OK, everybody, we're going to talk about quantum. Quantum is the new technology that we're actually starting to pursue. We actually were doing to let you guys know we formed a little hidden away quantum group about a year ago. We decided that it was the technology we wanted to progress with. And we said, we need to start working with this at the Air Force level. And so we got together. And this was after we had taken, as I said, CTO, we took trips to California and talked to D-Wave a couple of times. And we talked to Google, and we talked to several other people about what we were doing. And so we said, we will get together and figure out how we're going to progress, going down a quantum path, in a way that we can actually make sense of it. So basically, and this is history behind it, but let's talk about something else first. We basically were working with AFRL. We work with Air Force University, AFET, the Academy, and we decided to get together and say, what could we actually do in terms of quantum as we progress? Now, this is just a couple of slides on refresher because of terminology issues that we get into immediately when we start talking about quantum. The history behind quantum is basically that, and my deputy used to be a quantum chemist, and she used to correct me all the time. So I make a mistake. Don't worry about it. I'm used to being corrected by my quantum chemist. And she still works with me, but not as my deputy. So I still talk to her a lot. Basically, classic physics is a Newtonian model. And Maxwell's Law of Electromagnetics, and they found there were three use cases where they couldn't use these to actually explain an effect. And basically, the effect was, the first one was a black box was it could emit an infinite amount of energy when it absorbed at all frequencies. However, it didn't work that way. Also, the next one was the number of electrons energy emitted when ultraviolet light is shown on a metal surface was dependent upon the intensity of light. That didn't work either. And the last was classical engineering theory. You can explain the optical emission. These three caused the issue to occur that they had to figure out another method of doing things. And that's where it came out to be that, basically, light behaves both as a particle and as a wave. Now, if you go to everyone to classical physics or physics knew, you find that this is the prevailing theory across the world, that light is both a wave and that's what they teach. They never teach the background of how they got to that and how they got to the quantum piece of it. Oops, let's try this. OK, the quantum term superposition is basically two different states exist at the same time. This is how quantum basically work. It says that it can be in every state at the same time. And that's some of the basis for some of the computing processing that we have right now is they believe that what happens is I can see every possible combination of a particular optimization at one point in time. Then I have to download those results out. Same with entanglement and qubits. Cubits is a quantity measure. And there's particles and the quantum information. And this basically, the theory is that I can see, if I push something through a quantum, I can see both all states that possible while it's working. And we'll go back to this one again per second. I don't want to give you a classical theory class here, but OK, the real issue is the optimization piece. What we get out of it is classical computers work in a binary manner. Quantum computers are not limited to two choices. Quantum has every possible combination at the same time. And so this supports instantaneous optimization problems. And that's where most of the research has been. And obviously some of them, the problem spaces has been in decryption. This is the concern that everybody's had already, because decryption is a factoring problem. So if I can know all possible combinations instantaneously from my factoring, I can break encryption codes. And this is where it's first started off, is why we have to go to quantum. Because if we don't go to quantum, the enemy is going to go there and decrypt everything we've had for the last 25 years. Now, having said that, the idea is, what are the quantum encryption algorithms can we also build that will be quantum decrypting proof? And so we'll get into that some of the theories behind it. Also, we were stuck with an environment where the microprocessors are reaching their maximal mutations right now. We've done stacks of processors on top of each other and everything else. And now we're getting down to the point where everything's going to be too small and they're going to get into quantum effects.  So we have to figure out another way of doing things. And that's where we're going to break out into, what are we going to start doing next? Where are we? No, this way. And I want to show this one, basically. This is from a Gartner. Gartner basically says, quantum computing spans all the technology spaces we have. These are from the emerging technology pieces. And we've talked about, if you were 5G meeting, we talked about autonomous things. We talked about, yeah, we haven't talked about age-driven stuff, but that's there, too, digital twins, immersive experience, blockchain. Quantum is going to surpass everything. It's going to be across the board for the technologies you're going to have to have. And it'll actually support most of those technologies except for possibly blockchain. But the research is for the AI side as well as most of the other ones tell us that quantum is going to be the supporting element that we're going to go forward with. And we'll get into some of these other ones. Right now, we're working on a draft strategy. It's in draft right now. We'll probably release it in a couple of weeks. And the strategy was built upon talking with the community that we started with. What things we want to actually forward in quantum. It was basically, it's through sensing. Sensing is one area. Communication is computing. Material development education. We'll get into each of those areas as to what we mean by that. But the goal, basically, for the strategies to provide near-instantaneous sensing, alternative decision development, and secure activation of decisive actions that can tend to multi-domain mission operations. That's a lot to say. But basically, it boils down to how fast can I make decisions in a multi-domain operation? And how fast can I actually affect them? Okay. First objective. Objective in the strategy is for sensing. Developed capability to provide precise location and imaging data to detect enemy targets and navigation support for friendly aircraft. Some of the areas are really radar and imaging. This is something that's been going on for a while. That, the theory is that I can send quantum beams out and I can determine what comes back if I detect an object or not. I could also detect its size. I can detect its shape. I can detect everything about the object. So stealth goes away as a defensive mechanism. Because I'm not depending upon absorbing radar anymore. Quantum does not be absorbed. It detects. So it bounces back. And I can see the sense of the same thing at the same time. Same thing with the chemical biological radiation, nuclear explosive issues. How fast can I detect these things? So research is going into what quantum technologies can we actually do that? Navigation support is kind of interesting because we've tried to fix P and T for a while now. So the new philosophy is basically we're going to be able to show that we can have quantum gyroscopes, accelerators, field detectors and things. Based upon quantum being fast, I can determine where I am based on some other detector and measurements. So if I'm someplace over here and I can detect, I can determine how far away from something right away. I know that something exists. And so the philosophy is I can do this in a really quick manner. I can do this so I can detect everything I need to do to determine where I am. This has been one of the keystones of some research has already been done on this. In fact, AFRL has done some of this already. So this is something that theoretically is where we can go right now if we had enough technology. And I'm losing my voice again. So hang on there. Communications. Quantum key distribution is a big deal. We've actually talked to a startup company that is actually starting to do this on an electric grid right now. And we are trying to put them into the small business and innovation research fund to actually do this for us, to do some more testing in our power grids and they work with the Department of Energy. It basically says keep generating random numbers and keys and keeping them absorbing them. And so if you detect an auto sequence issue, you will be able to detect that you have been attacked or somebody else that grabbed your information. Likewise, do this at terrestrial. We believe that it can be done in between SATCOM and everything else in free space, optics. And so the research is being done in that area as well right now. So it progressed. This is one of the major areas we're gonna go forward with. Computing. Computing is kind of interesting. The other two are pretty specialized areas. Computing means general computing. And it depends on the algorithm or the process you want. Now usually you talk about two types of machines. The general annealing architecture. And this is just because it's interesting because quantum computers are not like binaries. They're not the same. When we talk about qubits, across all the processors, all the computers that we have, everyone defines a qubit slightly differently, but also the same. For instance, D-Wave has 1000 qubits, IBM has 50. They theoretically do the same thing. It's a question of how you put them together and how you manipulate them to get through any same result. The general annealing architecture is for optimization. Basically it comes out to be a, if you like a topological map that you input into the system and say basically show me the maximum or show me the minimum from the topological map. And so it's an optimization problem. The classic optimization problem maybe does, except that it could be instantaneously solved. Same with the gate architecture. The gate architecture looks like a computer processor except it's pews the outputs through like gates to determine and or gates or whatever like electrical. It comes out with a result at the end. And so you find the two different philosophies of how to do it. And for instance, the gate is like for material science is being utilized right now, as well as material development, determine the atomic structure of various things. So you see those architectures out there. So they're kind of like specializing, but they're all based upon the same problem space of how to look at a qubit and how to determine all possible combinations of that qubit at the same time. And when you see these computers, and I think that's the IBM computer. You don't see them like that. You see them in this round case. It looks like a round case. It looks like a water heater. And the problem with the computer chip, which is really usually way at the bottom, is that most of the processing tape, most of the case is used to cool it to near zero, near zero Kelvin. And you need to cool it all the time. And so most of it is just cooling capacity as opposed to anything else, as opposed to the actual chip. Chip sizes are like chip sizes, real chip sizes. And so you think this little box, this little thing is sitting there with wires attached to it. And you have this huge chamber above it, which is basically all the cooling that you need to do it. And they usually cool in layers. They cool out or they keep on cooling down all over and lower until they get to the right temperature. And it's near zero degrees Kelvin, which is pretty cold. And, but it's not zero degrees Kelvin. They found it doesn't work at zero degrees Kelvin. It has to be like plus two. Dennis Muay. Also there's a problem with quantum error. Quantum error occurs because it's hard to maintain the quantum state for a long period of time. And we're not talking like taking pico seconds, a long period of time. The reason is because there's outside influences. Anything that comes from the outside, cosmic particles, whatever can affect the quantum. And so the way they have to do this, they have to push out. You'll see most of these computers are in very stable environments where there's no tremors. They're encased, enclosed, and various protective shielding, whatever. And that's basically the reason why, because they have to decrease the quantum error. And research is being done to actually, how many qubits you need to actually decrease the cubic error is an issue. The other piece of this is that half of these, all of them as far as we know, are connected to another computer because what happens is like for D-Wave, they generate 30 billion instances in an instant.  This happens so fast that 30 billion instances roll out and you take the minimum or the maximum of those 30 billions. Because they're still trying to figure out how they can narrow it down to one instance coming out that is correct, the final real correct value. This can't do that yet because of the error quality that you get when you start implementing it. So this is the way to get rid of some of the error in the system. Obviously for capability, cryptography is a big deal. Also to come with backwards, the quantum resistant encryption capability also. So we're looking at those two areas as well. Material development, what you really wanna do is in this case, you wanna model it and replicate chemical reactions. And this is where my deputy was really involved. She loves this. They can actually model true chemicals into their energy states. And when you determine the energy state of the materials, you can affect understanding what the materials do and you can change the energy state, which will affect the material. And so, like for instance, medical research, there's a lot of issues occurring with protein folding. Which you can do with this is you can actually unfold the proteins in the quantum state and then you can determine whatever possible projection of protein to drug combination you can have and do the effect. So it's a simulation of the result. And research is being done in that right now. Understand, this is the new technology, what you wanna do with it. Education, of course, you wanna provide an environment for them to learn quantum effects and how they should do programming. Programming is a little weird in these environments. Let's just say that's an understatement. The IBM one, which is like, if it's 2,000 cubic, it expects a string of 2,000 ones and zeros. And basically what they're doing is they're laying on a topology map of what you think should go up and down in the equations. Just like a real optimization problem. The IBM one is still a different. They're doing gates and so they wanna look like electrical structure or whatever, how you actually do this. And in or gates and things like that and some other combinations thereof. So what you get is two different models of how to program. Now they all wanna come out with a single programming interface. Which is interesting, which I don't know if they can achieve that, but that's the end goal is interface. But right now they're using all sorts of tools. Someone's math lab, they've kind of used math lab to actually come out with math problems and they automatically push it into the right format for the particular quantum computer. There also are trying various other tool sets that actually support what they wanna do, but this is something new. So programming is not like what you think programming is. Programming is totally different in this environment. And that's one of the drawbacks of this is because since it's totally different, you have to train people totally different to think about this. This is not your standard, if that else clause issue. This is a, for chemistry, it's putting in the chemical equation in such a way that you can actually pull out the proton-photon electronic capabilities and show that. This is very messy, but it does work. Does work to certain degree and they're getting much better at this right now. So we've talked about providing opportunities for programming, programming quotes, I should say. Using the EBE program and everything else to try to inject Airman into various organizations that are currently trying to do computing which is basically, right now, D-Wave, Regati, IBM, as we go forward. And we also talk about developing a quantum education center. We have liaisons to various quantum hubs as well as research institutes. So that's all part of the strategy of how we're gonna go forward with it. Current efforts, which is what we're doing right now, we've established groups across, we've established groups across all the disciplines. We've been scrusting quantum. We're gonna have a face-to-face meeting again next month to try to iron out some of the difficulties and try to figure out how we're gonna go forward with it. We're instrumenting, we're gonna finish the quantum strategy. We have telecoms every other week with a little group. We want some other interesting people to join. What we're trying to do is we're trying to go forward. We now developed, or AFL, is developing a relationship with IBM and they'll have the next number of hours of quantum computing capability as well as some resources for IBM. We have a small business, Innovative Research Grant with, yes, with Regotti. And we're gonna have to them, actually, we talked to them last Friday. They're gonna give us, oh, X number of licenses to start using their computer as well. They're actually gonna want us to, they want to train our people, they want to have real-world problems. And they want volunteers from you guys. This is something else we're gonna have to get into. So if the issue is, you know, if you wanna be involved in quantum computing, this is probably the time and place to start with. We're trying to develop, we may actually go to the AI side, the AI cross-functional team actually had a request out for problems to come in. And we got almost 100 plus problems coming in. We may select some of those to go forward with to say, maybe this should be some of the quantum research because machine learning is one of the big things for Regotti, machine learning and optimization. Also mechanical, also materials. So it's a question of how you wanna progress and when everybody, we wanna be able to show that it is applicable to real Air Force missions as opposed to just the theoretical basis. So really, we want participation from everybody. We really need it. We really need, if you have a good idea, if you have a problem that you believe needs to have a quantum computer or wants to be tried for a quantum computer, let us know because we really do want to do this. And it's an important step in our evolution with the strategy and everything else we're trying to do. Because we are gonna start pushing across of the rest of the Air Force. The AI cell, basically, we're trying to coordinate this a little better from the headquarters side. And so we are looking at the AI tasking as well and seeing how we can mesh the two together to some degree for some of the problem spaces. And as we get better and better, we'll figure out how we're going to actually allocate the licenses for training for the IBM side and how we're gonna actually do it for the Regali side. The guy side, since it's a small business innovation, it's gonna be a little bit different because their end goal to get out of their cyber is to actually train us, give us training, actually do problem spaces with us and come out with some results that make sense. IBM is just, here's my box, here's the computing capability.  We'll probably have the same arrangement of D-Wave. D-Wave wants, I'll tell you, all of them want to have people work on their computers because they want to figure out the best way of programming their computers. So it's like crowdsourcing, how do you compute a D-Wave? How do you, it's like crowdsourcing, how do you compute an Aquantum computer is what it's really coming out to be because they're trying to find out the methods and which ones are best for which capabilities. And so that's why they want our support and everybody else's. And we believe that we have to go forward with this pretty quickly because as technology is changing and we find that our enemies, let us say, are working well in this area, that we have to be able to catch up at least in a certain way and we want to be able to grab whatever quantum computers we have and use them for the best possible missions that we have available. Okay, we want to increase our working group. We really want people are interested in this because it's gonna take a lot of work from our side. It's not trivial to set up a new strategy, set up a new group and start doing this. So if you're interested, let us know because we'll try to play in. I mean, we're using this Gmail, US Air Force, CITO, at gmail.com. So send in information and requests or whatever. If you want part of the quantum group, we can bring you into the quantum group. That's really easy. If you want to be part of the experimentation, let us know. If you need good ideas and we really need some good ideas. So, because we want to make sure that the money we're investing in regati and it's not an instant fund because they're also getting public, they're also getting commercial support to do the job with us. It's not the normal Sibbers. It's like three times the normal Sibber. So it is a lot of money that's being spent to support this towards effort. It's not Air Force money either. It's capital venture capital funds as well because they want to be able to actually sell the product. And so that's what you see a lot, is that the product owners like to spend some R&D money to support whatever they're doing. This is one of the ways they're doing it. And I think that's all I got. Far lose my voice here. Yes, any questions? Problems, queries. Yes, okay. Sorry guys, I'm gonna lose my voice today. Mentor information to us. We'll come back and talk to you. We have to get your commander to agree to it. Which is always part of the hardest deal. But enough emphasis we could put on it. We'll try to figure that out. And it's a question of what do you want to do? I mean being part of the group is interesting but our meetings are pretty short basically trying to figure out when we're gonna meet with each other and then look at what research we're gonna start working on. That's pretty much what the meetings are. If you wanna participate in actually doing the stuff then it's more interesting. Then we get into more detailed conversations as to what we want to do and where you can do this and everything else associated with it. And as we progress with both IBM and Regatti, we'll progress this even. We'll get better process established of how we want to do this. We know that the requests for as we have more requests then we have to vet the request and determine if we have the capabilities to actually support it. And then as we will figure this out. But this is something we're trying to do with the AI side as well. It's up a little bit farther with the AI side because we had requests in to do AI that was gonna work with MIT. However, there's only, we can only have 10 projects work with MIT. And so we got 150 requests. So as we go through that, the same thing with this. This is gonna be the same thing or we go back to the AI side and say, hey, what request you have that may be compatible with quantum capabilities. Other questions? Discussion, problems? How's your day been today? I'm losing my voice. So you can know my hot days today. Yes? We can have discussions about it, yes. I mean, we're trying to get a Ciber with one already for the quantum key management. We were looking for other people too that we would actually do some arrangement with. Either a testing agreement, a crater, maybe a Ciber. Yes? No? Okay, I'll tell you. My deputy would say, we want a chemist. So I don't think that the qualification matters so much. I mean, the interest because it's the wide enough field. It's interesting because it's not programming. That's the key here. It's not just programming. It's something totally different. And that's why we need to have the education different than what you normally go to. And so the fields are open.  As well as common. But if you have an interest in it, it's more important now than anything else because of the areas that you want to get into. Because we are learning about this.  It's, you know, Python code. You know, if you're coded enough, you can code in Python. Let's put it that way. I mean, not be good, but you can code in Python. Come out with stuff. This is not that. This is totally different. Anything else to anybody? Okay, nothing else. Thank you. Sure presentation.


All right, thank you all for coming. This should be fun. It is really an honor to be here. My talk is titled, Getting Out of Furskir, Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi's Journey with Peorel Cloud Foundry. Quick word about myself. I'm Lakshman Diwakar. Everyone calls me LD, working as a platform architect at the Alliance. Up here on stage with me is Didi Esan. Yes, hello, hello everybody. I'm Didi Burkhalter. I'm working as what we call platform architect at Pivotal and working closely with the Renault-Nissan team for a while now. So happy to be there on stage, having the story described for you. Cool, thank you. A bit of context before we move into our journey with the Cloud Foundry. Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi is a Franco-Japanese strategic partnership between the automobile manufacturer Renault from France and Nissan-Mitsubishi from Japan. We are the world's largest automotive group and a global leader when it comes to electric vehicles. Last year, one out of nine vehicles sold worldwide, where by the Alliance. Under the Alliance, I work for the connected vehicles department.  Under the department, we actually focus on the following categories. We provide emergency calls, provide better routes and an enjoyable journey, discover the new ways to travel, enhance the safety and security of the car. We actually calculate the car insurance based on how you drive. And finally, the remote services where you can use your mobile app to remotely invoke functions in the car. And this is a very high-level overview of the connected cloud, which is powered by the Pivotal Cloud Foundry. As you can see there, the module within the car is connected to the cloud and all the three companies of the Alliance consume this cloud and also its B2B partners and the backend applications of the mobile app and various other interesting applications are deployed on this connected cloud. Here are some of the production applications that are running on the Cloud Foundry. On the left is a Nissan Leaf, which is the best-selling electric car. And on the top right is a mobile app, which makes it easy to remotely start your car or other vehicle functions, like turning on your air condition, checking the battery status. We also have an Alexa skill that allows you to use your voice to remotely invoke functions in your car. At the R&M Alliance, they've been running Pivotal Cloud Foundry for about one and a half years now. People here would have heard about the two-pesa team rule by Jeff Bezos. Any team that is solving a problem should be fed by two pizzas at the lunch. That is about six to eight people in a team. Having said, we are a one and a half-pesa team. My colleagues, my manager Fukuda-san and a lot of you are here in the room, and we're actually split into two regions, Paris and Tokyo. And we still have room for awesome people. We have seven foundations that span across three regions in the world, and we have 100-plus developers that innovate on the platform, and a bunch of applications related to connected services are deployed. But all these one and a half years were not as easy as it looks. There were days where we would walk in and look at each other and say what we were thinking. So this is a compilation of lessons we learned in running Pivotal Cloud Foundry. So this will be useful for people who are looking to start on Cloud Foundry or people who might already be running Cloud Foundry. And today, I present to you our journey with the Cloud Foundry. We know that the Cloud Foundry community is obsessed with this 12-factor app. And DDS-san here in the States came up with this idea that let's explain the journey in 12 steps. And being in the car industry, I thought let's explain these 12 steps as the road trip. Like every journey, we also face the hardships and I've represented these hardships as rocks here so that you don't have to repeat it. And with that, I hand over it to the DDS-san. Okay, thanks, DDS-san. So first step is the discovery phase. So the team started, I would say, two years ago and having no team, having no platform. So the head of the team at this time had to choose a partner that is being able to help this new team to build this platform. So having a partner that has worldwide coverage and having also an expertise and references in the automotive market. So it was still pivotal. And also to bring this market to life, there is some criteria that the solution chosen at this time have to provide. It's a polyglot platform. So polyglot means providing the capacity to run on multiple clouds, so major clouds, so major IS like AWS, GCP or Azure. Having the capacity to provide liberty to developers with multiple type of languages, what we call having the support with build packs. And also with the fact that the CloudFondry is an open source solution and providing multiple layers of abstraction not having this kind of vendor locking constraints. After you have chosen the solution, after you have chosen the partner, you have to do an installation. So there is a small roadblock, but I would say installation is always easy or should be always easy. So we decided to onboard the developer team, so provide the better developer experience and boarding the team on PWS, so the public solution from Pivotal. Then we started to install the solution on the Azure resource group from ICMS, from Bruno Nisan. And we did, of course, a lot of manual installation. We were using the Cloud CLI and we were also using, for example, templates but it appears that this kind of installation and update and upgrade of the platform was very time consuming. So it took at least, for example, two to three days to have a complete installation. So this was not sustainable for the team. So we decided to go to some very automated solution to be able to deploy the same solution across multiple geos. And for having less snowflakes and having better efficiency from the operation point of view. And LDSAN will come back on this automation, I mean capacities and practices, good practices. Yeah, perfect. I hand over to Mr. Adisan. Thank you, thank you, LDSAN. And the next on is practice agile. We are a single team but split geographically into two different time zones. Agile and the virtual tools are the things that unites us. So most of agile ceremonies were adopted from the Pivotal dojo. As Dom Andrews here in the room said that it's not the technology problem. That's a solved problem. So the problem is the process of developing a product. And that's completely true. Dojo is an onboarding program where Pivotal engineers pair with you to help install and educate the platform. And that's where we learned the art of pair programming. And we try to pair as often as possible so that which increases the team velocity and reduce the break and breaks the knowledge silos. One of the important parts of the product development is the feedback. User interviews were helpful to actually understand the pain points of developers, the feedbacks and the suggestions. And we later used those feedbacks to prioritize our backlogs. Everyone in the team is always excited about one event which is retrospective. This is really a fun event and it helps to keep the team more transparent. And we are really excited to have our second dojo right after the summit. So the next one is start small. If you're a small team like us, you might not have the experience and the resources to manage both the application service and the data service, like the Redis, RabbitMQ and the other services. So it is very difficult to start and juggle all the problems at the once. It is better to start small and slowly expand. Earlier in the talk, I was telling you that we were running Pivotal Cloud Foundry and the great thing about Pivotal is that they have great data services that integrate with the platform. And we hope at one point of time in the future, we'll build our own service and integrate that to the platform, the open. Even before we had our stable platform, we actually introduced Pivotal web services to the developers. The connected service department is a brand new under the Alliance and once that we have decided to use Cloud Foundry, we actually introduced Pivotal web service to the developers. While the developers get accustomed to the Cloud Foundry environment, we were working on and building our own foundation. This was a pretty good move as we took our own one to two month to bootstrap our own foundation and onboard the developers. And this concept applies same to the new data service. When developers request you a new data service, try to deploy a minimum viable version of that. Allow the developers to play with it and collect weekly or bi-weekly feedbacks and use those feedbacks to prioritize the features and improve it. Trust me, this really saves time both for platform operators and the developers, bridging the gap. This was a hard lesson. So we soon realized that developers were not completely leveraging the platform and the services. And we found that updating the documentation is not solving the problem. So we tried to organize some meetings where some developers showed up, but many didn't because they had different priorities. And we tried to organize something called Lunch and Learn where we offered free lunch to encourage attendance and involvement. And to the surprise, many attendees turned out when compared to the previous meetings. In fact, this was introduced as part of the dojo and from that, we tried to organize at least one Lunch and Learn per month where we actually discuss about the platform updates and do some demos. And earlier in the talk, I told you that we were a small team and developers were expanding rapidly. New teams like integration and testing started to appear and they use Cloud Foundry, but many didn't knew the team behind the platform. So that was the time we decided to brand our own team. This happened at the dojo and everyone came up with interesting names. But finally we settled with Kinja, which means that Camry owned, which is our cloud platform and all the platform engineers had considered us ninjas and that's why we have Kinja. So we started wearing t-shirts like this and changing our logos in the slack. So people started noticing us. So they were asking, what is this Kinja? What is this new swag? So we definitely got some traction there. And moving on to the communication. Communication and enterprise is terrible, isn't it? So slack is the main mode of communication, which is very quick and efficient to answer the questions. So we had our own slack channels where developers posed the questions and we tried to answer as fast as possible. Moving on to the next one, automate the platform. This is my favorite topic. When it comes to the platform, we need to completely remove all the manual tasks and make it 100% automated. The sequence starts at the pivotal network. Any updates or patches comes to the pivotal network, which triggers the whole update. Initially, the update is applied to the Sandbox Foundation, which is in the Europe. And our automated smoke test kicks in and which tests the complete platform. And if the smoke test passes, it is then applied to the staging foundations, which is in different regions. And then, only if the smoking test, a smoke test of the staging passes, it is actually applied to the production foundations. So you can see that the updates are applied to the production foundation only after two layers of testing. So this makes sure that the updates does not break the foundation. And this is the success scenario and what happens when it fails. So it fails. So there is something wrong in the pipeline and have you been drinking? Hard, no. No, we don't drink at Japan. So there comes the platform operator. I wish I'm that cool like the guy over there, but that's not me. And this is me. And I go fix the pipeline and the cycle continues. And this whole automation is powered by concourse. We make sure that the patches are applied to all our foundations within a day or two. So this is the automated platform where we make sure that the patches reach all the foundations. And we are 100% sure that any technical depth is available there. And moving on to the next one, eliminating the toil. This is becoming a buzzword in the Asari world. According to the Google Asari book, toil is some work that you do more than three to four times are the work that takes hours and hours of your day. In the cloud foundry, I think we have some toil, like adding and removing a user, managing the orgs and the spaces. You'd be really working on a special feature in the platform and you'll be bugged by the developers asking you to add them to a specific space and a specific org. That was really frustrating. And we came across this tool called CF management, which automates this toil with the help of concourse and a git repository. And this not only automates the toil, but we also have a single source of truth about the orgs, spaces, and the developers underneath them. Moving on to the next one, which is hard and insecure. Every enterprise has a big security team, even we had it. So before you launch an application, you have to pass the security test. So did we. And the security team analyzed the platform, did some penetration testing, and created a bunch of tickets related to the security policies of the platform. Going through the tickets and sending messages back and forth was not efficient and this was actually delaying the release date. So we realized that this setup was not working anymore and we tried to create a virtual platform team with a security expert where the security expert passed with the platform engineers to actually increase and enforce the security to the platform. And this virtual platform team setup was way better than the previous setup. And one good takeaway is that, try to involve the security team as early as possible so that you can enforce all the security policies right from the start. And the next one is testing. We know that the Cloud Foundry comes with a default smoke test. We make sure that we run the smoke test after every updates. Even though the smoke test was successful, we were getting compliance from the developers that they were not able to connect to a particular service or the application could not restart. So when we looked into the issue, we actually found that the developers were trying to connect to the service in a different way that the smoke test were not covering. For example, they were trying to connect to a Redis application with HTTPS but the smoke test was covering only the HTTP one. So we soon realized that and we looked into the application architecture and tried to come up with our own smoke test. And we make sure that we run the smoke test after every update. And writing the smoke test also helped us to understand the application architecture and give feedback to the developers regarding the 12-factor app and other different policies. And the next job was we were given the task to come up with the SLIs and SLOs for the platform. We know that the Cloud Foundry is pretty robust when it is deployed in the high availability mode but we really need to test it before we come up with a value for the SLIs and SLOs. And we devised a Chaos Monkey script which randomly destroys a VM and this Chaos Monkey was really helpful to understand the networking bottlenecks that we had and some of the VM performance issues which we later rectified it. So I highly recommend you to actually do a Chaos Monkey test if you want to ensure the reliability of the platform. And the next one is monitoring and alerting. This was a hard listen too. So the developers use PCF metrics which is a dashboard that contains all the app-level metrics like the request errors, the 4XX errors and the 5Xs. They also have Zipkins which we're telling them the latency between the microservices which were very helpful for them to improve the architecture. And the platform operators us, we use the PCF Health Watch which is an opinionated dashboard containing all the key performance indicators of a platform. And these contain metrics like the Canary app and the CF push and about the Bosch jobs. Since the whole department was actually using the Slack we both use Slack for alerting. So earlier I told you that we had seven foundations and there were about 100 KPIs for each foundation and we started setting up the alerts for all the foundations. And we soon realized that most of the alerts were actually solved by the Bosch self-healing capability so we were paged by all the alerts and we soon lost the interest in actually looking at each alerts and solving that. And then we found out that we need to monitor only very critical alerts like the Canary app whether you can actually CF push and whether the apps manager or ops manager is up. So that's why I've quoted that less is more. And then moving on to the final one which is extend and scale. So this is a geographical representation of our present regions. So right now we are in Japan, France and also in the US. In the near future and in the future we are planning to expand to different other countries like Russia, India, China. In order to scale rapidly we need more awesome people so we are hiring. If you're interested please feel free to talk with me after they talk or my colleagues who is actually in the room. You can also DM me in the Twitter. With that, thank you so much. Thank you.


from the Regency Center in San Francisco.  Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and this is the CUBE's coverage of Serverless Conf 2018. Happy to welcome back multiple CUBE alum, Erica Windish, who's the CTO and founder of IO Pipes. Great to see you. Thank you. All right, so Erica, I talked to you last year at AWS New York City. You also talked to John Furrier and the crew at AWS New York City this year, but it's the first time we've had you on at Serverless Conf. So, before we get into some of the technology, about 500 people here, you're speaking at the show, you go to a few shows. Tell us what you think about the community and the show. I mean, so it's the first day, for me at least, because we have workshops and a hackathon, but this is the first day of the proper conference. And for me, I have to still kind of feel about the audience and see who's present. Honestly, I was a little afraid that these shows might've been turning more into more vendor-oriented, which I don't think is necessarily the case. I think it's been good for Serverless Conf to be in strong developer centers because only two, three times a year, they're doing more, but Serverless Days, which is another conference, is more like DevOps Days. It's like, any city that wants to host it, does it. And this conference is a little bit focused on being bigger, but then that means it has to be focused on Hubs, like San Francisco, New York, Austin, et cetera. And I think it looks like it's doing a good job at that, but again, it's the first day, so I've only been able to talk to so many people. Yeah, absolutely, and I just spoke to Michael Garski from Fender, so they do a good job reaching out to some of the users. And what I've found, at least, there's many of the vendors that are here that they're using Serverless, they're developing Serverless, so companies like yours. So, give us the update on IOPypes. Sure, so IOPype, we've been around for a little over two years now. Let's say, we're selling, we have a product that is useful and usable, and I would say pretty critical to building these next generation of applications, because for me, the products evolve so much, probably since the last time we spoke, I mean, definitely since the last time we spoke, but also just in the last two years, we started out of, okay, how do you understand the Serverless applications, but people we were talking to were thinking about us and looking at us and comparing us to infrastructure monitoring. And I see our story changing to more about application visibility and application insights. Like, how are users using your application? When your application, let's say your database fails, like your computer server's not going to die anymore, like Lambda's going to keep working. Well, when your database goes down, what do your application do? Like you, let's say you're looking for a user and user didn't exist to try and then create a new user. Like, what's your failure mode, right? Robustness of software is critical, but what happens a lot of times when your software doesn't work, you don't know why, or rather, you might know why it didn't work, but you don't know what that caused. You don't know what the unintentional side effects were, you know, those unknown unknowns. And, you know, tools like IOPype are really useful for like, okay, I can now track a conversation for an Alexa scale and see how the user interacted with the scale. And if something does go wrong, I know exactly where it went wrong and what we told the user as a response, right? So we can improve the user experience, the developer experience, you know, we have tools for like, things like understanding what code path your application went down, and if it's going down the wrong path or what percentage of times it's going down, you know, an unusual code path, for instance. Yeah, so Erica, you said a lot has changed since we spoke a little over a year ago. Most people, when they hear about a technology and they hear about, oh, here's what it is and here's what it is, it kind of fossilizes in their brain. Sure. This space is changing so fast. Gives a little insight as to what you've seen, you know, serverless in general and how that's impacting your product. Well, I think serverless is definitely being used for more things, you know, a lot of the early use cases are operations and it's a wonderful use case for serverless. It's a great way of getting used to it and becoming, you know, accustomed with the development model. But you know, we are seeing larger applications moving to serverless. We're seeing more lift and shift of applications of serverless than we did before. Is that a good thing? I've talked to a number of people in the community and they're like, this is wrong, don't do it. I would see this.  Okay, yes, there's still servers but also state, stateless applications. There's still state. And if you stateless, or I'm sorry, serverless applications or serverless infrastructures like Lambda is a stateless infrastructure for stateless applications. If you can describe your application as stateless, it is a good match for moving to serverless. You know, it's one of those things like if you have a highly stateful application, then no, you're not going to have an easy time migrating. But if you have stateless applications, a stateless architecture, if you've already been, you know, going down that stateless route hall, then serverless may not be as hard of a transition as you think it is. Excellent, that's great clarification. I appreciate that. What else, what are you finding, what advice would you give to people out there that are fogging their way through?   You know, serverless can save you a lot of money but like honestly, start with like reducing things that take up time from your ops team, right? If your ops team is spending time on this thing, then put it in the serverless function. Yeah, that's great advice because, you know, our human resources are one of the most expensive things and if you've got good people, they can focus on more business value to the business. All right, last question I have for you, give us kind of the roadmap and outlook for IOPype, you know, what should we be looking for kind of for the next 12 months? So one of the features we're going to be announcing very shortly, I guess a little pre-announcement, we're doing what we call auto tracing. So we'll be able to auto inspect HEP calls that originate from your functions. So you'll be able to have automatic inspection of things like you put a file in the S3. Okay, well, what file did you put in the S3? You know, how big was the file that you put in the S3? What was its object name? You make other API calls, you'll be able to see those and trace them, their timing, their parameters, things like that, their headers, automatically out of the product, which of course you can also filter and make sure nothing that you don't want to go into, you know, into our services don't go out. But you'll automatically get that capturing. Well, some of the things we didn't choose for the last year were things like event inspection. So events come into your function, we automatically inspect them. Now we want to inspect the outcome of your function. So what is your, what's coming into your function and what is it doing, right? That's the IO for the IO pipe. All right, Erica, anything from serverless in general? I guess two things I want to add. One is, or most people you're talking to is still kind of Lambda, AWS centric, and any commentary around kind of multi-cloud and some of the other options out there for serverless and anything you'd be looking for the community to mature, to help this be more useful in the future. So I mean, I definitely hear more and more Azure. I mean, if we're talking about non-AWS, I am hearing more Azure. One of the issues with Azure is they have like kind of like this V2, like next generation of Azure functions, which I'm kind of impatiently waiting for. Because I do think they need, there's a lot of architectural changes that I think are kind of really kind of necessary for that product and they're coming. We've just got to wait for them. And I mean, I think it's just, it's maturity, right? Lambda is deeply mature at this point, or like it's definitely mature enough. And the other services are getting there and they're getting there, they're going to be there soon, but probably waiting another, probably for the next serverless conf to start hearing like, yes, we've been looking at and we're using it. Some of the use cases that work well on Lambda just don't work well, like things like Slackbots don't work as well on some of the other platforms because they're cold start times and they're been packing algorithms, just aren't as good yet, but they're going to get there. All right, well, Erica, pleasure to catch up as always. Thank you. I hope I end everything happening in this space and thank you so much for watching theCUBE. I'm Stu Miniman.


And Angela is going to take it live now on YouTube and Facebook. So, Ben Norton was once on the front lines for Peace with Essacode Pink, and I think the last time I saw you, Ben was on the streets of Columbia. He's the editor of Grey Zone and the producer of Moderate Rebels podcast, which he co-hosts with Max Blumenthal. They're on the front lines of the lies that oppress and take us to war. Thank you so much. Ben's a journalist and a writer whose work primarily focuses on US foreign policy, the Middle East, and movements for economic justice. So, Ben, you know the drill, you teach the drill. They use lies and fears so money will flow to the Pentagon and the need for more war. You know, I first started working on China because it just seemed like a rock all over again to me. And you were young then, so what is this for you as you look at this playbook on China? Yeah, I think it's very fair to compare it to an Iraq-style scenario, although we're talking about a country that is significantly larger. And I think we're talking unfortunately about a conflict that will go on much longer than Iraq, although it would be difficult to be longer than the Iraq war, considering the US still has troops in Iraq. The latest news is that NATO is going to increase from 500 to 4,000 troops in Iraq. It's 2021. The invasion was in 2003. And then that's not even to mention the 1990-1991 war. So, I mean, the torture of Iraq has been a 30-year process now. But unfortunately I think with China it'll be even longer, even longer than 30 years. And I think that it's going to be the defining conflict of this century. Now, it doesn't have to be, but the reality is that China has a massive economic power, primarily economic, not so much political, because China has a very hands-off foreign policy. For many decades, China has had a lot of bilateral relations with countries and has not meddled in their internal affairs, including countries that, you know, honestly you would not expect to have good relations with China. So China diplomatically and politically has shown itself to be a very hands-off partner, unlike the United States. But economically, the United States sees China as a massive threat in scare quotes because it's the largest economic engine in the entire world now. And, you know, there's estimates about when or whether or not China will overtake the U.S. economy. I think those questions miss the forest for the trees. China is the dominant economic power. And we even see, for instance, the European Union. Just there was a new study that shows that the majority or rather the plurality of the trade it does is with China, not with the United States. So the U.S. as the country that has dominated the world since the end of the First Cold War and the overthrow of the socialist bloc, you know, George H.W. Bush declared this era that we're new in the new world order. And, you know, that that's been kind of distorted. And it's not some grand conspiracy involving like lizard people. Now, I mean, the new world order is that it's a unipolar world in which the U.S. is the global hegemonic power. And essentially the entire planet is ruled by the U.S. It's pox americana. And we have seen that the rise of China is a so-called threat, not a threat in a way that it actually poses a threat to Americans, but rather the U.S. sees it as a threat because it's a country that can challenge Washington's unipolar domination of the world. I think that's the moment that we're living in right now. And that's why I think it's so important that you have this initiative because the reality is that there isn't need to be conflict. There can be diplomacy. There can be positive relations between these countries. And believe it or not, the U.S. doesn't need to be the world's policemen and emperor and merchants. I mean, there can be multiple powers in a multipolar world. And I think that's what we should advocate for as peace activists. But unfortunately, that view is not popular, not only in the Republican Party, but also in the Democratic Party. Yeah, and so to go back to your tweet this morning, it's trying to also move that hegemony of opinion down to the progressives and the left. And clearly with the propaganda targeting, I talked to people who are on the front lines of the struggle here in L.A. on homelessness, on housing.  And I'm like, why is China bad, you know, like, and, and also, you know, just our, we have a local peace economy project in Oakland, and they were all out last weekend against Asian racism that's happening in their community that's driven by this hate and propaganda that is literally focused on progressive and and left forces. So, and that's new for me, but you kind of really laid out, you know, where the hegemony already is and where it's attempting to go as far as just the propaganda that drives us to war. Absolutely. And I think this is a really important example of how imperialism and racism fuel each other. There's there's like loop a feedback loop a kind of dialectical relationship and frequently when liberals when Democrats in the United States talk about anti racism. To ever move what what in my view is that is the most important part of anti racism opposition to war and empire.  I mean to me that is the most extreme form of racism but frequently. You know there's this kind of cooptation the Democratic Party and kind of neoliberal forces have done so racism becomes all about micro aggressions but but what about the macro aggressions that the war is an empire so. The point you just mentioned is is so important that we now see this massive demonization campaign against China and so frequently US politicians say, whoa, we're not against the Chinese people. We're just against the Chinese Communist Party that the government of China but the reality is that oftentimes that that so called distinction is not actually what what manifests itself in political culture and that's why we see people who have Chinese descent being attacked at record levels in the United States in Canada and Western Europe hate crimes are rising it's not a coincidence that the same thing happened at the beginning of the so called war on terror. And the US government said well we're not against Muslims were just against terrorism, but we saw a massive increase in racialized violence against brown people who people assumed were Muslim I mean some of them weren't even Muslim they were like Indians, like Hindu Indians people thought were Muslim so I mean, this is a pattern here right at every time the US pivots toward a new conflict. It needs to justify that imperial aggression and it uses racism as a tool. So now, just as we saw during the war on terror we see dehumanization of Chinese people the narrative around. COVID is, it's the China virus as Trump and his administration said, and we're supposed to believe that it came from Chinese people eating bats or something there's this racist narrative that Chinese people are are backward and they're barbarians in some way it's absolutely preposterous, considering actually much of civilizations most important advances come from Asia and specifically China the compass. Forms of mathematics and so many other invent inventions. So, these things are all related but frequently, like I said, the Democratic Party kind of liberal establishment will intentionally leave out some of these key issues that's why I think it's so important for us to talk about it, and for us to center opposition to war and empire at the heart of the progressive movement because, in my view, if the progressive movement doesn't revolve around anti war and anti imperialist politics it's not progressive. Thank you so much for saying that because I mean that's we're you know addressing the progressive caucus with that every week that there are members of the progressive caucus that own weapon stocks and weapons companies, and take money from weapons companies and they're called progressive so yes constantly pointing out where the hypocrisies are thank you so much for doing that every day all day, Ben. So, on the propaganda. It's a lot of work on the propaganda piece like in in your, you know when you've been talking about China what have you found to be the pushback and how have you come back at it. Yeah, well, I think there's a few ways to approach this first of all, there are the media narratives and the myths and the frank the frankly the lies that are being spewed. And I think that, you know, we can talk about people kind of rationally in a way.  And now we've seen some people on the Republican side of the aisle doing basically the same but just replacing, just taking every article but replacing Putin's name for Xi Jinping and replacing the Kremlin for the Chinese Communist Party and it's basically the same thing. But that kind of thing. A lot of those people are kind of, they just drank the Kool-Aid and we should, you know, try to debate them and argue with them but that that's just a religion at this point, and the US religion is always scapegoating some foreign boogeyman but I think a lot of people, they otherwise they might you know have good intentions but they think because they've consumed so much media propaganda that China is some evil boogeyman it's this totalitarian regime. And the reality is look you have to just look at basic facts like one, and this isn't to say that Chinese government's perfect at all, of course, but the reality is that polls consistently show that the vast majority of people in China are supportive of their government. We're talking about over three quarters up 80 percentile range of people in China have positive views of the government which is pretty incredible considering, and the US usually it's around 40% or even lower depending on what government we're talking about. So we have to, we can first of all say look, I mean, certainly the Chinese government is issues but the reality is that the vast majority of Chinese people have a very positive view of the government so don't you think that maybe we should rethink some of the myths that were told that the Chinese people are oppressed by their government. And then second of all, I mean you can look at some of the absolutely preposterous things like it's so funny every time there is some kind of technological element of surveillance or social media. When US corporations do it, it's portrayed as some normal innocuous thing but if a Chinese company does it oh it's, it's totalitarianism so there's also the perspective of people say, well, the Chinese government is always spying on the people and, and we have to say well, first of all I'm against mass surveillance of course but you realize that you're living in the most mass surveilled country on earth right I mean, did you forget the NSA scandal did you forget Edward Snowden did all that just just go away. So I mean, there's all these double standards so China is just portrayed as some uniquely evil country when the reality is that some of these problems that people in China, you know they often have criticism but some of those problems are dealing with are are the same in the United States or even worse. I mean, we're talking about police brutality I mean those are problems that are unique to the United States the extreme racism in the United States. Those are, we do not see this the near the same level of police brutality in China so there's a matter of such a way to get in that context and then finally there's just like the preposterous lies that were told frequently so the latest is that China is committing genocide to this new campaign to basically portray Beijing as the new Nazi Germany. So if you don't support us aggression against it, whether that's military aggression or economic aggression through sanctions and a trade war. Then you're, you're helping fascism and you would have supported Hitler, I mean it's, first of all it's preposterous because one, the people who started this narrative were the Trump administration, led by a racist who wouldn't condemn white supremacists, and who said it after a Nazi rally they were good people on both sides. So the Trump administration is the one that started this myth that China is committing genocide, and then you can talk about other things like Adrian Zenz who's this far right extremist who's the one pushing this narrative who works for the victims of communism foundation, which is so extreme and right wing that it considers every death caused by coven to be a death of communism. So, so the reality is that we're talking about far right groups are talking about Trumpist extremists, and a lot of liberals have internalized their narrative so I think we should ask those liberals wait a second. You say that Trump is wrong about everything and I agree with you Trump is wrong about all these things. So why do you think Trump will be right about China. And the reality is that the Democratic Party, of course, is always bipartisan and I'm born with these issues but I think if you actually, if you try to interrogate these issues with people, especially progressive minded people I think they, you can move them a bit and and we don't we're not expecting people to overnight change their mind but the reality is that I think a lot of people don't realize how they're, they're feeding into this is essentially new Cold War propaganda. And now the latest news by the way, is that after Anthony Blinken this very hawkish new new conservative figure who's leading the State Department, even his own lawyers are now reconsidering the whole genocide thing because they realize there's not actual evidence of genocide so you know, I think we're pushing back slowly. But my concern, like you said is that more people who are left wing oriented are going to unite with the right wing and I think that's something we have to push back against. Thank you so much for saying all that because I think that's you know our concern and why China is not our enemy is like, but we, you know, why do people kind of lose their minds around China, because here you know, who know wars never the answer, who know that the disaster of war, and all of a sudden they are willing to accept lies and hate about China, because, you know, it's about human rights of Muslims. And who think does is the, that's all we do is care about the human rights of Muslims. And where have you been, you know I say to everyone where have you been for the Palestinian people for the Yemen people for the people in the Middle East, where were you for the people in Iraq and and people are starving in Iran but you are your your knee your knee is on their throat starving them to death. My knee is on the throat of Yemen. Me, I like, you know, I care deeply about human rights. For me the first casualty of war is the truth. And the second is human rights. So why would you even think of using this to drive us to a war when you know the next is, you know, women's bodies, you know, I do this for those reasons. And I would love that all this care about the human rights of Muslims I have so much I could give you to do right now. The wars are not being released to you know Muslim countries that are starting, you know, there is so much to do. And I was like what do you want me to do when the way that you can address these issues is only cooperation, only a relationship that, you know, listens to what's happening. And, you know, all these newspapers that are printing these lies from one person, and no historical context about the Saudi King saying that I was, you know, paid by the United States to take Wahhabism to the Uighurs in China so that the US would have a flank on China, and that we taught them Wahhabism and now the Uighurs are the most fierce fighters in Yemen and Syria, and then they come home and they bomb shopping centers and they have to do something. I mean, we had got Gitmo I would say you know they're not torturing and keeping people in jail for 16 years with no due process. But yeah they're you know trying to deal with the situation. I'm sure it's not pretty trying to deal with these situations are never pretty. But is it a reason to go to war on a billion and a half people, which I think is the other thing that's so strange is like, when we talk about white supremacy, and we talk about racism and that those are issues that are, you know, high on our basis to not be able to see that white supremacy and racism is at the core of this like even to speak, you know, why be used by something you don't have a relationship with that you haven't, you know, taken the time to really study, because there's more out there that you could read and understand even like how right wing, the root of this is so thank you for bringing that up I just would love to understand. Why is that snap happen, why is that thing that you just described that here you won't believe any, you know, you know everything Trump says is wrong, but you'll believe this happens I would have any, any insight into that. Yeah, because I think a lot of it revolves around this narrative of fascism. And, you know, there is a very real threat of fashion of neo fascism, and that threat emanates almost entirely from the West. I mean, India has a fascistic regime and Turkey you could say is kind of fascistic which is a NATO member, but really the main kind of fountains of neo fascist extremism today are coming from the United States and Western Europe. Well, in other parts of Europe, Central and Eastern Europe. And I mean, Poland, which is a NATO member and EU member, Poland just was exposed for having a state historian. He had to resign. This is a historian who's employed by the Polish government because he was doing Nazi salute So like the coup in Ukraine in which neo Nazi forces and other fascists were at the forefront of overthrowing the Ukrainian government in 2014 because it was insufficiently anti Russian as part of an EU neoliberal free trade agreement I mean, and then this isn't even to mention the white supremacist terrorism in the United States, the rise of the neo fascist Volks Party in Spain, the far right National Front in France I mean we're seeing a massive rise in far right movements. But what's interesting is that Western liberal imperialists have realized that they could weaponize that and and put the blame on China and also Russia.  I'm not a fan of Vladimir Putin's politics you know he's, he's kind of center right conservative but he's not a fascist and in the context of Russian politics he's pretty centrist honestly. And actually, Alexei Navalny is much more fascistic than Vladimir Putin and he's the darling of NATO and that's another example of this I mean Alexei Navalny, who, who now is on the front page of every newspaper Navalny released an ad several years in which he compared Muslim immigrants in Russia to cockroaches who'd be who should be stepped on or shot. So this is this is the guy that NATO wants to replace Putin, who are supposed to believe is supposedly a fascist so it's that was I think the beginning of the part of this narrative and now China, basically what they're saying is China is Nazi Germany. And if you don't oppose China, then you're not an anti fascist and in order to be anti fascist you have to oppose China I mean that that's part of the ideological sleight of hand that's going on. It's incredible because if you look at China's foreign policy abroad I mean China consistently supports progressive forces throughout Latin America and other parts of the world whereas it's the US it's the one that's propping up far right fascistic regimes in India, right now in Colombia, where Ivan Duque is trying to extend his term in Honduras. I mean, not even to mention, you know, the Gulf regimes and so the hypocrisy is incredible but that's why I think we have to push back so hard against this idea that China is fascistic in some way. And the main narrative it's incredible like you said the people pushing this idea that China is committing genocide against the Uighur Muslim population are themselves neoconservatives who have supported every war on Muslim majority countries, people who supported the Iraq war the Yemen war the Syria war the Libya war. This is the 10th year anniversary of the Libya war Libya still doesn't have a central government that country was destroyed it was the most prosperous country in Africa. It was destroyed there were opener slave markets for for Sub-Saharan African refugees for dark skin Libyans. Meanwhile, the people who supported who oversaw who led that war are telling you you have to support more conflict against China because China is violating the rights of Muslims. This isn't a dispute that China has a very heavy handed draconian policy against Uighur extremism, but at the same time, we can't just close our eyes and pretend like the government isn't meddling I mean, it was incredible the National Endowment for Democracy the NED, which is an arm of the US government it's basically a CIA cut out. It was founded by the Ronald Reagan administration in the 1980s to do, as one of its co founder said to do what the CIA was doing covertly but in the open, and the NED bragged several months ago that they have spent nearly 20 years, funding with millions and millions of dollars Uighur separatist groups. This is the world Uighur Congress. We know there's a variety of so called human rights groups that are not human rights groups I mean that's the term they use the weaponization of human rights. And these are groups that are often extremely right wing by the way, and speaking of fascistic. They're often collaborating with not just the United States but also Turkey, and the Erdogan regime which is extremely ethnic cleansing the Kurdish population in the south, which is militarily occupying northern Syria. So we're supposed to believe that Erdogan and US neoconservatives like john Bolton and Mike Pompeo who hate Muslims who are Islamophobes. They're the ones supporting Muslim rights against evil China.  It's, it's a complete there I mean there are a lot of lies it's a complete turning on the head to portray China, which is again supporting Nazi forces in the world as Nazi like and not the United States, which, frankly, not to not to be too hyperbolic but just being realistic here. If we had to look at what happened in the 1930s with the rise of Nazism and fascism and previously one of the most powerful countries in the world, Germany, becoming this horrible fascist dictatorship that committed genocide. And if we had to pick one country in the world that is most similar I'm not saying it's the same but most similar to that scenario it's going to be the United States, not China. But of course, that's why we're seeing such an insane new Cold War propaganda drive is to distract from the extreme, the extreme surge to the far right in US politics, and the rise of extremist groups and militias and white supremacist terrorists and mass shootings and endless war. I mean, that's the most Nazi like. Thank you Ben. And I think also the thing that people in the United States don't remember is that it was the United States, you know, billionaire millionaires at the time or heads of industry that funded fascism that it would have been stopped without the oil and from different, you know, heads of industry in the United States, and that it was Russia and China, without which they, Germany would have won it. The United States tends to believe they're the big you know white heroes white heroes that ran you know wrote in on the horse, but it was really you know China and Russia who lost the most soldiers fighting fascism. And there's no comprehension of that in the United States. No, absolutely not the Soviet Union lost over 26 million people 26 million. Meanwhile, in the US and Britain we're talking about 400,000. And that's not that's not to downplay how horrible that is but we're talking about 400,000 in the US and Britain, compared to 26 million and the Soviet Union and that's not that always should also be in the between 12 and 20 million Chinese killed. I mean, we're talking about the vast majority of deaths in World War Two came from the Soviet Union and China. And the Soviet Union was responsible for killing more than four fifths, or for killing, wounding or capturing four fifths of Nazi soldiers in World War Two, basically all of the fighting in World War Two happened on the front until around 1943. And then when we're talking about breaking the back of the Japanese fascist army. It was the Chinese. And again 12 to 20 million Chinese killed, and another kind of Japanese Holocaust committed against Chinese people so the sacrifices these countries have made fighting fascism is incredible and yeah that's not to say of course Russia has a very different government today. Russia has a capitalist government that is much more conservative in the Soviet Union, but there still is a lot of national pride and anti fascist sentiment today and every year, one of the biggest celebrations in Russia is the great patriotic war against fascism, because Trump, most recently he, he just gave an incredible speech, I believe this was last year in honoring the anniversary of World War Two, and he didn't even mention the Soviet Union. He said, we thank the United States and Britain and France for defeating Nazism just writing out the role of the country did the vast majority of the fighting against fascism so I mean that's a whole new level but but this isn't this is not an irrelevant point this is not just a historical debate because this is actually feeding into the rise of neo fascism today. And there's a really good scholar named Jonathan Katz, who lives in Lithuania, and he's an expert on the history of Jews in Lithuania. And he has a very good website called defending history in an academic journal. And it's called defending history because it's about the attempt to rewrite the history of the Holocaust and World War Two, and how these far right groups in Eastern Europe, almost all of which are anti Russian and pro NATO backed by NATO back by the United States have been trying to rewrite the history of World War Two to portray the Soviet Union as the villain and Nazi Germany as if not the good guys like the bystanders. And this is part of I mentioned that in Poland, a state historian was just forced to resign because there was photos of him Nazi saluting. And we see all across Eastern Europe and Ukraine in the Baltic states that there's this rise of these neo fascist movements, which are all uniformly pro West pro US pro NATO anti China and anti Russia. So this is directly related to the fight against fascism. And again this isn't to say that like China and Russia today are like some great perfect countries no I mean they all have their own problems every country in the world has problems there's no perfect country. But the reality is that we have to recognize, especially us as US citizens that it's Washington that is the one driving this aggressive policy, it's Washington that is supporting these extremist groups as proxies to try to weaken China and Russia it's Washington that is constantly engaged in this great game, trying to surround Russia with NATO members and US military bases and now surround surround China, not only with bases and allies of the United States, but also with troops. We saw in the Obama administration or now as it's referred to as the Obama Biden administration. We saw the pivot to Asia was kind of the hallmark of the foreign policy of the Hillary Clinton State Department. And when they say pivot to Asia they mean pivot to war with China is what they really mean. They mean sending two thirds of US military personnel over on the border of China into the South China Sea to surround China. Why are you doing that why do we want to war with China this is the largest country in the world. We saw the horror of World War two to be really on a World War three it's insane. Oh my god, yes war is never the answer that is just, you know, the insanity of it. And you're right the irrational, if they can take you into the irrational they can make you believe anything and I think that's really what we're seeing with this propaganda. And you've filled us with a lot today I'm so so grateful. I just one last question. There's a question in the chat about how do you talk about some of the anti China government conversation without it coming out as without it without fueling anti Chinese Chinese sentiment. You know, my responses is like it's propaganda it's not journalism. And there's never a whole look at it what would, you know, that's not. So therefore it is anti China, but how would you answer that. These are difficult questions because you know there's several questions kind of related to this one you sass as well about, you know, how do you report on real human rights abuses without feeling at the China sentiment. Well first of all, there's a few different questions here are a few different responses I would say, one, you have to answer the question depending on what your perspective is I mean I'm a journalist. A lot of people aren't journalists they're activists and organizers so it's different for each of us. I mean look we can acknowledge again that these countries have real problems and human rights abuses again every country in the world does.  Meanwhile, the United States has children, immigrants undocumented people in what you could call internment camps I mean if they're if they're concentration camps in China then the US definitely has concentration camps. I mean, we're talking about extreme abuse of immigrants in the United States, and their privatized and for profit facilities but we never hear people say that the United States is is running massive concentration camps for Latinos, which is basically what they are. There's the insane hypocrisy there but then we can also knowledge yes and like I said, we can acknowledge and we should acknowledge that okay China has a very heavy handed policy I would not support it, and the, you know, the reeducation facilities you know, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's pretty awful right, but at the same time those are not concentration camps, like that's a very different thing. And what we're talking about is that I mean this information is public that the Chinese government talks about it and this isn't to defend it but just the reality is that these are facilities where there are often Muslim leaders there are people are allowed to worship. Those are like kind of the Muslim equivalent of priests who give lectures and talk to people I mean these are facilities where people who have extremist views are put in. And the reality is that the US, its response to extremism is just to kill people with drones. It's just to murder people, or in the case in the United States to put people throw people up in, in Gitmo. I mean but autonomous still open by the way it hasn't been closed, even though Obama claimed it would be. And again, so this isn't to defend that policy but we're talking about different degrees of extremism here like the, in terms of the response. And, and also just again, these are it's not, it's not concentration camps because the whole point of the use of concentration camp is that it's supposed to turn your brain off and make you think China equals Nazi. And then there's also the whole element of the numbers, I mean the numbers aren't totally insane. I mean one week there's 8 million and there's 13 million there's more than the entire Uighur population and others won't know I mean these numbers are absolutely absurd. They're totally fictitious. We know that because as we've documented the gray zone my colleagues, Max Blumenthal, Ajit Singh, they've documented how these numbers come from two different studies. One of them is a group called Chinese Human Rights Defenders which is a right wing lobby group funded by the National Government for Democracy CIA cut out, and led by people who have called for overthrowing the Chinese government that's their goal. They've weaponized this notion of human rights to try to overthrow their government. Most of them live in Washington and exile or New York, and they did a study in which they interviewed eight Uighurs in Xinjiang, eight, and asked them about their families and their friends. And then they use those testimonies of eight Uighurs and multiplied it by the number of towns and the population of Xinjiang to get 1 million. I mean it's totally absurd. If you submitted this report to an undergrad statistics class, you would get an F, you would fail your statistics class. I mean this is totally fake numbers here. And then the other study comes from Adrian Zenz. And that's that this particular number also comes from this extremist group based in Turkey I should mention that a lot of these Uighur separatist groups are living in Turkey, supported by the Erdogan regime which is again pretty And they, there's this interview that was released by Radio Free Asia that was translated that came from a Uighur extremist channel that has had on people who support this extremist Al Qaeda line group called the Turkistan Islamic Party TIP, which is active in Syria. They have child soldiers and they proudly post the photos of them fighting. They work with Al Qaeda they have links even to ISIS. So we're talking about extremist fascist groups that released this, these claims that were then translated by Radio Free Asia which is created by the CIA as a propaganda arm. And then that number is just circulated so we have to also number, I say that okay, you can criticize China policy but you have to always situated within the context of what's actually happening, as opposed to the insane myths and narratives and distortions in the media. I mean, that's why it says a tricky thing to do because the, if you actually saw what actual China policy is you would see that it's, again, this isn't to defend it and say it's perfect but it's not, it's much more innocuous than we're than the extreme Nazi-esque comparisons that we're supposed to believe in and I know that this is kind of complicated and the reason is that I don't want to get really, because in order to have a deep in depth conversation about this you have to look at the numbers, at the statistics, at the sources, at the facts and that's actually very complicated which is why it's so easy to dispute this propaganda and say China concentration camps millions because very few people actually look at the granular details and see there is no, they're there and in order to look at that it takes a long time to explain it's complicated, it's confusing, it takes long articles but anyone who's interested in looking in this issue more deeply you can go to thegreyzone.com that's grey with an A and we have a lot of reporting on this just showing how ridiculous it is but at the end of the day the point is that the most simple answer and the most true answer just disqualitatively is that this is new cold war propaganda No one is saying that China is perfect and has a perfect human rights record but it is propaganda, it is disinformation, it is information warfare that is aimed at turning people's brains off and manufacturing consent for Washington's aggression in the new cold war Unfortunately that's what we're in right now. That's not even just my view. If you listen to neoconservative prominent right wing figures like the one of the most prominent right wing historians at Harvard University, who publish a New York Times op ed, Douglas Murray saying that we're in a new cold war with China and we should not embrace that term or listen to the right wing billionaire oligarch in Hong Kong who the Trump administration worked with Jimmy Lai who said we're in a new cold war or listen to Mike Pompeo himself. Mike Pompeo gave a historic speech at the Richard Nixon library saying that Richard Nixon was a good president but he made the mistake of having the meaning with China 1972 he never should have done that the opening was a bad idea China's the enemy we need to overthrow the Chinese government. The US government said that the US State Department said that under Pompeo, we are in a new cold war you can't ignore it. Now, I think our responsibility should be to expose the lies and propaganda of the cold war and to end the cold war, and return to a peaceful diplomatic relationship with China. And I think that's what code pink's doing and I applaud them for it. Thank you so much Ben thank you for being with us today thank you for making a smarter on this issue. And please everyone follow the gray zone to literally not have your brain co opted by the powers that be, but to be able to support those near you with the facts and the deep research. Ben, thanks, as always for being out there for telling the truth and for really doing the deep research so that we can stand on something firm. All right, everybody is my pleasure is never the answer. A new cold war is a really innocuous term to something very horrible and dangerous and a new nuclear war on this planet would be the end. So even just saying and you know it's a cold war. It's a very serious thing. These are two nuclear powers. And that is the end of life on this planet, not to be played with with that we've been lucky for a very long time and luck runs out. Let's not take it there. So peace out. Thank you for all you do. Keep sharing truth. Bye Ben.