Over the past few weeks, multiple reports have emerged of monkeypox. In its latest report, the World Health Organization has said that there have been about 550 cases of monkeypox reported in countries outside of Africa where the disease is usually seen. The virus was first discovered affecting humans in 1917, the continent. There is still a great deal of uncertainty over how the disease is spreading. Amid the heightened coverage of health issues in the aftermath of COVID-19, there has been a lot of interest in monkeypox as well. What causes monkeypox? What are the symptoms and modes of transmission? How dangerous is it? What lessons can we learn from the global spread of monkeypox? Immunologist Dr. Satya Jitrat has the answers. So this week we are talking about a new viral disease that has been in the news for quite some time now, quite a few weeks now. And that is monkeypox. First of all, even though it's called monkeypox, it's actually found in a very broad and diverse range of animal species. It's found in rodents and mice, rats, some monkeys, many non-monkey species, and occasionally, especially from the forest animal communities from which it transfers into human communities. It is seen in humans. So what is monkeypox? So we are all familiar, or at least we've all heard of viral diseases that cause rash, blisters, and blisters that heal into scabs and then the scabs fall off. The most dramatic, the most lethal, the most spectacular example in human history is, of course, being smallpox. But there are a number of other poxviruses. Some of them are more closely related to each other. Some of them are more distantly related to each other. The monkeypox virus belongs to the poxvirus family. It's related to the smallpox virus. Smallpox, of course, has been eradicated as a disease. And exactly like any other viral infection of skin and of throat-nose linings, the way that monkeypox is transmitted from one person to another is by large droplets because there are blisters in the mouth and so on and so or by the fluid from the blisters or by the scabs. And all of this, as far as we can tell, needs fairly close contact. And the fairly close contact is perhaps why it has been known to be transmitted during sexual intercourse and relationships. As a result of this, it is not a very efficiently transmitting virus as compared, for example, to our current situation with SARS-CoV-2, the COVID-19 virus and its most recent Omicron, BA4, BA5, BA221 lineages, which spread extremely rapidly. In comparison with that, monkeypox spread is generally thought to be much slower and there is no evidence suggesting that it's spreading any faster. What does the virus infection cause? As I said, it causes blisters, a rash that converts into blisters, blisters ooze. Sometimes they can get secondarily infected with bacteria but by and large they ooze, they dry, the scabs fall off and people recover. And in that sense, it seems to be by and large and illness without major long-term severe consequences. Immunocompromised people, as with any other infection, including COVID-19, immunocompromised people can be overwhelmingly infected and can die. In fact, I think there has been perhaps one report in the last month or so of an immunocompromised individual dying of monkeypox. In association with the rash and the blisters, it also of course starts with fever, body ache, fatigue, all the usual symptoms of almost any infection in the body. Everybody wants to know if this is a new virus. No, it's not a new virus. So monkeypox we have known about for many decades. It sporadically comes with animal to human transmission from forest communities. There seem to be two major lineages of the virus. One lineage is Central African, the other lineage is West African. The current outbreak that has been seen as cases outside Africa, the couple of hundred cases that have been reported, all appear to belong to the West African strain rather than the Central African lineage. By and large, as I said, this is a relatively mild illness, although there is always some risk of severe illness. Severe illness in addition to immunocompromised people has been known on occasion to be seen in children, which is quite different from COVID-19. This is a DNA virus as different from the COVID-19 virus SARS-CoV-2, which is an RNA virus. The chances of errors in copying, in making progeny in expanding populations is much greater in RNA viruses than in DNA viruses. So RNA viruses tend to change and give rise to potential variants somewhat more rapidly than DNA viruses do. And there is no reason so far to think that there is any new variant of monkeypox circulating. These sorts of outbreaks, both within West Africa or Central African communities, and on occasion, by some contact traveling outside Africa into small outbreaks in other places, have been known in earlier decades. And what seems to be happening so far, isn't any different from that. So the question is, what are the precautions then that we should be taking? And I would argue that both in terms of precautions, in terms of treatment and in terms of prevention, there is a personal component and a community public health component. At the personal level, if you are infected, you should be quarantined for the couple of weeks that it's going to take for you to be completely recovered. Diagnosis like COVID-19 is with PCR testing exactly like COVID-19. There are antiviral drugs, but they provide modest improvements and they're not widely available. And by and large, they don't seem to be needed since by and large, it's a relatively mild illness. The vaccine is the interesting thing. The smallpox vaccine, which most people across the world of my generation have had, appears to provide studies have shown that monkeypox can be protected against by the smallpox vaccine to a very substantial extent. The numbers of estimates are 80 plus percent protection. However, since globally we eradicated smallpox in the late 70s by 1980, we no longer have the cowpox vaccine supplies that has been used until 1980 as a smallpox vaccine. And therefore, if we were to gear up to vaccinate for monkeypox, we would have to expand the old cowpox vaccine stocks, which brings me to the final point, which is what we really need to ask is not so much a direct concern about this virus, but the lessons drawn from COVID-19, monkeypox, influenza and related viruses, which is do we globally have public health systems funded by communities and states rather than by profit-making companies, which reach remote communities, which reliably monitor with good technological backup for a variety of viral diseases, does information get collated, analyzed and put into public health policies by developing vaccines, by developing networks and by enhancing our public health care capacities for delivery to the poorest, most disempowered of communities. That still remains the monkeypox question.


Well, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the next edition of the OpenShift Operator Hours show. And I don't know why that went back on us there. Yes. So today we're lucky enough to have with us Trilio. And we are going to be talking with Morali Balcha, who's the founder and chief technology officer of the company, as well as Prashanto Kochavara, who's the director of product. So welcome, gentlemen, welcome to this TV show today. Thank you, Michael. And a founder's story, I believe we were going to talk about a founder's story. What can you tell us about that? Morali, is your microphone on mute? Yeah, yeah, thanks. Thanks, Mike, for the introduction. No problem. Hey, it's in these, you know, I'm going to make a, last night, Cyrus, Champion, I decided we were going to make a round of t-shirts for everybody. And one of them is going to say, can you see my screen? And then the other shirt is going to say, hey, you're on mute. And so everybody can be wearing these. And if someone is that, we can all just start pointing at our shirts, you know. It's going to be one of the best setups. Yeah, so welcome, Morali, a founder's story. You founded Trilio, tell us about that. Yeah, yeah, so I founded Trilio in 2013, and it almost feels like Eons back. So before that, I was at EMC. I spent almost 15, 16 years at EMC. EMC, we know it's a pioneer in storage area networks. They single-handedly invented the storage. I was part of that journey. I think I was fortunate enough to basically get to work on almost every storage area technologies that is there. So when EMC bought VMware, I was leading the integration of virtualization with EMC technologies. Again, back in 2012, 2011, when cloud was still at the inception, right? And Amazon AWS was probably the only public cloud out there. And the shape and nature of the cloud is still up in the air to define. So every vendor was trying to figure out what they can do in the cloud and how they can play in the cloud. We're looking at various technologies that EMC has and how they play in the cloud paradigm. We're looking at the data protection. And then I suddenly realized most of these products, they were there since 1980s, when they was the predominant backup medium. And they haven't really evolved much since then. I think they still have client server architecture. They're backup lots of files. And it is administered by one central administration. And so it wasn't really meant for cloud. So cloud is a different paradigm. It was upending everything that we know about the IT. And we thought we need a completely new thinking around the data production. And there's a reason led me to basically come and found Trilio in 2013. And what's in the name? I mean, we have lots of partners. I have probably 1200 software vendors that I work with on a daily, weekly basis. I do marketing activities with our partners once they've certified their software. And we're going to get to that in a little minute about your support for OpenShift. But names of bugs, names of rockets, and what's Trilio? Yeah, why Trilio? So I think what I realized was coming up with the name is one of the challenging things. We tried various things. And then we realized, well, we have three founders. We kind of came together with some passion. It takes kind of a line sort to basically come and start a startup company. So we tried three lines, so it's kind of rhymed with Trilio. So we went with that. You know, and it's even way more than that. I mean, actually, today's my 20th anniversary at Red Hat. I just found out I had all these people like messaging me on LinkedIn this morning. And I couldn't figure out why. But having been here at Red Hat for 20 years now, which I learned today, I've dealt a lot with brand and marketing over the years around logos and new product creation and so forth. And, you know, when you make a name, it has a big ripple effect on everything else from a brand perspective about the naming of the products. And all the way down to like trying to put a logo on a baseball cap, you know, if your logo was like this, it makes it really challenging to do branding with other companies. So I just thought I'd bring that up. Anyway, so founding the company was smooth sailing. You got a little bootstrap capital and then everything just went perfectly as planned or what? Absolutely. No hiccups, nothing. It was a straight drag race. No, it wasn't that. You know, I think every startup company has some challenges. You know, hitting that mark with the business case, right? Some companies can do much better. I think partly they are lucky and partly they probably hit the market very well. But a lot of other companies, I think they have some winding path, like some trial and error methods until they get the act together, right? We know we have a big opportunity here in the cloud. Cloud is going to be the next to biggest thing back in 2012, 2013, right? And but, you know, the hype that we had at the time when we left the company and start and then kind of exploring and talking to a lot of companies, it didn't really match with them with the reality, right? Every company wants to do something in the cloud. They want to basically organize their IT into the cloud paradigm, but reality is different, right? They still have the older business processes in place. They use the old technologies. So it was a bit of a surprise for us, like, you know, the hype versus reality. And we, in a few years, it's a bit of a struggle to find these customers who are looking for a product in the backup space. And on top of it, especially with the backup, backup is not a day one problem, right? They need to first deploy the applications in the production. They need to run in the production for a few days before they realize they need a backup. So it's a day two problem. So that also exasperated our ability to succeed in the marketplace. But it almost took three years for us to land our first customer. Years, wow. And Trilio Vault for data protection. It's a cloud native. It's built on Kubernetes for Kubernetes. How is that? Why does the world need another data protection solution? I mean, I've been around, you know, as long as dirt and, you know, back in the day when I was a digital equipment corporation, there were great backups, pieces of software. And, you know, we all know the names of them, but how come people just don't use something that's that's been around and has been well, well, well manicured for the last 20 years? Why, you know, why do they need something new? Yeah. Well, it's IT, right? It requires constant innovation. The, I think, you know, most of the backup systems that they developed, they are very much a detachment from the platform they are protecting, right? It was okay in the Windows Linux bunch of Linux servers. But I think when you look at the cloud, they layered some kind of management layer on top of this form of servers, right? They have the multi-tenancy, they have the self-service aspect of it and the scale-out architecture of it. So the world or paradigm is that you have a backup administrator who knows every application out there and knows how to backup and restore. That doesn't really work with the cloud. Cloud is more about self-provisioning. So if I want to provision 10 applications, I'll go and provision, right? I'll manage everything. There is no central administrator who basically helped me provision the resources that I needed for my application deployment. It just happens, right? And the backup has to flow into the same paradigm, right? There is no central administrator. And so we always put the platform first, right? We want to make sure that this functionality flows with the platform without adding additional friction with the deployment for the use and management, right? It looks like very native to the platform that you are working on. So that's been our mantra, our foundational piece, our theme for our company, right? We started that with OpenStack. We are the first backup, as a service, true backup as a service that is self-service multi-tenant into the OpenStack cloud. And then when we are looking at the cloud native, the Kubernetes, we still want to stick to that same paradigm. So we could take whatever we develop for OpenStack somehow, retrofit into the Kubernetes world, but we didn't do that. Because again, the same thing, right? Platform first. So if someone is using Kube-CTL to manage their workloads, provisioning and managing them, they should still use the Kube-CTL to manage their backups. That is our theme. And that is the reason why we went and developed this from ground up, right? It looks natively built. And it provides all the ease of use for the end customer. OK, you mentioned OpenStack. I just had flashbacks. I mean, like I said, I've been here for a little while. I remember when OpenStack was the shiny object. And they started the, what was it called, the OpenStack summits. And they were all up in Portland. I remember going up to Portland and the amount of hype and excitement and energy on those show floors when you were walking around there of everyone. This is the next big thing for computing. This is the next paradigm shift of distributed computing. And then six years later, it just seems it's kind of been more niche into the telco type space. And then all of a sudden, Kubernetes is here. And it's the same thing. And now you go to KubeCon. Well, I guess we didn't get to go to the one. And there was this Amsterdam, right? But I mean, it was going to be, we were really ratcheting up for that one. So I don't think we're going to see Kubernetes going away anytime soon. I think it's here to stay. And it was the key component for orchestration in a hybrid world. When you said you got your first customer, what was it that they said, okay, we want to go with you? Why did they select Trilio as, it's hard. I mean, I remember being at Red Hat when we first started here. I started in 2001, I think. And going in there, you had to sell the customers not on your company or on your product, but we had to sell open source. And that we weren't wearing skateboard. We weren't have blue hair and skateboards. And we had a lot of rep turnover back then because we were trying to convince people that open source was a good model as opposed to why they should be buying our product. So how was it when you got your first deal? What were the challenges that you had with them? Right, that was a very interesting story. So we were given the opportunity to present our solution with one of the biggest telecommunications in US. There was a three day backup there and all the vendors are presenting. And we were the last one to go on the third day on the last day to present our solution. We don't have any brand recognition, nothing. So we did go there and we did present as a natively built OpenStack solution that adhered to all the OpenStack principles, the scale and the multi-tenancy and integration with the Keystone and everything. So the guy stopped my presentation, two slides into it. And then said, you're in. What? He didn't even let you finish with Death by PowerPoint? No, no. And he basically turned to his rep and said, this is exactly what I've been asking for. And all the vendors are presenting how good they are with the virtualization and doing it for OpenStack is going to be nothing, right? They can do it, but no one presented the vision that we have. And frankly, we didn't have a GA product at the time. We were at the beta, but they are willing to take a risk with us saying that because our vision is aligned with what they wanted to do. What's the saying, fake it till you make it, I think? Well, the vision is important where we are taking the company and that perfectly aligned with what they want to do with OpenStack, rolling out the cloud for the entire enterprise. Okay. And I know that we are going to have a technical demonstration. Prashanto is going to be putting that on before we got into that. I did want to just talk about your company and your operator for a second. You know, we invest a lot of time and energy working with software companies like yourselves. You folks have a Red Hat certified container that's certified and fully supportable for use with Red Hat products. Do you have an operator as well? Yeah, our offering is fully certified and available in the operator hub. And I think we've been doing it since day one, right? Starting with V1 product. And we regularly update our operator in the operator hub. So the latest version that is available is 202, which was released last week. Okay, cool. And if you're not there already, I'm also involved with the marketing for the Red Hat marketplace operated by IBM. If you're not connected with them already, we'd love to have you talk with them about having your backup solutions available in the marketplace. I don't know if it's there yet or if you're having that conversation. We know we have it in the IBM marketplace, but Prashanta is a Red Hat marketplace. Yeah, we are in the Red Hat marketplace and the IBM marketplace already might have so. We've done one to all those pieces and make sure that we're there. Okay, great. So why should cloud architects, backup admins and developers look at data protection? I mean, this is obviously a question that we have scripted here to get the dialogue going. To me, it sounds pretty straightforward that, of course, cloud architects, backup admins and developers should be concerned about Kubernetes, but in your own words. Yeah, I think this is where we need to look at the backup and recovery beyond just backing up a few files. And when it's needed, like you recover those things, we want to elevate the conversation of the backup in a bigger scale, especially in the cloud native. The Kubernetes being the cloud platform where you can write your application once and then run anywhere, right, that paradigm. You can do that with DevOps.  But the challenge is the data. So if you have a data heavy application that is running on the Kubernetes and for various operations reasons, you want to migrate the application to a different cloud, right? Especially in the multi-cloud scenario, that will happen. Every business should be looking at how they can have this multi-cloud strategy. So the challenge is how you can move this application between the cloud transparently. Right, so backup can capture the application and then record the application. So we want to elevate the discussion and make it almost the must help the functionality in a multi-cloud scenario. So that way you can backup the applications, you can recover the applications on a different cloud for DR purposes, for other purposes. You can migrate the applications for cost savings, right, for compliance reasons. So you can realize a lot more use cases if you make the backup as a central theme for your multi-cloud strategy, right? So as you can see, it plays a much bigger role in your IT. Okay, and I would like to throw out there that we are live right now.  If you folks are watching on any of those live streams, if you post any questions into the chat, so there are producers will pick them up and we'll get them over here and we'll be sure to address any and all questions that you folks may have. Prashanto, a little bit about yourself. You're the director of product. What does that mean? What do you do? How terrific are you? Were you the founder of Google before coming here to Trilio? She's a rock star. Moonee's being kind, but yeah, a little bit about myself. I'm the director of product for the Kubernetes offering at Trilio. So I deal with all things Kubernetes in general, looking at it right from the business angle, looking at the market drivers, looking at requirement generation, helping with go-to-market strategies, engineering, architectural discussions, everything. So my focus is in terms of building, developing and selling the product. And that's what my day-to-day job entails. Before this, I was at bigger corporations where I was running engineering as well as product management teams. And when I learned about Trilio Vault for Kubernetes and the venture that Moonee was getting into, I was immediately attracted to it and definitely wanted to be part of it. And after a few talking sessions, I was happy to be at Trilio and we are adding this next-gen technology. Okay. What about some more stories? We generally like to hear some aha moments or some type of interesting war story from deals lost, deals won, things that you want to share with our viewers. And that could be either for yourself or Murali. I just, you happen to have the stage right now. I would say from aha moments, when we went down initially how we built our product was in terms of applications that were being done within Kubernetes. So people were running operator-based application, helm-based applications, and they were deploying applications based on labels and so on. So our focus was in terms of protecting a helm chart, basically, an operator piece of the application as well as the application controlled by the operator and so on. And what happened is eventually talking with customers, what we realized is there is a good population of customers who because of the lack of proper definition of an application within Kubernetes, they were using namespaces as the boundaries or as their definition or their scope for an application. There was a one-to-one mapping between a namespace and an application. So immediately we realized that. And that was one of the biggest value odds that we added into the product was a namespace level backup and recovery feature, which is very well appreciated by customers today. And along with the helm and operator pieces, they end up using the namespace backup recovery protocol and the procedure a lot more as well. So helm chart versus, say, a level four operator, I know internally at Red Hat, we have a large technical team that works with software vendors to run their operator through our test certification suite. And so it's Red Hat certified. I'm very familiar that building a helm chart is easy, but making an operator is more challenging. Can you talk about that? Yeah, I mean, with an operator, it's almost, you know, not almost, it's pretty much developing two applications together. You have the operator based application and then the application that the operator is controlling and managing in a way. So the way we have looked at the landscape, then we realized that in order to provide customers the best feel and approach for managing the Kubernetes environment, simplifying the Kubernetes infrastructure for them, operators was the best way forward for us. So what we've done is we have adhered and adopted the OLM framework for operators from Red Hat and supported a operator for open shift directly through OLM. And then by a helm, we have an upstream operator as well, which can be deployed in upstream environments. Okay. Maybe Morali, maybe let's go back to you. What are the required principles behind a cloud native architecture for data protection and management? I think software first. So one of the challenges is not to rely on any proprietary stuff, right? Whether it's a backup format, because multi-cloud is the, must be the main focus area. So essentially what it means is your, if your backup functionality is limiting you to be mobile with your applications, able to basically move these applications from one cloud to other, then you should stay away from that backup application. A lot of backup vendors they go with very proprietary format because the storage savings that they basically created an IP around it, they get it only when you save their backups on their appliance. But you can't move that appliance into the cloud, right? So we always start with, we never ever want to develop any proprietary technologies that basically prohibit our customers to be completely nimble in a multi-cloud environment. So obviously software only solution. It doesn't rely on any of the proprietary technologies and it uses standard Linux-based standards and tools for creating backups whether it's a space savings or for all the functionality that people expect from backup vendors. But on top of it we are very nimble. So you can take an application that is backed from say upstream Kubernetes and then you're running OpenShift on AWS. You should be able to recover your application without losing anything from our backups. So that is the flexibility that we provide. And of course we talked about the native integration be part of the platform itself. So that also gives us a lot more flexibility because we can and we do discover all the applications running in the Kubernetes and provide a one snapshot view to the end user what applications are protected, what applications are not protected. Kind of gives a risk profile for the end user like if there is an exposure for the applications because we have a good integration with the platform. So we can do and provide that kind of analytics to the end user. You can see that in Aplashanthos demo when you do the demo. Okay, fair enough. So how's business? We're doing very good. I know that when this whole challenging time thing started we were like, oh my gosh, I haven't been on an airplane in a year. Not that this is necessarily tied to our business, but I was wondering about our account managers, the lack of traveling on site and what that would do to slowing down sales. But I think everyone's adopted to working virtually these days. But outside of just these challenging times, how is your business trending as far as adoption and growth and so forth? Well, I think we've been doing very good. Of course, like any other company, we need to adapt change. And I can talk about Justin or marketing like he had so many plans laid out for 2020. And then he has to change them to adapt to the COVID times. We did not miss a beat. I think we did very well in 2020 in terms of a number of new customers that we signed up. And the number of products and the releases that we rolled out, even though everyone is working remote. I think we did very well. That's good. Okay, so just let's talk about the key use cases that customers are looking to solve. And then I think we'll switch and get more into an actual hands-on technical demo of it. But can you talk about the customer use cases? Yeah, I think we focus on four use cases with our solution. They look almost similar, but of course backup and recovery. If something bad happens, users should have a way to go in backup and recovery. And in a multi-cloud environment, our focus area will be multi-cloud because that is going to be the standard. So when you say multi-cloud, it doesn't have to be between AWS and Azure or VMware and Azure. It could be like multiple Kubernetes clusters that are running on-prem. That can be multi-cloud too, because they are two different platforms. And you need to have something that tie all these clusters together to provide that unified view and then provide these interesting use cases. And so application mobility and the migration is under the big use case that we are solving. We address. And the other one is the disaster recovery. Disaster recovery for the applications. If something bad happens on the production side, how quickly you can recurve that application onto the remote side? So these are the four use cases that we focus on with our solution. Okay. Toronto, how about over to you? I think you prepared something here for us today. Yes, yes, definitely. What I'll do is I'll share my screen and you can let me know once we can see it. So what's the, what's the, before we get started, what's the over under Morali? What's the over under on whether or not his demo is going to hang throughout some bugs, which he fixes uncomfortably in front of everybody or goes flawlessly because it's been pre-reported. I think it goes flawlessly. I know and I know technology. I did. 22 years ago, I was working for this company called Mission Critical Linux and we, it was before Red Hat bought us and I was flying around the world with Intel because we had a really interesting workload that ran on itanium. And remember the itanium system is these ginormous, you know, the predecessor to x86 64 and I was on stage and this is the reason why I asked Prashanto is I'm on stage with this, with fellow Will Swope, I think was his name and we're just about getting ready to go to do the demo. There was like two big racks and then there was a client that was going to run an app and we're going to fail it over between the nodes and it had a memory leak in it. And so because I staged it behind behind scenes while while we're waiting for me to go on the memory just started leaking, leaking, leaking, leaking, leaking. And so they announced me on stage, I go up there and the client is just like completely dead.  And after that, after that, and this was like big was like Linux world, right? It was like 15,000 people in the audience or something. So after that, I can't everything. I just, I don't think we have 15,000 people here today, but sorry. A little less risk here on the open ship. Live demos are always risky. Yeah, hopefully the demo votes are with me. So let's see how that goes. I'm assuming everyone can see my screen. You can see the open shift console. Yes. And you see, this is exactly why we're having these t-shirts made and we are going to get some shipped out to you. We have no joke. Cyrus and I were designing last night. We're going to have, we're going to have 1200 made that say, can you see my screen and 1200 made that say, you're on mute? And we're going to, you guys can be our first recipient and you'll get one of each and then you can wear them during all of your zoom meetings and you can just point, hey, you're on mute or can you see my screen? And the same thing goes for anyone who's watching us right now on Facebook or YouTube. If anyone wants to get one of these limited edition, can you see my screen red hat t-shirts? Send me an email.  Over to you, Prashanta. Great. Thank you, Michael. So what we see in front of us right now is the open shift console. This is a open shift 4.6 environment which is running in AWS. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to look at the operator hub over here, operator hub as we all know is like the marketplace for deploying applications into an open shift environment. Search for Trilio. Right now we are available in the marketplace and you see a couple of other tiles. One of the tiles is the official 2.0.2 version and the other tile is a custom version that I was using for testing. But this is the custom version. It says 0.5 or 7 version and this is the one which is actually installed. As you can see from a capability perspective, we support full lifecycle upgrades, patching everything for the operator itself. It is a certified product. We provide additional information around how to learn more about the product and our live labs and so on. Licensing information from a licensing perspective. There is a 30 day free trial or a 10 node basic condition that we provide for free and folks can get jump started with the technology very, very quickly. So overall, this takes about three clicks. You go into the operator hub, search for Trilio, click on the tile, click on install and within a matter of five minutes you have Trilio up and running within your environment. Since it's already installed over here, we'll go and take a look at how it all appears. Now, one of the things when we were talking about the helm and the operator piece, we could have just developed everything as a helm chart itself. But what we've done is we've followed an operator model because we realized that we can have very much of first service-oriented architecture by going via the operator model. And what we've done over here is if you see, each of these tiles represent a custom resource definition for Trilio. So we have a custom resource definition for a license for creating the backup repository, which we call a target, for creating policies, scheduling policies, attention policies for supporting hooks. Hooks are injection points within an application that you would run to wires the application and get it to a consistent state before taking a backup. We have a PRD known as the backup plan, which is basically the protection scope that a user defines for what they want to protect. It can be just a helm chart. It can be a helm chart and an operator-based application. It can be a namespace or it can be a combination of any of those items. So whatever the user wants to protect, he can define that within this entity or within this resource. And then finally, we have the backup and the restore operations, which basically enable the backup and restore activities. So overall, if you see what we've done is we've modularly built the product based on the operations and based on the activities that end users would want to do. Now the value in doing it this way is the fact that because each of these operations is a mobile operation, you can apply Kubernetes RBAC, which we directly plug into on each of these items. For example, Michael, let's assume you were the administrator and you had control over all the storage resources. Now you would not want any of the developers in the organizations to create targets. So you can specifically make sure that the target custom resource definition is available only to you for use. So you can create the targets, but all the other folks within your organization can leverage that target for use for storing their backups. And the entire product, whether it's hopes, policies, backup plan, backup restore, any of these activities can be granularly segmented based on a user's role and scope. And any questions on that, Michael? Based on how we evaluated the product and how it looks and appears as an operator over here? No, none at all. I think it looks really nice. Awesome. So right now in this environment, I just applied a license here yesterday. It's the free license that we are using. It's all active. From a target perspective, we have two targets available over here. And similarly from a policy, there are few items that are created everywhere. And I'll go through it again. But overall, the way a user would want to use these different tabs over here is by clicking on create target. They have the option of either using a YAML view. We have the entire instructions on how to use the YAML on the right-hand side panel. Or if they do not want to use the YAML view, they can use a form-based approach which OpenShift provides and we directly plug into it. So we have addressed and adhered to the framework for these dynamic forms. And because of that, our entire YAML specification files are available as a click-driven or simple form-based approach if users are not familiar with the YAML approach or don't like the YAML approach and don't develop this good end-up using the YAML approach. But in case you want to use the form view, you have that as well. Now, as I said, we have a few targets created over here. From a policy perspective, we have some policies created based on retention. You don't have any hooks for the backup plan. As you see, there are a bunch of different backup plans that are running in this environment associated with different protection scopes. And just to kind of show you how that works, we just call this OpenShift TV, backup namespace that we had on StormApp. And from a backup config perspective, we're going to use one of the outputs that I already have created. So once you provide all this information, you go ahead and click Create. This will go ahead and start creating the backup plan. And once it validates, the controllers will validate that whatever I've asked for it to backup is actually correct and put it into an available state. Beyond that, a user would come into the backup menu. They create backup. Let's call this OpenShift TV and give it a little backup. I'm not giving any labels over here. Backup type, we do a full backup. And the backup plan name will be OpenShift. There are other information around API version and we think if you want to provide that, not necessary. And we can go ahead and create this. So what happens is once we trigger this backup, which is right here, OpenShift TV backup, it will go through the Trilio process of, you know, snapping the metadata objects or all the manifest files that comprise of the application we protect that first. And then we get into the data components of capturing the persistent volumes and so on. So it's pretty much sequential step by step process, which would take, for this operation, I expected to take about five to six minutes overall. But in the end, it would depend upon, you know, how big your persistent volumes are whenever you're doing a backup. But that's overall, you know, how you end up doing a backup from OpenShift for any of your applications running anywhere within the cluster. So I have a couple of questions if I may. I didn't want to interrupt you right in the middle, but you know, you reference at the top that this is for Kubernetes. So does this work with any flavor of Kubernetes? Like, do you see people using community-supported Kubernetes inside their environments and they're asking you to back up? And given the fast change rate in Kubernetes development by itself, how does your product keep up with all the changes that are coming along? So, yes. So to answer the first part of your question, we have developed the product as a Kubernetes-native solution. So it will work in any distribution that is CNC certified. So that's how we've constructed the product, making it, you know, very seamless for any Kubernetes environment to deploy and use this.  Maintenance and upkeep becomes pretty easy for us because, you know, we are using firstly one of the, one of, but more of the basic level components that Kubernetes offers. So those components do not change as much or really change. And then that is backwards compatibility provided through the Kubernetes system itself that makes the churn on our end very minimal. So from that angle, you know, all the abstractions to hook into the Kubernetes system, the, you know, compatibility, the, all these different pieces help us in, you know, pushing our code really, really fast. So one of the things that we've been doing on average is we've been doing new releases, you know, with cutting edge features, almost about every couple of months. And, you know, we've seen things or I've done things in the past, you know, not Kubernetes centric and I've seen how long driven and, you know, how long those cycles can be. But Kubernetes and all these different newer technologies are changing the way we do things. And we are, you know, while we are building a product for Kubernetes, we ourselves are realizing the benefits that it provides internally for us. Okay. And what about, what about workloads? Are there, are there some apps that Trilio Vault works better with because of the way they're architected or what if someone, what if someone's using an app that's not cloud native and they sort of did a forklift, you know, jam into the cloud? Does that pose any problems? Does your backup solution work best or work only for an app that's cloud native? So right now, if your application is a Kubernetes-based application, we can protect it via the Kubernetes solution. Obviously, if you have a, you know, make a more of a traditional VM-based solution, then we have our other products around Rehoban OpenStack as well that can support that. But each product is specific for those domains. And, you know, future consolidation is something that we have thought of, but it's kind of down the road. Okay. And what about, so I was just, I was just on a call before we were with you, we were talking with, with one of the modern cloud native SQL database vendors out there, and they're, you know, they're running in a very distributed node manner. What's the magic? How does it, how does it work in plain people speak maybe for doing, you know, backup or data management when you have these nodes that are distributed, you know, and like, say you take an OpenShift cluster that runs on public cloud and private cloud and on-premise. And, you know, is there any special source or magic that would, that is required to have Triliovault be able to address the data management needs in such a distributed model? Exactly. So the, the secret source or the way we do it is through hooks, you know, we can basically inject commands before a backup happens and, you know, after a backup happens directly within the container itself. So is there, there is any kind of management activities or three work that is required for us to perform the backup or for the application to get a consistent backup, we end up doing those through hooks. And what we've also done is, if I take you to our, So, if I can interrupt Prashanta. So the other aspect to my mic in that, in that is obviously application discovery, right? When you look at this complex application where you have multiple nodes, some of them local, some of them remote. The thing that is tying the entire application is how they roll out the application. It could be an operator-based application or it could be a helm-based application, right? So, you know, you need to have the backup policy that operates at that abstraction that the developer intended to, like if they are rolling out a helm-based release, the backup need to run at that level, not nodes are not PVs are not containers level are the operator. So I think we are the only backup solution out there that can operate at that operator or a helm level where we auto discover all the components of that application, including the PVs and the container and secrets and the config. And we can, we can back up the application as they are laid out, as it is laid out. And, and I'll say if the application has basically grown into more number of PVs, we automatically discover that and the next backup will include all those things. We preserve that application nature. And these are the hooks that essentially provide the application consistent backups for you. Do you sign off on that? Yes, yes, totally. Moody has the higher authority on this. But what I wanted to show you was, you know, we have, you know, tested, validated and we do support, you know, multiple applications that have these distributed nature like the Sandra and so on. We provide the backup plans and the hooks that we've tested with, you know, as a hooks kind of show your, what is the hook you want to execute, which is the pod that you want to execute it against, is that any kind of specific container you want to run this within. So, you know, you have a lot of granular control to make sure that you can talk to the application in the right fashion to get it into a state that you can perform the perfect backup or the consistent backup that you need for your people. So you, in your hooks there, you specifically have hooks for Cassandra, hooks for Mongo, hooks for MariahDB, do those come already or do those have to be preconfigured?  And the reason why I ask is I'm more concerned about transactional databases like SQL in nature, like a UGBITE or faunaDB, I think they just added SQL functionality or what's the other, like CockroachDB. Those are the ones that I see are going to start displacing transactional databases traditionally from like an Oracle or a DB2. Correct. So, yes, one of the things we provide these hook examples has, you know, templates for customers to leverage within their own environment. Obviously, they can tweak them further to match it exactly to how they are running their applications. But, you know, following the kind of 80-20 principle, this would get them to 80% of the level there. And if there is any additional nuances or patches required on top of that, they can obviously, you know, do it on top.  There are a few, not few, a lot more that are on the, you know, on the bandwagon for things to complete. And you will see things like, you know, time series database, noDB, nfluxDB, primitives, related databases, and so on being added here in the upcoming weeks as well. And that was the second part to your question, right, Michael? There was a second part, but I do want to make sure we're cognizant of the time here. So, we probably had about two minutes left to address the second part. Okay. So, the second part of your question was around, and if we leave, you were talking about these examples itself, right? And Michael, you there? Were you waiting for me to, yeah, please. Yeah. So, as I said, these are different application-based hooks that we are providing. They're constantly being updated. You know, we test them out internally. They are provided as a, you know, template for everyone to use. And we continue building these over and over again. And whatever the new applications that we see, the amount from customers, they will be added here as a proof point that this works. And we've tested it relatively well. I talk with, the reason why I'm bringing this up is because I talk with customers all the time. And this morning, I was on with our entire financial services, sales leadership team, and they identified one of their key workloads as being these transactional SQL databases for DB2 and Oracle offload. So, you might want to take a look at throwing, putting, adding some support in there for those right out of the box. Definitely. Definitely. So, we have a couple minutes left here. I wanted to get back out and talk with Morali about, you know, where do you see this going in 18 to 24 months from now? Are we there? I mean, has the eagle landed or is this just the beginning? No, this is just the beginning. There is so much that we need to do here, right? You know, you can see the Kubernetes is going to be the pretty much standard in a cloud environment as a platform of choice. And people are also calling it a platform of platforms, right? Now, you can see Red Hat is bringing the virtualization technology to the Kubernetes with a keyboard. And we want to extend our support to a keyboard. You know, and then there are other distros in the platform that we need to qualify, including VMware Tanzu and anything that is happening in the public cloud, right? So, this is a big play, Kubernetes is enormous. And we want to be there in every part of it. And also, you know, that's on the platform side. But also the features, we need to keep up with the features and be ransomware is one of the biggest threat. And we strongly believe the backup player a vital role in protecting against ransomware threats. So, we are closely looking at some of the standards like NIST cybersecurity framework and how we can be part of that bigger picture and looking at additional use case in the multi-cloud environments and then also public cloud. So, you know, Eagle hasn't landed. He hasn't. So, I think we are so excited about what the future holds for us for this year and next year. Okay, great.  We can get a little bit larger graphics of your CEO there. There we go. Much better.  It's this, we talked about this, like, what would that be? He wanted me to talk a lot of things. We covered everything pretty well. I think we are good. What did I not talk? Do you want to talk about the management console that we built? Something around that? Management console, we have management console. We have a lot of good partnerships going on with things with a lot of back vendors and other people, like, you know, we recently answered a partnership with Veritas, which is big for us. It validates our vision in the cloud marketplace. That is one thing that Justin wanted me to talk about. Yeah, that's pretty much it, Mike. I'm going to now go for my clunky slideshow, start from the current. So can you see my screen? I hope you can. This is the call to action part of it. If you want to see it in action, you can follow the link on here. They have demos, they have labs, and certainly if anyone needs to get in contact with them, you can see Prashanto's contact information on the bottom left, or you could always send me an email. I know these folks really well, and frankly, I know just about every software company fairly well. So it's just wait at redhat.com. Morali Prashanto, thank you for joining us here today. This was great having you folks on the show. Thank you for having us. Mike and Chris, it's been great. Super exciting. Thank you. And we can end it.


From Seattle, Washington, it's theCUBE, covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon North America 2018. Brought to you by Red Hat, the CloudNative Computing Foundation and its ecosystem partners. Okay, welcome back everyone live here in Seattle for theCUBE's coverage of KubeCon and CloudNativeCon 2018. I'm John Furrier of theCUBE with Stu Miniman breaking down all the action. Three days of coverage, we're in day two, a lot of action at open source. 8,000 attendees, up from 4,000 North America. They're in China, they're all over Europe. The community is growing in a massive way. We have two great guests here from Red Hat, all making it happen. Part of the community we've got Dan Mueller, who's the Kube alumni director of community development many times on theCUBE. Good to see you and Rob Somsky, Somsky principal product manager, both at Red Hat. Guys, thanks for coming on. Great to see you again. Yeah, glad to be here. So the world's changing a lot and there was some news recently around Red Hat. I can't remember what it was recently, something big news but you guys have been big players in open source for years. We could always cover it. We always wax on about the origination of it and how the evolution but the CloudNative piece has gotten so real and you're rolling in particular. We've had many conversations going back to the open stack days of how OpenShift was developing then the bet on Kubernetes and you guys made CoreOS acquisition. Those two things I think to me, at least from my perspective, really catalyzed a lot of things at the right time. So from there, a lot of things has just been happening really in a good way. Big tailwind for you guys, CloudNative app developers are using open source, CI CD pipeline and then also policy based up under the hood. Completely big shift in moving the game down the field. So congratulations, first of all. But what's new? What's the update? The update is operators. I think the next big thing that we're really focusing on and that's the game changer for all the second day operations type things and we'll make Rob talk about it in detail is the rise of Kubernetes operators. It's not a scary thing. It's not like Terminator Day or anything like that. But it is really the thing that helps us make the service catalogs, the Kubernetes marketplaces really accessible to all of the databases as a service and all of the other things and takes out some of the complexity of delivering applications and databases as a service to anybody running Kubernetes anywhere. Take a minute to explain Operator real quick and then we can jump into it because I think this is a fundamental trend that we're seeing. Developer trend is pretty obvious. Been that for a while. CloudScale, ML, machine learning, all the goodness around application. But the operator side of it has been an IT thing. But now you guys have a different, a new approach that's winning. What is it? What is Operator? What's Kubernetes that has the approach? And I'll let you... Yeah, so it's basically like the rise of containers is great because you can take a single container and package an application and give it to somebody and know that they can run it successfully. And Operator does that for a distributed system in the exact same way. So you're using all the Kubernetes primitives so you're not reinventing service discovery and secret management and all that. You can give somebody an entire Kafka stack or a machine learning stack or whatever it is that these very complex distributed systems and have them run it without having to be an expert. They need to know Kafka at a high level but not exactly all the underpinnings of it because that's all baked into software. And the benefit and the impact of the organization is what? And just to clarify this, so this was added in, I believe Kubernetes like 1.7. It's something that's in there. It's not something Red Hat specific. Yeah, it's got, yeah. So you're extending Kubernetes. So you have a custom resource definition which is an extensible mechanism for saying, hey, I've got a deployment or a staple set but what if I want to have a new object called a MongoDB that knows how to deploy and manage and upgrade MongoDB? So that's the extension mechanism that we're using. Yeah, so you've got to think, there's certain applications that this is going to make just a lot easier, how I manage them, deploy them, things like that. Any specific examples you want to share as to? All the cluster databases? I've just seen that there's a lot of, the application side in this model have been very excited about this. Yeah. So it's all the vendors and partners that want a hybrid cloud story just targeting Kubernetes. So we're using Kubernetes under the hood and then everybody wants to run a staple database tier whether that's Mongo and Couchbase, Cassandra, whatever. And these are all distributed systems. All right, so I want you to just parse. You said a hybrid cloud, explain that model because that's something, in general, discussion is hybrid or multi means I'm running multiple places, I'm not necessarily stretching an application but I have instances there, just want to make sure I'm on the same page. So this would be more the compatibility that you're programming against when you're building an operator is Kubernetes. It's not a cloud offering, it's not OpenShift, you're just targeting Kubernetes. And so you can run MongoDB on-prem in the cloud and have it function the exact same by standing up one of these operators. And then if that operator has higher level constructs for how to do multi cluster aware data rebalancing, you can take advantage of that too. And the open source status of this product is what? It's all open source, it's all in the GitHub repos. There's a Google group for operator framework that anyone can come and participate in. We hold SIG meetings on the third Friday of every month, 9 a.m. Pacific time, and it's a completely open source project. There's a whole framework around it. So there's the operator SDK, the operator lifecycle management and operator metering, all the tooling there to help people build and manage these operators and it's all being built out there in the open with the community support and feedback loops. What's the feedback? What's the top feedback you guys are getting right now? I have to say, this is really like, I've been hanging out with you guys like the past three, four months on this topic, trying to get my head around it and everything. And we came here and we had two sessions, an intro session and a deep dive session, intro yesterday, a deep dive today. Today's deep dive, the room was about 250 people and there were people outside of it. Security guards, blocking people from coming in. Nobody could come in and it's insane. It's like, everybody needs these things and everybody wants to figure out that. And when you ask people in the room who's building one, half the room raises their hands. You know, it's just, it's great. This thing crept up on us really, maybe not on CoreOS, okay? Crept up on me very quickly. So, and it's very rapid adoption. We have a Kubernetes operators workshop on Friday. So not only do we have pre-conference days of like OpenShift Commons and stuff like that that are huge now, but now we're starting to bookend CNCF events and put on other things just because, and that, we had 100 seats that we thought we, you know, we were hoping we would fill and it sold out like in minutes once it got in there and there's a waiting list of 300 people. It is like one of, you know, aside from Knative and all the other wonderful hot things too and how, it is one of the most interesting developments I think right now. Thirst for the content. What an impact. Yeah. You can get all of, all of the documentation is out there now and people are already building them. We have a list of 50 community operators. It's just, you know, it's phenomenal how quickly it's growing. You know, Diane and Rob, it's funny because you know, we do so many of these Kubernetes we're doing for this our 10th year doing theCUBE coming up and I remember the conversation going back in the OpenStack days. We would ask questions like, if you had a magic wand, what would you like hope to have happened, right? And you know, those are parts of the evolution where it's like, it's aspirational, things are being built. It seems now with Kubernetes, it's like, I mean, it's almost like, wait a minute, it's actually, this is actually, the goodness is so compelling. Yep. Above and below Kubernetes that it's almost like, uncomprehensible to think about, okay, this is actually happening. Finally, the kinds of steady state kind of operational things that have been a pain in the butt for the years. The material, it's gone. Yeah. For the most part. Yeah. So, Rob, I've been having a lot of, just thinking back to, you're employee number two at CoreOS. When I first talked to CoreOS, it was, you know, we're going to build all of these, you know, individual tools and we're going to open towards them and it's going to be good. We've watched this just rising ecosystem in the CNCF and feels like what's nice and what's different that I see compared to some previous things is it's not, you know, one product or even, you know, small group of companies. It's, you know, I have this toolkit and some of them work together, but many of them are independently used. You know, we talked to your peers earlier about LCD. LCD is totally standalone. Doesn't need to be Kubernetes.  So we've always filled in where we see gaps and so something like LCD, the concept is not new. It comes from Google and they have a system internally. And as Brandon got up on stage and said, we needed that to coordinate reboots across a cluster of machines. Didn't exist, so we had to build it. Same thing with how we wanted to manage Linux. There was no distro that even really resembled what we were doing. Wanted to do automatic upgrades. People thought that was crazy, so we had to go build it. And so, but we always adopted the best debris technology when it existed. And our early bet on Kubernetes, we just saw this is the thing and went for it, you know, I don't even remember what version, but it was months and months and months before 0.0 or 1.0. So it was, we've been doing it forever. And you just see the right thing and it's the little nugget that you need. And if you don't see it, then you build it. What are you surprised about, Rob, in terms of the ecosystem now? What you mentioned, some goodness is happening. Still a lot more work to do. Visibility around value creation. You start to see spots where value can be created in the ecosystem, which is great. Still more work areas. But what's surprising you? What do you see as opportunities, challenges, your thoughts? Because this vision of ease of use and programmability is happening, right? So it's still more work to do. What do you, what's your vision there? What's your thoughts? I mean, I think self-service is key. So this is like the rise of the cloud comes from self-service for developers. And Kubernetes gives you that right abstraction where self-service for VMs like OpenStack, which is not quite at the level of what you wanted. You didn't want a VM.  You wanted load balancing. You wanted service discovery.  And so Kubernetes raises you up to where you're productive. And then it's about building stuff on top. But what's interesting in the space is we're still kind of competing on Kubernetes installers and stuff like that. So we're not even really into like the phase where people are being super productive on the platform other than these leading companies. So I think we'll democratize that and we'll have a whole new landscape. And so 2019, you see as what being a key theme for Kubernetes? I think it'll be core stuff built on top like all the serverless frameworks, a bunch of container native storage solutions, solving some of these problems that folks are reaching out to external machine learning but bringing that on to the cluster, GPU support, that type of stuff. It's all about the workloads. And traditional end users, you guys have a huge install base with Red Hat being well-documented. As the end users start coming in and looking at cloud native and doing the reimagining of their environment whether it's IT spend, IT investments to how they run their coding and their deployments, it's going to change. 2019 is going to have an impact that I call mainstream enterprise for lack of a better description. What's the impact of those guys? Now they now have headroom. They can do more. What's the mainstream enterprise look like right now with Kubernetes, the impact of Kubernetes? I think they're going to start deploying applications and get like lower the time to business value much, much lower. And you know, I was just talking to a customer, they ordered bare metal machines like a year ago and they're still not raked in in the data center. And so the people are still getting over that type of stuff. But once you have like a shared Kubernetes layer, you can onboard teams like crazy. I mean, namespaces are free quote unquote. So you can get 35 engineering teams on a Kubernetes cluster, super easy. So they can ramp up a development teams basically as they bring value in-house for outsourcing everything as they start getting development teams this is where the action is. I think you're also going to see the rise of those end users contributing back things to the Kubernetes community. And you know, as Lyft and Uber and everybody are great examples of that.  And you're just going to see people that you didn't normally see.  But I think what we see here is the end user community is now embracing open source is getting the legal teams there, allowing them to share their things because you know, one, they get more people to maintain them, you know, and more people working on them. But it's, you know, it's really, I think the rise of the end user we'll see as they start participating more and more in here and you know, that's what, that's the promise of open source. And that's where CNCF really made its bones. It wasn't really vendor led per se. It was really end users driving the guys building out their stuff for the first time. You see Lyft for instance, great example. You guys did a CoroS and like, this is like the new generational model. Yep. Final question before we break. I want to get this out there. Get a plug in for Red Hat. What do you guys, what's the focus for the show? What's the news? What's the big story for Red Hat here at KubeCon this year? I think it's operators is what we're here talking about. It's a really big push to once again, get smarter workloads onto the cluster. We've got a really great hybrid story. We've got a really great over the air upgrade story that we're bringing from some of the CoroS technology. And then the next thing is, you know, once it's easy to run 35 clusters, we need a bunch of workloads to put on there. And so we want to save folks from the toil of running all those workloads as well, just like we did at the cluster level. Awesome, awesome. Well put, I couldn't add more. I think it's definitely, one of the things that CoroS did, you hit the nail on the head earlier, is when there was something missing, they helped us build it. And with the operator SDK and the lifecycle management and the metering and whatever else the tooling is, they've really been inspirational inside of Red Hat. And so, you know, they've filled a number of gaps and it's just been all operators all the time right now. It's great when a plan comes together, you guys got a great tailwind. Congratulations on all the success. And it's just the beginning of the wave. It's theCUBE covering the wave of innovation here at KubeCon CloudNativeCon 2018. But back with more live coverage, day two of three days of CUBE coverage. We'll be right back.


I've worked alongside of Williamson Memorial Hospital and we're working toward getting the hospital to come down and do EKGs on all the guys. Because sometimes kids will have some cardiac issues underlying that are benign. They don't have any symptoms or asymptomatic until they just have sudden cardiac arrest. Some of these things can be caught early if the proper tests are done. So what I'm working out now is we're going to have EKGs for all the kids and then arrange for a pediatric cardiologist from WVU to come down and interpret the EKG, do a little assessment on the kids and give us a clear. Some advice I have for the parents is I know that sometimes when we get these physical forms back they may or may not have seen a doctor. I know that that happens sometimes. Please don't do that. Make sure that kid gets a good athletic physical by a certified doctor. Watch your kid. If you see something changed in his activities, if he's more tired, different things like that, let us know. Let the trainer know. Let the coach know. If there's some kind of condition that the child may have had and you just want to look over it because you want them to be normal and be a football player or be a soccer player, a baseball player, don't do that please. It's not good for your child. Let us know what's going on with them. Make sure that they do drink. It's hot. It's summertime. They're just kids. The parents can also make for sure during the day that they stay hydrated. They can help us by making sure that they drink the proper things. Water is good, but not all water. They also need electrolyte replacement. I've often gave kids pedialyte. They can drink some pedialyte. They can also drink Gatorade. There's lots of drinks out there that they can drink that have electrolyte replacement, sodium, those kind of things that they need. So they don't have a depleted potassium to where they're cramping. To go a little farther with that, depleted potassium can cause some cardiac issues also if it gets low enough. So we want to stay away from those things. Cramping is just a warning sign that your potassium is getting to a dangerous level. It's getting low. So cramping is not a good thing.  He's just got to cramp. Well, my profession, that's not a good thing. So we need to take it more serious. Starting with the parent level, our trainers, our coaches, we all got to pay attention.


I'm James Milan and this is our series Justice in the Balance. Today we are getting to talk to Middlesex County's District Attorney Marion Ryan who, like the rest of us, is at home and checking in. We are so appreciate you're taking the time to be with us today. First of all, before we get down to business and there's much business to talk about, we are always interested to find out, hey, how are you in particular weathering these extraordinary circumstances under which we all live at the moment? How is it going for you? My understanding is that you're a very active person so it must be strange for you to be spending so much time at home. It is never home this much, so it is very different. The work of our office continues and we've just been adjusting like everyone, excuse me, to doing that remotely. So we're busy on a lot of fronts with that, but definitely miss the personal contact. I miss being out in the community, being in schools, things like that. So looking forward to seeing people again. Yeah, you are, as we know, as a district attorney, a constant presence in many, many communities and, you know, we're lucky here in Arlington to have seen you fairly regularly over these years. So we look forward to when we get to do that again. All of us do, obviously. You were saying that your, you know, the operations of your office continue as best they can. Tell us a little bit more about what kinds of adjustments you're needing to make, what kinds of things are moving or working in the same way as they always have and what aren't. So of course the courts themselves, the physical buildings are closed, but one thing that I think people need to really know is that the work of the court continues. And really to the credit of my staff and to the court staff, they've adjusted pretty quickly and with really little warning to doing this all remotely. So we have, we had two things that were really very fortunate in middle sex. Right at the beginning of January, we had convened a group of our law enforcement partners. It was my view at that point that, you know, you always have to be anticipating these kinds of crises and we needed to be putting together a good strategic plan should something happen. Obviously, never envisioning it would be a pandemic. So we were fortunate in that by March, we had already had an opportunity to be doing a lot of work on that. And in addition, one of the things that works really well here in middle sex is the relationship we have, not only with our law enforcement and first responders, but also with the sheriff, because one of the concerns that came up pretty quickly as we've seen, unfortunately in nursing homes and other places is once the virus gets in, it spreads very fast.  So really, even before we had the shutdown, the sheriff and I had started working together about how would we respond to something like this? And what would we do about trying to reduce our jail population, especially our pretrial, the folks that were being held before they'd been tried? And we put that part of the population, right? It was a big part of the population. And that is even keeping in mind that in middle sex County, we do not ask for cash bail, unless it's our expectation that we will be asking for jail sentence at the end of the case. So already the number of people where we're asking for cash bail is very reduced. And we started in the second week of March, I guess, starting to come to agreements, reaching out to defense council, we had reached out to the committee for public council and started saying to them, who are a list of people you want us to look at? And then we were, of course, doing our own list. But there would be things that we wouldn't necessarily know, for instance, somebody's medical condition or something like that, that the committee was providing us with. So we have as of last Friday heard had heard over 300 of those motions. And it was really when the case came up before the Supreme Judicial Court, when people statewide were raising that, we submitted a filing where we asked the court to do pretty much what they did. We asked them to kind of adopt our model of bringing people together and having those conversations. And they did something very similar to that they appointed a special master to help what we were doing here, which was voluntarily working between the DA's office and the sheriffs, but to have that happen across the county. So we have by now released close to 200 people. The numbers are so greatly reduced, if Bill Ricker, that they've been able to give a lot of people their own cell, which was critical. They've also been able to close one of the dorm wings. So that people are now in a much more individualized space that obviously helps with the spread. So those numbers have really declined dramatically. And I think we've been able to do that in a very collaborative way, obviously keeping in mind the public safety piece as well. Because at the same time, we've been working with our first responders about really only making a rest when the public safety is immediately in danger. So there are things that are happening where it is safe to leave the person out in their own home, and to summon them into court. So we've been doing that a great deal. You know, obviously people being off the street has reduced the number of driving kind of things. We don't have places open late at night, especially places that might be serving alcohol, that sort of thing. So people have less places to be, which are normally draw some criminal activity. But we have seen about a 75 to 80 percent decline in our arrests. So that's obviously helped to keep our numbers down. And really the numbers at Bill Wicker are at pretty historic lows. And it's helped them to really, they've done a good job up there, both in their hygiene practices and separating people to keep pretty much the infection at bay up there. You know, we have recently, as part of this series and others been talking to folks from all different perspectives dealing with what we would call the front lines of pandemic response in different ways. Those include advocates for prisoners, for instance, and the picture that you are offering us of what's happening from from your perspective and at Bill Wicker, for instance, that that stands in some contrast, I have to say to what to the concerns that were expressed by some of the advocates we've spoken to who were saying, you know, these are situations, obviously, just like elder care facilities, situations in which you've got almost a Petri dish for the growth of this, and that more steps need to be taken to of the sort that you've just outlined. So it's interesting just to note that in fact, you see that that that effective steps are being taken to try and safeguard the population both inside, and also limit, as you said, the number of people coming in at that point. So I'll just note that and move on unless you'd like to comment on that at all. Well, I think, you know, a part of that, as I said, is collaboration. We've worked very well together in getting a lot of that done. I think part of it was getting started very early. And you know, the important piece is one of the things is it's obviously you want to protect the folks that are inside the institution, but they all of those institutions have big civilian and officer staffs that come and go as well. So, you know, you want to reduce the chances of them contracting the virus because then they go back out into the community. So this is something, you know, we obviously want to protect the people who are in custody, but it serves all of us to limit the spread of virus in these situations. Absolutely. And again, because we're aware that your time is short, though, I'd love to talk about this a little bit more and perhaps we'll touch on it again a little bit later. I did want to move on to other areas of concern for you. So one of the things again, that in talking to folks dealing with the direct effects of the pandemic, we've noticed is that some of the things that happen all the time and that your office has to deal with all the time have been exacerbated. People are taking advantage of the situation. Well, that reminds me that people are always taking advantage of the situations of vulnerable populations. Your office is a place where the protections for those populations is most robust. Tell us about what's happening in the area. For instance, of scams, which I know is a constant preoccupation for your office. It is. And actually, one of the last public events we did was in Arlington with seniors talking about scams. You know, anytime something happens, there unfortunately are the scammers who both take advantage of people's fear and their generosity. So we've had reports of on the fear side, lots of people reaching out either telephonically or actually showing up at people's doors, both asking questions about the stimulus check that people are expecting. You know, I'm the bank, I'm the federal government confirming your routing numbers, all of that. One thing people should remember is that they're absolutely will not be a call, an email or visit from somebody from the federal government or your bank about those checks. So if someone starts the sentence with I'm from any of those places, I absolutely promise that's a scam. And you should step away from that. And if you feel concerned about it, reach out to the police department, because there is that check is going to just come automatically, you don't need to do anything. You don't need to confirm anything with your bank. So that is totally a scam. The other thing we've been hearing is praying on people's fear about the disease, offering either some kind of at home testing, or even more insidious offering some kind of pill or medication that will prevent you from getting the virus. And we all know that the FDA has not approved any at home testing. And as the World Health Organization has been making clear right now, there is no proven treatment or vaccine. So anybody who's offering you any of those things is purely taking your money. And then on the other side, obviously, there are lots of people suffering during this pandemic, and lots of people who've been incredibly generous, giving food or money or any number of things, that should always come from you. So you should never give to people who are soliciting you. So someone showing up at your door asking for money for the local restaurants or businesses or even first responders, it's unlikely that that money will make its way to where you intended it to go. There are lots of if you go on the websites, the Massachusetts state government is running a COVID-19 relief fund, you can certainly donate there, all of the reliable charities, the Red Cross, all of those places are taking donations, but you should initiate that. And if you're uncertain, you know, reach out to the police department, you can reach out to our office, we're answering our phones, and you can get some information about places that you might want to donate. Great. I mean, do you have, do you want to point people in any particular direction or give them any resource in for contact information at this point, or is it best just for them to contact your office? Well, they can do that. Or the one really general fund is the mass COVID relief fund, which that is showing up really, if you put your television on, it's showing up all over the place, but it's MACOVID19relief.gov. And that is a sort of full service relief fund as well. I'm sure it's a constant challenge for the DA's office to get the word out to the populations you are trying to, you know, again, protect and safeguard, especially elders, etc. Are you finding that you are able to use the same means that you always have now that we are all, you know, physically isolated? Or are you leaning on other kinds of platforms? Are you finding that you're able to get messages such as the one you're giving right now? You're speaking directly to people who are in these positions of susceptibility or vulnerability. Do you feel like you're still able to connect to that audience at this point? We are connecting. We have a pretty robust social media presence. Excuse me. And all the time we've stepped that up, obviously. We are in constant contact with our police chiefs and fire chiefs, getting the message out, getting materials out. We've been looking for new places where people are obviously people can't go to the senior center, but they are going, for instance, to the grocery store. So we've been trying to get our materials out there as well. One of the things, and I hope the viewers will keep in mind, is I always say that these scams thrive in isolation. And we probably all know somebody who's even more isolated right now. And people can really help us by phoning a friend or checking in on a neighbor to make sure that they aren't falling victim to these kind of scams. You had mentioned earlier that there has been a drop, a dramatic drop, and understandably so in what might be called street crime, the kind of crime that, you know, a lot of the time police officers are needing to spend their time following up on. That, of course, makes sense with so few people out on the streets in common meeting places, as you were saying. However, I think what that also means is that there's a lot going on behind closed doors that maybe always happens there, but now people are stuck in those situations. And so I'm wondering, you know, we've talked to some others, again, advocates and frontline people about the kinds of challenges coming for those who are isolated around depression, around mental illness, around just getting along with each other. But one very disturbing thing that we've heard is that there has been an increase in suicides. What can you tell us about that? We have unfortunately seen an increase in suicides over this last five weeks or so. You know, one of the things is, I think, for somebody who might already be struggling with some issues, and maybe is a little more disconnected from the contacts they had before, that can be a very stressful thing. I think all of us, even in the best of situations, may you may be sheltering in place with people you love, feel disconnected. So there's that whole issue. I think sometimes there are people who are concerned about being out, for instance, and filling their prescriptions and getting their medications. So what the message we really want to get to people is there is help out there, it's help in a different form. For instance, people who might need help with their prescriptions. You know, first responders are still willing to be helpful about that. There are all kinds of contactless deliveries that are happening from local pharmacies. That if you're in need of help, there is tele-help that's available. Pretty, I mean, Massachusetts has really done a good job about making a lot of those resources available. And also just encouraging people to try to the extent they can to to focus on the things you can control. I mean, obviously there's a lot we can't control right now. We don't know how long this is going to be, but you can control what you are doing today. You can reach out to people. You can at least get out of your house and get a little bit of fresh air. You can try doing some very small tasks. There's a great rule that a lot of the mental health professionals have been talking to us about the five-minute rule. If you are really feeling overwhelmed, just think about I'm going to do something for the next five minutes and that's often enough to energize you going forward.  So I think we all have to be taking extra steps in thinking about our mental health. And for those who are struggling, there really is a lot of help that's out there to talk to people. Are you finding any difference in terms of your office's interaction and intersection with the youth population in particular right now? Have there been any, again, changes due perhaps to the pandemic itself around, again, your relationship with young people? One of the things is that a lot of kids, particularly at risk kids, we've run a lot of affiliated with a lot of programs for instance the U-Tech program, a lot of the boys and girls clubs, all of those things. I think they all share our worry that those are often kids really in need of somebody to talk to in need of services. Cities and towns are doing a pretty good job of getting the nutritional component out there, but obviously kids aren't having that same interaction. That's concerning. It's also concerning to us that we've lost a huge category of mandated reporters for kids who may be being neglected and abused, you know, teachers who see kids five days a week and not seeing those kids. We've been putting out a lot of resources for them in terms of things, even in the Zoom check-ins to be thinking about and watching for because that is a real concern. There are kids that no one is seeing that typically we're out five days a week in a daycare or a school setting. And now they're they're at home in a place that may not be safe for them and also with often a lot of other stressors. Employment, income, all of that. Middlesex County is a kind of more progressive and innovative area that many around certain kinds of things. So diversion programs for youth, for instance, the use of restorative justice as an option. Are these kinds of programs being able to move along in this, you know, I don't know what you want to call it, the COVID-19 era? They are still moving along in the sense that, for instance, just a couple of weeks ago what got a lot of media attention was we had an unfortunate episode in one of our communities with some very racist homophobic graffiti. That case is going to be resolved with the use of restorative justice, the young people that were involved in that. So we've been talking with them, talking with their parents remotely, obviously, getting that agreement, setting that up. We are unable to do the restorative justice community circle right now, obviously, because we can't do that safely. I think as we go along, we are already talking about, is that something that would be effective if we do it the way we're meeting now in a Zoom way? You know, I think as this stretches out, we're going to have to start moving from the temporary to the more permanent. Right. Last thing, I was curious because earlier you were talking about the different ways in which you happened to be better prepared. Some of it's serendipitous and some just good preparation on your part and in terms of collaborating with Serif Kutujian and others. So it seems like the situation here in Middlesex County is pretty good, relatively speaking, on a number of levels. I'm wondering, first of all, well, I guess I've got two things. One is how much do you need to be working with the governor in order to be most effective right now, versus how much really are you able just to do for yourself, because the DA is a very influential, is a very influential figure, for sure. And secondly, how much variety or variation do you see in among the different counties and DA's offices in Massachusetts in terms of how a lot of what we've been talking about is playing out? I think in terms of the governor, obviously we're in contact, you know, with the governor's office and there's a frankly, they have the unenviable task of really being focused primarily right now on the health care piece of all this, in keeping that part going. We will obviously, there'll be more contact in discussions as we're moving into budget season now. So as the district attorney, you're fortunate because we've given our budget and then we really exercise our judgment in terms of using that, you know, it doesn't, it isn't hard to imagine that the budget statewide is going to be pretty severely impacted this year. And the question will be how do we make those accommodations? I think one of the things that this is really illustrated is the importance of our first responders in our health care. And so we can't ever let that leg in the budget and what will we do in other ways to make up what we're spending on that. You know, we're still bringing plain loads of personal protection equipment in. So obviously at some point you're paying for all of that. So there's that piece. In terms of the other counties, you know, we're very fortunate here. As I said, I think we had already built an infrastructure. It's, it's hard to build the plane as you're flying it. So I think for places that didn't already have those relationships that they've had to forge quickly, that's made things more difficult. We've been fortunate here. We had a pretty well-developed technology situation. Our folks had technology that they could pretty easily transition to working at home. And that is not the same in some of the smaller offices. That's been a little bit more difficult. And you just were talking about the fiscal challenges to come or budgetary challenges to come. Any other special challenges as you move forward, as we, as this, as you say, continues to play out and become something that we're going to have to live with as opposed to just react to? Well, I think, you know, one thing we've been talking a little bit is the whole jury system. You know, for at least a short time we could probably do jury trials of a number that would allow for more social distancing. You know, we are fortunate, for instance, in Lowell right now we have a really beautiful brand-new courthouse that has probably more ability to socially distance people than some of our very old courthouses in the county. And I think people, obviously, are going to be much more conscious of that and be maybe a little bit more reluctant to be in that situation. And we're going to have to think about that and how people have constitutional rights. They're going to have to have their trial. How are we going to be able to satisfy that and still accommodate people's legitimate concerns about their own physical safety? Yeah, that's a good point. Finally, just wanted to invite you to either because it was something that we could have or should have talked about and we didn't, or just to address directly the people of Arlington and Middlesex County just to invite you to add in anything at this point before we sign off. I think the thing that I most want people to know in all of this time when things seem out of control is that when it comes to physical safety, I think the folks in Middlesex County are in pretty good shape right now. The courts are open. People needing protection, for instance, restraining orders or dissection somebody who may be struggling with mental health or substance issues. That's all still available. The police and fire departments and really in Middlesex County, the chiefs have done a great job of implementing emergency measures. We've been incredibly fortunate. We have had some folks test positive for the illness, but in the way they've separated the departments. We haven't had any departments really decimated by that. People should not hesitate if they need help to reach out because that help is still here and available. Well, we again want to just thank you for taking the time to spend this time with us. It was highly informative and substantive half an hour. We appreciate it so much. We look forward to talking to you again under more normal circumstances. I look forward to that as well. Thank you for having me. All right, thank you. That's our Middlesex County District Attorney Marion Ryan. I'm James Milan. You're watching Justice in the Balance. Thanks for joining us and we'll see you next time.