deal with later. And if I did that correctly, you see, we have DT vids and then the opening bracket and then the title. So that takes care of part of the form that this needs to be in. Now, the next thing we need to take care of is the closing bracket, which needs to go at the end of the title, you know, and then before the URL. So the easiest way to do this would just be to do a quick substitution. So I'm going to do colon and then I'm going to do percent sign. Yes. So I want you to do this on the entire document. I want you to search for HTTPS. Actually, I think I want you to search for space HTTPS. Yeah.  And if that worked, yeah. And now we are really close. If I zoom back out so you guys can see the only thing we're missing is we needed an equal sign. So actually should have added an equals to the HTTPS. So that was my mistake. I could actually just undo so you on the keyboard and Vim to undo. And then I could try to run that command that I just ran. So I just did colon to get back into command mode up arrow to get my last command, except this time, instead of that space, what I'm going to do is ending bracket equals HTTPS and then run that. All right. So we've almost created our associative array. The only thing is we need the URLs. I think they're going to have to be wrapped in double quotes. I'm pretty sure that's important. So I'm actually going to undo you to undo again colon to get back into command mode and this time what I'm going to do is I'm just going to rerun that last substitution. Except this time I'm going to turn that space into a closing bracket equals double quote HTTPS. All right. And now the only thing we need to do is add the ending double quote to the end of every line. Typically how I handle this is I just do a macro. So I'm going to do Q2 on the keyboard. Q means assign a macro, pick any key on the keyboard. I picked the number two. It didn't matter what I picked. And now it's actually recording the keystrokes I'm about to do. So I'm going to do J to go down a line. Then I'm going to do a to append a line, meaning go to the end and get me into insert mode and then do a double quote and then escape. And then I'm going to hit Q on the keyboard again. Now that macro was recorded. I just need to run it. There were 52 lines, so I need to run it 51 more times. I'm going to do 51 at two. And you say it just did that 51 more times for me. So that is it. That is the array I can get rid of the example array. And that is the DT vids associative array. So that was actually very easy. The only time consuming part was going to get the titles of the videos of the URLs of the videos. But creating that associative array was actually really easy. Thanks to the power of VIM macros.  This is just a variable. I can name it anything. I'm going to call it title because I want a list in deep menu of video titles. I want all of these video titles, which is the key, which is the part in the brackets for each value of that array. So I'm going to do title equals dollar sign. And then I'm going to do parentheses. Let me zoom back in here so you guys can see how zoom. I had to zoom out so you guys could see the whole lines here. But I'm going to zoom back in just a little bit. So title equals dollar sign parentheses. Now that signifies we're running a command. What command are we going to run? I'm going to run print f space.  And that is the placeholder value. So whatever value print f is printing, I want it to backslash in so that is a line feed. So basically, I want everything on its own line. Now we need to tell print f what it needs to print. So what I'm going to do is, of course, I'm going to print everything in the dt vids array. So I'm going to do inside double quotes, dollar sign. And then I'm going to do the curly braces. And then I'm going to do dt vids and then the square brackets and then the at sign. So I want you to print everything in the dt vids array. Now remember the associative array, each line has two values, right? We have the key, which is the title of the video that I put in the brackets. And then we have the part equals and then inside double quotes, a URL. So which is going to get printed here? Well, dt vids, that variable there is going to print the URL. That's the value. If you want the actual key, which in my case is going to be the video titles, what I have to do is instead of doing dt vids, I need to do exclamation dt vids. And that will return the titles rather than the URLs. And just to verify that that actually is the case, what I'm going to do is I'm create a new line and let's just echo title here. And I'm going to write that and then I'm going to open a terminal. Let me zoom in on the terminal here and I'm going to run this script. I named it dtos-help.sh. And if I run that, it actually does echo in the terminal here. You guys can see it's all names, right? It's titles of videos. There's no URLs. You can see there's no HTTPS anywhere in that output. So that actually did do what we wanted it to do. But of course, I don't want that to echo all that information in a terminal. What I want to do is I want to take the printf command and let me get rid of that ending parentheses. Because what I'm going to do is I want to printf the key values. And then I want to pipe that, of course, into dmenu. And I'll give dmenu the following flags, dash L for lines, 20 lines, and then dash P for a prompt. I'll call the prompt dtos-help. Space, I'll add a space behind it just in case we need some extra spacing. And then finally, of course, I want to add back that ending parentheses that we deleted earlier. And I'll write that and then let me get back into the terminal. And I'm going to rerun the script and you see dtos-help colon and then a list of video titles. Now, I could click on one, select one, but nothing's going to happen. Because, of course, we haven't told the script yet what to do once we actually select something from the dmenu list. So I think what I'm going to do for this, you could do this a bunch of different ways. I'm just going to do it if statement. So I'm going to do if and then opening brackets here. And then inside double quotes, I'm going to do title. So if title, meaning if I selected something from the title variable here, so the dmenu, right, if we select something out of that dmenu, then I want you to run the following command. The command I want you to run is I want you to run my browser and my browser is brave at the moment, but it could be cute browser. I have cute browser installed cute browser is the default browser inside dtos. So I want you to run a cute browser and then cute browser URL. So I want you to grab the URL from the associative array. But of course, we need to define what the URL is. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to do URL equals. And then once again, we're going to do dollar sign parentheses for a command. And I want the URL to equal print F. And then once again, inside single quotes, percent sign is backslash in. And then what do we want it to print? Well, kind of similar to what we did here, except instead of getting the key value, which was the title, I want to grab the URL. So this year, do a Y to yank and then go down here and paste that. Yeah, forgot one of the double quotes. There we go. And then this time, instead of that exclamation point, I'll just get rid of that. And now that should grab the URL. So URL equals print F and then dt vids and then inside a bracket, the at sign. Now, the at sign is not going to work for us because at signifies print out everything in the array. So it's actually going to print out all the URLs. Well, I don't want Kube browser to open 50 something URLs, right? That's going to be a lot of instances of Kube browser that open. So I actually want to specify a specific value here. What value? Well, I want the title. So what I'm going to do is inside the brackets here. I'm going to do a double quotes again and then dollar sign and then the braces and title. So you guys see how that's going to work. I'm going to get a D menu. It's going to give me all the titles of my videos. I'm going to select one. And then when I select a title, it's going to use that title as the key value to find in the array. And when it finds that title, that key value in the array, it will set that as the URL to be opened inside Kube browser. Now, we need to finish this if statement because we did if then run this command. We also need else because it's always a good idea to add else, even though there's really nothing else I wanted to do. Just in case for some reason somebody quits out of the D menu or doesn't select anything or for some reason the script fills, I want you to echo program terminated and and exit zero. So it's just going to quit out the program and finally FI, which is if in reverse, that's how you end an if statement. So you begin it with if you end it with FI.  Right. This is not very difficult. This was not a lot of lines of codes. And of course, I took my time a little bit explaining it, but this is not complicated at all. So if I rerun the DTOS help shell script here, I get a list of video titles. One thing I don't like is they're not in alphabetical order. So let me escape out of that. And this is very easy to fix. What I could do is where I take the titles of the videos and pipe them into D menu before I pipe them into D menu. I'm going to pipe them into sort. And then after they get piped into sort, and so they're sorted alphabetically, then pipe everything into D menu. I'm going to write that. And now let's rerun the script. And now everything is nice and neat in alphabetical order. If I wanted to watch my video, do me max for noobs. I could click enter and that should launch. Cue browser. It does. On that video, of course, we're going to get a ad playing. So again, really simple script, these kinds of scripts, these simple shell scripts. I mean, that solved a real world problem that I had and that took all of just a few minutes and I will eventually package that up in a nicer format. There's some other things I probably need to add to the script before I put it out there publicly, but eventually here in the next few days, you guys that are running DTOS will have a package available so you can install that particular D menu script. And that way you have an easy way to quickly get help information if you need it. And before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this episode. Devin Gabe James, Matt Mitchell, Paul Scott, Wes Akami, Alan Schuch, Commander, angry Kurt Diokai, David Dillon, Gregory Hike, Oli Maxim, Michael Mike, Nitrix, Erion Alexander, Peace Orch and Fedora, Polytech, River, Red Prophet, Stephen and Willie. These guys, they're my high steered patrons over on Patreon without these guys. This quick episode of me doing some rather basic shell scripting would not have been possible. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen as well. All these names you're seeing on the screen right now. These are all my supporters over on Patreon because I don't have any corporate sponsors. It's just me and you guys, the community. If you like these kinds of videos and want to support my work, please subscribe to DistroTube over on Patreon. All right, guys, peace. And it doesn't have to be YouTube. You could create a list of videos from Odyssey, PeerTube or even The Hub.


Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Discover 2016, Las Vegas. Brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Now, here are your hosts, John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live in Las Vegas for HPE Discover 2016 Hewlett Packard Enterprise. This is SiliconANGLE Media's theCUBE. It's our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Dave Vellante, our next guest, Alistair Wynn, who is the VP of Technology Services of the Compute Group within HPE Enterprise. Alistair, welcome back to theCUBE. Thank you. Great to be here. So, I just want to start the segment off here just quickly to define and clarify the HPE spinout of the other services group. Technical services, we have Scott Welleron, the chief of the group. And just draw the decisions. Take a quick second to explain the difference between kind of what's happened is the announcement of spinning out the outsourcing services group with CSC. Explain what's left over, why it's relevant, so on and so forth. Sure, no great question. I was expecting you to ask me that one. So enterprise services is really where customers choose us to operate and run their environments for themselves. So it's really where they applicating responsibility for IT. And that's been a very successful business clearly for us over a number of years. And technology services, we've reacted as a supplier to them quite frankly. We actually view them as a very important customer even though they're an internal entity currently. So really, from a technology services perspective, we're very much focused on the infrastructure itself, providing support, providing advice and guidance and technical consulting around the physical products themselves. And clearly enterprise services then take those and they add layers of value on top which they then present back to. ES, enterprise services, what's being spun out. Correct. That's more on the delivery end to end, traditional kind of SI kind of function. Correct, SI, managed services. You guys are doing technical services which is really the meat and potatoes of helping customers get to their destination of whatever outcome they're looking for. That's a solution around hybrid cloud. Also you're on the compute side. What's the most important thing going on there and why is that staying within HP Enterprise? So, I mean what we do exactly as you described is, I'd say it's more than meat and potatoes quite frankly. It's very, very strategically important. Meat on the bone, oh no, but important. It's extremely, extremely important. And you're right, from a technology services support perspective, historically we've had a reputation and we've added value in the data center specifically to help customers with availability and security of their environments. And I think what we're doing now with the emergence of hybrid is really helping customers move on that journey and to ensure that they have very consistent experience throughout that process. So we're really looking to empower them and especially around the placement of workloads and apps, we want to ensure that regardless of the environment or the platform that that app lands on, it's very clear that they have a support partner and a services partner to call on and that's our role. I mean I've always looked at the technology services component as the accelerant to achieve value as fast as possible and it's sort of, okay we're going to do this. How do we do it? You guys are who we call to get that done. Is that a fair assessment? It's absolutely, absolutely fair. So our role is absolutely to look at the business outcome that the customer is attempting to achieve, try and translate that back into the technology aspects that they may own or they need to buy or consume and yeah we're there to really partner with them to extract that value. What's the biggest challenge that you see with customers right now? Because as they look at app development, workloads are a big focus, yet the data center investments are there and the hybrid cloud is that integration point. Can you share some things that you guys are doing right now? I know the data center care and some other things you guys have done in the past have been pretty successful. What's the new thing? What's the new insight that you could share with the audience? Sure, absolutely. So I think we really regard IT operations as our principal customer and I would say in the discussions I have with IT operations really their principal challenge is meeting the needs of their developers. So creating an agile environment which meets their needs and meets the needs of the business. So it's all around the shift to hybrid shift to DevOps and actually what we've been doing is we've been spending a lot of time looking at the unique characteristics of the public cloud and looking at how can we apply some of those characteristics actually on premise to aid and help our IT operations colleagues and customers. So things like changing the consumption model from just being a capex straight purchase to a variable consumption model. Looking at how can we help customers avoid the complexities of capacity planning? So how can we take that away? And also how can we give them customers and IT operations in particular advice and guidance and help to really enable them to pull together the DevOps supply chain with all these tools and technologies that exist in order to really meet the needs of their customers. John and I talk all the time about cloud and everybody sort of thinks about cloud as a destination. It's where you put your data, it's where you put your apps but we talk about cloud as an operating model. Independent of where it is and I'm sure you guys sort of agree with that but I wonder if we could unpack that a little bit. So what does that mean to change the operating model from where we have been historically to where they want to go? What are customers telling you that? So I completely agree. And in fact, in much of the data we look at actually the principle destination for customers or consumption model is private cloud or a virtual private cloud. So clearly the principles of self-service and simplicity are really resonating with customers. Really, where our customers are looking for help is around automation and really trying to remove the human middleware that, I mean there's a lot of heavy lifting that has to happen in IT if you own and operate your own environment and historically a lot of that's really not added true value to the business. So it's about how do we automate that and ensure that customers can go from, the business can go from an idea to implementation as quickly as possible. So when customers go through a business case Alistair for automation, do they try to target, okay look we're spending X amount on IT labor that's not differentiating us from our competition. We want to cut that out through automation and we want to redeploy that to Y. Is that a part of the business case? Is it that explicit or is it more, there's just a better way we can sort of go to school on what the public cloud people are doing and apply that and see what the outcome is. Talk about that a little bit. So, no it's a great question. I would say that actually every customer that I've come in contact with is approaching in a slightly different way. Actually what you tend to see is the impetus for this happened because of a particular project or workload requirement. So rather than trying to transform everything at once customers are sort of looking at a particular use case and yes they'll absolutely do as you describe. I mean we'll sort of help to understand what's it going to take to run it in a traditional way. And many customers will actually explore private cloud and public cloud as potential sourcing options. And then based on I guess the unique business and IT context in which they're operating in because some are ready for cloud, some really aren't, some are much more advanced in their automation than others. They'll choose the optimal location to operate their workload. I think the other thing that customers are looking at is trying to make the workload portable. So it's not just about making a choice and then that's where it's going to reside forever. That's sort of the traditional way that we've operated.  Now we want to be able to actually move the workload. We want to be able to optimally place it. And that may well reside in the public cloud for test and dev. You want to move it back on-premise for much of its life. And you might want to end up moving it back again as the app comes end of life. When I first heard the term dev ops about five years ago, I was, John and I were talking about explain that to me. And then you said something, John, at the time. It's, you know, Dave, it's really ops dev. So many ops people out there that need to transform. Are you seeing that transformation? How is that taking place from a skills perspective? And how does HPE Enterprises Technology Services evolve at skill sets to accommodate that? So I would completely agree. I think it certainly is ops dev. And I think the IT operations feel a sense of threat even from the public cloud. So it's about them really stepping up and be able to provide a service. Protecting turf. Well, protecting turf. But you know, what we see is, you know, developers, they'll just bypass, I mean. Yeah, of course. You'll see a lot of shadow IT. And that's not optimal workload placement. You know, that's just people being creative. So they're absolutely looking for our help and our guidance. And we have a service that we call infrastructure automation. I think we've talked to you previously about it where, where we provide advice, best practicing and guidance. We have a large team of people who are themselves developers, which is interesting. And we make those available as a service to our customers, principally operations teams that are looking, you know, they're really pulling together the supply chain of DevOps tools. Are they historically developer software engineers or are they more? Yes, they're absolutely software. I mean, within our group, as an example, we develop the software that connects our products back to HP for like data center IoT is what I'll call it. So yes, they're absolutely using these tools and products every day. And we give our customers access to them as part of this service. Alastair, talk about the change that cloud has impacted the enterprise, specifically around application development workloads. That's always been the conversation. Oh, the workloads run on this. And that's going to compute side, you're close to that kind of conversation because you want to compute close to the data. You want to move compute around all that causing around data and the app. So DevOps implies I'll see infrastructure as codes. The app developers don't have to do all that heavy lifting on the infrastructure side, which is you're involved in. How does that change the solution architect out there? Because at the end of the day, the guy in the customer environment that your customer is sitting there saying, I have an app I'm working on, but yet it's also a DevOps challenge because it's a horizontally integrated approach. What are some of the things you're seeing that's impacted that conversation? Is it the cloud? Is it DevOps? Because the app developers ultimately are going to drive the workload into the infrastructure where you're going to be adapted and agile on the same side. So talk about that dynamic and what's the, that's a real impact there. So yeah, that's an interesting question. I would say that from a developer perspective, what we're clearly seeing is the switch towards containers and microservices development. So the way that apps are being built is very different. And the fact that they're continuously changing and evolving is sort of new to the environment or to many IT operations teams for sure. And so the developer is really not particularly focused, I think, on the infrastructure destinations so much rather than the features and functions that the application or workload requires for it to be successful. We're certainly seeing a sort of a resurgence of bare metal deployments. So yeah, we went through this huge VMware virtualization wave and we're now starting to see containers really emerge and customers starting to deploy those onto bare metal. And of course, what we announced last time in London with Composable Infrastructure, we have technology there that actually enables an IT team to invest in one platform and actually be able to service all the requirements. Is there a theme that you're seeing out there that rises up to the top in your conversations? What's that theme that keeps on bubbling up with your customers in terms of, you know, really kind of moving to this agile environment? So I think the recurring theme is the need for speed. They still want all of the attributes that we've traditionally associated with mission critical IT, they want the availability and security and uptime, but they just want to move fast and in the digital economy, speed is everything. The need for speed move faster die, as we heard earlier. I guess my final question would be, take a minute if you can to talk to the folks out there watching or watch the video or watch the Cube Gym highlight about what's the most notable thing going on around technical service within HP right now at this HP Discover and how does that change or enhance or augment the pre-existing announcements that you guys have done in helping customers cross the bridge to the future? Sure, absolutely. So the one thing that we're introducing here at Discover is a service that we call campus care. So what I've talked to you about principally is activity residing in the data center and what we're doing is we're taking the principles of data center care and we're applying them to customers who are embracing a mobile first approach. So where they're actually gearing out their campuses with wireless technology. And again, they want one number to call, they want an assigned accounting that understands their business requirements and they want to do activities that continuously make the experience of their customers a better one. So that's a really exciting opportunity for us to actually move outside or beyond the data center into some other areas. And exciting things you guys have shown on the show floor. Anything notable, specific solutions you'd like to highlight? I think I would certainly recommend people go and check out the HC380, our new hyper-converged solution. So although it's a physical product, actually that's all about the experience. And for me, this is one of the first products that we've announced where we've not really talked about the speeds and feeds, it's all about the experience it creates. So it's a very simple intuitive device to use a bit like your iPhone. And it has a very high level of service content. So we're really trying to abstract the complexity away from our customers there. Here's the last word, what's the vibe of the show this year? You can encapsulate it down for the folks who couldn't make it, what's the vibe this year? So I think it's a huge level of excitement. I mean, this is, we brought HPE to the world in London six months ago. We've had two quarters now of very strong performance as a business, we're still very much focused around our transformation areas. And I think they're really, really coming to life here. So I think it's excitement and I think people can really get a sense now of what this new company is about. Alistair, thanks for sharing your insights here in theCUBE. We're live here at HPE Discover in Las Vegas. This is theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante, my co-host. We'll be right back with more after this short break. You're watching theCUBE.


What's going on guys, today I am back with another Destiny Top 5 video and today we have Top 5 WTF moments of the week, if you guys do enjoy the video leave a like as much appreciated on my behalf and if you have anything to send in, send it into the email I just linked in the top of that video description, we'll get straight into this Top 5, in at number 5 we have a clip sent by Rupert 280, this is why I stay clear of trials and sorrows. At number 4 we have a clip sent by your boy Big Moist, so apparently you can be slammed across the room, absolutely awesome. In at number 3 we have a clip sent by Starstruck 76, I'm actually seeing this more and more often now, Tev is being glitched so that they never run out, what is actually going on with this game? In at number 2 we have a clip sent by GAR9591, taking the term Titan Loot way too seriously.  You're inside the box, save it man will you, I have to see this, oh no, well you're half in, half out. In at number 1 we have a clip sent by Sajota, did that knife track and chase this dude? I think it did, secret perk uncovered. But guys that is the end of this Top 5 WTF moments of the week, if you enjoyed the video leave a like as much appreciated on my behalf, thanks as always for stopping by and I will see you on that next one.


Hello everyone, this is Abdullah Said and today we will cover Cisco Virtualize Infrastructure Manager prepared for the 5G-era with Cisco 5G support. As a start, we would like to start with this safe statement. Then Cisco UltraCloud 5G architecture, this is our message an evolutionary jump delivering advanced automation, higher resiliency, greater security and deployment simplicity into service provider infrastructure. The cloud native, the key benefits for the 5G are the light weight footprint, increased service velocity, state separation, service mesh, increased security, improved performance and hardware efficiency and scalability and availability. All these benefits can be translated to easier upgrade, faster time to market, faster security response and true scalability. Cisco UltraCloud contains from 4 pillars, microservices, containers, DevOps and continuous delivery. Microservices as you know, the couple software services, individual deploy and life cycle managed. Cooperatives will be the orchestrator used for automation and scheduling and scaling. On top of that one, we need the continuous delivery, automated continuous integration, validation and availability for containers. DevOps is the automate and manage rapid deployment, isolate production change and deploy once validated. If we move to Cisco cloud native architecture, we have the subscriber microservices infrastructure so called SMI. This will be over Cisco virtualized infrastructure manager CVIM. It provides vertical stack design for high performance low latency GUHA. In this vertical architecture, we can see the first stack is the infrastructure, the open stack, which will be created and deployed by CVIM. Then the next layer is the cloud infrastructure itself, which is the Docker's cooperatives STO Helm as a chart manager. Then on top of that, we will have the common application infrastructure, Prometheus, Grafana, Yeager for open tracing. Then after that, we will have the layer which will contain the 5G network functions like SMF, PCF, NRF and so on. All of that orchestrated and managed and deployed by Cisco orchestration layer, which is the NSO network service orchestrator and EC, the elastic server controller, which will make sure all these layers and the full cycle of the hardware and software, all of them orchestrated and managed properly. Here we compare between what was before the cloud native as a monolithic software, where all the state and application are in single process. However, in the micro services and container platform, we can decouple the software layers from the services from the state itself. So we can have stateless applications, then we have service application, then we have the common layer and after that we can have the front end layers, which will provide the interfaces for logging, tracing and northbound interface. Cisco Subscriber Micro Services Infrastructure, also called SMI, made of 5 pillars. The first one is the SMI cluster manager, who is responsible to manage pod deployments in cluster, configuration, health monitoring, resource scheduling and lifecycle management. Then we have the opcenter for all network functions, where they are the common API for deployment, configuration and management to enable automation. Then the third layer is the common execution environment, which is shared by all application for non-application functions. It is used as data storage, telemetry and alarming. Then we have the Cisco service mesh, which is the intelligent service mesh to connect micro services and containers for application and steer traffic between the containers. Then the 5G database, which is the common database layer, built for high performance low latency, especially for application like 5G and cable. And now we move to J to cover the CVM part. Thank you Abdullah. So with that, let's take a look at CVM. So Cisco VIM is Cisco's telco platform, OpenStack based, and this is the platform that we hopefully enable you and telco operators to achieve what we think they are trying to achieve. So what do we think they are trying to achieve? So obviously, as with any company, it's all about trying to maximize your revenue while keeping costs down and minimizing risk. So when we talk about something as complex as a telco-cloud platform, it's almost obvious these days that the only way to achieve this and do this properly is through extensive automation. And that's exactly what Cisco VIM will do for you. So when we take a look at what it takes to build and operate a telco-cloud, if we'll go from a bunch of servers all the way to a fully open running cloud, there's a whole bunch of things that need to happen. Now, this slide is actually intentionally quite busy, but this is just to show all the things that Cisco VIM will do for you. So all of these things need to happen, but most of these can actually be automated and will be automated in the context of Cisco VIM. So with Cisco VIM, we only expose those activities to the end-user, to the operator, to the admins that are actually meaningful. So that in the end, the amount of time that you as an operator and administrator need to spend dealing with telco-cloud itself is going to be as little as possible so that you can spend your time where it matters, which is with the workloads, with the mobility workloads, with whatever VNFs you want to run, with whatever applications you want to run. Because in the end, that's where the money is. Those applications, those VNFs are what are driving your business. So as such, if we can enable it, if we can enable you to maximize your resources to use them where it matters, then we are setting you up for success. So as such, the way we intend to do that is by automating most of all of these tasks. So if I take an example, if we want to apply a patch on a cloud or a telco-cloud, which can be 10, 20, 100 nodes, everything will be automated. So you just say, look, this is the destination version I want to go to. And then the installer and the orchestrator, engine and lifecycle management tools will automatically download all the necessary software that is comprised in this particular patch. It will push it toward the necessary nodes. It will start and stop the processes in a way which makes sense, so that we don't have any downtime where it's not needed. And everything will be configured and set up correctly, validated automatically and tested automatically. So at the end, when the process finishes and it goes back to the administrator saying, look, patch applied successfully, you will actually have the confidence and the trust that this has actually happened as it was supposed to happen. So when we take a look at the different deployment models with CVM, you actually have quite a lot of flexibility to choose how are we going to deploy this, what is going to be the form factor and the amount of physical resources that we're going to dedicate to running our instance of this telco-cloud. So if we take a look at things here, if we go from right to left, then on the right we have the traditional full port where you have a dedicated set of the service from controllers, three or more dedicated service for storage and everything else for compute, along with the management server which these days can be evangelized as well. So that doesn't have to be a physical server. This is usually what we find in core data centers where you have first of all a lot of workloads to run and at the same time you also have the physical space to run all of these servers. While if you go more toward the middle, you can say, look, there are use cases where it actually makes sense where we will have instead of fewer bigger ports we'll have more smaller ports. And these ports are typically closer towards the edge. And with the edge as this can mean many different things that usually means in this case closer to the source of your user traffic. And with these micro ports we basically reduce the hardware footprint so that you can have more optimizations in the sense of given a certain amount of physical servers on how many of these servers can we actually run workloads. So with the micro port what we have done is we collapsed the control, the storage and the compute plan all on the same server. But we still take three of each just to make sure that we still have the HA, the redundancy and the reliability that you come to expect in telco networks in the service provider in communication providers networks where everything needs to remain up no matter what. And then when we go to a somewhat more optimized version probably even closer to the edge and typically this is also where you will start to see virtual radio access network workloads that's what we call the edge port and an edge port is basically an optimization of the micro port in the sense that we've taken out storage component. So with an edge port we no longer run local storage and we depend on a centralized storage cluster for our edge compute nodes to actually gain access to their image repositories. And usually this is fine especially in the context of virtualized network functions which typically don't need persistent storage and only need storage when they're actually booting up the instance so that we can grab the image from that. And then something that we are about to release is what we call the Nanopod which is basically a telco server a telco cloud inside a single server so that's basically a one server form factor. Now to deploy syscopin next to different pod types we also have a whole different ways of deploying the entire stack because just having open stack obviously is not enough even as awesome as open stack is we need a bunch of tooling in the ecosystem to make everything work. Because it's not just the telco cloud platform that needs to be automated automated we need to be able to automate everything around it. So basically everything is syscopin the hardware the software the different VNFs the automation in the form of the VNF manager in the form of ESCE and the NFV orchestrator in the form of NSO but this is not the only way that you can use syscopin so syscopin we pretty much have very close to an a la carte way of deploying your entire stack where you can basically plug and play the different components so in Model 2 you say look we still use most of the components but we will also run third party VNFs and actually if I look at the syscopin deployments that I am aware of and I am aware of most of them I will actually see that in many if not all of the syscopin deployments they have at least some VNFs which are not syscopin some of them that's even most of them which are non syscopin VNFs at this point in time now with Model 3 we are also going to be introducing some non UCS servers and then with Model 4 we are not just going to be taking a third party VNFs and a third party hide work but we also introduce the capability to run more cloud native if you want to call on that containerized network functions which can be called sysco and not sysco CNFs so with that I hope to have given you a very short introduction into what is syscopin this is not the first time we have talked about syscopin at OpenStack events so I'm sure you will find other recordings and videos and sessions from previous events in case you have more interest and more appetite to learn more about syscopin thank you very much hello everyone this is Abdullah Said and today we will cover how to utilize sysco virtualized infrastructure manager so called CVM to deploy sysco 5G stand alone packet core so our demo we will show how to take a full advantage of sysco automated ecosystem to fully deploy 5G stand alone packet core on top of the OpenStack layer which was created by CVM and including creation of the virtual machines Kubernetes cluster 5G network functions and all day zero day one configuration so our demo we'll start from using OpenStack which was created by sysco CVM also we will use a single dashboard this will be used just to trigger the configuration utilizing NSO which is the network service orchestrator it will be used to orchestrate and send all the configuration and also we will use sysco ESC which is the elastic server controller this will be utilized to use and configure all the virtual machines so the single dashboard will send the rest of the API to the sysco NSO then the sysco NSO will send the netcom to the sysco ESC sysco ESC will send the rest of the API to the OpenStack to start creation all the virtual machines SMI cluster manager Kubernetes masters Kubernetes workers and UPF as well then the next step it will be to create the 5G network functions that will be done by sending the rest of the API to the sysco NSO to start day 1 configuration so the sysco NSO will communicate to the SMI and to the UPF as well that will install day 1 configuration to the UPF and will install all the 5G packet core network function like AMF, SMF, PCF and NRF and let's go to our actual demo this is the OpenStack infrastructure which was created by sysco CVM and as you can see here we allocated one project for our demo for our 5G packet core SA installation this is our project and as you see here from the hypervisor point of view we have 7 nodes allocated to our project this is where we will create all our virtual network network all our virtual function here we just have here only 2 instances NSO network service orchestrators and the ESC which is the sysco elastic server the network already created in advance just for allocation or for this project so this is the networking that we would use to allocate for our 5G packet core if you look here this is the topology that which we have right now and as you can see this is only 2 network elements are created which will be used for creation of the VNM so this is what we have right now NSO AC in the service manager as you see this is the deployment here so if we go to the dashboard here there is nothing here it's configured yet so we don't have any devices except the ESC if we go to the services you can see there is zero deployment still here nothing installed here except for sure the ESC which is the one which will be used for the installation in ESC level in the dashboard you see there is only one tenant is created here but there is no still no deployment so we started deployment from the NSO and as soon as the NSO trigger ESC to create all the virtual machines in the cluster so we will start to see our instances start to be created in OpenStack let's just give it a time and just do refresh here as you can see here some deployment start to be displayed in the ESC level which is the masters the masters here the OpenStack level as well we will just do refresh you can see the start here building more instances coming up in the ESC portal as you can see here there is a start deployment more more of the deployment as you can see we will have multiple deployment creating for each VM so let's see here how many instances we have so we have our worker we have our ATCDs we have the masters and we have the SMI Deployer which is the cluster manager and we see all the worker again all of them are active all of them are created here if we go to the ESC you can see the ESC all of them start to be active here so you can see all our deployment in the ESC here you can see the if we go to the network topology you can see here now all instances created attached to the network and you can see all of them new you can see they are created now should be active now as you can see 3 devices connecting the SMI cluster which is the Kubernetes cluster and the UPF Star OS and initially already had the ESC from the beginning you can see how many deployment that we have here and have services here so you can also check the service manager to see what was deployed from NSO side first of all you can check the SMI cluster and you can see here we have a plan for the SMI so this is the plan here and you can see this is all the SMI cluster which was orchestrated and created by NSO as you can see 85 components of the SMI cluster including all the elements in the Kubernetes cluster which will be the base to install later on all our 5G as you can see here this is the first component which is the CEE the common executive environment which is used for KPI's 1M and monitoring all the 5G NF's here you can see as well the NRF already created and this is we can check what was created from NSO and you can see multiple components were created for NRF as you can see here PCF SMI so let's check the PCF side again in PCF side 7 components was created or monitored by NSO same here for SMI so now the orchestrator which is NSO is looking after all these components and as one we can see all of them which we created them under a slice so you can see 31 components now at the final step we can check all the network function are created by login to the Grafana Grafana is our dashboard where we can see all the network functions and get the KPI's the graphs from them as you can see here we can list all the code created and all the Kubernetes elements mainly you can see all the nodes here this is the master here we can go back as well to check the other network function like SML so here you can see some graphs and KPI is collected from the SML itself related to the hardware resources KPI's request again this is also some graphs collected from AMF so basically you can see all the network functions AMF PCF SML and that was all from my site thank you


When we last met we said that next we are going to go on to discuss basics of lasers but I thought I will put it off for one more module which might be a little longer than other modules or maybe this can become two modules we will see because this is one more issue that I would like to address about instruments as they are used without getting into the math of it before we start talking about laser basics. So all this time we have talked about various techniques we did a very brief sketchy discussion of pump probe spectroscopy then went on to talk a little bit about time correlated single photon counting and then we have done a discussion on femtosecond optical gating or femtosecond fluorescence subconversion technique. So before taking a holiday from the instrumentation part of it let us discuss one more thing unfortunately we do not have it in our lab but this is an important instrument to know and you will see why because use of these instruments like this is actually on the rise it is going up I will tell you why they are not as popular as they should have been given the appeal that they have and I will also tell you why they are becoming more and more popular now right. So today we talk about gated detectors and stake camera remember this entire course is about time domain measurements we want to look at dynamics we want to see how spectra evolve over time. So in this this gated detectors often play a very important role now what is the mean of getting meaning of getting so even before getting into the instrument as such it is not very difficult to understand if you use a real life analogy. Let us say there is a marathon 20,000 people are running the marathon or something of course that end there is the end line at finishing line at very different times. So now suppose what you do is you put a gate at the finishing line you keep the gate closed and open periodically what will happen first time you open it for say 2 minutes first you open it for 2 minutes the first 2, 3 runners who have reached they will get through and then you close the gate and you count that 3 people have reached if required you say these 3 people have reached then you keep the door closed for some more time whoever reaches that gate actually waits and then after a few minutes you open again for 2 minutes whoever is there gets in close the gate now you count that 10 people have gone in and then you keep on doing it how will the distribution change what do you think initially there are very few winners right so maybe 2 people will go in then 3, 5, 10, 20, 30, 40 then will come the mediocre the middle right then hundreds of people will start getting in for every instance when the gate is open and let us say I am opening the gate for a small time at periodic delays and then what will happen then it will start tapering again so towards the end people who are lagging behind they will reach so now if I keep on counting the number of persons getting through the gate and plot as a function of time what kind of plot we like it not necessarily Gaussian it will go up and then it will fall off so maybe Gaussian but what I would like to think here is that it will look maybe like an exponential function provided there are many who reach at the same time at the beginning you will get a distribution right it will go up and go down so this is basically the idea and this is what is used and to do this the first thing that we need to know little sketchily is about 2 dimensional detectors so we will not get into the electronics of charge couple device because after all charge couple device come as chips you cannot really do anything with them if something goes wrong you have to send it back to the factory so it does not make much sense to know about the intricate electronics of it for our purpose but we should know how it works at least now 2 dimensional detectors now are not as mysterious as they used to be maybe 20 years ago has anybody seen a 2 dimensional detector outside the lab mobile phone camera so with the advent of digital photography everybody uses this 2D detector right and everybody is familiar with the term pixel okay so what do you have you have an array of detectors right a matrix of detectors and typically you would have like 3000 4000 by 3000 4000 something like that and the way a CCD works is a little more complicated for that a CCD is not something new by the way it was I think introduced sometime in 1969 or so but then the technology has evolved and to understand how CCD works without going into the math there is this bucket analogy that Christian and look had proposed very early on they said suppose there is a field and you and it is raining and let us say the field is large enough so that the amount of rain at different points of the field is significantly different how do I know how much it has rained in at any given point of the field I put in an array of buckets I collect rain water and then when I am done measuring what I do is this is a conveyor belt you go ahead pour the water of the first row of buckets into this fixed buckets and measure the volume then maybe throw then the second row of buckets goes there so basically you are collecting information here and you are transmitting to a storage location that is essentially how a CCD works and the way it works is by changing voltages that are given to the pixels for our purpose all we need to know is that it is a two dimensional array detector if you look you could look at a CCD this is what it would look like okay you can see these lines can't you and if you look a little more careful you can see that each of these is actually something like a square so array can be along x direction as well as y direction 2D array so this is quite an old picture this one is an actual photograph of a 4000 by 4000 pixels CCD you might have a better CCD in your mobile phone now there is your megapixel and so on and so forth so more the number of pixels better is a resolution so of course what do we use it for we use it for imaging 2D detectors are actually very good for imaging purpose so when we talk about microscopy that is where these become extremely useful because you can capture the entire image are right away if you use single point detectors like what we do in our lab then you have to scan but if you use an array detector then you can actually capture the image like taking a photograph so that is where the real application is and CCDs are used in many different places are actually ubiquitous your CCDV cameras for example use CCDs and in astronomy the plenty of applications are there is not just our spectroscopy but then if you want to do time domain spectroscopy what is more important is not CCD but I CCD I CCD means intensified CCD so that is where the action is as far as we are concerned okay so what you have in an ICD CCD is that you have something that intensifies the image or intensifies whatever it is that you are looking at so before CCD there is something that increases the signal you can think if I put it in very simple term and that something almost always is a micro channel plate does this ring a bell micro channel plate have you heard of this somewhere in some other context a TCSPC micro channel pretty actual detector will come to that so this is what micro channel plate cross section would look like so what you have there is that you have in millions of capillaries that are fused together and well it is called micro channel plate why micro channel you can see the plenty of channels and why micro because the length is in microns so how good a micro channel plate is determined by the ratio of the length of the capillaries and the diameter okay and of course there is a coating of something the way a micro channel plate works is this so on suppose that this is the front face the face that we can see here and that is where your incident electron falls or maybe even light falls and an electron is generated this primary electron okay next what you have is you have this voltage ramp so now this primary electron since it is a capillary it is very difficult for it to just go straight it will hit a wall and then when it hits a wall and what is happening here is that if you see carefully look at the circuit this thing called strip current so you see this side is negative this side is positive right so the electron is actually being accelerated as it travels through the capillary so it is getting energized so this energized electron hits the wall then it gives rise to secondary electrons so this is what is depicted here one electron gives rise to two electrons two give rise to four four gives rise to eight and so on and so forth by the time it comes out of the capillary you get a large number of electrons for every input electron so what is it doing here it is sort of acting as a photomultiplier isn't it it is multiplying the signal it is acting as an amplifier or an intensifier okay so you can use it as a photodetector if you have a photocathode here or you need a photocathode here then light falls on it electron is ejected that is primary electron it generates a large number of secondary electrons and that is how the signal gets amplified right so typical amount of application amplification of course depends on what kind of CCD you use something like 10,000 40,000 something like that very large level of amplification can be observed here the reason why MCPs are very attractive is that to start with the very small transit time spread what is the meaning of transit time spread if you have read about photomultipliers there are dynodes there are plates at different varying voltages and then your electrons have to go from here to there that we the next one so on and so forth so the time taken by an electron to get go through the detector that is called transit time now there can be many different paths if there are many different paths then the transit time can also be very different depending on what path the electrons take the how wide the distribution of transit time is is called transit time spread and greater the transit time spread worse is the time resolution if transit time spread is small then time resolution is better and here the good thing is that you are working with a capillary that is only a few microns long you are not working with a photomultiplier tube which is 2 inches long so transit time spread is actually small in NCP so time resolution is good that is why until very recently even in something like time correlated single photon counting experiment the base detector you could use was MCP PMT you could get instrument response function of about 30 40 picosecond only if you use MCP PMT photomultiplier tube made by MCP micro channel so obviously one application of it is as we have said already detector the other application which is of more relevance here is that of intensifier we have already discussed how it can act as an intensifier you can see number of electron is going up so suppose you do not use it as a detector you have a photo cathode you have this and then you have some detector here suppose you have a CCD here if you do not have MCP one electron will hit the that pixel of CCD if you have a MCP in between the photo cathode and the CCD then 40,000 electrons will reach so that is why MCP can act as a good intensifier okay and that is what is important in our context and before going ahead further let me say once again let us say forgotten this intensification is going to happen only when you apply a high voltage between the phases of MCP are you clear about that as we know photomultiplier tube also works only when high voltage is applied here also you have to apply a high voltage 900 volt 1000 volt 2000 volt whatever it is depending on what kind of MCP you are using have you understood that MCP can act as an intensifier this is a schematic of an ICCD I hope you can see what we have written here so here first of all you always have a window what is window something which protects what whatever is there inside but allows light to go in so here the small dots are photons you can think then first of all there is a photo cathode this is a photo cathode as shown in the diagram and by the way this photograph well the schematic is taken from you see RA wireless world dot com I think that is about your CCTV camera so they said this is not confined to the lab use of these so photo cathode then this is your MCP micro channel plate and that is where you apply the high voltage from the micro channel plate typically what you do is in earlier models one would use lenses but nowadays for most of the optics for the purpose of compaction and lesser loss and all lenses and all have been all replaced and people use fiber optics so typically you would find fiber optic bundle that takes the information to different pixels of the CCD that is kept here so I hope it is not very difficult to understand that suppose this is my MCP this is a photo cathode array of light falls here the signal goes through gets amplified and then is taken by a an optical fiber to a particular pixel of the CCD that is kept here another ray which changes on another point is amplified and guided to another pixel okay and that is how one can obtain an image and that is really the more general application so I CCD in short is basically MCP intensifier coupled with CCD and once again let us not forget that this intensifier can work only when you apply high voltage and that is what allows this device to be used for time-resolved measurement why because when the high voltage is on that is only that is when you get an image when high voltage is off you get no image as we said earlier you can think that there is one primary electron if there is no high voltage maybe that one electron reaches the CCD maybe it does not but when high voltage is on that one electron is replaced by 40,000 so that is why when high voltage is on images on images obtained and when high voltage is off images not obtained on the CCD instead of image if you say signal I am fine for the moment alright so now you can use this high voltage as a gate remember we discussed this gating business where you had 20,000 runners and you are opening the gate at periodic intervals for a certain amount of time and you are measuring how many runners get through that is exactly what you can do by applying the voltage as a square pulse at regular intervals okay so essentially something like this let us say I apply voltage in this way this is voltage versus time plot so the voltage is off for all this time then it opens all of a sudden I mean it is applied all of a sudden it remains at a constant value then gets back to 0 and remains off for some time then again after some interval the voltage goes on once again the reason why I shown it like this is that the voltage applied is actually negative right on this side you need a high negative voltage and then this time for which the the time after which the voltage is switched on that is called delay time okay suppose you shoot a laser and then after 1 nanosecond you turn the voltage on this 1 nanosecond is delay time if you turn the voltage on after 2 nanosecond then 2 nanosecond is delay time and the time for which the volt the gate is on the voltage is applied this time this is called the gate time in fact this technology is nothing very new or anything even when you want to measure say phosphorescence on a regular flow limiter not a regular flow limiter a flow limiter with the pulse source of light you use this kind of gate delay technique okay the only difference is that there you are giving the high voltage to the photomultiplier tube here you are giving high voltage to the mcp which acts here not as the detector as such but as an intensifier. So what is crucial here okay but even before getting there I want to record a fluorescence decay how will I get it heat the sample with the pulse right and wait for whatever amount of time you want open the gate for some time and then close it again you make a measurement in the next shot fire the laser laser pulse wait for some more time open the gate for equal amount of time in the same experiment if you open the gate for different amounts of time then it is going to be completely messed up so you have to define your gate time and you have to define the delays you have to define the range of delays right so basically I consider this is the gate what I am doing is that for a different experiments I am just moving this gate along okay and if this is the starting point then now delay is 0 gate is whatever it is now I keep increasing the delay for every measurement okay that is how I can get time result data what is crucial here what are the things that are important first of all this how sharp this fall is that is very important you need a good square pulse kind of thing right if it is not square then of course you are not going to be able to make a good measurement and you have to have the electronic control to be able to change delay with the accuracy that you need and apply this voltage with the accuracy you need all this is important okay so this is an example of what I had said already here if you compare this with this what have I done I have used the same resolution why am I saying same resolution because the on time is same but I have used a different delay right different delay is what I should have written here different delay same resolution but then if I open the delay more then I hope you can see that you get course or time resolution here because you cannot differentiate between say this time and this time here you can differentiate between this time and this time so whatever time for which this voltage is applied that defines your picosecond per channel now earlier when I say earlier maybe 20-25 years ago the best one could do is nanosecond but sometime towards the beginning of 21st century these cameras like 4 picose and picostar were introduced where you could change the delay with picosecond time resolution and you could apply this gate times of say 50 picosecond to 20 picosecond now I think you can do 20 picosecond also so with the improved electronics that is available now this is becoming a better technique to do time-resolved measurements okay where it is it really used it is used in applications like fluorescence lifetime imaging microscopy in our lab we do FLIM using TCSPC this is another way of doing it so what you can do is so these are all called cameras right CCTV camera so what you can do is you can take this ICCD and you can connect it directly to the microscope so you will see the image now what you do is you keep on changing the delay and you define your gate time you will keep getting images and the entire image will be grabbed at the same time at different delays for whatever time resolution you have given right so from there you can actually get time-resolved images so that is the real application hardly anybody records just fluorescence decay or just time-resolved absorption using an ICCD camera ICCD cameras are typically used to image I mean that is why they were made but time-resolved image is a good application in fact many times people do not even care about time they just want to see the image and they cannot see it unless it is intensified so it is often used for steady state measurement but in high-end applications one can play around with this delay and gate time and record time-resolved images as well of course you do not have to image all the time you could do something else we said that you can couple the ICCD with an with a microscope and get an image suppose I am not really into microscopy but in our discussion earlier also very often we want to know about time-resolved emission spectrum right so in this 2D detectors that is something that is that you can do very easily okay maybe I will just draw a schematic now see let us say this is my ICCD okay and I couple it with a I put a grating in front of it so typically what you would use here is a spectrograph a spectrograph is sort of like a monochromator with an input slit but without an output slit so light falls on it let us say this is emission from something so it gets broken down into different wavelengths this is lambda 1 this is lambda 2 so now if you look at the images in each slice what you could do is you can get the spectrum okay so from here in your computer you can easily get the spectrum now suppose this is the spectrum that you get for 0 time change the gate time now get the spectrum after say 100 picosecond and let us see it looks something like this I am writing is getting worse every year so what am I doing here I am getting the time-resolved emission spectrum directly right that is one advantage of using something like this of course even here we are really using only one part of the 2D detector I am not using this most of the 2D detector is actually wasted if I work in this mode but I have at least shown you the advantage that it is not 0D at least from the discussion that we had earlier what do we generally use to use for our measure we use a point detector right so if you do not even have a spectrograph then what we are saying is the entire light this is your ICCD or CCD the light goes and falls on one point and you just said that you have things like 4000 by 4000 pixels out of this 4000 by how much is that 16 into 10 to the power 6 out of 16 into 10 to the power 6 points you are using maybe 10 because it will never be exactly one pixel so at least this is better we are using one horizontal row of the detector okay and that is where we can get time-resolved emission spectra using gated ICCDs and what I am telling you is that now you can get it is not really as good as TCSPC time resolution is not so much but 20 picosecond 30 picosecond interval 20 picosecond gate time that is now doable and the good thing is the speed the entire spectrum gets captured at one shot right but then still see we are as we said already we are wasting almost all of this ICCD we are not using most of the pixel is there some way of using those pixels let us see


Good afternoon everyone. Good to be back on stage. What's up? Slush and I'm really pleased to be here having conversation with Robert who I think is one of the most interesting founders of in Europe and why do I think that well a few reasons one is that it's actually building a company that is becoming a global Winner or a global leader in your category a global communications company And the two things that is close to my heart here with three things is global communications company Communication something I have a background on and the other thing I think is very very cool Personally for me is that you're from Amsterdam and that's what I started my first company in 2000 Because I wasn't too I started in in in Amsterdam and I used to have great memories from from there So I was a power user back then. Yeah You put you gave us a lot of problems Sorry. Yeah, so what robbers is doing another thing that we as an investor what we like about this company is that he has a hundred million dollars an annual run rate and With profitability and the company's been almost doubling or actually been more than doubling revenue every year So it's a massive company and growing really well. It's also a global company in terms of your reach So what they do is is a cloud communication service Robert talk more about that. It's a global company you're signing up customers all around the world and So needless to say At a time ago, we were extremely pleased that we were invited To to become an investor in your company earlier on this year when you took you took in financing for the first time And we did that together with our good friends at excel.  I know that you were doing something different before this. Well, tell us the story how it all came about Yeah, so I was basically working at my previous companies a pay Which was an API to pay for virtual goods on your mobile phone bill back then carriers were gonna become payment companies and and you know, we were sort of We were integrating with carriers in order to provide these payments and we wanted to verify users phone number with a text message and it was Very crucial to our business that we were able that that message would arrive because otherwise we couldn't verify the user And we couldn't process the payment and we use this vendor That was the market leader back then and basically messes when arrived they would arrive late We would lose conversions and it was one big mess So we integrated with KPN with some from Amsterdam's was a Dutch carrier They had owned back then op goes throughout Europe and Germany France and Spain integrated with them built it ourselves and Basically took the base business away from our vendor and the most interesting thing that happened was that a couple weeks later The account manager calls us and it's like hey What happened to the business that you were sending us and as I was complaining about how shit their service was They were like well if your service so much better Why don't you supply it to us and that was the first time that I realized that there was like a Aggregation business that that we could we did something that they didn't have because they didn't integrate directly with the carrier They were using another supplier that was using another supplier, which is you know the fundamentals of communications why some of it's broken So made kind of the contrarian decision back then we got an offer to sell the company We ended up selling it and we went into this like messaging business and back then everybody thought SMS was gonna die because of you know Facebook what's app But I just fell in love with the product and and the way that it worked technically There wasn't some you know, I was yeah more luck than anything else, but it turned out okay Yeah, and what's really interesting also One thing I would very impressed with when we looked at your company was that you guys you built your whole Technology stack in house, which is pretty complicated because it's actually a signaling seven Communication stack, which is you know, you have big your companies like Ericsson Nokia and others doing that but you guys just did it and it was interesting here is something that reminds me of when we built Skype because we kind of did the same thing and and And then of course you ask yourself why why do you build your own technology instead of kind of going out and procuring it from others I Mean for us it just it just seemed like the most logical thing to do It was kind of the same way that we looked at integrating with carriers directly Which seemed like a logical thing to do and and nobody else was doing it And it was the same that I think if you want to innovate into and if you want to innovate in communications in our space You want to innovate in technology? You need to own the lowest level infrastructure and so To build our own as a seven stack was like something that made a lot of sense to us I don't even think I realized when we started building it that nobody else had ever done it before That was just more something we but we just did it yeah And and it worked out you didn't ask if it was too difficult you just did it Yeah, we just what we just and you know a lot of stuff went wrong at the beginning, but it ended up Is that something to do with your t-shirt that you're wearing?  Oh, you can't see it, but oh so Let's turn to Amsterdam I'm sure I hope that some of you guys have seen the report that we launched today the state European tech 2017 and one of the things we're highlighting is that it's no longer about a few tech hubs that Where technology is happening in Europe as a matter of fact? We think that every city is becoming a tech city and I think message board is a great example that places like Amsterdam is also now We're not really on the map as well for for technology So Robert tell me what's happening in in Amsterdam in terms of startup ecosystem and is there Is there a lot of companies are the angel investors are their events? What's what's happening? I mean I have to be really honest that for me and you know I Try to I try to not go to a lot of events and and try to focus on building the business I think if you if you focus a lot on going to events, then you're probably not building something really good So I have a little bit of a skeptical view on that but you know, I think the texting apps sounds good We have you know obviously booking a company like ad yen payments company, you know competitor to Stripe Worth a couple billion. I think that's a really good example of like a Dutch founded company that stayed in Amsterdam All like 80% of their employees are there we transfer as a Dutch company. There's a lot of cool tech You know coming coming out of Amsterdam But we could be doing more. Yeah, of course you have booking.com, which is a giant as well So there there's there's been some some some big successes and talking about that What about talent is that you know, obviously you have a very talented tech team because you build some very challenging technology has that been is that is that Have you recruited everyone locally or did you get people from abroad? How many people are you today? By the way? We're about a hundred people today Well, there's any engineers that need a job. They're welcome. So and you know if finding engineering talent is always hard I think for any any place in the world. It's hard in Amsterdam as well We always took a deliberate decision to not use any recruiter So we were very proud that we've never used a recruiter in the history of message bird We do we do a lot of our own events. We do this event IPA's and API's where we just invite people to come have beers with us There's there's no structured. There's no speeches. There's no, you know People just come to our office and have beers It's been good for recruiting because you know people we get to show like what we actually do it Another thing is we you know our company is growing so fast and it's quite technically challenging that a lot of engineers Just like working for us because they have it's a real challenge. Yeah But yeah, we can we can always time do you spend personally on the recruitments Yeah, more than 50% of my time these days percent. Yeah. Yeah, I mean talents, you know Obviously started out with a couple people doing most of the work. Yeah these days, you know, it's the team that makes the company It's not an individual the reality is also A lot of time for a founder have that you have to spend a lot of time doing that Yeah, it's the number one. It's the number one thing that's important is actually if you have a really great team I think somehow you will figure out a way to be successful. Yeah And I think if you scale really really quickly and you don't have the foundations Properly set then it's a recipe for disaster. Yeah, so I don't tell me go You know, of course, we're thrilled about business models about technology But at the end of the day, it's about founders It's the founders who really make things happens and then certain characteristics that you need to have you need to have that really determination to win at any price and and to have you know want to build something that is a winning model of winning business that can can stand a test of time and One one point I really enjoyed when when we had a conversation earlier on this year Was when you told me the story about when you guys had a position offer That could have been potentially life-changing for you and financially you could make a lot of money because the other thing that didn't say was that You guys had new investors so you basically you and the team had Owned the company. So yeah, we bootstrapped our cat table was clean There was so today could have been a pretty life-changing event So tell tell what you tell us a little bit what happened and what was the outcome? I mean, it's a little bit of a confronting question, but you know, we're among friends here. Okay, so I mean look, I don't think that you as a founder You should try to build something that has impact that that gets you up in the morning You know, I've never woken up in the morning and didn't want to go to didn't want to go to work So I think that's the most important thing so when somebody comes with an acquisition offer I think the questions you should ask yourself is are you tired? Like are you are you done with with work?  Do you see something coming up that you think? You know if I get out now then like, you know, I've done really well and that also wasn't the case So I didn't really I didn't really want to sell that being said You know, I remember they invited us over we obviously knew What what the conversation was going to be you know when corp dev and found and founders of other big companies? Start inviting you over you kind of know what the what the question is going to be I mean it all starts with like we want to have a strategic discussion with you and see how we could partner together But you kind of know what it's about and then I remember they they wrote down They're like they wrote down a number on the board and you know, I won't say what the number was but I I remember just keeping a straight face Trying to not like think, you know, this is a dream. This is like, you know, this is not normal but then again looking You know a couple weeks past and and we entertained the discussions And then at some point it just didn't feel right. We we seriously considered it. It didn't feel right I can't explain exactly one thing what it was. Yeah, but we just weren't done Building and I remember walking into their office and thinking like so this is gonna be my Job like I'm gonna have to go here and have lunch here and be here and I just didn't see myself Do it and enjoy your money though.  I don't know. I've seen a lot of people I mean I've been in San Francisco a lot in the past two years There's obviously a lot of people that made a lot of money there every single founder has basically told me that they wish They kept their business so I Don't know for me.  Yeah, so when you made a decision about a year. It's actually this week Almost I think it's actually this week exactly a year ago. All right, and you look happy So tell me so when you made a decision, how did how did you did you do that? You know with a team and what did you tell the team and what? Yeah, how did it did it change your team? I mean it wasn't I mean this wasn't this wasn't my I mean I never felt it was honestly just my decision You know we had a fine found at the company with a founding team From like a structural level. I guess it was my decision, but like You know this was this was a team I honestly if they would if some of the other guys on my team would have said we really want this You know, I don't have a family they had families. I Probably would have done it because I you know, I just I don't feel this isn't this was an individual decision but the coolest thing was that I remember I had the conversation basically saying guys, I don't think we should do this and Then I had the conversation that I just told them. Sorry. We're not gonna do this that the acquiring company and The next day it was on a Sunday.    Did you did you kind of elevate your ambition level and and yeah? I mean that was that was the moment that we I mean we bootstrapped for for six years That was the moment that we really decided like okay If we really want to have an impact in the world if we really you know if we're serious about you can say jokingly Okay, I'm gonna kill my competition or I'm gonna buy my competition But what if you honestly mean it and then what are the steps that you need to take to get there? What's the scale that you need to get at? What's the help that you need so for us we were profitable it wasn't just about the money It was more about you know what the help you know working with with you guys you you guys have all been operators entrepreneurs yourself You know, how did how did you do it for us working with Excel?  What have they not seen work? Yeah, that was probably the moment that I decided okay now.  Yeah But it's interesting because for many entrepreneurs, it's almost a dream scenario your own you you know you have a profitable company you don't have a board you're not accountable to anyone and You can do whatever you want, but instead you went out to seek out venture capital investors and Now you have a you told me at a four-hour board meeting yesterday and my first real real board I had one before but I was a trial one. This is my first real board meeting. Yeah, so what was you know? so Why did you want? Why did you decide to take in investors and and what did you look for at? You know with investors I Mean I'll start with what we looked for I mean we were fortunate enough that we had people knocking down the door for a while So yeah, so we I mean we just ran a we ran I asked advice from other founders What we should do and we ran a competitive process. We we invited we made a deck. We invited ten of the best Venture capitalists to to have conversations with it starts with a coffee. We basically eliminated the first couple straight away You know that we went through the process it all went really really quickly I mean I think from the first coffee with Excel to term sheet was eight days I think it was similar to Atomico But I kind of knew when I walked in it was it was You know it's kind of like if you if you if you meet your girlfriend or your wife And you know there can be a hundred girls in the room or guys for the girls But it's the one that you like and why do you like that person? It doesn't have to be the best good-looking one or the smartest one It's just something about it and it was the same we were not the best looking investors Come on Robert But it was just something about it just clicked and I think it was also the conversations were very deep Yeah, so there was a clear segment between investors that were like just really wanted to jump on the ship and get on board and And both you and Excel had exactly the same mindset of like okay, but so you've done this But where do you need help? How can we help? You know, what are we gonna build? How's the company gonna look like in five or ten years? It's just an engaging conversation And that's what we wanted and and you know, I up until now I feel super happy with the decision we made Yeah, and now you're building a global business. So How how it you know, you have obviously, you know, you have business in and reach in in in Asia Latin America is that Is that the challenge or how do you think about scaling your business from here? I mean scaling is you know hiring and scaling is what keeps me up at night So it's like the two things we're lucky that the rest of the fundamentals of the business are good so far the company's growing Everything's good. Customers are happy. So You know, it's really about like how do you? We're a hundred people now. We hired about 41 people for 41 people since August So that's quite quite a lot of people for us and we spent six years. You know growing from zero to the first 35 people So it's it's going quite quickly. So, so how do you scale that? What what help do you need? What executive help do you need? You know, you don't obviously a Lot of the people in our company are young are super talented but are super young You don't want to combine that with like really let's say I don't want to age discriminate But let's say the old gray hair type people that everybody's afraid of but it's also the reality that you know We're here young ambitious talented But if you want to grow the company to 500 or 1,000 people in a couple of years Then how do you do that and your your mind your challenges are completely different to people that you have to hire the skill set that you need to hire for is different, so I don't have the answer that this is what we spent two hours of the board meeting talking about yesterday Half your time is is recruitment. It's the most important thing, right that they say and That that you need to be focused on and continue to get the best people Yeah, it's Challenging. Yeah, so a few takeaways here. We heard Coffee meetings and strategic meetings So we know what that means if you haven't got coffee that means that your first meeting for actually pitching and when there's a meeting about with a strategic meeting means that actually someone to buy you and and And the golden rule when someone does even if you want to sell the company you say always say no Yes, I mean, I did say no to the acquirer first like I think but you probably thought maybe it's like shit I want to do this, right? Maybe because you thought about the money a little bit. Of course. No, I mean, you know I won't deny I I looked at the type of houses. I could buy if I sold it, you know It's just you know, they're probably gonna still be around in Amsterdam for a while those houses. Yeah, I don't I'm I'm fine With where I live also. Well Robert, thank you very much. Thank you discussing with you and Congrats. Thank you so much. Thanks