You also have to take a look at where they are in terms of how the embrace of the tenets of democracy is because, well, the U.S. has been practicing democracy for well over 200 years. In a lot of these African countries, some of them are between 20 to 30. And then they have been interruptions of military interventions here and there. So you need to look at where you are. In some West African countries, and Southern African countries I know, the role of the media is very strong in those areas because they have been stable for so long. And so the politicians and the powers that be usually will allow them to operate with some freedom. It's not so in a lot of other countries. So it's the way democracy is, you know, the burgeoning democracy in these countries. So we have to weigh the two. The U.S. has been stable for a very, very long time. So they can experiment with whatever they want. Some African countries don't have that luxury to do that.


Playoffs for the NLL started last weekend. Toronto and Halifax tied at 13. Toronto was up really big in this game, but now they're tied with 28 seconds left. The NLL expanded, Halifax came into the league a couple years ago, like two years ago. Look at this, look at the map. Condensed in the Northeast, but they got Halifax, they got Saskatchewan, they got Calgary, they got San Diego, Texas, they're all over the place. And they're like the third highest tickets for an indoor sport in North America kind of wild. So anyway, they've run a set play here to win. This would be kind of a brutal loss for Toronto because they were up by a lot. So the play here from my guess is that the two guys on the point, they're going to pass it back and forth.  And then they're going to decide which guy should take the shot, depending on which guy gets beat up better. So 24's got it, he passes it back. These guys are going to come up, get their guy. Now the guy on the right, he doesn't get his guy. Guy on the left, he gets his guy, so they pass it back to 24. And he takes the shot and save, rebound, save. Another shot behind the back, behind the goal, tipped in, did he get it? Now on the clock here, if you look at the clock on the TV broadcast, the ball goes in the net right there and there's 0.8 seconds left, but everyone on the floor says no goal, no goal, and the Halifax players don't really argue, but they're like, can you take a look at it? They take a look at it, we get to the view of the back of the ref's head. That's very nice, good haircut by him. And then you can see here that as the ball goes in, hold up. The goal is ridiculous, I need them to cut the pads down in half.  Like look at that, that's not even a human.  I don't even get it, but the clock is zero at this point and then the ball goes in. So no one really argues. Would have been devastating, would have been awesome. They go to OT and this is how it ends. Halifax has the ball, nice little move there to cut to the middle, pass it down to the side, back up, takes the shot, misses wide, and the number 51's gonna try and, he tries to tip this back to the defenseman. You can see off the boards, 51 and white, tries to tip it back to the defenseman and then the dude on Toronto tips it over the defenseman's head. He's got a fast break.  He fakes high and then beats him low, runs into the board, smashes himself. You can see here, he's gonna fake high to keep the goalie on his feet. That's the fake high, goalie's name is bold and then he's gonna go to the backhand and bounce it five-fold through his legs. Toronto wins, they don't get embarrassed. It's not a crazy comeback. It's a one game elimination in the wild card round and they just won it and the goalie's sad. This man, he turns to the kid, the kid says, you wanna do a high five? He says, yeah, let's do a double high five and then he's back and I'm impressed by his quickness. He's got his hands folded. You can see down here, his left hand is over his right hand. They say, you wanna high five. He almost gets a fist out, okay? He corrects the fist, he double high fives, perfect contact, they meet in the middle, and then he's so quick back to left hand, over right hand, his standing position. Just really quick, good high five, goes back to standing and they're screaming. Toronto's just screaming, they're just screaming. And the other side, goalie's sad, bold is sad, his teammates are trying to pick him up. He says, it's okay, man, it's okay, it's all right. Hey, it's okay, man. I like this guy, I like that a lot.  Big, nice embrace there, and then I'll be like, whoa. There you go. Now, Toronto moved on, Buffalo also moved on, San Diego, Colorado, they moved on. I think it's three game series in the semifinals, then the championship.


Okay, perfect. Can you hear me okay? Yeah. Perfect. Excellent. Thank you very much. So let's thumbs up. So thanks for the invite, Rob. And as Rob said, my name is Mark Lynn and I'll be speaking along with my colleague Keith Hickey, who I'll introduce you to now in a second. But we were faced with the challenge of collecting video-based assignments, even pre-COVID, which has turned everybody's lives upside down. We were faced with the challenge of how do we manage video-based assessments. And what I want to do is to introduce you to my colleague Keith. He's going to give an engineering perspective on this and what his demands were from an individual faculty's point of view. And then I'll come back in to show how we've addressed it and time permitting. I will have a quick demonstration for you as well. So I'll hand over to Keith now and Keith, the floor is yours. Thank you. Thanks, Mark. And thanks, Rob, for inviting me to speak today. Hello, everybody. So my name is Keith Hickey and I'm the Education Technology Manager and the Faculty of Engineering Computing. So I'm going to give you a brief overview of the challenges we faced with video assessments and how UNICANN became part of the video assessment process first in DCU. So particularly in engineering, we use video assessments across our faculty for final year and top master project presentations and also third year group project presentations. So over the years, it's been quite challenging and logistically difficult to organize all of these. So some of those challenges that we faced were trying to book rooms, timetables, students and supervisors, the likes of setting up computers and webcams, organizing post-grads to manage the recordings and then obviously what do you do with the recordings after post-recording? Where do you store them? Do you store them in the cloud and so forth? So we had the plan for a more efficient approach for the recording of video assessments and the new goal was to have numerous rooms set up with ceiling-mounted PTZ cameras and microphones that could be controlled from a wall-mounted Android tablet. So students could then walk into any of these rooms without having to set up any equipment and make numerous recordings and send them onto their supervisors. So that was our goal. So researching and installing the hardware was actually the easiest part of the project we found. So some of the problems we now face was actually finding the application that could interact with our cameras. So this application needed to be very user-friendly and we needed to be able to store the video files in the cloud. So the teaching enhancement unit in DCU put me in touch with a colleague in the School of Nursing, Patrick Doyle because they were using an Android-based application to record their student nurses practicing clinical skills. So this application was called Unicam and it could control and record a feed from a PTZ IP camera. So over the course of the following six years, we started in 2014. So over the course of those six years, the teaching enhancement unit and the Faculty of Engineering, Computing Faculty of Science and Health were closely wished Unicam to develop to a version we're at now, which is a fully Moodle integrated video assessment tool that can record from multiple devices and cameras. It also has the added features of being able to record to Google Drive. It can translate audio into any language which we call this process transcription. It can record picture-in-picture and it has the option to save them the separate video files. It also has some nice post-recording tools like trimming videos and you can save separate audio files of your videos as well. And then the last part is it has a live broadcasting feature also. So overall DCU has made a substantial investment in the development of Unicam and in 2016 we won the President's Award for Innovation. And just recently we won a new commercialization award with Unicam. So our goal at the beginning of this journey was to find a more efficient approach for video assessment and we've achieved this with great success. So that's just a brief history of Unicam and how it's become a very important assessment tool for us in DCU. So thanks very much. Thanks Keith and I'll take over from there and follow up from what Keith was saying. It's where he was able to give the engineering perspective recording the presentations of final year students. We were finding across the university that video was much more than just multimedia courses, standard normal courses needed video. Keith mentioned Pathra Kiki and the School of Nursing. They have the oskies, the clinical exams which need to be done, bed making, drug administration, stitching, all of those other practical activities that need to be done. So the use of video wasn't restricted to multimedia courses that's there. We were very aware of existing commercial platforms which are brilliant not giving out about them whatsoever. They each had their own skills whether it was Kaltura or Panopto or Ubicast. Each had their own advantages and disadvantages for them but they all didn't do everything that we wanted to do. All the features that Keith had outlined there, secure storage in Google Drive, easy sharing, easy for people to use and record and so on. And we wanted to go beyond just recording on a fixed camera within a room. We wanted them to be able to record with any device whether they were recording doing a screencast or whether they were recording on their mobile phone or indeed with high-end cameras. We knew that students were going to come with so many different demands, so many different approaches would be required. And as we started to look at the commercial platforms that existed, the bills were just going up and up and up on the annual licenses of these things. And one of the major challenges we had with all of the platforms was the more you use this, the more expensive it became because storage of video is an issue, storage in terms of size but also storage in terms of data protection. The final challenge that we faced was because we were capturing all these videos from all the different devices, whether it was an Android or an Apple or whether it was a tablet or a laptop or indeed a PTZ camera, which is a pan tilt zoom cameras, they all come with different file formats and where we're all familiar with Word document is a dot doc and an Excel spreadsheet is a dot XLS. The amount of dots after all the video formats is just so confusing, it's own real. And what would happen is, David say for example in the GA could be getting some of his coaches to record a video in practice. But then when they'd submit the video to David, he wouldn't be able to open it because he didn't have the right software on his phone or on his computer and so on. So what we wanted to be able to do was to remove the headache of sharing it and you can have sharing on a memory stick and post a memory stick but that's just fraught with problems and indeed we're as a Google college, we each student and staff member has their own YouTube account so you can be private and long listed and public. Again, they were able to solve some problems but not everything. Unicam solved everything that we needed because what it does is it easily shares the video from the student's device, whatever it may be, to the lecture and submit it as an assignment. And what I'll do actually now is I will give you a quick demo. So if you could just give me a thumbs up if you can see the Unicam screen here. Yeah, great stuff. So conscious of time I logged into the screen earlier on I logged in as a particular student. A student is greeted with three options in this case record create a screencast record from a camera and they'd have to have an access codes to to record the camera which is only visible in that room, or you can upload from your device. Here's some I prepared earlier just in the interest to speed. Here's three videos that I uploaded earlier on.  And it doesn't matter what it is in this case it's a Donald Trump skit. But here I'm greeted with the option of submitting to Moodle. So when I click submit to Moodle, you will see on the screen it calls up the assessments and it doesn't matter what course or module this is belong to it would call up all of my assessments that I have. And then I will listen to click I'm going to submit to this one here and it tells me the video has been submitted to submitted to that assignment it should pop up now in one second and say that there we go video is done so it's taken from the students device uploaded to Google Drive and then the appropriate permissions are changed within Moodle and within Google Drive to ensure anybody that has a non-editing teacher or above permissions within Moodle so a teacher, a manager or indeed an administrator will have access to that video, but nobody else will. That was a big thing for us to security because we have an awful lot of teachers doing early childhood. We have PE exercises that could be done we have nursing videos that could be done and captured in hospital so we wanted to keep everything as private as possible and private by default, and we wanted to make it easy as possible. You also have the option, if you do decide to make the video that you've that you've collected, you can embed us in your in your ePortfolio, for example, where we were talking about the oskies to clinical skills they can send a link, a public link for somebody to access, assuming it's not a sensitive material, but it puts the control back in the users and you'll see it makes it as easy as possible to submit the videos, and that's what we're aiming for. Across all faculties now and this is available for all students and all staff. Well, it started off as as an idea has morphed into a campus company and is now spread out and they've gone public with it essentially for us and it's built on an academic requirements built by academics built by ourselves and the key integration with Moodle has proved vital for us because we've made it easy for students to make the submissions. We linked to Google Drive, but equally at interfaces with Microsoft OneDrive or indeed any server based platform that you want to integrate it with it's just a it's just easy. That's all we want to do is to make the process easy. And because we feel particularly now since COVID like we had over 2700 videos were submitted through the platform, and you'll see now how easy that is, you understand why we've had so many students ended up doing it. And that is that's that's my session done. Thanks, Rob. Okay, can you see my slides does my slides. Hopefully. Yeah, your slides are good. Good. Okay, so I'm going to talk today about how we manage our online content at Dublin Business School. So, just in the context of the digital edu framework, this is just as comes under the digital resources competencies of creating modifying digital resources and managing protecting and sharing digital resources. So, this is obviously nothing to do with digital resources. This is so this of the journey that I'm talking about today and really started. Well, when I first joined the DBS in 2018. And then, but I first talked about this last summer at the Irish EdTech conference. And this is actually taken from my home just about above my house. And the day I got back from EdTech. And so I presented I was asked by Penocto to join them to present short talk on our zoom Penocto and mood integration. Which we've been using to run. We've been running online to pay my courses for a few semesters a few in takes a DBS and which were taking part using zoom, maybe almost entirely on zoom lives in classes which were being recorded. So the challenge that we've had at the time when I first started was how to, and how to make these recordings quickly easily and securely available to the students, as they were the main resource of the course. And so the beginning of that years, September 2018 we started a pilot year with Penocto. And I saw then the opportunity. That we needed to take to make the connection between Penocto middle and also Penocto, which we did in our original implementation, and then saw there was an opportunity to connect Penocto with zoom. So we Yeah, so that's pretty much where we were last summer. And then moving forward to September 2019. We started to become a DBS, he was developing what we eventually called ourselves as an online learning team, which consisted of myself as a technologist. My name is Anna Sitzkowska, our new instructional designer, and my first hire at DBS and Bernadette Higgins I think both these two are on the call today who's who was I need. And we started working September on two new projects which would involve our integration in a number of new ways. And the first was to assist in the delivery of a number of blended modules, which the college was introducing into some of its normal face to face type delivered programs. So we started with with teachers on these program on these modules to record their lessons which we did using the Penocto recorder app. And then use these to create weekly on demand lessons for these students on these modules. And these were then delivered to the class prior to their class which was either a live online classes in zoom, or an onsite class. And I think that was roughly ratio four to one online to onsite. So the lessons were created, the lessons, the on demand lessons were created using articulate storyline. But so we kind of packaged our videos in in storyline lessons, but the videos themselves remained hosted on Penocto and were embedded into the packages. And the zoom classes were recorded and made available in Moodle also. Parts for a project in September was to try and increase the usage of Penocto for lecture capture for live onsite classes. And this was a time, well, it is an opt in feature at DBS. And we were to be honest struggling with this with a sign up for this. Also happened towards the end of that last year the integration between Penocto and zoom was updated. And it's the original integration that had been actually developed by zoom. And then when Penocto realized how many people were trying to use it, they actually decided to rebuild it from the ground up. And so they created a new integration which is actually a lot easier to manage you manage it from Penocto and rather than zoom in. And it has some new functionality so it now includes, you can include the chat and the chat will come into the discussion option area in Penocto. And it also includes a kind of a timestamp for and all the attendees in the contents. So we were now using this integration more in DBS. But to be frank, at that point, there was really the problem, you know, most students were getting through life without using zoom or do all Penocto or being aware of them. But the experience that we were gaining as a team was going to be invaluable to us. We added to our team in February we got an audio visual technician, which was about a month prior to lockdown so it was excellent timing on our part. So then all this happened. And of course everything changed. I just had to put this. We've had it for about 25 years. My husband found it at a gig he worked at. And it's even been on my wall most of that time. And it wasn't until about three weeks into lockdown when I've been sitting there staring at it three weeks. I actually noticed what the word said. So I just thought that that was just to demonstrate the changes that we all went through. So how have we all used it now? The answer is massively hugely incredibly sometimes really badly, but a lot. I mean in the first, I mean, as I'm sure most people on this call have experienced their lives being turned upside down since March. And these graphs just show a real overview. I mean that the zoom meetings that's over 12 months. That's monthly usage over 12 months. And I think that's a really pun opto graph. I think it's actually fortnightly. Mostly below missed a few February because we're busy training. But generally, you know, you can see you get the general idea. And my colleague our esteemed team leader Tony Murphy put it most succinctly. We, we wrote a, we published or he wrote and we published a new teaching lens strategy at the end of 2019. And I think it was approved by academic board, I think like just for Christmas. And we had this stated intention, which I thought was ambitious at the time and I told him that 50% of our teaching online or blended within three years. Obviously a few months later we put 100% of all teaching and assessment and examinations completely online in a few days and weeks. So it was a bit nuts. In addition to this, we've been using in addition to the teaching and learning side and assessment. We've also been using this zoom for combination for staff training. We've run open evenings on zoom. We have a student support desk and a library desk that are currently constantly open using zoom.  So just a quick slide on what the integration actually looks like. Just keep an eye on my time here. And so PANAPTO is our based video streaming service. And I'm sure most of you are familiar with it. And it has recording tools that you can use your screen capture and video recording. And then some kinds of minor editing tools and the ability to live stream, which has become really very valuable to us. We've used that a lot. Zoom is, this is Zoom. It's our, but for us it's, we call it virtual classroom. We actually have a number of shared accounts that we use at the allocate like rooms in the timetable now called V class accounts. So virtual classroom accounts. And obviously Moodle is our everything else is our access to, to all these systems. It's our student is the, sorry, is the students access the front line access. So PANAPTO integrates with zoom and through an API connection and PANAPTO also integrates very closely with Moodle. And so it provides provides the bridge that makes the zoom class recordings easily and securely available to the students who attended them. So the zoom classes are recorded to the zoom cloud, and they automatically a transfer to a specified folder in PANAPTO. And then once the, once the upload is complete, the trans the original video is deleted from zoom. And that's very useful to us because I've, as everyone probably knows zoom storage is very expensive and it's not really designed they don't want you to store lots of video there. And it was becoming a bit of an issue to have to go in and delete the recordings all the time so that automated recording was very useful feature. PANAPTO is up to the lecturer to move their recording into their class into the class folder and every PANAP every Moodle page or Moodle course has a PANAPTO folder and the folder inherits the access rights from the Moodle page. So if you're a teacher on the Moodle page then you have created rights on the PANAPTO folder.  So all the, all the lecturing needs to do is to move it from my folder into the class folder and they have access to all the classes they are teacher on. And it's very simple process to move it. You just literally change the folder in the settings. And then that's automatically accessible by the students. And this makes it like very easy for us obviously and we have single sign on between Moodle and PANAPTO. So all of the, all the usual accounts are automatically created. And the, that it's in itself Moodle is also linked to our student information system and time-taming systems. So creates, there's a lot of integration and automation, which makes our life fairly straightforward. Well, that part of it anyway. So this is a screenshot and example of how our PANAPTO content or ANZIN content gets displayed in Moodle. So this is a, this example is a playlist that the, or the lecture has created in PANAPTO. So, and then embedded that you can embed that playlist in a label on the Moodle page. You can also create links to individual, obviously to individual videos or embed individual videos on the page. Now, obviously one of the big changes that has been happening now is that lecturers so that our basic, our kind of reaction to the lockdown has been that our video, all our lecturers have been either pre-recording content at home on PANAPTO and publishing it in time for the time table class, or they've been live streaming to large groups using PANAPTO live streaming and answering questions through the PANAPTO discussion, or they've been live streaming using like having holding live classes on Zoom. So they've been given the option of three of those three different delivery methods and a combination and using a combination of those three methods. So using PANAPTO recorder, they can record their content from home. We've been encouraging them to create collections of short videos, usually voice over PowerPoints or they might be voice over screencasts if they're showing examples, practical examples of things, and sometimes person to camera. But we all know people like to avoid that. So they can, so they can create their content, they move them into their class folders and they can copy in, they can make copies of them if they have more than one class using the same content. And then they have this variety of ways that they can actually make it available to students. If they do nothing, except put it in the right folder, then the recording appears on the PANAPTO block automatically on the right pane of the screen. But we do encourage them to try and make it more obvious and more prominent on the middle page by embedding them or linking to them. So, onto assessments, I thought a picture of a nice empty exam hall, which is obviously what we will just be in. Two minute warning there is about. Okay, right. So just to say that we're using, we've been using Zoom for group presentations and the PANAPTO assignment folder feature for individual presentations. So that's just a screenshot of an assignments folder with all student presentations that they've been using, they can use the PANAPTO app to either record content or upload content that they record from their phone or on their computer. And I just want to talk a little bit or just show you some of the ways that this whole setup has made life so much easier for us at DBS. It's provided security and compliance for all our video content. As everything is inherited from Moodle, we don't have to worry about managing access rights to videos. The videos themselves are not downloadable and they're not forwardable, you can't forward the links to any other, so students can't forward links to any other students. We have, as well as having a very compliant and functional video player, the PANAPTO video player, we can also get closed captions, which are usually done on request, but they're very high quality. The automated ones are a bit dodged. The user experience provides a good consistent user experience either in the app or in the browser and students can make notes and bookmarks and certain parts of videos. They can speed them up and slow them down. They can create discussion posts that they can share with their peers. We have a huge amount of statistics on the usage. As far as training is concerned, because we had a head start and everything was in place, the ability, our ability to ramp it up with the COVID crisis and the lockdown was absolutely invaluable and we wouldn't have got through without all this having already been in place. We knew how to train on it. We knew how to roll it out. So all we had to do was to ramp everything up massively. The ability for lecturers to be able to manage their own content is very easy to do. Well, once they get hang of it, it's pretty easy to do. So it's made them and creating their own content very flexible. So just our future plan is to increase, I'm looking currently now at actually integrating Zoom and Moodle. This is to increase our security of access to Zoom calls to Zoom classes. So have all our students pre-registered, which will make things more secure. And we'll also have things to be able to set up breakout rooms in advance, which is things that we use a lot. Okay, sorry, just kind of rush through the end there.


Hey everyone, this is theCUBE's live coverage from Los Angeles of KubeCon and CloudNativeCon North America, 21, Lisa Martin with Dave Nicholson. We're going to be talking with the founder and CEO next of CloudNATIX, Rohit Seth, Rohit, welcome to the program. Thank you very much Lisa, pleasure to meet you. Good to meet you too. Thanks Dave, pleasure to meet you, welcome. So tell the audience about CloudNATIX, what you guys do when you were founded and what was the gap in the market that you saw that said, we need a solution. So, just to start, CloudNATIX was started in 2019 by me. And the reason for starting CloudNATIX was as I was starting to look at the cloud adoption and how enterprises are kind of almost blindly jumping on this cloud bandwagon. I started reading what are the key challenges the market is facing. And it started resonating with what I saw in Google 15 years before. When I joined Google, the first thing I noticed was of course the scale would just overwhelm anyone. But at the same time, how could they are utilized at that scale was the key that I was starting to look for. And over the next couple of months, I did all the scripting and such with my teams and found out that lower teams is the utilization of their computers, servers. And lower utilization means if you're spending a billion dollars, you're basically wasting the major portion of that. And a tech savvy company like Google, that's a state of affair, you can imagine what would be happening in other companies. So in any case, we actually now started, at that time, started working on our technology so that more groups, more business units could share the same machine in an efficient fashion. And that's what led to the invention of containers. Over the next six years, we rolled out containers across the whole Google fleet. The utilization went up at least three times, right? Fast forward 15 years and you start reading $125 billion that's spent on a cloud and $60 billion is a waste. Someone would say $90 billion is a waste. You know what, I don't care whether 60 or 90 billion is a very large number. And if tech savvy company Google couldn't fix it on its own, I bet you it's not easy problem for enterprises to fix it. So I started talking to several executives in the valley about is this problem for real or not? The worst thing that I found was not only they didn't know how bad the problem was, they actually didn't have any means to find out how bad the problem could be, right? One CFO just ran like headless chicken for about two months to figure out, okay, I know I'm spending this much but where is the spend going? So I started kind of treading those waters and I started saying, okay, visibility is the first thing that we need to provide to the end customers saying that listen, it doesn't need to be rocket science for you to figure out how much is your marketing spending, how much of your different business units. So the first line of action is basically give them the visibility that they need to make the educated business decisions about how good or how bad they are doing their operations. Once they have the visibility, the next thing is what to do if there is a waste. There are a thousand different type of VMs on AWS alone. People talk about complexity on multicloud, hybrid cloud and that's all right, but even on a single cloud you have thousand VMs, the heterogeneity of the VMs with dynamic pricing that changes every so often is a killer. And so Rohit, when you talk about driving levels of efficiency, you're not just talking about abstraction versus bare metal utilization. You're talking about even in environments that have used sort of traditional virtualization. Yes, okay, absolutely. I think all clouds run in VMs, but within VMs, sometimes you have containers, sometimes you don't have containers. If you don't have containers there is no way for you to securely have a protagonist and antagonist job running on the same machines. So containers basically came to the world just so that different applications could share the same resources in a meaningful fashion. We are basically extending that landscape to the enterprises so that that utilization benefit exists for everyone. So first sort of business for cloud analytics is basically provide them the visibility on how well or bad they are doing. The second is to give them the recommendation if you are not doing well, what to do about it, to do well. And we can actually slice and dice the data based on what is important for you. Okay, we don't tell you that these are the dimensions that you should be looking at. Of course, we have our recommendations, but we actually want you to figure out, basically do you want to look at your marketing organization or your engineering organization or your product organization to see where they are spending money and you can slice and dice that data accordingly. And we'll give you recommendations for those organizations. But now you have the visibility, now you have the recommendations, but then what, right? If you ask a Kubernetes administrator to go and apply those recommendations, I bet you the moment you have more than five clusters, which is a kind of a very ordinary thing, it'll take at least two hours just to figure out how to go from where you are to be able to log in and to be able to apply those recommendations and then changing back the CI CD pipeline and asking your developers to be cognizant about your resources next time is a month long ordeal. No one follows it. That's why those recommendations falls on deaf ears most of the time. What we do is we give you the choice. You want to apply those recommendations manually, or you can put the whole system on autopilot. In which case, once you have enough confidence in cloud analytics platform, we will actually apply those recommendations for you dynamically on the fly as your workloads are increasing or decreasing in utilization. And where are your customer conversations happening? You mentioned the CFL. You mentioned the billions in cloud waste. Where do you start having these conversations within an organization? Because clearly you mentioned marketing, ops, services. You can give them that visibility across the organization. Who are you talking to within these customers? So we start with mostly the CIOs, CTOs, VP of engineering, but it's very interesting. We say it's a waste, and I think the waste is more of an effect than a cause. The real cause is the complexity. And who is having the complexity is the DevOps and the developers. So in 99% of our customer interactions, we basically start from CIOs and CTOs, but very soon we have these conversations over a week with developers and DevOps leads also sitting in the room saying that, but this is the challenge on why I cannot do this. So what we have done is to address the real cause and waste aspect of cloud computing. We have what we call the management console through which we reduce the complexity of Kubernetes operations themselves. So think about how you can log in to a crashing pod within two minutes rather than two hours. And this is where cloud analytics start differentiating from rest of the competition out there because we provide you not only do this recommendation, do this right sizing of VM here or there, but this is how you structurally fix the issue going forward, right? I'm not going to tell you that your containers are not going to crash loop. Their failures are regular part of distributed systems. How you deal with them, how you debug them and how you get it back up and running is a core integral part of how businesses get run. That's what we provide in cloud analytics platform. A lot of this learning that we have is actually coming from our experience in hyperscalers. We have a chief architect who is also from Google. He was a T.L. of a technology called Borg. And then we have Sonic who was the head of products at Metal Sphere before. So we understand what it takes for an enterprise who's primarily coming from on-prem or even the companies that are starting from cloud to scale in cloud.  We are saying that if you're really careful about how you function on cloud, it has a value prop that can actually take you to the web-scaler heights without even blinking twice. Can you share an example of one of your favorite customer stories? Absolutely. Even by industry-only where you've really shown them tremendous value in savings? Absolutely. So a couple of discussions that happened that led like, oh, but we have already spent a team of four people trying to optimize our operations over the last year. And we said, that's fine. You know what? Our onboarding exercise takes only 20 minutes. Right? Let's do the onboarding. In about a week, we will tell you if we could save you any money or not. Put your best devops on this POV, proof of value exercise to see if it actually helped their daily life in terms of operations or not. This particular customer only has 30 clusters. So it's not very small, but it's not very big in terms of what we are seeing in the market. First thing, the maximum benefit or the cost optimization that they could do over the past year using some of the tools and using their own top-class engineering shots were about 7% to 10%. Within a week, we told them 38% without even having those engineers spend more than two hours in that week. We gave them the recommendations. Right? Another two weeks because they did not want to put it on autopilot just because it's a new platform in production. Within the next two hours, they were able to apply, I think at least close to 16 recommendations to their platform to get that 37% improvement in cost. What are some examples of recommendations? Obviously you don't want to reveal too much of the secret sauce behind the scene. But what are some classic recommendations that are made? So some of them could be as low-hanging fluid as, oh, you have not right-sized your VX, right? This is what I call, a lot of companies you would find out, oh, you have not right-sized, but for us, that's the lowest-hanging fluid. You go in and you can tell them that, whether you have right-sized that thing or not. But in Kubernetes, in particular, if you really look at how auto-scaling up and how auto-scaling down happen, and particularly when you get a global federated view of the number of clusters, that's where our secret sources start coming in. That's where we know how to load balance and how to scale vertically or how to scale horizontally within the cluster, right? Those kind of optimization we have not seen anywhere in the market so far. And that's where most of the value prop that our customers are seeing comes out. And it doesn't take too much time. I think within a week we have enough data to say that this service that has thousands of containers could benefit by about this much. And just to kind of give you, I wouldn't be able to go into the specific dollar numbers here, but we are talking in at least a $5 million-ish kind of a range of a spend for this cluster. And think about it, 37% of that, if we could save, that kind of money is a real money. That not only helps you save your bottom line, but at that level, you are actually impacting your top line of the business as well. Sure. That's our value prop that we are going to go in and completely automate. You are not going to look for DevOps that don't exist anymore to hire. One of the key challenges, I'm pretty sure that you must have already heard, 86% of businesses are not able to hire the DevOps that they want to hire. 86%. What happens when you don't have the DevOps that you want to hire? Your existing DevOps want to move as fast, cutting corners sometimes. Not because they don't know anywhere, but just because there's so much pressure to do so much more, they don't scale. When things become brittle, that's when the fragility of the system comes up. And when the demand goes up, that's when the system's break. But you're not prepared for that break just because you have not really done all the things that you would have done if you had all the time that you needed to do the right thing. It sounds like some of the microservices that are in containers that run the convention center here have just crashed. I think so. It's gone. Hopefully the background noise didn't get picked up too much. Yeah. So the time to value the ROI that you're able to deliver to customers is significant. Yes. You talked about that great customer use case. Are there any kind of news or announcements, anything that you want to kind of share here that folks can be like looking forward to? Absolutely. So two things. Even though this is KubeCon and everyone is focused on Kubernetes, Kubernetes is still only about 3% to 5% of enterprise market. We differentiate ourselves by saying that it doesn't matter whether you're running Kubernetes or you're running legacy VMs. We will come on board in your environment without you making a single line of change in less than 20 minutes. And either we give you the value prop in one week or we don't. Right? That's number one. Number two, we have a webinar coming on November 3rd. Please go to cloudnetics.com and subscribe or sign up for that webinar. Sommick and I will be presenting that webinar giving you the value proposition, going through some use cases that we have seen with our customers so far so that we can actually educate the broader audience and let them know about this beautiful platform. I think that my team has built up here. All right, cloudnetics.com Rohit, thank you for joining us, sharing with us what you're doing at CloudNetics, why you founded the company and the tremendous impact and ROI that you're able to give to your customers. We appreciate learning more about the technology. Thank you so much and I really believe that cloud is here for a long, long time. It's a trillion dollar market out there. And if we do it right, I do believe we will accelerate that option of cloud even further than what we have seen so far. Thanks a lot, Lisa. It's been a pleasure to talk to you. Nice to meet you. Thanks a lot, Dave. It's a pleasure. We want to thank you for watching for Dave Nicholson, Lisa Martin. Coming to you live from Los Angeles, we're at KubeCon CloudNativeCon North America 21. Dave and I will be right back with our next guest. Thank you.


and welcome to Hawaii Together on the Think Tech Hawaii Broadcasting Network. I'm Joe Kent, Executive Vice President of the Grassroot Institute of Hawaii, filling in for Kelly Iaquina. He's the president and CEO of our Institute. And today we're talking with Andrea Tupola who represents District One on the Honolulu Council. We wanna ask her about how the council's tackling the cost of living in Hawaii, including the cost of housing, permitting and property taxes. Aloha Council Member, thanks so much for joining me on the program. Hey, Aloha Joe, thank you so much for having me. I wanna start with your story. I understand you, we have a similar background actually. You started out as a music teacher and so did I. So how did you find your way into policy matters? Well, first off for all of you musicians out there, whether it's band or choir, I love the arts. I definitely think that it's a way that we're going to help raise this next generation as music brings people together. Well, I served a mission for my church in Venezuela from 2003 to 2004. And that's actually how I was introduced to political philosophies. You cannot be a political in Venezuela. You actually have to know who the president is. A lot of their philosophies of government affected the everyday living of the citizens there even till today. And so when I got back from Venezuela, my eyes were very opened to things that I saw that I didn't wanna see here in the United States and also things that I saw that I really had questions about. So I got involved when I got home and I ran for office for the first time in 2014. Oh, that's really interesting. So I know Venezuela has a big government sort of solution mindset to things. And that's how we have adhered to in Hawaii is there is a common thought that government is the solution to all our problems. But it sounds like you've got kind of a critical eye towards that perspective, is that right? Yeah, it was very disheartening to see in Venezuela how dependent the people were on the government. They gave free housing, free education, free medical to the lowest socioeconomic class. It made people very dependent on voting for the same person that continued these philosophies. But it also took away work ethic and it also took away the desire to try hard because the harder you tried, the more it was taken away from you. And so once I saw that happen, I knew that there needed to be a better philosophy of empowerment, of community ownership, of making decisions on a very district and city level. There are a lot of decisions being made by the largest form of government for even small towns and cities. And it just doesn't work well. It doesn't work well. And so when I came home, I was very much interested in getting involved in local government and helping to empower people, helping them to know how they can help themselves when the government should intervene, how we can affect policies and really how to keep the decision making as close to our neighborhoods and homes as possible. I see, and congratulations on your awesome social media. I've been watching, you know, on my Instagram and it's just so fun to look at your videos. You seem to be getting a lot of feedback from the community about your work and the issues you're talking about. What are people in Hawaii concerned about? Well, when I became a city council member in 2021, it was a whole new ball game for me. I was a state house rep for four years, of which the major issues that we tackle are the Department of Education, Department of Land and Natural Resources. So the topics we were covering, they were of interest, but when you become a city council member, really one of the heaviest things that we influence is the building of affordable housing, homelessness, permitting, zoning. So I learned really fast that that was actually one of the biggest problems that we had were people waiting in line to receive a permit. Now that's whether it was for a commercial project or a small fence that you needed to put up, or maybe for a residential project, or even down to solar. People were very concerned that the city really was holding up the progress of many local families being able to afford to live here. And so how did you delve into that issue? I remember you had some events, some talk stories that you had hosted. What came of that, and what did you find, and what happened? Well, after hundreds of inquiries to my office, constituents calling me with different issues that they had waiting in line for years for a permit, I thought the easiest thing to do would be to invite the director to answer questions directly to the constituents. So we hosted a town hall in June, 2022 with former director, Dean Uchida. And I really wanted clarity. And at the time, I don't think I even knew really how horrendous the problems were, but I thought, hey, why not bring the director here, have him itemized for us what he's doing? I even brought the audit that they recently did in 2017 on the department so that I could kind of like go through the audit and see if he was addressing certain issues that had already been brought up. And then I wanted there to be a question and answer to see if people who were in the room had better ideas than the ones that we had on the table, which is often the case. It's often the case that the people have really good ideas who have been in the trenches trying to fix things for the city. So that town hall was over 100 people attending, lots and lots of people really looking for answers. And it did seem like the director was interested in sharing that they wanted a new software system, that they needed more warm bodies and that he also faced a lot of pushback himself even as director. Those were the three main takeaways I got from him in that particular meeting. But I specifically asked, how many permits are we really waiting on that your department is trying to process? Well, at the time he didn't have the answer and then within two days he emailed me and said we have about 8,000. So 8,000 is a huge number, but if you quantify that into dollars, into projects, into homes, I mean, we're talking billions of dollars that are just stuck in the economy because they can't get a permit to process. And businesses too. I mean, there's a lot of businesses who try to small restaurants who are trying to open and all they're waiting for is a little permit and sometimes they wait for a year or two. So that's great. I actually remember going to that town hall and it was actually more interesting to listen to the people with the problems than the director, although Kudos to Dean Uchida that he was transparent enough to host that. But anyway, so what came next? Well, he had some suggestions. People had some suggestions, so I created a chart.  Is the mayor going to do this item? Am I as a legislator going to do this item? Is the director going to do this item? So I separated it out into responsibility and I knew that the column that had legislator, I could affect because the director and the mayor can't make law changes. We have to do that. So I started to list out what are the things that we could change in the law that would really help to alleviate the problem? Now, notwithstanding the heaviest portions do lie with the director and with the mayor, meaning the ability for them to hire people to do code review, the ability for them to spend out money to buy a new software. Those are all things that a legislator can't force. That's something the administration has to go through. So the few things that I had on my list, I thought they were doable. I listed them out. I said, let's make a bill for it. Let's push it through the council. Let's explain it to my colleagues on where we're at with it. And it's been interesting. It's been interesting because I haven't gotten a lot of pushback from any of my colleagues specifically, but I do feel like a zoning chair, Calvin say, he kind of tries to double check the things that I'm doing, double check with the director. And in the meantime, right, we got a new director. So I had to kind of run all my great ideas by her and say, hey, could we pursue these things that me and the former director were talking about? And I think these would actually be of great service to you. And she agreed. So I've been working hand in hand with her because we are trying to do things that help the department, not hurt the department or make it harder because that would be... So just to get technical, what kind of things are we talking about? Well, one of the things that passed right away because former council member Brandon Elefante was working on it was changing a notary to attestation. So we had had some issues with people having fines and liens. And so there was a law that was passed that said that every person that applies for a permit has to go get a notary statement saying that there are no fines and liens on the property. Now it's tough because the people who are applying for these permits are not the owner of the home. They do not know the history of the home. They could be the electrician, the plumber. And so many of them were having trouble even just getting through that step. Now a written attestation made it a lot easier because to the best of their knowledge, they needed to know that there was no fines and liens and then turn that in. So that changed right away with council member Elefante's bill. I started working on one for solar. It was a resolution urging them to use solar app plus, which is a federal tool that was made for each of the cities that are trying to pursue green energy goals. I made one to increase the amount of relief workers that we have, because I do believe while they hire people to work formally for the city and county of Honolulu, that we need relief workers now. I introduced one in regards to code review and that actually is done at the state side. So that resolution did pass and the bill itself was introduced at the state ledge but wasn't passed through all three readings. I introduced bill 56 that was recently passed that included more exemptions for home repairs. I have bill 18, which is about residential courtesy inspection. I wanna talk about that bill 56 because that's remarkable that that one passed and congratulations to you on that. I think you were the primary pusher of that bill. Can you talk a little bit about what that means? Sure, it was one of the easiest things for us to do was to talk through who shouldn't be in the line. So if we have a huge permitting line of 8,000 people, we may be micromanaging things that we shouldn't be doing, right? Because perhaps some of these outdated laws needed to be updated. So in the exemption list on revised ordinances of Honolulu chapter 18, it specifically states all the things you don't need a permit for. And some of those valuation amounts were old. So they were saying that, you know, with $500 or less, you didn't need a permit for licensed electrical work. I'm not totally sure what you could do with $500 or less because I just replaced like a switch in my bedroom and that was like $150. So, and it was just for the switch because it was broken. So I think what we had to look at was when were these valuation amounts set and really should that they be at a higher threshold considering that the valuation amount is for labor and materials. So we decided to add things to this exemption list like fences under six feet shouldn't need a permit. And that that's actually a handful of people, solar that needs updating because maybe you were like part of the first round of people who got solar when it first came up and now you need newer technology but you're changing nothing, you're swapping out parts and you have the exact same electrical output. Now that doesn't need a permit. Now electrical under $2,500 plumbing under $2,500 all of that doesn't need a permit. Well, can you talk about the idea of private review of plans to help ease the permitting backlog? Right now the plans are reviewed just wholly by the county. I think they have a third party review in some way but this would expand that somehow. Can you explain that? Well, that particular bill was brought forward by the administration and it's called, well, we have the third party review that you just mentioned but they're also trying to bring forward another way of doing it which would be that they allow for some code review to happen at the level of particular architect and electricians in a various group that have done certification through the city. I do believe that there is some concern, right? I feel like they really need to sharpen up the third party review because I think that introducing something that's almost similar to the third party review but not third party review is a little confusing. I actually just read an email this morning because the department's changing rules for third party reviewers. Now let's be clear that when you're a third party reviewer that you have commercial and you have private. Residential and so there are people that are specifically doing commercial review and people that are doing specifically residential review. The third party reviewers are required to get a license, required to do certification tests through the city, required to have X amount of millions of dollars of insurance and required to recertify every few years. So I think for the city they really just need to, I think, clean up their administrative rules and then decide what route they're going because I think the third party review obviously got a lot of backlash when people went to jail over it, right? It was one third party reviewer and then it was a handful of people working in DPP that were rubber stamping things, not looking at things and basically letting it push through. So I think that that is part of the suggestion the city has to expedite things but it has been a source of controversy because HGEA does feel like that is a way for the city to skip over hiring the amount of workers that they really need. And I would say that we can't downplay the fact that no matter what we're doing, we need more workers. Yeah, that's interesting. There's an interesting theme going on when it comes to from the outside observer if the department of public or permitting does it, then there's a potential that people might do bad things and go to jail. At the same time, if third party reviewers do it, there's a potential that people might do bad things and go to jail. And so it's kind of like who at the end of the day is watching things. Who are we gonna trust to watch things and how does incentives play a role in all of this? So that's a really complicated question. How do you view those types of question about who ultimately should watch the watchers? Well, I think that no matter where you go, there's gonna be people that are trying to game the system. Now that's with permitting. That's with game rooms. That's with anything that you have in the community where there's kind of a gray area, right? So there's always going to be people that need to be checked ethically to determine whether or not they are doing the right or the wrong thing. I do not think that because one person does the wrong thing that now all of a sudden this whole system doesn't work, right? So we have a bad actor and now we can't just say, oh, well, all of DPP is now dysfunctional. Okay, the one person that did the unethical thing that went to prison, that person needs to be dealt with, the people that were in that circle or that thought that that was okay, needs to be dealt with and then we need to continue to move forward. So I think it's an ongoing evaluation process of the work that's being done there and of the workers that are in that department, right? Is both of those checks need to be continuously happening? I wanna switch to taxes and property taxes. Hawaii's property tax assessments have been soaring this year. And, but it looks like the council is looking at a few measures that might help clap or exempt or help give some at least relief from these, from pushing property owners off the tax cliff, so to speak. So how do you view some of those proposals and what proposals might we be seeing? Proposals in regards to pushing people off the tax cliff, is that what you just said? Yeah, sorry. So there's, for example, bill 42 would put a cap on those assessments rising and then you've got bill 34, which might increase the standard home exemption. And so there's caps, exemptions and things like that. When it comes to Hawaii's rising property taxes, it looks like the city has some kind of initiative to keep those taxes at bay. Well, there are handfuls and handfuls of proposals regarding property tax assessments. And I've actually started my own spreadsheet of it internally in my office because it is kind of difficult to keep track of what all of them do and what classes of people they affect and how much each of the bills would potentially cost the city. And lastly, how much money it would actually save taxpayers. So in each of those columns that I've created, I've tried to itemize that out because I think as we push forward with all of these proposals, one, we have to figure out economically and feasibly can the city do that? Or are we going to be affecting other things? Secondly, is we need to figure out what is the most important class tax base that needs the most help? Is it the 80 and older? Is it the 60 and older? Is it the low income? Because there are a lot of people that need help with the rising cost of assessed property values and subsequently the rising cost of property taxes. So unfortunately, no one's kind of taking like more of a priority order to it, which I think would help all of us to understand like, hey, we're going to start with the kupuna first or hey, we're going to start with like the those making under 20,000 first, whatever we decide to do, I think that that needs to be dealt with first. And then you need to kind of look at, okay, how much does that affect the tax base? How do we compensate for that by having other city things that will now start to pay for themselves? So I think that that's my concern, but my personal thought, which is way past what people are doing was truth and taxation. I believe that truth and taxation is a solid concept. It's being done in four to five different states. I know that currently Texas has it, Utah has it, Tennessee has it, Kansas has it. And I think another Northwestern state, but the idea here is that the base of taxes being collected for property, property taxes stays the same. So what they're saying is, okay, if we collect 50 billion for property taxes in X city, then every year as valuations go up and down, we're still just going to collect 50 billion because that's what we need to balance our budget, right? And so what do they do? When the valuation starts to rise and they start to collect more and more money, they have a public hearing in the cities where more money was collected and then they determined that they're going to bring down property taxes so that the base amount is basically neutral. It's always the 50 billion no matter what happens. Now, I know that's a really hard pill for the city to swallow, but I think the first step that they take is not hard to swallow, which is annual public hearings just about property taxes. I say that's not hard to do. I see, yeah, I think in Colorado, they actually have a taxpayer bill of rights so that if they ever want to raise taxes, it has to go to a vote of the people. And because of that, that's kept a leash on taxes in Colorado. Now, that's an interesting idea about truth and taxation. And along with taxation, we have city leaders, excuse me, rail officials now talking about the potential to extend taxes that were once temporary for the operational costs or the future building of the rail. I don't know if everyone is jumping into the conversation yet. We only hear basically the officials talking about it, but do you have any thoughts about rail? Yes, we're building it. It's kind of done and they've shaved off a couple billion, which is good because we're saving costs. At the same time, they're talking about extending the rail going beyond and going beyond, of course, the taxation that we have right now too. Any thoughts there? Yeah, I do think that the biggest thing the city can do is try to figure out where and how they can bring in more income that's not tax related. We own the Blaisdell, we own the Shell, we own the Honolulu Zoo. We have things that definitely could generate more income than they're generating, but we don't. We have properties that could have solar. We have properties that could have energy savings. So I know they're taking some steps towards that, but when you talk about every department in and of itself, what we're saying is we need X amount of money from taxpayers so that we can do X amount of things for you, right? So if we need to do X amount of things, then all we have to say is, okay, how do we make it where each department actually is self-sufficient, where they generate enough revenue that they don't need tax dollars to operate? Now, that's where you become smarter in how you run the government is because then you're not constantly saying, well, we're not totally sure we might have to extend that tax because we're not sure if every part of the government, say for example, just the Department of Enterprise Services becomes solving, meaning like every year they don't need taxes to operate because they bring in money from the Shell, they bring in concerts at the zoo, they bring in money from the Blaisdell, then that department doesn't need any funding. If DPP started to run private activity bonds and give out loans for people doing affordable housing off of the bond cap that we are allowed in the city, maybe DPP doesn't need any funding anymore because they become solving. So I think for me, that'd be a better way to approach the funds that we have in the city and then later down the line, determine whether or not those funds can actually help the Braille instead of us ever, ever having to talk about more taxes. You showed some fiscal restraint when it came to the salary hikes at the council recently and the salary hikes which passed by the way, but can you talk a little bit about the reason, the reasoning that you had behind trying to advocate for not hiking the salary so much? You know in a time where people are very concerned that the rail just opened, we don't have enough money, we have other areas of the city where we're deficient, we don't have enough workers, we are short almost 400 police officers. It's a time where people really feel like this is not when raises should be discussed and this is not when money should be extended to the administration or to the leaders of the city and county when we have so much deficit. I also believe that many of the members of the community spoke out in the salary commission meetings as well as in our city council meetings and really those are our bosses. So I don't work for the city and county of Honolulu, I work for my constituents, they are who elect me. So if there is disciplinary action for me, I am disciplined by either recall or if I don't win an election. So I think that's where I really was like, we really need to be listening to our bosses who really are asking us to be more mindful and moderate. A lot of people were like, we're fine with the salary increase, not 64%. So looking into the future, what kind of issues and policies and things are you looking at tackling? Well, I definitely want to pursue and continue down the path of expediting and making more efficient the department of planning and permitting. Although we've had a few wins, we have lots and lots and lots of more work that we have to do in that department. I also think that on the property tax side, I do hope we can get at least an annual public hearing with the department of budget and fiscal services, even just going over how to do your home exemption, what type of programs we already have allowable and our pass that you can apply for so that you don't have as high of a property tax. So I do really openly advocate for more transparency in what we're doing, even if it's the 50th time we've said it. There are still people that are gonna say, I've never heard of that before. So I don't see any harm in us continuing to pursue as many public and transparent conversations as possible. Well, thanks. I know just watching your videos on Instagram and social media, it seems to me that you're trying to do two things. One is legislate and the other is educate. And education is part of it too. Also another thing I noticed is you trying rolling up your sleeves and not your sleeves, but other people's sleeves too to try to solve the problems. Yes, those are among my favorite things to do, empowering the community. And as a former educator, and I have three degrees in music education, it's a huge thing for me is that one day when I'm not here, I hope that I have educated the community enough that they're able to help themselves and know more about this government that really affects the quality of our lives. So thank you so much for allowing me to share more about what I'm doing at the city. Thanks so much for joining us, Andrea. And thank you all for watching. It's Joe Kent at the Grass Street Institute of Hawaii for Hawaii Together. Thanks so much to Think Tech Aloha. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please click the like and subscribe button on YouTube. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn, check out our website, thinktechawaii.com. Mahalo.


I am Sumitra, I am the introduction of C programming. It is basic programming language. It was very useful for us to improve our knowledge in C and this is very useful for us to learn more language, placement orientation. Where did you learn about this course? In our college, they said everything about this and they gave more practice and it was very helpful for us. Finally, we did our exam.