Welcome to the COVID-19 Reflections series hosted by the Center for Racial Justice at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, Poverty Solutions, and the National Center for Institutional Diversity all at the University of Michigan. I am Dr. Celeste Watkins-Hays, Director of the Center for Racial Justice and the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs here at the Ford School of Public Policy. I'm also a professor of sociology. The first two events in our series were led by my colleagues, Dr. Mara Osfeld and Dr. Luke Schaefer from Poverty Solutions. The first event included a phenomenal panel of scholars and activists focused on the local impact of COVID-19 on communities of color in Michigan. And Dr. Schaefer moderated an amazing conversation with Dr. Cameron Webb on the national response to COVID-19 racial disparities. I invite you to check both of those out on YouTube and on our website. I am so happy to be joined today by Dr. Jonay Caldoon. Dr. Caldoon is a nationally recognized healthcare executive, health policy, and public health expert who currently serves as the Vice President and Chief Equity Officer for CVS Health. In this role, she advances strategy, programs, and policy to achieve health equity across all CVS health lines of business. Prior to this, she served as Chief Medical Executive for the State of Michigan and Chief Deputy Director for Health in the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services, where she oversaw public health, Medicaid, behavioral health, and aging services. She was the lead strategist guiding Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer's COVID-19 response and in 2021 was appointed by President Biden to the COVID-19 Health Equity Task Force. Today, Dr. Caldoon and I will be reflecting on the two-year anniversary commemoration moment pausing of the COVID-19 pandemic. And specifically, talk through the lessons learned related to Michigan's response to COVID-19 health disparities. Welcome, Dr. Caldoon. It's wonderful to have you with us. Yes. Yes. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Yes, so we wanted to do this series as we thought about two years or now over two years of this pandemic and just to pause and reflect on the lessons learned. But I wonder if you can first take us back. Take us back to that time in early 2020 where we became aware of COVID-19 and tell us about how you got involved in the fight. Absolutely. So I first say that we have, and many people don't know this, there's a great apparatus of public health professionals across the state and local and the state health department who really their daily job is just this, responding to public health threats, responding to infectious diseases, outbreaks, environmental health threats. And so I have an amazing team at the state, many of whom are still there, who were really looking at this very early on. So I remember actually being on vacation in late 2019 and over the holiday break. And I remember seeing international news about this virus in China. So remember that. I remember saying to my husband, you know what, this is going to be a thing. When I get back, I'm going to have to talk to my team and kind of see what's going on here. Because what I know is that oftentimes for these types of infectious diseases, particularly respiratory, they tend to get ahead of us as far as being able to identify them, track them. We know that it's a global society, right? So they often don't stay within borders. So essentially fast forward of maybe a week or two, we're in January 2020 now. So actually at that time, I was engaging with my team with the CDC. We were making sure we had the latest information on the virus. Again, at this point, we weren't even sure close contacts were being impacted, how it really spread. But we certainly were making sure we had our teams together. Actually remember talking about, I think we're going to need more capacity as far as staffing to be able to deal with what it ended up becoming. And so essentially really just got our team together to make sure I was preparing our Health and Human Services Director, our Governor's Office briefing them, and then unfortunately it became what it did, which is of course the pandemic that we all know now. But there was a lot of behind the scenes work before the actual first cases were announced in the country or in the state. And that's so important because it's such a great example of how policy and public health are operating and the wheels are turning before the general public really has a strong awareness. And you're right, people remember those early news stories in 2019 and perhaps thought about it as this far away distant issue. But it's key for policy officials and public health officials to move it into the present in terms of, all right, what's going to be involved in our day to day planning, right? How are we going to think about putting the mechanisms in place? So then can you walk us through as the cases started rising? And we had our first cases in the United States and we saw the movement, the first cases in Michigan. Can you talk to us about what that was like and what some of the initial responses, reactions were from a public health perspective and from a policy perspective as you were trying to figure out exactly what we were dealing with? Absolutely. So I think what's important about these types of crises and public health responses in general is that often we don't have complete information, we don't know everything about the virus, how it spreads, who's been impacted. And so that information, again, that's kind of how science works, unfortunately, we don't always know research, we investigate. And then as we know information, we share it, we tell people what to do, and then we continue on. So I would say that, I remember the very early days, excuse me, the very early days, and don't quote me on this. It was maybe late January or February, I'm forgetting the exact time, and certainly before we had cases identified in Michigan. I remember speaking to my team and there were many CDC calls. And I remember someone telling me that we were only going to be able to test people who had recently traveled to a subset of countries, or I remember in the early days, people were saying, oh, it's just these countries, right? So only people who had recently traveled and only people who were severely ill were going to be able to get it, obtain a test. I know that sounds crazy now, but that's really what it is. The horses out of the barn and people are symptomatic at that point, right? We were only going to be able to test people who were severely ill. What I know as an ER doctor, as a physician, as a scientist, as a public health leader, is that often respiratory illnesses are not always severe. If you only test a subset of people, you're going to miss a lot. And you're therefore, again, it's not just tests for the sake of testing, tests to see who has it, and you can isolate them and they don't spread it to others. So if you're not able to identify the illness early, you're not going to be able to prevent the spread. And so I remember having that conversation and saying, are you sure? And that's what the CDC said. And I don't mean to disparage the CDC at all. I just think as a country, we weren't prepared as much as we would have liked. And I don't think that anyone would disagree with that. And so essentially, that's what we did. We had limited testing. We had to work very closely with our hospitals, identifying, making sure people who they thought might need to test met this very rigid criteria. Then they got swabbed, they sent it to my lab at the state. We would then send it to the CDC. I mean, this is very early on and waiting for the result of that test to come back to us. And that's what the CDC was doing for essentially every state. So I share that because I think that alone is partly how we got a little behind as a country in being able to quickly identify and stop the spread. However, again, kudos to our lab, public health professionals of the state. We did build up a state lab capacity pretty quickly. We trained other labs across the state. We partnered with others. And so we were able to expand our testing capacity. But again, the early days, it was about testing, trying to isolate and then making sure people had the information they needed to protect us themselves. And one other point I'll make is about data. And so in the early days, I believe people probably didn't understand just how underfunded and inadequate the public health data infrastructure really is. Many health departments, most health departments, quite frankly, data sharing is with fax machines. Fax machines. There is no system. They had not been a system where someone goes to ex-hospital. They have a certain symptom. The test is there. It automatically goes to the health department. I click on it, and then all of a sudden I know who they are, where they've been. So that system does not exist, right? The data infrastructure, the communication, it was literally on paper. And so again, that's a national challenge where we don't have the data infrastructure. So you can't understand and respond in the way that we really needed to be able to do to be able to hold this pandemic back. How do we help the public understand the importance of resourcing data infrastructure? It's not the most exciting thing, but it turns out that data ended up being critical for the identification of racial disparities in the response, and then the subsequent ability for us to be responsive and to help save lives. So how do we think about making that connection between data and the ability to save lives? Absolutely. I mean, I like to say you measure what you treasure. If you don't measure it, you're not going to be able to do anything about it, right? And so I absolutely think that and people in public health, public health leaders know this. We've known that's been a lack of infrastructure support for public health for decades. What tends to happen is that when crises occur, so H1N1 flu, things happen, and then funding is made available, and then the funding goes away. The funding goes away, the staffing goes away, and that's kind of just the life of being in governmental public health. And so absolutely, the data infrastructure, building out the IT systems to be able to collect the data, interoperability between hospitals, doctor's offices, the local health department, the state health department, the CDC, and all their lab capabilities, right? We should not be in 2022 or in 2020, we should have not been on fax machines, right? We should have been in place. Literally in the beginning, the way we were able to identify demographic information about cases was if someone actually wrote it on the lab requisition form that was shipped to, literally shipped physically to the state lab in Lansing, right? That is a failure of the public health system as a country. Again, Michigan is not unique in that. That is a national challenge that I think many people have recognized. There have been efforts to expand funding for public health, and I know governmental public health officials have been grateful for that. But we just were ill-prepared, not prepared as a country to be able to address just the basics of where the virus was, but alone how it was really impacting communities at the local level. So cases are rising in 2020, and we're working through this kind of early operation in terms of testing that we know is not going to be adequate. And the cases are rising, and we start to see who's being most affected and who's being disproportionately affected because of the nature of COVID-19 being a respiratory virus and all of the dynamics around close contact. There's social dynamics. There's sociological dynamics. So of course, we see how it maps on to social life and who has access to what. So can you walk us through the conversation, the awareness about this is an infectious disease that can affect anybody, and yet we're seeing disproportionate impacts? Absolutely. So that's really critical when you talk about health disparities and health equity.  And I will say this is something that I've always championed in my various roles. So whether opioid crisis and deaths, maternal deaths, I always encouraged our team to when you're looking at data sets, make sure you're looking at by race and ethnicity is really, really important. And so COVID cases, we started building up our capacity to be able to track them appropriately. The team really built out a, continued to build out a great dashboard. We had a website, right? Just building, building. And I asked, you know, let's look at these cases. Let's look at these cases by race and ethnicity. Can we do that?  Or they weren't asking it, clinicians weren't asking it when people were getting a test. Or, again, we had the contact tracing. We haven't talked about that, but the contact tracing where you call someone or the case investigation. Some of that information we had to get when we actually identified, so got the positive result and then we called the person back to understand more about that person, right? The person who was the case and where they had been so we could identify their close contacts and then call them to make sure they were isolated appropriately or quarantined appropriately, etc. And so essentially, the team said, yep, you know, Dr. Caldwell, we're going to look at this. And so they really did, we really worked on collecting that race and ethnicity data and being able to analyze it and share it. Michigan was actually one of the first states to be able to do that, which I'm really proud of. But I also want to talk about the disparity. And I want to make sure people understand this is not about genetics, right? And the disparities that we have seen in COVID-19, blacks and Hispanics, particularly early on, about three times as likely to be hospitalized, almost twice as likely to die from COVID-19. Those are not because of genetic differences.  It just does not exist. However, what we need to talk about is unfortunately the structures in society, right? So racism, classism, etc. That mean that there are disproportionate numbers of people of color, black and brown individuals who are more likely to live in poverty, who are more likely to not have access to high quality education or high paying jobs, jobs that allow them to work from home, jobs that allow them to buy and have their own car so that they can again get into COVID-19, isolate and not take public transportation, right? Access to health care, right? And so not having access to health care, not being able to live in communities where you can have access to safe places to exercise, chronic diseases that come from that, right? So you have a situation where as a country, some individuals, because of the structures of society, less likely to have resources. And so again, COVID-19 and respiratory illness, if you are more likely to live in less stable housing or crowded housing, that's how the virus is going to spread, right? If you're not able to stay at home, right? And isolate, if you're a frontline worker, you're going to be at risk for getting the virus. So more likely to be exposed, not because of genetics, but because of your social situation. We learned that chronic diseases made you at higher risk for getting sicker from COVID-19, right? That's why we had that hospitalization rate, not because of genetics. It was because the underlying, the higher likelihood of having a chronic disease. And of course, if you're more likely to get severely ill, you're also more likely to die. And so I think we have to really understand that landscape when we start talking about the disparities because it was not about anything that people were doing wrong, right? Blaming those communities. It was really about the structures that were never set up for historically marginalized communities to be able to be protected from a public health crisis such as COVID-19. So many of those issues that you talk about are the things that I think about as a sociologist. And when you're able to, when you're making those linkages between the sociological and economic dynamics and their implications for health, how do you begin to target that through policy? How do you begin to respond to the disparities through policy in terms of, do you think broad, in terms of we've got to address the broader structural systems? Do you think at the institutional level, in terms of people's access to different kinds of helpful institutions? Do you think at the micro level, in terms of what individual behaviors can we try to promote?  Right, so those structural barriers that I spoke about, you can't, it goes overnight. They took centuries to get to where they are and so you can't snap your fingers and fix them, but you can at least understand that they probably exist so that data piece was really, really important, early identification and data. And then you have to understand what those risks are, right? Why people are, who have been historically marginalized and have not had the resources to support themselves or the communities, you have to understand what those barriers may be and then you have to respond. And so for, in the middle of a pandemic, right? It has to be immediate response. And so of course we looked at the data, we identified there was a disparity and then we acted and included those to many people at the state and local level for acting. One of those actions was creating the machine task force of racial disparities who, Lieutenant Governor Garvin Gilchrist, my friend was chair, so that was one response. But what that really was, was one, the governor saying that racism is a public health crisis, which it is, and that's how we got to the disparities in the first place. The task force was really about, we can't do this in mode. And government, you can't sit in your office and look at data and then decide you're gonna launch programs because you think you know everything, right? So really the task force was about pulling together the amazing expertise across the state, people with lived experience, people from and in the communities who were disproportionately impacted by the pandemic. So bringing those, just brilliant, many people together to really advise on what are the issues on the ground? What should we be doing? And also using, I shouldn't say these, that doesn't sound right, but really I think leveraging our resilience, right? In these communities. And so actually many of them on the task force were spokespeople, spokespeople for the community, just getting basic information out. This is what COVID-19 is. This is how you should protect yourself, wash your hands, wear a mask, get your vaccine. So really making sure it was not just me, Dr. Caldo or the governor sharing that message for really the communities that were disproportionately impacted. And then it's also about, if I had to say, understanding what people were living through in the moment. So we did a lot of supporting people in their homes. So providing food, right? Providing isolation. So if someone didn't have a safe place to isolate, being able to provide that type of housing, stable housing, food delivery for people who were in their homes, a free mask, right? We sent out millions of free masks across the state, particularly focusing in underserved communities. And the messaging, we put a lot of, when we initially identified those disparities, we pivoted our messaging, our communications team did a great job of this. And we really focused our messaging in Southeast Detroit metropolitan area. Again, early on where we were getting the most cases and deaths focused our communications efforts as well. And then I'd also say Medicaid. So this was not just about the public health team, but our Medicaid team did great work in looking at their policies, being able to get 90 days of medication as opposed to 30, right? When you're trying to get medications. Virtual, making virtual visits, being able to be paid for through Medicaid, which is not something that was possible before the pandemic. So again, a lot of, it's about data, understanding what people are going through, leveraging the communities and then acting with resources, money, communications, and then policy changes where you can. Absolutely. And it's so helpful to hear you lay all of that out because it helps people understand the larger apparatus that is a public health response and to understand all of the different players and systems and how they have to work together in order to be able to create a kind of outcome. There were nevertheless barriers, I know, through that process when, in terms of continued challenges around access to testing, when vaccines rolled out, getting people to get access to the vaccines and trust the vaccines. I wonder if you could talk about some of the challenges that began to emerge as the pandemic unfolded. Absolutely. I think in any public health crisis, communication is so critical. For something that's a global crisis, aligned messaging and coordinated messaging is so critical, using the right messengers, making sure your message is accurate, credible, early and frequent, right? So that's something that we certainly at the state really prioritize. I mean, I know people saw my face many times on TV, press conferences and other media outlets, but it wasn't just me. It was also, we used again, local community members as well. But I'll say one of the challenges early on is that we did not have a consistent or appropriately science-based approach to communicating the pandemic at the White House level early in the pandemic. There were just things that were shared at the level of the federal government that were sometimes untrue from the White House that were simply untrue and not scientific. And unfortunately, I think that contributed to this pandemic becoming quite political. And it really impeded our ability as a public health community to be able to respond as much as we could. And that just fueled fuel on all of the issues that I talked about earlier, where we already know that there are historically marginalized communities, lack of access, et cetera. But it just made it even more difficult to gain that trust and to be able to respond. So I think communications were certainly a barrier. Again, the public health infrastructure, we talked about the data already, that was not there. But I'll say we really tried to make sure we were thinking about access as testing became more available. We actually brought in our private sector partners and brought in mobile clinics, partnering with the faith-based community, going to places that were in people's neighborhoods, so that they could actually get to them. And also, again, partnering with trusted community organizations so that, again, we could get beyond that barrier of distrust. And let me also say the distrusts that many people have in these historically marginalized communities, it's quite valid. I think, really, we should not be judging these communities for thinking, what are they really saying? Is the government really looking to support me? And I'd say, particularly for African-American communities, we know public health and medicine have done some egregious things in black and brown communities. And so that's why there's just this kind of hesitancy. Sometimes, not for everyone, but sometimes there is this hesitancy, which is why it's so important, and this is what we really focused on at the state level, have frequent conversations, make sure the data and the science, we are frequently communicating that, working with trusted messengers, and just having those places and spaces for people to have those conversations in an open, non-judgmental way. And I think that we had some success there as far as really getting the message out and helping people understand what they could do to protect themselves. And then when you think about how important that was for us to have a response that was both universal in terms of trying to reach everybody, but also targeted in the same way, responding to the disparities, that ended up being an approach that was critical in terms of offering leadership for many other states and many other places. And in fact, at the national level, in the Biden administration, many of the things that Michigan did were lifted up as really important and useful practices. So can you talk about also the role of local and state policymaking and implementation in terms of informing what happens at the federal level? Yeah, you know, I say there's one thing we've learned and not a surprise for many public health leaders, but I think there's some work to be done as far as coordination of our governmental public health system from a local, state, and federal level. So it's really, how do I put it? The federal level, at the national level, they have certain authorities in the New Yorkies, but they don't really have the ability to do things really at the local level. They kind of defer a lot of that responsibility authority to the cities and the states and counties. And every state is actually built a little differently as far as the laws. There are laws on the books that give local health officials and state health officials authority. So in some states, actually, the local health officers report up through, like literally they're on the payroll of the state health department and their authority kind of comes through that. Here in Michigan, essentially, we have laws where oftentimes the local and the state health department have the exact same authorities. So, you know, not to, there's pros and cons of that, but the point of that is that there's really a lot of communication and coordination even at the public health leader level at the national, state, and local level that really needs to be done. And I will say that does make it challenging because sometimes at the state level and local level, we wouldn't exactly know what was going to come out as far as recommendations from at the national level. So sometimes I would wake up in the morning and I would see it on the news, unfortunately, from a New York Times article just like we put out. So it's not like at some point, like the CDC would prepare us at the state level that this is coming heads up, this is what you want to think about. We will find out about it at the same time as the general public. And then, of course, we asked to speak about it. So again, we were always constantly, always, but sometimes trying to respond in that way. And so policymaking, again, local, state, federal, having to communicate across those lines, understand different authorities, but where you do have authority and you think that you can, we did this obviously at the state level when there's a public health emergency, which I don't think anyone would argue that the pandemic was or was not. I think there's different kind of avenues you can take to protect the public and those laws differ across the state and between the local, state and federal level. Right, right. And I want to ask you, and I think many of our viewers would be very interested in this, particularly our students. So when you're in this situation where you're trying to respond to an emergent public health threat and you're still learning what it is and you're still trying to understand the science of it, you're trying to think about how to run a coordinated response. And then there are moments where you're hearing things in, you're reading things in the New York Times and just getting informed in terms of how the communication is not flowing in the ideal way. And then you've got a press conference that morning. How do you think through how as a policy official, as a public health professional, how do you nevertheless push through to be able to act effectively and act in health so much swirling around you that is in fact complicated, uncertain, contradictory? What did you learn from that kind of battle testing? You know, I'll say that, you know, this was really not the, of course I hadn't responded to a global pandemic before, but this concept of there's some type of crisis. There's a public health threat. We need to pull people together, understand what the threat is, understand why it happened. Make sure we're communicating with transparency and speed to the public, what we know, what we don't know, what we're doing, what they can do, and what next steps will be. That's kind of public health response, crisis, communication, that's really what it is. And so I think, of course, this pandemic was an entirely different another scale, but we were continually just constant communication, daily, multiple times a day communications with the public health team, the Medicaid team, our behavioral health system, the governor's office, other departments at the state level, departments at the local level. So there was really just a lot of communications, a lot of groups, we call these, there's an incident command system that's set up and I won't get into, but this concept of emergency crisis response and how different government and non-governmental departments work together. That's really what we were able to stand up, making sure the governor and her team were always aware, making sure we had supply chain going. And also I would say anticipation. One thing that we always did was think about, what are the next steps? If this happens, what are we gonna do, who needs to know? If that doesn't happen, the other thing happens, what are we going to do, who needs to know? But to anticipate what this might be, six months, three months, six months from now. So we were never just sitting in the today, we were always, and I know, I haven't been in the state I left in September, but I know the team is just great at thinking about what we have, anticipation, responding. That is what a public health response is that we did in Michigan and other states as well. I wanna come back to our conversation around disparities and the word equity as the goal, as the desire. I wonder if you can talk about, first of all, what does health equity mean, particularly for our listeners just to understand the concept, but also what does it mean in terms of trying to think about policy formation? Can you talk more about that concept? Yeah, health equity is quite simply making sure that everyone has a fair and just opportunity to be healthy. And unfortunately, I would say across the globe, we don't have that. It's not, for most conditions where we see disparities, so a disproportionate impact of a certain health condition on a group of people that shouldn't otherwise exist, right, we see disparities. It's often because of this disproportionate or disparate division of resources and opportunity. So health equity is really about understanding that and then doing something about it. So ideally, ideally to advance health equity, you really have to look at the infrastructure. So how are we making sure people have access to quality education, right? Quality food, environmental threats, right? We know that unfortunately black and brown communities are more likely to be living in places where there's poor air quality, right? That was by design, right? So when you have, again, when you have these structural challenges, you are going to see health disparities. So when you're in a pandemic response, you have to know that exists. We're not going to be able to fix air quality or education jobs overnight, right? But you have to at least understand the challenges that people are facing in their daily lives and respond with, okay, how can we make sure people can isolate appropriately in their homes? Do we need to send them anything? Do we need to think about virtual? Should we be looking at pay time off policies? So all of those things have to come into play when it comes to addressing a pandemic of this magnitude. I wonder if you can talk about the work ahead as it relates to COVID. We're at a moment where many people are commenting that the perception seems to be that the pandemic is over in a lot of ways. You see a lot less masking in public. You see people who feel like this was a thing in the past and they've moved on, yet we're still seeing infections, we're still seeing serious illness, we're still seeing people who are not vaccinated. Can you talk to us about, if you think about a pandemic as a lifecycle, this period that we're in right now, where the emergent crisis where people are glued to their TV screens and thinking about this every day has largely passed, yet we still have to fight this pandemic. Can you talk about that moment that we're in? Absolutely, I talk about it from the kind of infectious disease perspective but then kind of outside of that as far as forward thinking about our kind of response. So I think from an infectious disease perspective, again, early on 2020, we kind of anticipated, especially when we realized that our testing was behind and this was gonna roll out and be the pandemic that it was, we knew this was likely not going to be just over in a few months, right? We knew just like the Spanish flu, 1918, similar kind of rollout, we knew this was gonna happen. We knew what type of virus, I'm talking about weed, the scientific community, again, this is what viruses do, they mutate. They mutate especially when you have such rapid and widespread of it, we knew it was going to mutate. We knew that our vaccines were going to have to change and we would likely need boosters. I mean, you can think about it from the perspective of the flu, right? The flu virus mutates constantly and that's why we have to get a new flu shot every year and so I think that where we are now, pandemic is certainly not over. There are still many things people should be doing to protect themselves, masking, particularly when you have high rates of spread in the community, where you're going to be in large public spaces, considering masking, when you have vulnerable people in your home, right? We're more likely to have severe illness. Of course, vaccinations, getting your vaccine at the appropriate time, making sure you're up to date. Those continue to be the bread and butter, things that are important for people to protect themselves, but I think ideally we get to a place where we've been with the flu where at some point, maybe when we come seasonal, I wouldn't say it's the pandemic is seasonal at this point, but where we see this kind of these increases and decreases, hopefully we have vaccines which we do today that are effective in decreasing the severity of the disease and decreasing, limiting the spread as much as possible. And we want to, of course, not get to a situation where our hospitals are overwhelmed. And so that's what we're going to continue to monitor. And I anticipate that the virus will continue to mutate because that's what viruses do. So there's kind of that infectious disease aspect. But let's really think about what we haven't talked about yet, which is mental health. What I am very concerned about is that, you almost think of this as like a disaster, a crisis after post-response, where we know that across the country, four in 10 adults have experienced symptoms of anxiety or depression over the past two years of the pandemic. That was compared to one in 10 prior to the pandemic. We know that, again, it sounds like just a number, black people being almost twice as likely to die from COVID-19, particularly in the early years of the pandemic. That's not just a number. What that means is that these communities have been disproportionately impacted more broadly. So when a child loses a parent or a caretaker, or when they have not been able to be in school, you know, those things, the mental health impacts of that are very far reaching. And I believe we'll be dealing with that for generations, actually. And so we think about our response. We have to think about what's happened, right? So how are we responding to more mental health perspective, educational perspective, economic perspective? But let's also think about, there will be more pandemics, right? Again, that's just, there have been pandemics before. There will be outbreaks. How can we really make sure to what I said about, we can't kind of snap our fingers and deal with the air pollution and access to healthcare and medication overnight. But we can do things now that if there's a new pandemic in five years, 10 years, whenever it comes, I don't pretend that I know when it will come, but it will come. Can we make sure the next pandemic, we don't see the disparities that we've seen? Because again, they were not a surprise. You would anticipate it if you know anything about the structure of society and how viruses spread. So what can we do as a society to make sure that does not happen again? Right, absolutely. And then when you think about the disparities, how you were able to respond to the disparities in Michigan, can you first talk about what kinds of results we saw through the efforts that you described? And then can you talk about the lessons learned around that that you hope are replicated? Right. So now we're going back a couple of years, particularly early on when we identified the racial and disparities in cases and deaths specifically. And again, kudos to many people who acted, identifying it as a problem in the first place, pulling together the leaders, dedicating resources, changing policies. We actually, in 2020, excuse me, saw that disparity essentially close over the span of a few months, right? And this data is on the Michigan website. And so we always knew that was fragile, right? We always would tell my leaders like, okay, let's not high five and say the disparities are over because we know the structural reasons this pandemic will be ongoing. And of course they did open up after that, but not quite as wide. So I think that, again, understanding early what the disparities will likely exist, measuring them, and then acting with speed and intentionality, I think was really important. And so that communication is so key policies that make sure that people have access to what they need. We built out testing in, again, in communities so that they could have access to testing, know where the testing was, right? So we're moving barriers to access, supporting people if they had to isolate or quarantine was critical. So all the things, the resources, human resources, the financial resources, the communication efforts, it's the equity will only happen when you're intentional. And so I think that was the lesson learned that I try to share with others is you can't just expect it to happen. And disparities are not inevitable. Right, right.  Okay, I don't have to exist, do something about it. You can actually close the gap and save lives, right? So I think that's really, really important. It's so important, disparities are addressable. And I think that so often we hear about it and it becomes, first, it's an old story, it's background noise, well, we knew that was going to happen. It is what it is. And not recognizing that disparities are addressable. They are addressable. And I think that one thing that's so important as I hear what you're saying is the commitment has to be there, right? So I wonder if you can talk about how, kind of the big element that was really important for all of this was commitment. Commitment for leadership, the governor's office, et cetera. There are times where there's less commitment, there's times where there's not gonna be commitment in all the different historical moments and life circumstances we can talk about. How do you build commitment? How do you get people to care? How do you get people to become invested? Those who aren't affected, how do you get them to care? Those who are affected but are apathetic and are tired, how do you get them to care? How do you sustain commitment? Right, I think you're right in the sense that commitment, and particularly commitment from leaders is so critical. And we have that. We've had that in the state of Michigan and something I've been quite, I was quite proud of. We had that commitment in the state from our government officials to address this pandemic, to respond, to address disparities, to highlight disparities, and to provide resources to be able to address them. Because without that, we would not have seen, we would not have seen the success that we did. So I think that commitment is very important. But I also say it was commitment from non-governmental individuals as well. I'm currently the Chief Health Equity Officer for CVS Health, a company that reaches over 100 million people every single day. Health insurance, a pharmacy benefit plan, obviously our minute clinic and retail footprint. But CVS actually stepped in very early and expanded is the one retail arm that's provided the most tests, COVID tests and vaccines across the entire country. They were great partners actually for me in the state and expanding those kind of locally based testing sites. So the point there is it's commitment, but not just from government, it's from public and private leaders, those partnerships, academia, I would be remiss. Actually, if I didn't highlight how important our academic partnerships were, University of Michigan actually was a great in the School of Medicine, School of Public Health, others information I'd be remiss, I know there are many other folks, but we're great partners in actually analyzing the data, sharing the data. We actually brought them in, right? There's no room for egos in public health. We brought in the experts at the University of Michigan. They were in our governor calls and we were giving updates on the data with the governor and other leaders in the state. He saw some of the leaders from the University of Michigan in our press conferences. So again, University of Michigan, there were others, Wayne State, we worked with hospital leaders. This commitment really, I think I would say was phenomenal in the state of Michigan. And I really have to use this time to thank many individuals who supported me and my team and many others in this work. And I think collectively we were able to save lives. And what that highlights is there's so many different roles to play. So for students who are trying to figure out what's gonna be my plugin point, there's so many different ways to plug in through government, through the public sector, higher ed, et cetera. There's so many different plug in points to address some of these challenges and to just understand the wide array of opportunity that's available to you. I wonder if you can talk about, we've spoken a lot about the challenges and the policy response and the impact of the work that has been done in the state of Michigan and the work that still remains in the lessons learned. I wonder if you can talk about where we go from here as it relates to this challenge of how do we put public in public health? How do we help the general public understand that we are all in this together? How do we help the general public understand that we all will be better suited if we better understand the issues, better understand the implications, if we have a better understanding of when public health officials make recommendations, why it's important to respond? How do you think the public's reaction and the public's relationship to public health changed through this pandemic? Talk to us about the challenges when I suspect there were moments where public health officials felt very challenged by the public, but also talk about the symbiotic relationship that we hopefully now have and the ability for us to understand just how important public health is to our society. Yeah, I think now most people probably understand how public health, what public health kind of is. Yes, a lot of people probably didn't even understand what public health was until the pandemic. And now they do, in their personal lives, in their professional, so I think every business probably understands now how they have something to do with public health, right? People probably know they're local health official or know that there's a local health department, right? And people kind of know that. But I would say even before the pandemic, I think there were already relationships, but I think that they could have been stronger in the sense that I think that there should always be a connection between your local health department and local business leaders. There should always be a connection. And I did this in my roles between the local health department and your local doctors and hospitals, right? Some of this I did when I was chief medical officer in Baltimore, we responded to the unrest with the Freddie Gray murder. So there I convened many of the local leaders and we responded to providing food, et cetera. So really public health is always, should always be that kind of leader in convening and making sure people have the things that they need. Similar in Detroit, when I was the Detroit health commissioner, Hepatitis A. Many people may not remember that. I remember what Hepatitis A in 2017, 18, happened to respond to that, convening health departments, convening, providing vaccines. Again, we did this early on to the Hepatitis A, to respond to the Hepatitis A outbreak in Southeast Michigan. Convening, being present, hospitals knowing that there are resources with the local health department or other communities. That's really, really important. But again, I think that there's work to be done because I do think that unfortunately, again, because early on, I think the pandemic became somewhat political. I think that has hindered the pandemic response and hindered people's relationship in some places. In some instances, not everyone, but with public health. And so I think we have to do some work on that. Absolutely, in terms of the challenges to the credibility that happened, the challenges to science and the real struggle that I think happened in the early stages. I wonder if you can also talk about, and this is my last question, you still treat patients. And I wonder if you can talk about that in the context of how that informs your approach to public health, how you think having that patient contact helped in terms of understanding COVID and the pandemic. I wonder if you can just talk about that relationship between the very intimate relationship between patient provider and then how it eventually funnels up all the way up to the highest levels of government in terms of how we mount a collective response. Absolutely, I love, I practice emergency medicine at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit. I love it. I love practicing emergency medicine. I think it keeps me grounded as well when you're in an emergency apartment and you're seeing people waiting in the waiting room. You're seeing that you're limited with supplies, right? The fact that we had to save our N95s and it was hard to get gloves and things early on in the pandemic. For me, when I'm in conversations at the state level thinking about the supply chain, it makes it not theoretical, right? You can really bring that lived experience and seeing that, yeah, it is mostly black and brown people coming into the ER. Seeing that you're pronouncing people dead from COVID-19 and you're trying to figure out how to take care of them medically, how that relates to the state policies that you might consider. And so I consider it an honor. I'll tell you, it's been, my gosh, when I practice still and people still kind of recognize me and they say, oh, you're the doctor from the state and I'll tell you it's been such an honor because sometimes people say, well, thank you. Your press conferences, the information share was good. Thank you, Amal. I remember one time when we switched from telling people wear a cloth mask to the surgical or the KN95 mask and someone in the ER, a shift I worked during that time said, I saw that you said it and I got my KN95 now. And so for me, it was also a way to kind of sense are people listening? What do people need to know? I remember the public health messages. Exactly, how are they receiving the public health messages and what's going on? Our hospital frontline workers, my gosh, just have incredible respect and just so grateful for what they have done and been through. I have lost a couple of people who trained me in emergency medicine in New York to this virus and what people have sacrificed their own physical health, their mental health to be able to take care of patients. I don't know how we can ever repay our healthcare workers for that sacrifice in that commitment. Absolutely, we owe them a debt of gratitude. We truly do, we truly do. Dr. Joanie Caldo, this has been a fantastic conversation, so helpful, enlightening, inspiring. Thank you for all that you have done and continue to do. Thank you for educating us and giving us a sense of what's happening behind the scenes and what was happening behind the scenes. It deepens our understanding. It deepens our appreciation. It hopefully deepens our commitment and our motivation to do more and to do better, particularly as it relates to making sure that we all have access to good health. So thank you so, so much for being here. Truly appreciated. Thank you, it was a pleasure.


Okay, this is blowing my mind. I was having a conversation with my wife in the car the other day, and we were listening to a John Piper sermon. Now, John Piper was making reference to Hosea. Now, if you're not familiar with Hosea, basically Hosea, the point of Hosea is there's this man named Hosea, and he marries this prostitute, this whore, as the Bible puts it, Gomorrah, okay? And basically, the point of the book is to demonstrate that Hosea is supposed to play God, and Gomorrah is Israel, so God is the faithful husband who continues to receive back this prostitute of a wife who continues to abandon him, but yet he still loves her. And this was a picture of God's love for Israel, and yet Israel continued to rebel and just screw things up. Now, after hearing the story, you might be like, wow, that's a really cool analogy, and that's really amazing of God, and that's kind of how I've always thought about it. But then, in this conversation we are having, we're actually kind of digging deeper a little bit more to understand that sex, right, and sex within marriage is one of the most vulnerable and intimate experiences, if not the most, right? Vulnerable and intimate experiences a human being can have. And so within the context of that relationship, there's the vulnerability, there's the intimacy, but then when somebody within that relationship decides to betray that trust, betray that intimacy, and sleep with somebody else, in a sense that is the deepest betrayal that we can experience on earth, right? Because you think about it, it's the deepest intimacy, the deepest vulnerability, and yet that is betrayed with another person. And so what God is doing here, I think in an amazing way, that just kind of a mind blowing way, is he is showing us that we have betrayed him in the most intimate way possible, by us leaving his, him creating us, right? Him creating us, him knowing us from day one, and yet we've decided to spit in his face to rebel against him. I think about throughout the Bible, when it talks about kind of this sexual intimacy that happens, often it's referred to as, you know, somebody knowing another person. So Adam knew Eve, right? And that's such a cool way of phrasing it because it's this deep intimate knowledge that moves beyond just kind of the intellect to the physical and also the spiritual, because it is a spiritual act as well. And so what God is doing here, continuing to do, is to demonstrate that there is this deep intimacy that has been broken by our sin, that we've betrayed him, that we've rebelled against him, and yet while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Another interesting aspect to this is marital unfaithfulness, is grounds for biblical divorce. Think about that for a second. When a partner decides to sleep with somebody else, right? That is grounds for biblical divorce, not all the time that people would go through with that. There's forgiveness to be had, but that is at least on one level, something to be said, okay, hey, this is justified, but we have betrayed God. And in a real sense, he has had grounds for divorce. He has had grounds for divorcing us of any kind of life or hope or freedom that we might want. He has grounds to just separate us for all of eternity, and yet he receives us back in love. He receives us back in love. How beautiful is that picture of the gospel that we didn't deserve that, we didn't deserve his love. He paints himself as the husband who has opened himself to provide and protect, and he's offered himself to us in that way. And yet we have turned aside and returned to the scum of the streets. Oh man, this theme of betrayal runs deep in the scriptures. I think about David, right? King David, a man after God's own heart, right? Somebody that God loved deeply. And yet God, in the moments where he committed the sin with Bathsheba and had Uriah killed, and all of these things and tried to hide his sin and run from what he had done, he was betraying God and he was betraying those around him. This is deep betrayal. And yet when David turned to God in repentance and said, God, against you and you alone have, I sinned, he received forgiveness. He received forgiveness. God had given him so much, so much, from being a nobody, right?  And yet David, as he committed that sin, spat in God's face, spat in the face of the God who had made him. And yet God forgave him, amidst his repentance. I think of the apostle Peter, who was right next to Jesus, throughout his whole ministry, who would say, no, nothing's gonna happen to you, Jesus. We won't let anything happen to you.  No, we'll be with you. No, we'll never betray you. Constantly reaffirming his love and his commitment to the mission of Christ. And yet, when the rooster crowed three times, he betrayed him and betrayed him and betrayed him again. And that was a powerful moment where even Peter, the one who had stood beside Jesus, betrayed him.  This is a powerful invitation back into the mission to say, hey, I recognize that you've done this. I recognize your betrayal here. And it's not a dismissal of that, but it's rather an invitation to say, hey, let's get back on the path. I recognize, you know, you've messed up here. You've known, you've done something wrong here, but I wanna invite you back onto this mission because that is what is important. Think of the apostle Paul who was ravaging the church and murdering Christians, and yet God transformed his life so that he would be one of the powerhouse apostles in writing the scriptures, in converting, in planting churches. And it's just this wonderful display of God's transformation. And his forgiveness emits this kind of betrayal. You see, Paul, he thought he was doing the Lord's work. He thought he was acting on behalf of the God. He thought he knew, but actually he was acting in opposition to God. And it was only amidst his transformation that he recognized that me, yeah, I am the chief among sinners. And he understood his own lowliness in the kingdom of God, and yet God elevated him to this place of exaltation because of this humility that he experienced. And so we see this theme of betrayal throughout scripture, and yet God once again receiving us back in our repentance into his family to say, I welcome you back. Just as the prodigal son ran from home, spending all of his inheritance on sinful pleasures and things that would not satisfy him when he returned home, he said, I'm just worthy to be a servant. Just make me a servant.  And the father welcomes him home saying, my son has returned, let's throw a party because this is a joyous and this is the son that I delight in. And that's a beautiful picture. It's something that that son didn't deserve and it's something that we don't deserve. And so this is kind of just what I've been pondering. I've been thinking about this. We've betrayed God in the deepest, most intimate way. And yet God once again receives us back by his grace. It shows us the extent and the gravity and the grandeur of his mercy and grace. Truly delight in him, delight in that grace. If you've yet to receive that today, put your faith in Jesus and receive his mercy and his grace and become a child of God today. Thank you to everyone who supports what I do on this channel. If you enjoy this content, subscribe because I'm putting out new videos every single week. Thanks to everyone who supports on Patreon and my mission of equipping people to follow Jesus daily. If you wanna support what I'm doing, click the link in my description. Until next time, God bless.


Anakogi state government has accused political actors of orchestrating a witch hunt to destroy the image of Farmer Governor Lahaji Yahya Bello. The state government claims that the EFCC is using its privileges for political vendetta and that the charges against Bello are false and far from the truth. The government has called on President Chinabu to order a special probe into the situation in Kogi state before the EFCC is used as a hired gun by political hawks. The Kogi government believes in transparency, accountability and property in line with the trend from 2016.


Hi, everyone. This is Greg Bowman at Roger Williams University School of Law. You know, I've been the Dean at Roger Williams Law for nearly two years now. And yet I have never been able to attend a Champions for Justice event in person. I was so excited that this year I would be able to in January on January 28. But nature and the pandemic have intervened and in the interest of everyone's health. We have decided to delay the event to later in the spring when the weather is warmer and hopefully the pandemic has receded. So I'm very sorry to not be seeing you in person on January 28. But I do look forward to seeing you in person very soon when we do hold champions later this year. In the meantime, thank you for all that you do for Roger Williams University School of Law. We could not do what we do without your support. Thank you again. I look forward to seeing you soon.


Hello. Welcome, everyone. So today we are going to see a DVR SNADHA for Neutron. So I'm not sure, like, how many are aware about the DVR and its features. So what we are going to do is we're going to touch base on the introduction about the DVR just to give an insight for the new audiences. And then we are going to move into the details about the DVR. So here, along with me, so my name is Swaminathan Vasudevan, and I'm an active technical contributor in Neutron and working on DVR for the last two years. And along with me here, Adolfo Duarte, and he was one of the active contributor for the SNADHA. And here's Hardik Italia, who is going to co-present with us, and he's going to show a demo along with the presentation. So without wasting much time, let's go into the actual presentation. And then, so just to give you an expectation, so we will give you some time at the end to have some questions. So if you have any questions, feel free to get to the speakers or mics on both sides, and then you can ask your questions, and then we will try to answer your questions. So the agenda for today is, as I mentioned, we will have an intro to DVR, and then what are the current problems that we face with DVR and SNADNode, and what solution we have today to address that. And then we'll move on to the DVRHA to address the problems that we have today. And then we'll go into the details of the DVR SNADHA to tell you what contents it has in the namespace, and how it takes over using VRRP and KIPA LiveD.  We don't want to show you a live demo, and most of the time it doesn't work. So we make sure we have recorded it, and we can show you the recorded demo. And then we will also touch base. If we have time, we'll touch base what are the features that we achieved during the Mitaka timeframe for the DVR, basically with respect to scheduling and control frame changes. And then we will go over the roadmap that we will be working on for the Newton timeframe. So let's get started. So on an intro, so Neutron has legacy routing capability, which it had a routing capability. We call it as a legacy router. And then we introduced the DVR routers. So that's why we had a name. We gave a name to it as legacy routing. So if you look at the pictures in here, you see there's a VM1, VM2, there's a router. And the router is basically created in a network node. You have compute node. And this one shows you how a VM from compute node A can talk to compute node B. If this has to, if they both are in two different networks, if it has to route the traffic, the traffic has to always go through the network node. It has to get routered and then packet has to hit the VM. This is not only the case for VMs that are existing on two different nodes, but it is also the case for VMs that are residing on the same host. So if you have two VMs on the same host, even if they want to communicate between each other, the traffic has to go all the way to the network node and come back. In order to address this issue and to make the solution more scalable, the other issue that we have here is like if you have a fixed IP on this VM and if you want to expose the fixed IP to the outside world and you assign a floating IP to this VM, all your floating IP traffic has to go through the network node. So it's all the traffic, all your floating IP traffic, all your SNAP traffic, all your inter-VM traffic or intra-VM traffic will all flow through the network node. So you are stressing a lot on the network node and that was the reason that led to the invention of the DVR. So what the distributor router does is basically what we did is we took the same architecture as the legacy routers and then we were trying to create routers on all the compute nodes with the help of the agents that are running in each and every compute node. So if you see here, we are running L3 agent in the network node, we are running L3 agent in the compute node one, we are running L3 agent in compute node two. So we have routers here, Qrouter one and Qrouter two and we have Qrouter one, Qrouter two, Qrouter one and Qrouter two. So what we do is we basically replicate the routers on all the nodes that we have and these routers are replicated on demand basis. They are not created by default on all the nodes, they are only created on demand. So what happens, which is the, even that actually triggers the VMs to be getting created. So if you have a VM port, for example, I'm giving an example as a VM port because that's the most dominant one, but there are other ports. We call it as DVR serviceable ports.  On all these three cases, you need a router, a local router to be created on the compute node. So any of these nodes pop up on these compute nodes and if that port has a port binding associated with this compute node one, as soon as the L2 agent sees that, it communicates to the neutron server and the neutron server instructs the L3 agent to go create a router for that port in here. So a local router is created in here and your traffic, if you want to send traffic from red VM to the pink VM, it'll get actually routed and then sent back to this VM locally. So you don't need to send the traffic all the way to the network node and get routed back. So again, if you want to have an inter-VM between the nodes, the traffic will actually flow, it'll get routed on compute node one and the traffic will flow through this one and go here and then reach the VM on the other node. Again, if you want to have a floating IP, if one of these VMs have floating IP assigned, we do create a floating IP namespace on the compute node and the floating IP namespace will be connected to the router namespace for every routers. So this floating IP is basically a shared namespace between all the tenants and it will be created on the basis of external networks. So for every external network that you have public network, you will have one floating IP namespace that will be shared by all the tenants. So here in this example, I have one external network, so I have one floating IP namespace in here which is being shared by all the routers. So in this case, one of these routers is connected to the floating IP. So all your VMs floating IP traffic need not hit the network node and it'll actually bypass the network node and it can flow through this one. The one limitation that we had with the DVR is even though we actually distribute the East-West traffic as well as the North-South floating IP traffic, our SNAT traffic will still be flowing through the network node. So in this case, if you want to do, if these VMs have a default SNAT configured, what we do is in the case of legacy routers, we don't have a concept of SNAT namespace but in the case of DVR routers, we do have a concept of SNAT namespace. What we did is we kind of split the functionality within the router namespace for the legacy routers because the legacy routers have one single router namespace which does floating IP functionality, Natting functionality, as well as the routing functionality. So we kind of split apart that functionality into three different namespaces, a router namespace for doing router functionality and then a floating IP namespace to do the floating IP translation and then an SNAT namespace to do the SNAT translation. So based on its functionality, we kept it in the place where it is required. So we kept the SNAT namespace only in the network node where it is required. We kept the floating IP namespace in the other nodes. Again, the DVR can operate in two different modes, basically the L3 agent. One is the DVR SNAT mode and the other one is the DVR mode. So if you are running in a compute node, you don't need SNAT, just run the L3 agent in a DVR mode. But if you're running, if you need SNAT on that node, just run it in a DVR SNAT node. But if you want to go back to the legacy one, just configure it as a legacy mode and it will still work with the legacy routers. So those are the options that you have. And then, as I mentioned, the SNAT was centralized. And the issue that we have here is a single point of failure. So Newton has an L3HA that was introduced in Juneau. But the DVR was introduced at the same time, but we did not have the DVR SNATHA for the routers. But they had L3HA. So there was an issue running L3HA along with the DVRs. So that's a solution that we tried to solve here. So what happened is now we are trying to provide a high availability for this SNAT namespace that is residing in here, which exactly uses the same technology that the L3HA uses. So we are not making any change to that protocol. Moving on to the next slide. So this is the network node issues that I talked about. The one thing that I mentioned about, the reason we went to the centralized SNAT was the VPN as a service is a singleton service. And it has to run in an SNAT. And we had it running previous to Juneau. So when we introduced DVR, we don't want to break the feature. So we said in order to support VPN as a service, we need to have SNAT as a centralized one. So that's the reason we had it as a centralized one. And we still maintain it. So going to the next one, as I said, before we introduced the HA, the only solution we had for SNAT was, in case of failures, what will happen? How will you transfer the SNAT functionality from one node to another node?  Basically, there is no CLI command that says move my SNAT into node 1 to node 2. But it's basically we have been using the same API that routers has for router move. But if it is a router move that has an SNAT, what we do is, if you are moving from one DVR SNAT to another DVR SNAT, we basically check if it is a DVR SNAT node. And then if you want to move it, just remove your association to that agent and associate to a different agent. So in order to do this one, we are not allowing any routers to getting migrated from a DVR node to a DVR node, because that is not required, because we already have a high availability solution as a scalable solution by creating routers on each and every nodes. So we are not allowing you to move routers from one compute node to another compute node, but we are allowing you to move a SNAT from one node to another node because of the restriction that we had. So that was the solution we had. Now, I think with Mitaka release, we do have the SNAT HECHE, which is similar to L3 HECHE. So Adolfo will take over from here, and he is going to go into the high-level details about the SNAT HECHE and how it works. Here you go. Hi, everyone. My name is Adolfo Duarte. I work for HP Enterprises. And as Swami said, I'm one of the many contributors to work on the DVR HP SNAT. By the way, I see a couple of you out here. Thank you very much. You took a lot of people working on this to get it out the door. Very much appreciated. So the subject of DVR HP SNAT HECHE is a bit complex to try and just get it explained in a couple of slides. So what we're going to do is I'm going to go over a high-level overview of how it works, and then Swami will go again over the same subjects in a little more detail, and hopefully the repetition will help us out here so that we can understand this. And even if you don't, we wrote the slides so that you can use them as reference. So after this, if you still have questions that we didn't answer, please come back to the slides. With that said, we're going to see a lot of little details, little labels, little connections on these slides. Don't try to read them all at once right now. Again, we put them there just so you can have them as reference later on. And hopefully if I do my job right, I can give you a high-level overview of how it works, how the functionality was implemented. And then Swami can take it in more detail, and then later on, Hardik can show you some more configuration. So before I start, can I see a race of hands of any network engineers, administrators, or you've been a network engineer? I see a couple out there. So I was actually a network engineer in my previous jobs before I started working OpenStack Neutron. So I thought I would approach this from that perspective, because to me, it makes sense. It's things that I know, terms that I've used before. So I will be using some terms that I usually use network engineering to refer to certain things here, and hopefully it'll be clear when I make that reference. All right, so let's see. And by the way, I'm not reading text right now. I'm just having to, these are my notes. So I have to go and make sure that I cover everything that I wanted to. OK, so let's get started. All right, so let me go over for a couple of facts about DVR SNATHA right out the door. One thing is base, like Swami said, is based on L3HA, which was already implemented since Juneau. The DVR has not high availability. Just like L3HA, legacy L3HA is provided by Keep Alive D processes. If you don't know what Keep Alive D process, it's a Linux process, open source package that provides redundancy. Particularly it uses VRP to provide redundancy, but I'll go into more details. The point being, it's the same way that L3HA legacy does it. We just did the same thing for DVR SNATHA. Now the Keep Alive processes, which are doing this high availability redundancy, they use an HA network. Now this network is a tenant network. In other words, it's created under the tenant. However, only the Keep Alive processes have access to it. Actually, theoretically, anyone has access to it, but it's meant only the Keep Alive processes have access to it. When a high availability group is pre-created, and that's a router group, all the routers are pre-created. This is a little different than DVR. In DVR, usually the router is not created until you actually need it. In other words, you create a router. You won't see a router name space anywhere until you either associate a VM or attach it to an external network or do something that requires the interface. That's not the case with DVRHA. DVRHA takes the legacy L3HA approach, which is you create the router the moment you enter, for example, the Celia and the CLI, create router, router name. You will see the router name space is created in the network controllers, or what we usually call the network controller, which is the node that runs the L3 agent. So this diagram right here, this is DVR without SNATHA. In other words, this is what's available before Mitaka. And again, I try to do a network diagram, if you will. If you take a look, the bottom two squares, which I have labeled compute node, which is the open stack usual term we use for it.  All the servers are down there. The top rack, I'm sorry, the top square, which is the network node in open stack terms. In networking engineer terms, it will be your router. So all the servers in the bottom two stacks are connected to the router on the top. Now, the orange lines and blue lines represent your networks. In open stack, the orange line represents your data network. That's the internal network, the network that VMs use to communicate with each other. The blue line represents the external network. That's where the other side of your floating IP lives, where the traffic that goes out to the internet or any other external network is used. Now, think of the orange and blue lines as physical connections. Just think ethernet, if you will. That makes you feel comfortable. Now, in DVR without SNAT HA, any traffic that requires SNAT services, and by the way, SNAT stands for source network address translation, flows to the router, and you can see it by the green lines. That's the flow of traffic. Everyone is sending traffic to that guy because he's providing the SNAT services. Again, network engineers, just think of it this way, it's your router interface. You have a router that is doing NAT. Everybody who needs NAT is going to send their traffic that way. That's DVR. Now, the problem with this is, obviously, if the router dies, that's it. You lost your services, right? So that is the point of DVR with SNAT HA. It's a pretty simple concept. We just bring another router, and then they create an active standby configuration. By the way, you can add more than one router. This diagram only shows one, but you can add two, three, however many you want. Malcolm would. I haven't tested up to 10, so I can't tell you that it works, but at least it makes it obvious you can have an active and a standby. Now, in the case of failure, just like a regular router that is providing redundancy for another router in the networking world, what happens is that, in reality, what's happening is that the standby is usually monitoring the active router. If you have more than one standby router, they're all monitoring the active router. The moment that active router fails or something goes wrong, of many reasons why it could fail, the standby routers select a new active router. And they do their magic and say, I'm going to be active. No, I'm going to be active. No, you be active. Well, somebody becomes active. The other routers stay a standby. The new roles are informed back up to the Neutron server so that all traffic can be redirected to the new active router. If anybody's seen network engineers, if you've seen BRRP, that's exactly what this is. It's basically BRRP on the Neutron, but we are using it to provide redundancy for the SNAP services. Very strict, very important distinction that I will go over later. So that's pretty straightforward, right? Now I'm going to go a little bit in detail about how the KIPA live processes are keeping track of what's going on. This is a new diagram. It's a little more logical. I added a third router here just to make it more fun. So the previous slide, you have two routers on the top. This slide, I added a third one. There's no difference. I just wanted to add more boxes to confuse people. But what's basically happened is that each one of the routers is running a KIPA live process. Now, for those of you who know how namespaces work in Neutron, the KIPA live processes are running in the SNAP namespace, okay? That's one of the difference between DVRHA and legacy HA. So we introduced that for DVRHA. Again, the KIPA live processes are running in the SNAP namespace of the router. So in this diagram, as you can see, what's going on is that that, no, I don't want to go there yet. The, that green circle represents your HA network. Remember I mentioned there was an HA network created so that the KIPA live processes can talk to each other? That's the tenant network, and it's HA network. And you can see it. If you do Neutron net list, you'll see it. And this is from L3HA, so it's nothing new. If you've used L3HA in Neutron, then you know what I'm talking about. If not, take my word that's a tenant network that is used for KIPA live process to talk to each other. Now the protocol being used between KIPA live processes is VRRP. All the rules of VRRP are of A, who becomes active, who becomes stand by, all of that is used. So in this scenario what happens is once the KIPA live process is detect that the active KIPA live process has gone away, I won't go in detail so how to do it, but it's basically a ping, right? Just like VRRP, they kind of keep each other saying hello's and all that sort of stuff. Once that guy goes away, all the other guys say oops, our active guy just went away. We better elect one. They go through the VRRP rules and they say I'm the active guy. Once that selection is made, they reconfigure the interfaces, the router interfaces. Now I'm talking about, still talking about the router interfaces in the snot namespace. They get reconfigured to provide the correct traffic flow for the new active router. Once the roles are selected, the Neutron network server is informed so that he can do whatever is necessary to make sure that all the compute nodes, network nodes, and anybody else who needs to send traffic that requires snot services is sent to the correct, newly active router. So it's pretty straightforward. I mean this is just VRRP in the open stack space. So that's a high overview of how it works. Hopefully it'll become clear as Swami gets a little more details. Now before I give the mic back, I want to go over what DVR snot HA is and snot, just to be clear so that when you try to implement it or you plan to use it, you know what you're gonna need to and you know what to expect. So DVR snot HA provides high availability for the snot process of DVR. So DVR snot HA provides high availability for the snot process of DVR. Okay? DVR HA is available when two or more agents, these are L3 agents, are configured with DVR snot. It's very important. What we usually refer to as the DVR or network controller in open stack, in DVR terms, it's an L3 agent that is running in the DVR snot mode. If you have used DVR before, this is clear to you. If you haven't, then don't forget that, okay? Very important. And you need two because you're providing redundancy. That's a matter, you can configure how many you need but you're gonna need at least two. So that's why you have two. And finally, which is the big deal and anticlimactic for all those people who have worked here on this is that before Mitaka, if you try to create a router and you try to set the distributed flag to true and you try to set the HA flag to true, you will get a message that said, no, you can't do that. We don't support that. Well, what happened is that we finally got rid of that and now when you enter that command, you get a router that's DVR HA. So now let me go what it's not. DVR HA is not, I'm sorry, DVR is not HA does not provide redundancy for other services running on the network node. And let me be clear why I put this in here. When we're talking about DVR is not HA, if you enable it, it does not mean that you automatically get high availability for other processes like DHCP or VPN or LBAS. I'm not saying you can't do it. I'm saying that enabling DVR is not HA is not enough to provide redundancy for those. You have to do a little bit more work, right? Those are two separate processes that are going on. DVR is not HA is not FIP HA. Again, another very important distinction and I'm not trying to wiggle out of it, it's just that's a different discussion, different work, different approach, different namespaces. So we're not talking about FIP HA here. That if you want FIP HA, that's a different thing that you have to do. DVR is not HA only provides redundancy for SNAT services. One good thing is that no new configuration options have been added to the configuration files. In other words, etsyneutronneutron.com, the ml2.ini for the agent, l3agentini, no new configurations. You just have to set different value ones for the ones that are already established. And then finally, upgrading for regular all the types of routers to a DVR HA router is not currently supported. Many reasons for that. One of them is we haven't tested enough to say that it's supported. And personally, I rather not say that it's supported and then have somebody try it and break their system. And there's also other discussions that have to happen on that. Okay, thank you. Now I will give it back to Swami. Just want to go back again to the old slide that I have. This is my familiar diagram that I have, which exposes everything. So it's pretty clear how the traffic flows. So you just wanted to go back again to there to show you how the traffic flows. So I showed you the first picture where it was just a single node. Now we have two nodes in here as net nodes. One is the primary, which is basically the active and the standby. So if you see the next slide, the traffic flow external to internal network. So if you see here, your external traffic will be flowing through the bridge here, goes through the SNAT namespace. And actually it is headed towards the green VM. So you have the green network already connected to the SNAT namespace. So you don't need to do any kind of special routing in here. So it just passes to the green network VRN and it knows based on the ARP details in here, it knows where the VM resides, and then the traffic goes to the node. Similarly, for the flow on the reverse direction. So if you see, similarly on the reverse direction, if you see for the traffic that is originating from the red VM, the traffic goes into the router and it has a default route which says, okay, for the red network, my default gateway port is residing in this node where the red interface is connected to the SNAT namespace. So the traffic goes into the VRN, it flows through the VR tunnel, comes here, goes into the VRN, comes to the red network here, goes to the SNAT namespace and the traffic flows outside. Okay, so what happens when you have an SNAT failure? So the traffic that was actually flowing through the green node will now start flowing through the yellow node because you have already the SNAT namespaces that you have created, but the only problem is this SNAT namespace will not have an IP on it. So basically once the IP is assigned, the traffic will start flowing through this one. So in order to go more deep into the namespace details, I just had another picture to show you a clear picture of what actually the namespaces will contain. So if you see in here, I have shown the QRouter namespace and the SNAT namespace. So you have this red network and the green network in here which has the QR ports in here and then you have the SG ports in here which we normally create for every interface that you add to a QR, we normally create a port on the SNAT which has a prefix of SG which is basically an SNAT gateway port and because of this port, all the traffic is able to be reaching the red network and the green network and the vice versa and you see the actual QG gateway port residing in here. So the next one is basically showing the network node with a HA. So in this case, I'm showing you both the namespaces. The one addition to this one is basically a key polite is actually running on this namespace and you see an extra port, an interface that's been created which is basically an HA interface and if you see the active one has an IP on this one and in this case, what happens is this HA interface has two IPs. There is 169.xxx.1 and .2, whichever gets the .1 that's a primary and whichever gets the second one, it's basically the secondary. So if you have any issues with SNAT HA, you can actually go into the namespace and see which one has .1 and which one has .2 and which is a standard and which is the primary, standby and primary and you can also have a CLI command to see that. So I will actually basically, so this is a dump which basically shows all the information that I just shared with you with the HA on the active node and then this is a dump on the standby node. So this one, you can actually use it for reference, we will actually publish the slides, you can take it from there and then I will actually hand it over to Hardik for a short demo and a configuration option. Thank you. Thank you, Swami. So for the configuration, good thing is that you don't have to learn about any new configurations file or a new configuration parameters. As far as you know how to enable the distributed virtual routing in the L3 HA, you should be good to turn on this DVR SNAT HA functionality, right? So as mentioned, no new configs, it's just old config. The word you just have to set is just number of agents, minimum and a maximum number of agents which will participate in hosting the DVR SNAT routers and then the router type, right? So if you see the table which is basically a neutron con, there are two flags. One is for the L3 HA and the second one is for the router distributed. So based on that particular values, you can create a default router, right? So you can create DVR legacy router. You can create a legacy with L3 and now with DVR and HA, right? So based on those values. So again, just go into the little bit detail about like controller configurations. These are the pretty well documented neutron con again, there is nothing new here. You just turn on the router distributed. Also turn on the L3 HA. You specify the cider to be created for the HA networks to talk to each other. And then again, you configure the max and minimum of agents that will participate into the hosting the router, HA router. This configuration is for the ML2 configuration. Again, you just turn on the routing. And for the L3 agent, the main point here is that for the controller or a network node, you specify the agent mode as a DVRS net. And for all other configurations are just a VRRP configurations. And on the compute node, your agent mode needs to be configured as a DVR. So this is just a slide of how to create now distributed and HA router. Again, based on your default settings, you may not have to specify those flags. And then I'll just show the pretty much recorded demo to you guys. And before I start the demo, so demo was prepared with a three node DevStack. Two of them are controllers less network node where two L3 agents are running in a DVRS net node or DVRS net mode. And one compute node which is running on the DVR mode. So just to give you on the top corner, two screens are basically capturing the TCP dump on the active SNET namespace and the other side is on the standby. And the middle top, you have a VM which will start just sending the traffic that you will see it. And the bottom two window is just to execute some neutron command to see what we are doing. So I'll just play it. So when we do the router show, it says the distributed is true, which is DVR and HA is true. So it's a DVRS net HA. And when we do neutron L3 agent list hosting router, now we have a status, HA status, which shows which node and which L3 agent is hosting the active and the which one is hosting the standby. And as I mentioned, these are the two window where I'm just capturing the packets on the SNET namespace where we will see that traffic is going out. So now from VM console, just pinging some external IP. And we can see that on the active SNET's namespace traffic, it starts moving, right? So once it's there, I just do disable the HA interface. I just do the hard way to do the failover. And now we see that the ping stops. It takes some time, but okay. Let's start. And now we see it's just flip over to the different namespace. And now we go back to the hosting router. We see that the HA status just flip from active to standby and standby to active, okay? That's all. And I'll hand it over to Swami. So I think that's all we had for SNET HA. And then the next one I just wanted to cover is basically what we have done for DVR during the Mitaka cycle. So one of the major things that we have done for DVR for Mitaka cycle is the scheduling changes because as I mentioned, previously we used to have scheduling options for different scheduling options for routers as well as different scheduling options for DVR for the SNET. So instead of having two different scheduling options and making it more complex, we have actually nailed down to a single scheduling option similar to the legacy routers where we schedule the routers to the DVR SNET node as soon as the routers comes up. And for scheduling it to the, basically to the compute nodes, we are no more scheduling it. Basically we are creating routers based on demand whenever the port comes in. So that was one of the major change that we made, which kind of simplifies the scheduling aspect on the DVR. So this is a summary of the things that I wanted to show. And the one thing that has been deprecated or not probably not deprecated, but we are not using post Mitaka is basically the CSNAT binding stable. We used to have a CSNAT binding stable which actually keeps track of the SNAT bindings to the agent. And right now, as I said, we are going back to a single scheduling option. So both SNAT and router is being tracked by the router L3 agent binding stable, not the CSNAT binding stable. So the next one that we, we did make change to the control plane to increase the scalability on performance is basically is, we have done as a community a lot of changes to in creating the routers and informing the agents what we have to do. Because previously what we have been doing is we have been sending notifications to all the agents which was creating a lot of control plane issues and scalability issues. And now what we do is we only specifically send messages to the agents that are required to know. So we know where these VMs are or where these routers are located or where these floating IPs are installed. So if any credit operations that happens that affect those DVR serviceable ports, we only send notification to that specific host and we don't send notifications to every other host. And there was also another change that was made was during an agent sync up with the servers. If we have too many routers that you have configured, it takes a while for it to fetch all the details through a RPC from this agent. So we kind of had a throttle mechanism to actually fetch a bunch of router information at a time and then it goes in a sequence. So those were the changes that was made. Thanks to Oleg from Marantis who did the work. He did a great job on doing all these works. So that was a great improvement for scalability and control plane performance that we did during the MetaCycle. And last but not least, we also made the DVR job voting in the check queue and we almost have pretty much stable in the multi-node and we'll make it voting in the next cycle. That's all we had for today. And the one thing that I wanted to touch base again is for the Newton, we have some more work to do with the DVR. So we are planning to have some support for BGP speakers because today the BGP speakers have some issues in talking or exposing routes to the next stop gateway using the floating IPs. So that would be addressed during this cycle and then we will also work on IPv6 addressability using North, South from the compute node. So those are the two things we will work on during the Newton cycle and that's all we have today. Thanks for the audience who came in today and if you have any questions, we can take up pretty quickly. Hey Prashant. Time is actually ended for the session. Any questions can be asked out in the hall or in the side of the stage. Sorry, thank you. Sorry guys, I'll take up the questions outside like if you want.


Hello Amherst friends, families, neighbors, residents of this beautiful town of Amherst. My name is Victor Nunez Ortiz and I'm running for District 2 Counselor. On November 6th, I'm asking for everybody's vote in District 2, a little bit about myself. I'm an immigrant from a small town called El Salvador. I was brought to the United States in 1990 and I was raised in Framingham, Massachusetts, where I received bachelors and graduated high school. Soon after graduating high school, I came to the University of Massachusetts where I met my beautiful wife and soon after meeting my wife, we got married, decided to have four boys and now reside here in Blackberry Lane. Why am I running for Town Council? So the biggest reason I'm running for Town Council is to be the voice for working class families, people of color, and people who normally don't speak up in the town of Amherst. Some of the things that I'm running for, I'd like you to know about myself is that I'm about preschool for all. We all know how important childcare and early childhood education can be for our children. I was blessed that my kids went through the Crocker Farm preschool system and it was very valuable in the development of my children. I'm also in favor of affordable housing for all. It's imperative that everyone here in our town has a place to sleep at night. We use my network of legislators that I've built as a veteran advocate to advocate for funding for affordable housing projects here in the town of Amherst. Another thing that I'm in favor of is a new fire station in South Amherst.  I took the fire department almost 30 minutes to get to my house. It is imperative that everyone across our town deserves to have the peace of mind that they can receive help within minutes, not 30 minutes. 30 minutes is just too much. To achieve this, I will support the building of a new firehouse in South Amherst. I'm also in favor of broadening our tax base. I will support the expansion of Amherst's economic development to broaden the tax base in a manner that supports the values of our citizens while relieving some of the tax burden placed on homeowners to fund vital projects, projects like new playgrounds or an athletic facility for our youth. The last thing I'd like you to know about my campaign is that I'm looking to establish a collaborative town council. If elected, I plan, one of my priorities is to set the new rules for the town council and it's a task that I will not take lightly. We need to establish checks and balances, improve the transparency in our government, and enhance the communication with our diverse mix of citizens that come from all over the world. So please, on November 6th, vote for Vic District 2 Town Council. You can also visit my website at www.VoteNumber4Vic.org Estimados Residentes Amigos de El Pueblo de Amherst. El 6 de noviembre, les pido su voto, por favor, vayan y voten, si necesitan saber donde votan, ustedes me pueden contactar al<PHONE_NUMBER>. Residents, friends, if you do not know where to vote, where your polling station is, please contact me at<PHONE_NUMBER>. Vote for Vic on November 6th and thank you for listening and have a great day.