Refugees who cannot now go back to Hungary, to North Korea, to North Vietnam, to East Germany or to Poland or to any of the other land from which a steady stream of refugees born for an eloquent testimony to the cruel oppression now holding sway in their homeland. Originally my family's from Prague, Czechoslovakia and when the invasion of Czechoslovakia happened we were on holidays in Italy. So that was me, three, two sisters and one brother and my mother and father. So we heard some information on the radio and one of my early recollections was of us huddling together around this little radio with other Czechs that were also camping and travelling around Italy trying to get the latest news. My father rang a relative great art in Czechoslovakia in Prague and she said to him, well basically I'm just looking at the windows we speak and I've just seen a protestor run over by a tank and it was that point that my father decided he's not going back. We have this fantastic photo of us arriving in Australia after a 36 hour flight. It was a Sydney airport was taken by a local newspaper and that was literally we got off the plane because it was a big hoo-haar, us coming from like we were political immigrants. That's me on the bottom left-hand corner, okay, just got off there not really knowing what was happening. What you see there is the clothes on our back and in the cargo was the actual tent and that's all we came with to Australia. My real name is, most people don't know, is Vratislav Kasparek. Vratislav is my first name, Kasparek is my last name. No one really wanted to sort of try and pronounce that name or the short version of Vratja and I remember having tennis coach lessons and the tennis coach when I said to him what my name was he said, mate I'm not calling you that. I'll call you Fred and that's how I got my name Fred. And what's interesting about that was that literally by adopting that name that everyone could remember and say I had so many more friends because they felt comfortable. Not that people were mean, but they felt comfortable able to pronounce your name. What has Australia given me? It has given me everything. It's given me my wife, it's given me my children, it's given my father and mother-in-law. It's given me a lifestyle that I never could have dreamt about anywhere else. What I've contributed to the community through my architecture is affordable housing. The sector where semi-professionals can't quite afford their house, they can actually afford to buy one. It's giving them good design, good construction and a place where they can enjoy their life. Refugees are an important part of Australian culture because it's like a good meal. The recipe is made up of a number of different ingredients and each one adds its spice, the sweet sour and so forth to bring up a good meal at the end of it. And you need that diversity to create a healthy meal and something you can really enjoy.


Hello, welcome to Trophy TV. This is the match preview ever. Travel to Doncaster Rovers in the Carabao Cup second round first...  Don't give us more legs. No, no, no more legs. It's a one-off, it's a one-off second round of the Carabao Cup to be decided on the night, of course, on penalties if either team hasn't sorted it in the 19 minutes. It's a battle of two very poor sides at the moment. Doncaster bottom of league two, Everton bottom of the Premier League. They scored any goals, though? They have scored a goal, yeah. So they're winning at life, aren't they? Yeah, they're winning, they're smashing it, yeah. Really. Big game, innit? From an Everton perspective, surely, surely this is the game in which we scored a goal. Do you think so, innit? Surely. I think it's a big game in terms of where the season's panning out, obviously. I'm open to see it, you know, a strong team. Don't really want to see too many changes. Excuse me, I'd like to maybe see Timothy playing down the middle. But other than that, I wouldn't want to see too many changes from the side. I think you need to take this seriously, like you say, get some goals, get some confidence and get a win on the board and get into the next round. Realistically, you know, you're talking about the multi-years since we won a trophy. This is the trophy that gives you the best opportunity to win, albeit it's still very difficult in this day and age with the strength of squads, the top teams have got. But, you know, this is something we should just take seriously. Realistically, we've got a possibility of getting into the third round and just, you know, what, you're three or four games then away from getting somewhere. I think that there is the interesting thing with this is because I've seen a piece today talking about the changes he could make. It was like nine changes or 10 changes and I was like, you know, do we want, do we want Javagin here to play? Do we want, listen, I'll say Javagin because Javagin was played in the first and played against Manchester City in the first quarter. So it's not that and played well in pre-season. So I imagine he will play. I think he might well take pick for that for this. But there was all, you know, people suggest on all kinds of changes at the back and bring Michael King back in and claim Ben Goffrey. You know, you're looking, I think, I imagine Michael Enco will play because he's come back to fitness. Goffrey, I imagine, will play. Personally, I'll play Brantwick and Goffrey and just let them. I know what you mean, if you start messing with it too much, then you get a totally disjuncted performance. And it highlights your heightings, donkastas off the team in the season, doesn't it, for an upset? For me, I'd look to try and build some partnerships. I'd rather see Tarkovs game Brantwick. Just get the job done and if you're three in a lop, if you're three in a lop after an hour or so, bring them off.  But, you know, you've got five subs you can use. What about the likes of Tante, you know, who is like, not fit in E probably? Needs a plenty to go. I think Michael Enco's a good shot, and I think it's a good shot, not just because he needs the fitness. I think Ashley Young's, a couple of last couple of performances haven't been great, so it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world to just get that balance with the left foot on the left hand side as well. So I think he'd be a good one to come in, but I wouldn't mess it around, honestly. I think they really need to find a way of playing. What about Dobbin? Dobbin's an interesting one, cos I actually thought he'd done all right. I mean, he wasn't amazing by any set, but at least he was bright and he was trying to get at them, but played the whole season and leave one last season. These are the lead two side, without being disrespectful to Doncaster at the moment, the bottom of the whole pyramid, aren't they? And this should be again a Dobbin can really get at these and cause them. He's just, I'm for his own confidence as well. And, you know, you don't know what's going to happen. If I'm bringing all the winger in this week before the window shots, is he going to be allowed out on loan or will they just keep me round the squat cos he can play a couple of roles, but would you leave him in and see if he can build on Saturday? I'd leave him. What I'd like to see is, I'd like to keep Dobbin in, put Dan June me out wide, Timothy up front, I'd take a dress of Ghana gay out and I'd put James Ghana into centre of the field. I would keep the back four other than Michael Enco and I'd keep pick for the goal, to be honest, and I'd just go, right, let's just win this game. Let's just win it. We won't keep pick for the goal though, will we? He's had it lightly too, but I would. I think he needs, he just needs, you know, to keep playing, keep that continuity with the back four. I think they need to find something and quickly they've got an international break coming up soon. Yeah, well, yeah, I mean, we've got, we've got Chef United sat in and there's a break, isn't it? I think, obviously, evidently, at the time of the game, just about to, and that's better, or, you know, close to an action better, and some people will be hoping that he's involved. I don't know whether he would be, you know, if he's been playing, he's fit, so whether or not the manager puts him straight in, and not straight into the team, but as I'm on the bench, will she, but what would you do? If he is fit, or do you think he needs a week of dice fit before? Look, if he's fit, you put him on the bench, wouldn't you? Get him down with the lads integrated into a wee work from a matchday perspective. I wouldn't look to start up, certainly not in this game. So, yeah, if he was available, I'd have him on the bench. You know, let's not have two goalies on the bench. And, you know, have those options. The iron, he was on, sadly, we had three strikers on the bench, didn't have any on the pitch, but we had three on the bench. They just, just unfortunate none of them are particularly good enough. But, you know, I'd look, I'd have him on there if he was available, cos, you know, he's been done as pre-season in Serie A, and he's played a couple of games already, so he's obviously fit. You know, get him involved. What about the likes of Tyra Rangyango, who went, you know, played in League One with Beton last season, went to Forrest Green and got injured and was off for the rest of the season. He's been around the first team all pre-season, played in games, he'd come on a billet, albeit for 90 seconds. Yeah. Not tempted to put him in this one. I just, I just wouldn't mess with it too much. I really wouldn't. I'd have him on the bench in an ideal situation, which, look, we know, that might not be the case. In either situation, get a few goals ahead and bring those lads on. Absolutely perfect.  Let them see the game off, give them off, and I'll pay perfect. But, you know, let's just get some continuity, to get some goals, to get a win. We need some positivity going into the weekend. You know, if we're going into that Sheffield United game off the back of getting knocked out by these on pens or something, you know, it becomes, the pressure's ramped up even more. So, let's just be professional, get the job done, and then move on on to the weekend. Look on the Doncaster, play five games, one non-drone, one loss, four. They scored four goals. I don't know what that feels like. It's got four goals. Can see the 12th. So, the average can see them more than two a game. Beating at the weekend, at MK Don's, two-one. Not counting beaten three, one on the week before. This is it. If you're Sean Dyche on the coaching staff, this is a game you want to put your marker down here. Everton want to go here. Again, I'm not saying this would happen, but this is the kind of game where, like, Premier League teams might go and win, like, four-nil or something, and they get boost the confidence. I'm not saying I haven't done that. But Sean Dyche will be looking for that, but he's looking for this kickstart. You know, I haven't dominated three-point games and haven't been able to score a goal. 16 shots on target, I think, in the two-one games without scoring, and, OK, Villar away was shot, and, hey, how? He will look to try and get some momentum going into a game at Sheffield United at the weekend, which would be very difficult, even though they're struggling as well. Play what I'm going to say to them. They don't, well, I mean, they don't, yeah. If 12% or whatever possession is playing well, they don't all right, but, you know, they stuck to the task and were well-organised, absolutely. So it's going to be a tough game for Evan. From Dyche's point of view, how important is this game?  He started the season poorly.  You know, no managers ever, three games away from getting the sack. Two games I've ever done in recent times.  Because I've ever meant to lose this game. I think that's the answer. I think you've just answered it yourself. But what about, sorry, just on top of it, what could a win do for him then? I think as an individual game in a one-off, it's not the biggest thing in Evan's history, of course, it's not. But it's off the back of the momentum. Like you said, if we'd have picked up six points so far, go on to this, rest a few. It's great to move up, will it? Yeah. So, but in the context of where we are and what's going on with the season, no 100% I think it's a big game. I think it's a big game because of the momentum to go into the weekend. I just, I just don't like the idea of going into that game in Sheffield tonight to having lost four games on the bounce. Do you think it makes a difference to the players that have everything, say Evan went on 1-3-0 at Doncaster, played all right 1-3-0. Do you think that, do you think it would translate him like confidence wise or would it just be well, it was Doncaster and this is...  Yeah. You know, we sometimes talk about the importance of, you know, it's nice to get some wins in pre-season and blah, blah, blah, just to get in the habit and so on and so forth. It's a competitive game, you know, it's a league cup game.  Put out a strong side, you know, like I say, if you can get Timothy in there, we can create the chances we've been creating. Hopefully. I would fancy that I'll have to be able to, you know, hopefully pick up a goal or two. You know, nice confidence for him going in, going into the rest of the season. Dan Dumech and maybe, you know, cause a bit of problems. Dobbin, you know, perform well and even if he doesn't then stay around, it might get him a better loan move and whatever. So there's bits to go on it. I just think just get it done. You've five subs. As soon as the game's done, let's get the players off that we need to protect for Saturday. That's what I would personally do. Do I think he'll do that? I'm not convinced he will. I think he'll. Not mass, but I think there'll be, you know, a few, like you say, like Targoski coming out, Pickford coming out. And look, they may well work. They may well work. But to me, that's centre of our partnership. I just want to see Bran Tweed Targoski long term. Now just we stick through it, through thick and thin. It's going to be ups and downs from it. But we stick with that partnership. And this type of game where you would fancy them to be in control. They can build that relationship up without being under mass pressure. And then you can take that into the weekend. Yeah. I mean, it's going to be interesting because, like we said, it's a pressure game, but it's a game that should win being where we are. Both teams are struggling. And we need to kickstart on this might be it. Well, hopefully this can be it. Because that's all you can be. It's hopeful, isn't it? At some stage, surely it's going to change. Our luck in front of goal is going to change. You think so, won't it? Well, you'd hope so. You'd hope so strange of things have happened. Let us know what you think in the comments section below. It'll be a tricky game because Don Castle will be well up for it. Why wouldn't you be? Evans Conference isn't great yet, but it does represent a good opportunity. I think that the likes of you should give him a start. There's no, in my opinion, sorry, just to go back before we finish. Be no point, really, like starting Neil Mawpai, you're looking to get out the door when this is a good opportunity for you should give him a start. For that type of signing, yeah. Absolutely. So, let's see. What would you do? Let us know in the comments section below. Give the video a thumbs up. Subscribe if you haven't. And if you want to become a Trophy TV Premier member, get the link, like my. The link is in the description and the key back out on the screen now. See you later.


Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Open Source Summit. We're excited to be here to tell you about this specific case about serverless data storage. I'm going to start with a few questions. How many of you have heard about serverless workloads? I bet a lot of people. How many of you have heard about stateful workloads? I suppose a lot of people, too. You have the most typical ones like databases. But how many of you have heard about specific serverless workloads just for stateful applications? Probably not that many. So we haven't seen that many. And this is why we think this is an idea. So we're trying this new approach or we think not many people are doing this. And this is the whole premise on this talk. A little bit about ourselves. I work at Rakuten and I'm in the CNCF. I'm a co-chair in the SIG runtime. And Amarjit works in Keoxia, America. So next. OK, so some of the history or what we're going to be talking about today is we're going to talk about a little bit of history behind the serverless applications and some of the storage technologies. Then we'll talk about what stateful applications are and how you can see some of these existing applications. Then we'll dive into some of these new storage technologies like MBV over Fabric. And then our DMA over Converged Ethernet. Then we'll talk about how you can put it all together with Kubernetes with container storage interface or CSI. Then we'll talk about some stateful type of workloads very minimal and that you can do with serverless or the serverless paradigm. Then we'll show you a brief demo. And finally, we'll give you some takeaways and what it looks like in the future. So what's in the books for these technologies, for serverless technologies and for storage technologies? What can you go back and see how they came about? So if you look at serverless in 2008, Google App Engine was released and that's when you basically took an application and just run a script and automatically pushed it over to the Google infrastructure. And Google basically takes care of everything including scaling and the endpoints and everything you need for that application to run. And then basically the developer forgets about how that runs underneath. Then in 2014, AWS released AWS Lambda and that's when they took it a little bit further where they said, okay, now you can run these specific functions but you don't have to care how they run in the back. Then in 2015, Jaws was released JavaScript AWS and later renamed to serverless framework. And this was a way to say that you can run a full blown application using all these different functions. You could combine with different services in AWS like AWS API Gateway and Amazon S3. That coordination. So this framework allows you to do that. Then that same year Kubernetes was released 1.0 and that's when a lot of people started talking about deploying all these different workloads in containers and orchestrating and serving them behind low balancers and a full blown set of infrastructure using containers. Then in 2016, GCP released its own version about functions, how you can run functions just like AWS Lambda. And then it followed on with some of the other cloud providers like Microsoft Azure. Then in 2018, Knative and other open source projects were released as a way for you to run serverless on top of Kubernetes. Then what can we say about storage technologies? A long time ago, SCSI was released as an interface to interact with storage in a faster way. Then much later in 2011, NBME 1.0 was released as a way to talk to all these different solid state drives. So faster storage emerged and then it was a way to kind of address some of the interface between your computer or your host and all these different SSD storage devices. Then in 2016, ROCE, which is RDMA overconverged internet, V2 was released and that's a way to use this internet as a medium to access memory directly, like RDMA, direct memory. And that same year, NBME over fabric, the standard was released and that's a way to connect to storage devices using NBME over different media like ethernet or fiber channel or some other different fast type of media. Then in 2016, that same year, the Linux kernel added support for NBME over fabric. And then last year, just the Linux kernel 5.0 added support for NBME over TCP, which is the most widely, TCP is like the most widely standard in networking. So it could work with multiple net cards or multiple hardware interfaces. So what can we say about some of these stateful applications? So let's add a little bit of context behind the stateful applications. So we have different kinds. So we have the basic relational databases. You have the MySQL of the world or the Postgres of the world and then MariahDB. So you have a master slave configuration. Then you have the cluster databases that allow you to have multiple nodes. And then if you want to expand your storage, you would just add additional nodes. You would add just like, you know, in example, you have a 10 node database or cluster and if you want to add more capacity, you would just add like five more nodes. And then the database automatically balances out all the data. So this is kind of like what this cluster databases would do or do and then some examples are like CassandraDB and Silla. But then you also have some of the asset type of databases like CockroachDB and FoundationDB that allows you to have that consistency across different regions. So you could have a region in the US East or US West and then these databases allow you to have that consistency. And finally, there's the broker type of databases that allows you to subscribe and publish or clients to publish and send us streaming data. So very popular when you're processing lots of data and lots of streaming data and examples of that are Kafka and Nats. So what can we say about Kubernetes and all this stateful application support? So before 1.5, they had a Kubernetes resource called Petset. And that was a pretty bare bone resource for you to just kind of bring up maybe these containers in a sort of coordinated way. But then after 1.5 stateful sets as a resource was released and that's when people were able to just coordinate say master and slave or when you wanted to to bring up that specific container. So you could actually do that unique type of workload coordination that you need for stateful applications. But some of those challenges still remain. I mean, you need to still need to do that coordination between the master and slave. You need to take care of that replication across different nodes. You also need to make sure that you're not corrupting your data. So say like when your container goes down and you need to come back up on a different node or Kubernetes node, then it doesn't have to do a crash recovery or it knows about that container is doing a crash recovery. So you notice all those different things. And also testing for stateful applications is quite a challenge. There's this nice tool called Jepsen. It's an open source tool that allows you to do testing for stateful applications, but yet still pretty challenging to do that testing. So now, Amarji, we'll talk about some of the storage technologies. So let's talk about some of the storage technologies. To put it in perspective, as Riko talked about storage interface history, when SCSI was formed, when SCSI came into existence and started to get popular, our storage needs or that time storage needs, if not in kilobytes or were at least in megabytes. Today's storage needs are in terabytes or petabytes. That's the difference. Also at that time, storage was, or the drives were on servers, especially large servers. Today, we are talking about containers which come up in seconds or microseconds and then need storage. So that's the difference. But in all those years, there were not much advancements on the interface, not much changes. One big change came was how storage or how data is stored, the underlying media, which originally was basically spinning magnetic disks. Today, the most popular media is flash memory. So in the modern drives, magnetic disk media is being replaced by flash memory solid state. So with those changes in the demand, in the market direction, from media of spinning disks to media of flash, there was a need to come up with a new interface and that's what is NVMe. So NVMe is a new interface which came into existence almost at the same time or maybe a few years earlier than the containers. So containers, Kubernetes and NVMe, they from the historical perspective, they came into existing at the same time. So what NVMe does for you is basically it offers tremendous speed, enormous speed to send data at a very fast rate. To compare it to SCSI, SCSI offers sending IO commands or storage IO commands in one queue and that you can have at any time up to 64 storage commands. This was good at the time SCSI was introduced, but today with the change in demand, we need much more than that. And hence NVMe came up with the new standard, with new interface and also new capabilities and that capability is NVMe can handle 64,000 commands, storage IO commands versus only 64 in SCSI, not only that, NVMe can also offer such 64K queues. So you can have 64K commands in 64K queues. So that's how fast NVMe can be. Most of the modern applications, they are written with the perspective of older storage interfaces, such as SCSI. So they still don't demand that much speed and performance from the new storage. Hence, if we have to think that, okay, my storage disk is much faster, is my application ready to take advantage of it? Probably not all, but not few modern applications, but not all of them. On top of that, if I have many NVMe interface drives in one, let's say 2U server, which can host up to 24 drives, can that server and application on that server handle or can consume or throttle all the fast drives know? So that's where basically the need to have a storage which basically can be centralized in one place and can handle that workload came. So that is basically is NVMe over fabric. So NVMe over fabric is that you disaggregate storage on one node and then all the client nodes on the other side, multiple client nodes can basically use that as their storage. It offers same type of performance that a local storage would offer because NVMe protocol is designed for that. It's fast and the only bottleneck would be underlying network media, but which is not. Today we are talking about 100 gig or 200 gig network speeds. When we say that, okay, NVMe over fabric can take storage from one node, central node to multiple client nodes, there are different medias. Ethernet is one of them, there could be fiber channel. So for this session, we'll focus our discussion around Ethernet. So Ethernet basically is very standard in most of the data centers is widely used. We can leverage two technologies directly to send NVMe or storage commands over Ethernet. One is RDMA, the other one is a standard TCP. So RDMA is very fast, very efficient. It offers direct connect between the memory, between two servers, but it requires specialized hardware. On the other hand, TCP is a standard networking protocol used for everything that we communicate among servers and nodes. So if we send NVMe commands over TCP, then we don't need a specialized interface. However, this requires more CPU power and hence the performance is lower as compared to RDMA over a converged Ethernet, but it's a design choice, which you as a end user infrastructure admin will have to make. Now let's talk about how the overall stack fits into operating system, especially Linux. As I said earlier, there are various ways to send NVMe commands over different type of medias, fiber channel, Ethernet. So at the very bottom, those medias, they have technologies to connect with each other. I think this is outside the scope of this talk, but when the network connectivity is established between client and the storage node, target node, the NVMe commands, which are on one side bundled and the network frames from target node and then being sent to the client node, they get unbundled at the kernel level or the module. And in fact, even there are a couple of options. You can have kernel based NVMe over fabric, also a user space based, that's also kind of a little bit outside the scope. But however, this stack shows that once NVMe over fabric, connectivity is established and NVMe commands are unbundled on the client side, the volumes or the drives are available as usual raw or block volumes to the client. Hence, the drive or the volume which client sees, client sees is no different than a local drive. This diagram also shows how two nodes, one client, which doesn't have a local storage for the data store. However, it may have operating systems disk. And then on the other side, there is a target or a storage node which offers storage to multiple client nodes for the simplicity. I'm just showing one drive here. So the underlying hardware NVDrive basically is used by a software that you need a specialized software on the target node. There are many in the market. And then that those software, they take hardware on the one side, virtualize that, basically offers you multiple volumes and other advantages. And then send those virtualized storage volumes over a fast ethernet with the choice of technology that you want to use whether RDMA or TCP. And on the initiator side or on the client side, those drives or volumes are available as raw or block volumes which kernel can start utilizing. So in the world of Kubernetes, how does this fit into Kubernetes infrastructure? So Kubernetes basically entities such as pods, they require persistent volumes. Persist parts need to basically access persistent storage via persistent volume claims. Persistent volume claims are further bound to persistent volumes which are like physical volumes. So physical volumes, persistent volumes, they can come from various storage technologies. It can be from local storage. It can be from a network storage to make this job easier. The job of attaching persistent to storage to pods, wherever it comes from CSI driver is the one which helps here. CSI driver has a controller which interfaces with the storage, central storage or the local storage, depending upon what the CSI driver is written for. It takes a provision storage, they're attaches, detaches to the pods. When pods move from one worker node to other node, CSI driver also takes care of moving that storage. So now Ricardo will talk about serverless computing. How serverless computing and that framework fits in Kubernetes world. Yeah, so what about the code that you can run for functions, right? So, and if you wanna run a stateful type of applications, this is just a simple example where you just write into the disk, hello go, hello world type of application. And then it's just as simple as just driving into a mounted drive here.  So yeah, so that's in essence what a very simple function would do. But then obviously when you're running a serverless type of paradigm, you would do this many, many times. And if you wanted to extend some of this functionality, you wanna find out when you have events and when you want to trigger these functions, there's a project called Cloud Events from the CNCF. And it's a way for you to describe these functions so that they're more portable and they have more consistency and you can share them across your organization. Yeah, in this case, it will be something to describe when you wanna start in reading something and decide what you wanna do with a specific function. So Cloud Events has bindings for many different languages. So in this example, it's the Go binding for Go lang and we have received function here. So that means when we receive an event, we can instantiate or we can write a specific something to a drive, to something to some data to an MBA storage. So you can see here at the bottom after you start the receiver, so it's kind of like listening for these events and when that event triggers, you can say you can write like a string or you can write like a larger amount of data. So in essence, this is how it would read for events. So what if you wanna add more complexity to all your different workloads of serverless type of applications and paradigm if you wanna connect all the different things? So there's also a project called Serverless Workflows Packets and it allows you to identify all these functions that you're gonna be using for that specific workflow. So for stateful applications, you can define, okay, all this read and writes on how you wanna read and write data and you can also identify what type of events would trigger some of these type of storage functions. And then you also wanna or can identify the different states where that workflow can be in, for example, it can be like in a waiting state, it could be in a running state, it could be in a blocking state, whatever the type of serverless or in stateful type of application you are actually writing or creating. So now, Emergy, we'll talk about how the orchestrator works and how you can put this together with serverless frameworks. All right, so far we have talked about storage technologies, we have talked about Kubernetes and we have talked about serverless framework. Let's put everything together. So serverless framework are basically frameworks to serve on-demand kind of needs when a function basically executes, it quickly does its jobs and terminates. So serverless functions are short-lived functions. Right now, their popular use cases are with stateless applications. Stateful applications, if they ever have to use serverless functions, which are inherently or are supposed to be short-lived, need fast quick provisioning of storage. So let's see how all it fits together. There are multiple serverless frameworks available. Many of them are still not, like depending upon our research, they don't have capability to leverage persistent storage. One such framework, which has the capability to leverage underlying persistent storage is called Fission. So for the purpose of this session and then also for a demo, that which we are going to show a little later, that for that purpose, we have selected Fission. And then the way basically Fission works is, so it has a central controller and then Fission, it runs basically everything on Kubernetes. And it uses Kubernetes native custom resources and controllers. So basically Fission, serverless framework, and then you can know more about this by visiting their website. But basically at a very high level, it has underlying environment, which is basically pre-built for type of functions that you are going to run on that environment. That pre-built environment is always ready to execute functions. And then the second part is the function. You can have one or more functions leveraging one type of environment. So in one way that Fission takes advantage of persistent volume is to store its own state, like type of environment, a compiled code of libraries, which functions are going to use so that when functions execute, it's readily available. That's one small use case, but that's not the only topic of this discussion. Our discussion is around using persistent volumes in the functions itself. So that's where Fission serverless framework is very basically helpful and it allows us to take advantage of underlying persistent volumes. There could be many use cases of having a persistent volume in serverless. So one or few use cases on the same line that we could think about was, let's say you have a large stream or a large set of data coming in and then you need to process that data either individually as it comes or you basically buffer that data until it is large enough to be processed. So it could be a data coming from sensors or any other place, or it could be a media also, like photo upload just for the simplicity sake. It could be a photo upload that uses upload and then there is a processing at the background or a video upload. So that is, I mean, there could be multiple use cases but this is one of the use case and in those use cases, you want to still keep the nature of serverless functions which is short lived. That type of nature, you want to keep that but at the same time want to keep the capability to process that data later on. So in those cases, short lived functions, they can just receive the data and then exit and then after that, you can have other ways to process the data either via other functions which gets triggered through some other triggers or you can have usual Kubernetes jobs or other applications which are already running there. But the idea here is that the underlying persistent volume media will serve as a cache or as a buffer which basically is going to be shared by the other functions or the jobs. So putting this all together, this is what our use case of, or a proposal of a use case is. As I said, this is just one of the use case. Assuming that there is a photos upload or a media upload website which also need to process media. So in that kind of application, one function which I'm showing on the left side here in this diagram, can receive media that gets triggered from HTTP request. Once the media is received, it can be stored on persistent volumes. And depending upon the processing needs, if every request or every received file or data stream need to be processed at the same time, there could be another trigger to trigger another function or an application which basically process at that time or it can process at later when there is enough to process. So let's basically show this in a demo. I'll show you our demo here, how we set this up in Fission serverless framework and how we use that demo, please. Oh, okay. So we have a Fission serverless framework which we have multiple functions. So this is what we are showing that it receives media which basically the function to receive that media is upload when a user sends media upload function gets triggered. Here in this demo, I'm just doing it manually from a curve. So we'll see that this media file now gets stored on data which was earlier, not there. And then once one or more files are ready to be processed, we can trigger another function or another job outside the serverless framework, however you want to do. So that job or function in this, in our case, it's a process function. We see that it basically processed from beautiful to more beautiful picture. Then you can process multiple pictures and that's basically one of the use case as I discussed earlier of using serverless framework with persistent storage. So now, Rico will talk about some of the other trends or happening things in this space. Yeah, so what about other type of work that's been going on with serverless and stateful applications? So a lot of it happening maybe between 2017 and last year. Obviously there might be something this year. One of the examples is Pocket. It's a storage system for serverless analytics type of applications. So it's a multi-tier storage system. The serial research project, it's available on GitHub if you want to take a look. But essentially, yeah, it's basically you have many servers in multiple tiers and it allows you to have this way to attach storage to different serverless functions. Then another paper in research going on is this paper specifically from Berkeley it's called serverless computing one step forward two steps back and it talks about how serverless is a trend of the future and a lot of developers like it because they don't have to worry about that infrastructure in the back. But yeah, there's still a lot of challenges when it comes to processing lots of data. So typically you have a serverless function doing asynchronous type of work where you pick up maybe an event and then you tell some other server or service behind a lot of servers that needs to process some amount of data. For example, reading from a queue and then sending over some large amount of data to Amazon S3. So that is a typical use case but if you want to do functions or code that actually needs to pass a lot of information inside the function. So say you wanna pass a large amount of variables inside a function for some reason maybe you're streaming data. So they mentioned that there's a lot of challenges around that aspect, right? So but yet there's a lot of promise there and lastly Aurora serverless is the service that resembles more to what we're talking about here which is pay as you go. So you're paying for all the reads and writes and there's a couple of papers available on Amazon Aurora and you know, they show a lot of the architecture that's behind Aurora but yet they don't show you how they specifically implement the serverless part. How they make it so that they're only charging for reads and writes, whether they use an NBME storage or what are they using in the back? So that actually is not a share by Amazon but yet this resembles the most to what we're talking about here. So what does it look like in terms of these workloads in the future? What can we see going forward? So we talked about the phishing framework and we talked about PVs, physical volumes and PVCs. For these to be able to be accessed by functions we had to pre provision this initially. So maybe we'll see some of this automatic provisioning from these frameworks. So that allows you to like automatically pick up this physical volume and PVC from Kubernetes and attach it to a specific node and then just run the function whenever you want to and then maybe read or write depending on the operation you're doing. So maybe we'll see more support from some of these cloud providers for their own serverless type of offerings. So maybe Amazon EBS mounting for Lambda functions. So you can read and write specifically but you don't know whether EBS will be using something like NBME or Fabric but then maybe possibly you can have fast storage. Just recently AWS EFS storage was announced and then this is a way to mount EFS storage on AWS Lambda. So that's exactly what was announced and Lambda attachment of EFS storage. But one of the downsides of EFS storage is that it's kind of slow, it's not very high performance. So it's good for kind of slow type or maybe batch type of applications but then if you want like high performance type of applications, it may not be the best fit. And then maybe we'll see more integrations with like some of these stateful applications that we talked about in the beginning like MySQLs of the world or Postgres where they specifically allow you to attach to a function or have a function do a read and write operation. Obviously you can do this with libraries now but then there's no specific kind of integration or built-in integration or friendliness between these two type of technologies. And then we talked about Fission and so PVC and PV attachment as of today we didn't see that it was available and can be even open fast some of the most popular serverless frameworks. So possibly we'll see this support in the future. So now Emergy will wrap it up and talk about some of the takeaways. All right, so let's see what we have discussed so far. Put everything together into perspective. As we started our session, this is more of an idea and then we are all discovering use cases or we are more than use cases we are all solving problems that we otherwise have by putting various pieces together various technologies together. Many technologies they are basically new they came almost at the same time and now if we put everything together they are ready to solve modern day infrastructure problems. So the serverless framework basically it offers you to run functions or the course very short lived and then you can choose the language that you like. Keep it simple and then the serverless frameworks somehow it should be or it is possible to run it outside Kubernetes but Kubernetes offers objects, customer resources and other things that it's hard to think that serverless framework can be run outside Kubernetes. So it's better to leverage what Kubernetes offers. So fast storage which offers desegregation of storage or centralization of storage so that it retains flexibility. Those technologies NVMe and NVMe over fabric and fast ethernet or the media transport technologies they all are basically here to help and put everything together. Again, this is a beginning of putting all this together there will be many trial and errors going forward and remember serverless is a pay as you go it's an on-demand framework very short lived functions. So I hope that all of us together we will come with more use cases in before we have a next session. So now we will basically kind of show you all the references that we use for this talk or when you can go for more details this presentation will be available online you can refer to these links later on and if you have to reach us these are our Twitter handles we are basically excited would be eager to talk to any and all of you so we'll open up for questions please this is a virtual event so please type your questions and we are ready to answer all of them here. All right, so we have some questions we have a question from Frank it says are there any projects focused on high availability for NVMe over fabric? So I think I will hand this off to Amarjit because he's most familiar with NVMe over fabric I'm not aware of any projects doing that specifically. So maybe Amarjit are you on? Yeah, yeah, thanks Rico. So that's a good question. I'm not aware of any specific project that is being worked on to do redundant your limitedly maybe high availability of NVMe over fabric but I would like to comment here on this question in couple of ways. One is NVMe over fabric it brings volumes from one centralized disaggregated storage to many clients those clients or initiators or hosts they run applications those applications could be one of the modern applications like MongoDB, Cassandra and all that. So such applications they offer high availability right from application all they need is fast storage but they can and they can offer high availability out of them. So the second way of looking at it is if application doesn't offer that natively many Linux projects such as MD or maybe there are fewer. When you bring multiple volume from multiple storage nodes into one client or initiator native Linux technologies or some of the preexisting technologies as I said such as MD they can be used to bring a high availability into infrastructure. That's what I will basically I think that's what I see in the market or in the community. I don't see any more questions I only see two. Frank I hope that answered your question. So if you have any more questions feel free to type them on the chat. All right so I think we have a couple more minutes so we'll remain here if somebody has any questions. Oh I have another question here so from Alejandro he says what's the name of the serverless framework that was used in the demo? Yeah the serverless framework that we use in the demo is Fission, the website is fission.io you can look at it and then all the documentation the way to set up is available. Let's see if there's any other questions. Support, yeah so what I was gonna say that that's the only framework that we found that supports Kubernetes, PBCs and PVs right now. So we expect some of the other frameworks to support that in the future like K-Native and OpenFast but we didn't see that support there yet. Okay we have 10 seconds I think thank you very much. Feel free to reach out to us, we're available on Twitter so we're happy to talk.


My name is Dante Luna. I photograph 48 of 50 states. I still have Alaska and Hawaii. I haven't done those. I kind of want to take my time with those and spend time there a little more time. But I've done the 48 continental states. My father is born in Dominican Republic. The other day he was talking about Niagara Falls. Like it was something he dreamt about. Like something he'll never see in his lifetime. So I put my dad in the car and he has no idea the journey I'm about to take. I mean it's already been a journey. We made a bunch of stops on the way here. We stopped by Harriet Tubman's house. Harriet Tubman's grave site. Susan B. Anthony's grave site. And Frederick Douglass' grave site. And then we see my Buji. I love Buji. I can't pass through Rochester without saying what else is Buji. So we're here in Niagara Falls. And I'm excited. All right Pa, you ready? So start walking towards it. Yeah, start walking towards it. You been down here before? About a hundred times. Yeah Pa, we're getting on one of those boats. They're gonna take us a little closer. What up Pa? He's making videos. I sent it to his family. It's pretty cool. I've been here a bunch of times. So it's pretty cool to watch him experience it for the first time.  Oh thank you. Thank you. Rainbow. Thanks boss. I don't think you have no idea what we're doing.


So I just wanted to finish with a couple of points, sort of ironic points about Brexit, as I see them anyway, and I've mentioned these in the book. Brexit was all about taking back control. One of the ironies of Brexit was that it was never really anything to do with Europe. If it had been to do with being a member of the European Union, there would have been a proper debate about what it was like being in the European Union, but it wasn't. Brexit was about immigration, and Brexit was about the internal politics of the Conservative Party. That's essentially what Brexit was, why Brexit was called the way it was, when it was, and why the debates happened the way it did. Brexit gets real on New Year's Eve in just a couple of weeks. The UK leaves the European Union on December 31st this year. And here's another date. Next year in 2021, Northern Ireland will mark its centenary, a big round number. Brexit has jeopardized Northern Ireland's very existence. The Brexit process has complicated political relationships within Northern Ireland and helped destabilize the institutions set up in the wake of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. So always more than just a line on a map, the border has become really an existential marker of identity, as well as a reminder of the dark days of violent conflict in the past. Fergal Cochran argues that Brexit is actually the most significant event for Northern Ireland since the partition, and that Brexit is breaking peace in Northern Ireland. Friends, welcome to November's chat and chat at World Boston with Breaking Peace, Brexit and Northern Ireland by Fergal Cochran. I'm Mary Eintema, the president of World Boston. I am pleased to introduce Fergal Cochran, our speaker. He was born and educated in Belfast and has been publishing and teaching on Northern Ireland and wider themes of violent political conflict and peace building for 30 years. He's the author of 10 books and numerous other publications including articles in international peer review journals and chapters in edited book collections. His Northern Ireland, the reluctant piece published by Yale University Press in 2013 was shortlisted for the UART Bigs Memorial Book Prize in 2015, and the second edition of that book, Northern Ireland, the Fragile Piece, will be published by Yale in 2021. Fergal was professor of international conflict analysis at the University of Kent and director of the Conflict Analysis Research Center, or CARK, within the School of Politics and International Relations from 2012 to 2019. He's also held academic appointments at Lancaster University, Ulster University and Queens University Belfast. He's now a senior research fellow of CARK and professor emeritus at the University of Kent. And it's really late, late o'clock where he is past 10, so we're particularly pleased to have him with us tonight. Fergal, welcome to World Boston. Thanks very much, Mary. I'd just like to thank World Boston and for facilitating this and to yourself, Mary, and Elise as well, for all the work that's gone into it. And everybody who has registered to listen to this. So as Mary said, the title of the book is Breaking Piece, Brexit in Northern Ireland. And I just wanted to rather than give you a summary of the whole book, which would exhaust me and you watching, I'm sure. I just picked out some of the main themes from it. Talk a little bit about, I suppose, the arguments surrounding Brexit and why it's particularly important for the peace process in Northern Ireland and for the Good Friday agreement slash Belfast agreement of 1998. I'll also try to connect it in with the recent presidential election and president elected Joe Biden's forthcoming administration. And hopefully I can answer some questions around the edges of all of that as we go along. So the origins of the book were actually on the 23rd of June, 2016, that was the day of the referendum in the United Kingdom, the in-out referendum. So it was a very binary choice. Didn't really ask you for any complexity. Referendums are like that. So is it in or is it out? Are we to leave the European Union or are we to remain? And that was the very blunt choice that people were faced with. And on the 23rd of June, I was actually running or I was going over to Northern Ireland to run a workshop on devolved governments because Northern Ireland was doing a very good job of breaking peace on its own without Brexit. But when Brexit arrived, it was a whole other set of problems. And the picture that you can see in the screen, there's a storm in parliament in Belfast, open in the 1930s. And this was sort of the seat of government from 1921, or not 21, it wasn't created in 1921, but when it was open right up until 1972. And for a lot of people in Northern Ireland from the Catholic nationalist side, it was seen as a venue for their own subjugation and disenfranchisements because they lost every election that was held between 1921 and 1972. And for the Unionist community, it was their seat of government. You know, it was the focus of attention and it was a majority rule of parliament. And the figure that you can see in the foreground there is Sir Edward Carson, very well-known Unionist leader from the origins of the homeroom movement. So we went over on the 23rd of June after we voted, we flew over to Belfast and we had this, we talked about our program the next day and we were a bit worried about, we had a session on Brexit in the afternoon but we thought it's probably going to be a Romanian outcome. So, you know, what's there gonna be to talk about?  So we didn't get worried because the next morning at breakfast, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom had resigned, the UK had voted to leave the EU. And this is when for me sitting there in the workshop, I realized what a meteor had just landed on us because it hit Northern Ireland like a bolt from the blue. Everybody really expected Remain to win and that was the same in Great Britain as well. So once it was a lead vote, it was a bit like a horror film when you see the camera director sort of suddenly, the camera suddenly pulls away, you know, when you sort of the screechy music starts it was a bit like that because all of a sudden the border between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic became something else. It became the frontier of the European Union with the United Kingdom. So in other words, the Irish Republic wasn't just the Irish Republic anymore, it was a frontier of the EU to or it would be the frontier of the EU to a non-member state of the European Union. And of course borders in Northern Ireland had been a major issue. Which side of the border are you on? Which side of the border are you living on? So that was immediately recognized as a problem with the people who were living in Northern Ireland. And so in some ways Brexit actually happened in Northern Ireland on the 24th of June and there was a lot of the sort of discussions in Great Britain about when will Brexit happen? But for a lot of people living in Northern Ireland it happened on the 24th of June, 2016 because they immediately provided it pushed identity politics back on to the front of the agenda. Are you British or are you Irish? Are you in the EU or are you living it? These sorts of binary absolutes were once again back on the agenda and the Good Friday Agreement and the peace process and sort of muddied the waters. It allowed us to agree to differ about where we're actually going and say, well, it's the people of Northern Ireland can decide that in the future. The consent of the people of Northern Ireland can determine that down the line. But the problem was that the ambiguities that surrounded the peace process, referendums are very bad at ambiguities and peace processes and diplomacy and negotiations all about ambiguities.  And peace agreements and negotiations are all about trying to massage that zero sum equation of your identity. Where is the sovereignty lying? Are you Irish? Are you British? And of course the Good Friday Agreement allowed us to be both. It allowed us to be Irish and it allowed us to be British and it allowed us to be Irish and British. And of course the referendum sort of drove a wedge through that thing. So I think that this date, the Brexit date the 23rd of June, 2016 is up there as one of these iconic dates in the chronology of Northern Ireland. And I think it bookends partition very nicely and we're having the centenary next year which has again become an issue some people want to celebrate 100 years of Northern Ireland. Some people don't want to celebrate that at all. So it's certainly up there with 1921 when Northern Ireland was created, 1972 when this majority rule parliament was suspended by London. 1998 when we established a power sharing administration between Nationalist Union. So that building that you can see in the slide there there's no power sharing administration with both Unionists and Nationalists taking part in it. And then we've got 2016 and of course we've got 2021 next year. So I just wanted to talk a little bit about the past because in Northern Ireland as you probably know if you know anything about Northern Ireland the past and the present are intertwined indelibly. We can never quite get away from our history. Somebody once said that our history is always in front of us in Northern Ireland which is quite a good way of putting it. You should never quite get away from it or at least people use using history for their own political ends. So I grew up in Belfast in the 1970s and this is a place where territoriality and borders were very clear. When you went into Belfast at the centre you didn't just sort of drift in you had to go through a turnstile. You had to be searched. Your bag would be searched. There were soldiers with weapons there for security purposes asking you what your name was, where you were going, why you were going there. But in the context of the sort of masking COVID debate in the United States where people are talking about their freedom you imagine sort of saying well you can't actually walk down that street tell me why you're going down that street nevermind whether you've got a mask on or not or I won't let you down that street because I've decided that I don't want to let you go down there because you have security risk. These sorts of issues were very visceral in the 1970s when I was growing up. But of course these wire meshes, searches, questions were there to try and catch the people who were bombing the city and put a ring of steel around Belfast and so on. But you didn't just drift along you knew very well where you were and you had to explain why you were there quite frequently and you felt you were lucky to actually get down the street and there wouldn't be a bomb explosion or a bomb scare going on. And of course the border was part of that whole infrastructure. And this was in 1970, this is just outside Newry and just outside the border between Newry and Dundalk. And you can see there from the image that you didn't cross the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland accidentally or quickly or without some sense of tense angst. It was, you had to wait to do it. You had to answer questions about why you were crossing the border. You might have to get out of your car, open the trunk of your car, show a soldier what was inside the car. It was a whole big palaver about getting from one part of the island of Ireland to the other part. And yes, of course that had costs and that had inconveniences but it also had a sort of existential factor as well which is that it created a chill between the North and the South. Now, when I was growing up you quite often didn't see a car from the South in the North, it was quite rare to see it. So there was almost like an invisible apartheid created by the border being there. Now that was the sort of previous situation and the peace process and the Good Friday agreement helped mitigate this, helped us make the border invisible. And I spoke to a journalist when I was writing the reluctant piece book that Mary referred to. And I said, what's the best thing about the peace process? Is it the North-South bodies? Is it the par-sharing executive? And this journalist said, it's the motorway between Dublin and Belfast because that's the reality. That's what allows you to live in one state and work in another state. You know, you could live in Dublin, work in Belfast or vice versa. And it took all the heat out of it. You didn't have to get out of your car. You didn't even know where the border was. And so it was that organic growth really allowed people to connect, reconnect together again. So that was the before and this is the after. Now, I took this photograph myself. This is separate, this is the border now. This is two little towns. One is a town called Belcu in County Fermanagh. And the other side of the road is in the Irish Republic. And it's a town called Black Lion in County Cavern. And the border is in the river underneath that bridge. And I thought it was interesting that, you know, I didn't know where the border was. You can't really see it physically at all. And the only way I was able to work it out was my sat-in avenue in the car where the border was more than I knew. Just being in the physical space. And you can see there, I took a picture of it because I thought it was quite ironic that the sat-in avenue where the Irish border was and I'd been born in a rare darned into where it was. Now, the worry of course is that with Brexit, the border is going to be back and it's going to be physical. This was the worry for several years during the Brexit negotiations that the border would come back, you would see it. It would be sort of a hard border back in Ireland with all the security issues that would raise again. And so a lot of the worry was that it was going to be a hard border in Ireland. That's going to confront us with being on the wrong side of the border, one way or the other. I mean, they're on the British side or on the Irish side and I know which side's which. But of course the peace process allowed us to muddy that border, not really know in here and now. At the precise point of where the border was at any given time. So just to say a couple of things about the title, a bit of provocative title I suppose. Initially I had a question mark at the end of it and I just gave up on that during the writing process. I want to give you a couple of reasons why. One is because the cement and the peace process was a relationship between Britain and Ireland. It's not a very sexy thing probably, you know, to talk about intergovernmental relationships. It doesn't really make a lot of headlines, but the relationship between the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland, they really jointly managed the peace process during the 1990s. They're co-signatories of the Good Friday Agreement and supposedly joint guarantors of it as an international treaty. So the Good Friday Agreement's an international treaty. And the two sovereign governments are signatories to it. And they very much spoke as one publicly. Lots of joint communiques been given during the peace process and certainly 1990 and onward. It's been very, very few joint communiques since 2016. Very much being now opposite sides of the liberal searing table over Brexit. And Northern Ireland has sort of fallen in between the two. So Ireland and Irish relations have dipped quite substantially since 2016, and Northern Ireland can only suffer as a result of that in the long term. It was not helped by the fact that in 2017, the British government lost its majority in parliament, was trying to negotiate Brexit when it was very weak internally. And it relied on the Democratic Unionist Party, Ian Paisley's former party, to keep itself in government. And so it raised lots of serious questions about how the British government could be a co-garrantor of a power sharing system, when it was in fact beholden to the DUP, who was one of the parties in that system. So there was an accusations of bad faith over that. The other issue, I think, was that the whole peace process was based on the consent of the people who lived there, that it was up to the people of Northern Ireland to decide on their future. Now, the people of Northern Ireland voted to remain in the EU. They didn't vote to leave. And so what Brexit did was it really shrink-wrapped a sense of Britishness into more of an Englishness and more of a right-wing English project. The Scottish suffered the same as the Irish to this extent, in that Scotland also was probably known as Scotland, voted to remain in the EU as well, Northern Ireland, voted to remain quite significantly, by 56, 42, or 44. So quite a significant margin. So two of the constituent parts of the United Kingdom voted to remain. But a day after, or certainly when Theresa May became British Prime Minister, she said Britain has spoken. The people of Britain have spoken. The people of Britain have decided to leave the EU. But of course, that was a misnomer. 17 million people voted to leave the EU. But 16 million voted to remain in the EU. And two of the constituent countries or regimes in the United Kingdom voted to remain in the European Union. So this immediately then raised the issue of what country do you live in? So once you say, well, our country has decided to leave. Our sovereign country has decided to leave. The DUP were quite keen on that idea, because they wanted to leave the EU on the same terms as the rest of their country. But of course, for Irish nationalists, they had another country, which was Ireland. And they may or may not have adhered to a connection with the United Kingdom. But to some degree, it pushed nationalists further towards the Irish Republic. It forced them to choose between an Irishness and a Britishness when the whole Good Friday agreement was not choosing without having to choose. So that's why it really increased tensions. Other thing I wanted to say was that, yes, 56% of North Ireland voted to remain in the EU. But that hides a big difference between the nationalist Catholic population and the Protestant Unionist population. So between 88% and 90% of Catholic nationalists voted to remain in the EU. And only about 35% to 38% of Protestant Unionists voted to remain in the EU. So in other words, Brexit did not complicate the ethnic national problem. It reinforced it. And that also was a major issue in terms of the political dynamics that were existing there. And it was very difficult for Sinn Fein and the DUP to reach any working relationship because of the Brexit situation. And so really, Brexit has stress tested the agreement. Since 1998, this has been the document that we've all been focused on and several iterations of it since. But it's based on the notion of consent that is up to the people of Northern Ireland to decide on their futures. And of course, what it really did was it pulled the rug from under these devolved institutions, not just in Belfast, but in Scotland as well. Because essentially, London was saying, it's the United Kingdom that's sovereign, really. It's not the devolved administrations. And we will be leaving the European Union as one unit. And so it really stress tested them. So I just wanted to get on to the president-elect, Biden, and the Biden-Harris administration. Because I think this is really fascinating in terms of the impact that it's going to have on the United Kingdom and on Brexit itself. As you probably know, Joe Biden has got strong connections with Ireland. And he's very aware of them and has visited Ireland several times. It was skeptical at best about the whole Brexit project, was had a front row seat during eight years of the Obama administration. Certainly, I'm sure the relationship between the United States and the United Kingdom is going to be perfect accordion. But Biden has already come out and said that if there's any damage to the Good Friday agreement or any damage to the peace process, then his administration would not look kindly on that. And his priorities are not going to be a trade deal with the United Kingdom. They're going to be looking to the United Kingdom as an ally over America's role in NATO and the whole role of NATO generally. He is a sort of multilateralist. He is going to want to establish international partnerships. And I'm sure the United Kingdom is going to be a very important player in that. But the problem for Boris Johnson, the prime minister, is that when Donald Trump was president, a free trade deal with America seemed to be in the context of no deal with the EU, looked like it was a feasible option. But a deal with the Biden presidency with a no deal Brexit looks like an impossibility. So that will not be lost on Boris Johnson. And I'm sure we'll have to see how that plays out in the next couple of weeks. But we're now really up against it in terms of a deal. There are days, there's a ticking clock, as Mary said, going to the end of December. And on the 1st of January, Northern Ireland, Northern Ireland is going to be the hot seat of the economic fallout of Brexit. Just to give you a little example, a practical example of that. I don't know if any of you like Cottage Pie as a thing to eat, but apparently Cottage Pie, I don't know who actually did who worked this out, but Cottage Pie goes through nine border changes before it actually gets from production to consumption. So in other words, products go backwards and forwards. They're going to be needing export licenses. Costs and delays are going to go up significantly if there's no deal Brexit. Supermarkets have already talked about contingency planning, product reduction. There are worries of food shortages in Northern Ireland because of the fact that delays over just-in-time deliveries are going to be accentuated in the context of a no-deal outcome. So this is getting very real very quickly for people in Northern Ireland. And really, those issues are not making the media headlines at all, hardly at all. And this is one of the interesting ironies of Brexit. Northern Ireland didn't figure. The biggest problem for the United Kingdom has been Northern Ireland in its prosecution of Brexit, getting Brexit done. But Northern Ireland was not an issue in the referendum at all. It was only really afterwards. It was an afterthought. And similarly now, the practical implications of a no-deal Brexit are pretty much an afterthought in terms of the Britain agenda. And this has been one of its problems. It's never really seen Brexit through an Irish lens. Maybe it was never capable of doing that. So the Biden-Harris administration, I think, has got a soft power leverage over the British government, over how Brexit evolves from here. It's interesting that Boris Johnson is making a lot of noise about climate change recently. He hadn't really been saying an awful lot about that in my knowledge, up until Joe Biden won the election. It'll be interesting to see how that factors into the final days of the negotiations. But I would be prepared to put a good, if I were you, a couple of dollars on the fact that if there is a no-deal Brexit, that there will not be a free trade deal with America. And that Dublin, if Dublin makes representations to the Biden presidency over the damage to the good Friday agreement, that they'll be listened to. And that certainly behind the scenes that there will be communications going from Washington to London about that. Even if it isn't in a greater scheme of things, publicly stated. So I just wanted to finish with a couple of points, sort of ironic points about Brexit, as I see them anyway. And I've mentioned these in the book. Brexit was all about taking back control. One of the ironies of Brexit was that it was never really anything to do with Europe. If it had been to do with being a member of the European Union, there would have been a proper debate about what it was like being in the European Union. But it wasn't. Brexit was about immigration. And Brexit was about the internal politics of the Conservative Party. That's essentially what Brexit was, why Brexit was called the way it was, when it was, and why the debates happened the way it did. Another irony is that Sinn Feim, who for a century, pretty much, have denied the legitimacy of Northern Ireland as a legitimate entity. As far as they're concerned, it's a partitioned state from the rest of Ireland. And for many generations, they had not sat in legislative parliaments in Northern Ireland because they didn't sit in Stormont. They wouldn't sit in local councils and so on. And they changed that in the 1980s and through the 90s. And now there are no better defenders of the self-determination of Northern Ireland than Sinn Feim, who were, of course, originally very Eurosceptic, seeing it as sort of a rich person's club. And now they are tub thumpers for the European Union and for the self-determination of Northern Ireland, which is quite an ironic turnaround in some ways. Equally ironic, if not more ironic, and probably the biggest headline of all, is that Irish unity has probably never been as close as it is now. And the reason for that is because of the DUP, the Democratic Unionist Party, who were pro-Brexit, who had major influence with Theresa May's government after the 2017 general election, and who prevented Theresa May from getting her Brexit legislation through the House of Commons because they had the votes to stop it. And what they've delivered is a border in the Irish Sea between Northern Ireland and the Great Britain. And they're now having to be their own dealers, setting up customs posts in Belfast and Lawn with Great Britain when they were the party who said that we must leave as one country with the rest of the United Kingdom. And what they've ended up with is Boris Johnson calling them loose when he had to last year, signing the withdrawal agreement on Northern Ireland protocol that effectively is going to put a border, not have a border on the island of Ireland, but put the border in the Irish Sea between Northern Ireland and Great Britain, which then raises questions about, I suppose, whether Northern Ireland is now in a different status within the United Kingdom. What we're effectively going to see is a border within the United Kingdom, de facto. It's not going to be called that, that's what it's going to be. One last point maybe to mention is that, as Mary said there, I've got a revised version of my Yale University Press book coming out next year to Marcus and Tina, we have Northern Ireland. And one of the questions I ask in that book is how far into its next century is Northern Ireland going to actually get? And I think it really depends on how hard Brexit lands on Northern Ireland. Because, of course, Northern Ireland was based on the union being economically strong. And if we're faced with a United Kingdom outside the EU, a United Kingdom smaller internationally as far as countries like the United States are concerned, where they're more concerned with the EU than they are with the UK, where doubling in the Irish Republic is a secular, modern, industrialized country. Then the equation over whether you would vote for reunification changes. And the idea of a border poll was pretty much a thought experiment for academics up until Brexit. And it's now on the front burner of political debate, both in the North and the South. Not sure if we call it the front burner of political debate, but certainly there. And it won't be the DUP, and it won't be Sinn Fein who decide on that. It will be the sort of middle, 15 to 20% of the population of Northern Ireland, the undecided voters, the swing states in American, the Pennsylvanians and the Mexicans and so on. It'll be those groups. And they're there to be convinced. And it really all depends on how Brexit lands on us from January onwards. If it's a soft Brexit, if there's a deal between Britain and the EU, and if Anglo-Irish relations improve, then the status quo is gonna be much more tenable. If it's a no deal of Brexit, a crash landing, economic difficulties, then the arguments for coming back into the EU, through a reunified Ireland, becomes much more viable. And I could see that being discussed over the next decade or so. But anyway, that book's gonna be out next March with Yale. And just finally, because my time's up, thank you very much for listening. I think I have just a minute left. Yeah, so I'll wind up there. I've got a website on the slide there. If you wanna read any more, you can read it there. So, thanks very much. Oh, fantastic. Okay, and we can probably put that website into chat as well so that people can pick that up. Thank you so much, Burgl. I'm sure that we have some questions. Yes, we do. Okay, and I actually, well, I'll save my question. I'll let our distinguished members go first. Yeah, actually, let's go to Ursula, our wonderful colleague from the British American Business Council of New England, great Royal Boston friend. Ursula, what's your question? We'll pull you in. Okay, my question is, since the Brexit vote was so close, why didn't David Cameron just declare the results to be interesting information? Yes, well, that's a very good question. I think the reason he did that was probably because he was too weak then to say that. I think Cameron was probably pushed into the referendum by UKIPP, and if he had then denied the majority vote, which he could have done constitutionally, of course, then he would have been attacked by UKIPP and probably his own party as well. And of course, the Conservative Party has been torn apart by Europe for a generation, if not more. So, yeah, he could have said this is an advisory, but after the referendum, I'm not sure what your view of that Ursula would be, but my view is probably because he was too weak to do anything else by that point. And I think what he should have done was say, because he nearly, of course, lost the Scottish referendum a couple of years previously in 2014. And of course, when the opinion polls turned against, he also rushed back up to Scotland and said how much they loved the Scottish. And what he should have said, I think, about Brexit would have been to preserve the union, we'll have to have a majority in Scotland, Northern Ireland, Wales and England to have Brexit. And if he'd been strong enough to do that, which he wasn't, then the result would have been a foregone conclusion. And he could have had his referendum, said he'd given his referendum, and not had to deliver it. Let's see, I'm not sure if my colleague has got people ready to go here. Ruel, are you with us? My question has to do with what happens if in fact Scotland does have another referendum and decide to secede? Well, now you'll have a UK that's breaking apart. Will that affect Northern Ireland, perhaps even renew ideas about joining with Ireland again? Will it result in violence again? Yeah, well, there's two questions in there, I think. So that's a really great question. I'd say that the odds of another Scottish referendum are very high over the next five years, certainly. Particularly once Brexit happens, and it happens in Scotland, it happens for Scotland, the opinion polls in Scotland are pretty much showing an acceleration of a desire for independence. And I think COVID is also part of this because the experience of the Scottish has been, Nicola Sturgeon, the First Minister of Scotland, been seen to have done a pretty good job over COVID in a way that maybe the Scottish view of Boris Johnson hasn't been quite so positive. So I think that raises interesting questions for unionists. What do you do when the union disappears behind your back? How do you then have a, who is your union with? And it doesn't technically damage Northern Ireland's position within the United Kingdom or the Disunited Kingdom. It doesn't technically change that. But it would certainly take one of the pillars away, I think, of the equation, which was a lot of the unionist view is a connection with Scotland, and they see their unionism as similar to the Scottish unionism within the United Kingdom. So if Scotland go independent, I think unionists, one of the major pillars of their political allegiance will be certainly dented. And I also think that on the other side of it, it gives a stronger push from the Irish nationalist side to say that you're putting your money on a slow horse here. Why not rejoin the European Union? And to sell the idea of Irish reunification, if they're sensible, it'll all be about being in the European Union as much as it will be about being in some sort of Irish entity, whatever that might end up as. On the point about violence, I certainly think there will be smuggling post Brexit. Once you've got a border with different tariffs, you're going to have smuggling, you're going to have criminality. And you may well have, depending on the type of border, you may well have politically motivated criminality, which is where it gets slightly more interesting. I don't think you're going to get large scale violence the way we had it in the 1960s and 70s though. I think that the underlying drivers for that aren't there anymore, but the organisations are still there. And they're economic drivers for that paramilitary activism is still there and the people are still there. So, yeah, I think the potential for violence is still there, but I don't see it getting to the levels that it was in the 70s and 80s. Actually, Frugal, can I ask you to round that out? Because I think many of us think of those days of violence, as you mentioned, why are those drivers not present now? What were they? Okay, so really what you had in the 60s, this brings us back to the United States, of course, because what you had in the 1960s was the emergence of a civil rights movement, particularly amongst the Catholic national side of the population who lost all these elections. They eventually got fed up with it and thought, well, there's no point in the formal political system isn't delivering. So we'll have to take civil disobedience measures. We'll have to take the streets and they were inspired by the American civil rights movement by the arrival of television as well and by the French riots in the 60s and so on. So, and by an educated middle class who had come through the university system and free education from the post-war, ironically from the post-war British sort of 1940 Butler Education Act. So they've come through, let's sort of say, well, this is clearly unfair and they've started protesting peacefully. But as these protests got more violent with stone throwing, and of course once you ban a march, once you say your march is illegal and the police will remove you, then you can guarantee that more people will come the next week. And then it gets political. And then once the stone throwing starts, the political analysis disappears and it becomes much more of a sectarian battle. And so it evolved from a civil rights agitation over electoral gerrymandering over the allocation, it was all right, you know, all politics is local. So it was all about the allocation of public housing, about unemployment levels amongst the Catholic population. There was no, I mean, back in those days, your religious affiliation could be used as a reason not to employ you. And in fact, again, it was America that played a big role in fair employment legislation in Northern Ireland, back in the early 90s with the Clinton administration. So the drivers were discrimination, security, you know, the police were pretty much made up of 90% of one side of the population, which was the Protestant Unionist population. So it was a non-transparent armed police force policing a recalcitrant disenfranchised minority who felt that the political system could not deliver for them, but also you had a lot of discrimination, a lot of poverty amongst the Unionist population as well. And they couldn't understand why the Catholics were saying that they were second class citizens with a lot of working class Protestants felt that they were second class citizens. But nonetheless, an attempt to reform went too slowly, misdiagnosed the problem, rioting pogroms, people getting burnt out of their houses, rampant sectarianism. British army arrived as supposedly peacekeepers, but were controlled by this Unionist government. And of course, then became peace enforcers very quickly. And then you had the old IRA re-arming itself and then taking on an undeclared war with the British state. And of course, that escalated. And that became internationalized through things like Bloody Sunday in 1972. And America gave a lot of dollars for the armed struggle or terrorism, as Margaret Thatcher would define it, or would have defined, or did define it. But also the internationalization brought sucked in people like Colonel Gaddafi and Libya, who provided Semtex and sophisticated weaponry and so on. And so the whole thing became a sort of escalating arms race between a guerrilla movement and the British state and ended up in a stalemate. And so the drivers were economic, they were security, legal arguments about the administration of justice, the lack of justice. Those issues are not there now. There is firm employment legislation. Catholic population does not feel that it is second class in the way that it did in the 1960s. That's probably a, I'll probably give you a long lecture on this somewhere. But you know, today, yes, there are grievances over identity politics, but the underlying disparity and even the numbers are different. So back in the 60s, you know, you had a dominant, unionist community, but it's very 50-50 now in terms of population split. So even if you were to see it as sort of Catholics on one side, Protestants on the other, it was much more complicated than that. But let's even take that. You're not looking at a 60-40 permanent majority, permanent minority problem. It's much more even Steven. And again, that, I think, helps the whole power sharing type of model. And, you know, so I think the reasons for the emergence of violence are not there at the moment. That's really helpful for outsiders. I wanted to go back to actually something that you said when we were in the virtual green room, Fergal, you mentioned this, but I just think it was so compelling if you could round this out a little bit. You mentioned that the, we're talking obviously about the virus. That's what everyone does these days.  All the emotion that comes with that reminded you very much of growing up in the 70s in Northern Ireland and kind of that tension. And you said a fascinating thing that it's not about science anymore. It's about identity. So help us understand how those things are similar to you. Yeah. So it's a classic conflict mentality, really, which is that you don't need to listen to what somebody says to you because you already know what they think. Right. So the mask and non-mask debate, to me, watching it, it seems to be it's not really about the mask. It's about what the mask represents. It's a more existential issue. I mean, it is about the mask and it's about public health. But from the people who are reluctant to wear masks, they feel that, you know, the mask is a thin end of the wedge to their other rights-based constitutional thing. I mean, gun control could be another dimension of it. I don't know whether there's a correlation between mask wearing, non-mask wearing and gun control and, you know, wanting sort of M60 machine guns. But I think that it's so and for a lot of people in conflicts, this sort of it's the symbolism of the thing. And it's the fact that it's a sectarianize, a sectarianization, if you like, of relatively mundane things because the mask is an emblem of other things. And so if you see somebody talking about wearing a mask, your mentality jumps to extrapolate that across a whole range of different dimensions. It could be Democrat versus Republican. I mean, I may be speaking out of turn here in terms of American politics, but it could be rural versus urban. It could be an age demographic going on there as well. But the emblem of the symbol, in the case of Northern Ireland, it could be, for instance, the sports that you play. It doesn't really matter if you say you're a Catholic or a Protestant. It's about whether you're, that's just a badge of ethnicity and that's a badge of whether you are one of us or one of the other or whether you believe in the whole sort of iconography of that I believe in or whether you are on the other side of that fence. And to me, with the Trump presidency, I can see a very sort of sectarian, and you can see it with the vote, you know, nearly 80 million people voting for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and 70 odd million voting for Donald Trump. And the votes come out in both sides. It's a very divided country, clearly. And there is very little middle way, you know, and I think that the mask versus non-mask debate is sort of almost emblematic of that sectarianized situation. And in Northern Ireland, you know, if you play one sport like Gaelic football or hurling, you would be perceived as a Catholic and a whole extrapolation of your political viewpoints would follow. This is certainly what I was growing up. I mean, it would be enough to get you beaten up in a bus stop to carry a hurling stick or to carry a rugby ball on the other side because our education systems are very divided. And so Catholics go to Catholic schools, learn Catholic sports, Protestants go to state schools, learn other sports. So you carry a cricket bat, it's emblematic of the fact that you're British. You carry a hurling stick, it's emblematic of the fact that you're Irish. And so those very objects become sectarianized. And it doesn't really matter if you think, well, I'm currently a hurling stick, but, you know, I've got a very cosmopolitan outlook on events. It doesn't really matter. There's a reductionism that happens in conflicts. And to me, in the States, from the outside, I think the mask debate is sort of emblematic of that sectarian scenario, you know, and we'll have to see where that goes, I'm sure. Fascinating. All right, so Ed, are you okay? Can you come on? Is your mic working? If not, we'll go over to Brian. Okay, looks like we can't get Ed. Maybe he'll join us in the post chat chat. Brian, what's your question? Go right ahead. What about Johnson's internal market bill? What's the impact and will the EU ratify any agreement if he keeps pushing that bill through? Good question. On the second part of that note, EU will not ratify any deal with the internal market bill there. And the reason for that is because it gives, just for people who are not OFA with the internal market bill, effectively what this does is it supersedes an international treaty that the United Kingdom has signed. And so it gives the United Kingdom, it almost allows it to supersede its international obligations and its agreements with the European Union. So you would never, I hope nobody has to go through a divorce or has ever done, but if you had a divorce lawyer, and the two divorce lawyers were having a chat, and one divorce lawyer said the other divorce lawyer, just leave it with me. I'm sure I'll decide no divorce lawyer in their right mind would say, okay, I'll give you unilateral choice over working this thing out, you can decide it. That's not the way it works. So the internal market bill allows the United Kingdom to unilaterally dispense with aspects of the withdrawal agreement that it's made with the EU. So there's no way the EU is going to let that happen. There's also no way that the American government, the incoming American government's going to, I mean, Joe Biden's already come out and against the internal market bill for that very reason, because how can you, and members of the Conservative Party, including Theresa May, as you probably know, have also come out and said that, you know, we would be an international laughing stock. The next time we sign an international treaty with anybody, when we've said in Parliament, and I don't know if this has ever happened before, but a serving Minister has said, we will break the law in certain unspecified and limited ways when it suits us to do so. So would you ever sign a deal with somebody who said that? Probably not. So it will be interesting to see how the internal market bill gets adjusted, if it does get adjusted. But I think it probably will need to be, even though Johnson said he is not going to. I can't see a deal with the EU unless that is significantly revised. Okay. Thank you very much. I really fear that our time is winding down. Yeah, I'm afraid we're going to have to wind this up. I am sorry that we did not get to all the questions, but boy, Fergal, you have raised many questions in our mind and also answered a bunch of very fascinating topic that I think nobody could have imagined a few years ago that we would be talking about Ireland, Northern Ireland in this way. Fergal, thanks for joining us from all the way over there late at night. I hope many of you will join us in our informal post chat chat. And Fergal, once again, thank you and good night, everybody. Hope to see you again soon. Pleasure.