Welcome back to Think Tech here on a Monday morning. I'm Jay Fidel. This is Community Matters and we have Rabbi Itchell Krasnijanski He's a Rabbi of Chabad of Hawaii. It's very important. We talk to him once in a while get perspective and You know have the wisdom that rabbis only rabbis can provide welcome to the show rabbi Thank you, Jay. It's a pleasure to be here as always So we have some things going on I would like your reaction if you don't mind as a rabbi as a spiritual leader We have the we have the the coronavirus we have the demise of the stock market with 1500 points down today You know, we have the prospect of a global not only pandemic, but endemic, you know a permanent condition of threatening even a deadly virus And and all of that doesn't seem so good. So what does the Jewish reaction to that? What is your reaction to that? Well, first of all, it's important to take the necessary precautions obviously that the experts are advising us on but In answer to your question, you know as you as we reflect on this endemic or Pandemic, I think there's a lot of thoughts that come to mind firstly How interconnected humanity is civilization is you know, we think that We're all islands to ourselves and therefore we only have to look out for ourselves, but here comes this Pandemic and it's a wake-up call and it reminds us that you know at least in this area we're so Vulnerable because we are impacted by those around us and therefore it's important to not just build ourselves but to Think of of the Of everyone of all of humanity These are just thoughts that you know that I'm having you know Also, you know all of Judaism is about being is about spreading spreading God's values and God's teachings by being a certain way by living in a certain way and We see from this whole endemic how one region one person Whoever Ever from wherever it began is having a ripple effect and it's cascading and touching every corner of the world and It you know it can serve it should serve to Start us thinking along the lines how each and every one of us as Even though we're only individuals Have the ability on the good side to actually have outsized impact on the world around us and You know, I think that the biggest problem is sometimes even though we always say that the problem in our society is people are You know think too highly of themselves egotistical and all that kind of stuff, but It's the flip side of that is it's very often we underestimate our abilities or underestimate What we could do what we can bring the good that we can bring to the world and every once in a while when we Look at this kind of a phenomena. It should serve to To teach us to remind us that in fact we Have a very very very big ability to influence the world and influence People around us and care for each other and work together to collaborate on solving problems that affect everyone I think sometimes forget that and once in a while you have what I consider this kind of a Biblical reminder that we really must work together or else. I'm reminded I hope this resonates with you with the stories of Helm The stories of Helm one of the stories of Helm is about them these guys had some kind of community crisis And they weren't working together And each one was looking out for his own interests his own silo and the lesson of the story was ultimately If you guys don't work together, you know, you're gonna sink the ship So you have to start working together and that goes to nations it goes to all the divisions on the one hand these days We see a lot of divisions, but you know, this is a reminder that we really can't can't survive that exactly You know the Jewish dream and aspiration for the millennia has been you know the coming of the Messiah And what is so exciting about the coming of the Messiah is that he will bring people together There won't be no more wars as the Prophet says as the Prophet says and there won't be this infighting and Each one of us pulling in our own direction. There will be this global unity Yeah, and that's yeah, we can pray for that Well rabbi on a happier note We're doing Purim this week and Purim is a happy festival one of the happiest if not the happiest Jewish holiday in the year and it's all about Iran Or may I say Persia? You know Persian Persian and it was you and I had a conversation a show about this very topic just a year ago in early March 2019 so let's review What Purim is how it came about what it means sure so Purim as you said is one of the Jewish holidays and It is the most festive of the Jewish holidays even though it's not a biblical holiday. It's not in the Torah However, this the setting of the story took place after the destruction of the first temple Before the common era, I'm not sure exactly what year and the Jews at that time were after the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem the Jews were exiled through the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar to Babylon modern-day Iraq and over time The Persians were fighting with the with the Babylonians and then the Persians became the world power so in that setting is the whole story of Purim and What the story is in a nutshell and we hope we have the McGill and the story of Purim the scroll of Esther That we read every year to Review the story and the great miracle of Purim. So how did the word McGill I get to mean? Something really long the literal meaning of the word McGill is a scroll and This is the scroll of the scroll of Esther that tells the whole story in detail So when somebody goes on and on and on he's telling us the whole McGill so basically There was a king his name was a hash verosh and he had a wife named Vashti and After three years that he was sitting on the throne.   Her name was Esther She had an uncle whose name was Mordechai Mordechai was the leader of the Jewish people at the time And Mordechai said to Esther that she should go and she should also petition She should be in this pageant and she went reluctantly and lo and behold from all of the beautiful Persian Girls Esther was the one that a hashir fell in love with and she became the next queen Mordechai instructed her not to tell the king About her background that she's Jewish and just to keep it a secret So she became the queen and Mordechai started hanging out, you know, the next to the king's palace One day when Mordechai was hanging out in the king's palace because Mordechai was the leader of the Jewish people and he was the head of the Sanhedrin the body of Legislative body the Jewish legislative body And one of the requirements to be the head of the Sanhedrin was to be able to speak all of the languages the 70 languages of the world So he understood all the languages and the dialects of the different languages and being in the king's Hanging out next to the king's palace He heard two employees of the king talking between each other in their local language How they were planning attempting to poison the king By feeding him, you know food that he would poison him. So Mordechai immediately sent word to Esther and Esther passed that information on to Acha shares his people and the next morning when they brought the food these two people big son The Saresh brought the food to the king. They had a dog taste it and the dog instantly died so they realized they saw it's correct and The king's life was spirit in the meantime. There was a minister's name was Haman Haman who was from the the nation of Amal Amalik the Amalekites the biblical Amalekites who were Evil people and Amalik was an anti-Semite the Megillah tells us because when I'm Haman rose to power The rule of the land was that when he passed by you had to bow down to him and Because Mordechai would not bow down to him because as a Jew we don't bow down to to any human being other than God so this infuriated Haman and He decided not not to take his revenge against Mordechai, but against all of the Jewish people so He was planning the scheme to To have Mordechai to have Mordechai hung and a decree issued you Was planning to go to the Cheshire's to issue a decree to annihilate all the Jewish people Somewhat like what Hitler tried to do and When Mordechai heard of this decree he immediately began, you know Calling the Jewish people together together together to pray and fast and petition God to save the Jewish people and at the same time He sent word to Esther that she should go plead before the king and reveal her identity to the king and Tell they asked the king to spare the Jewish people from this decree And then in the meantime the Megillah tells us that one evening our hash waish couldn't sleep. So he asked his his His attendants who were attending him to reach from the king's chronicles So they opened it up and opened up the book and they read the story how Mordechai saved the king's life years ago So the king asked and what did we do to Mordechai for saving my life? What what reward did we give him so they looked in the book and they saw there was no reward given to Mordechai? At that very moment there was a knock on the door and In the middle of the night and who was it it was Heyman at the door coming to a hash waish to Discuss with him his scheme of having Mordechai hung and this is right after that they read to Mordechai They read to a hash waish the story how Mordechai saved the king's life. So before Haman was even able to begin Talking a hash waish asked Haman.  So Haman the egotistical person that he was figured that the a hash waish was talking about him About Heyman and how he being this you know this important minister is saving the kingdom so he said to a hash waish that the person who the king wants to show honor and gratitude should be paraded down the main boulevard of Shushan, which was the capital of Persia and they should have a person And that person should ride the king's horse and where the king's clothes and have a person people running before the horse and saying this is how The person that the king's shows gratitude. This is how he is rewarded And a hash waish says good idea now go and do exact that exact exactly that Mordechai the Jew And Haman almost had a heart attack But he had no choice in the meantime Esther Esther came to a hash waish and said Can you do me a big favor and I would like to invite you and Haman to a private party And the king writer he sent word to Haman to come to the palace for a private party with Esther and Esther through this party and the king said to Esther so tell me My wife what is it that you would like and why are you throwing this party? so she said That I am I need to ask a favor I need to plead with you to save my people from annihilation the king said what what people are you talking about? Because he didn't know that she was Jewish So she said that my people are the Jewish people and they're being Threatened with annihilation because of Haman and she pointed to Haman because of Haman who Who issued this this decree with your blessings. So they immediately did the decree was nullified and The day that was set to be the day for all this annihilation turned turned Things turned around and it became a day of great celebration a great joy and this is the holiday of Purim that we celebrate and The tradition is that you know people get dressed up on Purim I'm sure as Jay as you remember as a kid people get dressed up on Purim because Purim the story of Purim basically Expresses the idea how things can turn around and things are concealed and things are not revealed so The commentaries point out that the miracle of Purim is a very fascinating miracle and very different than the miracle The biblical miracles that we find in the Bible are for example the splitting of the Red Sea where God Temporarily suspends the laws of nature and the supernatural occurs in the story of Purim There's nothing supernatural here, but all of these coincidences Came together in such a fantastic way That as we look back and we look at the whole picture We recognize that this was no coincidence, but this was in fact God's doing so the fact that Before Haman's rise to power God arranged that Achashveresh should have his wife killed so they should be seeking a new wife a New queen and Esther should be in place. So when Haman would indeed rise to power she would be able to Plead for her people the fact that Haman's coming to Achashveresh to discuss hanging Mordechai was at the very moment that they happened to read Achashveresh How Mordechai saved his life? These are not these are not coincidences. These are gods pulling the string so to speak and The commentaries further point out that there's something very interesting and that is that in the book of the Meghila and the scroll of Esther which is one of the It's part of the Old Testament the Old Testament consists of 24 books and The Meghila of Esther the scroll of Esther is one of those 24 books There's something unique about the Meghila and that is that God's name is not mentioned even one time And that's an oddity that we don't find anywhere else in the Bible where God's name is Front center and let everywhere you turn God is talking and God is saying and why was there a reason Yes, so the reason they say is because this represents the concealment So to speak that God is it was not apparent God was it was concealed God's hand God's hand was concealed and One can mistakenly think that if you don't see God that means he's absent. He's not there So the story of the Meghila is that even even while when God seems to be absent He's very very present. It's in the story. He's in the story It's a miraculous circumstance. His footprints his foot his hand his prints are all over the place Yeah, and and that's an important lesson for each and every one of us in our own lives Sometimes we we think that God is absent from our life He's busy doing something else and he's not paying attention and not answering our needs But as we look if we step back we'll realize that he's guiding every step of our way of our lives So it's a charming story too and you talk about putting putting Costumes on I remember people had costumes for all the players you've mentioned for Hordecai for our favoros Right for all the girls were Esther and and even Haman Haman Haman also the people people dressed up for for Haman as well And I you know I always thought that was really interesting It's sort of like a Halloween, you know and it says everybody wears a costume and they all have fun And then they have these noise makers in the temple. They have the noise makers and the Gragas to When anybody reads the the word Haman the name Haman from the Meghila they they make yes Raz noises about it now something very interesting The story that I just shared with you and the story that's shared in the Meghila is read In a total of 11 chapters takes about 20 minutes to read it But in real life it took about 15 years from when Achashire is through the party until The whole the decree and the turn of the events so those people who are living through it May not have connected the dots and not have realized that what happened nine years ago Was The catalyst for the turning of events today so the the whole Message of the Meghila is that all the dots are connected. We may not see me. We may not see it that way and And this is one of the powerful messages of the Meghila now What's interesting is that the story of the Meghila doesn't begin with the story of the Meghila it actually begins generations earlier The Torah tells us that Thomas tells us that the first Jewish King his name was show Show was from the tribe of Benjamin as we know that our forefather Jacob had 12 children that comprised the 12 tribes of the Jewish people and the first King his name was show Saul he was from the tribe of Benjamin and In the Bible the tells we learned that there was a nation called Amalek Amalekites who ambushed the Jewish people when they left Egypt for no reason There were they provoked it. There was not there was nothing. There was no reason for them to to ambush the Jewish people and So then God said to Moses that we shall erase the name of Amalek in other words Amalek represents a kind of evil that cannot be elevated or transformed. It has to be destroyed and When Saul was the was the king when he became king the prophet Samuel came to him and said now is the time to to take up arms and to kill the Amalekites and Saul did that and he killed the nation of Amalek except for the leader Who he reasoned was an elderly person and there was no harm in keeping him alive It was the younger people that that he that he waged battle against So the story is told in the Bible that the prophet Samuel came to Saul and said did you follow through in God's command and he said yes, I did She said how was it that he didn't kill the king I broke he says well because I Didn't think he was he was who he would be a harm so Prophet Samuel said that because Saul didn't listen and follow through to the letter of God's command He would lose his kingship and then King David was the one who arose in his place and became the Jewish king so the Talmud tells us that our God that evening was with his wife and She conceived and the descendant of that child was Haman That's the context right there and in the story of Purim It was it was Mordechai that saved the day for the Jewish people and what's interesting is Mordechai was from the tribe of Benjamin like the first King Saul so with the mistake that his his ancestor made generations later Mordechai fixed by being the one who Brought a downfall of Haman and there's a very fascinating story Prologue to this whole story that in the Nuremberg trials after World War two There was the Megidla tells us that there were Haman had 10 children and they were all hung in the Nuremberg trials. There were 11 Nazis high-ranking Nazis that They were put on trial and they were all judged to be hung one of them One of the big ones I forget his name now committed suicide the night before he swallowed some cyanide So the next day 10 were hung one of them while he was being hung cried out Purim Fest Purim yeah What was that about because because the Nazism were the descendants of Haman they were pure evil and Just like in the story of Purim with the 10 were hung Haman's 10 children were hung these 10 generals Nazi generals were hung so it's you know It runs through it pulsates through history. It's not just connecting the dots You know in our lifetime But connecting the dots from the beginning of time to the end of yeah Well, it sounds like a real story in the sense that these have these things happened and they were passed down the generations And they it kept on going down the generations and and if you look today at Iran I you find a lot of anti-Semitism. They wanted to destroy Israel and all that it is the one singular country that Is so publicly and vehemently anti-Jewish anti-Semitic Didn't do a good job and in terms of passing the word long that you know leave leave the Jews alone They're okay, and the country you know still managed to be anti-Semitic from then till now a couple thousand years Anyway, so the most important point is to say that Purim is a very joyous day. It's a very happy time Everyone's invited to come to actually our new Khabar house. We have a new address. It's 2241 Kapilani Boulevard It's Kapilani Macaulay and Everyone who hears this is invited to come join us tomorrow evening We're gonna have we're gonna read the magut that read the magilla and have a big Purim party come come dressed up and have fun and pick your character and Yeah, we could use a little cheer in these frightening times. Yeah Well rabbi, it's great to go through the magilla with you. I I sure appreciate it And you know this the detail you've given us the magilla level detail You've given us it's very valuable to know about to think about it So as you say all the dots are connected and all of this has relevance in our time Exactly, and yeah, I wish I wish the world could know what you're saying I I hope everybody watches this and I hope everybody shows up tomorrow the 10th the 10th of March Right at at 5 30 We're gonna have their magilla reading and the party great Thank you rabbi. Thank you for coming. Thank you for inviting me again. Happy Purim. Happy Purim


Hi there and welcome back to another episode of Visual Studio Toolbox. I'm really excited to be here talking about a product that I actually work on in my day job and I'm here with my guest Jeremy. Jeremy, welcome to Visual Studio Toolbox. Hey, thanks for having me. I'm Jeremy Epling and I'm a group program manager on the VSTS team working on CICD, Git, and also going to be talking about some of the agile experiences today. Yeah. So Jeremy and I, we spent a lot of time talking to each other for my quote-unquote real job. But here in Toolbox, we love to bring great developer-relevant stories and Jeremy and I have a really fun thing to talk to you guys about today. So Jeremy, why don't you tell people just a little bit of a brief overview, like what are we going to talk about today? Yeah. So there's a couple of different things. First, we're going to start off looking at some of the new navigation experiences that we introduced to the product recently, and some of the feedback we've already heard, some of the changes that we're going to make based on that. After that, we're going to walk through some of the changes to CICD. So we've done some really cool things in our build and release views. So we're going to go through those, and then we're also going to talk a little bit about some of the agile changes that have come in, of how we split up the boards and have some new experiences there, and then I think you're going to wrap us up with another look at Azure DevOps projects. Yes, that's the goal today. So one of the things I want to make sure folks, I don't make assumptions about our audience. I think there's so much tools and so much noise, and so many awesome products out there. They might be like VSTS, what is VSTS? So I figured let's try to talk about what is Visual Studio Team Services, like Visual Studio Toolbox has often the IDE's and the editors, those kind of conversations and Cloud. But this is part of our DevOps stacks, and maybe you can introduce VSTS a little bit. Yeah, definitely. The way to think about VSTS is, it's really a collection of DevOps services that we have, and there's five main services when you think of VSTS. There is version control, which supports TFEC, which is our centralized version control system. But we also have great Git support with pull requests and all the features you would expect out of there. One of the other pieces that we have is obviously version control. One of the things you need to do before that is actually plan your work. So we have a great agile offering that has Kanban boards, queries, everything like that. Another piece of it is CI CD. So we have a stack where you can do continuous integration and deployment. You can deploy to Azure or any other Cloud. Works great with AWS or Google Cloud or anything else, and works great with any of the different languages, just like we've been doing with the client work in Visual Studio. So it doesn't matter if you're building Python apps or anything like that. We also have a product for doing manual testing and low testing. Then finally, we have a package management service, which allows you to create your own private package management feeds and use those if you need to have your own experience within your corporation. Yeah. So this product has been around for a long time. We've been working on VSTS that anchored in for Visual Studio Team Services for a bit now, and it even has a longer history. I mean, this started as an unprim product that we still ship and support today called Team Foundation Server or TFS. So maybe you can explain what happened there. How did we go from TFS to VSTS? What was the vision? Yeah, definitely. It started off like a lot of Microsoft products as like an unprim product a while ago. Then one of the things we saw and need is customers just want to go to the Cloud, and they really want a SaaS offer that's just going to handle a lot of those infrastructure deployment pieces for them. So we started off with TFS and we, over time, more customers were using it and loving it, and as we saw the Cloud transition, we ended up just refactoring TFS in a way so that it can run great on-prem, but we share the vast majority of the code and also runs in the service. So we have a great hybrid mode where whenever we add any feature to VSTS or to TFS, it goes in both places. Then with TFS, we ship a new major version about every year and then updates surround every quarter to three times a year. Yeah. So it's cool. I mean, we ship very often to VSTS. It's like every three weeks, it's a sprint release, so the features keep coming if you're a Cloud customer, and then every quarter or so, we try to push as much as it makes sense to push back downstream to TFS. Exactly. Really, however people need it, they can use it. I think that's pretty awesome. But I think one of the things we're going to really dive deep in today is, how has this product evolved? Just another level set for people that might not know. I mean, this is a product that is integrated with many other products. So like in Visual Studio, it's a Team Explorer experience, like you have places of IDEs where you're connecting to this product, but it also has this powerful web UI where you can do pretty much everything from the website, and I think that's what we've been realizing we need to make more and more investments. So maybe you can talk about like, how do we lead into this conversation? What investments are we making that we're going to show later today as demos? Yeah, definitely. One of the things you can see up on my screen here is a blog post that I did recently that talked about the new navigation experience that we're looking to do for the product and one of the things that we heard from customers is one, like the VST UI was functional, but it wasn't quite as engaging and as modern as they wanted it to be. So one of the things we've been working really closely is with our design team to kind of figure out how do we have a really simple approachable experience that feels really great. And then also looking at all the feedback we've gotten from customers over the years to see what tweaks do we want to make that would be kind of model level changes to make the experience a lot more approachable and easy. So one of the big things that you'll notice is we made changes in a couple areas. One of them is the overall visual style. We added a couple new elements and I'll kind of walk through these in a second in the demo. Across the product, we have a new left hand navigation that we've introduced that you can keep expanded or collapsed. And then we've also made it really easy to create those common artifacts because a lot of times you could be sitting there looking at a build, you find a failure, you want to file a bug immediately, we've got to click action just no matter where you're on the product to go file a bug and kind of get started with that. So we really want VSTS to be this blend of a great suite of services that interact really well together, but also allow customers to pick and choose which ones they want to use. So if you just want a CI CD service, you can use us and you can pair that with GitHub, you can pair it with Bitbucket or any other cloud provider that you have for Git. Your source can be wherever it makes sense for your source to be. Exactly, and the same could be for maybe you want to use Jira, that's fine, or you can use our Agile planning solution as well. So it's really this kind of best of breed service where you can do great things together but also use them independently. Yeah, it's an awesome thing, I work in this product so I spend a lot of time talking about it to people and I go to events, like you guys, we spend a lot of time talking to folks that've never seen it before and I find interesting that as much as we're making it super flexible to be the features you just want, like you said, you just want CI CD, you can just turn that on so everything else is kind of out of your way in this new paradigm, we're going to demo, but at the same time it does work great together and that demo is awesome and I show people who've never seen it before that you can go from like a work item that can be linked to a bunch of code that was checked in against the work item and then that code triggered a CI CD build that all the way went out to production and you can see that release tagged all the way back out to that work where it started and seeing that end to end trackability is awesome but it's also amazing to say, hey, if you just want one part of it, you can use it and we are very open to extend and go beyond. So this is super, I think exciting work and let's jump in and take a look, like what is the experience and I want to preface to say this is a preview experience, you have to opt into it at this point. Eventually this experience will come to TFS customers, we will make sure both products are consistent. So what we're showing today though is already available for folks to try but they have to go and try it, we'll show at the end how to enable that. So just wanted to point that out. So let's jump into the demo and take a look. Great, yeah, let's do that. So I'm going to jump over here and I'll start with what Dmitry just said, which is let's show how you enable this. So what you'll see is a banner at the top of your account. If for some reason you missed that banner or just missed it and want to check it out again later, you can go up to your avatar in the top right, click on that and go to preview features. And this is the way that you can see all the different preview features that exist in VSTS and you'll notice this one right here called new navigation. So you just click that toggle, flip it on and then you can immediately start using the new experience. Yeah, and one of the things I like to point out for folks who are really into their product is is this notion of like your account, right? Right now you're not in any particular project, you're on a much higher level of view, maybe you can talk about that. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, so one of the things that we do is we want to have a great landing experience for people to get started with their day. So in this account, I'm in the Regis organization right now. As you can tell, I work at Microsoft and we use VSTS for all of our internal projects. So there are a lot of internal organizations that I'm a part of, but in this case I'm using kind of one of the demo organizations that we have. So one of the things that you'll see over here is there's kind of three main pivots on this view. One of them is the projects. So you can see a project that I've been to recently. There's a nice big card for that. You can see all the different services I'm using. And then down here is the list of all the other projects in this organization. So if you need a search, you can go up to the top right here and filter through the projects. I can click on any one of these and you can actually see on the right when it does this cool little animation which services are enabled. So again, it gets back to what we talked about before where it turns out on this mobile CI project I just needed CI so I can use that and kind of simplify my experience just to those services or I can go up to these bigger ones. One of the other pieces of it though is it's not just about jumping into a project. Sometimes I wanna see a view of what are all the things I care about.  What are the pull requests? What do I have to get done today? So in the top right, we have my work items experience. And this is actually something if you're in our preview is not there right now but we're actually introducing. And it was something that was based on a bunch of customer feedback where they're like, hey, I really need these experiences where I can see across things. So I'll go to my work items and I can see a couple of these work items that are assigned to me, the state that they're in. I can click right on them and jump right in. And because this is a picture at the organization level, it also tells me which project they're in. So I can't get confused of what that is. Then if I jump over to my pull requests, you'll see that I'll also see pull requests that are assigned to me. And then if I had created any happen, I hadn't created one before this. You could also see the ones that I've created. So I can kind of see both sides of that. And this one has a little blue dot to let me know something's changed since the last time I was there. So if I click into this pull request, it will actually show me at the top the couple of things that have changed. And then over here, I can see that it's a new pull request, the number of comments, who's working on the pull request. Just basically just think of this as kind of your to-do list when you wanna get started for the day. This is everything that I need to get done in this organization. Yeah, and this complexity, I don't want it to overwhelm people because at the end of the day, that left hand side will be completely empty if you're in just one organization. The point is though that we can scale all the way up. And I've had people say to me, well, is this only for big customers? Like is this for like the enterprise scenario? And I'm like, I'm one guy, and I use this for all my source code, for all my like planning of the work against the source code for my CACD. It works for me just fine. It's free for up to five users. Folks are surprised to hear that we have a free tier. They think, oh, I used to pay for this or it's part of some VS Visual Studio thing. I'm like, well, the name is associated, but it's its own product. It has its own free tier. Go check it out. And this, I think, proves my life a lot if I was working with you guys day to day kind of on code and on planning work. So that's kind of awesome. I even learned a few things. I didn't realize that in one of the screens you were showing, someone was like, oh, yeah, I didn't notice that, even though I stared this now. Yeah, almost every day. So that's really awesome. So okay, so now you've gotten to the point where you understand what your life looks like. Let's jump into the product and take a look what the next level of depth is. Let's do that. So I'm going to click into a project and immediately I'm brought to the project summary experience. So I kind of get an overview of what's going on in this project. This is actually something that was in the old experience, but there's a couple areas that you'll notice that are new. One, this whole left-hand nav is new. So in the current product, it's kind of a blue strip across the top that tells you where you are. One of the things we've done is brought it over to the left side. This allows us to kind of scale more and to get quick access to kind of everything that we have. So over here on the top left, I can see the project I'm in, this Fabricam Fiber Web Project. You can see that I've got overview and that's where my dashboards are. So things that sort of give me a view across all the services that are enabled for this project are all kind of in the overview. So like my Wiki could apply to what we're doing with our CI builds versus what we're doing with work. I can come down, hover over work. You can see I can get to the familiar work pages around seeing all my work items, boards, back logs, for code, a similar set of things, build and release CI CD. We talked about tests and then finally package management. So you can see kind of these five major services that we have across the product. And one of the nice things is like I was saying before, no matter where you are in the product, so I could be on any one of these pages, I can click on this plus button up here and just go ahead and file a bug or create a work item from anywhere. Because very common kind of activity people do all the time. So that's the quick access bar to it. And then one of the other things we've heard is that sometimes people would get kind of lost in the product because there is a lot here. So one of the things that we've done to correct that is to have this breadcrumb up at the top. So you always get an idea of where you are. So you can see I'm in the Regis organization, Fabricam web project, and then we call these top level items over here services. So kind of like I'm in the work service, the overview service, and then I'm on the summary page. And if I were to go over to work, you'll notice the overview closed because you don't really need that anymore. We expanded work. And then you'll notice the breadcrumb updated to say, okay, I am in the work page. And then the page under that is work items. And I can see all the different work items that are on this page. One of the things that you will notice though as you move around the product is sometimes you kind of just want more room and to kind of immerse yourself. So if I go over to boards, we have a great boards experience here. But sometimes I just want to be able to go edge to edge with my board. So one of the things that we've done is make it so it's really easy to collapse the left hand nav. So if you want to be in this kind of collapse to minimal state, you know the product really well, you know what the icons are, you can still hover and get tooltips on them. But you can really get into that immersive view of what's going on with my board. Yeah, let's crawl them in more of the productive space. And then I guess you can still go fully full screen like in some of these experiences with top ride. Exactly. So you can really even take over more. Yep. More of the space there. So that's cool. I mean, let me ask a question.  Or was there more of a process? Because I know that a lot of times people want to be part of these things hosted in the cloud. They want to provide their feedback, make sure it's executed on. They think we're trying to do a lot more of that. Yeah, definitely. So I'd say this process started probably around like January, February. And it started with us just really looking through all of our customer satisfaction data. So we use this thing that promoter score NPS. People probably be familiar. Anybody here that's ever gotten one of the pop-ups that's like, do you like the product or not? We actually do read all of those and look at the feedback. I start most of my day is actually looking through all the verbatim comments and seeing what people like or not about the product. So one of the things we did was we saw consistent feedback around how do we improve the navigation and how do we just improve the performance, which has been another part of this. And then another piece around just kind of modernizing the visuals. So we looked through a bunch of those. We actually contacted a bunch of people who set their marketing preference so that we could contact them, did a bunch of interviews with them, ran usability studies. This was probably the fourth iteration of this design as we were testing it with different people over a couple months. We went and built it. We launched the preview in June. And since then, we've actually gotten even more feedback. And like I mentioned on the last page, that my PRs, that my work items, that was a major piece of feedback. A couple other pieces of feedback we've gotten is changes we've made to teams. So VSTS has this notion of projects. Inside a project, you have a team. And one of the things that we've done in the agile space is actually make a change here. Before, we used to just have a backlog page over here. And it contained kind of your board was in there and your sprints. And a lot of times, people were kind of confused because it was this very much an amalgamation experience of multiple different things. So we split those up. But then we noticed from talking to customers that it kind of introduced a different set of problems. So one of the things that we're working on now is trying to figure out, how do we respond to that feedback and make sure that it's still really easy for people to switch between their teams and kind of keep that context if you work that way. Yeah, we definitely listen to all the feedback. So it's really helpful, whether it be Twitter or blog comments or the NPS results. And whenever you turn off a preview feature as well, you'll notice that we actually ask you why'd you turn it off? And I can guarantee we read all of those too. Yeah, I mean, I get that question asked a lot. Like, do you guys read the feedback? Do you follow the feedback? Was something influenced by feedback? Like, yes, across the board to all of those. And even the experiences that are in the preview and it's a preview for a reason, we still don't feel like we've gotten it. Like it's not nailed and it's working perfectly. I mean, forget like bugs behind the scenes, but even in the experience that we are trying to redefine, we haven't figured out 100% how we're defining it. We're looking at people's feedback and we're continuing to evolve that definition. And that's part of our done state of calling this thing complete, if you want at some point. Definitely. Like when I look at like my commitments, like up to my managers, it's all about like how satisfied are customers with the product. And like, I don't really consider a change like this done or a change for any feature done until customers are really happy with it. And that's, like you said, it's kind of like the core exit criteria, if you will, for like shipping a great feature is like, do people really love it? And if it turns out we shipped something and it's not doing great, we're committed to keep working on it and tell we feel like it is great. That's awesome. So in this experience that we're showing, I think you started with sort of like my view, but the view continues to be available to you, right in the top right of the nev, so maybe we should show that. That's right. Like that's one of my favorite changes. Yeah. So just like you were saying, we have this kind of global navigation. So on the left, this is kind of things you can do within the project. So all the services that are enabled are creating things. You can click the VSTS or Visual Studio Team Services logo to get back to that page we were on before that shows all my projects. We have the breadcrumb bar across here. On the right-hand side, you can search and this searches across the entire project. And like you were saying, we have this notion of this kind of to-do list of my workplace. So one of the things we heard is not just having it on a separate page is what people want. Like some people want that and they want a URL that they can just bookmark to that. But a lot of times people just need that quick access no matter where they are similar to creating a work item. So what you'll notice is we kind of have this peak view here where I can see my work items, my pull requests, and then also all of my favorites right here, which looks like I probably forgot to set one up before the demo. No problem. But we can go through and we can favor one over here. And then the other thing that I have is a link to the marketplace. And then before we show this, which is my avatar, which is like all of my core settings related to me. Yeah, and also in that avatar, that's where we can enable this preview experience. So maybe we can show like whether it's one more time just to make sure people know. Because it's easy to miss. It's one of my top ask questions. Folks say, where's that thing that you guys talked about in release notes? Or did you just treat it about like, this is where you go and this is where you go for everything. If it's available to you. And this list will be different for even different people, right? So some people will have more items because they're in kind of more deeper preview rings of our product. And then engineering has sometimes the most. I see some people having quite a few. And then we have these enabled. And you can always opt out. That's another very key thing. Like we understand you need to get your day job done. And also what's the scope of this new navigation? So if I have like my work VSTS and I have my private one, can I switch it out for one, but not the other? Will I impact other people in my organization if I turn this on? Is there any fears around that? Exactly. So just like you said, we roll out features based on rings. So sometimes you'll have access to some things and other people won't. But yeah, I can specify how I want to turn on a given feature. So in this one, it says for me, like Jeremy Eppling. So in this case, I would just be toggling these on for me and only me. One of the other things I can go do is go do it for my entire organization though. So in this case, in this demo organization, I don't have permission to go do this. But if I did, you can see there are more features over here and I can go ahead and toggle these on for the entire organization. So in this case, I'd be forcing everybody that's in this Regis organization to turn on the new nav or do something like that. But only if you had permission. But only if you had permission, that's right. Yep. Okay, yeah, that's awesome. I think they'll give people some sense of safety in trying these features on knowing they can turn it on for just one particular account that they're in and not have to worry about their work account or other people even in the same account being impacted if that's that's right. Cool. So we've not only made improvements to, like you said, to the breadcrumb or the favorites or the navigation, we're actually making improvements to the individual screens within different parts of the product because of course we hear that even they need to be modernized or improved. And maybe we can go for a few demos of those. Yeah, that'd be great. So we can start right here on the agile board and then we can go over to some of the CICD scenarios. So awesome. On this one right here, one of the things that you'll notice is we've kind of simplified some of the top navigation. So if I have multiple different boards that I want to go to, I can click here and quickly switch between those and whichever ones I favorited will be at the top. So I have quick access over to those. As you saw me do earlier, I can quickly favorite any board. And then if I go over to my list over here, let's go away, come back. Oh, looks like that might be taking a little longer than I hoped. I tend to file a bug. Yep, read yourself. And then another thing though is kind of what else is going on with my team? So let me click over here on this icon and it'll show all the related artifacts for that team. So I may have a board, I might have a backlog, I could also have a sprint. So you can see all the different things. So I can quickly move in that team context between things. And then I can also see who are all the members on the team. So this is something else that we've added new. So again, trying to have that person centric view of the world and not just kind of the different artifacts or landmarks within the product, but also who are the people, what are they working on and how do they all relate together? Because a lot of people like to think about things both ways. Yeah, makes sense. One of the other things that we've done is we can go over and show some of the work that we've done in Build. So this is another preview feature that's only on for kind of a limited audience. But we've been updating a bunch of the UI in our Build experience. So one of the things you'll notice is I have a Build pipeline over here on the left. And then I can see which branch it's building, when was the last time it was built. Over here I have a history of kind of all the different builds. And in this case I can see that there was kind of a scheduled build running here. So I can click on an individual build. And this gets to our new build results experience. So one of the things you'll notice, especially for you to our old one is we've definitely cleaned this up and modernized it a lot more. So we have some nice cards so it's really clear to see what's going on. We have this new timeline view, which is something that I'm really excited about, which kind of gives you an idea of what is everything that's kind of going on with this build. So actually let's jump back over to one of these other ones. And in this experience you said it's on for a limited number of people, like what does that mean for people watching this video? When can they give this a try? They're excited. Yeah, one of the things that you'll notice is and some of the things I'm demoing today are still only for the engineering team when we're rolling them out. So for this one right here, I would say in our next Sprint's deployment, we're gonna have a preview that's gonna come out for people and they're gonna be able to start checking out. So in the next couple of weeks, it'll be available to everybody. And we have release notes. We'll make sure there's a link to the show notes where we in a very detailed way put all the top features in the release and we even have a little videos. So lots of ways to learn about what's shipping every release. Definitely. So here's another one to look at. So in this case, what you'll notice is I can have a list of all the different commits that are in this change. In this case, I was just building the same thing that I had already built for a demo, but it would list all the different people and the commits that are in that change. Then I can see, okay, that's kind of the first step in the timeline of a build. Then I can go through and see this build process and I created one with warnings just so we can get an idea to see what that is. So it'll pull out from the logs the exact warnings that came out so I can quickly make a decision there. If it was all green, it would be fine. In this case, I've configured my build to succeed even if there are warnings. If there were failures, you'd see them bright red right there. So as soon as you come in, you know exactly where your build's failing. So again, it's all about trying to draw people to the action that they can take. Awesome. So it's a bottom up kind of timeline. Yep, yeah, exactly. With the latest on the top, kind of like a feed style. And then a lot of the times once you've built something, you want to get to one of the artifacts. So in this case, this build produced a couple different artifacts. I can go ahead and download those artifacts. I could also click here and do it. Yep. And then if I wanted to kick off a release from this, I could just click over right here, kick off a release. One of the common things people also need access to though is the logs. So in this case, the way I set up this build was I'm actually kind of doing two build jobs at the same time. So you can see both of those jobs over here. I can go through and see everything succeeded. If I go and click on any one of these, it'll actually slide open. And this is actually the Monaco editor. So this is the same editor that's actually in VS Code. So you'll notice we automatically have syntax highlighting. We have a mini map over on the right hand side. I can jump between the different tasks that are in the build. So it's a really easy way to kind of go through my logs. In this case, I'm doing something simple. As you would imagine, like some people have very complicated builds with lots of logs. And having a lot of these features from the VS Code's core editor makes it really easy to navigate and get through those. Yeah, I love how we're sharing code with that team. I mean, that work started, I think, with moving one of the first places to use it at least that I can remember back in the day. So it's kind of cool. Definitely. It became an amazing code editor too. So let's jump back over to the timeline. And then one of the other things you'll see is that I actually kicked off a release based on this. So we'll go over to the release. Yeah, so it's worth kind of pointing out again, just to level this up for some people that this is like two distinct capabilities of our product of VSTS. You haven't used them independently or they were great together like this. You can build your code in the cloud and you can choose to stop there or you can even choose to make it a continuous integration. So it's constantly building and checking based on how you configured it. And then we have release management or what we always often call RM. And this is that release management side and they're connected. But again, you could have used either one independently. Could have built with something else. Some other competitive product took the artifacts and released it with our product. So there's lots of flexibility, but these are all tied together. And if you want to use them that way, so that's kind of what really awesome. Yeah, definitely. And we definitely see a lot of customers do that that have a current CI system or build system they're really happy with, but they need a more mature kind of deployment product or already using VSTS or something else. And it's a great way to like connect those two things together. And then over time, a lot of those customers will choose just to use VSTS or stick with what they have and they like. And even on the CI build side too, you can bring whichever like build runners that you want to that.  So yeah. Yeah, this is one of the new views that actually was in the release notes recently. So that we can show status of different releases. So one of the things you'll notice is I have an artifact. This was triggered off a specific build from VSTS, but this could have been a Jenkins build. It could have been anything else that like created this artifact. And then you can go over here and see I deployed it to Azure. In this case, it triggered a failure just so I could show that in case there's a failure if you just needed to, you could go through and redeploy. One of the other things that we can go and do is actually edit this release or even just edit the entire release pipeline. So I'm gonna bring up this pipeline view and what this does is kind of shows some of the other things we have. So we have this is like how your release is configured, right? So these are the various steps in the journey of your release going from the artifacts all the way to environment and this view lets you manipulate that configuration. Yep, exactly. So one of the things you'll notice is on this specific stage kind of of that journey I go through here and I can say, hey, I've got this release that's happening to Azure. It has three phases. It has seven tasks. I could dig into what those are. But sometimes for more mature, I would say customers that are going through and doing deployments they'll have different conditions they want. So different things have to be met before a deployment can happen or after a deployment happened. Maybe you have a set of people that need to approve from it. Maybe you wanna set up a set of gates that can basically trigger things where you're gonna be monitoring health over some period of time and you wanna kind of run that over time. The release gates is a cool feature. It's something we shipped fairly recently so a lot of people still don't know. It's in there in the settings but having the ability to gate and we even have like the marketplace extensibility of it, right? So people can even build their own gates against this and make decisions what protects their builds and how they deploy super option. Exactly and like some of the most common gates that I see in some we use even for deploying VSTS is we use VSTS to build and deploy VSTS. Yeah, we've got inception going on there for sure. Exactly, different things around health monitoring and you just wanna check it on an interval to make sure everything's going well and then maybe after a day of doing that or an hour of doing that or whatever you think feels great then you can progress to the next stage of your deployment. So maybe you start off in the internal environment and you go to kind of a pre-prod environment and then you go to prod and it gives that kind of flexibility so you can do that. And just like you have pre-deployment conditions you can also have post-deployment conditions and these are also gates and approval so those same kind of extensibility API points you mentioned before like an integrate easily into both of these. And then if you need to you can always go through and create more environments and I'll just go ahead and create one here. We'll just stick with. Yeah, that list that dropped down we passed it quickly but it's very comprehensive there's a lot of stuff in there people can choose from. Yeah, let's do another one as you can see but yeah, as you can see we have a lot of different templates and you'll see a lot of Azure IIS on here but there are many other templates and we can deploy to just about any service. So you can see one of the most interesting ones that I'm working with a lot of customers on right now is Kubernetes, which we have right here. So, you know, if you do container based deployments and you go to an Azure service that's great we support you or if you wanna go directly to Kubernetes because you're hosting it on a different cloud or you're hosting your own hardware and wanna deploy directly that way we support that. And again, all these templates are driven completely from the marketplace so people can build their own or you can contribute your own and then see how popular it gets up on our marketplace. Yeah, it's very cool. And you can build really interesting complex environments throughout here as well. So I can go through here and say that this depends on both of these environments and just have different interesting configurations like that. So it really allows people to kind of do this notion of kind of fan out and fan in across their system. And then one of the things we didn't touch on quite yet was also the test part of the product and then the artifacts or the package management side. So those are two other pieces if you have manual testing, if you have load testing or you have a need to have your own kind of private registry of internal feeds that you're using within your company. Maybe you wanna ingest things from the outside like open source, have it in but only lock to specific versions. You can go ahead and kind of do that in a safe controlled way to make sure security, whatever protocols or compliance protocols your company has are met on there. Yeah, and it's cool that I mean, package management just like every part of our product is very much looking to be open and inclusive. So we're like supporting Maven and NPM and you get like, we're not, this isn't old Microsoft. There isn't just like only our products thing in there. It's pretty much looking to be anybody's package management solution. And we're looking for all the feedback from the community to make it better. Exactly. Awesome. So I think this is a great set of features and with this, I wanna segue to one closing demo that I'm gonna do for my machine, which is to talk about Azure DevOps projects because this is something your team builds as well. It's part of the ABSA portal inside of Azure. So people ask me, what is this and how does it compare to VSTS? I figure let's use this moment to talk about another great UX experience that lets you set up CICD pipelines and really explore multiple products and our cloud together. It's kind of a set of things that it helps you configure. So Azure DevOps projects is inside of the ABSA portal. And I'll switch over to the ABSA portal here and we'll have a link to this page as well so you can learn more about it. But this is me logged into Azure's management portal. And in here, if I say to myself, right, so I wanna create a resource. One of the options I can do in the create is type in DevOps and DevOps projects will come up. And DevOps project, when I hit create over here, it will show you that it is a tool that lets you kind of chain together a bunch of things that creates an end-to-end CICD pipeline. And you can use this to learn about configuring CICD pipelines. You can use this to explore our product VSTS because it creates the repo, the build and release part of that pipeline. So VSTS is the CACD engine and where the Git repo is stored for this. Think of it as a way to again learn. And then you connect it over to App Insights which is our ops piece which can monitor the deployment. And you have a target, so you're gonna aim this thing at a particular resource on Azure. And that's the resource that is the final endpoint. I'll show you, it takes a few minutes to build all this out. So I'll show you how to work through it and then show you all the pieces that it's connected to because this is I think a really awesome way for folks to learn CICD or explore the various products that are part of it. So here on this first screen, you have an option to choose what is my starter application? Now, this is not gonna be locked for you. So I've seen people ask me like, okay, so let's say I choose Node or Python. Let's say Python in this particular case. Does that mean that the only thing this thing ever works for is that sample Python application? Well, no, it's gonna be checked in into a Git repo. You can right away check it out, make changes, check it back in. If the build doesn't break, it'll build, release, deploy, and be out in the production endpoint. So it's kind of cool, but let's choose Python as a starter experience here. And then the second thing is that, just like most runtimes, there's some kind of framework, a UX framework or some choice that people have. And again, if there's a fourth one that's not on this list, you can check out from Git and replace the whole thing with whatever you want. But we right away out of the box give you some popular templates that Python developers would be familiar with, Django in this case. I've used them for so many demos over the years. And here's where it gets interesting because now, and we're constantly evolving this feature to say, all right, so which runtimes do we support? Which frameworks do we support? Which services can we deploy to? All of this, the list keeps getting bigger. Right now, for Python, it supports web apps for containers, and that's gonna be a Linux-coasted container, or you can just deploy to just like a web app on Azure that's not a container-based environment. But if you go to something else, so for example, let me show you Node, if you were to choose Node through this wizard, Node actually supports Kubernetes already. So we're adding Kubernetes to this as well. And again, this is an awesome way. This is how a lot of people are learning how to actually set up a Kubernetes deployment through a CAC pipeline for a particular language that they're interested in. And again, this is all end-to-end wizard, like if I go through these steps, let's go through them for the first one I selected. So let's choose Python again, say next, Django, next, let's say yes, I'm fine with the Linux container for it, then it's gonna ask me, now, which VSTS instance do you wanna use? And at this point, if you never even use VSTS, you can go ahead and create a VSTS account that's gonna be your CIC orchestrator, and you can name it right here. Or in my case, I have one already, so I can go ahead and select my particular one at the bottom here. If only I knew how to scroll, there you go. So, and then I just need to give it a project name. So Azure DevOps PD-01, let's call it that, just to be a demo. So this will now link my source code that I selected, it will put it into a repo and it'll configure a CAC pipeline in this account that I selected inside of this project, and it'll deploy it to Azure, to this particular region. And in that region, it will also instrument it against application insights, so that you can monitor the release. So in this case, I'm gonna pick the west region and I'm just gonna hit done. And as long as I didn't choose something that was incorrect, you know, a reserved project name or something like that, it will let me go forward, and it will start creating the resources. So, within less than 10 minutes, you're gonna have all this stuff deployed. And it's really powerful, there's even some database options being added to it, so it's a really cool way to do it. I'm gonna jump into one particular place that I recreated a project. So, if you click into this project, we have, again, investments in UX. We're trying to make it easier for our developers to be able to understand what exactly is it that they are managing in a visual way. So here, we show that there's code that's checked into a repo inside of VSTS. The builds are happening inside of VSTS, and VSTS supports Mac, Linux, and Windows builds, so it's choosing the right build, and we support containers and Kubernetes and our release. So our release is pushing this out. And from here, you can literally click on one of these. So if I wanted to see the source code, I can click in, and here you go, it's opening VSTS for us, and it's showing us the code, it's showing us a code diff, there's so much rich features there. And then if I wanted to see how the build's doing, I can click on builds, again, jumping out to VSTS, showing the build view, the one that we were just talking about a second ago. And all of this, all the experiences that Jeremy was covering as something that you could do from VSTS itself could be pre-configured here, and you can jump in and take a look at the end. I have my releases configured and all the way out to a website that's gonna be up in Azure. In this case, a Python website, I even changed some code and the pipeline kicked off again. I added some exclamation points, because I love Azure. So it's really cool, and it's not a replacement for VSTS. When people ask me like, is Azure DevOps Project the replacement for VSTS? No, it's another UX inside of Azure that makes sense in Azure. And I think we'll see more and more places where VSTS plugs in over time into parts of IBS and the management portal. But just wanted to show this off because I was excited on this UX day to show some more cool UX our teams invested on. So that's it. I think that we covered our agenda for today. Yeah, thanks for everything. No, that's everything. Okay, awesome. Well, thank you folks for watching. We hope you enjoyed this episode. Please leave us your comments. You can follow us on Twitter. We'll put all the links and all the show notes. And please give this a try. Give us feedback. We really are listening. We hope that you'll use our DevOps products and thank you for watching again. Have a great day. Definitely, thanks.


Live from the Masonic in San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering Lenovo Tech World 2016, brought to you by Lenovo. Now, here are your hosts, Stu Miniman and John Walls. Welcome back to Lenovo Tech World. Here in San Francisco, we're in the Masonic auditorium, John Walls, along with Stu Miniman. And we're wrapping up here from San Fran with the chance to look back at all that we've heard today, Stu.  We've seen new devices, we saw the new tablet, the FabPro too, and what have you. And there are a lot of bells and whistles, a lot of fun stuff, right? Virtual reality, augmented reality. But underneath all of that, right, it's all data, it all needs the underpinning, it all needs foundation and infrastructure, and I think that's the interesting play here, is that Lenovo sees that and obviously is trying to prepare for that future. Yeah, absolutely.  I mean, it's kind of nice, right? I feel like, you know, you go to the Super Bowl, they're a sports center, we've been called the ESPN attack, so, you know, John and Dave, you know, we're missing you here in San Francisco. We're on the field. But, you know, yeah, we're on the field. We're on the field. Here in San Francisco.   It's connected computing.  We understand where those are going. So, you know, big pushes into mobile, and you know, we'll talk a lot about the enterprise. I actually, I traded notes with a cousin of mine. My cousin Brandon Minaman really understands, you know, the mobility space. He and one of his brothers created a website called Pocket Now. Really understands the consumer space. He was actually watching the keynote, and he saw the Moto Z. And he said, you know, the Android space has been kind of dull the last couple of years. They got some cool things.  I mean, heck, they brought in Ashton Kutcher, to, you know, kind of show this. I don't know if he's invested in it, but, you know, he said he'll judge the million dollar developer thing that he's going. But the reason that ties this all together is all those devices and the smart devices, you know, PCs with virtual reality and augmented reality, the internet of things.  So that's where, as you know, we've said a number of times, the boring infrastructure stuff sits behind there. And on theCUBE today, we had the people from Lenovo say, from the server side, their job is to make sure that it just becomes indivisible. You know, this is the foundational layer that sits behind everything.  Oh wait, you know, sorry, that paycheck went in. Oops, sorry, no money. So, you know, we understand that, you know, that the nitty-gritty stuff that happens in information technology behind the scenes, most people don't pay attention to it, but it is critical to how our modern society works.  This is part of the IBM acquisition, you know, the SystemX back in 2014. And so we're not newbies to this at all. It's just we've reconfigured, we've reorganized. But you go to the storage side and we heard Stuart McCrae readily admit, we are new to this. This is a new game to us, but they see that as an opportunity of a lifetime, he called it. So it's interesting that they have obviously cited what they think is a big upside, a big opportunity, and they're trying to seize it now in the storage side. Yeah, so first of all, right on the server side, of course, IBM's got a great legacy there. You know, they really were the first in the blade server market. They brought, you know, Linux, you know, to a large parts of data center when their servers brought, you know, small form factors, a lot of innovation that IBM's driven in their times, but the X86 business was not getting the attention that it needed when it was inside of IBM. IBM still has the power systems. They still have the Z systems. So, you know, spinning it off was helpful for IBM so that they could focus on what they need. And it's going to, you know, Lenovo hopes to reinvigorate the X86 group. We heard that there were some, you know, some challenges anytime you make an acquisition and Lenovo made two big acquisitions, the Motorola piece and the system XP. So both of those big acquisitions, a lot of people, there were some people that left the organization, there were people some cut, figuring out the strategy that it fits, but they think they've got that where they want to go and they think they can win back market share and be aggressive, both in the traditional enterprise space as well as the hyperscale place, because Lenovo has global reach, global support, and they can push much lower margins than IBM can in the hardware space. And where that fits for the storage side is what we talked about with Stewart and Radhika and some of the others, is if you look at the hardware that makes up storage today, it's X86 servers. So, you know, underneath it used to be custom monolithic hardware that you build. And today, you know, it's mostly Intel based architectures, and they did that. When EMC switched their main product line, the Symetrix, you know, over to an Intel based architecture, you know, it went pretty smoothly for them. So, if you look at Lenovo and you say, okay, they have what they want to be one of the top leaders in X86, should they be a storage player? Well, if you're a server vendor and storage is coming back to the server either to build storage arrays like scale out filers or for hyperconverge where you've got both compute and storage together, well, you're either going to be a supplier to storage companies or, you know, hey, that you should have that mix of partnering and what you do internally. So, it makes perfect sense for Lenovo to be there. Stewart says it's the once in a lifetime. He said, well, you know, it's usually every 15 to 20 years you get a big opportunity with some of these, you know, seismic shifts, but absolutely Lenovo has the right to be at the table and that we are in the early parts of their journey to see how they can compete both against the big guys as well as, you know, some of the incumbents and partnering with the likes of, you know, Cloudian, Nixenta and Nutanix who is the leader in hyperconverge today. That's right, I want to hitch up on the partnership thing too because we've heard that a lot, right? That if they don't have the expertise they're going to lie to themselves with those who do. And we see that on the networking side with Juniper, you know, Radhika Christen was telling us about that. So, that seems to me to be smart play, the right play because they're augmenting their offerings now with the expertise of those who have really been acutely focused on it. Yeah, it's interesting, there's, you know, there's been the vertical integration of a lot of companies. If you look at an Oracle, you look at an IBM, how much of the stack can they own? But when you talk about the breadth of these solutions, if you're doing IoT, you're going to be partnering with somebody just because just all of those devices and the edges, nobody's going to own all of the pieces. So, you know, Lenovo is starting out, they've, you know, put their places to where they have some of their early partnerships, ones that fit well with kind of the architectures that they have, and they'll grow that out. On the networking side, you know, Juniper's a good partner to work with. They both are interested in kind of that disaggregation of hardware and software. Networking is one that we're still, I mean Cisco's still dominant in that marketplace, but you know, we believe that there are places where, you know, customers will start to make changes and move to more of these distributed architectures and make some of those decisions separately for hardware and software. So, interesting opportunities there.  Today they say they, you know, don't compete with any of those partners well as you grow out a portfolio. Eventually you reach a point where you compete. Dell used to say- I'll say naturally there's friction, right? At some point.  They partnered with networking well. They made acquisitions. They made a big acquisition, you know, with EMC more recently, which will be wrapping up soon.  So, it's always that maturation of the solution and, you know, especially for storage, partnering out is a great way to start and get you into these markets. They're changing fast.  And it seems Lenovo has the commitment to get there, too. I found that interesting. Always a pleasure to work with you. Good seeing you out here.  We've talked from, again, from many of the folks inside the company, very optimistic, upbeat, positive and assured, I think, of the path they're on. You feel good about it? Yeah, no, I was impressed by what I saw here and it's interesting.  They just shed their consumer division. Lenovo believes that, you know, it is the breadth of the portfolio and, you know, very different portfolio than that other company that they have. So how they work together, how they'll put those solutions together, I think Lenovo has an understanding of where they want to take it. There's some tough competition out there and things are changing fast. So it's always exciting to watch this on theCUBE. I'm excited. We've got, you know, so many shows coming up here. We talked about Nutanix next. I'll be back here. Hey, you're a busy guy. Thanks San Francisco for the Red Hat Show. You know, summer will be gone quick. We'll be back for VMworld this year in Las Vegas. So yeah, John, thank you for coming out for this one. A lot of fun. I want to say big thanks to our team.  We're also broadcasting from the Fairmont. So I want to just, yeah, we have big thanks to Pat, Greg, Chuck, Brendan, Alex. You got them all. Team effort, you know, everybody back in the home office that have been blogging in the cube gems and everything else, you know, team effort here. Really appreciate everybody watching here. You can always hit us up on the Twitters and you know, see SiliconANGLE TV for what's going on. We had a one hour turnaround here. And if we didn't need time lapse to show you, because they were flying around in fast motion the whole time, but did a cracker jack job of getting things set up, we do appreciate that. Stu, been a pleasure. And we thank all of you as well for joining us here on theCUBE. For Stu Minimum, I'm John Wall, so long from Lenovo Tech World here in San Francisco on theCUBE.