Good morning. No energy today. Good morning everyone. Okay, how is it going? I think we are having a lot of technical sessions and in pipeline also there are a few more that you can enjoy. Okay, now coming to my session I'm going to talk about like this subject says how you can enhance your Node.js application with using Kubernetes and CI CD. So I'm not going to you know going a theoretical context. I will share a case study with you. So what was the situation with the customer and what's the problem statement was that and what's the basic requirement for the customer side and how we overcome that and what were the challenges that we faced during that. Okay, okay. So the case study that I'm going to share with you today is we had a customer. We had a customer who was in sector of providing website services for the conferences. So they were a big organizer for the conferences related to the medical sector. Again, they were worldwide and on an average they were they were handling 100 conferences per year. So in initial phase it's the big number and when they were targeting a bit more and they were growing at large scale. So the issue that they were facing because each and every conference is that they were going to host. So all the you know the person or the unit for which they are going to organize the conference. So they had a specific set of requirement like they want to say okay the conference that you are going to organize for us. This specific website should be designed for us. So all the core feature will be same but you I need to get change or someone will say okay payment gateway need to get change and or some other one will say okay we need to have this specific functionality to be part of your website. So when you are going to organize our event. So there were a lot of you know changes that were coming at all bases that they had to handle. So at high level the issue was they were growing at large scale. Another they need to be agile for for the core change and the request that is coming from the customer side. And they had a team of 12 developer who used to handle all the stuff for them. So all the stuff I mean to say they they were responsible for the development. They were responsible for the testing and they were responsible for the all the managing the operational stuff when your code is in the production environment. So they were having high customer demands in which you know because the requirement get change at all bases. So they all the changes they had to do in code in their code that had to be reliable. It's not like they are making some change and their production environment got break. Coming back to the actual requirement. So they were hoping that whenever they are going to host any conference all the requirement all the feature that specific customer is looking for that need to be hosted on a separate and then so they will they will be having all the features request. To be hosted in a as a separate entity so that there is clear segregation between all the customers and another requirement they were having for example if I need to host a new customer today it should be quite easy to do. So there should be less time to onboard any new customer for them. And apart from this overall time that need to you know need to take in consideration when you are having any code change in between for any set of requirement. So that should be hosted quite frequently. So they should it should automatically do all the testing stuff finally deployment and do monitoring. So that should be end to end automated. Apart from this if there is any kind of issue in the production environment my system should be capable enough to get it rolled back as quickly as possible with the desired state that I say OK just roll back to this specific version of my code. And apart from this they need to have a system through which they can monitor health of they're all the tendons that they are having. So in the sense it should be end to end like how my testing is done. What were the phases of the testing. How many in between environment that I had deployed this code. What was the state of that. And finally in production how my code is performing and how it's a performance in the sense your CPU memory and apart from this if there is specifically logging requirement it should be capable to handle all this stuff. So they need to have visibility around that. And apart from this as we talk about they need to they wanted to have less overhead in terms of time and complexity to deploy any tenant. And apart from this they because they were thinking of you know micro service been moving from monolith architecture to micro service based architecture. So what they were hoping if they can containerize their application and host it. So they wanted to have some services around the docker container strategy. And also as you can see all the portfolio that they are having it was related to the open source like docker they had they had they want to use the GitHub. And also they were going for the MongoDB. So they want to leverage all these existing services and they wanted to have management tool for their deployment like if they can leverage CI CD. So this was their desired state. So when we talked to customer they were saying okay although we need to grow our business as soon as possible but all the basic requirement that we are using existing tool all the open source we need to keep these as well as let's make something which is scalable enough and which is you know fully automated and how fast we can you know grow our application in customer base. So that was as a you know brief of the requirement. So then we talked to customer. So again it's a business that we are not going to change because business need to grow. If business need to grow we can't change you know anything around business. So one thing that we could change is around the code. So all the engineering practices that we were doing around our code. So we had our Node.js application and we had our repo for Git and we had you know our back end as MongoDB. So what we could do around all these services so that it is you know we can implement all the automation so that we can deploy it as fast as possible and with less error rate. So what we did so we explore that it is two segment. One is we are having our developer team. Another is we are having operations team. So these were two core pillar of overall architecture and overall the people management team of the customer site. So we identify if we need to do some automation around the development work and what if we need to do some motivation around the operations work. So we come up with this DevOps automation that we need to do. So if I talk about developers so it was like first so planning will be done with your whatever tool they were using. Another is how they can work around the code. Ad customer has already suggested that they are going to use GitHub for that. So they are going to have GitHub as an repo for them and they are going to commit all the code there with different branches based on the feature based on the customer requirement and segregation based on the customer or you can say tendent that they had. So once they are done with the code so they need to move this code to the build phase. So for building they were using Maven. So we draw this architecture and identify which are the technology which is currently in the market and which is mostly used and which is already existing in the customer environment. Whether we can leverage the same or we can we need to have something more around it. So at high level we identify for code we already have a gate and for build we have Maven and for testing they are using a specific format and for DevOps side we also had like for deployment they said we need to have Docker. But now they had you know identify we need to do some CICD automation and they want to use Docker. But how they are going to leverage all the Docker related benefit. Then we work with them whether they are open for any open source or they want to again go for the property. Then they said okay we want to explore the open source. And the best open source technology that we found for managing their you know Docker container services that was the Kubernetes. And when we designed identify all the tools and technology for the customer then we say okay for Kubernetes specific we are done with our coding part how we are going to handle our code testing and deployment with CICD. Now how we are going to manage their Docker. So we come up with a Kubernetes CICD. So in Kubernetes CICD we identify few segments that we had to you know work on. So like if so sometime one happened one what happens when you have you know start selling of your tickets your peak or your memory or CPU utilization will be at at higher end. So your application should be auto scalable enough right. So and sometime when all the selling is done it should be auto sync so that there is no additional overhead in terms of cost to the customer. So this was the core feature that my application should be auto scalable enough and then squeeze as required. So that there is no additional cost. Another is what if one of my application instance goes down. Is it capable enough to boot it up again. So this was another feature that we were exploring how we can do this with the Kubernetes. Another main was can we you know have our overall infrastructure as a code. So that in future if I need to add one more node to you know balance the load. Can I do this dynamically or with the coding part because if I can write the code I can automate it right. So those are the key highlighted which we identified to have any Kubernetes CICD pipeline. These are the core feature that we had to do. Then finally we came up with this particular architecture. So one is how our developer is going to operate and then how we are going to deliver the solution and then how we are going to operate it. So at high level what we did. So we had the Git as source code repository. We leverage Azure DevOps for that. So you can use like Jenkins or another solution that whatever your choice. So we did automation around it. So once your code is getting committed to GitHub my DevOps pipeline should automatically identify okay my new code has been committed and based on the configuration it should identify this code is related to which particular customer and it should build all the infrastructure based on that. So it should automatically build my infrastructure as a code and after I have my code ready it should package it in Docker and then host it on Kubernetes environment. And finally let's move it to production. And for infrastructure as a code automation initially we started with the ARM template because we were using most of the services on Azure like Docker, Kubernetes. Later on because you know customer need to be portable enough so that if currently they are using Azure tomorrow they can move to any other infrastructure like any other cloud player right. So we build their infrastructure as a code on Terraform so that it's quite easy to port from one cloud provider to another cloud provider. And for finally observability and clarity on the what's happening behind the screen what's the performance we use as your monitor for that and we had provided a plugin so that in future they want to you know switch to any other monitoring tool or they want to have L cost some other stack or within Kubernetes if they want to go for you know Prometheus, Gryphana they can easily switch for that. So that is high-level architecture that we defined for them and finally let me show you a quick demo or the pipelines that we designed for them. So this is my content is integration pipeline in which you can see we have multiple steps first it is going to prepare the job and then Helm is a package that is used in the Kubernetes to do automatic you know resource provisioning and all within Kubernetes. So we did this and then we check out the code and we created a Kubernetes as your container registry we build the Docker image we push the Docker image. So all these steps that is required to host any image on cloud we did in continuous integration part as of CI pipeline. So once I have my CI pipeline in CI pipeline I was able to push code build the image and final Docker image was in my as your container registry. So as an output I have a Docker image now as a next step I need to host this Docker image to Kubernetes cluster. So for that we had Kubernetes deployment pipeline. So I'll show you this is again my build pipeline. So this is you know at high level how it was happening behind the screen. So my CI pipeline actually create a VM that I have specified it need to be on Ubuntu. On Ubuntu it will first build or install all the required packages. For example if I need to create a Kubernetes cluster with Azure CLI it will install the Azure CLI and then I say okay you need to run kubectl command for Kubernetes. So all the processing will be happening on this particular Ubuntu machine and on then you can see it was installing the Helm package and copying the ARM. ARM template as your template that was replaced by the Terraform later on. So after we done with CI pipeline then we proceed with the CD how we can have continuous delivery around that. So this was my continuous delivery pipeline. So in which you can say for a testing we hosted our application only on the development environment and these were the high level steps. So for that what we did we had our application code as a container image as a Docker image and then we had our infrastructure code. So that is infrastructure as a code. So that was like as a first step for which I had to create a Kubernetes cluster. So that's the one step. So once I have set up my Kubernetes cluster now I need to extract the resource information like which image I need to host on my Kubernetes cluster. What's the parameter to scale it up scale it down or blue green green kind of deployment. Blue green deployment is like so when you are going to release a new patch first apply it only for the 25 percent of the load. So if it is successful on 25 percent of load then let it roll out for the 100 percent load so that there is no failure. Okay so that we did and after this we installed all the helm package and upgraded it. So that was our continuous deployment pipeline. So there you can see so all the best script that we had for authentication like it should be in secure environment we had service principle for that. On these scripts we provided okay it's not like open anyone anyone can run it they need to have a service principle so that they have proper authentication authorization for that. So we provided all the information in the inline script that you could found. So once we are done with this service principle stuff then on later on we applied all the changes and in inline configuration that you can see this Kubernetes tiller environment setup we had actual YML files. So in Kubernetes we have YML files through which we deploy our application and we deploy services according to that. So we configure all the things in the inline configuration. So once we're done with the inline configuration our next step was to get it run on and if required we could also have test cases that we wrote and now I'll show you the repository so this is all about CICD pipeline. So this is my repository. In there you can see at high level we had application and we have ARM template. ARM template is your infrastructure as a code and application is your actual source code. In this you can see there there is a docker file. In docker file I was creating my docker image for my Node.js application and I was saying this need to get exposed on 8080 and how to get it started with NPM start. So this was initial stage I told earlier when we move further we made a lot of changes in this code. So the final changes that we hosted was like this. So there you can see we have as your pipeline.tml. So what we did instead of keeping everything hard coded in the CICD pipeline so in future if you need to add another step in your CI pipeline or CD pipeline what you could do. So we created this this ml file and submitted this ml file in our Github repo only. So now my CI CD pipeline will pick this ml. So instead of running the same same CI pipeline CD pipeline again and again it will first check this. So do we have any change in our CI CD pipeline? If yes it will pick it from there and then run it. So that we did apart from this we created our AKS cluster with the Terraform. So this is the sample Terraform. So through which we created all the required resources that was part of the project. And again this is part of Github. So what was happening if there is any change in the resources also based on the Git commit my CI CD pipeline my Kubernetes cluster will get to know with the GitOps that yeah there is some change in the code. Then it will you know based on the modification it will trigger all the CI CD pipeline and hosting again. So that was another set of requirements that we handle. So once we're done with all these you know CI CD and monitoring part. So this was the final output. Sorry this was the final output. So we reduce actually the provisioning time which customer had earlier while like one plus week to 2.5 hours because everything was automated. Someone just need to have a check whether everything is successful or not. Although we had configured the notification of that. And once we're done with that then for the security we had used with Kubernetes service we has used keywords. So all the secrets password there RSA key is going to be stored there. There is no risk related to security. And overall because we assume that if resource consumption is going to be low then it should be capable to scale down. So we configured everything in the ML Kubernetes ML. So overall we saved around 33% of their run cost. And again for automation we used ARM template and later on it was Terraform template. So this is overall architecture that we did but for Node.js side what we as a best practices what we used was. So like in GitHub when you are not going to have you don't want to have something part of your project you just use gitigno. In same way because in testing phase we have some dummy data there are some test cases that is going to run but we don't want that data to be part of our final production right. So we use npmignore for that. And also there was a when are you when you are going to use this npmignore you need to be conscious about which is going to be take precedence whether it use a gitignore or npmignore. So all the consideration that you need to take care around that. So if you are having gitignore in your code then although npmignore will take first precedence but if it is there is no npmignore then it will be gitignore. That will be part of it. So this is few best practices and apart from this there was one more that is because everything that you are going to that they were building for the customer it was virgin based managed. Like if they are having 10 conferences running so they had 10 different tendent. For each tendent they have different code base. So for maintaining that code base they had specific virgining attached for that. So when you are running your CICD pipeline by default it provide you the auto generation of the virgin code. But what do you need to do when you have your npm version configured through the command. Same thing you can configure in your CICD pipeline otherwise it will it is going to your every time it will generate a new number and you cannot correlate this new number is related to which customer and which build. So you need to come up with your own virgining scheme specific to the requirement and apart from this once you are done with your code always try to have a consolidated and push this to origin one. So these were few best practices around the node code related things and this how we solve the customer issue. I think now I can open the place for the question. Any question around this. So how was your development environment? So are you using Kubernetes in your development environment? So for Kubernetes for development environment we had the normal developer machine but for you know testing of their code they had Minikube. Okay Minikube. Yeah. Okay because we are using the Minikube for the development environment other than the Kubernetes so that's why. Yeah that's fine because in the end underling library is the same. So if your everything is running on Minikube then you are good to go for actual Kubernetes cluster environments. Okay thank you. In my architecture I had like four slaves running and there was a master server also set up. Okay. For me to access APIs because my the client the API that I was using was restricting me to 100 requests per minute. So I was forced to use an architecture which had four slaves and there was a master server that was running and we also had a lot of problems when we're deploying it in the dockerized environment. We were not actually able to set it up even now. We are still struggling with it and is there any way that you can handle that? Sorry you mean to say you had master and slave for Kubernetes? No I was working in a normal I was working in AWS. So I was doing this in an AWS environment so we had like four slaves running and they were thinking we had to send requests from different IP address basically to the API.  So in such an environment we had issues deploying it using docker. Like when we were trying to dockerize it we had issues where the servers would crash out of nowhere and then our preview server would also go down and we were not even able to track the whole thing because I don't know why but the server log also didn't log in. Is there anything that handles where there are multiple servers coming into play? For us this was not an issue reason being we have you know when we set up our Kubernetes in AKS at least I'm sorry I'm not sure about the ADS how does it handle. In Azure it automatically your master server and end user need not to bother about which is master and how it is going to manage the server slave servers but for all the API request that is coming in. So we have Azure monitor and it is having plug-in to get it to configure with Prometheus and Gryphana so that you can have all the traceability so from where request was coming in you can configure your custom metrics around that for monitoring. So this was one way and to route the request internally so as I said load balancer and another we have API management that we used internally. So I think in similar way you must be having something in AWS that can you know route the request based on the requirement but there should not be restriction like 100 API request per second or something. That was put forward by the provider not by us. Okay not us not us. Okay so if you need to apply restriction that is customizable I think in across the industry you can restrict the like because they can be hacking or security risk so they always provide some restriction okay you can restrict your request like 100 request per second it should not exceed they provide but this is not an upper limit this is custom limit that you can apply. Thank you.


I'm prepared to bring out and ready to bring out the next speakers the insurance soup big bowl of soup man Best taste in soup in the insurance industry my good buddies Michael McCormick and Taylor Dobby Unbelievable dudes when I say unbelievable dudes. I really mean it. I really really mean it I met I got the pleasure of meeting them a couple years ago when I first started putting on wanting to put on the conference and what they don't know is Having them a part of it was a huge blessing and help to me. Okay, they made me a moderator of their Facebook group the insurance soup. They're just Freaking amazing guys. I don't know why they like do so much for me You know, I want to keep doing more for them like that's that's a that's a mutual Relationship that you want to be a part of and I'm telling you what the insurance you guys are Unbelievable, they don't realize this that several years ago. I would say three four years ago. I Was like man if I could ever get my business to where I'm like Rolling and doing well like the insurance soup and this massive Facebook group and all the amazing things they have going I'm like, I would love to meet these guys. It would be incredible But what I didn't know is I would actually be introducing them on a virtual stage right now in front of thousands of insurance agents And I didn't expect it They didn't know that I was thinking about them and and and and talking about them before we even met Okay, and I'm blessed to know them Unbelievable guys. They truly care. They shared how to generate Facebook leads alive at the last 8% Okay If you don't quit you can't fail these dudes will never quit great dudes excited to bring them out to the virtual stage Mr. Michael McCormick and Mr. Taylor Dobby of the insurance soup 8% welcome back to another presentation here in this virtual summit that we are in the middle of my name is Mike McCormick and With me to my left or my right depending on how this ultimately shakes out during editing is my better-looking better bearded brother from another Mother Taylor Dobby We are the co-owners of Insurance soup and all of the insurance soup brands if you're not familiar with insurance soup We are the largest community on social media for insurance agents brokers and team members and we have Very thriving community where the action is just absolutely non-stop We're talking good bad and ugly in the industry all day every day Well providing some infotainment and a number of really kick-ass and badass products and services to the injury Industry at the same time so all that being said when we speak at 8% nation and very Last number of years to continue to be invited back. We make it a point to always rain value down on you guys We want to make sure that when you leave this virtual conference But when you leave this summit that you have something actionable that you can go back into your agency and Implement to get those registers ringing all that being said I am going to pass the baton over to Taylor here And we are going to start to dig in and provide that value to you now Awesome and before we really dive in I promise Mike and I are at least six feet apart as he's in New York And I'm in Texas and don't let the brick walls behind us for you But we are limited on time compared to what we normally would be you know standing on stage having an hour So we want to dive right into a couple actionable items you can take back apply and benefit from So we're gonna go into a drink in general and then I'm gonna pass it back to Mike I'm going to really have a segment the audience on Facebook. So you're staying in front who you want to But when it comes to Facebook edge rank, we've all heard about the algorithm, you know this this Secret formula that Facebook uses and what edge rank really is is it's yours? Your social credibility when it comes to Facebook. So if I Mike and I didn't communicate at all whatsoever Facebook is going to recognize that and say okay if they're not communicating They're not liking engaging commenting sharing each other's post Then we don't want to waste spot on their timeline because they must not be interested with each other Taylor, why don't we why don't we back that up a little bit and explain why? They're picking and choosing who's content to show you on the on the platform because I think it'll start to make a lot More sense for people if they understand why Facebook is choosing who to showcase and who not to showcase You know once you understand like the logistics of the why you'll understand why getting the edge rank and why understanding Taking of how to take advantage of the algorithm is super important. No, absolutely So Facebook we all know it's a money-making machine and the way that Facebook makes their money is by serving ads in your newsfeed If you were to scroll through your newsfeed, you'll see about every three to four posts as an ad So Facebook in order to pay their shareholders they serve ad and by serving the ads they're taking the advertisers money So they want to keep you on Facebook for as long as they possibly can So that they can serve you as many ads as they can they can collect those ad dollars from the advertisers and make money Pay their shareholders all in all that's how Facebook makes their money So the edge rank is very important to keep you on Facebook for as long as possible so if you view your timeline as You know prime real estate Facebook wants you to be scrolling through your timeline and engaging and staying there for as long as possible And so that's where the secret form of algorithm kind of comes into play So if Mike and I didn't communicate Facebook recognizes that and says okay, there's no interest there We're not gonna waste up that prime real estate and show Taylor Mike's post or Mike Taylor's post because they're just simply non-interested Now if I were to start engaging on Mike's post I start liking commenting sharing You know Facebook recognizes that says okay. They've been friends for 10 years We hadn't really shown any of their posts to each other because they weren't interested now. They're engaging They've got some similarities We're gonna start showing them more and more the more that they engage with each other So that's why if you go through your timeline, you know your newsfeed you'll see it's the same people that you engage with You know that you're seeing day after day after day and you look back and go man I've been I've been friends with Sally for for 10 years and I don't see any of Sally's post And if you were to go back and look it's because you're not engaging with Sally So what Facebook really recognizes is you know the likes the comments the shares Well, there's a couple other, you know formulas built in you may notice that if you were to reach out to Sally on Messenger and send her message and y'all start talking back and forth there in the Facebook Messenger now Facebook recognizes Even though it's not on the timeline where you engage when you engaged in part of their platform Facebook's gonna start to serve you up some of Sally's post and Sally some of your post now the more that you engage the more that you see each Other's you know interactions You know also recently Facebook has incorporated more and in the algorithm any marketer anybody out there that says they know The algorithm one that they're full of it. No one really knows the secret formula, but what you'll see is You know the topics right now is a big one Facebook is always making changes to the algorithm And if you post a topic right now Facebook is gonna show your post to others You know on your friends left list that show interest in that same topic So if you were to post about your high school even though you haven't engaged with a lot of friends from your high school They're going to show the friends on your friends list that you went to high school with that post because there's some similarities there So there's multiple different ways to kind of manipulate the algorithm and that's really what Mike's gonna dive into To make sure that you're staying in front of the right people at the right time to always, you know Pull the opportunities from Facebook as often as you can Yeah, so, you know Taylor just brought up two very Concrete ways for you to kind of make sure that you're getting in front of exactly who you want to be speaking to You know while you're on the social platforms, you know Like you just mentioned you can start to engage them in their messenger and in turn You'll start being fed their content and vice versa And just like you also mentioned if you are topically bringing up stuff that that is of interest to people on your friends list Then Facebook will begin showing those topical Posts to people that would you know that that have previously engaged on other posts or other content on the platform around that topic But there's a third way that that we've been using we've been teaching for I mean geez This is the strategy that we're sharing on this one. It had to be kind of quick and super simple So this is this is one that we've that we've had pretty much from the very very beginning before we were even doing ads This is a pure organic strategy on how to build a nice little army of potential referral partner prospects and that is done by by creating your own Your own friends lists within your friends list on Facebook and this is something that the majority of people out there Don't really know that you can do So I'm gonna walk you through that right now So all you need to do is you need to go home actually first thing you do if you're not part of insurance soup is joined we got 31,256 members in there as of this recording and everything that we do in there is solely around the topic of insurance in the industry and everything good bed ugly and in between but Shameless plug over what we're gonna do now is we are gonna go to the home screen here and from the home screen And I I apologize for anything that is not appropriate that is showing up in my newsfeed right now That is not my content, but What you're able to do is you're able to right here where it says explore if you click on See more you're gonna see a little tab here that says friends lists and now I would go out on a limb And say the majority people on Facebook are not fully familiar with the fact that this even exists But it's a very very powerful little feature that is buried here under the the explorer tab So what we're gonna do is we're gonna click off on friends list and what you're gonna see here is the ability To create your own little subset of friends lists within your own personal Facebook account So what you're able to do is you're able to isolate the people that you want in different categories for whatever You know for whatever your purpose is so right now you're looking at a number of different lists that I personally have got on my Facebook Most of these are client based at this point You know you see CAC marketing agency elephant users, etc. Etc. But the way that I used to use it when I was an agency in the way that Taylor used to use it when he was an Agency in the way that so many CAC clients are currently utilizing it in their agencies is like this What what we do is we create lists of people that we want to have as potential referral partners So what you do is you go to create list It's just gonna ask you to name the list and start plugging people in here So let's just say for example you are looking for more loan officers more real estate agents more accountants more attorneys Whatever the case is a couple of things that you're able to do is You know start reaching out to people on the various social platforms I would recommend if you're looking for people that are profession specific to start on LinkedIn find their profile on LinkedIn And then try and find them on Facebook Send them that friend request on Facebook first if they don't accept it shoot it over on LinkedIn and then hey want to know Hey, I shot you a friend request over on Facebook as well. I always find it better for you know potential referral partner relationships You know for us to kind of know each other on a little bit more of a personal level And what you're able to do is you are able to put together these lists of people that all fall into You know whatever category you put together now. Why would you want to do that? One of the easiest ways for you to get yourself in front of a new potential referral partner is by building a social Relationship with them online first by building some social currency And the way that you go about doing that is by lighting their stuff commenting on their stuff sharing their stuff You know basically giving them the warm and fuzzies and letting them know and feel that the content that they're putting out there Resonates with you and that there's a lot of commonality So what you what you'll wind up doing is you'll create a list of loan officers or a list of real estate agents Or a list of whoever it is that you're trying to get yourself in front of and keep yourself in front of local business owners Uh, you know, what have you and you'll have this list that you'll be able to dig into each and every day So I'll click on this one right here super admin and cac coaches There's not no harm no balance here and what you're going to see is you're going to see everybody who currently has A uh an admin or moderator spot with us in insurance soup And i'm able to keep up with the content they're putting out on a daily basis. These are my co-workers. They're my employees They're uh, my my my closest friends and colleagues in the industry Of course, I want to engage with them as frequently as possible and let them know that you know, hey I'm thinking about you throughout the dates. Uh, you know, hope you're thinking about me the same way But from a referral partner standpoint What this does for you is it creates? Little environments little ecosystems within your personal facebook that you're able to jumping to Throughout the day and make sure that you're not missing a beat on any of the people who's uh, you know, who's trust You're looking to earn what let me chime in here real quick mic Please do the reason this is so important and we're all guilty of it is we'll add someone on facebook Or they'll add us and we'll engage them and then life, you know gets in the way and we forget It's a new relationship. So it's not someone that's on, you know, you're thinking about or you're laughing about your last engagement It's someone that's a very new, you know to that that facebook world when it comes to the uh, that friend So when you add them, it's a place where you're easily able to go. Oh, yeah Let's go check on what johnny is doing because he's a new friend when you add them to this They don't disappear. This is only going to show you who you put on that individual little news feed Absolutely, and and if we're being completely honest and we're calling a spade a spade The majority of the referral partners that you're adding to your facebook You're not adding to your facebook because you've got this overwhelming desire to get to know them You're adding them because you've got this overwhelming desire to potentially do business with them, right? You're going to get to know them during that process But when you are just adding potential referral partners to taylor's point It's not in your mind to be constantly checking up on their social media so that you can like on their stuff Comment on their stuff and until you establish that good edge rank with them until facebook is recognized that this is someone who when they put content out You personally the end user you the agent want to see that content until facebook's established that that uh, you know that You're looking to see that content type of relationship. They're not necessarily going to continue to feed You know feed you each and every post that you're uh, the people that you're looking to earn as referral partners Is putting out into the wilderness so uh all that being said What you're able to do by creating these silos is you're able to stay on top of these referral partners that you're looking to earn And you're able to continue to like their stuff comment on their stuff share their stuff So that when you do build that social currency to a point where you feel comfortable reaching out and introducing yourself And please please please. I beg of you. Please Do not start reaching out to these people until you've started building started building social currency If you reach out to them as a total stranger and ask them for a cup of coffee Anyone who's making money in whatever industry they're in is going to tell you know And anyone who's not making any money in that industry is going to tell you yes waste your time So so mike you're saying that the best strategy isn't to add the referral partners as a friend and then immediately spam their inbox That's a much more succinct way of saying it than I was just saying But what I am begging of you is to not just go out there grab new referral partners Add them to your friends list and start spamming and bamming them What you want to do is you want to add them You want to build that social currency through some of the methods that we talked about today Whether it be through maximizing edge rank whether it be through uh, you know Creating silos within facebook so that you're able to stay on top of them and build that social currency And from there once you've established that a little bit of back and forth Uh and a little bit of reciprocity with them because what you're going to see too What you're going to see and I promise you this because I've done it a million times Is as you start to engage with them The law of reciprocity starts to kick in and they're going to feel the need to start to uh, Kind of chime in on your stuff too Particularly if there's a good vibe there, you know If they if they happen to wander over to your stuff because you've liked the last four or five posts Hey, who is this taylor dobby guy that likes all my posts now They wind up on your profile and they see oh you like hunting Oh, you're you're you're you're into this you're into that and you have some commonalities Now you're cooking with gas and now that new referral partner who you were a virtual stranger to just days before Is now seeing all your stuff and realizing that there's a lot in common here And when you do reach out for that very first time after you guys have kind of you know Volied some likes and comments back and forth on some posts. It's not going to be weird. It's not going to be awkward It's not going to be spany. It's going to be hey taylor Just wanted to reach out and and formally introduce myself We've been kind of liking and commenting on each other's posts for the last You know for the last month or so we got we seem to have a lot in common I figured I'd just reach out and say what's up. I appreciate you here on uh, you know I appreciate the stuff that you put out on uh on facebook and boom Now you're off to the races with a normal human being conversation Yeah, I mean it gives back to before you do business with anyone or anyone does business with you They want to know like and trust you So what what social media allows you to do is really bridge that that no factor and that trust factor You know Mike and I before the first time we ever met in person I could have told you his kids name says wife's name worry What is interest are everything about Mike because of a facebook itself And what happened when I walked out the those airport doors at dallas fort worth the very first time we met I was a high five a hug and it was like we've hung out a hundred times You hopped right out of the car and we and we hugged. Yeah, I mean it's it's uh, it allows you to bridge that gap So when you're engaging and you're interacting and you're letting them kind of see into your life And you're saying into theirs when you do have that conversation There's something to discuss there. You've got some similarities. There's that interest They know you they you know, they like you or else they wouldn't continue to engage and now that trust is being built So that now you can get to the you know the business side of things Absolutely, absolutely So all that said we're uh, we're a little bit pressed for time here. This isn't a typical uh, this isn't a typical presentation from insurance suit So we are going to start to wind down here If you are not already a member of insurance suit do a search on facebook Just type in insurance suit and you'll see our group pop up We've got a little bit over 31 000 members here and every last member that joins the group is just as important as any other Because you bring your own individual and unique insight and experience the table and that helps keep the soup nice and hot and full If you are not already in soup again We appreciate and look forward to you becoming part of the family if you are in soup Well, here we are again, you're used to seeing us But uh, either way we have recently as a way to kind of drive and fuel The industry the best we can from uh from behind the scenes We have recently created a mini course that we are literally giving to everybody in insurance suit right now The the point of the little education that we put together was to help agents who are transitioning from an office setting to home So it falls right into into theme here with this virtual conference of Of of you can't fail if you don't give up We wanted to make sure that we were giving everybody an insurance insurance soup a number of different strategies and tools that they could implement Uh to get through this hard time a little bit around organic marketing a little bit about automation Make sure that when you join insurance you can check the announcements and snatch that up Yeah, Mike shown real quick since you haven't pulled up what where the announcements are and the actual post Uh for the the announcement. So all you're gonna do when you join insurance soup is click announcements right here In an ideal world, it'll be right at the top. It probably isn't A couple of blog posts. Here's the conference Gotta find it And also if you're doing it from your mobile, uh, then it's just gonna be the the top post You'll be able to click and drop down You'll be able to find it if for some reason it's not an announcement now we'll make sure that it is uh here shortly and You know take what what you've learned on this call and take action You know the the theme of you can't fail if you don't quit when it comes to social media It's being persistent you can't hop on once a month And and put a little bit of effort into it or reach out to that referral partner You know once every six months and try to create any kind of credibility or relationship there It's you've got to be persistent. You've got to you know dive in me personally. I dive into my little, you know Personalized news feeds, you know the segment and audience I'll go in into the morning and some engage and then in the evening. I do the same You know with facebook There's prime hours of the day the morning and the evening are going to be where you get the most activity Where you know that engagement's really going on so that's when I like to do it I don't just hop in randomly throughout the day to me. It's a system. It's a process. It's a way of doing business And so I treated it such you have to do it consistently though Don't give up because you're not seeing results right away All that said some of the stuff that we talked about today is our our great ideas for you to begin laying down a foundation for when the future Rebuild or or reemergence of uh of when your business is really banging is going to take place You know fortunately a lot of agents have been able to continue moving forward But I I know that there are a lot of agents that as they as they move to home have found themselves technologically a little bit stuck Struggling with having family around struggling with homeschooling and all that kind of stuff right now If you're a little bit slower or you find yourself on social media a little bit more than you normally do What you've got the opportunity to do right now with these little strategies that we just laid on you guys today Is uh begin to plan for the future by establishing and building those referral partner relationships So that when your doors are open when you are public facing again and all these new referral partners whose relationships You've been building over the last number of months have begun to blossom You're going back to the office with a horde of new referral partners that are looking to help you build your business all that said Hope you've enjoyed the last, uh, you know 20 minutes with us Uh, we are short on time. So hope you enjoy the the you know speakers ahead and look forward to seeing you in an insurance suit Absolutely appreciate you guys and uh, look forward to the next speaker. They're gonna be awesome I told you be good. They'd be good and they're freaking hilarious. Thank you so much insurance soup for doing that for us Michael and Taylor. I love it. Thank you for being a part of this Can't wait to see you on stage again in vegas doing a p&c panel doing a p&c breakout session a part of the lunch Everything we got going on the experience is going to be leveled up from a p&c perspective because of the insurance soup Awesome job. Thank you guys for being on this that if you don't quit you can't fail, right? That's the theme. I'm gonna keep saying it over and over because I don't want to see you quit 92% of insurance agents fail 8% nation was born because most of you fell and you can't Fail if you don't quit right and I don't want to see you quit You watch this video and you want to learn how to take a live call and transfer it from an opener to a closer That video is for you. Click on it and I'll see you there again I'm not sure what time you're watching this video, right intro expert control qualified transfer This is how to effectively transfer a live call from an opener to a closer


Okay, yeah. Hi everyone again. So I'm Elias Mima from Technical University of Vienna where we have roughly 27,000 students and 5,000 employees and we are in science and engineering university. And yet today I want to present you some lessons learned when deploying Jupiter perhaps for lectures, for teaching. So maybe a bit about the project. So in the beginning, as I said in the introduction before, I'm working in a thing called data lab where we want to support our researchers and lecturers with data science and machine learning workflows. So quite early they came up the need for Jupiter notebooks and also for accelerators GPUs in Jupiter notebooks. But when I built up the first system, soon it was asked if they can use it in lectures and in teaching. And so my focus then over the last year was supporting several lectures with Jupiter notebooks, Jupiter hubs. And last semester, we had around 850 students and this semester we have a few more lectures but less students, 650 and yeah, but this semester the requirements are a bit harder and saying so, yeah, the requirements are really diverse. So we have small lectures with 20 students doing Earth observation with large data sets and a need for notebooks with a lot of memory. And on the other hand, we have this really large beginners programming courses with 200 students doing simple Python programming and therefore we can go with one gigabyte of memory as an example. Yeah, so one thing to solve was authentication first. So I don't know, in Austria we have lots of ISO solutions and not really a good solution for the authentication system providing for new services. And so I came up with the solution of using the learning platform, the learning management system, Moodle in our case for the authentication method and I was somehow adapting and already their authenticator based on to use this LTI 1.3 interface that Moodle and Canvas have. Yeah, another thing was that as I already told the lectures are quite diverse. So the software stack they use is so some are coming from technical chemistry, needing special packages, others doing machine learning, deep learning, whatever. So I decided to provide them in the current phase with individual software stacks for each lecture. And as it's for teaching and exercises, we needed some method for grading and doing the exchange of the exercises. So we are going with MB grader right now, but yeah, I will tell you more about this. And of course, yeah, persistence of the data was important. So we have shared folders and town folders and optionally group folders that we persist. Yeah, some features, optional features we use is a virtual desktop for providing lectures with which have the demand for some GUI tools with an VNC browser based VNC solution. And right now we have a lecture where they do some C++ programming. So we also gave them an IDE, VS code like IDE called TEA in our setup.  Yeah, I will come to the details later, but we were using syndrome as a backend for the PVs for Kubernetes based by SAF. We were also using Manila and now we are using SAFFS directly for the localizing we are using Octavia. Yeah, so we are running everything right now on virtual machines, no bare metal machines, and I'm using zero to two to half. So this is Helm charts for the Kubernetes cluster where we additionally create resources in the cluster with some Ansible scripts. And yeah, the main effort really went into building the individual images with the individual software stack for each lecture. So we have quite elaborate CICT setup already for this. Yeah, images are based on Docker stacks. We do some image scanning since this semester. And yeah, we are running everything on our own registry for speeding up everything. So yeah, as I said, we are using Docker stacks. And if you have a collaborative Jupyter environment where you have shared folders, you have to have users inside the containers. And that is not really a problem. If you run the containers as root, then you can somehow inject new users at the startup of the container, but running the containers as root doesn't really feel safe. So one thing I want to try out next is to bring somehow held up into the containers so that I can run the containers without root access. Yeah, another problem right now is if you're doing collaborative workflows with Jupyter Hub is that there is no real way to get groups right now into the Jupyter Hub environment. And I'm working on enabling it, but yeah, still not ready. And you have the pull request here for this one. Yeah, but now back to the open stack problems I had. It was mainly storage issues. So first, I was naive and I used for the homes for each home as in the backed volume. This leads to quite a lot of volumes. And it was really hard to back up because I didn't find a good solution to back up block storage PVCs in communities so that you can track all the users to whom this PVC belongs. Yeah, then also this lead to some problems in Cinder. So startup times increased and we also had a problem in the color setup that there was some timeouts in the Apache used for the Cinder container. And yeah, so I decided to switch over to some shared file system. And first I was using Manila generic servers with NFS because it was quite easy to set up. But soon I run into another problem that I had. I used the word IO driver for storage. So was only capable of running 30 shares per Manila share server. And after that, creating new PVCs failed. So that was not a good thing. Also resizing didn't really work for me. We're running out of time. Okay, we speed up. So I decided to use CFFS instead and because it's quite easy to integrate it in Kubernetes and easy to back up as well. And also I could design the structure of the homes and the shares, the folders myself. So it's easy to reuse maybe giving users access to the files in an own cloud or whatever way. Yeah. And maybe a few things that we are currently developing. So we want to have more fine-grained monitoring. GPU support is still a question, asked a lot from our researchers and lecturers. And yeah, we had quite a few problems with the grading service, this NP grader. And right now we are developing a new grading service based on this NP grader that should fix a lot of these issues. And when we are ready, we will release it as open source. And yeah, of course, there's always, there's still the plan to have Jupyter Hubs for research. And my last point is we are as always hiring. And if someone is interested or someone can recommend some capable of open stack engineers. So please, you're welcome to do so. So I am finished. Thank you.


What do we want to do when we throw the shot? Do we want to do an offset? Who do we want to emulate? Do you have a technical model? We're going to talk about it in this video. So check it out. Hey, everybody, it's Eric Johnson from Arte Throws Nation. And in today's video, we are going to talk about style versus mechanics. Now, one of the things we've always said is don't confuse style with mechanics. And this is always a topic that seems to create controversy. But what we're trying to talk about is finding a style that helps you hit the most optimal mechanics. And again, with the throwing chain reaction system, we always argue there's six pillars of the throw. And there's a lot of ways to do that per the individual. So in today's video, we're going to just kind of use one of the examples of one of our athletes who had come out to train with us and show you what we did literally in a matter of a day. We took a style that he was utilizing. He just couldn't really get comfortable or on balance or move in a way. So we kind of set him up and started to do more of an offset with a bigger, longer movement that helped him create more speed and whip in his throw. And that was really the key. And the distance jumped immediately. And the consistency in his throwing jumped immediately. So here we have the athlete. And what he was doing on the left was trying to feel more of a static start. And truth be told, there was a little misunderstanding in how this was supposed to work. But it was at first kind of helping him get more on balance and be able to move around the entry axis. Remember, we go pillar one is kind of setting up our chain reaction and winding. And pillar two is going to be shifting left, moving around the corner, dropping into the throw, which is pillar three. You're going to notice on the video on the right, we had him kind of reach right. And we're creating length. We're creating this longer start. And he's coming around for him this bigger motion of teaching him how to like move the upper body in conjunction with the lower body. He started to create this much better sweeping position. He would kind of start to feel his wrap position. And you see how he's actually kind of getting that elbow up. So he's moving really well and he picked it up really easily. And I think this is a really important thing for a lot of throwers that you have to find comfort in your throw. And that's one of the things we're doing. So you're going to notice here, everything just started to move better into his throw. He was rotating and you're going to see that the length and the be able to punch, getting way more extension out over the board. You know, a little bit more control. So you can see not bad, but when we look at the throw in full motion, you're going to see that he just moved a little bit easier. Now we look at it again in slow motion and you're going to notice so we went to a more dynamic movement. And I think that's a really important thing. So one of the things that we break down in the throwing chain reaction system is we always teach, we have technical days and we have rhythm days and we have technical work and we have rhythmical work. And it's really important to find what is also going to create that big nice rhythm point in the throw. Look at the difference in where the athletes come and how he's approaching into the throw. He's getting a lot bigger stretch and you're seeing how he's creating that whip a little bit over rotated, but less over rotated than he was. Sweep leg is much wider. He's coming into and rotating around, getting it into the power position, longer moving ahead and being able to rotate the feet into the throw. So when you're trying to improve your technique and find that technical movement pattern that works best for you, remember that's kind of the whole point of what we decided with the throwing chain reaction and the six pillars was to teach you the mechanics that allows you to be able to find the most optimal movement for you. And that's a huge thing that you wanna do. So sometimes you just gotta go simple, find your comfort zone and go with it. And in this case, we tried, hey, let's just try something completely different. Let's approach this differently. We're gonna lengthen it. We're gonna do all these different things and it absolutely worked and the athlete is still sticking with it to this day. So hopefully that helps. Be sure to check out the throwing chain reaction system. We break it down step by step, teach you how to things that help you unlock your potential and hit bigger results faster. Thanks so much for watching and we will see you on the next video.


Welcome to theCUBE's continuing coverage of AMD's fourth generation Epic launch. I've got a special guest with me today from Prowis Consulting. His name is Evan Tabard. He's a senior technical writer with Prowis. Evan, welcome. Hi, great to be here, thanks. So tell us a little bit about Prowis. What does Prowis do? Yeah, we're a consulting firm. We've been around for quite a few years based in Bellevue, Washington. And we do quite a few projects with folks from Dell to a lot of other companies and dive in. We have engineers, writers, production folks. So pretty much end to end work, doing research, testing and writing and diving into different technical topics. So you, in this case, what we're going to be talking about is some validation studies that you've done. Looking at Dell PowerEdge servers that happen to be integrating in fourth gen Epic processors from AMD. What were the specific workloads that you were focused on in this study? Yeah, this particular one was honing in on virtualization, right? Obviously it's pretty much ubiquitous in the industry. Everybody works with virtualization in one way or another. So just getting optimal performance for virtualization is critical or is critical for most businesses. So we just wanted to look a little deeper into, how do companies evaluate that? What are they going to use to make the determination for virtualization performance as it relates to their workloads? So that led us to this study where we looked at some benchmarks and then went a little deeper under the hood to see what led to the results that we saw from those benchmarks. So when you say virtualization, does that include virtual desktop infrastructure or are we just talking about virtual machines in general? No, it can include both. We looked at VMs, thinking in terms of what about database performance when you're working in VMs, all the way through to VDI and companies like healthcare organizations and so forth where it's common to roll out lots of virtual desktops and performance is critical there as well. Okay, you alluded to sort of looking under the covers to see where these performance results were coming from. I assume what you're referencing is the idea that it's not just all about the CPU when you talk about a system. Am I correct in that assumption? Yeah, absolutely. What can you tell us? Well, for companies evaluating, there's quite a bit to consider obviously, right? So they're looking at not just raw performance but power performance. So that was part of it. And then what makes up that those factors, right? So certainly CPU is critical to that but then other things come into play like the RAID controllers. So we looked a little bit there and then networking of course can be critical for configurations that are relying on good performance on their networks both in terms of bandwidth and just reducing latency overall. So interconnects as well would be a big part of that. So with PCIe Gen 5 or 5.0, pick your moniker. Right. In the infrastructure game, we're often playing a game of whack-a-mole looking for the bottlenecks, chasing the bottlenecks. PCIe 5 opens up a lot of bandwidth for memory and things like RAID controllers and NICs. I mean, is the bottleneck now just our imagination, Evan? Have we reached a point where there are bottlenecks? What did you see when you ran these tests? What were you able to stress to a point where it was saturated, if anything? Yeah, well, first of all, these are particular tests for ones that we looked at industry benchmarks and we were examining in particular to see where world records were set. And so we uncovered a few specific servers, PowerEdge servers that were pretty key there or had a lot of relieving in the category in a lot of areas. So that's what led us to then, okay, well, why is that? What's in these servers and what's responsible for that? So in a lot of cases, we saw these results even with Gen4, PCIe Gen4. So there were situations where clearly there was benefit from faster interconnects and especially NBME for RAID for supporting NBME and SSDs. But all of that just leads you to the understanding that it means it can only get better, right? So going from Gen4 to Gen4, if you're seeing great results on Gen4, then Gen5 is probably going to be blow that away. And in this case, Gen5, in this case, Gen5, you're referencing PCIe. PCIe, right, that's right. And then the same thing with Epic actually holds true. Some of the records, we saw records set for both third and fourth gen, so with Epic. So the same thing there, anywhere there's a record set on the third gen, makes us really, we're really looking forward to going back and seeing over the next few months, which of those records fall and are broken by newer generation versions of these servers once they actually ramp to the newer generation processors, based on what we're seeing for what those processors can do. Not only in, sorry, just because they're not only in terms of raw performance, but as I mentioned before, the power performance because they're very efficient and that's a really critical consideration, right? I don't think you can overstate that for companies who are looking at, have to consider expenditures and power and cooling and meeting sustainability goals and so forth. So that was really an important category in terms of what we looked at, was that power performance, not just raw performance. Yeah, I want to get back to that. That's a really good point. We should probably give credit where credit is due. Which Dell PowerEdge servers are we talking about that were tested and what did those interconnect components look like from a perspective? Yeah, so we focus primarily on a couple benchmarks that seemed most important for real world performance results for virtualization, TPCXV and VMMark 3.x. The TPCXV, that's where we saw PowerEdge R7525, R7515, they both had top scores in different categories there. That benchmark is great for looking at database workloads in particular, right? Running in virtualization settings. And then the VMMark 3.x was critical. We saw good results there for the 7525 and the R7515 as well as the R6525 in that one. And that included, sorry, just checking notes to see. Yeah, no, no, no, it's bad. Included results for power performance, as I mentioned earlier, that's where we could see that. So we saw this in a range of servers that included both 3rd Gen AMD Epic and newer 4th Gen as well, as I mentioned. The rate controllers were critical in the TPCXV. Don't think that came into play in the VMMark test, but they were definitely part of the TPCXV benchmarks. So that's where the rate controllers would make a difference, right? And in those tests, I think they're using Perk 11, so the newer Perk 12 controllers there. Again, we'd expect to see continued gains in newer benchmarks. That's what we'll be looking for over the next several months. Yeah, so I think if I've got my Dell nomenclature down, performance, what do you know? No, PowerEdge rate controller, is that right? Exactly, yeah, there you go, right? Yeah, with Broadcom, powered by Broadcom. That's right, there you go. Yeah, so isn't the Dell naming scheme there, Perk? Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. Back to your comment about Power, so you've had a chance to take a pretty deep look at the latest stuff coming out. You're confident that, because some of these servers are gonna be more expensive than previous generation. Now, a server is not a server, it is not a server, but some are awakening to the idea that there might be some sticker shock. You're confident that the bang for your buck, the bang for your kilowatt hour is actually going to be beneficial. We're actually making things better, faster, stronger, cheaper, more energy efficient. We're continuing on that curve. That's what I would expect to see, right? I mean, of course, can't speak to pricing without knowing where the dollars are gonna land on the servers, but I would expect to see that because you're getting gains in a couple of ways. I mean, one, if the performance increases to the point where you can run more VMs, right? Get more performance out of your VMs and run more total VMs or more VDIs, then there's obviously a good payback on your investment there. And then as we were discussing earlier, just the power performance ratio, right? So if you're bringing down your power and cooling costs, if these machines are just more efficient overall, then you should see some gains there as well. So, I think the key is looking at what's the total cost of ownership over a standard, like a three year period or something and what you're gonna get out of it for your number of sessions, the performance for those sessions and the overall efficiency of the machines. So just to be clear, with these Dell PowerEdge servers, you were able to validate world record performance, but this isn't, if you look at CPU architecture, PCIe bus architecture, memory, you know, the class of memory, the class of rate controller, the class of NIC, those were not all state of the art in terms of at least what has been recently announced, correct? Because you use PCIe 4.0, so to your point, world records with that, you've got next-gen rate controllers coming out, next-gen NICs coming out. If the motherboard was PCIe 5, with commensurate memory, all of those things are getting better.  NVMe, you know, just collectively, all these things just open the doors, you know, letting more bandwidth through, reducing all the latency, those are all pieces of the puzzle, right? They come together and it's all about finding the weakest link and eliminating it, and I think we're reaching the point where we're removing the biggest constraints from the systems. Okay, so I guess, is it fair to summarize to say that with this infrastructure that you tested, you were able to set world records. During this year, I mean, over the next several months, things are just going to get faster and faster and faster and faster. That's what I would anticipate, exactly right. If they're setting world records with these machines before some of the components are, you know, the absolute latest, it seems to me, we're going to just see a continuing trend there and more and more records should fall. So I'm really looking forward to seeing how that goes, because it's already good. And I think the return on investment is pretty good there. So I think it's only going to get better as these roll out. So let me ask you a question that's a little bit, a little bit off topic. Okay. Kind of. You know, we see these gains, you know, we're all familiar with Moore's Law, we're familiar with the advancements in memory and bus architecture and everything else. We just covered Super Compute 2022 in Dallas a couple of weeks ago. And it was fascinating talking to people about advances in AI that will be possible with new architectures. No, most of these computers that are running right now are N minus one or N minus two infrastructure. You know, they're PCI-3. And maybe two generations of processors old because you don't just throw out 100,000 CPU super computing environment every 18 months. It doesn't work that way. Exactly. Do you have an opinion on this question of the qualitative versus quantitative increase in computing moving forward?  Do you think there's an inflection point coming? What do you think? That's a great question. That's a hard one to answer. I mean, it's probably a little bit of both because certainly there will be better consolidation, right? But I think that the systems, it works both ways. It just allows you to do more with less, right? And you can go either direction. You can do what you're doing now on fewer machines and get better value for it or reduce your footprint or you can go the other way and say, wow, this lets us add more machines into the mix and take our level of performance from here to here, right? So it just depends on what your focus is. Certainly with areas like HPC and AI and ML, having the ability to expand what you already are capable of by adding more machines that can do more is going to be your main concern. But if you're more like a small to medium sized business and the opportunity to do what you were doing on a much smaller footprint and for lower costs, that's really your goal, right? So I think you can use this in either direction and it should pay back in a lot of dividends. Yeah, thanks for your thoughts. It's an interesting subject moving forward. Sometimes it's easy to get lost in the minutiae of the bits and bytes and bobs of all the components we're studying, but they're powering something that's going to affect effectively all of humanity as we move forward. What else, so what else do we need to consider when it comes to what you've just validated in the virtualization testing? Anything else, anything we left out? I think we had all the key points or most of them. It's really, it's just keeping in mind that it's all about the full system, the components, not the processor is obviously a key, but just removing blockages, right? Freeing up, getting rid of latency, improving bandwidth, all these things come to play and then the power performance, as I said, I keep coming back to that, but we just, in a lot of what we work on, we just see that businesses that's a really big concern for businesses and finding efficiency, right? And especially in an age of constrained budgets, that's a big deal. So it's really important to have that power performance ratio and that's one of the key things we saw that stood out to us in some of these benchmarks. So, well, it's a big deal for me. It's all good. Yeah, I live in California and I know exactly how much I pay for a kilowatt hour of electricity. I bet, yeah. The other places don't even know. Yeah. So I totally understand the power constraint question. Yeah, it's not going to get better. So anything you can do there, right? Yeah, well, Evan, this has been great. Thanks for sharing the results that prowess has come up with third-party validation that even without the latest and greatest components in all categories, Dell Powered servers are able to set world records. And I anticipate that those world records will be broken in 2023. And I expect that prowess will be part of that process. So thanks for that for the rest of us here at theCUBE. I want to thank you for joining us. Stay tuned for continuing coverage of AMD's fourth-generation Epic launch for myself and for Evan Taugher. Thanks so much for joining us.


Contention. Critique. Conjecture. Conclusion. I look with paperplusoffice.co.nz. Shop online any time. They're open 24-7. It is 26 this evening's huddle, Josie Pagani and Cameron Slater and a very good evening to you both. Hello. Good evening. Alright, let's start with this messy, messy, messy labour stuff. Why on earth Josie did Cunliffe when asked just say yes, I support him for now. Well, exactly. You really got two choices.  And that's the mistake he made. I think he's overplayed his hand for that reason that people just think, look, if you're going to do it, you've got a right to challenge the leadership. Absolutely. But go ahead and challenge it. And instead he's created this hiatus where everybody's going to say, that's where everybody's going to be second guessing until February. And I tell you, it's heartbreaking as a labour supporter to sit there in a slow news week again and watch the party melting down in the public glare. I mean, this conference, we're not talking about the substance of the speech. We're not talking about any policy. We're just talking about how did this train wreck of a conference happen? Cameron, how much damage has Cunliffe done to himself and how much to the party? I think he's done a huge amount of damage to the party. If not him, then certainly his loyal band of hardcore activists who basically mounted a coup on his behalf during the week, which they bottled, by the way. And this is why I wrote a post earlier today saying that they discussed me the Labour Party because they can't even have a proper blood and guts coup without bottling it and getting all squeamish about the whole thing. One person or the one group of people I blame for this is the party leadership itself because the whole point about party conferences, no matter which party it is, they're stage managed, exactly. I mean, look at the American conferences and stuff like that.  How do you manage this though? How do you manage a guy who essentially went rogue on you? Well, what you don't do is follow the play card of Bill English and others where you now say that you're going to discipline this person, you're going to deal with them, you're going to smack them up, you're going to do all of these sorts of things. All David Shearer has done is paint himself into a corner and he's used his own brush and his own paint. And he's got a situation now where if he doesn't deal with David Cunliffe, he's damned as being weak and vacillating. If he does deal with David Cunliffe, then the conference was a very clear indication that the party organism for want of a better term is not happy with the way that the parliamentary wing is operating. But I think what we saw though, we saw David Shearer show a bit of mongrel this weekend, which is good for him. We saw the man who stared down the militia with the AK-47 pointing at his wife. You know, he did. He sounded different. He had a bit of backbone. And I think what he's got to be careful here is not to turn David Cunliffe into a martyr. He can't humiliate him, but he does have to do something like that. You've got to send him to the back benches though, don't you? You've got to send him off to the back benches. Absolutely. I think you've got to show some strength. And that cuts some oxygen off for him Cameron too, doesn't it?  We're heading into the barbecue season metaphorically and physically for the Labour Party. It's all going to go quiet after another couple of weeks in Parliament. You're going to have a hiatus over Christmas. I think it will be a rehab. They're going to come back after some of the polls aren't going to show any improvement for Labour. In fact, if I was a pollster now, I'd be in the field and engaging just how much, how damaging this has been to Labour. And I'm predicting probably three or four or five points. I can hear a breath there, Josie. Hold that breath, hold that thought. We'll come back in just a moment more on the Labour leadership spill with Josie Begani and Cameron Slater, 16-6. It's Susan Wood on Larry, Williams Drive with the Business Banking Specialists at Westpac. 13-6, the huddle this evening, Josie Begani and Cameron Slater. Now I hope you held that breath for me and that thought, Josie, because what I did want to get out of you. David Shearer heard him talk to my cosking this morning. It was a different interview. He got a sentence out. He made sense. He did a great speech at that conference yesterday as he's starting to show some leadership chops. Well, I think what you said earlier, Susan, is spot on, that he needs to believe in himself. He needs to start trusting his own instincts. He got into Parliament and he wanted the leadership for one reason, which was to turn the country around, to create jobs, to create a whole new economic vision for New Zealand. Now, if he can somehow locate that and really communicate that to the public of New Zealand, he'll be fine. But the problem he's got now is that there's been a massive shift of power away from the caucus, away from MPs, to the party. Now, that's a good thing for democracy. Party members can have a say on the leader, they can have a say on policy. Pretty messy, though. He's going to have to keep the party happy, which is an ever-dwindling membership and a narrow and narrow base. He's going to have to also appeal to the public and I think that's going to be a hard juggling act. The party, the public and the unions camp. Well, and that's the joke of it. Basically, the Labour Party has ceded 20% of the choice of the leader to the unions. But, I mean, the bigger joke, though, is that all from the lead-up to the conference last week, you had the base baying for Shearer's blood. All during Saturday, we had this massive, you know, from what I'm told from the insiders that were inside the actual room. And there was pretty intense blood and guts everywhere. A leadership argument without a leadership battle. And, again, wanting to eviscurate David Shearer, then he delivers one speech and all of a sudden they're all sick of fans again. I mean, honestly, one speech and then a good interview the next morning does not make a leader. And John Key's absolutely right. But if they can't organise a conference, then they surely can't organise the country. All right. Quick subject change here, Josie. Tertiary Education Minister Stephen Joyce is giving Auckland University extra money. He says, spend it on engineering and science. The tertiary education union says, no, that's against academic freedom. They should be able to spend it on what they will, Josie. Well, the irony here is that it was Michael Cullen who initiated this approach and tried to push the universities into, for example, specialising, I don't know, if you're in the Hawke's Bay, specialising in food and wine. Let's have one world-class engineering school. Let's have one world-class... Well, he's got a poll. We've got a lot of universities in this country spread up and down, all competing against each other. It's nuts, I think, yeah. When Michael Cullen did it, Stephen Joyce was the first to turn around and call him a nanny stator telling students what they want to study. So, I mean, I actually think this kind of intervention from government is a good thing. But the government's paying. If the government's paying for it, Cam, surely they can say what the money's spent on. Exactly. And look, I think we need to do something really drastic in our tertiary sector.  You're basket-weaving and faking this. What we've got to do is we've got to fund people into you. If you want to be an engineer, we'll fund you. And we're going to lock you in and you're going to stay here and you're going to work on those sorts of things, but you'll have your education pay for it.  Oh, come on. We love politics. We love politicians. But you don't need to go to university to study politics. It opens your mind. It opens your mind. All right, we're going to leave it there. Jocie Bougani and Cameron Slater. It is now nine before six o'clock.


Hey everyone, this is a video write-up for the challenge algebra from CSAW CTF 2018 Prompt here is are you a real math whiz and it gives us a net cat connection that we can connect to? So if we go ahead and try to connect to this it says, can you find x? x is Okay, looks like an algebraic expression there. We can solve for x And we could do this by hand each time, but it sounds like we're gonna be doing this a lot So we should try and figure out how we can automate that Well, I have a handy dandy youtube video tutorial series on simpi, which is a neat and handy Simpi, I don't know why it all completed that. Thanks. Cool. You suck the Python library for symbolic mathematics So essentially computer algebra system solves algebraic equations does cool stuff I'm just gonna run through how to use it Essentially to just solve this challenge, but I have a little bit of another video tutorial series It's very very old Sorry, it might suck But you can check that out if you want to see more of it, but it's pretty cool Just again just solving algebraic expressions So let's go ahead and start up a script where we can connect to this thing and work with it I'm going to create a shebang line here user bin environment Python Let's get just that hostname set up for us If you don't have some pie installed you can probably pseudo pip install it If you don't have pipsudo app get install pip and let's import simpi just as I said and from Bone import all okay cool So s can equal remote with that hostname and port being 902. Let's do s.close and then Let's just see what we've got to work with right up here Let's do print s.receive and we'll pop this over to our shell over here where we can Python 8 and Looks like we get the ASCII text so we don't need that one But we do want to check out what s.receive up here is now after we see that and it says okay two new lines The actual equation that we need to solve and the prompt what does x equal? So let's save that as a variable I don't know why again. I was gonna say value, but I knew I should have said variable So okay, let's have prompt and then let's say Equation can equal prompt dot split New lines and let's just get zero here and then we can display the equation each time So looks like that's gonna. I can just fine great Let's go ahead and create a variable that we can work with with simpi now Let's say x can equal simpi dot symbol capital S for symbol a string of the variable that we wanted to be represented as So capital X in this case Now we can go ahead and split up the equation with both sides of the equation the left and the right side so let's say left right can equal equation dot split on this and Now we can go ahead and try and create an equation Simpi module sense that will go ahead and evaluate this kind of thing. We could if we wanted to put together a Simpi dot eq left and right let's just say or how about eq lowercase and We will want left and right as actual constants. So unfortunately I would not encourage this usually we're kind of have to be trusting the CTF challenge Which is again already a big bad thing and vulnerability We would normally want to run like the safe eval or the safe expression that comes with Utils or pon pon tools pon utils. You could run safe eval expression on left or right But because it has x in there as a variable It doesn't even trust that because x could be anything it could be remote code or whatever So unfortunately, I feel bad. We are gonna have to use the dangerous eval function in this case to go ahead and convert it in a quick dirty way to something that simpi can handle So if we were to print out eq after we've got it Let's again display it all here now We have an equation that we can tell simpi to solve it simpi dot solve eq with our x variable We can say answer And let's print out answers. So we know we've got something working negative five for whatever that case may be We're gonna index it zero here perfect so now let's go ahead and send line of The string of answer because it's just a number here. Let's go ahead and print what we receive following that Let's say okay. We got yay. Keep going and that gives us the next question So if we wanted to loop this real quick if we just wanted to turn the crank on it What we receive or prompt any iteration is going to essentially have the next question in the success message So it's kind of a quick patch what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna test if Yay keep going is in the prompt Otherwise sure if it's the first occurrence we can get the equation from the top line But if yay is in there, we're gonna end up getting it from the second line As you can see yay keep going is the first response line and then the equation is the second one So just dirty patch CTF code if yeah, or whatever is in the prompt. We will use the Second line for our equation. If not, we'll use the equation down below and then Let's print out s dot receive again just to make sure that all works and We'll let's go ahead and crank through it. Let's see if we don't receive and then we Start after we've gotten the banner. Let's turn the crank on it while one starts to loop through stuff Let's print out our prompts So we always see what we get in case the flag is in there and let's run through it Looks like we get a couple but eventually one of them one of the Questions one of the equations one of the queries tells us. Hey, that's not valid input. Remember. We only accept decimals So it looks like this is gonna end up returning a fraction for us. So Sympa is gonna want to handle that as a real fraction like an exact value one over three or something Not a decimal, but they're only accepting decimals. So, okay, that's fine Let's take the answer turn it to a float Before we actually turn it to a string so we can pass along an answer. Just just fine Now let's run this crank through it and it's going to go through a bunch of these. Oh, okay. Looks like one of them missed That's all right. Let's try it again Lots of crazy algebraic expressions come out here And as I am testing this over and over I'm finding cases where we're getting what could be a complex equation and Sympa is not easily handling that easily handling that so What I'm gonna end up trying is actually just trying the script over and over again until we actually hit the flag unless we just get lucky and Finally have something that doesn't give us a complex system After a little bit of hard fuzzing we got it didn't take too too long I realize it's probably not the most elegant solution. Just kind of waiting on when we actually Get lucky and don't hit any complex solutions or whatever the case may be, but we do get the flag So let's go ahead and save that we could submit it for the points Win some win some prizes or whatever, but uh, that's it. That's that challenge Sympa super cool module to solve algebraic expressions. Uh, keep that in mind. Keep that in your toolkit in your arsenal But uh, hope you guys enjoyed quick special shout out to the people that support me on patreon. Thank you guys so much I can't say it enough. Uh, this list keeps growing and that's just incredible. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you Thank you can't say it enough one dollar a month on patreon I'll give you a special shout out just like this at the end of every video just to make you feel good Like you're helping like you're supporting helping the channel grow. Thank you $5 a month on patreon. I'll give you early access to everything they release on youtube before it goes live So I like to record in bulk and then let youtube gradually like release things on a scheduled basis But if you want stuff right away white right when it's unrecording, this is the best way to do it Just five dollars a month on patreon if you did like this video Please you'll like comment and subscribe if you are willing to join our discord server Please do link in the description cool community full of ctf players programmers and hackers You want to hang out with me or other awesome people? That's the place to do it We like to team up for some ctf's where we can like seesaw This itself where where if we don't have a team capsize We'll just all go in hard. Uh, if there is a little bit of a team capsize We kind of just divide into some sub components and we'll have group chats and it's it's just fine It's a cool ctf work camp. So we're gonna be tackling seesaw red this weekend and pico ctf as it comes live So it's a great thing come join the party. I'll personally greet and welcome you if I'm awake and alive So thanks again guys. Hope to see you on patreon. Hope to see you in the next video. Love you. Bye


They are brilliant! It's positive, it's positive. It's wonderful! It's wonderful! It's positive, it's positive. You scared of the coronavirus, bro? Um, no. Yes, no.  I think we're idiots. I will say this. I don't dapp up everybody. I'm doing straight Michelle Obama for Rock Fist pumps right now. Yeah, you going? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.  I'm not tripping off the coronavirus, bro. We're immune to it. Yeah, Taylor thinks that because you're black, you're immune to it. No, that's why it's the what-a-fucking-idiot section. Yeah. She went, what? Did you make your own sound effect?   Oh, was it? Yes, yes. You did not start that. I've never seen it before. I've not seen that meme so much on social media. I'm like, stop. What else did you start? Black power fist? Maybe. I'm going to tell you the main reason I'm not scared of it is because I was walking through the airport. And this was this weekend. Coming back from LA, and I saw an old sign. You know how when you're walking down the runway and you about to get on the plane? So it was an old sign tucked away in the corner. And it was an old sign. And it was old. Like you could tell it was old. And it was about the bird flu.  Then I started thinking about all of the different viruses we've heard about over the past 10 years. SARS, bird flu, swine flu, Ebola.  Zika?  Zika. Zika. They had a song about Zika? Yeah. Oh, it was easy.  Zika, whatever. But I'm just saying, think about all of those different diseases that we've had over the past decade.  All of them were supposed to kill us. And it's like, all right. Are you wiping down the seats on a plane now? But we've been, I do that anyway. So that's the thing I don't do. I'm lying. So I barely, yeah. Karen did it this week. And I was like, oh, OK. Yeah. My girl did it. I'm like, maybe. That's the thing. I feel like coronavirus has brought my hygiene to where it was supposed to be. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like I got trash hygiene. I don't wash my hands after I pee. Like you know this about me. Yeah. And like. That's where I'll only give you pounds. Exactly, yeah, yeah, yeah. Forever. We haven't shook hands in years. No. Yeah. And I understand it. I'm not doing it. But so I think corona just brought me back to like where everybody is in 2020 now. So I guess I'm grateful for corona in that way. I mean, also the thing with corona is it's like, all of that stuff we're supposed to be doing, you're like, how do you prevent corona? Wash your hands. Yeah. With soap and water. Use hand sanitizer. Clawing to your arm. I'm like, what is this, kindergarten? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm going to prevent corona. Don't be homeless. That's literally the way to prevent it, right? It seems pretty matter of fact.  Is she freaking out? No, we're not.  She is with the kids, what she's doing is. Soon as the kids walk in the house, she makes them take off their clothes at the door, go wash their hands, and then they can hug and kiss and all that other kind of stuff. I do the same thing though, you know what I mean? I don't want to take no chances. I'm laying in the bed last night, and I'm like.  I was on two planes this week, and I had to walk through Atlanta Airport, and they said it was like, 200 people had symptoms of corona in Atlanta Airport like a week and a half ago. So of course it's in your mind. 100%. But I'm just sitting there thinking like, we've seen this before. And when you look at corona, like I saw everybody giving Trump shit, cause somebody asked Trump about the corona virus and Trump said something to the fact, like you don't think if you take care of it, the way you would like the flu. What do you say specifically? What do you say? He goes, he goes, he goes. Play the clip, Taylor. He's having a conversation with his like, the medical advisory board, right? About what to do with corona. And he goes, it's kind of so funny. He goes to them, he goes, he goes, okay. So what if we gave them a very good flu vaccine? Would it work? That's not a bad question. And the reason I laughed is because the second the corona virus came out, the first thing I thought was, we'll just get the flu shot, right? Like, have you read about the corona virus? I read an article in USA Today. They said that when you get it, don't panic. They said, treat it like it's a common cold, are the flu. But how do you get it? Sharing chopsticks?  They're talking about somebody sneezing. Like that's literally every disease, bro. Sneezing, coughing.   But now they're saying don't wear the masks.    I think it's in Iran too. Isn't it in Iran?  Yes, that's a good point. They dress like beekeepers. Exactly. They dress how you would dress if you wanted to not get the corona virus. Absolutely. But they still got it. They still got it.   What?  From blinking? No, that stuff can get in your eyes. Your eyes have pores.  So we need to cover these women entirely. I just don't think we got what I wanted. I don't think you can escape it. Dude, what if Ola was just trying to protect you from corona virus? That's a good point. He's ahead of his time. That's a good point. Ola predicted a lot of things.  You know what I'm saying? It goes up your booty.  That's true. All right?    The corona virus? The corona virus. The corona virus. I'm just saying, I'm just not tripping off corona virus.  But we've seen this a million times. Just take care of yourself, man. Wash your hands, use your hand sanitizer.  You know what I mean? Just don't be nasty. Don't be gross. And I just don't, even when they say things like, oh yeah, we might have to cancel South by Southwest. Might have to cancel the Olympics. Gotta avoid large crowds. I'm like, where do y'all live? That y'all can just avoid large crowds. New York City, you don't have that luxury. California doesn't have that luxury. We're gonna cancel Times Square. Chicago don't have that. Like exactly, like you're around large crowds all the time. This is a large crowd. There's more people in this room right now than in the Wu-Tang Clan. Count. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine. That's Wu-Tang, right? Then 10, 11. There's more people in the Wu-Tang Clan. This is a large crowd.  Fuck, I don't know. You do stand up every weekend. Dude, we're on a flight, two flights. Every weekend, man.  And speaking to the same microphone. Come on, man, come on. You can't avoid it. If you meant to get it, you're gonna get it.