All right, the microphone is working. Well, good morning, everyone. Thanks for tuning us and those of us also on webcast. We promise an interesting panel today, the Arab Voices on the Challenges of the New Middle East. You know, when Perry invited me to moderate this, and when I looked at the survey we're going to discuss, I kept thinking of the Arabic saying we use back home. The people of Mecca know its ways best. Ahlu Mecca Adra Bishahabihah. And it kept coming to mind as I was, you know, looking at the quotes from one or five experts from over 20 Arab countries quoted in this survey. To me, the study is raw, refreshing, unfiltered, and a nice break from what we hear in Washington. It questions everything, the legitimacy of governments, the role of military, the education systems, and definitely the US policy in the Middle East. We will go into details with our panelists who know very well both the Arab world and Washington. To my left is Marwan Muashir. He needs no intro. He is the vice president for studies at Carnegie and worked for over two decades in regional diplomacy and development. To my right is Perry Kamak. He is an associate in the Middle East program at Carnegie. And I can easily say that he worked with, he knows and worked with Secretary John Kerry more than anyone in this room. That would be seven years between the Senate and the State Department. We're also honored to have Dr. Shibli Talhami with us today. He's the Anwar Sadat professor for peace and development at the University of Maryland and also a non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. How we're gonna go about it here? I'm gonna turn it to the panelists and then we're gonna get to the Q&A. If you do use Twitter as much as I do, the hashtag for this event is Arab World Horizons. So please feel free to use it and quote any of us. And I will turn the floor to Marwan. Thank you very much Joyce. And it's good to see everyone here. As Joyce said, this is an effort. This is the start actually of a long-term effort. Whereby we are trying to bring Arab voices to talk about the current turmoil in the Middle East and of course, the future discourse. This is by no means a scientific survey. As Joyce pointed out, we have sent it to around 350 thought leaders from across the Arab world. We have tried as much as possible to take into consideration the population in various Arab countries, gender, different political outlooks, et cetera. But of course it remains an indicative study rather than a random sample of the Arab world. Still I think it offers very interesting results because it is by Arab thought leaders who have been working on this issue in the Arab world for many, many years. And that's something we always try to do is as I said, project voices from the Arab world into Washington and into the decision-making process here rather than look at the problem that the Arab world is facing from a Washington perspective. And if I am to pick one major theme, one major result from this survey, it would be that the crisis of legitimacy which really led to the Arab uprisings in the first place, five years later has lost neither its resonance nor its urgency. Overwhelmingly, Arab thought leaders have pointed out the issues of authoritarianism, corruption, terrorism as the main problems facing the Arab world. They see it as a problem of governance or lack of governance. They do not see these issues as maybe many in the West see it and actually many in the Arab world, they do not see it as from a security prism. Unfortunately, the prevailing problem, the prevailing position here is that this is a security problem and it has to be fought through military means. And if the survey says anything, it is that bombing the problem away is not going to solve it. If you want to solve it, you need to look at the underlying domestic causes that has caused it. Arab thought leaders are not as interested in ISIS or Iran or the war on Yemen as they are interested in educational systems, in authoritarianism, in corruption, and in economic empowerment. So I think this is a central theme that we see over and over again in the survey that Perry is going to guide us through in some detail. They also do not see that political reform should be delegated to the future because of security concerns. They do not see this overwhelmingly. Thought leaders say that political reform is needed and it is needed now. It is not needed down the road, five years or 10 years down the line. I was very interested in the results on education. I mean, again, the experts overwhelmingly are dissatisfied with the educational systems in their country. 79 of 105 respondents said that they are not satisfied with the educational system. One Jordanian female said our education is basically a bootcamp for extremist groups. Something as stark as this. Another Egyptian respondent said the educational system in the Arab world is neither education nor a system. And so, I mean, these are very important, I think, issues that often get ignored in the Washington policymaking community here who only look at the security aspects and who so far have not paid much attention to the domestic challenges that the Arab world faces. One, I think also interesting question was we asked people to rate the most three, the three most successful Arab countries. And why? Open-ended question. And the results also I think are interesting. The number one country came as Tunisia. So despite the economic and security issues that Tunisia faces today, I think the political inclusion process that Tunisians have followed and the social contract they have been able to produce apparently is popular in the Arab world. It might not be popular among Arab governments who have not looked at the Tunisian model closely, but it's certainly popular among thought leaders who apparently think that political inclusion is a very important issue to pursue. The number two country was Morocco, again for similar reasons, but to a lesser extent than Tunisia. And the third was the UAE. So probably because of Dubai and the economic model that UAE has given. The number four answer was no one, no Arab country. And that's something that is also interesting. For example, we had 20 Egyptian respondents in the survey. Not one person, not one of them chose Egypt. In fact, no one chose Egypt among the 100 respondents. So once again, authoritarianism issues like that are important and come out clearly. If the survey is important in any way, I think it is important in the sense that it can be the starting point for an alternative discourse to what we are seeing in the Arab world from discourses like ISIS or other radical discourses. And I think the survey points out very accurately to the issue of state building in the region that is going to require building institutions that can protect democracy and nurture it. And so they have identified the main issues. The role of the military, they don't want a role for the military to play in domestic affairs. Education deficiencies, political inclusion, new social contracts, a new definition for citizenship in the Arab world that treats people as citizens rather than subjects. All of these are I think important building blocks that we are going to use in our effort to produce a report that hopefully can contribute to showing the way forward for an Arab world that is pluralistic, democratic, and inclusionist. And I'll stop there. Great, thank you. Thanks everyone for braving the weather. I'm gonna say just a few more words about just to give you a sense of who these experts, who these participants are. And then I have a kind of short PowerPoint we'll go through very quickly. There's lots more on the survey which should be online already. But this will hopefully spark a discussion and give you a flavor of the kind of main findings that we found. First, as Marwan said, this is not scientific. We don't purport, but this is kind of representative of certainly of the broader Arab public. I like to think of it as a kind of very complex and nuanced and even contradictory kind of composite of expert opinion. We have parliamentarians. We have a number of current and former advisors to heads of state. We have business executives, the CEOs of multinational billion dollar companies. We have former envoys, ambassadors, et cetera, et cetera. But we also realize that there is a disconnect between youth views. There's a definite age division there. So we also went out of our way to try to cultivate and find younger leaders, people that emerged in 2011 during the initial phases of the Arab Spring. So again, it's not representative, but I think it does provide really some interesting insight. These ultimately are the people and represent the people that if the Middle East is to become more stable, ultimately are going to have to engage in their societies and also be engaged by the US and the West. So let's go very quickly. I know people at the back may not be able to read that well or online, but this is just to give you a snapshot. So first question here, are you satisfied with the relation between the government and the citizens of your country? As you can see, only four out of the 93 that answered this particular question said yes. Those four included one from Egypt, one from Jordan, one from Lebanon, one from the UAE. But 84 said no. Next slide. Now, people in the back, even me, it's hard for me to see all these words here. So this is a word cloud. What are the most important steps the government in your country could take to improve governance? So we have kind of education, services here, transparency, management. I think even Tom in the very back can read this word, corruption. It jumps out. And again, this is the entire body of our survey from across the region and corruption really stands out, which kind of highlights what Marwan was just talking about. Do you think representative democracy is a suitable form of government for your country? Again, 80 respondents said yes, six said no. And to me what's interesting, this is not so surprising. I think most of us would expect, there's been plenty of opinion polling done on this, but I think two things are kind of beyond underneath these headlines. The first is that I think we in the West and Washington are kind of conditioned to think of democracy as its own reward as a kind of abstract good. But as we actually unpacked the answers for why they supported our experts in any way supported democracy, it became clear that it was much less about give me liberty and give me death, these lofty ideals, but really about these are instruments to address the overarching concerns that Marwan was talking about, authoritarianism, corruption, better governance. The second thing is, even though 80 of these 101 in this case said yes, we support representative democracy, they didn't come without caveats. There was lots of concern. Let me read you a couple quotes to give you an example. A Syrian male said yes, I support representative democracy, but authoritarian regimes in the Arab world have mastered the art manipulating democratic processes to gain legitimacy. Another thing that was kind of interesting among the Tunisians, it may be the case, it's a small sample size, but Arab seem to be more excited about the Tunisian model that the Tunisians themselves are about the Tunisian model. So one of the respondents that said, they were not sure, this is a Tunisian male, representative democracy, which offers everyone the right to do and say everything and elect anyone to power, may drive us to populist dictatorships in some form of anarchy. We need to rethink what kind of democracy we need away from the Western cut and paste concepts and the outdated post-colonial authoritarianism. So yes, our respondents are keen on democracy, but not without caveats and not without concerns. And frankly, there are concerns that many of them have seen firsthand. This again in the back, Marwan, I think talked about this. We asked, we gave the experts a list of 10 issues to rank order, sectarian tensions, corruption, educational deficiencies, female disenfranchisement, refugees and displacement, authoritarianism, regional conflicts, interference by outside actors, terrorism and religious extremism, unemployment and underemployment. Now I only wanna highlight two things here. First of all, the top line here, authoritarianism. This I found astounding. With all of the conflict, terrorism, regional tensions, et cetera, et cetera, as Marwan said, authoritarianism. 45 out of the 103 picked that as the number one issue. So almost half, with everything that's going on in the Middle East picked authoritarianism. Corruption was number two, with basically half of the respondents ranking that as either number one, number two or number three. And then rounding out the top three, which is one of these security issues. Terrorism and religious extremism came in third. But for the most part, these strategic issues that we're reading about in the front pages of newspapers every day really are kind of much further down for the most part. Next, are you satisfied with your country's education system Marwan talked about this? I won't go into any more detail. Nine respondents said yes. 79 said no. One other point though that I at least found was very interesting was the extent to which in their longer discourse, the experts really drew linkages between the educational deficiencies and the authoritarianism and corruption in their societies. So for instance, a Moroccan male said, are you satisfied with the system? No, because the educational system is deliberately chosen by the state to maintain the current situation. And this is from Morocco, which ostensibly does actually quite well relative to other countries. Marwan also talked about this. Which three Arab countries enjoy the most successful forms of governance in the region? Again, not surprisingly, Tunisia, Morocco, UAE. First, as Marwan said down here at the bottom, 16 said none of the above. Saudi Arabia received one choice. Egypt received zero. But even here, when you actually read the answers as to why folks aren't necessarily enthusiastic about, even the countries at the top, it's not that people are really enthusiastic about it. Often respondents would say, well, if I have to choose, I'll choose Tunisia and Morocco. Or if you really forced me to choose, okay, fine, Oman, Jordan, UAE. But in most cases, these were relative choices, not absolute ones. There's lots more we could talk about. We polled about the military role. We polled about the role of religious authorities. We can have a discussion kind of about views on US policy, which I'll give you the headline is, just like Americans, our experts are very conflicted about the role the US should play. But where I'd like to end at least my portion of this, the big takeaway for me is really the thirst that's kind of permeating the entire survey is a real thirst for an affirmative agenda. And speaking of someone that has some experience in US policymaking circles, or at least trying to influence from the inside US policymaking circles, that the real takeaway, I think, is that we have to get beyond the kind of drone, the US policy just being about drone strikes, counter-terrorism. If we're missing the governance piece, the authoritarian piece, and frankly, if Arab leaders themselves are missing this, I think we're really missing the bigger picture. We have to find a way to kind of walk in Chugam at the same time. There are real security threats out there, but at least my takeaway is unless we get at some of these issues, these security threats are likely just to continue and further exacerbate over time. Great. Dr. Sath, how may you give us your analysis, your insight on this? Well, thanks very much. Thank you for hosting me and congratulations to Carnegie. I think this is a really useful exercise, and I learned from it, and I'll say why in a minute. But I want to start by saying what this is not, and we should be very clear on that. This is obviously not a public opinion poll, so this is, and not necessarily matches public opinion. Remember, these are experts, and this is a poll among experts, and public opinion may or may not match this, so keep that in mind that this is not a reflection necessarily of public opinion in the Arab world. And the second thing is, it is a very good cut of experts, but not necessarily universal one. Remember, these are people in the network of Carnegie solicited roughly 300 respondents from that network and got a really nice size response, almost one third, responding to it. So it's not necessarily reflective of all experts and thought leaders in the Arab world. It's those who have some tie or some connection to the Carnegie network, not necessarily four or against diverse, nonetheless, as Perry said, but we don't know what we didn't catch in this, obviously. So keep that in mind, first of all. But here's why I think it's important, nonetheless, and then I will tell you where I could probably add some analysis and perspective. It's important because it's not just this effort, now in the US, we always find it useful to look at expert opinion, not just public opinion, but people who are a little better informed or closer to the issues to see where they are on issues. We see that in a foreign policy type polling among experts, foreign affairs type, and those are very useful to tell us where people who are close to issues are following them closely, who are living them what they think. Now, we all know that those expert opinions often don't match public opinion here in the US either, so, but it's nonetheless very insightful and helpful when you're trying to analyze it, and we here in Washington as experts obviously need to be mindful of how the experts who are living this story in the Middle East think. I mean, we are living here and it's very easy for us to think, so it's very important for us to be mindful of those thought leaders in the region who have their own insight, who brings in their experiences into it. So I think this way is in very nicely into the conversation. Now, what I'd like to do is just give you a couple of thoughts both in terms of the results and in terms of interpreting them, so matching them against what I know of public opinion in the region based on polling and matching them more or less against what I know about expert or thought leader public opinion. Those of us who frequently go to the Middle East and in Marwan's case now lives there obviously have our own impressions because we constantly meeting with thought leaders. Opposition, pro-government, professors, journalists, workers, NGOs, government officials, the former government officials, we're always going in there. I just learned on Sunday from the Middle East after two weeks and obviously met with all sorts of segments like particularly in Egypt where I spent a week. And so we have, there are certain impressions of how well this corresponds and certain, and then we have the data from polling, polling that Pew did, that Zogby did, that Gallup did in the past two years particularly to see whether there's anything that we can learn from this. So let me just say one thing about the finding and then try to match it. That as noted both by Marwan and Perry, you know, it is striking that when you look at how people rank the issue, the concerns in among the thought leaders in the Arab world, the top cluster, particularly if you look at the results, if you have them, if you go online and get this study, you will find that if you cluster the top three choices together, then the number one cluster would be authoritarian slash corruption, which I call systemic factors. And then followed by the cluster of extremism slash terrorism slash unemployment, which I say consequences. But as I see this, this is really fascinating because those are the two clusters that a lot of people talk about constantly and they really generate the debate. So for example, we all know that the debate we have about Egypt and that Egyptians have about themselves, you know, what is the cause of what? So is the extremism slash terrorism pushing Egypt toward more repression? Or is it repression that is ultimately giving birth to extremism? That is a profound debate, I think. And I think even the moral issue stands on how we interpret this. So expert opinion matters, how we fall on this issue matters a lot. So in Egypt, I spoke with various segments of society across the board, including people who are against the regime, people or people who are against Mubarak and now for the regime, people who have changed the mind. And what it ultimately boils down to is they know what we have is not optimal. They know something is wrong. Some of them say that's really the reason why extremism is being born. But some of them say, no, it's the opposite. This is a reaction to the extremism. This is a reaction to the rise of terrorism in Egypt and that the debate is vibrant on that issue. And I would say that among the people that I have encountered, you could say my network across the board, people are pretty divided on this. It's not an overwhelming majority on one side of the people are very divided on this issue. And I'm gonna come back to this in a minute, but the other thought that I had related to this particular finding, particularly the authoritarianism slash corruption is that when we look at public opinion polls in the Arab world, we see kind of the same tension, the dynamics. So if you take, for example, the pupil taken November 2014 in six Arab countries, corruption was actually the number one concern for people. So this resonates actually with that particular finding. Obviously, comparison have limits because the questions are not asked in the same way. They're not given all the same choices. You have to take that obviously with some perspective here. But nonetheless, corruption rises to almost the top in that particular poll. And what I have all been grappling with, particularly since the Arab uprisings and dealing with the crisis like the rise of ISIS or the rise of militant groups or there's in Iraq or Syria or elsewhere across the region is that the problem for a lot of people is that the same causes that fueled the Arab uprisings, wanting freedom, wanting democracy, wanting responsive government, being fed up with authoritarian rule that has prevailed in the region. That same thing is still alive and well as this reflects among thought leaders, but I think it's also reflected in public opinion. It's alive and well. This is a function of the empowerment that comes with the information revolution. It's not going away. It's only gonna expand. And therefore it gives people tough choices. So when you are saying I wanna defeat Daesh by supporting the Saudi government, well, if I was in Tahrir Square after Mubarak was overthrown with hundreds of thousands of people in Tahrir Square, and I saw the pictures of every sitting Arab ruler with a question mark. And if you're asking people to support Arab rulers to defeat the extremists, it's a problem for them essentially going back to the same order. So there's a lot of tension in this particular package of issues. And other polls, by the way, I mean, separate from the corruption, other polls like Zogby polls in the past two years and some Pew and Gallup polls shown nonetheless that when you ask people, and you give them a certain basket of issues to choose what the top priorities are for them, they choose the first two issues, they choose economic issues in dealing with unemployment, economic prosperity, and security, and local security, fighting crime, personal security. Those are the top issues pretty much in that come up in those two. And that's why I think despite of the expert opinion in terms of prioritizing authoritarianism, you have a lot of people who in the short term kind of rationalize or justify the repression or rallying behind authoritarianism because they are frightened by the immediate priorities for them of lack of economic prosperity and lack of local security, which is why almost everyone pitches those two issues, economic prosperity and security as the top priorities. So it's a dilemma for the region, it's a dilemma for thought leaders. I think it's a dilemma for public opinion broadly and I'm really glad that Carnegie has put this material for us to start a conversation that is far more complicated than we've been used to. Thank you. I mean, and when you look actually at the results, I mean, what I took away from it is we Arabs are not exactly exceptional as one of the responders also said. I mean, when you look at the top choices, that's so similar also to the exit polls that we saw coming from New Hampshire and Iowa and other places.  My question to you, Marwan, is can we move forward across the bridge to democracy with all the, what we're seeing in Syria, what we're seeing in Yemen and what we're seeing in Libya? When you talk to average Arabs, some of them are frightened. Nobody wants to be Syria right now. So how much does the instability choke this tendency to move towards democracy? I think there's a big difference between being afraid of ending up in a state like Syria and therefore not going to the street and not proceeding with protests that you did three or four years ago and between the impression that the problems are over because people don't want another Syria in their own countries. The fact of the matter is as the survey says and as many public opinion polls show that the problems are still there and they're still as vivid and as deep as they were five years ago. Unfortunately, I think most Arab governments and as well the international community reads this as the Arab Spring has failed. What we need to do is look at the region once again from the same security mindset and prism that led to the Arab Spring in the first place. This is the danger just because people are not out in the street. Does not mean they are happy. Does not mean that the problems are over and if we don't really start a state building process that is going to take decades but if we don't, if we ignore this, I think we would have learned little from what has happened in this region or for that matter in any region across the Arab world. What the survey to me once again, why is it important is because it points out to the real issues facing Arab societies and they need to tackle these issues and these issues have to do with education once again, political inclusion, economic empowerment, new social contracts and new definitions of citizenship, all the issues that no one in this town frankly or in many Arab governments, no one is talking about. Everybody looks at the problem today as an ISIS problem and the way to do it is to bomb ISIS. We forget many times that we did bomb ISIS predecessor, you know, Zarkawi in Iraq and in fact, we thought that we decimated that organization only to find out that because of political exclusion, you know, a new form of ISIS came about that is far more barbaric and radical than the old version. This is to me the central message. It is basically a problem of governance that need to be addressed. If people are afraid to go in the street because they don't want to end up like Syria, this is the perfect time for Arab governments to conduct reform in a smooth and systematic way and in a way that does not provide shocks, you know, to the system. Is that message being internalized? Absolutely not. May I follow up on this a little bit because you know, I think that, you know, first of all, this is not a Washington problem. I mean, Washington, we have a problem obviously in our foreign policy for sure, but even these experts don't see Washington as a central thing. So that's in fact one of the interesting finding in this is that the thought leaders in here don't see, you know, don't see the Washington as the central problem. They do want though a very different US policy. I mean, some of the respondents said, we need to know what the US does for supporting our dictators or... For sure, for sure. And I'm critical of, as you know, I write critically of US foreign policies, I'm not defending the mistakes that we make in the region, but what I'm saying, those kind of things that Marwan once done are not at the core America's issues and the US will not be able to get them and the US will not be able to do state building. We've tried that and it has failed. So this is really a regional problem, it's not a Washington problem as much. But the second thing I wanna say, you know, I think I'm 120% in agreement with Marwan on the fact that the public really doesn't want authoritarianism and they want reform and that is the core of what drove the Arab uprisings. I have no doubt about that in my mind, we're in full agreement on that. But the fact that people want it doesn't mean that it's an immediate option available or that they see it as an immediate option available to them on the table. And so that's why governments prevail when they say, if we open up right now in the short term in Egypt, we're gonna start looking like Syria and nobody wants to be Syria right now. And so, okay, so then what is the debate? The debate is about are they right or are they wrong? And people in general know that in the long term, that's not the way to go, but in the short term, they're rally. And that's also the choices for most governments around the world who don't even have the capacity to really build states or engage in a critical fashion. So we still face those choices that everybody faces at that level. And so I ask myself, for example, in Egypt, in a country that is so large and so diverse and you have people who had, who worked against the Mubarak regime and people who went to prison opposing the repression, why would they then turn around with that liberal moral view for which they were prepared to pay a price? And they're as liberal as I am and I'm for total human rights and democracy, so don't get me wrong on this, but for people who share my values and people who not only share my values who are living this day in and day out and who are prepared to go to prison for it. I'm not sure I'm prepared to go to prison over that, by the way, but they were prepared to go to prison for it. So why then do they turn around and jump on the overthrow of Morsi? I have to, you have to ask that question. So you can't say because they're just not human rights advocates or they're not liberal enough for the, you can make whatever argument you want to disagree with them, but there's something here that you have to take into account. That is that there's a debate, maybe they're wrong. I don't say they are. I actually happen to think they're wrong. I've had a problem with a lot of the steps that have been taking place, but for me, just like we are trying now here to look at thought leaders in the Middle East because it's not just us thinking in Washington, but those people who are thinking there, we also have to take that thought process for people who are sitting in there trying to make their daily choices and not jump into moral conclusions without listening to them. And thank you for making some of that available so we could listen to them. Perry, one of the respondents is an Egyptian male. He said the US should either become a real partner to help the region develop or let the region find its own way. You know, in this city we've gone and you've witnessed it from an over aggressive push in the region by the Bush administration to a very reluctant and shy one now from the Obama administration when it comes to democracy promotion. What is there a balance? And what can we really expect Washington to do here? Well, first, thanks for highlighting that quote. That stood out at me, kind of either be a real partner or stay away, really, you know, if you put these hundred experts together that kind of jumped out to really, I think, summarize that I think that particular Egyptian spoke for a lot of the participants, at least in our survey. I think the challenge here, I think we've had a healthy debate over the last couple of years on the use of military, US military in the region. Healthy in the sense, I think it's exposed that the issue is much deeper. It's not stay in or get out. It really is, are we going to, how to be pragmatic, how to be effective? And I think maybe Shibley was talking about the long term versus short term tensions in the region, but that's very much present, I think, in Washington's thinking as well, in that we know we've got these, I think people in government clearly understand these governance issues, human rights issues, democracy, authoritarianism, et cetera. But the question is, what are the tools at our disposal to address those issues and what are the time frames we're dealing with? So if we're facing an immediate terrorist threat from Syria, from Libya, for whatever, that is going to get every policy maker's attention and it should get their attention. But how do you infuse within that kind of counter-terrorism, CT security framework, an honest assessment of the issues that come out in the survey, that I think is a much, much harder thing to do. I think over the last year, over the last decades, the US has become in a very narrow sense, I think, pretty effective at some pretty lethal CT strategies. The intelligence has gotten better, counter-terrorism has gotten better, but, despite 12 years in Iraq, invasion of Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, all the rest, I don't know that we as a country are any better in 15 years later at addressing these kinds of issues. There are narrow military options that American leaders have for narrow military problems, but ultimately, and I think the survey highlights it, these are political challenges as much or even more than they are security challenges, and there, we're not even, we're nowhere in the sense, we're not anywhere, and frankly, I would say the Arab leaders themselves are nowhere in the sense of how do you tackle these issues? How do you make the first step? How do you even start moving in the right direction? But at the same time, I'm gonna push you a little on this one. There isn't one positive quote in the survey about the United States policy. That's very interesting. I mean, what is missing, and we are in an elections now, what can the next president do to rebalance things with the, I'm not saying with the governments of the Middle East, but with the people? Is it? I personally, I think the most important thing the next president, he or she, will have to do is to articulate an affirmative American agenda for the region. I think there will be quite a bit of continuity, regardless of what happens in a lot of areas, but I think Arabs understand pretty clearly what we're against, but I don't know that Arabs understand what the United States is for, and so I think articulating a positive agenda, going back to exactly what you said, either become a partner or stay away. Can we continue to do these things on the security side, intelligence, et cetera, while also being a partner? That's a very difficult balancing act, but I think it's essential unless we wanna keep having the same discussion next year and the year after that or a decade from now. One last question to Marwan before we move to the audience, the component on education is very interesting in the survey. The Jordanian female who said it's a bootcamp for extremism, you've worked on this issue. I mean, is there any hope? And when you look at ISIS schools, what ISIS are teaching, the new generation and Mosul and Raqqa and Deir ez-Zur, is this also a product of a broken educational system in the Arab world in general? I mean, I'm convinced that the rise of organizations like ISIS is partly due to the education system in the Arab world. Doesn't of course answer all the reasons why they're there that as I said, are reasons relating to political exclusion, lack of empowerment, et cetera, but education systems and I'm one of the very vocal people about this. We need to confront this, head on. Our education systems suffer from many things but they suffer particularly from two main deficiencies, the absence of positive values that tolerate, that promote tolerance and acceptance of the other and respect for different points of view and understanding that truths are not absolute but relative. There's a clear absence of these values from our education systems, but more dangerously there is a presence of exclusionist values that depict if you are basically, and I hate to simplify but I will, if you are a Muslim Sunni Arab male, then you are better than any other sect.  You are better than non-Muslim people and you are better than non-Arabs. The exclusion of the other is extremely dangerous and that other is not always the outside world. It started as the outside world. Today the other is not just the outside world but your fellow citizen. If your fellow citizen happens to be a woman, happens to be somebody with different political views than yours, happens to be somebody with different ethnic or religious background, then that other is explicitly ridiculed in the curriculum. And I don't say this slightly because I've been studying in detail the curricula particularly in my own country. There is a need to confront this fact which is still ignored, denied by governments and who still do not want to do anything substantive about it. And this goes for the governments that have not undergone transition as well as the governments that have undergone transition. Nobody wants to admit that the value system that we are giving our children is dated and needs to be fundamentally changed if we are to build truly pluralistic and democratic societies. Yeah, I agree with Marwan on the need for educational reform absolutely and one of the reasons I was in Cairo actually I'm a founding member of the Education for Employment Foundation which is trying to transform part of the education and elevate the skills. But I want to make just a quick note on the American role, it's really important because we talked about it and Perry mentioned it. And I think we have to really try to be a little bit more sophisticated about how we read regional interpretations of the American role. Look, the US is not going to win the Middle East in public opinion or thought leaders. It just isn't, it might reduce the tension a little bit or more, it's not gonna happen. But despite that, every single party in the Arab world wants the US to be on its side because it's a powerful nation that can make a difference. So there is a, everyone is trying to win the US and so they're gonna be critical to try to lure the US to take their point of view. It's a polarized region and the thought leaders are also a group that wants reform, that wants this and that, that they can't do it on their own, that they are also focused on trying to get the US to do it. So we have to keep that in mind that we have a public sentiment in the region that is highly polarized, that despite their frustration with the US, they still see the US as a critical and powerful player and every body would like to win them on their side. I mean, of course, but again, when you look at, having covered many administrations now, there is a component missing in the Obama administration and it's the people to people relations. We've seen many secretaries of state before, go to town halls and Doha and Cairo, that's no longer there. And as I think Perry noted, very few in the region know what the United States now stand for. So I think we can improve the message that at least would be a step forward. But now we're going to take some of your questions. Wait, maybe Ambassador. Good morning, Gluckman-Feller, Iraqi Ambassador. First of all, congratulations on keeping this key theme of understanding the Arab region specifically to Washington. I have a couple of comments and the question. The question to start with is the role of ideology. Did you cover it as a problem or not in the region? Because the surveys are talks about the governance rather than the ideology. I think it's an issue. So please tell me if you did cover it. From a US perspective as an ambassador, I think the key problem is, as Marwan said, in a way if you try to contain the problem in Middle East, it will not be contained because of what we saw as ISIS is one example of why you cannot contain it. But at the same time, I may be wrong, but I would say the key problem at this moment here in this town is define, give me a problem statement, scope of the problem. I don't think that has been defined yet. All the policies and others are talking about different issues than identifying the problem, scope it, and then resolve it. That's, I think, is missing. I need to know who that Iraqi, who that person who voted for Iraq, by the way. Oh no. Don't go on then. Let's say, for example, take an example. In Iraq we say we have democracy. We have elections and votes one person. However, people still don't understand what democracy is all about. They associate it with one person, one vote. Not the culture, not the governance, not rule of law, not others as well. So I think we need to have, we need to go through an education process. To go through that education process, we need to go through a trial and error. Because of social media, problems highlight straightly and therefore people don't want to be associated with other countries. We don't want this model because, look at the chaos they're in. And therefore people will go back to the Italian because they don't want to go through the trial and error problem. That's the key issue because of the social media. So here, awareness is not useful in one way but you need to go through a very painful process. I'm not sure whether our region do want to go through that painful process with understand the scope of it. You need to go through certain level of governance before you want to go through a democratic system. That's another issue. For us democracy has to be a stage rather than the, might be an end solution rather than the immediate solution for us. So that said, because at this moment in Iraq, when you talk about democracy, you see this is the problem of democracy. We need to go bring back authoritarian systems. Egypt, they have better problem because they've gone back to the authoritarian system. So we need to understand the extent of this challenge as well. And final point is in relation to basic assumption where specifically when you have surveys, these are the problems and this is what is needed to be done. I'm afraid they have to go through a long process before you identify their need. Don't expect that there is a need, therefore there will be a solution. They may not be an environment for the solution. Therefore you need to talk about them providing an environment to satisfy our needs. I think that's still missing. I can say very quickly, it wasn't Iraq, you may not be happy to hear it wasn't Iraqi citizen who identified Iraq as one of the models for the region. So we were admiring his fortitude. We did not specifically ask questions on ideology, but they did permeate the survey, particularly on the education, questions and others in terms of challenges. I'll leave it there, there's lots of questions. Well, we did ask a question about the role of religious institutions. That's not all of the ideology in the Arab world, but it's a religious ideology. And people again were clear that they do not want a role of religious institutions in decision making. If anything, they might be, some people said we need an advisor role, most people said, but that's expected because of the sample itself, okay, that they want a separation between religion and state. Ambassador, I think that the scope of the problem has been defined by the survey. And if I summarize it in one sentence, I would say the lack of good governance. This is it. Oh, no, in Washington, I'm sorry. Okay, no, no. No, okay, in Washington, I'm like Shibley. I'm not that concerned, frankly, with what Washington thinks, okay? Because whether Washington does good or not, whether it interferes or not, in my own view, it's going to be in the long-term marginal to the state building in the Arab world. Either Arabs do it or nobody else is going to do it for them. Washington can play a constructive or a destructive role. Frankly, what it has done in terms of interfering in the region has not had a very positive historical record. I don't think any of us disagree on this. But whether Washington improves its record, I mean, I'd like it to improve the record, but I still think it remains marginal to what Arabs themselves have to take on in terms of state building. I agree with you that identifying the problem might not mean that we have an immediate solution. And I think that, frankly, a place like Syria might take 50 years to be reconstructed. I don't think the problem of state building in the Arab world is going to be solved through a period of five or 10 or 20 years. But in fact, no other region in the world that has attempted such a transformation did it in five, 10 or 20 years. So I don't understand why we want to hold the Arab world to a higher standard than any other region in the world. This is a historical transformation. It's not a transient phenomenon. It's going to stay with us for a long time. And some people are going to understand the right lessons and start state building. Some people are not. And so not everybody will be successful in the Arab world either. But to me, the process has started. It's a process that should have started, maybe, after independence in the Arab world. It didn't. At least now it has started. But we shouldn't expect it to be a smooth or linear or quick process. Since we're running short on time, we're going to take three questions at a time to get as many answered. Why don't we start from the back, the gentleman and then the lady and then have the gentleman also at his hand up for a while. So let's do this. All right. Thank you so much. My name is Alex Norris from the National Endowment for Democracy. This has been great to learn about the survey. And I'm curious to know, from either the survey or from your own experiences, how do thought leaders and experts in the Arab world feel about their own ability to influence sort of the public opinion, both in terms of their own safety to safely express opinion or their ability to influence sort of the crowded public sphere? Hi, thanks for this wonderful study. But I wonder if we have comparative, disaggregated opinion like I do. I want to know what other things, like when you said the Tunisians are not as enthusiastic about their country like the others. Are there other things like this and how can we see the different opinions from different countries to compare? Are you more interesting to know about Saudi Arabia because we hear nothing about Saudi Arabia and the US media hears? So I don't know how people there think. Thank you very much, Hisham Jaby from MSI. I have a question and a comment. The first question is about the youth bulge in the Arab world where you have two-thirds of the population below the age of 30 and neither local government nor private sector nor even foreign direct investment will be able to absorb this number of young people.  The comment is about the governor's structure. The question, I think the framing question, Dr. Muashir, is definitely it's about governing structure, but the question from my perspective is what kind of governing structure that works within the culture in the Arab world? And another question like, how does average young person receive public servant in the Arab world? There are issues are not well defined still there.  I did so and so in this public entity. And he talks about Russia in a sense of being shorter, meaning like smart and clever, he got it done. So there are another issues related to culture that is missing in the discussion about governing structure is the issue of, for example, take the early marriage or how does the production unit in the Arab words within the family work? So there are cultural dimension is missing when we talk about culture. What kind of governing structure that works within our culture and rules and norms that average person feel proud about? Maybe you want to take the first one. Let me just address a couple of one, one about the influence of thought leaders and the youth. Obviously that's not directly in here but the fact that people think that authoritarians are the main problem or that corruptions are the main problem tells you how helpless people feel. So these are people who have served in government, many of them. In fact, many of the people who participated in this are former high level government officials who feel very frustrated by their inability to do something. So that tells you something about how much influence they think they have. But the youth issue I think is really important for the following reason. I actually, we all have a point of view and Ambassador Mascher and I agree on the inability of the US to really make a huge difference. But one issue where I think it could make a difference is this one and let me tell you why. Because I think from the US point of view, there are two things. One is the opportunity cost and the priorities that Middle East has not been necessarily always a top priority for the US. And certainly the bringing about democracy is not likely to be. And the second is to work with the powers who are there. I mean, basically the US can't operate in vacuum. It can't do it all. It has limits. So it has to have to work with people who have power on the ground. Who are these people? They're going to be the governments or the militaries or the security services. If you're going to fight ISIS, you're going to have to make a deal with the Saudi government. You're not making a deal with the Saudi people. You're going to get the check to pay for the weapons from the Saudis or you're going to get the intelligence cooperation with the security services of all the people that you're dealing with. That's obviously the problem for the US, particularly on the issue of democracy. On the youth issue, here's the thing. I think almost every single government recognizes that this is something that is going to come back to haunt them. I mean, Dave, it's not that they, for self-interest reasons, they know this is going to come back to haunt them. The unemployment issue, the education issue is going to come back to haunt them. And they are prepared. They don't know how to deal with it. They don't know how to prioritize it. They have broken bureaucracies. They have broken systems. They have corruption in the system. The educational system is so troubling. It is very hard to fix, and you don't know where to start. But that's where I think they're open. They're open to working with people, whether it's NGOs, whether it's private sector, whether it's governments on the outside that could help them to create, to upgrade the skills of their population, to link them up with employers, whether they're global employers or local employers. And I see that actually the place where we should put most of our energy constructively when we're thinking about the Middle East. I'd like to make two points. One is, in response to Amy's question about comparative studies, this study is not the end result of this project. It's actually the starting point. So we have not attempted to, of course, provide all answers to all problems. This is a study that we hope will guide us as we embark on this three-year project, actually, to do two things. Go in depth and identify the problems that the Arab world is facing in depth. But not stop at that. We want to also, hopefully, guided by Arab voices be able to provide an affirmative agenda.  So this is just a guiding study to help us as we embark on this. To the youth issue, my own experience with youth tells me two things. One, they have no trust with governments. I mean, I pity any public servant in the Arab world today because he or she are starting with being seen as corrupt, with being seen as ineffective, with being seen as advancing their own personal welfare at the expense of others, et cetera. They don't believe anything that the government says. Now, what do most Arab governments do? They say, oh, yes, we have a problem with youth. What are we going to do about it? We're going to establish a ministry for the youth. That's the bureaucratic, they don't get it. They don't get it. There is a gap of trust that is extremely worrying to me. Because once again, the unemployment rate in the Arab world for youth is 30%. It is just not sustainable. No ministry is going to solve this. But there is not yet that understanding that you need to pay more attention to what the youth are saying. And the other problem with youth that I fear is many of them are being radicalized. You look at the youth in Egypt. For example, the Muslim Brotherhood Youth, they're being radicalized. They looked at what their older generation did and they said, if peaceful change is not possible, we're going to go to the street. They're not even listening to their elders. People in my own part of the world, more people are being influenced by ISIS than anybody would want. And it's not just because of ideology. It's because of empowerment, both economic empowerment, as well as personal empowerment. They feel they're now being offered a voice when their own governments are not offering them a voice. These are the issues that need to be addressed if you want to really talk about youth empowerment. They move away from rentier systems. And this does come out in the survey. The Arab world has suffered from a rentier system which has not promoted productivity, which has been based on the WASTA system, on patronage versus in return for loyalty. You cannot deal with the problems of unemployment anymore if you keep the system. Well, on that note, I'm very sorry, but we are out of time. The study is on Carnegie's website. Stay tuned for more on this project. Have a great weekend. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.


It's always good to have some more autism content that that's, you know, it seems to be quite actually autistic focused in the mainstream spheres. Have an amazing day, guys. I don't think I think the key takeaway from that is that, you know, it's good to have a balance, you know, it's good to get to recognize both the positives and negatives of being autistic and, you know, this being great, this has been autism representation in the media by Toon Ruins. A very, very good video, very interesting video. And I feel like it touches on a lot of really key things about autism representation.


How's everybody doing? Enjoying the summit so far? Cool. It's about to get better. We're here to talk about OpenStack control planes and how we can make them a little bit more resilient and self-healing with Kubernetes. So before we go into the intro, I just want to say that we're all co-workers that we and friends in the container community. And we decided to come together to work on a proof of concept in our spare time to help solve a common community problem, which can we make a self-healing control plane. That being said, I'm Derek Chamorro. I'm a cloud security architect at eBay where we try to containerize everything we deploy. There's my Twitter. I blog primarily about lab stuff and a lot of virtualization. I've been an OpenStacker since the Folsom release. And for those who know me, I'm a container in Kubernetes. I'm the founder and CEO of a startup company called Cloud Perception in RTP North Carolina. We provide application-centric solution through analysis and interpretation of sensory information with actionable outcome. We're also the organizers of a triangle Kubernetes made up. So today, we have over 120 people join us. We also have a great help from OpenShifter team and also Automatic team from Red Hat. And as a local community from the different region, such as Charlotte, container orchestration made up, and also New York City Kubernetes made up. And I'm Randy Tuttle. I'm a co-founder and CTO of Cloud Perceptions. I've been in software development in the early part of my career, switching over to systems and solution engineering regarding capacity and high-availability systems, particularly around a service provider of VoIP and a service provider of video systems. I've been playing around with OpenStack since Folsom and also along with Shishon, also a co-founder of the triangle Kubernetes Meetup Group. So moving to our agenda, we've basically broken this into three parts conveniently so we can all speak. The first part basically sets a bit of context about why we're doing what we're doing. The second part is going to talk a bit about the approaches we took. And finally, the third part will be the demo and is what we actually did. And then we'll wrap up with a bit of a summary and then some time for Q&A at the end. So what is our vision? What do we think would be the perfect environment for an OpenStack control plane? Well, first of all, we believe it should be easily deployed. So with minimal steps, we can have a functional OpenStack environment, spending fewer man-hours and requiring minimal expertise, especially around configuration and troubleshooting. We'd like for it to be consistent and repeatable. So any deployment should be repeatable and easily replicated across organizations with consistent outcomes. We feel that with consistent outcomes, we can spend less time troubleshooting those deployments. We'd really like for it to be quickly operationalized. So with OpenStack deployments, we need to overlay operation stacks to effectively monitor those deployments. This takes a lot of engineering skills. But ideally, we could have a fully functioning stack in five to 10 minutes. I mean, that'd be perfect, including the ability to monitor and do straightforward in-service upgrades. It should be easily and quickly. We should be able to drop in some value-added features. It should be simple to scale. We want to be able to do some hands-off. You don't want to touch it. We want to have it expand to a maximum scale to meet demand and then retract when that demand has subsided back to a guaranteed scale level. Surely it should be able to self-heal upon failure. In other words, we want our primary focus to be on maximizing availability. And secondarily, we'll address what the cause of failure was. So then with more uptime and confirmation that the service is performing at the level expected, we expect it would see improved SLAs. So for today's focus, though, we're going to focus on these main areas. So what are some of the OpenSec pain points that we sort of deal with? Well, around deployment, we want it fast. When we talk about fast, it's just synonymous with automation. And furthermore, I think most people would agree that automation is table stakes and DevOps. Some automation tools are currently available, such as Ansible, Chef, Puppet, et cetera. And these have really emerged to aid and speed deployment, some of which a few OpenSec projects actually utilize. But these have an appearance of being somewhat adjunct to the core of OpenSec and still are time-consuming to utilize. Despite improvements in OpenSec documentation, they're still targeted more to a generalized deployment approach with indications of what knobs and things to tweak to add flexibility. So while OpenSec is quite flexible, this is flexibility that organizations sometimes struggle to overcome when adapting to their own deployment architectures. And so companies are sort of left with this do-it-yourself approach, or even turning to many of the turnkey solutions that are out there. And of course, all of them require their own skill sets. So then we run into these inconsistencies between our development environment. Last week doesn't work this week for some reason. The different dependencies between development, staging, production environments can lead to breakages all along the points along the way. And we could argue that some of this is probably attributable to complicated organizational processes, which tend to have many moving parts and many points of failure and great opportunities for miscommunications all the time. And then another area we see is operalization. First off, what is the appropriate engineering? Typically our systems are overengineered for worst case demand, which can result in a wasted or underutilized capacity. We have the traditional monitoring tools, which really not enough anymore. They sort of give us this reactive rather than a proactive approach. So we need to bring in more advanced tooling to collect these metrics, these use metrics, and what I mean by use. I mean utilization, saturation, and error rates. These kinds of metrics can help us better trigger failovers and adapt to scale of demands. And then, of course, we want to have some level of upgrades. At some point, we're going to have to upgrade our application. And ideally, that operation should be non-disruptive or have very minimal downtime. But when we bring in the advanced tooling, of course, it can require a specialized skill. So going back to our vision, in terms of these three main points, we'd like for our solution to be easily deployed, quickly operationalized, consistent and repeatable across DevOps, and finally, self-heal the primary focus on availability. OK, so since the focus is this presentation around open-stack control plane, we'd like to touch on a couple of those pain points we consider problematic. So up front, we have this investment in pre-deployment planning and engineering. First, we've got to determine the anticipated demand and sizing requirements prior to the instantiation of our control plane. This capacity planning skill testing is significant, and it requires a lot of upfront man hours, which can delay our time to market. Systems tend to be over-provisioned because no one really, really knows what the demand will be, and that adds cost. And then we have this inadequate post-deployment problem. We can't really monitor that well. So again, touching on DevOps, we know that DevOps organizations must utilize sound monitoring practices. These provide teams with solid feedback, where adjustments may be needed. As we said in our vision, the primary focus is on service availability. Failure causes are secondary. Nevertheless, the insufficient use metrics, the utilization, saturation error rates, makes it very difficult to diagnose and troubleshoot service failures. And then we also have the lack of these built-in API health checks, specifically application or service-centric health checking. And then we lack service healing. So a lot of systems don't really have these built-in service healing capabilities. Sometimes we have to just drop in an overlay of automation to achieve that. Again, self-healing should be our end game. Again, with our focus on service availability, and the cause of the problem being secondary to that. Then we have lack of elasticity. So as we mentioned earlier, the systems tend to be a little over-provisioned. And so when we have to add additional capacity, expanded the system may result in more capacity than we really, really needed. And then we have to go, of course, stitch all that in. The other side of that coin is that all this added capacity that we just added in is not really removed when it's no longer needed in a lot of cases. We just leave it stranded there, and it's not really ever utilized. So by having some level elasticity, we can spend less time up front with the engineering and planning and move more quickly to a service deployment, and then we allow our auto-scaling system to handle elasticity around the predetermined policies. So just quickly, we'll drill down on what really makes HA control plane, and where do our problems manifest themselves. So with any HA control plane, we know that our goal is to eliminate a single point of failure. So let's look over some of those elements and discuss some of the previous invention pain points. So at the top, we have our load balancing services. Generally, when we add a service or expand it or contract it, we have to go in and manipulate our load balancing service. And this can be a tedious, error-prone manual process, or maybe we're lucky enough we have some sort of overlay orchestration to do that for us. But again, that still requires specialized skills to drop in. So we'd prefer it if our load balancing services could update behind the scenes without us being involved in it. So then we talk about what about control plane failover. So all of our control plane components are HA, as we've noted. And a lot of the services in OpenStack we distribute them across the various controller instances. So this works pretty good under optimal conditions. But so if we're near or at our engineered levels or a single fault occurs, then we might have some problems. And we'll lose all those services kind of get lost on that one node, for example, because we tend to bunch all those redundant services over on that one controller. So we're sort of in a weird air condition where we've got services sort of at some level of outage going on. So what we really like is some sort of self-healing control plane that we could know with confidence the service would function at maximum availability regardless of any failures that may have occurred. And so what about upgrades? This is some of the same characteristics of a failure, but in a bit of a more controlled fashion. In other words, we can plan for it. So nevertheless, upgrades tend still to be disruptive, which can make the HA service partially unavailable. So you can work around these to avoid these disruptions. But again, we have to put temporary measures in place. And that requires, again, additional man hours to do all that. So it'd be better if we could just sort of selectively pick what services get upgraded and when we want to do it. So then, again, just touching a bit on the topic of scaling, when we build out our control plane, we sort of take, again, our best guess estimate. And eventually, or maybe we might even use some empirical data that we have handy, it can help us predict what the anticipated demand might be. So while that's imperfect, it can lead to over or under engineered systems. This can then manifest in poor user experience, for example, high latencies, or because you're under engineered the system. Or you might end up with some underutilized capacity. So it becomes a real challenge to find the right balance. And operationally, it becomes onerous to make all these changes. So we'd prefer if our system could sort of scale up and down on demand whenever it needed it and operate within a minimum max range. And then it would place the workloads when and where they were needed. And then finally, on the topic of service troubleshooting, it's sort of difficult to isolate all the instances while trying to maintain that maximum service availability. So next, I'm going to hand it over to my colleague, Derek, who's going to talk a bit about Kubernetes. And while we believe the attributes of Kubernetes and the attributes of containers in general can accommodate many of our needs and help us with our pain points. Thanks, Randy. So before I go into our proposed solution, I want to do a brief primer on Kubernetes, covering some of the core concepts as well as some of the overall architecture that we've used. So first, Kubernetes, what is it? It's an open source automation framework for deploying, managing, and scaling applications via Docker across the cluster of hosts. It was started about over a decade ago as an internal container management system at Google. It was codenamed Borg. It evolved over time, infused with the lessons learned from a decade of their experience and managing applications and scaling them out. It was open sourced in 2014, and its current version is 1.2. So what's the advantage? Well, first, it's declarative. It allows your applications to be deployed quickly and predictably. Kubernetes works to monitor the current state of services and synchronizes it with the desired state as defined by you, the administrator. What does that mean? That means that if an application container temporarily goes down and you declare that you need three copies of that application, it's the responsibility of Kubernetes to start up another container, scale. Applications are scaled on demand instead of requiring resources to be allocated statically. The current version of Kubernetes can scale up to 1,000 nodes and up to 30,000 containers per cluster. It's easy to build. It's easy to update. You can build a fully functional self-healing control plane that you'll see in our demo later in as little as five minutes. You can seamlessly roll out new features to existing deployments without the need for added downtime. And it's efficient. So you're using only the resources you need. Thus, you avoid over or under provisioning and increasing your average server utilization rate. So why does it benefit the OpenStack community? Well, it's what this talk is pretty much based on, it's self-healing, auto-restart, auto-scale, auto-replication, those are features that are needed now and not tomorrow. It's consistent. It's consistent with your build as well as your resources. You pragmatically and efficiently only use the resources you need on demand. As well as improved SLAs. Kubernetes comes with built-in API health checks, specifically application and service-centric health checks, as well as self-healing services that lead to greater uptime of services, and that's always a good thing, right? So let's discuss the architecture a little bit more in detail in the next slide. So the controlling unit within the Kubernetes cluster is called a master node. It serves as the main management contact point for administrators, and it also provides many cluster-wide functions for its worker nodes. And when I say cluster, a cluster is a set of compute, storage, and network resources where applications are deployed. Some of the core components of the master node are at CD. At CD is a distributed key value store for shared configuration and service discovery. And that CD provides the ability to watch for changes and represents the state of a cluster that each component can reference to configure or reconfigure themselves. We have an API server. The API server exposes a restful interface that processes operations, such as creating pods and services, and updating the corresponding objects in that CD. We have a scheduler, and what it does is it schedules things. The scheduler watches the API server for unscheduled pods and schedules them onto healthy nodes based off of resource requirements, as well as tracks resource utilization on each node. And then we have a controller manager, and it manages a few different controllers, primarily the endpoints controller, which manage service endpoints, and the replication controller, which manages the ability to scale pods across the fleet of machines to ensure the desired number of pods are always running. Then we have a worker node. The worker node runs all the components necessary for running application containers and load balancing service endpoints. Nodes are also responsible for reporting resource utilization and status information back to the API server. So the components of a worker node are as follows. We have a kubelet. The kubelet service communicates with a master node to receive commands, and these commands are received in a form of a manifest, which defines the workload to be performed. The kubelet also is responsible for checking the health of the service. We have Docker, which hopefully everybody in the audience is aware of and familiar with. It's the container runtime engine. It runs on every node and handles downloading and running containers. Dockers control local EVS API by the kubelet with pods. Pod is the basic unit that Kubernetes deals with. Containers themselves are not assigned to hosts, but instead are grouped together as pods. A pod generally represents one or more containers that should be controlled as a single application. And finally, we have kubroxy, and kubroxy is responsible for forwarding requests to the correct containers. It can do primitive load balancing as generally responsible for making sure the networking environment is both predictable and accessible, but at the same time, isolated. So how does this compare to our previous control plane architecture? If you look at the previous control, HA architecture that we displayed before and then update it with a proposed architecture, we've replaced HA proxy instances with kubroxy. Each service is built out separately and managed and monitored via Kubernetes, which you fail over by having multiple copies of each service that we scale up or down based off of need. Load balancing that we found to be tedious to update with HA proxy is updated in unison with each service without the need to reconfigure manually or through a separate layer of automation. The architecture looks similar from a service perspective, but in the next slide, you'll see how we've built, scaled, and monitored our control plane with Kubernetes. So first, we build each open stack service, in this case Glance API from a corresponding Docker file matching our defined standard. Standard version, packages, volumes, and config. Containers are built as replicated services, grouped together as pods, and exposed via kubroxy as an open stack service port. Health check probes, we'll check the, which are native to the build process and managed by the kubelet are added to each pod configuration to perform pre-build readiness checks, as well as check the health of the pod post build. In the instance of a service failure, and provided that you declared more than one replica in your open stack, in your build, then a copy is rebuilt, making the service, quote, unquote, self-heal. And then we leverage Kubernetes built in monitoring to detect service disruption repair, as well as customizing our resource utilization. So why did we select Kubernetes over other container, automated container platforms? From a provisioning orchestration perspective, it's a complete automated container platform, where that we can have a fully functional self-healed control plane as little as five minutes, thus spending less time on the installation and configuration and more time customizing it to fit our needs. It's easier to provision and orchestrate new applications as pod can be started in seconds versus the minutes it takes a VM to instantiate. It also allows you to eliminate the need to worry about under-over provisioning, reducing the time needed for additional capacity planning. From a CI CD consistency standpoint, it's easy to deploy and maintain applications. Kubernetes leverages Docker as the build and deployment artifact, and you essentially gain a portable and shareable package in which a company can deploy their software to almost any infrastructure stack. So pretty much anyone who can build a Docker file can build a replicated service application in Kubernetes. Kubernetes also provides fully integrated deployment options like rolling updates for version or security purposes, an example, green, brownfield deployments, and AB testing. We also found upgrading to be no longer a disruptive procedure, but actually a productive one. Scaling, the benefit of the CUBE service system is its ability to maintain connectivity to the underlying service aggregation, even when it's rescheduled to a different node after failing or if the pod's IP address changes. The key benefit here is that there is no reconfiguration required from a load balancer perspective. Kubernetes does it for you. There's also significant cost reduction in increasing your average server utilization rate, therefore reducing your server footprint. A lot of environments that run their VMs run them with a low utilization rate, sometimes as low as 10%. While applications in a Kubernetes cluster can see a much higher utilization rate, sometimes as high as 70%. It self-heals. Kubernetes has built-in self-healing mechanisms such as auto-restarting, rescheduling, and replicating containers. As a user, you define the state, and Kubernetes ensures that the state is met at all times in the cluster. We've all, hopefully, a lot of us have here who experienced a lot of issues troubleshooting open stack services, whether it's in the pre-build architecture or in a post-build service failure state. With the ability to maintain service uptime, you replace what happened to my service with the well it corrected itself. And I also like to reiterate the point that service availability should always take priority to finding the cause of failure, not to ignore the cause, but uptime is king to maintaining any guarantees on your SLA. So you're all ready to see the demo? I'll hand it over to Sean. Thank you, Derek. Today's demo have three parts with four video clips. It's going to last for about 10 minutes. In the first part, we're going to show you how easy and how fast you can use our proposed solution to deploy an open stack liberty control plan. Since today's topic is self-healing, we're going to demonstrate the self-healing capability of Kubernetes in part two. And we dedicate the last part for our friends in the operation team, during which we're going to showcase how easy you can use to use Kubernetes building elastic search engine and Kibana for the monitoring purpose. The entire demo system is built upon three Ubuntu VMs. One of them act as the Kubernetes master and the worker nodes. Another two act as just the worker nodes. In this context, Kubernetes is going to orchestrate open stack liberty release running inside a Docker container. We also offer the live demo, but unfortunately, it's not going to be feeding to today's 40-minute time window. So if you are interested, let me know offline. And I can run it for you. All right, so in the first video clip, I start from a working system. I already have existing pods. So here, in this case, I run a clean up script to try to clean it up. Here, I said just go grab a cup of coffee. It's actually a little bit exaggerating because by the time when your coffee is ready, the work is already done. And then we can use a Kubernetes control command, control get pod command, and verify the status of the system. And you can see that there's no pod exist at this moment. Then as the next step, I kick off another script just to try to deploy the open stack liberty control plan. As you can imagine, it starts from our typical stuff like a Mexico database, the rapid MQ cluster. And these two steps actually take a little bit longer and followed by the keystone, which is one of the most important component in the control plan. Then afterwards, as the next step, as you can imagine, I start deploying other core services. For example, Glance, Nova, and Neutron. As the last step, we actually deployed the horizon dashboard. We also added the Neutron agent. Actually, we don't want a Neutron agent. We want to eventually come out with a solution to replace it. I just added here for fun. It's still running. But as you can imagine, I actually fast forward a little bit because the entire deploy moment is going to take about five minutes, about five minutes. So by the end, I want to highlight two things. The first one is the cleanup process take about one minute and 18 seconds. And surely, it also have a lot of room for us to improve. But the deployment itself only take five minutes and one second. In the second video clip, we're going to start from where we left. And in this case, let's first take a look at the Kubernetes cluster. And here, you can see for all of those OpenStack key components, they are all running. And each of them have three replicas. And thank the god of the demo, they're all running fine. There's no restarts. And then I said, well, let's verify the OpenStack control plan functionalities. I kick off another script. As you can see, there's nothing fancy. I just go there, check the Keystone API. And you can see the list of services. And then the OpenStack glance image is actually written nothing because it's a brand new system. And then afterwards, all of those normal computer just come by fine. They're all up and running. And the neutral agent, they all come back with a smiley face. And then I said, well, I need to entertain my audience. So here, let's say, just upload an image to the Glance image store. And you can see it's just running fine. It will come back. And the OpenStack image list command returns this entry. The next step, let's take a look at the self-healing capability of Kubernetes. This is one of the most exciting stuff. I write a Python script. It's actually do nothing, just go to the Glance API, constantly grab the list of image. And here, it returns how fast the Glance API can react to the API call, together with the HTTP error code or the return code. So let's keep this Python script running. On the different terminal window, we also let's review the status of those parts. They're still running fine. I'll just pick one of them. I use the Kubernetes delete part command and just remove them. I remember, at this moment, that Python script is still running in the background, is doing its job. As you can tell, Kubernetes immediately figured out that part is being terminated. And in parallel, it launched a new one. The new one is actually in the painting state. In the Python script, it's actually reporting no outage. There's no outage. And the use in operation, you can see, it's not about deletion. At a time when you actually add a service back, it's cost more outage. So for the extreme cautious reason, let's take one more look of the part. I want to wait until the part is in the fully running states, joining back to the repetition controller. And then by that time, let's verify the outage. There's still no outage at this moment. So this demo gives you some idea how fast Kubernetes can detect the termination of a part and how fast it can bring up another one based on our pre-determined, pre-designed template. In the next one, I want to show you the Kubernetes dashboard. This is the native Kubernetes dashboard. As you can see, all of those OpenStack components were deployed in the previous steps. They all organized as a separate section. I label them as a dash RC, means replication controller. Here, if you clip those view details, you can see the details of those parts. In this case, Glance API, I have three of them. The couple things I want to highlight here. The first one is, as you can see, those parts, they actually consume very little resources in terms of the CPU utilizations and also the memory consumptions. The second thing I want to highlight here is, as you can see, those parts, they also have their own unique IP address. They also spread across those three virtual machines with IP address 7.11, 7.12, and 7.13. And do you see that the blue, the log icon, if you click it, you can see the log. This log entry is actually generated based on my Python script. It gives some ideas of how your service is running. If you see that edited icon on the left, on the left panel, here, this is the place you can use to scale out or scale in your cluster. And surely, we're not going to demo that today. I just try to... All right, so this is the Kubernetes dashboard. It's nothing fancy. And in the next step, I'm going to show you the Kibana dashboard. Here, I laid out four charts. The first one actually gives some ideas of how fast your Glance API is going to react to your HTTP call in the term of milliseconds. The next one shows you just the traditional CPU utilizations. In this case, I actually timed it by 1,000 because 0.001, which is kind of boring. The next one gives you some ideas of the memory consumption in terms of megabytes. And the last one, that big green pie, that is just the HTTP return code. And in this case, you can see the old HTTP 200 OK is a good indication our system is healthy. So that concludes our demo here today. Like I said, it was over the live demo. You roughly run about 40 minutes. If you are interested, let me know. I'll be more than happy to run it for you. So here, based on our years of experience, I witnessed a lot of issues in the open-set cloud, both public and private. And for so long, we have been trying to tackle them, mitigate them, or fully address them. But surely our efforts are not complete yet. And I hope today's demo convinced you the order can be brought out of the chaos and your business can be successful with open-set cloud if the right approach is taken to get it closer to Nalana. So let's take a look at what we've learned out of this proper concept. The first thing is, we firmly believe that open-stack deployment can be very easy and fast. With the manual installation and the configurations, we'll talk about days or even weeks of work followed by the months of chaos. With the rise of automation tools like Ansible, we can brought out hours. As a matter of fact, we love Ansible. We have Ansible solution playbook, which can help with deploy open-stack liberty in about 30, 40 minutes. But still, that's not enough.  We would love to hand over to our friends in the security team and also in the service team so you can spend less time on the installation and the configurations, and more time to make sure you're customer happy or execute test suite to make sure your code is always in the deployable state. And I threw out an entire course of CACD where I anticipate a small batch size of work flow through the dev team, query team, and the operation team. So original thinking has significantly improved the productivity by creating an environment on demand, limiting the working progress, and also build a system which is very safe to change. But in reality, what we realized from our customers was not the case. This great concept actually introduced a more delay due to the inconsistency between the diving environment, which is built and developed for the unit and function test, and then the staging environment driven by the query team to find the corner cases and test the business logic, and also the production environment. So given the nature of a container, you can package your application with its dependencies and we can create a virtual isolation on top of your physical box. And don't forget, Kubernetes as a very typical orchestrator is also provided lifecycle management capability. So when a dev team need an environment, we can burn up in five minutes. When they don't need any more, we can shut it down in one minute. It has never been so easy before. With those tons of good news, go to the dev team and also the service team and also the query team. For our friends in the operation team, I have a bad news for you. With the introduction of those replicas, the complexity level of running an open stack is going to be timed at least by three. And also make the matters worse. The name of the container and also the number of the container can be quite dynamic over the time. Take those 10 plus deployment into the production every day, actually, the complexity level can be exponential. But don't feel frustrated because we still formally believe a solid operational solution is still achievable and we're actually working on it. Just in case we have any decision maker here in our audience, we can summarize today's session with one word, which is efficiency. By the end of the day, it's all about improving efficiency. So today, we demonstrate a approach which we can apply the technology developed outside of the open stack community and onto the open stack cloud itself. And the business value is quite clear. It can help you cut on the cost, for sure. And it also can help you increase the usability of your open stack services by a significant factor. And sure, this approach would require a lot of rethinking. Now, the question is, what are we going to do next? It's very simple. Just make it better. The top priority on our roadmap is scale. Today, this system is running fine in the small-scale environment. And tomorrow, we're going to go above and beyond by continuously integrating other open-source tools. And eventually, it's going to become a great product for everybody. So the next one is the flexibility. Today, we actually hard-code several parameters in our code, including user credentials, due to the time constraint. But tomorrow, we're going to make it more flexible so our customer will have more knobs to tweak for your own design and the use cases. The last one is reliability. Today, we're going to share with you a subset of what we already developed. Tomorrow, we're going to continue expanding our efforts. So eventually, the auto-skating decision can be smarter and it can be more reliable given the retro set of metrics. But what's going to happen next, I don't know. But I guarantee you it must be something more exciting. I think we can close for Q&A, if you have any questions for our presentations. Sure. How extensive is the quality of service support within Kubernetes, if any? Actually, Kubernetes have a couple of building features. It gives you some basic level of color service even performs the measuring. For example, one of those metrics I displayed here on the Kibana is actually what we're going to do next. It is actually provided by Kubernetes by using Kibster. But with that being said, like I said, it's very basic. We're still kind of exploring other alternatives. For example, integration with Datadog. Those can give you a retro set of metrics, in our opinion. But that work has not been done so far yet. I have two questions. So one is, where and how do you do the initial seed, for example, of the database and registering the service endpoints? And the second question would be, what do you do with OpenStack services that are not horizontally scalable, like Cinder Volume? Actually, we're at time. But if you want, we can just continue a little bit offline. Yeah. The quick answer to your question is, we actually give up our own algorithm to tackle those issues. Very troublesome is the metric and everything that is kind of the reference.


You'll probably never encounter this problem because you don't like spicy food. But for those of you who do, and you ever encounter the serrano pepper, which is a very common thing to have here. I will never. We were making Valerie's world famous chicken tortilla soup. It's beyond extraordinary. And serrano peppers are some of the things you chop up and put in there. We all know not to touch your eyes after you've touched serrano peppers or any kind of a pepper that's really, really hot because the oils will transfer. You know where else you shouldn't touch, folks? Your nether regions. That's the only place. I was in agony. Why were you touching your nether regions while cooking? As boys often do, when there's nothing else to do, while you're sitting on the floor watching TV, eating your dinner in a bathrobe and nothing else on, I grabbed my peepee. Why did you think that would be a good intro? Awful. Awful. It's a great intro. Don't ever do it again. Macquas. Say something? Cool. Ah. Josh! Okay, welcome back to our Stupid Reactions of Corbin. Burning peepies. And you can follow us on Instagram, Twitter for more juicy content. Thank you dirty sports and Patreon, follow us on Instagram, subscribe, like button. So today we're watching a trailer for Merry Christmas. I thought you were gonna say something else. Nope, Merry Christmas. Great. But here's the reason. Obviously, if you saw our one, we reacted to the Hindi version. I'm told the Tamil version is completely different. And like edited differently. Edited differently, different shots, everything. They said it actually feels like a different film. Why you would do a trailer that way? I don't know. Okay. But so people, if I knew that, I would have reacted to both at the exact same time. Yeah. So we could have obviously gotten the vibe. Sure. Of each of them. Cool. I would like to know though, is this a Hindi film or is this a Tamil film? The answer is yes. Which one should I be seeing it in? It's a Hindi film or Hamel? Since I'm, I don't think Katrina Kaif speaks Tamil and I know Vijay does speak some Hindi. That doesn't ever matter to me. And the director. Cause, well. Cause they'll learn it for a film. Oh no, a lot of times they'll have somebody else dub it. Yeah. Like without their permission, right Mark Bennington? Hopefully with their permission. Cause I know Nawaz has done that before. Like in other actors, like they'll do a Tamil film. But Nawaz speaks every language on earth. That's true. Most people don't know that. Except Farsi. Yeah.  Anyways, let's, I don't, I don't, I don't know. Okay. So this dropped the same day. Same day. If I would've known they were this different, I would've reacted to both at the exact same time. Here we go. You were happy at the time, weren't you? Come, let's go to that time. This is a completely different trail. We'll go up and down in the same speed. I didn't tell you. It just started. Merry Christmas, brother. I'm ready to do this. Super, man. Good idea. I'll call you when I'm done. Freaking weird. Weird, man. Uh, are the films different? Cause that, yeah. One, one is a crime mystery. And the other one is a rom-com. I feel like two totally different films. That one felt almost like Knives Out, Quirky, slightly, with a little bit of rom-com. Well, Underhun was kind of that way a little bit. Yeah, but the other one, the Hindi one, made you feel like it was going to be very much like Underhun in that it was going to be a mystery and she's very much looking like she might be the bad guy. This didn't have, why would you do this? This is very strange. Yeah, very strange. But is Radhika in? Cause she wasn't in the Hindi trailer. No, she's not in the Hindi film at all. I don't know. It's very weird. Why would you not have Radhika Upday in the Hindi version? Hindi audiences are more familiar with Radhika Upday. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Very, very strange. Never seen anything like this in- It has to be that they just cut it differently for what- I don't know the reason for that. I don't know what the reason, maybe just to get- People talking? More hype for- I don't know. I don't understand why you would do that. Except to maybe get people to go watch each version and talk to get people to talk. Maybe to get people out of their comfort zone that know Radhika and from the Hindi world and we're like, oh, I'm going to watch the Tamil one to see Radhika. Or really if you combine the two and it's over everybody says, what the heck? Just like a Malialam trailer. Yeah. I really, this is very odd. Obviously I'm still very interested. They changed it to Kamal Haasan, that little ticket. Yeah. And that gave Groundhog Day vibes. It did because there was a repetition going on. Yeah. But that wasn't conveyed in the first trailer at all. They're right.  It absolutely feels like two different films. Yeah. I still got some of the same vibes of like, and I got the Groundhog Day vibe in the first one. You just see it more in this one. But they did change the ticket to Kamal because Kamal was not in the first one in terms of the ticket that came out. And Radhika may appear in the first one. She just happens to go so lightning fast that we didn't even pick it up. I do not remember seeing her. I don't get it. Very strange. I'm still very excited. I'm just, I would want to know which one I would need to see. What do you mean? Is it a Hindi film? Oh, you mean the actual final version. Yeah. And like I said, I'm sure they were both filmed at the same time. So I'm sure they filmed the Hindi version and then the next take was like, all right, we're going to do the Tamil one now. But I need to know. Because there's a very real... I want the least amount of dubbing possible. There's a very real possibility that they're different scripts. No way, man. Could be. There's no way. I just... It's strange. What does it list it anywhere? Google, IMDB. Yeah, she was... Katrina Kaif apparently was... Her dialogue in this was dubbed in the Tamil version. Which is what I was... Because... They often do that because they know... Indians are so... I don't know if sensitive is the right word. But if an accent is wrong at all... Oh yeah. That matters. It's...  No, it's... It's emotional. I can't even watch it with that Punjabi accent they gave. It falls into the category of the emotions. Very emotional. Yes, but it is. That is like a number one thing that you often hear about an actor's performance. But we're that way. Not like them, but if somebody, especially a good actor, doesn't get a regional accent, we... I mean, Benedict Cumberbatch and his Boston accent, we butchered him on that one. And he'd butcher himself.  But... But... I think anybody anywhere will do that if... It's so... But it is a big deal in India. I heard... But again, is this a Hindi film or a Tamil film? Yeah, I'm sure the Tamil people will say, Tamil, watch it in Tamil. I'm sure the Hindi people will say, it's Hindi, watch it in Hindi. I don't know. Obviously, we can't tell that stuff. Like, we saw a donkey. Obviously, if you saw a review of it, people were... I heard people critiquing Shalwa Khan's Punjabi accent. Obviously, that's something we'd never... No, I heard she got... Pick up one. That Tapsi did well. And he did not. In her Punjabi accent. Yeah. Yeah, obviously, something that we would... We can't pick up on that. We would not know. There is... But... I... My guess is Hindi, just because he's the director of Vandahan Dahan, Radhika Zanat, Katrina Kaif, Hindi speaker. Vijay, I know speaks Hindi. He does. He was just... He was just in Jawan. Yep. And played Santa Claus in that. Yeah. It was Jawan. Yeah, it was Jawan. And so I know he speaks Hindi. And so I'm... That would be my guess. Does it say...? I want to know for sure. IMDbPro or Google... No, I'm sure it was just filmed at the exact same time, because that's very common, as you know. Yeah. And it won't matter when it hits streaming, because those platforms put it in whatever language they think will be the most popular. But I also want to make sure it's the exact same film. Yeah. Very interesting. Because if it's not... That's weird. Also, I'm very sad this is not coming out before Christmas. Yeah. I like my Christmas movies at Christmas time. Yeah. Because it gives you the warmth of the feels. The feels. Yeah. Anyways. Speaking of that as well, a little plug for the holdovers. It's a holiday film. If you haven't seen it and you can, I don't know that it got a distribution in India. But it's a holiday film that deserves to be watched. It's really good. Anyways, let us know what you thought about it. If you're excited for this film, let us know down below. Just...