I'm Michael Wittek from Merck-Darmstadt, Germany, and I'm in charge of the commercial aspects of our smart antenna products. And so what you can see here is like a novel technology approach using liquid crystals to enable smart antennas that can do beamforming to connect to the new satellite constellations like the Leo constellations like Starling, Kuiper, and so on. But that also can be used in novel telecommunication applications like 5G. So this is like the really the hot topic Elon Musk's company is trying to cover the whole planet, but there's also a Chinese company doing something. There's the Amazon, the Blue Origin is going to deploy, other companies are going to deploy, and all these need, as far as I understand, they have a big dish right now with phased array system, and it's not using liquid crystal right now, but in theory you could use liquid crystal for that and get the cost to be lower on the dish. Yeah, I think the big advantage of using this approach is that the manufacturing infrastructure is already there. And the LC-based antenna is also very similar to a display. So a small modification in the display line and you can build a smart antenna in the existing manufacturing infrastructure. And that's a big plus, especially when you go to large numbers. All right, so the liquid crystals are just huge, right? The market is doing billions and billions of displays. And how do you modify an LCD panel process to make your product? Oh, I think there's only small modifications needed. So I think mostly then 90% is using the same technology. There's only some parts that has to be modified. I mean, we have to, for example, to put somewhat thicker metal layers onto that. So that's being modified and then you can produce those panels in large numbers. And how's a different dish that goes to the satellites and a dish that be used for optimal 5G kind of cellular, what's the difference when you do it? Well, I think the basic setup is very similar. I think only the specs are different. I think for satellite communication, you need to have extreme good signal to noise reception because satellites are typically further away. Whereas when you use beam forming technology in an urban environment or rural environment, it's only small distances. So I think there are different requirements to the antennas there. And that's going to be modified. But the basic technology is very similar because I think that the frequencies that are being used in modern 5G that are going up to like 28 mm wave is 28 GHz. And that's kind of in the same ballpark like the frequencies that are being used for satellite broadband communication like the KA band. That's also around 20 to 30 GHz. So the base technology is very similar. So as I understand, the satellites are up in the sky, right? And the 5G and base stations are kind of like on the ground. So is it like a different direction you need to go or is just you point a different way or the whole point is that you don't need to point it because you just have it, for example, on like a little thing. And then it just works in any direction? No, I think the higher you go with the frequency of radio waves, the more directionally the wave scans. I mean, see, look at light beams, for example, they just go into like one directions and they need like a point to point line and line of visibility to connect that. And the same happens also when you use radio waves, higher frequencies, you need a line of sight connection. And that is extremely important factor in modern telecommunications because the amount of data that's being transmitted is getting larger and larger. And so also then the frequencies are being used, getting larger and larger. And then you end up in a frequency regime that requires line of sight. And when you have a line of sight requirement, you need antennas that can actually steer the beam. And you don't want to do that mechanically because mechanically is always always a lot of maintenance. And it has an unfortunate form factor, but you want to do it electronically beam steering. And this is exactly where the modern antennas, modern smart antennas come in, the beam steering antennas. So you want to do the beam steering electronically. And DLC is one solution. And it's a very cost efficient solution to do that. What is the phased array, the huge, beautiful dish that Starlink is selling for $500? What kind of technology are they using? They're not using LCDs, right? No, I mean, that's a semiconductor based solution. And semiconductor based solutions typically require more costly. I think here we see that and that the Starlink antenna is extremely cost optimized, partly also of some compromise in performance. I mean, when you look directly at the antenna, it still has to move mechanically. And it can only work with the Starlink constellation, but there's a lot of satellites up there. And so our approach is different coming from a passive technology. I mean, we are from the start. I mean, we are very energy efficient with this technology. And also given the infrastructure there, I mean, we are from the start very cost efficient in large numbers. Maybe you can get back to your slides and show some of the different things. There's already some comments in the chat. How do you combat interference? I'm always thinking that the whole 4G, 5G aspect has this problem that you probably never going to have a base station for less than the thousands of people. Usually they put a base station as thousands of people around. And they all kind of like fighting for the bandwidth. And there's all these Wi-Fi, Bluetooth devices in people's homes. Is the stuff that you're doing, is that helping? Because you're using different line of sight kind of tech? I think in general when moving, I mean, for the telecommunication part, when you're moving to higher frequencies, I mean, the density of base station gets much, much higher. And there's many more base stations required. This also means the energy requirement is very high for all those more base stations to connect them. And we envision this technology also to feed a lot of base stations. I mean, LC is, per se, I mean, from switching is not the fastest in switching time, but it can enable to a dynamic grid of base stations. So to feed them all and thereby to also minimize then the energy consumption. Because energy consumption is probably one of the biggest topic for the 5G and 6G rollout. Another thing is also that this technology can be used for active reflectors. Intelligent surface is that reflect the beam in a certain direction in an urban environment. So this is also being tested right now. So there's a lot of applications there also in the telecom area. To make a great 5G network, you need to maybe an order of magnitude more base stations compared to 4G, right? You need to make many smaller base stations. And instead of cabling them all up with fiber or something, you're suggesting they could have line of sight to some kind of a bigger base station that sends them the bandwidth to each of the base stations? Yeah, this is one use case. I mean, the other use case is to have a base station in a remote area. So I mean, like cabling up all the base station in the remote area is also not very cost efficient. I mean, you can feed that base station via satellite, for example. So that's another use case for these antennas. I mean, you can have a base station top of a mountain somewhere remote. And since it's very energy efficient this technology, so it can be solar powered and it can be fed then by a satellite, for example. And there are so many satellites out there, and with the new Leo constellations. So that's also then a use case for these antennas. There's another question coming right here. Can we cancel dishes in North Africa? Dishes destroy the view of buildings. What I'm wondering a little bit, for example, and he asked there, the question is about TV dish antenna. Is there any chance that your phase array can work for data and also for connecting for all the traditional, what do you call it, geostationary satellites that do TV broadcasting at the same time? Sure, it can, sure it can. But I think this segment, I mean, we are talking about when we look at TVs, we are talking about an antenna that's in the price range of, like say, 50, 50, 50 US dollars. And so we can't beat this at this stage. So, but technically, in principle, I mean, it's possible to do that, so. And maybe you can show some of your slides, but while you set them up, I'm just wondering, when you have line of sight bigger base stations sending the signal to a smaller one, why would you need liquid crystal if the base station is going to stay exactly the same place forever? Is your technology more suitable for something that keeps moving like satellites? No, I think when we have a network of base stations, it's always a dynamic network. And so you want to switch the load in between the base stations. And for that, you would need, like, a somewhat more dynamic beam steering antenna. All right, so you have to switch, constantly switch. Where the data comes from and where it goes also. It's constantly switched. I mean, you just had the example of TV dishes.  In Asia, for example, you have a lot of monsoons, a lot of storms and so on. And this causes that the TV dishes are always move a little bit and that they have to be adjusted again to the satellite. And so people ask us, why not using this technology? And this technology is perfect for that because we have a dish on our roof. And once the storm is coming through, I mean, you have to adjust it. And so this can self-adjust it, for example. So I think it's a viable approach for at least more antenna. It's a mind-blowing idea that it's been a dream for a long time to cover the planet with internet and with these satellites. And it looks like it's happening, right? The Starlink is really happening. And so the question is, for example, if you have a village somewhere in Africa, how do you connect all the whole village to one base station? Is it just using cellular technology? Or is there some other kind of like, I always thought that white spaces was going to be a thing where people are going to use those TV bands to do internet. But I guess it's also, in theory, just part of 5G, right? Yeah, yeah, it's part of 5G.  And connect it to some wireless, like Wi-Fi device, like a router. And then you can have internet for everyone, for example, for a village. I mean, that's one use case. Or the other extreme is you have your own antenna in the village and have your internet connection. But I think it's not only the villages, but it's also like mountainous areas. I mean, these are extremely difficult to get fiber to. So I think you can, an antenna on the top of the mountain covers most of it, right? Yeah, if I do a quick Google search on antenna dishes, you see all these. What is that? I don't know if that's real. So are you going to help with that? How is your technology going to look like? Is it just going to be one of these white things that looks like that? Or it could be completely different in terms of architecture and design or size? It could be really flat. It could be just be integrated in a building, right? It doesn't have to look so ugly, right? Just like a flat panel. I think this is a very good point. I mean, we are receiving like a lot of requests by the automotive industry right now. Because they said, oh, come on, we have Starlink. We want to use it because there's so many use cases in the automotive industry, like autonomous driving, which needs a lot of data. So there is an antenna that can be integrated. And I think that's a really nice use case. And I think that's a use case. I mean, I think Starlink and Tesla, still it's mechanical. It's still at this point difficult. I mean, what is better than having a Tesla with a nice integrated flat panel antenna that can do the real autonomous driving? And you can watch movies even when you drive to remote areas in Nevada. I mean, everybody's driven through those deathwells. It's difficult, almost no reception there. What is better than to drive on these long highways and watch a favorite movie? So when you take, for example, a Tesla right here, I'm sorry, I'm back on the Google search. But they're like so smooth and I'm not going to use the word silky smooth.  And then it would be useful to have a better like a few years ago, like 10 years ago, I was I was testing out this Acust. They were doing a thing where you could capture dvbt signal in the car. But you had to have an antenna on each side of the car. And every time you turn the car, the signal will kind of like stop working and stuff. So let's say you have a smooth antenna on the roof of the car. Can it be used for 5G plus Starlink in the same antenna? Or do you have to choose what you do with it? Well, I think I think a modern modern modern antenna solutions in the car.  They have an antenna just for 5G and they will have an antenna for satellite communication, then they will have also some antenna for Wi-Fi. So it's an integrated solution. And depending on the area where you are, the antenna chooses the best connectivity option, right? So once you're in the city and you have a very good 5G or LTE coverage, you can use that. But once you drive out of the city in the mountainous areas, it can become necessary to use like a satellite communication, for example. So I think it's always going to be a hybrid mixed case.   So I'm not saying you want to be on satellite all the time, but there's moment where you really need it. And that's a necessary option then. Especially when your car breaks down in a remote area, you want to have some connectivity, right? So you can do both. You can do both with one antenna. You can do any kind of system. You could do 5G, Wi-Fi, satellites. How does it work? No, I think this will be several antennas. This will be an antenna module with one part dedicated for satellite communication, the other part for Wi-Fi, another small antenna for radio reception and so on. So I think it's going to be an integrated solution. And one part is going to be a satellite antenna. And the size probably of the antenna determines then how much satellite connection you want to have. I mean, right now, we are now working with companies for Internet of Things applications. They have a smaller bandwidth, but a very small antenna. So the antenna is 10 by 20 centimeters, very small. Like this? Yes, really small, but you can have a basic connectivity. But then, of course, when you want to have really broadband connectivity, I think the antenna modules will go a little bit larger. And so I think we have these options, especially now with all the satellites going up. And that's not only Starlink, it's also one web. It's TaylorSat, there's so many options to choose from. And also China is building their own constellation. There's so many options to choose from. And so many use cases you can have up for smaller antenna for basic communication needs. And you can opt for a larger antenna. So you have also like a Starlink-like broadband everywhere. So I think it's very exciting times now for connectivity options on the go. And it's not only the automotive case, but it's also the maritime case.  And aviation, of course. I mean, aviation, I think, I mean, the last year we started to have internet on a plane. I mean, this year, this year, last year, we are not traveling. But I think when we will start traveling again, there will be so many new options also. Connectivity options on the plane. So we can watch our favorite movie there and do internet as we did before because the satellites are there and they have to be used. So these airplanes are going to connect to the satellites. Yeah, sure. I mean, they're not going to connect down to Earth. Well, they will also down to Earth. But on a typical flight, you fly over a lot of ocean, basically. And over the ocean, there's, well, technically, you could have some boats there. But there's no way to get ground to air connectivity there.  But hey, all the satellites are there. So why not using the satellites? There's one thing I'm thinking, you know, like in general capitalism and competition is good to see all these different satellite companies compete. Of course, they'll make sure that technology is the best. But wouldn't it make sense that they all kind of like roam with each other and that they expand on the same network and just make it better and better and, you know, like pay each other fees to use each other's networks and just like so the Chinese could work with Starlink and just like instead of competing on the same, you know, like. Yeah, if they all put 40,000, if they all put 40,000 satellites up there, it's going to be a lot of satellites at the end. I know, I know. But I think I think now we are on the early days of satellite communication. And you can probably compare the early days of telecommunication. So you have one telecom company and it puts out their claims and you've got another one puts out their claims. And so it'll probably take some time until you get a roaming on, on, on, on, on, on, on to the satellites, especially when you go like on satellite constellations, different continents and different countries might be difficult, might be difficult at this stage. I think what we are now observing is like the first wave of Leo communication. So I think everybody will have their own network, their own antennas. But the second wave, third wave, we will probably also see some, some, some roaming in space. Some partnerships going on there. Yeah, I think so. You have just encrypted data, right? If the Chinese are afraid that the Americans are going to check what they're doing, they just encrypted and it should be fine, right? Yeah, I think, I think in the, in, in, in the long perspective, that's going to happen right now. I mean, there's, there's some issues there. So it's, it's, it's difficult to envision that right now. But I think in the long run, there will be some roaming. And hopefully all these antennas will be what's it called, future proof, or like it'd be nice to have one antenna that works with all the providers and that works with all the different kinds of antennas and different altitudes. Yeah, I mean, so, so what we see now that you mentioned the Starling antenna, the Starling antenna only works with the Starling constellation. And it's, it's just for that constellation. And, and you cannot use for any other constellations. And we've had a lot of discussions also with satellite companies, also with other agencies. And they would prefer having antenna that also works with different network, with the, works also with the Geos, works with other Leos. And that's currently for Starling, that's not possible. And so I think, I think there will be not only roaming, but there will be probably at some point also some standard for satellite communication. As we've seen in mobile communication, we had the GSM standard, for example. And so we will see that probably in the second wave, third wave, we will see some standardization. But I think this is at a very early time. And so now it's time to, to put out the claims and, and, and, and to see that very similar, what we've seen in telecommunication. So maybe you can, you can show your slides again, like, and maybe give some background. Mark is a very famous company doing pharmaceuticals, right? But you also provide the whole, like we are doing video right now about a part of the display week 2021 coverage. And you're like providing a lot of the materials for all the displays, right? For LCD and everything? Yeah, yeah, yeah.  Merck, Merck, KGAA in Darmstadt, Germany. So that is different from the US Merck. So that's a completely different entity. So the, I say, German Merck. So our business is based on three pillars, like health care, life science and electronics. So health care, just we do a lot of oncology stuff and so on. And for life science, we're doing a lot of lab stuff. I mean, we are very much involved and also in developing parts, lipids for vaccines, very close collaboration with BioNTech and Pfizer and, but we are based in the electronics. And so this technology, LC's Marlantana, got it roots in our activities in LC for this place. So we are a market leader in LC's. And for this place. And we also do a lot of materials for the next generation displays, like OLEDs, a lot of material is done there. And also lately, we just added semiconductor solutions like photoresist, all the stuff that the semiconductor industry needs added to that. And we also have some nice colorful pigments. So that's the electronics part. And this is where the satellite communication and 5G part comes in. And so we took the liquid crystals and looked what other use is there besides displays and we've identified windows, for example, and we also identified modifying microwaves. And so this is the base for the technology for the LC based antennas. All right. So when people think about like LCD as a biggest success in display history with billions and billions of displays, is it possible for you to say how many of the LCD displays get materials from Eric or it's not really public to say, is like a big part of them? It's a big part. It's a big part. It's a big part. I mean, we are market leader, basically. So I don't have the numbers, but a big part. And how affordable, I don't know if we spoke specifically about it before, but how affordable can it get to make a nice, beautiful, flat beam, what do you call it, beamforming or phase aerials? Yeah, beamforming or beamsteering antenna. I mean, steering antenna for for the sunlight. How affordable can it get compared to a five hundred dollar Starlink? Yeah, I mean, I mean, well, I mean, first of all, I mean, we all believe that the Starlink antenna is subsidized and the cost is probably different to that. But I mean, you can compare it to a TV.  So it's it's I mean, when we speak of the panel, I mean, we're talking about five hundred US dollar or less. And an antenna of that size shouldn't be when produced in large numbers. But the the the cost point shouldn't be different. So for a for a panel for 50 inch, I think the panel price is is two hundred US dollar. And so an antenna, the panel should be should be in the same price range plus some electronics modems and so on. So I think this is what what what we are talking about. And this puts us in a in a in a in a very in a very competitive space in the industry, where typically the antenna antenna costs is much, much higher. All right. So maybe you can show some more on your on your I can I can I can go on. I mean, we talked about that the topic is hot. And just to see what is the the satellite communication is all about. I mean, we mentioned Leo, we mentioned the Mio and Geo satellites. So originally, we had the Geo satellites. So the Geo satellites is characterized that it's just it's not changing it. It's positioned in the sky. So that's why you can point your satellite dish to a certain spot and it just stays there. Then we have a satellites in lower orbits closer to Earth. So the Geo satellite is 36,000 kilometers to Earth. So the signal time traveling there, it's it's pretty long. It's a millisecond and it's not really suited for really online activities. So but you can go to Mio satellites that are closer or Leo satellites that are much, much closer. And then these satellites, Leo and news, they are they are they are they are they are not fixed in the sky. They are moving. And so you need an antenna basically that follows follows them. Also then changes then to to to to to another other satellite. But here you have the advantage they're much closer to the Earth. I mean, the the signal strength doesn't have to be so high. And of course, then the delay times are much, much smaller. So we're talking Leo is like 20 milliseconds or less. So we've seen two scenarios right now. I mean, one is that the geostationals. I mean, they're really going to high throughput to get a lot of data out there. And for every every every car that's moving, you also need a beam steering antenna. So Leo, as you can see here, the satellite is also also a moving and you need an antenna that follows then the satellite. So this is this is these are all the constellations.  So we look at broadband consumer, which is huge. You see, and we mentioned that is backhaul. So backhaul means like connecting your base station in a remote area using using a Leo constellation. I mean, that's that's also an interesting use case. And then you, of course, have all the mobile segments like automotive, maritime aviation, that that that will create a lot of demand for these antennas. And then you have we mentioned that. I think we have the automotive use cases. But now I think that's a very hot topic right now. Within within the automotive within the car industry. There's a lot of things and we discussed that. I mean, 5G is always not sufficient. So you need to have something in a in a remote area, especially when you when you go go go into autonomous driving with all the sensors with all the information that's coming in. That's going to be a very interesting use case right now. We are discussing right now. So here is here is a video just explaining how the technology works. So here you see an example of a of a flat panel in steering antenna and you can see it's built very much in layers like it like a display. So you have one one layer with the liquid crystals like in a display and like in a display, this layer modifies the electromagnetic waves. It modifies in a way that a beam can be steered as light can be steered and it's built up like a display and can be produced like a display and could be put in very nice integrated into car, airplane and also in a boat. And it's perfectly for for connecting in remote areas with all those new satellite constellations that are being launched right now. Yeah, yeah, so hopefully you can hear me, right? Yeah, the sound is OK. The sound is perfect. Yeah, yeah, so so that's is it. Are you the only ones in the world doing this technology or do you have competitors doing exactly this? Or is this is like groundbreaking and nobody's thought about it so far? Yeah, I think I think I think we start we started. I mean, this technology we started 15 years ago. I think it's I mean, it's not it's not something you can do like immediately. So so we had a collaboration with a local university downstatt and together with the university, we did develop materials as suitable for to modulate microwaves.  We have and we patented, of course, all these materials. And we have a very strong position from a technology point of view and also from from a patent point of view. And so the early on also working now with startups and to bring this technology into the market. And it also requires then a partner in the display industry. And I think we work now with all the major dismay makers. We introduce that technology and they are now assessing that and and preparing that to bring that technology into the market. How big does the antenna get when you talk about a five hundred dollar TV? I'm thinking sixty five inch TV, you know, like I'm thinking, especially for some of these brands that make really affordable, crazy good TVs. Are we talking about the antenna could be a big one also or smaller? Or I mean, I mean, I mean, as as I said, depending depending on on the performance of the antenna, it can be small or it can be larger, right? And the good part is, I mean, you can tile also, you can have smaller antennas and you can combine them. You can have a tiled approach, which is especially useful when you have like a car roof or you put it on your trunk. You may have smaller segments of the antenna. But but as I said, I mean, you can you can have small antennas, 10 by 20 centimeters for base connectivity, IOT, or you can have larger antennas with much higher performance because for for face antenna, typically the performance scales with the area of the antenna. And depending depending on the performance of the antenna, you would need the antenna is smaller or larger. So, I mean, I mean, we had the example, I mean, having connectivity, a very good connectivity to a geo-satellite, you will probably have a larger antenna when you have a very strong signal to a to a neoconstellation and the antenna can be small. So I think there's there's there's all these use cases there. And and the the beauty of of the LC technology is that the cost just scales linear with the area, whereas other technologies like semiconductor it scales with a number of chips and a number of chips scales per square per area. So here you can have larger antennas also with with a very good cost control. Like the liquid crystals are like really a fantastic invention, fantastic for a world, for a planet, right?  And Mark is in like really the top like expert in just providing this material, providing in the. Yeah, I think I think Merck Merck commercialized these liquid crystals for this place. And and it was a huge success and it still is a big success. And then looking looking at competing technologies like like OLED and so on, they still haven't penetrated like the large area displays in big numbers like TVs. It's still the the the major technology for TVs is still LC. I hope will be also for for for for the time being because just it's so cost efficient and we have have that. And our approach is also to transfer this technology that's being so successful in the display world, transfer that and find different applications. And I said one application I'm not going to go into that today is is Windows. So Windows where you can control control the transmission or you control the opacity like so you can make them or more milky. So you can control that. But these are the Windows people at Merck. They're doing that and they're doing a fantastic job. The other case is is antennas. So I mean, we see and we see here a very similar story to that we've seen in the TV business in TV business. Remember, I mean, you probably experience those huge CRT TVs. Those big clunky clunky CRT TVs. And very similar. We see a very similar story in the antenna space. So I mean, coming from this big clumsy mechanical parabolic dishes, it come now to a flat panel antennas. And within the flat panel antennas, there's many competing technologies. And we've seen a very similar story also with LCD where we competed against plasma and plasma loss because energy consumption was one topic. So I think I think these are very nice parallels. And we will see how this all is going to develop. So I'd like I'd like a window like it's your friends at the window team. But I'd like a window that I can control who can see through from which side. Right. I want to make it opaque if I want to watch a movie in my projector. And I want it to also be a solar charger and an antenna at the same time. Is that too much to ask of a window? I mean, I mean, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, we are getting there. I mean, there's always a big request for transparent antennas that can also be used for the for the for the windows, especially now when you go in the five two millimeter wave connectivity. So so typically, like when we talk about higher frequencies, they are not able to penetrate any buildings or windows anymore. You probably had this issue when you're driving a car. Some cars have those heatable window windows and there's there's metal in there. And so you have really bad connectivity in there. And you've got very similar issues. You've got also with buildings and millimeter waves. And and so I thought it's being looked at having transparent antennas and also to integrate this into windows. But I think this will be take some time. But I think it's it's it's it's a valid use case. And and we also talk to our colleagues in the windows to look at that because it's becoming a big issue when you go to higher frequencies, how to get the higher frequencies into a building to make the windows transparent to to micro waves, two millimeter waves. And so that's that that's a big topic. And that's also being looked at in the telecommunication industry. The really awesome Boeing airplane Dreamliner. I don't know if all of them ship with it, but it's really cool when you push this button and the window becomes dark or oh. And I guess you say it's some kind of a metallic thing, maybe that goes through the window is electrochromic. So it's it's a different technology. I'm not going into that technology. It's it's also a good technology. The seas are much faster. The electrochromic is a little bit on the slow side. It takes a minute till it changes. And I'll see window goes snap a couple of milliseconds and switching time is relatively fast compared to other technologies. So I think there's a lot of use cases there. And and I don't know if you showed this in your slides, but maybe what's called maybe I can open it right here and try to zoom out a little bit. So there's there's a feeding network. What what's part of the feeding network? Is it like electronics like PCB? Yes, the feeding network basically basically. I mean, you have to to get the the the the microwaves to the individual cells. So basically, that's that's what the feeding network is doing. And basically, it's it's it's it's it's some some feeders basically down there. And it's typically based on on PCB. All right. And then and then you have the right there. Then we have then we have very similar to a display. I mean, we have a layer where we have the phase shifters and and and the liquid crystal layer. And and you can control every every phase shifter. You can control using then the liquid crystal layer and controlling the phase shifters allows you then to to to form the direction of the beam. That's not fully depicted in this promotional video. But this is how basically that works. And then there's a radiating elements layer. So so once then once the and it's shown before, then the the signal goes to the radiating elements and and it starts radiating then the radio waves and depending on the phase shift in between each radiating elements, you can you can steer down the beam basically in both directions. And there is one device that I dream that I wonder if it's going to be able to connect to the Starlink and the other satellite networks is the the phone. What's the chance, you know, like you see those those phones have they have a display and often it's an LCD sometimes they do all that, right? Wouldn't it be awesome if you could use your phone's display as an antenna? Oh, that would be lovely. That would be lovely. But I think we are not we are not we are not there yet, but it this way. I mean, as as I said, with these frequencies, I mean, we require a line of sight and activity. And every time you're holding your phone and just remember the antenna gate for one manufacturer where you covered your hand the internal antenna and you didn't get any receptions. So so typically a mobile phone has several antennas. So everywhere you covered the antenna, you get a reception. And so from a millimeter away, I think it will still take some time until the I can connect a mobile phone to that. I mean, we've got asked for that. And I think there's a very strong demand. You're not the only one. What's it? Because because those Starlinks, right, they're so awesome. But it just sounds a little bit bulky to have this huge dish as the only way to connect. It'd be awesome if what I'm thinking. I don't know if they are at all announcing anything, but right now they have a thousand satellites, right? But the goal is to have 42,000 satellites, something like that. Maybe when there's more and more satellites and they get even lower in the altitude, they can have cheaper. They can enable cheaper antennas. Maybe they enable the else liquid crystal antennas. And then maybe hopefully it becomes a kind of really pocket size that even connects with satellites.  So that's foreseeable. Or I mean, what you can have, I mean, you can have, I mean, and we talked about the car.  So it has the antenna that connects to Starlink, Onewab, to any Leo constellation and this car acts as a Wi-Fi station. So I think that's why the automotive use case is so important. So you can use that also then to go camping, for example, put an antenna on your camper. So that makes it so interesting. You can drive to any remote area once you are in 100 meter with your car.  And honestly speaking, most people not moving further away than 100 meter from their car, probably not 90 percent. 10 percent are really hiking remote, difficult, but most people stay close to their car and so on. I always thought that one of the things that might happen is that people will connect their home broadband to make small base stations. I forgot what they called, you know, like a base station at home that they can share with all the neighborhood to make the, to provide pretty much like a free Wi-Fi that kind of like, but using white spaces. But now what you're just saying, it makes me think that in theory, like the Teslas or another car brand could suddenly help identify this 5G bandwidth in the, maybe help in the cities, but especially help outside the cities, right? To just and share it with all the people around the car. So hundreds of meters around the car, they could connect on the car and it goes through some kind of roaming and stuff like that, right? And so I mean, I mean, this could, this could be any car manufacturer, it could be a telecom company. That's crazy. Yeah, but I think it's possible and it's a very interesting use case. I mean, for all the cars that are driving around. And so, so, so. Especially when we're talking about like electric vehicles, they always have some sort of power there. So that's also a big plus. And they can, I mean, they can also use part of the power to be a small base station. So why not? That's all. That's so awesome because they all are going to come. These self-driving kind of like Ubers, right? That goes around and picks people up self-driving. And in theory, they could also self-drive themselves where they need for more bandwidth. Well, that would be, that would be good. I mean, I think once you have, once you have like a soccer game or whatever, you have a baseball game. The Giants are playing, driving. There'll be a hundred Tesla's around just for base station. Yeah, but I mean, people, people, I mean, people, people drive there to the stadium and you can, they can use their cars to connect, basically. But then, of course, I mean, then, of course, there are some sort of limitations from the satellites. I mean, there's not so many satellites up there. Yeah. But as far as I understand, the satellite better works better outside cities, right? It works better when it's not to densify the populations of villages and stuff. So the dense stuff might be not the perfect use case. But but again, camping in a remote area, this might be the ideal use case to act as a base station there. So that's all possible, like mobile base stations. So why not? So it could take like a, if it's a dense area, we do the line of sight kind of thing and then create a lower power, smaller base station to not to, to, to provide just the people a few hundred meters around. Okay, this is a lot of talk.  So I think that's also foreseeable than using a card and or any other, any other platform. I mean, nice, using, using a boat, for example, is very similar use case, right? There's a question. I don't know if it was already mentioned. What is a bandwidth on focus beam antennas? What can you say about bandwidth? Are we going to be able to do gigabit per seconds? Oh, that depends as a, as a, as a, as I said, as a, it's a very, very good, very good question. There's the bandwidth is given, basically, one bandwidth is given by, by the satellite, right? So a typical satellite goes 10 gigabit per second. Some more. And then you have the bandwidth limitations of your antenna. That depends, as I said, if you had a very small antenna, you have a rather smaller bandwidth or you have a large antenna, you can, you can have a much, much higher bandwidth.  Yeah, because I think the starlink is 50 gigabit per second. But I think you can, you can do that. You can do that also then on the antenna, but it really depends on the antenna size and which constellations you're using. If you're using a geo, geo, geo, and so on. So it's not the easiest question to answer, but we think we've seen, we've seen with the data of the, of the, of the current starlink that you can easily go 50 megabit or 100 megabit per second. Yeah, they're, they're, they're kind of like they're Elon Musk, he tweets about it and stuff. And they, they kind of say, supposed to go to gigabit, maybe even 10 gigabit, that's what they're talking about. But when you're saying 10 gigabit per satellite, seems limited. That seems a little bit limited. They don't have more than that per satellite. They cannot do hundreds of gigabit per satellite. No, no, I think it depends on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, which level of technology that the satellites are and also probably also on, on your plan, you're having the starlink. So I think for commercial use cases, for example, when you want to link up with like a cruise ship, for example, I need, you need, you need a very high bandwidth. You have a thousand people on the cruise ship, probably 10% are always online. So, so you need a very high bandwidth. And so you can probably have a dedicated satellite just connect to that, to that cruise ship, for example. So I think these are, these are the use cases there. And then also on the antenna side, I mean, you will have larger dishes or larger flat panel antennas that can connect to, to the satellite. So it's very, very much a system view basically. You have to look at. So there's one project I'd like to, to, to envision, to see if it would be possible to do a very affordable antenna that connects to the satellite, but that doesn't need to have a stable connection that keeps sending data. It just needs to send a little bit of like some logs once in a while, kind of, and it doesn't have to be at a specific time. You know, like, so is it, you could, I guess it's possible to envision a very small one that just is, you know, like just for not so much data and goes to the satellite anyway, and it will be out in the sea. It will be totally out in the sea and just sending a little bit of data from a small antenna. I mean, there are projects out there, especially for remote sensing. And we've seen a lot of requests where you have boys in, in, in, in the ocean for tsunami warnings for a small weather stations and so on. You have them on volcanoes and so on. And the only way is to connect them to via satellite. And this is basically this category IoT in the net of things. And so these are very small antennas, like 10 by 20 centimeters or even smaller. And they can send, they have a rather small bandwidth, but they can send real time data always to the satellite. And this is extremely important for, for, for, for ocean monitoring and so on. I mean, there's so many things you can monitor. And so there's a lot of use cases out there. Our partners also looking at it, so. Because what I'm thinking is, let's say the waves and the storm and stuff and the boat is moving around, I don't think it's important for it to have a constant connection. But as long as it can send some data every 10, 20, 30 minutes or something like that, or every hour, a few hours, it's even okay. So I'm wondering maybe that means that it could be an even smaller and even cheaper antenna, potentially. Yeah, yeah, it depends. I mean, you can, you can go then also to much lower frequencies where you don't need a beamforming antenna. So for that case, but there's a very low bandwidth or like a small bandwidth, I think when you go to 10 gigahertz and so on, you need a kind of this beamforming, beamforming antenna. And as I said, our partners developing IoT antennas that are 10 by 20 centimeters with a very low energy consumption. When you say they're developing, does that mean it's a project that's coming? Or it's not yet already there, right? That's a project that's coming. So I think the prototypes are out there and they're now being tested. And so, so, so it will be available next year. And you're happy to work with every company like in China and everywhere, all these manufacturers, design houses or do you work a lot with mostly European or American? Or how does how do you do the Merck Merck is a global company? I mean, I mean, we work with with every partner that can bring up a viable technology approach, basically that. All right, I think I mean, as you know, I think, I mean, we have a very strong presence in the RC business in Asia because there's all the LCD panels are being produced in Asia. Yeah, China is huge right now with LCDs, right? They invested billions, they invested billions in those fabs. Luckily, with the with the strange time where everybody have to stay at home, people buying TVs like crazy. Yeah, yeah, this is only going to go up, right? The demand and then the big partnerships could be huge right there with these fabs. Yeah, yeah, yeah, so so the demand is the demand is going up right now. It's it's it's extreme crazy times put it this way. And we see a spike of demand because everybody is sitting at home. But that also means there's a lot of capabilities there in manufacturing there. And what is probably most important is there's a lot of like, say older lines that are completely written off, you know, and and that can be used as a starting point to to produce smart antennas, windows and other other other new technologies. So I think that's a big plus. I mean, you know, the display industry, and we're talking of a gen 10 11 lines where substrate is two meter 50 times three. So so this will be probably not the start for production for the smart antennas later on for sure. But in the beginning, we will use utilize smaller lines that are already written off. And so that's a very nice utilization also for for the older lines to start the panel production. This is really awesome. Like the TV business has been providing all the stay at home directives, you know, like people have to stay at home. But you can provide the get out of home future, right?  Yeah, I know. I know that's that's that's that's that's a very, very good picture. That's that's true. That's true. I mean, people just want to get get out of home. But but what we've seen and a lot of people now be observed that they want to work a very nice places. We've seen that here, that people are working in the weekend houses in even in Germany now in some say remote villages, we have really poor connectivity. So so and this is a means to to bring the connectivity also to these rural places and also for the people who want to work in the rural places. Because now what we've seen now here is that a lot of people are moving out of the cities into rural areas, having the home office there. And this antenna technology provides a very good means to to get to stay connected and to be able to to to to work anywhere you want, right? I think this is a trend also for the future of actually now, like people would dream to have better connectivity when they go out in nature with their camping cars, right? Yeah, and they want to have a better connection.  And and there is and also a standard is having a video conference right now. So people are not happy to to talk on the phone just only for business. You want to have a video conference. And so so I think this technology being connected everywhere just opens so many new possibilities to to to to for communication and also for working so you can be out in the nature, do your work and then have your video conferences, using this new connectivity options and and and and and then enjoy the nature, right? And this is coming very, very quickly and very, very fast, right? You at Mark, do you have experience getting technology to the mass market very quickly, right? You if if somebody says thumbs up, we like this, it's just going to happen so quickly.  And and and we also primed our partners in the display industry and they are getting ready too. So so it it basically the whole supply chain is experienced. So, Mark, we are very experienced in in launching that material. The supply chain partners like the display industry is also ready to go. So, yeah, we are basically getting ready. So, right now, the designs are being finalized and and the final testing is ongoing and hopefully then next year, we will get these antennas in in first and larger numbers. Nice, because it's I don't want to keep bringing back to the starting, but I'm I'm so fascinated by the watching all the the rocket launches and they do like every two weeks or something is crazy. And so that is going to get to a thousand then the four thousand and then to twelve thousand and all these satellites are going to be there. It'd be nice if what I'm thinking is India, Africa, all these regions that have bad connectivity, they need to have some way to connect all of them. And maybe, I don't know, it could be Germany, let's say when Germany says they want to help Namibia just as an example, right, they could they could just deploy a thousand base stations to all the villages using the technology and it's like it could change everything for all these billions of people who don't have good internet right now, if they can connect to this and but it needs to be more affordable, hopefully, and you're talking about five hundred dollars, but let's see. Let's see how who can pay for that or something like that. That's that's that's not the limit. I think that the beauty of these Leo constellations is there. I mean, capacity is everywhere, basically. And and and there's there's there's capacity everywhere and you don't want to have this capacity unused. So, I mean, there's always a flying a satellite over over Africa and so on. And as you can see, I mean, it's like I always compare it with like an airplane flying. I mean, you have seats that are very expensive, say, like in the developed world. So there will be different plans. But then you also have seats and the airplane is flying anyway, say, seats that are untaken when the satellites are flying over underdeveloped regions that can be utilized almost for free. And so what the limited factor right now is is really the the affordable antenna satellites up there. But the the the key factor is to have an affordable antenna, most likely in the $200 region. So so I think this is the region. I think everybody says this is the spot where we have connectivity. And if you can have just $200 and plus a little bit more electronics and you have a base station that covers the whole village, that's like totally affordable. That's like one dollar per person in the village. That's that's that's that's affordable. Plus, I mean, you can you can bundle that with any other service and you can bundle it to a small shop and everybody will come to the shop because it's close to the to the wireless connection access point. So so so I think I think there's a big future in that. Also, to connecting the unconnected right now, of course, I mean, the money the money generation will be in the more developed regions where people go out on the camper and so on and on the fifty dollar or hundred dollar per month plan. But there will be also then in areas that are not that affluent where you can have other plans to connect people in this underdeveloped regions. So I see this is a very big opportunity to have everybody connected. So it cost a certain amount of billions for the Starlink company and the other companies to sell all these up. But what I heard, for example, Germany is talking about working with potentially Starlink to connect two hundred thousand people who don't live in very good broadband areas in Germany. What I'd like to see is that countries make a deal with the Starlink and says we pay you X billion and then you give it a cheaper monthly cost to all the people in our country, especially in developed countries. So based on the the GDP per capita, like in all the poor countries, they should pretty much have it for free. I think kind of like, you know, like some some some philanthropic donation or some country should pay for it, of course. But it should be like the people in the country shouldn't have to pay a hundred dollars per month for internet. But then in the rich countries, of course, they can afford it. But, you know, you know what I mean? Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean, that's a it's a it's a it's a very viable question. And we see it also in other cases. Like so I think there will be ways to have a more just distribution of connectivities there. So that's a big opportunity. Yeah, and even in the rich countries like in Germany and the US, there's like pretty much like millions of people that don't even have good broadband. Like today, I had to visit my neighbors to get to get the internet because over there, there's still no internet here in Denmark and the summer house over there. So even though like in double countries, they don't they're not so eager to get the fiber to every home because it costs thousands of euros and stuff to dig the holes. Yeah, especially especially in mountainous areas and Denmark is not mountainous. But Denmark is one of the richest countries in the world. So even there and I've seen when we go for the weekend to that's 50 kilometers south of Darmstadt, connectivity gets really bad. So that's a big opportunity to get everybody connected and also it offers then a new connectivity options like as we discussed, like mobile mobile access points when you integrate this into cars and the other mobile platforms. So I think it got a very big future. But I think what it really needs is affordable antennas. And I think this is I think we're working on that and we want to leverage the infrastructure of the display industry to do that. And we have a very clear pass to do that and and very much experience also in materials and our partners in the display industry to to to get to this goal. You know, but still I mean it's it's it's it's it's a new technology. And and it it a lot of people need to be convinced in the industry. OK, because when I think of LCD it's not as sturdy and reliable. But no, I mean, we've demonstrated this with all the LCD panels. We've we've tested in very rugged environments. It's it's it's a super reliable and and the same is also going to be true for the antennas. So it's a super rugged technology. So I guess you are very busy, but you're going to get so very much very busy in the in the future months and years, I guess, if hopefully this becomes huge. And how do you want to work with like startups or if the startup has some new ideas, what they can do by connecting with you or you more like working with the huge companies to make the LCD and stuff? No, I think I think I think we are it's a it's a very unique. I mean, we we work with startups and the startups do the design of the antenna panels and develop the technology. On the other hand, the startups and we also support that to connect with our state partners and the display partners have the infrastructure to produce that. So that creates a very win-win situation. I mean, the startup typically doesn't have the resources to set up their own production line and so on. And they can use utilize an existing manufacturing infrastructure. That's by the by the display industry and also then can use their experience also to assemble those. So that's that's a very good situation right now to go to the next market. And the the the key word that I keep hearing when I when I see all these people that what's it called a they tear tear down the the antenna of the Starlink. They always talk about the face, the ray technology that was only military in the past, but they are kind of bringing it down to consumers somehow. When you talk about your technology, is it compatible with this whole concept of phased array antenna? Yeah, it's so this face phased array is one way to utilize the the the LC in this approach. And the difference here is that the what's coming from the military or what's people say, phased array is is is an active phased array. You have active chips to produce each each antenna element here. I mean, we have like in in a display a passive is a so-called passive layer that modulates the microwaves and also for each kind of elements that stand the face using a passive phase shifter. So it's a very similar approach. The difference is only it's passive. And so so you have advantages. In one thing is you don't need this number of active chips. So that's a cost efficiency. And also you have some efficiency in energy consumption because you only need like one one element that's getting producing then the the microwaves instead of a lot of small chips. So it's a very similar but different approach. And so it's one way to to to get the cost of the phased phased array technology down. And and also you can you can have any shape you want. It doesn't have to be like a rectangular or square. It could be like round or anything. Yeah. You can you can you can you can you can change change change change phases. I mean, what you can do is you can tile also these elements together. So you can have certain tiles and do that. But you can you can have different different shapes. Also, technically, I mean, we've shown that with this place you can also bend those things. But I think that's that's more in the future to go to go for more bended or conformal types of antennas. Right now the first approach is just a very old school panel like approach, right? And you would just go straight up. Yep. You don't point it to one side of the other or you might right but maybe you just go straight up. You could you could. I mean, the beauty is of having this tile approach. I mean, you can you can you can put several segments of the antenna pointing in different directions. And so by optimizing then the the the reception basically. All right. Thanks a lot. Thanks for I don't want to get into your you probably have next meetings and stuff. Thanks for doing this feature film on my YouTube channel. That's great. More than welcome. And hopefully the people watching are the right people they can they can contact you. Is there a way to contact you through the website or? Website linked in. There's all these channels.  All right. Thank you very much. And thanks for connecting helping connecting the world and connecting us in every corner of the planet. That's fantastic. That's amazing. It must be really fun job also to have right to be a part of the teams that can make this happen. It's wonderful to work at the edge of technology. So that's always exciting. Right. Thanks. Thank you. Thanks a lot. Thanks everybody for watching. Bye bye.


Good afternoon. Welcome to our virtual talk. This is a talk on Kubernetes persistent data challenges, availability zones, regions, and multi-cloud patterns. So, what's the next slide? Quick hello's from us. My name is Chris Milstead. I'm a solution architect on that. So, working with customers around all things data in Kubernetes. And my co-presenter is Patrick McFadden. I work in data stacks. I work in developer relations and developer experience and work in the Apache Cassandra project and a few others, but mostly around open source data and Kubernetes. I'm also writing a book right now on cloud native data on managing cloud native data on Kubernetes available at a bookstore soon, Chris. Very soon. Oh, I've got an order. Don't you worry. Yeah. Well, you can still download it. We'll show the link at the end. Brilliant. And before we get into the bulk of the presentation, just a quick couple of thanks to Alex and Rags. Alex is one of the engineers on the Kate Sandra project and has been invaluable help in setting up a lot of the demos and stuff we're going to show later. And Rags actually built a lot of the multi-cloud crazy demo that we're going to show right at the very end. So, with that, onto the bulk of the presentation, and I believe you're going to lead us off, Patrick. I will. So, Chris, I think everyone's going to ask this question. Why would we even do this? So, I'm going to walk you through some of the reasons that you may want to be outside of one data center, one rack. And this is a pretty typical question because it does add complexity. It's very simple. Let's be very clear. It's very simple to run something. It's running on your laptop. And that's the most simple way to do it. But of course, that's not how we put things into production. So, when we think about production workloads in trying to conceptualize failure, this is why we're using multiple AZs, multiple multi-anything, is things around failures. And then there's more relevant reasons for contemporary reasons, I would say, which I'll get into in a minute. But we'll start with just availability zones. So, availability zones are built by clouds for this problem is to mitigate certain types of failure. So, I have a little chart here that is out there. It's nothing new, but it's about managing your failures. And the service level agreement, the SLAs that clouds give on an individual VM is you get three nines. Okay, that's not bad, but it's not great either. That's still minutes or hours of downtime. With hardware failures, and when we're talking about cloud, usually one piece of hardware could run multiple VMs, multiple images, multiple containers. But you get a five on the end of that. But when we're talking about entire data centers, we're now into four nines. And that's when the multiple availability zones come in, because if you look at a map, if you look at the satellite map in Northern Virginia, you'll see all these really big buildings with no windows. Well, you can see them all lined up in one part near Reston. That's Amazon East. And each one of those buildings is an availability zone. And they could lose power network or anything in one of those. And that's what we're trying to avoid. Now, when you get into multi-region, and like Amazon has regions all over the world, there's, like I said, more contemporary reasons to do this, where you may want to be actually closer to your customers. Speed of light is still a thing. Especially when we're talking about network speeds, because it's not the speed of light. It's much slower, 70% in speed of light. So when you look at distances, like difference between North America and India, that's pretty much halfway around the world, you're looking at hundreds of milliseconds around time. And if your data is in one place and your customers are in another, somebody's going to lose out. And so getting your data closer to customers is the name of the game now. And if you have global customers, you need global data. There's also a lot of regulatory requirements that you have to manage. Every sovereign data protection law has different rules. If you're in Europe, if you're in North America, if you're in Australia, like any of these governments, and they're always changing, by the way, are going to have regulatory requirements on privacy and things like that. You have to manage that. But sometimes when you have customers in those different areas, you need to manage the data that goes there. And then finally, I mean, this is my favorite part, is maximum uptime. I say this, you have 0% chance of 100% uptime if you're only in one region. One region can fail. And if you just do a quick Google on cloud failures, you can see that this happens quite often. And then multi-cloud, and this is getting into where people really get freaked out. But why would you do multi-cloud? And it's a funny thing because sometimes it's something that's done to you, as an SRA or an operator, multi-cloud can come about whenever, for instance, if you have an acquisition and you acquire a company that is in a different cloud provider than you're in, or if you're migrating to a new provider, let's say you're going from Amazon to Google, well, while you're in the middle of that, which is probably going to be three or four years, maybe five, you are now in multi-cloud company. And there's my favorite, which happens all the time, which is there's some rogue unit in your company that's just decided to go use a different cloud. Why? I don't know. No one's ever figured out exactly why, but it happens all the time.  And multi-cloud is, there's other reasons, and I think these are more relevant and contemporary, like I said, that we're at the point now where we're talking about avoiding lock-in, we're talking about spreading your bet, using the cost basis of cloud in a better way. So this is where we're getting into this world of hybrid. And hybrid is like, when we're building out, this is probably where a lot of you are now, where we're trying to save money in the cloud, but we still own a lot of data centers. And when you're migrating from your physical data center that you spent billions of dollars on and you're moving over to the cloud, during that timeframe, again, probably measured in years, you are now in the hybrid zone. And when you're in the hybrid zone, you have a whole different management challenge. So what we're attempting to do, I think at this point is help you manage that and make it less painful. Chris? Brilliant. Yeah. And the other thing I think, just to add to all of these kind of, you know, the things we're using to build these Kubernetes platforms and how we're trying to get this maximum uptime is we're also talking here about data. And why are we saying it's now going to be critical to get your data into the Kubernetes clusters? I'm a big fan of looking back at history. And I'm pretty sure that there's nothing really that new we've come up with in the IT industry over the last 20 years. We probably did it in the last 40 years before. And I think two of those trends are the first one is looking at the data problems. You know, we've moved our compute to the data.  We found out that moving datasets around is just too costly. So interestingly in that sense, we took a compute to the data, but all our compute now is in Kubernetes clusters. So actually, QED, we need to have our data in our Kubernetes clusters. And the other side of it is virtualization. So we still think of like, I'm going to go grab some storage and we still think of like grabbing a disk. If you look at, I think, 15K disks from yesteryear, they're like 200 IOPS that they max out on if it's random. You know, we can take an enterprise-grade SSD NVMe drive and we get a million IOPS out of that without batting an eyelid. And the gentleman who looks after a lot of the Linux kernel components here, he's got a set up with a couple of Optane cards, so two Optane cards, and he can get 10 million IOPS out of two cards. So thinking about what do we do when processors got that much more powerful? We virtualize them. So these two trends about looking at how do we make the best use of our resources? And if we're virtualizing them, how do we then get the spare resources when they're not being used? And how do we go back to those virtualization principles? And the other side of it is how do we actually bring our data into the Kubernetes cluster? So if you look at the next slide as well, the reasons for doing this as well, and there's a community that myself and my companies involved with and Patrick's heavily involved with as well, which is this data on Kubernetes. So we're surveying all the people in there and saying to the people, what are you finding when you put data in Kubernetes? They're finding there's a few things they've got to fix, but actually they're finding that all the benefits they were getting from their applications and the standardization and the CICD and the clicking a button and putting their developers closer to the computer and giving them back control and moving faster, you know, applications to production safely in a day, all those kinds of things we're looking for. Data is actually complimenting that as well. There's a few things to solve, but it's the what we're seeing is what people are looking to do in their Kubernetes platforms now. So watch out for this is the revolution. And I think Patrick, you're going to talk about hybrid licenses next. Yeah, the thing that I feel, and this is a very important part of what, you know, this is part of my book, Chris, so this is a shameless plug, but it's this concept in Kubernetes where we're building out something very revolutionary and evolutionary at the same time, where we went from physical servers to virtual machines to containers. And now we're orchestrating containers with a little bit of magic and creating virtual data centers. This is a logical progression in our virtualization, where instead of owning a data center and managing the power of managing the network, all those things, we are at the point now where we're renting compute network and storage, creating our own virtual data centers for what we need bespoke. And the reason is because we are building applications that have a certain amount of input, and then we require a certain amount of output. And what happens inside that virtual data center, we can be very specific about and we can build the tools that we need instead of just, you know, renting a service or something like that all the time. We're thinking a lot more about what builds our business and being more agile. So just one thing before we go into, you know, the data patterns and look at how we can complement the data in Kubernetes and where some applications have got application level capabilities. We're not saying to change any of the Kubernetes architectural patterns that are already out there. There's a link at the bottom here to the CNCF disaster recovery paper. It's very good. Broadly, it's don't stretch your Kubernetes clusters across regions. Start doing that at the application space, as Patrick said earlier, you know, the speed of light is finite. As soon as you leave an availability zone, if you're building in the cloud, things cost money. And, you know, bandwidth is not infinite and all those other fallacies. So at some point, you know, cap theorem will pick in and your partition or availability or your consistency, one of these things we'll have to give. So what we're saying is this is how to complement with the data layer. But don't think we're saying do anything different at the Kubernetes layer. So we've just been very clear on that before we go any further. So yes, on to the next slide. So now we're going to get to the bulk of the fun, which is the first set pattern. So this is the demo that I've put together. What I'm going to try and do is show the single cluster single az single region. And for that, what I've picked is I'll call it a traditional application. So I'm picking Prometheus. So it would like to have a single data store. And if the pod dies, then it will want to restart want to reconnect to that same data store. On the other side, I've got Cassandra, which is using stateful sets. And it's, you know, we can, Cassandra is a fantastic application. And we can stretch that halfway across the world, as we'll see in the next demo. But in this one, what I'm going to show is how we can allow Cassandra to do all the kind of storage layer intelligence. So the important thing in both in these kind of two demos on the left hand side and the right hand side is how we complement with the CSI. So the container storage interface plugin and the application. So making sure these two things are working in harmony. So there's about an hour and 45 it from cold to cold start to end of this demo. We've cut it down to about eight minutes. So I'm going to try and narrate it as we go along. So Patrick, let's go for it. So first step, we're going to spin up our cluster. I'm using AWS because I can use EKS CTL just to easily spin up my cluster. I'm using I3EN instances. Those are instances with local SSDs. And I'm using that because I want to get, you know, 300,000 IOPS. I want to get the fastest storage I can. And you can hopefully see there, there's some two in each of the 1A, 1B, 1C, those availability zones. So hopefully that aligns with the picture that you saw on the previous page. So if we're going to lens, I'm just using that as my GUI. So you can see what's going on. You can see my cluster and there's no metrics. So that's the important thing on that page that we just went past. I'm using my on that component as my CSI plugin. I'm using that because it can run against local SSDs and will allow me to do intelligent things like storage replication, encryption, topology awareness. And I can also do things like fencing for faster failovers.  So I've installed the storage OS is the underlying technology name on that product onto the platform. And you'll see that that component is coming up there. So when it installs by default, we'll get a storage class created, which is just give me, I'll call it dumb storage, but just give me straight, here's a bit of storage from an NVMe drive. I also created in there a more intelligent storage class where I'm asking the storage layer to do replication. And I've sold it to also encrypt it. So we can do per volume encryption. I've also asked it to replicate it between the three AZs. And that's the one I'm going to use for Prometheus, the more intelligent one because Prometheus doesn't have the smarts to replicate the data. But for Cassandra, I'm going to do that. So we're now into installing the actual workloads. So certificate manager has been going on in the background there. And then I'm using customize here to actually build and deploy the Kate Sandra operator. So so far, we've had a Qubes ETL plugin. We've had customize and we've had Qubes, just a box and Qubes ETL apply. So we've had three different ways to install it. So now we're going to try and put Prometheus onto the box. So we'll go for the fourth way of installing things. So we use the community helm charts. So we're going to put Prometheus onto my cluster now as well. So what we're going to get to is the point where we have that kind of traditional workload. And we should start to see metrics in our cluster. And we're also should have our in a second, we're actually going to spin up our actual Kate Sandra. Sorry, Cassandra cluster using the Kate Sandra operator. So let's just go and apply that. So there should be a custom resource of... Oh, I'm going too quick. There we go. But hopefully the important thing in there was there's one A, one B, one C. So I told Cassandra, the Kate Sandra operator to deploy a Cassandra cluster. And there should be a stateful set in rack one, rack two, rack three. And those are pinned to the one A, one B, one C availability zones. So hopefully in the bottom right, you can see there's that little one A, one B, one C. So I also do a little trick here. I'm going to actually label them on the on that layer to do fencing. So what we can do is we can do fast to failover. So if a node times out rather than waiting the five minutes for a Kubernetes node timeouts to expire, the platform can actually monitor it and kill the pod and actually start a faster failover if you wanted to do that. So just a little trick to speed up the stuff. The other thing here, I'm now running a job. So I'm running no SQL bench. So I'm running workload now and it's running live against this Cassandra cluster. I've now got running on these components. And you see the top right there? We've got metrics. So Prometheus is running. We've got metric storage for Prometheus. Cassandra is running. You can see my no SQL bench that'll be ticked along. We'll keep going back to the no SQL bench. And what you should see is we get up to about 60% through my workload. It's not running a hard benchmark, but it's just running background loads. And now we're going to do something nasty. We're going to coordinate and drain a node. So I think this is the one in one C. I can't remember exactly, but it's one of the availability zones. And I picked a node because it's running both one of the Cassandra pods and it's running my Prometheus server. Are you sure you want to drain the node? Yes, of course I am.  So Kubernetes has been Kubernetes. Yeah, exactly. Kubernetes has been Kubernetes. Does its happy thing goes, oh, I've evicted my pods. I better go and talk to my scheduler and go and see where to put them. So the Prometheus server is coming up there. And if we go and look at the Cassandra, so here we go, you see my rack to instance is very orange there and very pending. It's not very happy. So let's check my no SQL bench benchmark is still running through. So even though Cassandra has lost a node, it's not using any smarts at the CSI plugin. It's just using raw swell. It's using the CSI plugin to do smart things to be able to automate access to the NVMe drives, but it's not doing any replication at that layer. It's doing that all in the Cassandra layer. It's still running. So happy days. But my Prometheus workload, we killed it on a node. It was using a local SSD, but luckily I've got replication at the storage layer. So even though that workload has moved to another node, another local NVMe drive, if we have a look in a set, we should see if we go into one of these, we've still got metrics and we've got all the historical metrics as well. You can go back and look at the timestamps and you'll see that that's running all the way through. So we'll bring that node back into the cluster as well. And now, of course, because I'm evil, we're going to go for the big test, which is rather than turn things off nicely. Let's just check our no SQL bench. Yeah, still got workload going through our Cassandra cluster. Brilliant. Things are still ticking along. We're going to pull the plug out the server. So I'm going to go into my AWS console and I'm going to terminate my instance. And of course it's going to say to me, are you sure because you're using very fast local NVMe 300,000 devices, but if you kill them, you lose them. And I'm like, yeah, don't worry. We've got that covered. We're using a different plug-in. It's fine. So we kill it. And you notice I've lost one of my other Cassandra nodes now, but my no SQL bench is still plugging away. So brilliant. I'm still got workload. We're up to about 40% of that run, 44% of that run at the moment. So it's still running along through now. What actually happened here, it couldn't recover to the second node in that availability zone, because the Stargate pod was running. And I discovered later on, in the Cassandra operator, there's actually a flag you have to set if you want to allow Stargate and Cassandra to actually coexist on a node. So what actually happened here was Kubernetes did its stuff. So if you go in and look at the Kubernetes cluster in the EKS, you'll see we get it's initializing here. So it's actually building a seventh node to replace the sixth one that I nicely killed. So taints as it comes up. And then as it comes up, notice on the right hand side, the metrics, there is a small gap in the metrics here because we killed that node. We killed that stateful set by pulling the power out. But there we go. There's another storage OS demon set. So we brought storage, the demon sets running on there so we can access the storage over the network now. And there we go. Cassandra cluster is back to full health. We've got three stateful sets in three AZs and I know SQL Bench is running along. So there we go. Hopefully that everyone followed that as I said is about an hour 45 end to end in real time. We've compressed it to eight minutes. And if we go on to the next slide, you know, this is the big takeaways for me from this. Follow the Kubernetes design principles. We're not trying to do clever things by stretching Kubernetes clusters. We are doing clever things with the CSI plugins. I'm trying to get the fastest storage at the most cost effective point I can. And I'm trying to make sure that that CSI plugin is doing the right things for the right workload. So for a workload previous I'm doing storage level replication, storage level encryption, storage level topology awareness, all of those components in there. But for Cassandra, I'm just saying, hey, I will automate you access to these NVMe drives so you can have as many IOPS as you want to do your back end storage. And what we're trying to say is, as we said, you know, you can get to know to low downtime using a single region by taking this approach, even using because this approach as well because we're using local NVMe drives, this will map to, you know, your EKS anywhere or your on-premise, anything like that. Hopefully you can see as well, you know, there's nothing special about running this in the cloud. We're using local NVMe. So you could take this and run this in your data center today as well. And I believe that's the end of the first kind of set of patterns. And I'm going to hand back to Patrick now to take us into the multi region, multi region, multi provider ones now. Yeah, the multi, multi, multi, the multiverse, the multiverse of madness. Speaking of shameless plugs. So this is a, this is another pattern and it exploits the goodness of Cassandra. So this is again, using Kate Sandra, which is a project to help this built for running Cassandra and Kubernetes without pain, batteries included. And so there's some really cool things that Kate Sandra can do, especially with the latest operator about running a multi cluster, multi Kubernetes cluster. So if you have multiple Kubernetes clusters across regions or different clouds, it doesn't really matter. Thankfully, Rags is really the expert in this. And he recorded a quick video about how to do this. I'm going to just let him walk through it. And then at the end, I'll just go through some lessons learned there and some takeaways. This is a demo about Cassandra on multiple clusters. So the first thing you're probably going to want to do is set up the networking, the routing peering and all that. I myself am not a networking geek. So what I do is I have used a product called Aviatrix. And using Aviatrix, you can set up, you know, the VPCs, the routing and the peering fairly easily. So essentially, this is the Aviatrix controller. And it's running, you know, on the cloud somewhere, right? And as you can see here, I've set it up in such a way that, you know, AKS, which is the Azure Humanities Service is running on 10.2 and 10.2.0 and 10.2.128 and so on.  And on GKE, it's 10.3. And we can take a really brief look at the telephone scripts. It's essentially on this, you know, particular GitHub, Rags and S, AVX, multi-cloud Kubernetes, and I basically forked it from, from Aviatrix. And essentially, what you can do here is you can specify the different cloud accounts. And once you've onboarded these accounts, which I haven't talked about, you set up the controller IP, the username and the password.  Let's go into Lens, okay? And look at these different clusters. As you can see here, I have a bunch of different clusters, but I've added them to the hardbar here, the AKS, AVX cluster, the EKS, AVX cluster, and the GKE, AVX cluster. Okay, so these are the three ones. So now that we've seen this, the next step, you know, once I have the set up the clusters and on the three public clouds, they used to be a manual step if you wanted to do a multi-cluster, in which you had to manually inject the seeds from one cluster into another. You don't have to do that anymore. Instead, what you do is you have the concept of what is referred to as a control plane, and then you have the concept of a data plane. You know, very similar to, you know, what the Kubernetes services provide, the control planes essentially take care of installing Cassandra on a Kubernetes multi-cluster, multi-region, multi-cloud again, doesn't matter, and the control plane kind of handles that for you. So what I did to install the control plane is pretty straightforward. You know, basically what I did was I installed the Kitsander operator, okay, and then, you know, essentially there's the concept of the control plane, and you said that to True. So if you look at, you know, the different clusters, you will see that one of them, the AKS is set up as a control plane, and you know, the remaining two, which is GKE, and EKS are set up as data planes. So as you can see here, this is GKE cluster, right, and you can see here that it has the Kitsander operator, right, and if you dig through this, you know, Kitsander operator, you'll be able to see that this is operating as a data plane, and, you know, AKS is the control plane. So that's kind of how I set that up. So to install the Kitsander operator on the control plane, what you do is you essentially, you know, set the control plane as equal to True for the control plane, but for the data planes, what you're going to do is you're going to set the control plane as equal to 4. Next part is to be able to install the client configurations into the control plane cluster. So you take the GKE client config and install it in AKS, and likewise, you know, take what is an EKS and, you know, let the control plane on the AKS know that, you know, EKS is, you know, is part of it. And look at client config, you can see that, you know, these two clusters have been set up, which is the EKS cluster and the GKE cluster on AKS. To install the cluster, you know, what I do is I, and we can take a quick look at this, essentially, this is the, we are installing a Kitsander cluster. You can specify some default values for the storage class, but as you know, you know, the storage class is going to vary in the different clouds. So for GKE, I'm using premium RWO for EKS, I'm using GP2, and then I'm going to set Stargate, which is our unified APIs for REST SQL, GRPC, and, you know, GraphQL and so on. Now that we've done that, let's go take a look at one of the clusters, like let's take a look at GKE. Let me take a look at the parts that are running, and most critically, the Kitsander data center itself. So this is the GKE cluster. And, you know, if I go back and look at the EKS, you'll find something similar as wow. So if you look at the Kitsander data center, this is an EKS. And essentially what happens is when you install Kitsander operator with the control planes and the data planes appropriately, they will set up protocol called gossip protocol. So you need to be able to enable those ports to be able to talk to each other. And, you know, once they're able to talk to each other, they can form a multi-task. And one of the critical things that you do is basically make sure that it's one giant, you know, humongous cluster. Basically it's like a node tool command. So what you're going to do here is you exec the pod that is running the data center, right? And then you specify the, obviously the namespace. And then you specify the username and the password.  And essentially coming back saying that, you know, it is a multi-data center on EKS and GKE. So essentially what I showed here is how do you set up a multi cluster with Kitsander is pretty straightforward. Because once you enable networking, Kitsander is able to talk to, you know, to the other data center or the other node and automatically join up the cluster. So that was a really quick and interesting demo about how we can rent a multi-cloud. And there were some really important takeaways inside of that. And the first one really, and Rags was very clear about how he did it, is getting the network right. When you're transiting from one region or from one cloud to another, that's not just a click of a button. And so we're not going to try to sugarcoat that. And getting the network right means that you need to have your routes, you need to have your security and everything else right. It's not impossible. We've done worse things. Those of you who've ever done BGP and Cisco networking know that this is probably going to be way easier than that. But it is the most important thing in this case. And keep in mind, your charges, because when you do transit, that's when the charges for clouds get really up there. The next thing is about the, if you'll notice in the demo, he did this cross-credentials where like Google needed Azure's credentials from the cluster, from one cluster to the other. That's just a really important thing to take note of because when you're spanning one Kubernetes cluster to another, they need to be cool with each other. And the way we do that is with credentials. And then finally, with the Kate Sandra operator, we do have this difference between a control plane and a data plane. And that's an important call out because it's not just one full thing. You have to think about what we're trying to do is running across multiple Kubernetes clusters. We're against what Kubernetes really wants to do. It's like, I want to run it all. Well, you have to share. You have to share it out. So the Kate Sandra operator does the important work for making sure that Kate Sandra works across multiple clouds. And Chris, you got the next one. Yeah, so I think just a summary of it all. So hopefully, you've seen how you can put data into your Kubernetes clusters safely and how you can take these patterns and how you can build applications with no low downtime and how to use the right, I mean, this is the big thing. The big chunk in the middle here is complement your CSI provider with your application. There's got to be that contract between kind of the infrastructure kind of operations of Kubernetes and the applications consuming it. So they've got to know how to design their application. You don't want them to have like nine times replication where you've got three-way replication in the application and three-way replication at the storage layer. The thing in there as well, protect yourself. Don't let yourself get a denial of service. Think about your usual Kubernetes kind of resource quotas and limit ranges and all those kind of things. Use a CSI plug-in. And lastly, the thing, as Patrick said before, is that you can do this and you will be swapping kind of complexity into the network and security layers by doing this stuff. And always remember about what your costs will be as soon as you exit anything. Ingress and egress costs are going to be the things that will start costing you money when you start running this in anger across large distances spans. Yeah, and that's a really important point. Neither of us are here saying this is a click a button easy. And it's because the clouds don't get along with each other. That's okay. But it should be something that we're all used to as engineers and operators. There are the hard parts. That's why we still get paid money. If it was a click of a button, then developers are doing this all day, right? Indeed. And I think, in summary, we're saying data and Kubernetes, if you're going to be successful in Kubernetes, you've got to get your data into Kubernetes. So I'm expecting over the next year, 12, 24 months, every person's going to be having this as their next leg of their Kubernetes strategy. So hopefully there's some good questions for us after this. And please hit us up on the Q&A tool. And some links in here as well. All right. I just thank you everyone for listening and hope it's been useful. We've had a lot of fun putting this stuff together. So thank you. Thanks, everyone. Yes.


What an opportunity for Bradford City here tonight. A point will guarantee them a place in the lead to playoffs, but a victory will keep them in the hunt for automatic promotion going into the final day. The reason they still have hopes of going straight up into League 1, their dramatic late victory at Northampton on Saturday, preventing the Coppers from sealing their place in the third tier. Can crew prevent that from happening here tonight, where they are in fine form for successive wins at home? So our crew in the mood to put a spanner in the works of Bradford's promotion push here this evening. No pressure upon them, they can play with freedom. And on the front foot here, a jike who's had a fine season into the penalty area. He goes and he's taught crew into the lead. Well, how about this? This 15th goal of the season. And it's a nightmare start for Bradford City on this big, big night. Bull just pushed down the line and a jike got the better of Sam Stubbs. It's not good defending the angle tight, but he clipped it over Harry Lewis. And crew Alexandra have got themselves into the lead. 16 minutes played. Crew lead by 1 goal to 0. Just won defeat in their last 14 lead games form our Q-side. They've been good away on the road this season. 11 wins. Every time they've managed that many in their history, they've gone on to win a promotion. They've got a big job to do here tonight if they're to pick up their 12th. And he wins the free kick. It's a big opportunity. He was the hero at the weekend. Momeny Critschlow, and he really should have levelled things up there. Didn't get a clean connection. And it's cleared away by a rid. Breaks in midfield. Here's Banks. Still Banks going for goal, and it's just pushed away. They scored a couple of splendid goals in recent weeks. The reason why he had the confidence to take this on here, it bounced awkwardly in front of Tom Booth, who just did enough to tip it out of harm's way. A couple of minutes to go. Until half time, bit of space in midfield, and the ball's threaded into the path of Chris Long. Can he pick someone out? He can! A joy is there! His second of the night. And it's all going wrong for Bradford City. Just a little bit too much room when possession was picked up by Finnegan. He found Chris Long, and he provided the cross from which Ajay was able to tuck away. Critschlow perhaps didn't quite realise just where Ajay was. And Krunali by two goals to nil. Any one of us can feel low. Our thoughts can get us down. We can also feel worried about family and friends. But you don't need to struggle on your own. A helping hand is at the end of the phone or keyboard every day of the year. Call Guideline on their free phone number today.  Bradford need a fast start to this second period if they are to get something from this game here this evening. Turn inside, spin behind for a corner and those Bradford supporters have the belief that this side can still get something here tonight. And comes the corner and they've got a goal back! Guess who? Andy Cook yet again. It is the perfect start to the second half. His 28th league goal of the season and it comes at the most opportune time. Nothing that Booth could do and Bradford are right back in this game. Just the point for Bradford tonight would secure their place in the playoffs. They came here hoping for more. They perhaps would settle for the one right now. Long, long way to go in this game. Smallwood with the free kick. Booth has come a long way. He's got nowhere near it and Bradford have drawn level. Tucked away by Jamie Walker. Two goals in the opening. Nine minutes of the second half and there is no reason now why Bradford can't go on to win this game. Just watched Tom Booth here. He made his mind up early. He got nowhere near it and it broke to Jamie Walker who swept it home. Now quickly things have changed here. As it stands, Bradford will be in the playoffs. Can Krupp cause them some problems before this night comes to an end. Ajay, he's on a hat-trick now of course. It's still Ajay looking for the far corner and he wasn't too far away. The gap just opened up for him. Two Bradford defenders for company here but he just weaved his way back around the outside and he wasn't too far away. Krupp been very good here in recent times as I mentioned four successive wins at home. A thrilling late-combat victory over Swindon at the weekend and they're looking to get back in front here. Stinging effort from Chris Long and it was just inches away. Harry Lewis was worried here as he leapt to his left. Some goal that would have been Bradford find a winning goal here. He goes on to get into the penalty area. It's still Ossetabi takes the deflection. Hearted appeals I think in there for a handball as well. Then goes on delivery towards the back post. There might still be something doing here. It's Krupp towards goal pushed away by Booth. The effort comes in on the follow-up and then it's dragged wide. Bradford wants a corner. They're not going to get one. Searching for this winning goal to keep them in the hunt for automatic promotion. They're into the second minute of ten that are added on, largely owing to those crowd issues that we saw after the Bradford equaliser. There is still a long way to go in this game. RQ's side find themselves a winner. They're on the back foot here. They're in real trouble as well but it's put wide. Huge chance to win the game for Baker Richardson and only he will know how he didn't hit the target. Booth just lumped forwards. It was a lout about bad defending again. Critchlow all over the place but it's a reprieve from Baker Richardson who really should have made it 3-2. We are deep into time added on. Missed by Smallwood. Booth just flicked forwards and Bradford are looking stretched once again. Calla Mainley clips in the cross, it's flicked away. Now a chance. Oh it must be a penalty but the ball's in the net but the whistle had already gone. Well Crue thought they'd won it but the referee had already pointed to the spot. That's fortune favourite Bradford here. He just clipped into the box and then a move, took a touch inside and Smallwood, well he was off balance. It was a desperate challenge. Look at that, fired in but it won't stand. Hugely controversial moment here at the end of this game. It all comes down to Chris. Longy rifles it home win this game here tonight and it will go down to the final day for Bradford fans on the pitch. We don't want to see that but in the 11th minute of stoppage time Crue have surely won this game. He put everything behind it and it's a bitter blow to Bradford's promotion hoax. It looks very much now as if they've left it to the lottery of the playoffs work to do on the final day for them. One last chance perhaps. Forward by Smallwood. Here's Crue, he can't bring it under control. Crue in possession there is the full-time whistle. It is a huge opportunity miss by Bradford City who brought back into this game at the start of the second half. What's Chris Long doing here? He's gone straight over. It seems to antagonise Mark Hughes. That is not a good battle to pick. And it's all spilling over here at the end of this thrilling game. Chris Long the match winner but now he's letting himself down. He's being pulled away. He's got a smile on his face. He's the match winner here tonight. It's all a bit unseemly and all a bit unnecessary. Well, Crue, not a great deal to play for here this evening but it's five successive home wins for them but Bradford now have work to do when they host late and Oriented home at the weekend. Final score, Crue Alexandra 3. Bradford City 2.